Although quantum mechanics has significantly advanced our understanding of the physical world, it has also been a source of great confusion. Myriad interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations, have been proposed to try and explain away the seeming inconsistencies which lie at the heart of quantum mechanics. All of these attempts at interpretation center on the seemingly intractable measurement problem. In this essay I argue that a number of interpretations of quantum mechanics are plagued by inadequate and misleading assumptions about the (...) observer. These assumptions are based on a naïve “folk conception” of the observer. In discussing two phenomena studied in modern cognitive science, I will argue for a rejection of the naïve conception of the observer and adopt a more sophisticated view which offers a significant interpretational payoff. I argue that although the measurement problem in quantum mechanics appears to be a scientific problem requiring a scientific solution, it is plausible that the problem might be a pseudo-problem resulting from a conceptual confusion. The conceptual confusion is caused by naïve assumptions about the nature of the observer.1 Based on these arguments I will reevaluate a number of interpretations and assess the role of philosophy in interpreting quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature contains 110 images from the collections of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; and of the J. Paul Getty Museum, along with an essay by Paul Martineau that ...

This paper is part of a symposium on Paul Moser, _Philosophy After Objectivity (Oxford University Press, 1993). The paper replies to contributions by Philip Quinn and Robert Audi.

This paper questions the idea that Wittgenstein’s account of meaning as use requires an intrinsically normative understanding of this notion, and suggests instead that Wittgenstein is better understood as promoting a naturalistic view of meaning that undertakes an explanation based on non–semantic and non–normative facts of word–usage. It discusses the relevant positions of Kripke, Brandom and McDowell, all of whom are found to be united by the attempt to attribute to Wittgenstein a normative understanding of language that is not convincing. (...) While language does exhibit normative properties that cannot be naturalized, the understanding speakers have of their own words is “a prima facie plausible candidate for naturalistic analysis.”. (shrink)

In Moral Leadership>, Paul J. Olscamp shows how college presidents and trustees can use basic ethical principles to help make moral decisions. Olscamp describes the nature of the college presidency and provides a summary view of western ethical theory, outlining a series of principles relating to morality and obligation.

In this new interpretation of Plato's Phaedo, Paul Stern considers the dialogue as an invaluable source for understanding the distinctive character of Socratic rationalism. First, he demonstrates, contrary to the charge of such thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Rorty, that Socrates' rationalism does not rest on the dogmatic presumption of the rationality of nature. Second, he shows that the distinctively Socratic mode of philosophizing is formulated precisely with a view to vindicating the philosophic life in the face of these (...) uncertainties. And finally, he argues that this vindication results in a mode of inquiry that finds its ground in a clear understanding of the problematical but enduring human situation. Stern concludes that Socratic rationalism, aware as it is of the limits of reason, still provides a nondogmatic and nonarbitrary basis for human understanding. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 125-128. What is the nature of sound? What is the nature of volume? William James, in attempting to address these simple questions wrote, “ The voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation to the size of the ocean that yields it . The ear and eye are comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume” (203-­4, itals. original). This subtle extensivity of sensation finds its peer in the subtle yet significant influence (...) of habituated action upon our lives. This expansive quality of habit­making is what Craig Dongoski's bodies of work enable us to appreciate. Nearly ten years ago Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o'clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class and he recorded the sounds of their pencils scratching across their respective surfaces. This was a critical moment for him. Later he would place a contact mic onto a drawing surface and record the sound of his signature. Signatures change over time, they respond to the conditions in which they are performed. Signatures speak volumes about the author, but a practice of attunement is required for the volume to be audible. To hear all that a signature can tell about its author, the listener must tune into the frequency at which this information is being broadcast. Dongoski's drawings and video works draw­out the peculiar artifact that habit makes of living: habits establish a tempo of living and it seems that one's habitus is the signature of habitual living. I sat down with Craig in an attempt to sound­out some of the depths of thought in his practice. What follows is selected from our conversation. Paul Boshears (PB): Clearly your work is dealing with time: from the painstaking action of rendering the drawing to the free­form approach of launching a microphone into a body of water and waiting to see what's recorded. Craig Dongoski (CD): Are we talking about the films or the drawings? PB: Well, it's a bit of both in my mind. I know the drawings on first glance seem to be these flows of lines without concern but I realize that there is this painstaking action involved. CD: I'm interested in time because I'm interested in forms outside of control, outside of politics, and outside of economics. I think that art, when it's alive, does go beyond those. I'm interested in duality and paradox—a stream of contradiction, I suppose. For instance, scale and size. There is a tendency to think that these are the same thing. But really you can have something small that has a lot of scale—look at Goya's drawings, Los Caprichos , they're very small but they have a lot of scale. Likewise things that are spontaneous don't necessarily mean that they take only two or three seconds to do. This latter distinction is what I'm most interested in. Having that appearance of spontaneity. The image has rhythm, you can latch onto it; but the reality is that it took many hours—and many months in some cases—to arrive at. And this is in keeping with geological time. I like to insert this series of thoughts into my work sometimes as an attempt to make some of this stuff comprehensible. There are all these distractions inundating us throughout our days now. Time gets tweaked by all these technologies that we interact with daily. There's more than just digital time or the mechanical time of your watch. There's biological time, that time in which you're growing. PB: I'm reminded of McLuhan here: he made his career by making that strong claim that the humans of today are not the same humans of three generations ago because technology has fundamentally changed us. Are we not the same human beings as a hundred years ago? CD: I mean, I don't think we're the same human beings that we were when he was around! It's my understanding that before painting a flower, monks would meditate for hours on that flower and then they would complete the painting of that flower in less than a minute. That's what I want to point out about our world today, we have all this information, but how much of it are we metabolizing? PB: Is there a message you're looking for? Or that you're trying to share? CD: These drawings set­up the circumstances for me to continue them forever. I'm only about six years into it, but with more time, things can unfold. You know? If you take this cup of coffee and vow to restrict your work to only this material and medium for seven years—you'll make interesting work. The problem is that most people can't hold on to things or they give up or they get distracted. They don't trust that anything is possible; anything is potential material. Staying with this cup of coffee example, we can get enveloped in the history of the recycling logo, or the process for harvesting coffee and so on. The same is true for my work as it has lead me into places like graphical music scores. I had, of course, known about John Cage's notations and I'd always been interested in sound itself, but this drawing practice made it feasible to explore the intersections in a meaningful way. I think that if you trust your instincts and your curiosities and your abilities, then the bus drives itself. Look at Roman Opalka, he's kind of the patron saint of time painting. The claim is that no one can count to a billion in a lifetime so he's set­out to paint to seven sevens (7,777,777). He began with white numbers on a black field but over the years he has gradually reduced the black field to ever­lightening grays. His plan is to paint these seven sevens on what ostensibly will be white on white. PB: It occurs to me that I've never thought of the actual, literal, meaning of “microphone” in relation to “microscope.” The mic has made everything loud, the world's not allowed to be quiet anymore. Maybe we should call them “macrophones” since telephone's already taken... CD: Well, a microscope is a lens. What got me interested in sound was that a microphone acts like a lens. There are wide angle lenses, or a lens that gets your eye up close to something far away, or at a tiny level. The same is true of the microphone. You can use a parabolic mic to hear what the coach is saying on a sports field or a mic that picks­up the sound from the entire cathedral. There's this whole gamut... I'm kind of playing with the words here. I'm into the minuteness of the sound, but I'm interested in the minuteness of the mark itself. PB: I guess it's a Deluezean, generative, statement, then? It's not a metaphor, it's an actual thing with which we can work. CD : That's right. PB: While doing some background work on you I found myself at interesting places on the internet. For example, Konstantin Raudive and a brief jog into Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP); perhaps this was just synchronicity. But, it's a happy coincidence nonetheless because the them of this issue of continent. is “the moraine” and one of the nuances of this term is “what remains.” Is there a metaphysical or epistemological problem that you're sorting­out here? CD: Think about fossils: fossils are the first recording device, you know? It's the first, natural, recording device. It's in this way that I think my works are fossilized time. Artifacts of that process. Van Gogh is a strong source for me in this regard: it's not what he's painting it's how. You're seeing his nervous system at work. The what is so incidental, the chairs, the flowers, etc. It's funny: when I first started doing this, before I started drawing voices, I was doing these things in cemeteries. I was doing automatic drawings. And when I took this experiment to its maximum I was taking hydrophones and burying them in abandoned graves. I was thinking about the mic rig as the south coordinate and I'd use a shortwave radio as the north coordinate. Usually it was just white noise, but on the east and west I'd station a writer and a drawer. So I'd have these things going on simultaneously and I'd be mixing them at the same time. PB: How'd it come out? CD: Well, just like you'd expect. It was a lot of white noise. But I think that Raudive was on to something. Burroughs used to say something similar when he'd talk about being in a foreign country where he didn't know the language and then he'd start to hear things. At the base, what I'm doing is pattern recognition. I do have a writing component to the drawings. I haven't exploited it in a while but... I use a vocoder, which was developed to encrypt spy signals during one of the World Wars. The mechanism takes two channels, one being the spy's signal combined with noise and then the other channel is a sine wave so that the intended recipient can pick out the words. So I did something like this with Beowulf. I tried combining the spoken word with other television and radio sources, but that didn't work because a book on tape is usually read in a very steady clip and the result was too garbled. So the second try, instead of drawing I was writing, trying to articulate the sounds that I could hear in this garbled transmission of Beowulf. You start to think you hear something, so you start to write what you think you're hearing. But what you're hearing is just being triggered by this articulating action. When the sound of the drawing lines up with the sound of the word you get something. But it's not ever what you're really hearing. You start writing and you're trying to keep up with what you think you're hearing and it is truly, in the most true sense of the phrase, automatic writing. You can contrive and go into a “spirit trance” or whatever, but... PB: It's uninteresting to you? CD: Well, it's unbelievable. It's just listening to sounds and following along. The magic is out there, there are no tricks or anything. You do this exercise with twenty people and you will get twenty totally different writings. But, you're creating the sound and you're creating the writing as an interpretation. That's the thing with EVP, it's homophonic translation. PB: Do you trust a straight line? I know you start with these meticulous lines at the beginning of the drawings but they do change over time. CD: I'm trying to show that there are these imperfections in structures and that over the reiterations of these structures these imperfections become amplified. But you can see them in tree formation as well. The rings alter their shape as the trees grow. PB: Is that your transmission then? You're not just receiving these sounds but you're broadcasting this message as well? CD: Things exist because of their opposites. These drawings are really about nothing. It's the first body of work I've had where people project so much of stuff onto the works. So there you go, things existing because of their opposites. It's kind of like with Mike Kelley: the work was about a critique of commodity culture and commodifying emotions. Using toys this was a critique of production. But then suddenly people were saying it was about abuse and the abuse that Mike Kelley had suffered. And it wasn't but he heard that and said, “I'll go with it,” and so he did. I think that's the nature of communication: I send this but you receive that instead and this makes me think about what I sent in a different way. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Kant's extensive discussion of the sublime has received scant attention. This neglect, indeed, is a general characteristic of the reception of Kant's aesthetics in the Anglo-American, and German traditions of philosophy in the twentieth century. The reasons behind it have been usefully summarised by Paul Guyer. ;My approach will be as follows. In Part One of this study , I shall first outline the sublime as it is (...) understood in sources available to Kant--notably the theories of Addison, and Burke. I will then trace how Kant adapts these approaches in his pre-Critical aesthetics, and how he goes beyond them by, in effect, stipulatively defining the sublime as a moral concept in his Critical ethics. In Part Two I will first set the scene for a consideration of Kant's mature theory of the sublime, by discussing how moral factors shape the overall strategy in The Critique of Judgement, and also figure in his account of the judgement of taste. I shall then go on to elaborate and critically review Kant's structures and sources of argument in those sections of the third Critique that deal with judgements of sublimity. In particular, I will argue that whilst his theory of sublimity does fit in well with the overall strategy of the third Critique, the pressures exerted upon it by the Critical ethics are such that he does not succeed in establishing the credentials of sublimity as an aesthetic concept. In Part Three , however, by using some of Kant's basic insights, I will hope to establish these credentials and to apply the theory so derived, to the work of art. I will then proceed to some more general conclusions. ;Considering the wide ground to be covered by this study, and the necessary limitations on its length, it will not be possible to give Kant's concepts and arguments the kind of extensive and finely detailed analysis which has been provided by Paul Guyer. I will be concerned, rather, to provide working definitions of Kant's major concepts, and to trace the broad development of his arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Valerie Trollinger, “A Reconception of Performance Study in the Philosophy of Music Education”Paul LouthAs an educator who is a former professional trombonist I can certainly appreciate the issues raised in this discussion. Because I am inclined to agree with the spirit (if not always the substance) of Trollinger's remarks, I would like to respond with some thoughts on the manner in which she tends to (...) frame this debate, because I believe that this has crucial implications and may explain the cause of some of the very problems she mentions.Charlene Morton writes that a "bias for procedural knowledge... unwittingly immerses school music in the polemic arising from the false hierarchical dichotomy between 'hard' and 'soft' forms of knowledge."1 By this she means that the Cartesian mind/body split, which has led to our conception of thinking and doing as exclusive matters, is not remedied by our discovery of the importance of purely procedural knowledge, because we merely reinforce this dichotomy through acknowledging the latter term as a separate category from theoretical knowledge. Trollinger is correct in asserting that the act of performance is often overlooked and is not treated as a serious concern in music education and I believe that this may be largely due to this dichotomy, which manifests itself in the way that we divorce performance from its original holistic context.In general, if we accept this argument, then debates about performance versus listening, theorizing, and so on are inherently problematic because the discourse itself reinforces an artificial dichotomy. If we fail to address the remnants of this "Cartesian anxiety," then in our attempts to address a lack of concern over performance, we may be left with a performance model that is purely utilitarian, in the sense that the body can only justifiably occupy a central place in the curriculum if there are direct, utilitarian outcomes that we can associate with it and so long as those outcomes are supported by the free market. In North America, progressive educators have been struggling for some time against the concept of school as a locus of training for the market place. This model becomes more difficult to resist, I would argue, as long as we continue to compartmentalize performance and other aspects of musicianship. Such practices reinforce an artificial distinction between procedural and theoretical forms of knowing (and, by extension, between mental and manual forms of labor) that Apple, Giroux, and other critical pedagogues would argue atomizes student knowledge in preparation for the marketplace; yet musicianship can serve many other valuable purposes.2 [End Page 231]Trollinger, in using the word "holistic," reminds us of the connection between body and mind that exists in performance. Further, she correctly states that until relatively recently, those who taught music were musicians. I would add that in Canada (where I teach), the idea that music should be taught by musicians has often been used to justify its exclusion from schools, which is indicative of our tendency to exclude those things that we deem corporeal from the life of the mind. In my home province of Ontario, recent emphasis on "the basics" has meant that music programs have vanished in great numbers, while music study is relegated to the conservatories which, with their widespread tendency to essentialize musical experience as performance in the most limited sense of the word, have contributed further to this dichotomy.My point is that all of us, including Trollinger, may wish to reconsider the nomenclature that we carry into this debate from the outset. Because the word "performance" has become strongly associated with this particular pole (it is no accident that we use this word to describe car engines and stock returns) I suggest we can best elevate our estimation of the term by replacing it with the word "musicianship." In this way we can repair some of the damage done by the Cartesian split and the consequent de-valuing of performance that has occurred through separation from its original context. Within such an integrated model, it would become problematic to debate the relative importance of performing, listening, theorizing, or any number of activities with regard to the overall goals of musicianship... (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und (...) Literaturwissenschaften sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und (...) Literaturwissenschaften sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Ο συγγραφέας σχολιάζει τις πληροφορίες που αφορούν την ιστορία της ελληνιστικής Ανατολής από τη βασιλεία του Μεγάλου Αλεξάνδρου μέχρι και αυτή του Αντίοχου Α'. Περιλαμβάνονται στον πρώτο τόμο του corpus των βαβυλωνιακών αστρονομικών εφημερίδων που δημοσίευσαν πρόσφατα οι Α. J. Sachs et Η. Hunger (1988) : 1. Η μάχη των Γαυγαμήλων. Ο Paul Bernard αποδεικνύει ότι η εκλογή του πεδίου της μάχης, όπου ήρθαν αντιμέτωπες οι στρατιές των Μακεδόνων και των Περσών, δεν ήταν αποτέλεσμα αυτοσχεδιασμού εκ μέρους του επιτελείου (...) του Δαρείου Γ', αλλά η σύλληψη ενός στρατηγικού σχεδίου μετά από ώριμη σκέψη, του οποίου τις αρετές είχαν αποκρύψει οι κλασικοί ιστορικοί. 2. Η χρονολογία του θανάτου του Μ. Αλεξάνδρου. 3. Η επανάσταση των Ελλήνων αποίκων στις άνω σατραπείες το 323-322 π.Χ. 4. Ο αγώνας μεταξύ Αντιγόνου και Σέλευκου στην Μεσοποταμία-Βαβυλωνία. 5. Ο πρώτος συριακός πόλεμος (274-271 π.Χ.). 6. Η μεταφορά αποίκων από τη Βαβυλωνία στη Σελεύκεια του Τίγρη το 274 π.Χ. 7. Η κρίση της Βαβυλωνίας στα τέλη της βασιλείας του Αντίοχου Α'. (shrink)

De milieuproblematiek staat pas sinds kort op de agenda als een fenomeen dat de mensheid bedreigt. Toch blijkt het negentiende-eeuwse gedachtegoed van Karl Marx verrassende inzichten te bieden om deze actuele problemen te duiden. Marx laat zien dat het menselijk ingrijpen in de natuur leidt tot zelfvervreemding: de mens ondermijnt zijn bestaan als een wezen dat zelf deel uitmaakt van de natuur. Deze zelfvervreemding cumuleert in de kapitalistische samenleving. Marx lezend zien we dat de milieuproblematiek geen historische vergissing is, maar (...) fundamenteel samenhangt met de mens als redelijk wezen. Onze beheersingsrede heeft geleid tot de vervreemding van de natuur. Toch geeft dezelfde rede die de mens de vrijheid biedt zich boven het ecologische evenwicht te verheffen, hem de mogelijkheid zich te verzoenen met de natuur. Marx verwijst naar dit dubbele gezicht van de rede als hij stelt dat het 'rijk van de vrijheid' in de schoot van het kapitalisme wordt geboren. In dit boek onderzoekt Paul Cobben welke aanzetten de huidige samenleving biedt om vorm te geven aan de verzoening met de natuur. Paul Cobben is emeritus hoogleraar geschiedenis van de moderne filosofie aan Tilburg University. Momenteel is hij gastonderzoeker aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam en redacteur van de serie 'Critical Studies in German Idealism'. Van zijn hand verscheen o.a. 'Value in Capitalist Society. Rethinking Marx's Criticism of Capitalism' (2015)."-- Publisher information. (shrink)

In _Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science, _Paul Clements develops a new, morally grounded model of political and social analysis as a critique of and improvement on both neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. What if practical reason is based not only on interests and ideas of the good, as these theories have it, but also on principles and sentiments of right? The answer, Clements argues, requires a radical reorientation of social science from the idea of interests (...) to the idea of social justice. According to Clements, systematic weaknesses in neoclassical economics and rational choice theory are due to their limited model of choice. According to such theories in the utilitarian tradition, all our practical decisions aim to maximize the satisfaction of our interests. These neo-utilitarian approaches focus on how we promote our interests, but Clements argues, our ideas of right, cognitively represented in principles, contribute independently and no less fundamentally to our practical decisions. The most significant challenge to utilitarianism in the last half century is found in John Rawls’s _Theory of Justice _and _Political Liberalism_, in which Rawls builds on Kant's concept of practical reason. Clements extends Rawls's moral theory and his critique of utilitarianism by arguing for social analysis based on the Kantian and Rawlsian model of choice. To illustrate the explanatory power of his model, he presents three detailed case studies: a program analysis of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, a political economy analysis of the causes of poverty in the Indian state of Bihar, and a problem-based analysis of the ethics and politics of climate change. He concludes by exploring the broad implications of social analysis grounded in a concept of social justice. “Paul Clements’s _Rawlsian Political Analysis _mounts an important intervention into the philosophy of the social sciences, challenging the tired fact/value, empirical/normative binaries that continue to impoverish social analysis. His insistence that social analysis must engage both facts and norms, the empirical and the normative, the good and the right, interest and principle—and that empirical social scientists must engage constructively on questions of autonomy and social justice—is noble and ultimately essential if social science is to justify its place in the years to come.” —_Fonna Forman-Barzilai, University of California, San Diego_. (shrink)

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.

Many properties of compacta have “textbook” definitions which are phrased in lattice-theoretic terms that, ostensibly, apply only to the full closed-set lattice of a space. We provide a simple criterion for identifying such definitions that may be paraphrased in terms that apply to all lattice bases of the space, thereby making model-theoretic tools available to study the defined properties. In this note we are primarily interested in properties of continua related to unicoherence; i.e., properties that speak to the existence of (...) “holes” in a continuum and in certain of its subcontinua. (shrink)

This book is a detailed comparison of the major political writings of Machiavelli and Xenophon. By elucidating the remarkable scope, depth, and subtlety of the debate between these two great thinkers,Excellence Unleashed offers a fresh perspective on the philosophic and political significance of Machiavelli's proto-modern break from the classical tradition.

When political theorists teach the history of political philosophy, they typically skip from the ancient Greeks and Cicero to Augustine in the fifth century and Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and then on to the origins of modernity with Machiavelli and beyond. Paul Stern aims to change this settled narrative and makes a powerful case for treating Dante Alighieri, arguably the greatest poet of medieval Christendom, as a political philosopher of the first rank. In Dante's Philosophical Life, Stern argues (...) that Purgatorio's depiction of the ascent to Earthly Paradise, that is, the summit of Mount Purgatory, was intended to give instruction on how to live the philosophic life, understood in its classical form as "love of wisdom." As an object of love, however, wisdom must be sought by the human soul, rather than possessed. But before the search can be undertaken, the soul needs to consider from where it begins: its nature and its good. In Stern's interpretation of Purgatorio, Dante's intense concern for political life follows from this need, for it is law that supplies the notions of good that shape the soul's understanding and it is law, especially its limits, that provides the most evident display of the soul's enduring hopes. According to Stern, Dante places inquiry regarding human nature and its good at the heart of philosophic investigation, thereby rehabilitating the highest form of reasoned judgment or prudence. Philosophy thus understood is neither a body of doctrines easily situated in a Christian framework nor a set of intellectual tools best used for predetermined theological ends, but a way of life. Stern's claim that Dante was arguing for prudence against dogmatisms of every kind addresses a question of contemporary concern: whether reason can guide a life. (shrink)

Le concept de nature est reconstruit en considérant le processus d'objectivation à l'oeuvre dans l'expérience systémique du scientifique, qui prend la forme d'une expérience d'immanence redoublée. Ce redoublement est ensuite analysé à l'intérieur des systèmes que le savant analyse par l'étude du passage d'un système physique auto-organisé du type transition de phase à un système biologique. [Electre 2015].

Ce livre montre comment, à partir du néant, Sartre a radicalisé la conception husserlienne de l'intentionnalité comme rapport de la conscience au monde, transcendance, c'est-à-dire ouverture vers l'extérieur, à la rencontre des autres humains. C'est pourquoi, si la pensée de Sartre tourne principalement autour de la liberté décrite avant tout individuellement, elle a aussi une dimension collective et historique qui l'a conduite à une intersubjectivité humaniste.

In 1980, Michel Foucault's work makes two decisive turns. On the one hand, as announced at the start of his course at the Collège de France for that year, Le Gouvernement des vivants, his topic will be the modalities through which power constitutes itself in relation to truth. On the other hand, the texts on which he will concentrate will no longer be those of the early modern period. Rather, he begins with one by Dio Cassius on the emperor Septimius (...) Severus and then proceeds to spend the next two sessions offering a reading of Oedipus Tyrannus. He will concentrate on works from antiquity for the rest of his life. This book will offer the first detailed account of these lectures, examining both the development of their philosophical argument and the ancient texts on which that argument is based. This is the period during which Foucault also began work on Volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality. Yet, while there are clear overlaps between the work he was presenting in his course and the last books he published before his death, nonetheless the seminars are anything but rough drafts for the published work. Instead they offer a sustained encounter with the texts of the classical and early Christian era while seeking to trace a genealogy of the western subject as a speaker of truth. (shrink)

The Wisdom of the Christian Faith joins philosophy and New Testament theology to offer a unique product: an anthology of accessible essays by prominent Christian philosophers on topics of religious and philosophical interest.

I argue that idealization can throw a new light upon Freud’s theory of sublimation and that courtly love can be seen as an illustration of this suggestion. For Freud sublimation is the process in which the sexual aim of the instincts is diverted towards a non-sexual aim that is still related with the original one. Freud’s theory struggles with at least two problems.The first problem regards the relation between the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem. Freud describes this (...) relation with different terms. The notion of ‘desexualization’ represents precisely what he has in mind. This term propounds that Freud understands sublimation as a one-sided movement that consists in leaving behind the original sexual aim. Courtly love proves that desexualization, as Freud understands it, is not a necessary condition for sublimation. A weakening of Freud’s strong claim concerning desexualization implies however that the distinction between sublimation and perversion is not always clearcut.The second problem appertains to the processes that bring about the transformation of the sexual aim. Courtly love infers that idealization of the love-object can play an important role in bringing about sublimation. The kind of sublimation that corresponds to courtly love is what has been called Verführung in German Idealism.Psychoanalytic theory is not willing to conceive idealization in this sense. According to the classical psychoanalytic theory, idealization produces repression of sexual instincts. I argue that this idea is counter-intuitive and that Freud’s understanding of idealization is more subtle. I give a short overview of Freud’s approach and I draw attention to some elements in his approach that help us to describe the direct link between idealization and sublimation.Idealization of the beloved can go together with an inhibition of sexual instincts. But it is wrong to identify aim-inhibition with repression or with a softening of the instincts. My suggestion is that the interaction between idealization and sublimation can be characterised as an interaction between an intensification of the sexual instincts, as it happens in any form of falling in love, and an inhibition of them.This interaction results in being lifted up above the sexual instincts that are caused by the idealised object. In religion and art, the double movement of the instincts is called ‘exaltation.’. (shrink)