Some philosophers, like Mark Richard and Paul Boghossian, have argued against relativism that it cannot account for the possibility of faultless disagreement. However, I will contend that the objections they moved against relativism do not target its ability to account for the possibility of faultless disagreement per se. Ra- ther, they should be taken to challenge its capacity to account for another element of our folk conception of disagreement in certain areas of discourse—what Cris- pin Wright has dubbed parity. (...) What parity demands is to account for the possibil- ity of coherently appreciating, within a committed perspective, that our oppo- nent’s contrary judgement is somehow on a par with our own judgement. Under- stood in this way, Boghossian’s and Richard’s objections put indeed considerable pressure on relativism—or so I will argue. I will consider John MacFarlane’s at- tempt to resist their objections and I will show that, once their arguments are properly understood as targeting parity, the attempt is not successful. In the last section of the paper I will offer a diagnosis of what is at the heart of the relativist inability to account for parity—namely its assumption of a monistic conception of the normativity of truth. (shrink)

Abstract In his paper “The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem” ( Nanoethics 2: 305-36, 2008) Thompson argued that technological attempts to reduce or eliminate selected non-human animals’ capabilities (animal disenhancements) in order to solve or mitigate animal welfare problems in animals’ use pose a philosophical conundrum, because there is a contradiction between rational arguments in favor of these technological interventions and intuitions against them. In her response “Animal Disenhancement and the Non-Identity Problem: A Response to (...) Thompson” ( Nanoethics 5:43–48, 2011), Palmer maintained that the philosophical conundrum is even deeper if we introduce the non-identity problem into the discussion. In my brief response, I claim that in order to avoid the pitfalls of speculative ethics, empirical facts related to the technologies involved as well as costs for the non-human animals have to be taken into account. Depending on which changes we are referring to, ethical problems can be seen very differently. Widening the consideration to the socio-economic context in which non-human animals are currently used by humans, I challenge the idea of genuine philosophical conundrums from an antispeciesist and abolitionist perspective. Only in a context of exploitation, in which non-human animals are deprived of basic rights and their existence is totally dependent on human exploitation, the contradictions between improvement of welfare and disenhancement of capabilities make sense. Content Type Journal Article Category Critical Discussion Notes Pages 1-12 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0139-1 Authors Arianna Ferrari, KIT/ITAS (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis), Karlsruhe, Germany Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757. (shrink)

Since the publication of Truth, Paul Horwich’s ‘Minimalism’ has become the paradigm of what goes under the label ‘the deflationary conception of truth’. Despite the many theoretical virtues of Horwich’s minimalism, it is usually contended that it cannot fully account for the normative role that truth plays in enquiry. As I see it, this concern amounts to several challenges. One such challenge—call it the axiological challenge—is about whether deflationists have the theoretical resources to explain the value of truth. Some (...) philosophers have argued that they do not. The thought is that by being valuable in the way it is, truth plays a non-trivial explanatory role with respect to core phenomena of enquiry. In order to account for this aspect of truth, the challenge goes, we need to inflate truth’s nature to an extent incompatible with core tenets of the minimalist conception. In this paper, I first provide some clarifications of what we mean exactly when we say that truth is valuable. By borrowing important distinction from the current debate in axiology, I elaborate a framework within which to conduct investigations into the value of truth. With reference to Horwich’s discussion of the issue, I then discuss the link between questions concerning the explanatory role of truth and the issue of its metaphysical inflation. I conclude by briefly exploring a few strategies on behalf of minimalists to address the axiological challenge. (shrink)

Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida’s?De Man: I’m not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don’t determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida—which I think is typical and important for all that relationship which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on “The (...) Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I’m doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense—not as denegation or as false modesty —my starting point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis , that the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction: I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don’t claim to be on that level … Stephano Rosso teaches English literature at the University of Verona and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY—Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura and Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory into Italian. (shrink)

With the notable exceptions of Jan Bazˇant and Paul Harvey, most scholars subscribe to the idea that the representational scenes on Greek vases fall into one of two main categories: either myth or "genre," whose frame of reference is everyday life. This article challenges this distinction and makes a plea for its abandonment.

Paul Collins travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of our most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine. A typical book about an American founding father doesn’t start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine isn’t your typical founding father. A firebrand rebel and a radical on the run, Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. In death, his story turns truly (...) bizarre. Shunned as an infidel by every church, he had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, a former enemy converting to Paine’s cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain, where he planned to build a mausoleum in Paine’s honor. But he never got around to it. So what happened to the body of this founding father? Well, it got lost. Paine’s missing bones, like saint’s relics, have been scattered for two centuries, and their travels are the trail of radical democracy itself. Paul Collins combines wry, present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the remains of Tom Paine and finds them hidden in, among other places, a Paris hotel, underneath a London tailor's stool, and inside a roadside statue in New York. Along the way he crosses paths with everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and hellfire ministers—not to mention a suicidal gunman, a Ferrari dealer, and berserk feral monkeys. In the end, Collins’s search for Paine’s body instead finds the soul of democracy—for it is the story of how Paine’s struggles have lived on through his eccentric and idealistic followers. (shrink)

La memoria, la historia, el olvido, Paul Ricœur ha insistido en proponer la necesidad de un trabajo de memoria sin abandonar el horizonte de un deber de memoria, contrariamente a las acusaciones que se le han hecho. Ha definido un camino que lleva del trabajo al deber de memoria, a través de un trabajo de la historia que se une a la problemática de los “Lugares de memoria” del historiador Pierre Nora. Traducción de María Luján Ferrari.

Referring to Ferraris’ “Fenomenologia dell’istituzionale (Phenomenology of the Institutional)” is very appropriate to insist on some difficulties with the notion of “institution”. My intent is twofold: on the one hand, I would like to claim, against Ferraris and with Searle, that a theory (or phenomenology) of the institution is always the most important task in the construction of social ontology. Along the way, I would like to point to the importance of violence (and power) and violent strategies in the creation (...) and maintaining of institutions. By answering the question in the sub-heading of this paper, my intention is to understand Ferraris’ project, firstly, as a necessary addition to the ontology of John Searle. But, also, I would like to argue that this project could “incorporate” this same theoretical attempt that precedes it. The future of Ferraris’ project is in political and legal theory, in the understanding of the great and truly “ultimate institutional structures”. Ferraris, as inheritor of and contributor to the great project of Paul Otlet (Mundaneum), surpasses “the government as ultimate institutional structure”, and puts it in the place of the State-Europe and la Cité mondiale. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual publication which includes original articles, which may be of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. This volume presents the published version of the Nellie Wallace Lectures in Ancient Philosophy, delivered at the University of Oxford by Professor Gisela Striker. Together, these lectures make up a connected account of Stoic ethics. The other contributors to this volume are: Thomas C. Brickhouse, G. R. (...) F. Ferrari, Montgomery Furth, Charles Kahn, John Malcolm, Nicholas D. Smith, and Paul A. Vander Waerdt. (shrink)

When I began working on my dissertation on Kant’s aesthetic theory in 1971, I was able to read virtually all of the extant literature on the Critique of Judgment in English, German, andFrench going back to Hermann Cohen’s Kants Begr¨undung der A¨ sthetik of 1889, while also reading most of what I wanted to read of eighteenth-century British and German aesthetics before Kant—not because I had paid my dues to Evelyn Wood, but just because there was not all that much (...) to read.1 I pity the graduate student who sets out to write a dissertation on the third Critique now: since Donald Crawford, Francis Coleman, Jens Kulenkampff, Eva Schaper, and I published books on Kant’s aesthetics between 1974 and 1979 there has been a continuing flood of articles (this journal receives more submissions on Kant’s aesthetics annually than on any other historical topic) and books, a flood that has only accelerated since 2000. Confining myself only to monographs and anthologies on Kant’s aesthetics or the third Critique as a whole (but not those devoted exclusively to teleology) in English, German, and French on my shelves, and no doubt missing some, at least in German and French, I find twenty-eight monographs and anthologies published in the period between 1980 and 1999 and another twenty-seven just since 2000. (Indeed, two more have arrived on my desk since this article was written.)3 Someone setting out to work on the third Critique now has at least as many books from the last decade alone to read as I had in 1971 from the eight preceding decades. The present review will make only a small dent in this pile: I will discuss just five monographs and one introduction to the third Critique, all published in English in 2006 and 2007. (shrink)

Is truth itself natural? This is an important question for both those working on truth and those working on naturalism. For theorists of truth, answering the question of whether truth is natural will tell us more about the nature of truth (or lack of it), and the relations between truth and other properties of interest. For those working on naturalism who wish to have truth as part of the natural order, answering this question is of paramount importance. In this chapter, (...) we focus primarily on the kinds of theory of truth that occupy the central positions in current debates about truth, namely correspondence theories, deflationary theories, epistemic theories, and pluralist theories, and aim to discern the extent to which truth is a natural property on each view. (shrink)

Estudos anteriores indicaram que o esgotamento docente pode ser potencializado pelo entusiasmo excessivo ao trabalho. No entanto, a maioria dos métodos investigativos medem o esgotamento balizado pelos sintomas subjetivos informados, havendo poucas evidências que indiquem a causa dos sintomas e a amplitude da participação do entusiasmo do professor pelo trabalho. O objetivo deste manuscrito foi apresentar, as peculiaridades da relação entre o engajamento do docente pelo trabalho e o esgotamento profissional. Este ensaio acadêmico foi organizado a partir de uma revisão (...) narrativa da literatura, adaptando e explorando, reflexivamente, os conceitos e ideias de estudos disponibilizados na literatura. Os resultados evidenciam os estudos que escalonam a ocorrência e a gravidade do burnout em docentes, se concentram, na sua maior parte, em identificar e quantificar os sintomas subjetivos clássicos do fenômeno, não permitindo conclusões objetivas e definitivas sobre as causas dessa ocorrência. Estudos futuros devem investigar controladamente, os mecanismos desencadeantes de burnout para distinguir a amplitude dos desencadeadores do problema. (shrink)

The paper starts by highlighting that virtually nobody would object to claims such as “to regard an assertion or a belief or a thought as true or false is to regard it as being right or wrong”—a claim that shows that truth is intrinsically normative. It is well known that alethic deflationists deny this. Paul Horwich, for instance, maintains that nothing shows that TRUTH is a normative concept in the way that OUGHT is. By relying on a distinction among (...) dimensions of normativity I will try to pinpoint the weakness of Horwich’s argument in the fact that he works with a strong, uncalled-for, interpretation of normativity, whereas a weaker interpretation is more than enough. However, the impression might persist that a different understanding of the normativity of truth on the part of deflationists could eventually show the compatibility between alethic deflationism and normativity. The remaining part of the paper is devoted to contend that this is a wrong impression. Accordingly, it is stated that the normativity exerted by truth is ascribable in the final analysis to the world, and the provocative claim is defended that alethic deflationism lacks the conceptual resources to account for the relation between language and the world. (shrink)

This article contends that the evolution toward interdisciplinary collaboration that we are witnessing in the sciences must also occur in the humanities to ensure their very survival. That is, humanists must be open to working with scientists and social scientists interested in similar research questions and vice versa. Digital humanities is a positive first step. Complexity science should be the next step. Even though much of the ground-breaking work in complexity science has been done in the natural sciences and mathematics, (...) it can, if critically adapted, provide the needed metaphor for a broad integration of disciplines, humanistic and otherwise. Given its almost a-disciplinary nature, a complexity approach to the research problems in the humanities necessarily breaks down silos. Moreover, it can restore and reframe the seamless intellectual fabric sought by researchers before the atomization of the various disciplines in the nineteenthcentury academy. (shrink)

Despite significant advances in various special areas in the study of language, the question of what the basic nature of the theory of a language is remains controversial and unclear. In this paper we propose to rectify this situation and argue for a general perspective — one which only a few theorists have explicitly endorsed — by showing that it is at once theoretically illuminating and empirically plausible. This perspective consists of the following claims: that the most basic theory of (...) a language is a theory of communication viz., of understanding and production; that a theory of communication in this sense presupposes a theory of thought; that a grammar is most fruitfully thought of as a component of a theory of communication; and that so-called theories of meaning form a rather heterogeneous group, some of which being fragments of grammars, others being theories of thought, and still others being what are sometimes referred to as theories of reference. We shall be particularly concerned with and here. (shrink)

The Archaeology of Prehistoric Arabia: Adaptation and Social Formation from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. By Peter Magee. Cambridge World Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xv + 309, illus. $99.

D’Aden à Zafar: Villes d’Arabie du sud préislamique. By Jérémie Schiettecatte. Orient & Méditeranée, Archéologie, vol. 6. Paris: De Boccard, 2011. Pp. 372, illus. €64.

[ Philosophy against the natural sciences: “Dogmatism” in the dispute about “scientific monism” after 1900].

Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of the later Renaissance whose writings encompassed the ongoing traditions, intentions, and achievements of his times and transmitted them into early modernity. Taking up the medieval practice of the art of memory and of formal logic, he focused on the creativity of the human mind. Bruno … Continue reading Giordano Bruno →.

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more (...) virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith, and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy. (shrink)

While the definitions employed by different governmental agencies and scientific societies differ somewhat, the term “nanotechnology” is generally understood to refer to the manufacturing, characterization, and use of man-made devices with dimensions on the order of 1-100 nanometers. Devices that comprise a fundamental functional element that is nanotechnological are also frequently comprised within nanotechnology, as are manufactured objects with dimensions less than one micrometer. The differences in definition lead to occasional paradoxes, such as the fact that the most widely used (...) nanodrug is labeled a “nanopharmaceutical” by governments of European countries, Canada, and Australia, but it is not a nanotechnology for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is also common in scientific domains to restrict the term “nanotechnology” to objects that possess special, “emerging” properties that only arise because of their nanoscale dimension. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE Este texto apresenta partes de um projeto de longa duração, desenvolvido pelas autoras, que trata da cultura e identidade, memória e nomadismo através da música e, em particular do fado. Este gênero fixou-se no Brasil, através dos imigrantes portugueses e luso-descendentes, a transmissão sendo feita pelo rádio. Após um período de esmaecimento, o fado reaparece na paisagem sonora do final do século XX, com importantes mudanças no processo de assimilação e transmissão (...) do gênero. (shrink)

The production, manipulation and exploitation of future visions are increasingly important elements in practices of visioneering socio-technical processes of innovation and transformation. This becomes obvious in new and emerging science and technologies and large-scale transformations of established socio-technical systems. A variety of science and technology studies provide evidence on correlations between expectations and anticipatory practices with the dynamics of such processes of change. Technology assessment responded to the challenges posed by the influence of visions on the processes by elaborating methodologies (...) for a “vision assessment” as a contribution to what is now increasingly known as “hermeneutical TA”. But until now, the practical functions of visions in the processes have not been explained in a way that satisfies the empirical needs of TA’s vision assessment—that is to provide future-oriented knowledge based on the analysis of ongoing changes in the present without knowing the future outcomes. Our leading hypothesis is that we can only understand the practical roles of visions in current processes if we analyse them as socio-epistemic practices which simultaneously produce new knowledge and enable new social arrangements. We elaborate this by means of two cases: the visions of In Vitro meat and of the smart grid. Here, we interpret visioneering more in its collective dimension as a contingent and open-ended process, emerging from heterogeneous socio-epistemic practices. This paper aims at improving TA’s vision assessments and related STS research on visionary practices for real-time analysis and assessments. (shrink)

As bellicose nationalism continues to intensify in Western societies, letting loose ever more violent eruptions of hostility toward migrants and mid-wifing such astonishing developments as the Brexit vote and the Trump candidacy, the problem of how to theorize and mobilize a transformative politics of migrant justice has rarely seemed more pressing. Jacques Rancière’s writings offer resonant terms with which to meet the philosophical challenges of this urgent moment. Rancière’s conceptualization of political subordination in terms of defining “the part that has (...) no part” is intuitively well suited to thinking through both the dense interplays of inclusion and exclusion that structure migrant lives and the... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Section 1: Rational Judgment and Understanding Section 2: The Structure of Systematicity Section 3: Systematicity as Methodological Maxim? Section 4: Nature and Rational Structure.

on calculating Apocalypse, awakening the Avatar, and related.

i. a poetic solution of the Goldbach Conjecture; ii. several responses to the Epimenides Paradox; iii. the volitional solution to Russell's Paradox.

on ontologs, or words that are the thing they name; a volitional solution to Zeno's Line and Arrow paradoxes; on Sokal as unintentional non-parody; and more.

Ce volume reunit trois textes du celebre historien francais de la philosophie medievale Paul Vignaux (1904-1987), deux textes de nature plutot autobiographique qui retracent son itineraire intellectuel et Philosophie au Moyen Age, une introduction a la philosophie medievale qui compte toujours parmi les plus stimulantes presentations de la philosophie de cette epoque. Cet ensemble de textes est complete par d'amples notices bibliographiques et une presentation de la figure intellectuelle de Paul Vignaux qui fut egalement une des personnalites marquantes (...) du syndicalisme francais. (shrink)

The peculiar dilemma of the self in our era has been noted by a wide range of writers, even as they have emphasized different aspects of that dilemma, such as the self’s alienation, disorientation, inflation, or fragmentation. In The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch bring together scholars from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, theology, literature, biology, and physics to address the inadequacies of modern and postmodern selves and, ultimately, to suggest what an (...) alternative, “transmodern” account of the self might look like. The transmodern self, the editors argue, acknowledges meaning and purpose transcending the individual. In other words, it reflects an understanding of the human person that is not only intimately connected with the Judeo-Christian tradition but also rejects the twin delusions of absolute autonomy and cosmic meaninglessness that mark the present age. (shrink)

The heristic argument with which Meno questions the possibility of inquiry and knowledge is tackled by Socrates through the reference to an archaic and religious doctrine, according to which the soul is immortal and has seen all things. Through this reference Socrates actually wants to affirm the affinity between the soul and the world of forms. So behind the myth of the prenatal vision of forms by the soul Plato intends to assert the ontological condition of the soul, that is, (...) its affinity to forms. (shrink)