Recent work in cerebral neurology should be used to fashion a new synthesis with anthropological studies. Beginning with Paul D. Madean's model of the triune brain, we explore Ralph Wendell Burhoe's question whether creative processes result from a coadaptation, perhaps in ritual itself, of genetic and cultural information. Then we examine the division of labor between right and left cerebral hemispheres and its implications for the notions of play and “ludic recombination.” Intimately related to ritual, play may function in the (...) social construction of reality analogous to mutation and variation in organic evolution. Finally, we consider how our picture of brain functioning accords with some distinctive features of the religious systems dominant in human cultures. (shrink)

It seems uncontroversial that Dalton wrongly believed that atoms are indivisible. However, the correct analysis of Dalton’s belief and the way it relates to contemporary beliefs about atoms is, on closer inspection, far from straightforward. In this paper, I introduce four features that any candidate analysis is plausibly bound to respect. I argue that theories that individuate concepts at the level of understanding are doomed to fail in this endeavor. I formally sketch an alternative and suggest that cases such as (...) the one presented provide support for the claim that the genuine source for concept individuation is public sharable thought. (shrink)

Ever since John Perry's developments in the late 70s, it is customary among philosophers to take de se contents as essentially tied to the explanation of action. The target explanation appeals to a subject-specific notion of de se content capable of capturing behavioural differences in central cases. But a subject-specific de se content leads us, I argue, to a subject-specific notion of intentional action that prevents basic forms of generalisation. Although this might be seen as a welcome revision of our (...) pre-theoretical conceptions, I propose, instead, a strategy to circumvent this rather unexpected result: to reject subject-specific de se contents in favour of subject-specific ways of thinking that do not enter into the content of one's attitudes. (shrink)

The article discusses some of the fundamental conceptual and theoretical aspects of rational choice and moral order. A distinction is drawn between constitutional interests and compliance interests, and it is argued that a viable moral order requires that the two interests somehow be brought into congruence. It is shown that with regard to the prospects for a spontaneous emergence of such congruence, a distinction between two kinds of moral rules which we call trust-rules and solidarity-rules is of crucial importance.

This article attempts to re-establish the importance of Foucault's work for an understanding of the way in which modern law operates. This argument has two stages. Firstly, there is a critique of the interpretation of Foucault's work by legal and sociological thinkers. It is argued that by reading the term ‘juridical’ as synonymous with the term ‘law’ in Foucault, people miss the substance of Foucault's argument. The term juridical describes an arrangement and a representation of power rather than the law. (...) This is made clear through a critique of J. S. Mill's On Liberty which is shown to make a juridical distinction between power and a free space of action which is unsustainable. Secondly, Foucault's genealogy of power relations is recast from the perspective of a legal theoretician. Foucault's history of power relations is constructed from historical differences in the mode of operation of power and discourse. By analysing these differences and their relationship to the mode of operation of law, an account of the place of modern law in Foucault's genealogy is established. Modern law operates between Foucault's concepts of government and discipline. It provides a key way in which government decisions can adjust the relationships between disciplinary institutions. This introduces the idea that law begins to operate in the perspective of the complete lives of individuals rather than just to prevent certain actions. Law, then, operates in accordance with what Foucault calls ‘bio-power’. (shrink)

Ces etudes debordent le probleme du temps chez les Stoiciens et se proposent d'etablir que cette question, en apparence modeste, permet d'eclairer, et en meme temps commande l'ensemble du systeme. Au premier abord en effet, la theorie du temps se presente comme une simple section d'un chapitre de la Physique, celui qui traite des Incorporels. Mais deja la simple interpretation des textes transmis fait voir que cette theorie tient etroitement a d'autres theories, comme celle des incorporels en general, des categories, (...) de la substance. Abordant ensuite les theses majeures de la logique et de l'ethique, on s'apercoit qu'a leur tour elles sont solidaires de la conception du temps qui, dans bien des cas, fait evanouir leur apparence de paradoxe. A cela meme, il n'y a rien d'etrange, si l'on se souvient que le stoicisme, plus que tout autre philosophie antique, constitue un systeme coherent. Mais plus particulierement, le probleme du temps a du former comme le noeud de la reflexion stoicienne qui vise, contre les lourdes autorites de Platon et d'Aristote, a retablir dans sa realite et dans sa dignite, le concret, le sensible, disqualifie comme sujet a la generation et a la corruption, c'est-a-dire, en un mot, comme l'etre dans le temps. (shrink)

La philosophie pratique de Kant / par Victor Delbos,...Date de l'edition originale: 1905Sujet de l'ouvrage: Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804)Collection: Bibliotheque de philosophie contemporaineCe livre est la reproduction fidele d'une oeuvre publiee avant 1920 et fait partie d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande editee par Hachette Livre, dans le cadre d'un partenariat avec la Bibliotheque nationale de France, offrant l'opportunite d'acceder a des ouvrages anciens et souvent rares issus des fonds patrimoniaux de la BnF.Les oeuvres faisant partie de cette (...) collection ont ete numerisees par la BnF et sont presentes sur Gallica, sa bibliotheque numerique.En entreprenant de redonner vie a ces ouvrages au travers d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande, nous leur donnons la possibilite de rencontrer un public elargi et participons a la transmission de connaissances et de savoirs parfois difficilement accessibles.Nous avons cherche a concilier la reproduction fidele d'un livre ancien a partir de sa version numerisee avec le souci d'un confort de lecture optimal. Nous esperons que les ouvrages de cette nouvelle collection vous apporteront entiere satisfaction.Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.frhttp: //gallica.bnf.fr/ark: /12148/bpt6k255788x. (shrink)

The article explores and attempts the possibility of reading normative cultural relativism into J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. This article examines J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. It argues that even though Mill is often described as a moral universalist as evident in the methodology employed in the postulation of his ethical utilitarianism, one could also argue that his position maintained in On Liberty qualifies him to be a normative cultural relativist. Basically, the article contends that beyond the universalist reading of (...) Mill’s works, he is qualified to be called a normative cultural relativist. The article interrogates and interprets the position maintained by J. S. Mill’s in the On Liberty that commits him to normative cultural relativism. The paper concludes that anyone that maintains such a position as Mill need not necessarily reject normative cultural relativism. (shrink)

Abstract:How might reading fiction allow a victim of the deadly sin of pride to escape? Your fictive imagination uses the transworld exemplification of performance props playing the somaesthetic role of your avatar, a character whom you are not simply acting or identifying with but "being." You avoid the epistemic glitch of a point of view from nowhere. You play the fictive role of your avatar either in the make-believe world of sport and art without time past or in the rhetorical (...) activity of communication learning about history in that fictional world complete with moral judgment and the judgment of taste. (shrink)

Recent philosophical and empirical contributions strongly suggest that perception attributes determinable properties to its objects. But a characterisation of determinability via attributed properties is restricted to the level of content and does not capture the difference between perceptual belief and perception on this score. In this paper, I propose a formal way of cashing out the difference between determinable belief and perception. On the view presented here, determinability in perception distinctively involves homogeneous representation or representation that exhibits special sorts of (...) formal type variability. This formal characterisation, I suggest, goes beyond traditional approaches to analog representation and parallels a baseline notion of analog computation. (shrink)

Paradigmatic cases of disagreement seem not to be compatible with a widespread kind of solution to Kripke’s celebrated Pierre puzzle. As a result, the classical puzzle about rational belief is shown to be also a puzzle about public disagreement/agreement phenomena. In this paper, I defend that the new public version of the puzzle is substantial and challenging and conclude that a full solution to Kripke’s considerations must offer a satisfactory account of both the rational and public character of belief attributions. (...) I then argue that a notion of non-belief-individuating understanding is plausibly the key notion that would allow us to arrest both versions of the Pierre puzzle. (shrink)

Je soutiens qu’accepter les explications réalistes intentionnelles du comportement cognitif conduit inévitablement à endosser l’hypothèse du langage de la pensée, et que cette position théorique est, par conséquent, largement répandue chez les philosophes de l’esprit. Au cours de la discussion, je propose un exposé succinct et précis de cette hypothèse et j’analyse une série d’exemples représentatifs de l’argumentation pro-LOT. Après avoir examiné deux cas de résistance à ce type de raisonnement, je conclus en montrant que le soutien accordé à la (...) LOT est empiriquement substantiel, en dépit de la flexibilité et du caractère incomplet de cette hypothèse. (shrink)

Horace, Satires 1.3.117–23, as transmitted: adsitregula, peccatis quae poenas inroget aequas,ne scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello.nam ut ferula caedas meritum maiora subire 120uerbera non uereor, cum dicas esse paris resfurta latrociniis et magnis parua minerisfalce recisurum simili te, si tibi regnumpermittant homines.Let there be a rule to impose fair penalties for transgressions, lest you pursue with terrible scourge one deserving but the stick. You see, I don't fear that you will strike with a schoolmaster's rod one who has earned more (...) serious lashing when you say mere thefts are of a pair with brigandage and threaten to trim little things and great with like sickle, would the world but grant you power. Horace is attacking the Stoics for their doctrine that all sins are equal. The overall run of sense must be that given above. If kept, the ut of line 120 must then have the value of ne: were it allowed its normal meaning in expressions of fear the opposite of what is required would be said. The oddity of the construction was long excused as a sort of anacoluthon, provoked by the postponement of uereor. Such defences of the received text were rightly criticised by Palmer and Housman: ‘incredible’, they both concluded, and indeed it is incredible that Horace could have in such a short space forgotten what he had written, and forgotten it in such a way as to say the opposite of what he meant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Forms of Life and Cultural EndowmentsVictor Peterson IIYou know, honey, us colored folk is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways.—Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God 15)what does it mean when we speak of a form of life? When speaking of a form of life, we consider one different from others by way of its mode of expression, that is, by its (...) means of construction. This interpretation lends itself to a functional analysis of the material put to use and whose operations jointly express the concept we are after. Modes of expression can be plotted between a rhetorical and semantic axis (Gates 48). As such, "[t]he level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual reference and positioning in different discursive fields of meaning and association, is the point where already coded signs intersect with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional more active ideological dimensions" (Hall 56). Coordinates within this domain encode signifying practices, revitalizing the traditional concept of signification as a function of what's signified with respect to a signifier. The content of a syntagm in this coordinate system, a point in this plane, indexes its function with respect to others. As such, we will conceive of the content of modes of expression functionally.A function is defined by pairing an element from a domain and another from a sub/co-domain whereby that pair is an element of that function. In this way, we can treat functions as abstract objects. If we treat a domain as what determines the availability of an expression, and a sub/co-domain as representative of its range of application, then the function of applying some proposition maps a movement from a domain of selection to one of composition, that is, its use with respect to others. The function of an expression, then, represents an operation over the possible worlds of its appropriate application (Taylor 201–02, 269, 276). This becomes more interesting when considering assertions whereby one subject is known to be the case for another, a concept that's modeled when a proposition from one is appearing in the object position of another (Fara 65–73). Resultingly, a proposal for an [End Page 26] ontology constituted by modes of interaction rather than identity stipulations to physical entities arises. It follows that if a form of life is understood by way of its mode of expression, then its content is expressed as an ensemble of the functions of its operations. Let this ensemble of functions be called an endowment.There is a pervasive debate in cultural studies that obsesses over proprietary notions as well as the ability to locate an origin. With that in mind, let us consider a coordinate system where there are two perpendicular axes, and we define positions within the space provided at the intersection of lines drawn from each. Each axis is represented by an ordered series of markers. A line drawn from each axis indicates that the coordinates indexed at their intersection is a function of these two markers. This locates an individual at a point in that domain, indexing a relation between the axes framing that space. Therefore, that coordinate-wise space, here a domain of possible expression, is not "empty" as pessimists would claim, but is filled with functional-content, albeit functions yet applied and marked by a point in that plane.Although we are currently speaking of two-dimensional space, the same follows for as many dimensions as we want. A point's location is a function of three values in three dimensions, four in four dimensions, and so on. Forms of life, then, will be comprised of four dimensions. This allows for a space-time conception, wherein joint expressions bend space-time and that space dictates those individuals' possible movements. From this, we construct a geometrical model of space-time represented as a cube composed of two-dimensional slices with these slices extending in a particular direction like cards stacked one on top of the other to model time.We want our conception of a form of life to be spatial. After all, it... (shrink)

Inquiry will be made here into a specific challenge facing writers offabulae palliatae, namely the interior scene, which they had not always the same means to display as did the poets of the νέα they adapted. One of them, Terence, will be seen to have reacted by eliminating the interior scenes that he found in his models.

Despite appearing side by side as keynote speakers at a congress in 1962 devoted to the question of progress, Löwith’s and Adorno’s accounts of progress have never been linked. This paper is an attempt to establish this missed connection, to reveal important connections, striking similarities, and a fundamental difference between these two eminent thinkers’ work on progress. For one, Löwith diagnoses the three main problems that Adorno attempts to solve with his dialectical account of progress. Moreover, each is sympathetic towards (...) crucial aspects of the other’s account: Löwith towards Adorno’s claim that progress is dialectical, Adorno towards Löwith’s claim that progress necessarily has a redemptive aspect. A fundamental disagreement nevertheless divides them: whether the problem of suffering in history is part of our ontological condition, or something we must struggle against and overcome through political action. By establishing this missed connection, I hope to show how progress might still have an important role to play in our present-day historical and political consciousness. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to define a partial Propositional Type Theory. Our system is partial in a double sense: the hierarchy of (propositional) types contains partial functions and some expressions of the language, including formulas, may be undefined. The specific interpretation we give to the undefined value is that of Kleene’s strong logic of indeterminacy. We present a semantics for the new system and prove that every element of any domain of the hierarchy has a name in the (...) object language. Finally, we provide a proof system and a (constructive) proof of completeness. (shrink)

The pioneering analysis of synchronicity was given by Jung, yet despite the concept's momentous significance in Jung's work, and despite the widespread dissemination of the term 'synchronicity' even within pop culture, synchronicity is often badly misconstrued and remains "perhaps the least understood of Jung's theories". Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making has already been hailed as the most important analysis of synchronicity since Jung himself.

In this paper, we define the family FiCn:={FiCn}n∈ω of logics by means of semantics of bivaluations. This family is a variant of the family of paraconsistent bivaluated Ciun-logics, defined and studied by J. Ciuciura. We will show that every logic in FiCn can be alternatively defined by means of finite matrices. This result arises from the characterisation of the truth-values of the involved matrices (relative to each FiCn-logic) as being specific finite sequences of elements of the set 2 := {0,1}. (...) Moreover, we will show in this paper that such characterisation is related to the well-known standard Fibonacci Sequence, which is presented here by means of its binary expansion. (shrink)

L'esprit philosophique de l'Allemagne et la pensee francaise / par Victor Delbos,...Date de l'edition originale: 1915Collection: Pages actuelles; 40Ce livre est la reproduction fidele d'une oeuvre publiee avant 1920 et fait partie d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande editee par Hachette Livre, dans le cadre d'un partenariat avec la Bibliotheque nationale de France, offrant l'opportunite d'acceder a des ouvrages anciens et souvent rares issus des fonds patrimoniaux de la BnF.Les oeuvres faisant partie de cette collection ont ete (...) numerisees par la BnF et sont presentes sur Gallica, sa bibliotheque numerique.En entreprenant de redonner vie a ces ouvrages au travers d'une collection de livres reimprimes a la demande, nous leur donnons la possibilite de rencontrer un public elargi et participons a la transmission de connaissances et de savoirs parfois difficilement accessibles.Nous avons cherche a concilier la reproduction fidele d'un livre ancien a partir de sa version numerisee avec le souci d'un confort de lecture optimal. Nous esperons que les ouvrages de cette nouvelle collection vous apporteront entiere satisfaction.Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.frhttp: //gallica.bnf.fr/ark: /12148/bpt6k5608386g. (shrink)

This article examines the possibility of establishing a Department of Peace (DOP) as a Department of the Government of Canada. The topic has been introduced in Parliament twice, as Bill C-447 in 2009 and as Bill C-373 in 2011, without any further actions beyond the formal First Reading. The introduction of the bills could only happen on the basis of significant support among Canadians. At present efforts to introduce the DOP continue, although in somewhat muted form. Based largely on oral (...) interviews, this article assesses the potential for establishing a DOP in the context of the Canadian peace tradition as well as global developments. It concludes that a DOP has great potential to move the peace agenda forward but that, in view of the priorities of the current government and the general mood in Canadian society, it is not realistic to expect a DOP to be implemented at present. (shrink)

From recent work on Ingarden it is apparent that values are central to his philosophy, even in the context of his realist ontology. In this evaluation of Ingarden’s work we consider his principal philosophical notions (i.e. his realist ontology, his aesthetics, his reflections on language, and his consideration of values) in the light of what Nietzsche referred to in his own philosophy as the “reevaluation” or the “inversion” of all values. It is argued that two of Ingarden’s most fundamental values (...) are the notion of communication and the aesthetic dimension of thought. (shrink)

This article presents Nietzsche's notion of the Übermensch (le surhomme in French) as a development of romanticism conceived of as a quest to reveal the sentiment that defines or characterizes each individual as an individual. This approach reveals the affinities between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, notably with respect to Schopenhauer's notion of Will that Nietzsche transforms into that of the Will to power, thereby underscoring what can be considered as Nietzsche's individualism. We argue that as a romantic notion, the notion of (...) Übermensch fashions an ideal of what life could be but overlooks the importance of otherness and the role that otherness plays in defining the individual. Going beyond Nietzsche implies that the Übermensch, as a logical construct neglects the desire to please that constitutes an important part of an individual's relation with otherness. (shrink)

Os guaranis ensinam que o diálogo inter-religioso é possível porque existe sentido, e existe sentido porque existe linguagem humana, e porque existe linguagem humana é possível sonhar, e porque existe o sonho, é possível dialogar no horizonte mais pleno cujos sentidos da humanidade podem celebrar uma festa universal. Palavras-chave: Hermenêutica; Epistemologia; Religião; Guarani; Antropologia; Sentido. ABSTRACT The Guaranis teach us that inter-religions dialogue is possible because meaning exists, and meaning exists because there is human language, and as there is human (...) language it is possible to dream, and dreams allow us to establish a dialogue in a wider horizon, whose maenings of mankind may celebrate a universal festivity. Key words: Hermeneutics; Epistemology; Religion; Guarani ; Anthropology; Meaning. (shrink)

Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit: Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus. By Jodi Magness. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2011. Pp. xv + 335, illus. $25.