Devemos olhar o mito como um grande quebra cabeça da história, cujas peças esparsas precisam ser unidas corretamente e, mesmo assim, não é certo que as peças unidas possam vir a formar um quadro de acontecimentos reais. É provável que a causa primeira da distorção de fatos e acontecimentos em mitos ou fábulas, estivesse na incompreensão da língua, assim como aconteceu, em grande medida, com a criação do romance cristão, contudo, superada essa incompreensão, julgou-se bom e necessário à ordem dos (...) acontecimentos, manter o mito fabuloso, da história. -/- Alina: ah! Sobre o Novo Testamento, tenho forte inclinação em crer naqueles que dizem que sua redação final tem muito pouco dos escritos primitivos, mas não acredito que isso se deva à incompreensão da língua, Lancio, como dizes, pode ter ocorrido com os mitos. -/- Lancio: eu entendo o que queres dizer. Você fala do Cristianismo de Constantino, quando o imperador romano deu status de religião de Estado à seita dos galileus e, nesse tempo e momento, toda redação do texto religioso não passa pela incompreensão do semítico e sim pelo interesse do Estado e da Igreja. Mas quando o movimento messiânico judaico, nos seus primeiros anos, passa a aceitar não judeus em suas sinagogas, sua literatura, até então restrita a um pequeno grupo de zelosos, passa a ser redigida indiscriminadamente, formando um sem números de evangelhos permeados de simbolismos que não poderiam ser compreendidos plenamente pelos não judeus e como era bom aos olhos e às intenções daqueles que estavam por trás desse movimento, muitas das incompreensões passaram a ser propositais (143). -/- Para uma visão do simbolismo nos textos religiosos, o Zohar é uma fonte brilhante. Um exemplo; com a palavra deserto: Em Samuel I, IV, 8, está escrito: "Estes são os Deuses que golpearam os egípcios com toda a sorte de pragas no deserto". DESERTO na expressão dos sábios judeus significa linguagem, fazer por meio das palavras, como em: “Quem é este que sobe do deserto?” (Cântico dos Cânticos, III, 6) , análogo à expressão “E tua linguagem é graciosa” (Cântico dos Cânticos, IV, 3), ou “A palavra se levantou da montanha” (Salmos LXXV,7). Similarmente “Voz que clama no deserto” (Isaias 40, 3). No Novo Testamento “A voz que clama no deserto” ( Marcos I,3, Lucas III,4, Mateus III,3), Portanto, como nunca existiu praga no Egito, a não ser pelos escritos de um povo que em determinada época, oprimido, os amaldiçoou, a História nunca evidenciou qualquer vestígio dessas pragas, apesar dos esforços. Percebemos que uma forma alegórica na redação de um texto pode custar muitos estudos e investigações mal sucedidas. -/- Também a redação do Novo Testamento se utiliza dessas alegorias, e com as figuras mais proeminentes do seu Corpo de Doutrina. (Sefer Ja Zohar, prologue,125 – 129). -/- A referência comparativa da incompreensão da língua extensiva ao romance cristão, diz respeito aos primeiros anos do messianismo judaico, quando a quarta filosofia (144) transpõe os portões de Jerusalém e ganha a mente e os corações dos gentios. -/- Alina: tens razão, a primeira lembrança que me veio foi o Concílio de Niceia, por isso minha descrença quando falou em incompreensão da língua. Mas o que estou percebendo é que a história cristã não foi gerada somente pelo simbolismo piedoso daquela gente, mas também pela utilização da incompreensibilidade do símbolo como fundamento da crença, ou estou pensando de forma errada? -/- Lancio: pensas corretamente, Alina. Houve a princípio a incompreensão do real significado das palavras, já que os nomes hebraicos, em sua maioria, eram sentenças abreviadas (145) e outras palavras que além de serem sentenças, eram tidas como códigos, próprias da astúcia dos escribas, o que hoje é facilmente identificável na literatura periférica judaica, como o Zohar, ou o “Livro do Esplendor”. -/- Alina: perdoe, Lancio, mas quando falas em quarta filosofia transpondo os portões de Jerusalém...? -/- Lancio: nos últimos séculos, Alina, os hebreus se dividiam em três partidos ou seitas ou, como denominou o historiador Flavio Josefo, em filosofias, que eram os Saduceus, os Fariseus e os Essênios. A quarta seita, partido ou filosofia, surge na Judeia por volta do ano 6 DC, fundada por Judas, O Galileu, um sofista cuja família ficaria em evidência por várias décadas e suas ações culminaram com dois registros históricos: o desaparecimento do reino judeu e o nascimento do Cristianismo. É uma longa e bela história, Alina. -/- . (shrink)

Analogy among characters is not the only structural device which blurs the boundaries of the self. The very repetition of the act of narration, involving a chain of quotations, makes the story a perfect example of what Jakobson calls "speech within speech"1 and divorces the various characters from their own discourse. In addition to the real author's speech to the real reader, crystallized in that of the implied author to the implied reader, the whole story is the speech of an (...) extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator who, in the footnote, calls himself "editor" and who sums up Liddell Hart's account and juxtaposes it with Yu Tsun's dictated statement. Just as the editor quotes Tsun, so Tsun, an extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator, quotes Albert who in turn quotes Ts'ui Pên, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the crucial letter, sometimes by conjecture, as in the instance of Pên's supposed declarations about the book and the maze. Quotation, then, is a dominant narrative mode in this story, and quotation is the appropriation by one person of the speech of another. Since a person is to a large extent constituted by one person of his discourse, such an appropriation implies, at least partly, an interpenetration of personalities. Thus both repetition through analogy and repetition through quotation threaten the absolute autonomy of the self. · 1. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin , pp. 296-322. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is a senior lecturer in the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, she is currently writing on the poetics of repetition and, in collaboration with Moshe Ron, on contemporary narrative theory. (shrink)

Samuel Lebens takes the three principles of Jewish faith, as proposed by Rabbi Joseph Albo (1380-1444), in order to scrutinize and refine them with the toolkit of contemporary analytic philosophy. What could it mean for a perfect being to create a world from nothing? Could our world be anything more than a figment of God's imagination? What is the Torah? What does Judaism expect from a Messiah, and what would it mean for a world to be redeemed? These questions (...) are explored in conversation with a wide array of Jewish sources and with an eye towards diverse fields of contemporary research, such as cosmology, philosophical logic, the ontology of literature, and the metaphysics of time. The Principles of Judaism articulates the most fundamental axioms of Orthodox Judaism in the vernacular of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Humans have always sought to change their environment—building houses, monuments, temples, and roads. In the process, they have remade the fabric of the world into newly functional objects that are also works of art to be admired. In this second edition of his popular Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Samuel Florman explores how engineers think and feel about their profession. A deeply insightful and refreshingly unique text, this book corrects the myth that engineering is cold and passionless. Indeed, Florman celebrates (...) engineering not only crucial and fundamental but also vital and alive he views it as a response to some of our deepest impulses, an endeavor rich in spiritual and sensual rewards. Opposing the "anti-technology" stance, Florman gives readers a practical, creative, and even amusing philosophy of engineering that boasts of pride in his craft. (shrink)

Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against (...) both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)

I argue that Spinoza endorses "conceptual dependence monism," the thesis that all forms of metaphysical dependence (such as causation, inherence, and existential dependence) are conceptual in kind. In the course of explaining the view, I further argue that it is actually presupposed in the proof for his more famed substance monism. Conceptual dependence monism also illuminates several of Spinoza’s most striking metaphysical views, including the intensionality of causal contexts, parallelism, metaphysical perfection, and explanatory rationalism. I also argue that this priority (...) of the conceptual does not commit Spinoza to forms of idealism or mentalism. The question of how to understand different kinds of metaphysical dependence is quite controversial in Spinoza studies; I address major alternative readings in the notes. But there I also try to draw connections to the growing debate in contemporary discussions about metaphysical dependence, as this topic is a happy point of shared interest between Spinoza and contemporary metaphysicians alike. (shrink)

This essay engages with two large themes in order to address the social and intellectual practices of nyāya scholars in early colonial Bengal. First, I examine networks that connected scholars with each other and, to a lesser extent, students and households. Exemplified in historical documents of the period, these networks demonstrate that nyāya scholars were part of larger scholar communities in Bengal and across India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I map these networks and examine their relevance for how (...) nyāya scholars were organized in early colonial Bengal. Second, I examine circulation patterns of manuscripts of nyāya texts composed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bengal. I argue that a contraction in the distribution of nyāya manuscripts of works written in Bengal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took place, especially into southern India. The essay concludes by situating nyāya scholars within the context of colonialism and drawing larger conclusions about nyāya intellectual practices in Bengal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (shrink)

This article is a study of the trajectory of the contemporary French liberal philosopher Marcel Gauchet from his early, ‘anarchist’ commitments through the 1970s to his discovery and defense of liberalism, notably as expressed in his 1980 revival and interpretation of his 19th-century countryman Benjamin Constant’s post-revolutionary liberalism. Discussed in the article are Gauchet’s devotion to and revision of the portrait of primitive society he inherited from the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, how his early political and theoretical concerns are transmuted (...) in Gauchet’s reading of Constant, and the relevance of this trajectory for comprehending even Gauchet’s most recent pronouncements about the nature and future of liberal society. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that only practical reasons are normative reasons for belief. This requires viewing beliefs as the predictable results of our actions. I will show how this fits with our intuitions about mental autonomy. The remainder of the paper consists in a defense against a series of objections that may be expected against this position. The paper concludes with a metaphilosophical explanation about our conflicting intuitions regarding the normativity of rationality.

To be a liberal is, among other things, to grant basic liberties some degree of priority over other aspects of justice. But why do basic liberties warrant this special treatment? For Rawls, the answer has to do with the allegedly special connection between these freedoms and the ‘two moral powers’ of reasonableness and rationality. Basic freedoms are said to be preconditions for the development and exercise of these powers and are held to warrant priority over other justice-relevant values for that (...) reason. In the first half of the article I mount an internal critique of this Rawlsian line, arguing that it is flawed in two main ways. First, it overestimates the contribution of basic freedom to moral personality. Second, it underestimates the contribution of non-liberty resources to moral personality. In the second half of the article I repair these flaws. The result is a new, intriguingly radical version of justice as fairness, one with surprising—yet plausible—implications for economic and gender justice. (shrink)

Samuel R. Buss and Aleksandar Ignjatović. Unprovability of Consistency Statements in Fragments of Bounded Arithmetic.

This study aims to introduce a modal extension M4CC of Arieli, Avron, and Zamansky's ideal paraconsistent four-valued logic 4CC as a Gentzen-type sequent calculus and prove the Kripke-completeness and cut-elimination theorems for M4CC. The logic M4CC is also shown to be decidable and embeddable into the normal modal logic S4. Furthermore, a subsystem of M4CC, which has some characteristic properties that do not hold for M4CC, is introduced and the Kripke-completeness and cut-elimination theorems for this subsystem are proved. This subsystem (...) is also shown to be decidable and embeddable into S4. (shrink)

This paper argues in support of the WHO’s proposal to forego COVID-19 booster shots until 10% of people in every country are fully vaccinated. The Ethical Argument section shows that we save the most lives and ensure the least amount of suffering by allocating doses first to unvaccinated people. It also argues that there is a duty to support decent lives and to promote health equity, which establish that refraining from boosters is a requirement of justice, not charity. The Replies (...) to Objections section answers objections that appeal to pragmatism, nationalism, ownership, scientific advancement, self-interest, semantics and futility. The Conclusion section emphasizes that for now, wealthy nations should not boost vaccinated people’s immunity and should instead send doses to poorer nations where they are most urgently needed. No data was used in this study. (shrink)

Research on the folk psychology of free will suggests that people believe free will is incompatible with determinism and that human decision-making cannot be exhaustively characterized by physical processes. Some suggest that certain elements of Western cultural history, especially Christianity, have helped to entrench these beliefs in the folk conceptual economy. Thus, on the basis of this explanation, one should expect to find three things: a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, that people with predominantly (...) incompatibilist commitments are likely to exhibit stronger dualist beliefs than people with predominantly compatibilist commitments, and people who self-identify as Christians are more likely to be dualists and incompatibilists than people who do not self-identify as Christians. We present the results of two studies that challenge two of these expectations. While we do find a significant correlation between belief in dualism and belief in free will, we found no significant difference in dualist tendencies between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Moreover, we found that self-identifying as Christian did not significantly predict preference for a particular metaphysical conception of free will. This calls into question assumptions about the relationship between beliefs about free will, dualism, and Christianity. (shrink)

They say of morality, as St. Augustine said of Time, I know what it is when you do not ask me If this theory wexetrue, 9 PRACTICAL ETHICS mankind would be ...

The private self, however, cannot stand alone. "We cannot think of the self except in contrast to that which is other than the self". Royce finds the source of physical nature in this need of the self for a not-self. The whole difference between inner and outer is social in origin, for only social confirmation can sustain our belief that a fact is an outer fact rather than an inner fact which no one else can observe.

The Impassioned Life argues that theology's task today is to rethink the nature of the emotions and their relation to human reason. Such rethinking is necessary because the Christian tradition feels ambivalently about the emotions. Armed with a commitment to body-soul dualism, many writers have equated the image of God with rationality and wondered whether emotion is an essential feature of human nature; however, the tradition has also affirmed the value of emotions such as love and compassion and has sometimes (...) asserted the value of so-called negative emotions such as anger. The question, then, is whether the tradition's pastoral insight into the importance of moderation and control of the emotions requires us to think dualistically about soul (identified with reason) and body (the seat of emotions). To answer this question, The Impassioned Life explores the vital resources of the Christian theological tradition and also of contemporary scientific and psychological research in order to achieve a more adequate theological understanding of the emotions and reason. At heart, it offers a holistic, integrated vision of the Christian life lived passionately in its full range of human feeling as life in the Spirit. (shrink)

What is a human body? Some reasons are given for thinking that, in the primary case, it is a body that is both of and suitable to a rational animal.

In this article, I provide an interpretation of Heidegger’s critique of Hegel. Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics is often taken to be the core strength of his Logic. In his critique of Hegel, Heidegger attempts to show that Hegel in fact smuggles in a decisive presupposition concerning being. Building on the recent work of Robert Pippin, I argue that we can understand this critique by situating it in terms of their common understanding of problems of first principles. Once (...) we do, we can fully appreciate a point that Pippin misses, that Heidegger develops his methodology and concept of ground in order to avoid the problems that he locates in Hegel. The upshots of my interpretation are that it (1) allows us to appreciate the systematicity and radicality of Heidegger’s mature ontology, and (2) forces those sympathetic to Hegel to reevaluate Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics. (shrink)

One shortcoming of the chain rule is that it does not iterate: it gives the derivative of f(g(x)), but not (directly) the second or higher-order derivatives. We present iterated differentials and a version of the multivariable chain rule which iterates to any desired level of derivative. We first present this material informally, and later discuss how to make it rigorous (a discussion which touches on formal foundations of calculus). We also suggest a finite calculus chain rule (contrary to Graham, Knuth (...) and Patashnik's claim that "there's no corresponding chain rule of finite calculus"). (shrink)

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise is a landmark both in democratic political theory and in the history of biblical interpretation. Spinoza championed liberty of thought, speech and writing by discrediting the Bible as the standard for truth and a source of public law. Applying a new historical criticism, he showed that biblical teaching and law were irrelevant for a modern pluralistic state and its intellectual life. J. Samuel Preus highlights Spinoza's achievement by reading the Treatise in the context of a literary (...) conflict among his contemporaries about biblical interpretation - a conflict fraught with political implication. Preus's exposition of neglected primary sources surrounding Spinoza's work offers evidence regarding his rhetorical strategy and intent in the Treatise. The book provides not only a valuable contribution to Spinoza scholarship but an important account of the origins of modern methods of biblical interpretation. (shrink)

I present an argument that for any computer-simulated civilization we design, the mathematical knowledge recorded by that civilization has one of two limitations. It is untrustworthy, or it is weaker than our own mathematical knowledge. This is paradoxical because it seems that nothing prevents us from building in all sorts of advantages for the inhabitants of said simulation.

This book rejects the commonly encountered perception of Friedrich Engels as perpetuator of a 'tragic deception' of Marx, and the equally persistent body of opinion treating him as 'his master's voice'. Engels' claim to recognition is reinforced by an exceptional contribution in the 1840s to the very foundations of the Marxian enterprise, a contribution entailing not only the 'vision' but some of the building blocks in the working out of that vision. Subsequently, he proved himself to be a sophisticated interpreter (...) of the doctrine of historical materialism and an important contributor in his own right. This volume serves as a companion to Samuel Hollander's The Economics of Karl Marx. (shrink)

My discussion has four parts. In section 1, I reconstruct Leibniz’s early position on freedom and show how various problems motivated significant changes in Leibniz’s views over a short period of time. In section two, I outline a series of notes by Leibniz entitled “De Libertate a Necessitate in Eligendo,” where Leibniz develops a rudimentary theory of contingency that resembles the infinite analysis theory developed around 1686. In section three, I consider some reasons for why Leibniz dropped the “Eligendo” view. (...) In section four, I look at the link that Leibniz develops between an infinite series of reasons and indemonstrability and suggest how the rudimentary theory of “Eligendo” eventually became the infinite analysis theory of contingency. (shrink)

This paper traces some changes in Catholic political theory eventually taken up and extended during World War II by Jacques Maritain, who became the foremost philosophical exponent of the idea of "human rights" on the postwar scene. I show that the invention of the idea of the "dignity of the human person" as embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights occurred not in biblical or other longstanding traditions, but instead in very recent and contingent history. In conclusion, I speculate (...) on what the restoration of Maritain's route to human rights to its proper contexts might suggest about the cultural meaning the idea had in postwar Continental Europe, which became its homeland. (shrink)

The new edition of this introductory text presents, in an accessible way, classical and contemporary readings on topics central to and representative of all major periods of the Western philosophical tradition. The book presents 55 readings (23 of which are new to the fourth edition) on seven topics: epistemology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, personal identity and immortality, free will and determinism, ethics, and political and social philosophy. Pedagogical features make these readings accessible and interesting to beginning students. All the introductions (...) and biographical sketches have been revised for the fourth edition, as have the study questions and glossary. The explanatory footnotes and the stylistic modernization of texts are new to the fourth edition. (shrink)