We present the results of three experiments investigating the interpretation of comparative constructions involving pronominal reference in which binding Principle C is violated. We show that both children and adults retrieve interpretations that are not predicted. On the one hand, children appear to represent elided pronominal material functionally instead of in a strict identity relation with a pronoun on the surface, generating interpretations that are entirely unexpected from the perspective of the adult grammar. On the other, adult participants often appear (...) to ignore Principle C, being influenced by factors such as prosodic focus, the type of comparative, and structural position of the pronoun. We propose that the way in which the sentence processor is deployed in the incremental processing of such comparative constructions gives rise to so-called acceptable ungrammaticality. (shrink)

Nowadays, managing change in complex services requires that middle management re-designs its objects and professional practices, in order to cope with new needs. It seems therefore crucial to activate training settings that allow managers to: develop research and analytical skills on their own work practices and professional objects; face and manage conflict, related to every change, that represents an opportunity to reflect and review one's own practices; and build new and shared repertories of managerial practices, able to support a better (...) form of living and working together within the management community. Moving from these hypotheses, inside the setting of a training intervention conducted in an educational service, the article discusses a specific tool used to generate opportunity of exchange, and reflection, within a challenging framework of change. (shrink)

With the advancement of digital technology in contemporary art, new hybrid forms of interaction emerge that invite viewers to make images present in physical space as events that claim a life of their own. In breaking away from representational and performance art theories that have dominated the critique of new media artwork since the 1980s, this article analyses an iconic vision of mobile touchscreens based on the medieval Byzantine chorographic inscription of the sacred in profane spaces. As defined in recent (...) art historical studies on Byzantine icons, chorography ( chôra/space + chorós/movement) builds on a multisensory spatial interaction between the beholders of icons that results in feeling the presence of a divine, invisible image. In light of postmodern critique of digital images’ capacity to manipulate notions of reality, new media aesthetic theory hardly addresses this Byzantine iconic vision that is fundamental to western visual culture. Jeffrey Shaw’s installation, The Golden Calf, is discussed to offer an alternative in understanding how digital and physical spaces function together to evoke something essentially real. (shrink)

pt. 1. The dharma imperative -- pt. 2. The dharma toolbox -- pt. 3. The dharma user's guide -- pt. 4. Dharma in action -- pt. 5. The dharma of leadership.

ABSTRACT Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obvious but no less important impetus—the international negotiations of smaller states. Smaller states shaped communication networks in an international (albeit (...) politically and religiously slanted) direction. Their networks of negotiation contributed to the internationalization of emerging science through a political and religious concept of shared interest. While interest has been central to social studies of science, interest itself has not often been historicized within the history of science. This case study demonstrates the co-production of science and society by tracing how period concepts of interest made science international. (shrink)

We study the set of possible sizes of maximal independent families to which we refer as spectrum of independence and denote \\). Here mif abbreviates maximal independent family. We show that:1.whenever \ are finitely many regular uncountable cardinals, it is consistent that \\); 2.whenever \ has uncountable cofinality, it is consistent that \=\{\aleph _1,\kappa =\mathfrak {c}\}\). Assuming large cardinals, in addition to above, we can provide that $$\begin{aligned} \cap \hbox {Spec}=\emptyset \end{aligned}$$for each i, \.

Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's “The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata” to today's desiderata lists, suggests how an early modern model of imperial expansion has shaped, in unintended ways, (...) a scientific rhetoric of collaborative advance on shared targets. (shrink)

In a time marked by the development of innovative treatments in healthcare and the need for health professionals to deal with resulting ethical dilemmas in clinical practice, this study was developed to determine the influence of the bioethics teaching on the moral competence of medical and nursing students. The authors conduct a longitudinal study using the Moral Competence Test extended version before and after attending the ethics curricular unit, in three nursing schools and three medical schools of Portugal. In this (...) questionnaire the participant is confronted with three ethical dilemmas and asked to evaluate arguments for and against the attitude of the main character. For both nursing and medical students, C-score was lower after the attendance of the ethics curricular units, with a statistically significant decrease in the total score for nursing students and a decrease not statistically significant for medical students. A multivariate analysis did not find any association between this decrease and gender, course, or age. The phenomenon of moral segmentation was observed, with better performance in the worker and judge dilemma, than in the doctor dilemma. These results highlight the need to reflect on the curricular strategies that can be implemented for health professionals to better develop moral competence and decision-making, allowing for the provision of humanized health care. (shrink)

Replicability is usually considered to be one of the cornerstones of science; however, the growing recognition of nonreplicable experiments and studies in scientific journals—a phenomenon that has been called ‘replicability crisis’—has spurred a debate on the meaning, function, and significance of replicability in science. Amid this discussion, it has become clear that replicability is not a monolithic concept; what is still controversial is exactly how the distinction between different kinds of replicability should be laid out terminologically and conceptually, and to (...) what extent it bears on the more general debate on the centrality of replicability in science. This paper’s goals are to clarify the different uses of the terms related to replicability and, more importantly, to conceptually specify the kinds of replicability and their respective epistemic functions. (shrink)

Im vorliegenden Beitrag geht es – angesichts der enormen gesellschaftlichen Verbreitung von Quantifizierungstechniken und -imperativen im digitalen Zeitalter – um psychische Bedeutungen des digitalen Messens, Zählens und Vergleichens und um die Faszination für diese Operationen. Mit Blick auf eine sozio- und psychoanalytisch ausgerichtete Hermeneutik der Zahl werden erste Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts »Das vermessene Leben« erörtert. Eine der zentralen Fragen ist dabei, wie sich Merkmale digitaler Quantifizierung mit psychischen Dispositionen verbinden, spezifische Bewältigungs- und Abwehrmuster auslösen oder welche Rolle etwa die Externalisierung (...) von Affekt- oder Norm-Regulationen spielt. Schließlich wird nachgezeichnet, wie daraus neue Konstellationen und kulturelle Vorstellungen von Normalität und Pathologie hervorgehen können. (shrink)

This is the first monograph devoted to the theology of the Epinomis. It argues that the work offers a revised Platonic conception of the divine better suited to the political imperatives of the post-Classical age. The Epinomis is an 'appendix' to Plato's Laws written by Plato's student, Philip of Opus. Through a comprehensive analysis of the Epinomis' lexicon, and comparisons with the Corpus Platonicum, Vera Calchi offers readers an insight into the Epinomis' philosophical and historical context, purpose, and legacy. (...) Calchi argues that Philip effectively reshapes Plato's metaphysical language into a theology premised on the immanence of God in the heavens. The resulting account of God's providential activity in the cosmos, which offers a new way of thinking about morality and political order, can be regarded as a major step towards the cosmic theology of the Hellenistic period. The Theology of the Epinomis is suitable for students and scholars of ancient philosophy, particularly those working on the Epinomis and Platonic philosophy. It will also be of interest to those studying the history of religion and theology in antiquity. (shrink)

Definition of the problemThe article addresses the relationship between reproduction, time and the good life. Services offered by reproductive medicine and conceptions of the good life in time influence each other reciprocally. This interaction is characterised by implicit and explicit normative settings and expectations of appropriate temporality.ArgumentsWe first discuss the significance of time for the life course and for parenthood from a sociological and social psychological perspective. Reproductive medicine can increase the options for becoming a parent and thus for life-time (...) autonomy. However, in the context of societal imperatives for optimisation and efficiency, it can also have opposite effects and increase heteronomy. Overall, this leads to changed forms of adaptation and self-determination, new dilemmas and ambivalences in the temporal optimisation of parenthood.ConclusionsAgainst this background, we explain how the ethics of reproductive medicine could benefit from interdisciplinary research that focuses on life in its temporal course. (shrink)

Given the growing popularity of online methods for researchers and the increasing awareness of the levels of harassment and abuse directed at women online—especially women expressing feminist views—it is critical that we address the implications of online abuse for feminist researchers. Focussing on an often hidden yet significant part of our methodological decisions and recruitment, this paper details the online abuse levelled by men's rights activists against a research project on women's experiences of men's stranger intrusions in public space. It (...) argues for the need to locate such experiences within a violence-against-women frame, extending the concept of a continuum of sexual violence. Such an extension renders visible the added labour of ‘safety work’, which forms an invisible backdrop to the methodological decisions of many feminist researchers. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of Super-Humeanism, the world’s mosaic consists only of permanent matter points and changing spatial relations, while all the other entities and features figuring in scientific theories are nomological parameters, whose role is merely to build the best law system. In this paper, I develop an argument against Super-Humeanism by pointing out that it is vulnerable to and does not have the resources to solve the well-known problem of immanent comparisons. Firstly, I show that it cannot endorse (...) a fundamentalist solution à la Lewis, since its two pillars—a minimalist ontology and a best system account of lawhood—would generate, together, a tedious problem of internal coherence. Secondly, I consider anti-fundamentalist strategies, proposed within Humeanism, and find them inapplicable to the Super-Humean doctrine. The concern is that, since it is impossible to choose the best law system within Super-Humeanism, this doctrine may be charged with incoherence. (shrink)

Metaphysical anti-realism is a large and heterogeneous group of views that do not share a common thesis but only share a certain family resemblance. Views as different as mathematical nominalism—the view that numbers do not exist—, ontological relativism—the view that what exists depends on a perspective—, and modal conventionalism—-the view that modal facts are conventional—all are versions of metaphysical anti-realism. As the latter two examples suggest, relativist ideas play a starring role in many versions of metaphysical anti-realism. But what does (...) it mean for the existence of something to “depend on” a perspective, or for a modal fact to “depend on” a convention? We can distinguish between various dependence relations, giving rise to an array of drastically different forms of metaphysical anti-realism. This article offers a guided tour. I develop a systematic distinction between various forms of metaphysical anti-realism with a focus on the role of relativist ideas in this landscape. (shrink)

Im Beitrag werden Veränderungen der Kommunikation durch digitale Medien, ihre psychischen Bedeutungen und Folgen, u. a. anhand von empirischen Befunden zu Social-Media-Praktiken von Jugendlichen und von Eltern thematisiert. Bezugsrahmen der Analyse sind dabei kulturelle Wandlungen sowie soziale und psychische Bedeutungen von Aufmerksamkeit: geteilte Aufmerksamkeit als ein Kern der Kommunikation, aber auch die für psychische Entwicklung notwendige geschenkte, für den anderen oder für anderes offene Aufmerksamkeit als ein wesentliches Moment der Zuwendung, Empathie und Bezogenheit – im Gegensatz zu selbstbezogener Aufmerksamkeit und (...) instrumenteller Aufmerksamkeitslenkung. Überdies werden Folgen fragmentierter Aufmerksamkeit, wie sie aus der Überlagerung von Online- und Offline-Kommunikation resultiert, für psychische Entwicklungen betrachtet. (shrink)

The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists’ emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today’s emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey’s quality of situations and Gendlin’s felt (...) sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process. (shrink)

One dimension of cognitive success concerns getting it right: having many true beliefs and no false ones. Another dimension of cognitive success concerns using the right concepts. For example, using a concept of a person that systematically excludes people of certain demographics from its extension is a sort of cognitive deficiency. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often referred to (...) as “conceptual engineering”. However, so far it is unclear what exactly happens in cases of conceptual engineering. How does language change when we engineer a concept? This article offers an answer. I propose a view on which, when speakers assess the truth of propositions, they often rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for their truth. For example, when speakers assess whether unborn fetuses are people, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required to be a person. Based on this idea, I develop a model of conceptual engineering according to which speakers “engineer concepts” when they change how they assess the truth of propositions. For example, speakers engineer the concept of a person when they change how they assess the truth of the proposition that unborn fetuses are people. (shrink)

We study regularity properties related to Cohen, random, Laver, Miller and Sacks forcing, for sets of real numbers on the Δ31\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varvec{\Delta}^1_3}$$\end{document} level of the projective hieararchy. For Δ21\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varvec{\Delta}^1_2}$$\end{document} and Σ21\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varvec{\Sigma}^1_2}$$\end{document} sets, the relationships between these properties follows the pattern of the well-known Cichoń diagram for cardinal characteristics of the continuum. It is known that (...) assuming suitable large cardinals, the same relationships lift to higher projective levels, but the questions become more challenging without such assumptions. Consequently, all our results are proved on the basis of ZFC alone or ZFC with an inaccessible cardinal. We also prove partial results concerning Σ31\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varvec{\Sigma}^1_3}$$\end{document} and Δ41\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\varvec{\Delta}^1_4}$$\end{document} sets. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive guide to the metaphysics of Bohmian mechanics. Bohmian mechanics is a quantum theory that describes the motion of particles following trajectories that are determined by the quantum wave-function. The key question that the theory has to face relates to the ontological interpretation of the quantum wave-function. The main debate has mostly centered around two opposing views, wave-function realism on the one hand, and the nomological view on the other hand. The (...) supporters of the former believe that the wave-function is a physical field living in a high-dimensional space; the supporters of the latter regard the wave-function as just an entity that appears in the laws of nature and lacks physical status. This monograph discusses both views open-mindedly, illuminating their tacit problems and providing new insight into how they can be overcome. Moreover, it discusses the structuralist view, which is often neglected and which can be regarded as a reconciliation of the two main opposing camps. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics is arguably our most successful physical theory, yet the nature of the quantum state still constitutes an ongoing controversy. This paper proposes, articulates, and defends a metaphysical interpretation of the quantum state that is fictionalist in spirit since it regards quantum states as representing a fictional ontology. Such an ontology is therefore not physical, and yet it provides a reference for the language used in quantum mechanics and has explanatory power. In this sense, this view, akin to Allori’s (...) recent account of wavefunctionalism, combines elements of the representationalist and anti-representationalist camps and aims to be the best of both worlds. (shrink)

The subject of this book is the relationship between the Soviet regime and the Soviet middleclass citizen.

My main concern in this paper is to develop some ideas within the Kantian ethical tradition. More precisely, my aim is to develop an ethical perspective that is grounded upon the Kantian ideas of autonomy and ideal of the person (Kant’s notion of humanity) as fundamental starting points for a coherent account of Kant’s ethics in contrast to the deontological duty-based interpretation of his moral philosophy, then sketch, subsequently, some suggestions to show why this reading has more philosophical import than (...) what a deontological reading may provide. I take no issue for the time being however, as to whether or not the perspective I have in mind leads to either a Kantian orthodoxy or a revisionist direction in Kant scholarships. (shrink)

The use of reproductive techniques and the eventual reproductive negligence from the provider of reproductive services gave rise to situations in which the intended parents are deprived of raising a child genetically connected to them. Courts have been dealing with cases of those for years, but have systemically denied claimants compensation, failing to recognise as damage the loss of genetic connection. In 2017, for the first time, the Singapore High Court provided compensation for that damage, labelled “loss of genetic affinity”. (...) This paper will argue that the damage in question is the loss of genetic connection and results from a violation of reproductive rights because a key element of reproductive rights is to have children with whom we keep a genetic bond and raise them. The paper will explain why the arguments classically argued against such compensation are unfounded and it will argue for a compensation covering both patrimonial and non-patrimonial damages. (shrink)

Recently, Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich have argued that there are different gender philosophical intuitions and that these differences may play a role in explaining the marginalization of women philosophers. To the contrary, I defend the view that intuitions are in part socially constructed and the product of stereotypical behaviours. My paper has two aims: firstly, to offer some speculations about the effect of Buckwalter and Stich’s hypothesis and to focus on whether “intuition” is a gendered notion; secondly, to argue (...) that Buckwalter and Stich’s approach is inadequate, by showing that the data in the studies they report are insufficient to support their conclusion and that their thesis does not comply with the view that gender differs from one society to another. (shrink)

Desde hace unos años, la palabra crisis se ha instalado en nuestro lenguaje cotidiano. Se trata de un término polivalente que se aplica sobre una realidad magmática de contornos imprecisos. Inicialmente la crisis se manifestó a nivel económico. Pero la crisis afecta al disfrute de los derechos constitucionales, agravando el desamparo de una ciudadanía cada vez más alejada de la clase política. En este contexto, la corrupción política detrae una cuantía escandalosa recursos que podrían ser destinados a satisfacer derechos constitucionales. (...) De ahí que la lucha contra la corrupción resulte prioritaria. Los códigos éticos aparecen como nuevos instrumentos de regeneración de la vida pública con los que romperla judicialización de la vida política, que tanto daño están causando a nuestro sistema democrático. (shrink)

In this paper I am going to present several ideas selected from the field of two important current inputs to the interface of philosophy and psychoanalysis. First, there is the study of Linda Brakel who confronts Freudian unconscious with meaning theory, i.e. the philosophy of Donald Davidson. Brakel feels that the approach of Davidson/Cavell misinterprets the Freudian concepts and robs it of its central characteristics. She insists in the primary process which she describes as representational, contentful and a-rational. The second (...) input is to be found within today’s reception of Kant in the epistemological field. The debates depart from the controversial issue of whether Kant was a conceptionalist or a non-conceptionalist and frequently refer to McDowells Mind and World. Then I will present my own approach that combines psychoanalytical ideas with an application of Peircean categories. My aim is to show that this approach contributes to the understanding of mind in general. In comparing the philosophical concepts with psychoanalytical ones, I will point out the specific place of psychoanalytical concepts within the theory of knowledge. I will conclude by pleading for the integration of the psychoanalytic ideas into a broader theory of thinking. Furthermore, the meaning of this integration on psychoanalysis itself will be evaluated. (shrink)

Ontological expressivism is the view that ontological existence claims express non-cognitive mental states. I develop a version of ontological expressivism that is modeled after Gibbard’s (2003) norm-expressivism. I argue that, when speakers assess whether, say, composite objects exist, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for composition to occur. These assumptions guide their assessment, similar to how norms may guide the assessment of normative propositions. Against this backdrop, I argue that “some objects have parts”, uttered in the (...) context of an ontological disagreement, expresses a noncognitive disposition to assess the truth of propositions by using only rules of assessment according to which the proposition that some objects have parts is to be evaluated as true. (shrink)

El libro supone un acercamiento a la conformación de la lingüística española, a partir de la introducción en España por parte de Manuel Vilá i Fontanals de las novísimas metodologías y estudios científicos de las lenguas y el lenguaje que Alemania dio a luz a lo largo del siglo XIX. Hasta llegar a la figura importantísima en la lingüística histórica hispana, el autor realiza el recorrido desde Vilá, pasando por Menéndez Pelayo, hasta llegar al discípulo de ambos (de quienes bebe), (...) Ramón Menéndez Pidal. Enriquecedor es, además, la inclusión de un olvidado lingüista español, preestructuralista: Ángel Amor Ruibal, obviado por Pidal, pero coetáneo del mismo. La obra supone una visión de conjunto de la conformación de una ciencia en España que, con retraso respecto de Europa, ha seguido la estela de las grandes escuelas europeas desde la diacronía a la sincronía en sus intereses académicos. El público objetivo de este libro es el alumnado de grado universitario. Su autor es Ígor Rodríguez-Iglesias, profesor del Área de Lengua Española en la Universidad de Málaga y miembro del Grupo de Investigación HUM972 de Lingüística de la Universidad de Sevilla. Antes ha sido profesor en la Universidad de Huelva e investigador en las universidades de La Habana, Alcalá, Coímbra y Autónoma de Madrid. El libro está prologado por Francisco Marcos-Marín, profesor de la Universidad de Texas en San Antonio."--Cover page 4. (shrink)

A definition of a property P is impredicative if it quantifies over a domain to which P belongs. Due to influential arguments by Ramsey and Gödel, impredicative mathematics is often thought to possess special metaphysical commitments. It seems that an impredicative definition of a property P does not have the intended meaning unless P already exists, suggesting that the existence of P cannot depend on its explicit definition. Carnap (1937 [1934], p. 164) argues, however, that accepting impredicative definitions amounts to (...) choosing a "form of language" and is free from metaphysical implications. This paper explains this view in its historical context. I discuss the development of Carnap’s thought on the foundations of mathematics from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, concluding with an account of Carnap’s (1937 [1934]) non-Platonistic defense of impredicativity. This discussion is also important for understanding Carnap’s influential views on ontology more generally, since Carnap’s (1937 [1934]) view, according to which accepting impredicative definitions amounts to choosing a "form of language", is an early precursor of the view Carnap presents in "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" (1956 [1950]), according to which referring to abstract entities amounts to accepting a "linguistic framework". (shrink)

Do numbers exist? Carnap (1956 [1950]) famously argues that this question can be understood in an “internal” and in an “external” sense, and calls “external” questions “non-cognitive”. Carnap also says that external questions are raised “only by philosophers” (p. 207), which means that, in his view, philosophers raise ”non-cognitive” questions. However, it is not clear how the internal/external distinction and Carnap’s related views about philosophy should be understood. This paper provides a new interpretation. I draw attention to Carnap’s distinction between (...) purely external statements, which are independent from all frameworks, and pragmatic external statements, which concern which framework one should adopt, and argue that the latter express noncognitive mental states. Specifically, I argue that “frameworks” are systems of rules for the assessment of statements, which are utterances of ordinary language sentences. Pragmatic external statements express noncognitive dispositions to follow only certain rules of assessment. For instance, “numbers exist” understood as a pragmatic external statement expresses a noncognitive disposition to use only rules of assessment according to which numbers do exist. Carnap can thereby be understood as proposing a distinctive form of noncognitivism about ontology that is in some respects analogous to norm-expressivism in metaethics. (shrink)

A new political practice, the ‘reason of state’, informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered ‘secrets of empire’ from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of ‘reason of state’ by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, (...) such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560–1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582–1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art. (shrink)

This paper attempts to argue that a radically different notion of freedoms and rights that originates from the other, that is founded on the infinite responsibility for the other, and that demands an encounter with the other as pure alterity, could be a plausible starting point towards the conception and possible realization of a Levinasian society of neighbors. First, an explication is made on why a radical change in the area of freedoms and rights could be the starting point towards (...) a social, political, and moral philosophical framework based on the radical philosophy of Levinas as elaborated in his Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Then, a discussion on conventional conceptions of freedoms and rights, particularly those based on liberalism, libertarianism, and utilitarianism, is presented as groundwork for a comparative analysis between these conventional conceptions and a radical notion that would be entailed by a conception of a Levinasian society of neighbors. Lastly, an attempt is made to characterize a radically different conception of freedoms and rights based on the philosophy of Levinas and to argue how it could be the starting point towards the conception and possible realization of a Levinasian society of neighbors. (shrink)