Written in the American tradition, American Modern: The Path Not Taken describes how four major American thinkers practiced philosophy non-reductively by incorporating the arts and other human activities. Tejera provides a detailed analysis of Peirce, Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, showing that the importance they placed on the human can cure what is missing in recent philosophy. American Modern will interest philosophers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of American intellectual history.

El presente trabajo busca realizar una comparación entre las teorías del lenguaje de dos filósofos racionalistas, uno moderno y otro contemporáneo, Habermas y Spinoza respectivamente. Así, se intenta enfatizar que, lejos de ubicarse en ambos extremos de un abismo irreconciliable, ambos pensadores se hallarían en una posición sumamente propincua. De esta manera, el artículo procederá a elucidar las posiciones de Habermas y Spinoza respecto de la intencionalidad, el lenguaje y la democracia.

In this paper, we recover the idea cast by Graham Priest to our ears in 2000: That it was possible to experience Ontological Paraconsistency in life. He had, back then, as a translation of his thinking, a painting by Escher: The stairs could be going up or down, and one could not tell where they were going by simply examining the painting. The most obvious argument as to why that was not an instance of Ontological Paraconsistency found in reality was (...) that the perspective from which you would have to stare at the painting to see something different would be different too, so that it was impossible that we were getting up and down at the same time, that is, from the same perspective. That would happen with anything we picked in this world. We recently found something that does not entirely belong to this world, however, something that could finally satisfy the requirements of Priest, and therefore prove to us that there is a place for Ontological Paraconsistency. We observe that the paraconsistent robot, Emmy (Abe et al., 2006), is an application of the Non-ontological Paraconsistency, which we always believed to be passive of existence, but we here talk about another type of paraconsistency, which would be intrinsic to the being. The purpose of this paper is then providing a definite answer to the questions: Is there any real life instance of Ontological Paraconsistency? Is Ontological Paraconsistency a useful concept in terms of logical theories? (shrink)

William Bartram would accompany his botanizing father, John, into the wilderness and he would famously memorialize his own explorations with an account that mixed romantic conventions with natural history and Quaker theology. William’s interior life corresponds to the spirit of Virgil’s Eclogues with its promise of the resto­ration of a Golden Age, replete with bucolic scenes of shepherds tending their flocks and singing nature’s praises. This paper addresses some of the political interpretations that Bartram’s work has received and argues that (...) William was focused on a distant past which he was introduced to through the classical curriculum at the newly founded Academy of Philadelphia. William’s curriculum guaranteed an introduction to the conventions of the sublime and the picturesque, since Addison’s Spectator was also required reading and he was well-versed in Linnaean nomenclature, but wherever William botanized his observations of the natural world were framed by classical literature. His tour of ancient Indian ruins where he imagined an Areopagus and a space free of strife and bloodshed is a dramatic example of William’s habit of importing a place defined by classical literature into his natural history. (shrink)

L’ipotesi da cui muove la scelta di temi ed autori di questo percorso è quella di aprire esplorazioni ed incursioni nelle pieghe della cultura umana per cogliere le frizioni e le smagliature tra etica e politica in vista della possibilità, data o negata, di riconfigurare sé stessi e la cultura di cui ogni uomo è forza viva, mutante e trasfigurante. Un viaggio tra luoghi e stanze parallele, che a volte si svelano comunicanti, altre volte solo tracce di afone esistenze. Indagine (...) della storia e tentativo di una ermeneutica politica non riduttivistica, che intercetti intimamente la concezione e la struttura antropologica a fondamento di una società e di una sua organizzazione politica. La sfida di fondo di questo lavoro è quella di ripensare il posto dell’uomo nell’ordine dei significati del corpo, e ricondurre la corporeità nell’ordine dei significati di una antropologia politica. Da questa ipotesi, viene proposto un itinerario che intercetta alcuni dualismi e fratture come nuclei di criticità da cui muovere e infiltrarsi nelle intersezioni simboliche tra piano etico e piano politico dell’esistenza. (shrink)

Anche se il presente lavoro ha un taglio prettamente critico-ricostruttivo del pensiero hegeliano nelle varie fasi della sua attività filosofica, esso intende mostrare nel dettaglio il nesso strettissimo e intrinseco tra il sistema e il concetto di diritto sia dal punto di vista fenomenologico sia da quello epistemico-concettuale vero e proprio. Sin dagli inizi della riflessione di Hegel è documentata una trattazione serrata e ripetutamente approfondita del tema giuridico e in modo particolare di quello di Person proprio perché esso rappresenta (...) il fondamento di una ‘sostanzializzazione’ del soggetto nella sua oggettività che nella volontà trova il momento costitutivo della sua stessa libertà, altrimenti il soggetto sarebbe relegato inesorabilmente i insormontabilmente all’indeterminatezza più o meno naturale della sua stessa soggettività formale senza vero contenuto. A livello di letteratura secondaria, in base a quanto è stato possibile consultare, risulta che ci si sia focalizzati piuttosto sul contenuto a sé stante del concetto hegeliano di Recht e delle sue articolazioni mentre il nesso con il sistema non è stato esplicitato almeno sufficiente ed pare essere rimasto piuttosto sullo sfondo. Come appena accennato, la filosofia del diritto di Hegel è un elemento fondamentale all’interno del suo sistema e della sua evoluzione teorica sin dalla sua prima attività teoretica. Il suo concetto è essenzialmente ciò che si chiama “sostanza”, cioè l’oggettività rispetto al soggetto finito soggettivo e potenzialmente determinante della sua infinità reale, in cui la sua volontà aspirandovi trova la sua autentica (iniziale) libertà. Il concetto di diritto è necessariamente trattato sia dal punto di vista fenomenologico in modo che lo spirito finito sperimenti questa volontà giuridica nella Wirklichkeit secondo la sua forma apparente, sia dal punto di vista epistemologico in modo da presentare il suo vero concetto o idea filosofica all’interno della scienza dello spirito oggettivo. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present an interpretation of the nature and role of absolute knowing, which rests upon the concepts of Form and Gestalt (shape). These concepts constitute the essential dimensions of absolute knowing, in virtue of which it is possible to give an account of its structure and central properties. The first dimension – “first” thanks to the ontological value it can be ascribed to – is Form, which expresses the conceptual structure of absolute knowing; the (...) second one, Gestalt, is the exemplification of that structure in the sphere of existence. By examining selected passages from the absolute knowing chapter it can be shown how Hegel uses these terms to refer respectively to the logical-conceptual structure of absolute knowing and to its concrete exteriorization, emphasizing from time to time one of the two sides. Hence it is shown that absolute knowing is fully achieved only insofar as consciousness attributes to its content both the Form and the Gestalt of the self or, in other words, insofar as it acknowledges that the properties of content are the same as its own, and conversely realizes that the properties of thought do reflect the structure of its content. The article concludes with the examination of some questions about the subject of absolute knowing in order to highlight the pivotal role played by the temporal-historical dimension. (shrink)

L’alternative « soins ordinaires », « soins extraordinaires » en fin de vie nous place au cœur d’un débat très actuel de pratique et d’éthique médicales. L’article examine les difficultés de la médecine de fin de vie et met en évidence certaines insuffisances des analysesmises en œuvre pour prendre les décisions appropriées. La lecture des textes magistériels sur ces questions amènent pareillement à se demander si la science bioéthique n’est pas dans une impasse.

The beginning of Marx’s Capital has references to Hegel’s Logic of Being. From the individual commodity considered in isolation, Marx derives the value form as the germ cell of capitalist society. Marx’s materialist inversion of the Hegelian dialectic posits the value form as a spectral objectivity that constitutes the real abstraction specific to capitalism. As the most abstract expression of capital, it rules unconsciously the totality of social praxis as an absolute fetish. Value arises from a double mystification: the reification (...) of capitalist social relations of production in an objective abstract form, and its representation in concrete objects, as commodities and money in circulation. Value, as the real abstraction of capitalist social relations of production, is the disjunctive synthesis between the despotic command of capital in production and the reciprocity of exchange in circulation. In the final chapter on primitive accumulation, Marx identifies its historical genesis in the dispossession of the commons, which, by separating the subjective from the objective conditions of production, gives rise to the capital-wage labour relation. (shrink)

"This volume in Religion and Public Life, a series on religion and public affairs, provides a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The contributions address the decline of social capital-those patterns of behavior which are conducive to self-governance and the spirit of self-reliance-and its relation to the demise of the civic-humanist tradition in American education. The unifying theme, is that classical studies do not merely result in individual mastery over a particular technique or body of knowledge, (...) but also link the individual to the polity and even to the whole of the cosmic order. At the same time, American republicanism, in its exaltation of the common man from the Jeffersonian agrarian soldier to the apotheosis of Lincoln tempers the classical ideal into something less exalted, if more democratic. The effects on the contemporary state of the liberal arts curriculum are demonstrated in articles critical of the market-model university. Two essays explore the historical and philosophical significance of the discipline of rhetoric, that has suffered under the hegemony of rationalistic philosophy. A concluding contribution, invokes Giambattista Vico as an eloquent defender of the humanities. Humanities and Civic Life includes: "Rome, Florence, and Philadelphia: Using the History of the Humanities to Renew Our Civic Life" by Robert E. Proctor; "The Dark Fields of the Republic: The Persistence of Republican Thought in American History" by David Brown; "Unleashing the Humanities" by Robert Weisbuch; "Liberal Arts: Listening to Faculty" by Dennis O'Brien; "Historical Consciousness in Antiquity" by Paul Gottfried; "Taking the Measure of Relativism and the Civic Virtue of Rhetoric" by Gabriel R. Ricci; "The River: A Vichian Dialogue on Humanistic Education" by Randall E. Auxier."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis paper examines the reception of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, a philosophy quarterly which was founded in conjunction with the International Society of Phenomenology and for which Marvin Farber served as editor until his death in 1980. From its founding in 1940, Farber relied on the editorial support of many of Husserl's enthusiastic students who found themselves intellectual exiles, including Husserl's son. Farber's professional and personal interaction with Husserl's ardent followers reveals a dramatic story of former (...) students who were ever vigilant about maintaining the core values of the Master's unique philosophy, and Farber's personal philosophical transformation from a publicist of Husserl's work to a guarded critic intent on avoiding the promotion of sectarianism. (shrink)

The new edition of this manual brings together a decade's teaching in bioethics. It confronts new questions and monitors the latest far reaching experiments, whose results and publications need to be properly understood.

According to the theoretical framework relating hypnosis to attention, baseline attentional functioning in highly hypnotizable individuals should be more efficient than in low hypnotizable individuals. However, previous studies did not find differences in Stroop-like tasks in which the measure indicative of the Stroop interference effect was based on response latencies. This study was designed to determine whether subjects with different levels of hypnotic susceptibility show differences in baseline attentional functioning. To assess this hypothesis, high, medium, and low hypnotizable subjects performed (...) a Stroop task designed to evaluate accuracy performance, before being subjected to hypnotic induction. Results showed that the Stroop interference effect was smaller in high hypnotizable subjects than in low hypnotizable subjects, whereas it was not different between high, and medium hypnotizable subjects. This outcome supports the notion that baseline attentional functioning is related to hypnotic susceptibility. (shrink)

Nel 1516 Leone X sfuggì di misura a un’incursione di pirati musulmani mentre cacciava sul litorale romano.1 Presumibilmente gli incursori non si accorsero di quanto preziosa fosse la preda che avevano mancato. E noi non riusciamo neppure a immaginare le conseguenze di una simile cattura: ci vorrebbe un intero libro di storia controfattuale. Il rischio inaudito corso dal papa confermava la vulnerabilità dell’Europa cristiana, e addirittura del suo centro, Roma, che la frattura religiosa del Mediterraneo aveva trasformato in un avamposto (...) proteso verso gli infedeli. Il tema era presente nella mente di Leone X almeno da quando Paolo Giustiniani e Pietro Quirini gli avevano dato risalto nel 1513. Delle sei parti in cui .. (shrink)

"_On Friendship_, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601 Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller. _On Friendship_ distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and (...) provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, _On Friendship_ matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, _On Friendship_ is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation. (shrink)