Preparing the journey -- Consciousness -- Self-consciousness -- Reason -- Spirit -- Religion -- Absolute knowing.

The aim of this paper is to propose a formal approach to reasoning about desires, understood as logical propositions which we would be pleased to make true, also acknowledging the fact that desire is a matter of degree. It is first shown that, at the static level, desires should satisfy certain principles that differ from those to which beliefs obey. In this sense, from a static perspective, the logic of desires is different from the logic of beliefs. (...) While the accumulation of beliefs tend to reduce the remaining possible worlds they point at, the accumulation of desires tends to increase the set of states of affairs tentatively considered as satisfactory. Indeed beliefs are expected to be closed under conjunctions, while, in the positive view of desires developed here, one can argue that endorsing \ as a desire means to desire \ and to desire \. However, desiring \ and \ at the same time is not usually regarded as rational, since it does not make much sense to desire one thing and its contrary at the same time. Thus when a new desire is added to the set of desires of an agent, a revision process may be necessary. Just as belief revision relies on an epistemic entrenchment relation, desire revision is based on a hedonic entrenchment relation satisfying other properties, due to the different natures of belief and desire. While epistemic entrenchment relations are known to be qualitative necessity relations, hedonic relations obeying a set of reasonable postulates correspond to another set-function in possibility theory, called guaranteed possibility, that drive well-behaved desire revision operations. Then the general framework of possibilistic logic provides a syntactic setting for encoding desire change. The paper also insists that desires should be carefully distinguished from goals. (shrink)

Desires matter. How are we to understand the intentionality of desire? According to the two classical views, desire is either a positive evaluation or a disposition to act: to desire a state is to positively evaluate it or to be disposed to act to realize it. This Ph.D. Dissertation examines these conceptions of desire and proposes a deontic alternative inspired by Meinong. On this view, desiring is representing a state of affairs as what ought to be (...) or, if one prefers, as what should be. Desire involves a deontic manner of representing: a norm of the ought-to-be type features in desire’s intentional mode, as opposed to content. The dissertation is structured in three parts. In order to defend this conception, I formulate three main desiderata for a promising theory of the intentionality of desire in the introduction (§0). The first concerns desire’s direction of fit, i.e. the intuition that the world should conform to our desires. The second concerns the death of desire principle, i.e. the intuition that one cannot desire what one represents as actual. The last pertains to desire’s role in psychological explanations, i.e. the intuition that desires can explain some mental states and be explained by other mental states. The first part examines the main conceptions of desire in light of these desiderata. I argue that the classical pictures of desire do not adequately meet our desiderata. The first chapter is devoted to the evaluative conception (§1), while the second examines the motivational approach (§2). Following these criticisms, I then present the deontic view of desire (§3). In the second part, I defend this conception with the help of three arguments. The main idea is that appealing to norms of the ought-to-be type can satisfy our chief desiderata: the world should conform to norms (world-to-mind direction of fit, §4), norms are grounded on values and in turn ground obligations (explanation, §5), and norms are about non-actual states of affairs (death of desire principle, §6). In the last part, I develop the deontic view to draw a cartography of the various types of desire. Some desires are correct, while others are inappropriate. This distinction is explained by the deontic conception, as it matches that between states of affairs that ought to obtain and states that should not obtain (§7). Two study cases are examined: caprice and the impermissibility of desire aggregation. Intuitively, hopes, wishes, or urges are types of desire. The next chapter presents a typology inspired by the deontic view and the type of norms there are (§8). The last chapter discusses the main objections to the deontic approach (§9). In conclusion, I show the relevance of the deontic view for several debates in philosophy of mind and ethics. Desires are crucial because they are the ‘eye’ of what should be. (shrink)

"[This book] proposes new foundations for the Bayesian principle of rational action, and goes on to develop a new logic of desirability and probabtility."—Frederic Schick, _Journal of Philosophy_.

U ovom radu suprotstavljaju se dva moguca citanja Kantove prakticke filozofije olicena u dva razumevanja kategorickog imperativa. Po prvom razumevanju kategoricki imperativ propisuje uslov koji mora da zadovolji maksima delanja da bi cin koji se po njoj vrsi mogao da bude moralan. Takvo shvatanje se pokazuje kao konzervativno utoliko sto cuva vec postojece moralne norme jednog drustva. Obrazlaze se njegova homolognost logici zelje kako je izlaze francuski psihoanaliticar Zak Lakan i pokazuje se kako ono ne moze da obezbedi odgovornost subjekta (...) za njegove cinove. Njemu se suprotstavlja shvatanje po kome kategoricki imperativ propisuje nacin samog htenja jedne maksime; taj se nacin pokazuje kao analogan nagonu smrti i obrazlaze se njegov revolucionalni i eticki karakter. (shrink)

A close reading of Deleuze’s major text on desire The engagement of Deleuze with psychoanalysis has led to the development of a remarkable and highly influential theory about human desire. The most systematic account of this theory, crucial for anyone interested in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, can be found in the discussion of the dynamic genesis of sense, a pivotal part of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense. In Deleuze and Desire Piotrek Świątkowski picks up (...) the challenge to provide an ad literam commentary of this text. Świątkowski makes use of a broad range of examples, from psychoanalytic case studies to art, literature, and film, and analyses in an accessible and clear way the impact of the work of psychoanalysts such as Melanie Klein on Deleuze. (shrink)

Normal systems of modal logic, interpreted as deontic logics, are unsuitable for a logic of conflicting obligations. By using modal operators based on a more complex semantics, however, we can provide for conflicting obligations, as in [9], which is formally similar to a fragment of the logic of ability later given in [2], Having gone that far, we may find it desirable to be able to express and consider claims about the comparative strengths, or degrees of urgency, (...) of the conflicting obligations under which we stand. This paper, building on the formalism of the logic of ability in [2], provides a complete and decidable system for such a language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 150-177 [Access article in PDF] The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations Lydia H. Liu It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed (...) the imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined Communities 6]. That insight, however, has not drawn to itself as much attention or scrutiny as some of his other concepts, like "print capitalism" or "creole nationalisms." If one were to name a few of the blind spots in the contemporary discussions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora, one of them would be the place and placing of sovereignty and sovereign right. To those of us whose initial purpose has been to historicize the nation and nationalism, this blind spot cannot but raise some serious methodological and interpretive questions. Insofar as sovereignty articulates a major mode of exchange between nation and empire in recent history and moreover figures prominently in the realm of what Anderson calls "quotidian universals" [Spectre of Comparisons 33], the truism of its truth needs to be unpacked carefully.Hence, I would like to raise some tentative questions about desire and sovereignty, not in terms of legal studies, but in light of what we have learned about colonial exchange and its production of difference, fetishism, identity, and the logic of reciprocity. I am going to show that these intellectual and material developments have had significant bearings on the making of international law such that our inquiry into the latter can no longer be confined to the self-explanatory evolution of legal discourse. For sovereign thinking is one of those areas that must be reexamined, to borrow Edward Said's words, "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" [18].In this essay, I begin with a critical analysis of Benedict Anderson's work, focusing on the interplay of the historical and the universal in his study of the nation. I am particularly interested in examining what Anderson chose to do, or not to do, with sovereignty in his theory of nationalism, and I raise some questions about his idea of the "modular," whereby the universal takes on the role of a migrant figure making histories [End Page 150] here and there. Section two introduces the subject of fetishism and desire into the discussion by linking the display of the thrones of the Emperor Qianlong in British museums to significant moments of sovereign thinking in the reign of Queen Victoria and the Empress Dowager of China at the turn of the century. In section three, I attempt a detailed discussion of the sovereignty complex of Ku Hung-ming, a diasporic subject who grew up in colonial Malaysia, was educated in Europe, and ended up serving China as his adopted sovereign country. My analysis centers on Ku's well-known defense of the Empress Dowager during the popular nationalist uprising of 1900 and his work as a translator and publicist in Anglo-Chinese military confrontations. Finally, I turn to the theories of international law itself and ask how nineteenth-century jurists revised the notion of sovereignty to arrive at a new constitutive theory of recognition in the heyday of imperialist expansion. I argue that any attempt to explain the rise of the modern nation-state must take full account of this significant revision in the early nineteenth century, because the revision signaled a paradigmatic shift from natural law to positivist jurisprudence to the effect that a constitutive understanding of sovereign right would eventually overcome and displace the natural law notion of universal sovereignty. Sovereign Thinking in Migrant Nationalisms In Imagined Communities, Anderson pointed to sovereignty as a necessary condition in thinking about the nation when, for example, he... (shrink)

The Ideal Worlds Account of Desire says that S wants p just in case all of S’s most highly preferred doxastic possibilities make p true. The account predicts that a desire report ⌜S wants p⌝ should be true so long as there is some doxastic p-possibility that is most preferred. But we present a novel argument showing that this prediction is incorrect. More positively, we take our examples to support alternative analyses of desire, and close by briefly (...) considering what our cases suggest about the logic of desire. (shrink)

The present paper, taking as a point of departure Aristotle’s dispute with the ancient physicalists in Physics II.8-9 about the role of the final cause in nature, examines the context of the problem, his theory of the causes. Aristotle assumes an analogy between nature and craft and takes the production of artifacts to be paradigmatic. With these assumptions as guiding principles, the paper attempts to motivate his causal theory and propose what may be called a “logic” of the causes. (...) It examines artefactual coming-to-be more closely, focusing on the aspects of Aristotle’s account that are highlighted in his explanation of natural coming-to-be: the basic character of the causes, the peculiar distinction between the causes and the accompanying the deeper coincidence among three of them, the complementarity between the final and moving causes, the nature and role of desire in coming-to-be, and the primacy of form. It introduces the notion of a trans-temporal objective whole and shows the need to consider the full whole — which includes the entire process of coming-to-be together with its source — as the proper context for a full understanding of coming-to-be. It also points out the importance of the distinction between the objective and subjective perspectives, especially useful in understanding final causality. (shrink)

The principles that AN INSTANCE OF A CLASS IS THE CLASS and A CLASS IS AN INSTANCE OF ITSELF allow for the so called LAWS OF THOUGHTIDENTITY - WHAT IS, IS.CONTRADICTION - NOTHING BOTH IS and IS NOT.EXCLUDED MIDDLE - EVERYTHING IS or IS NOT.and allow us to adopt a bivalent system. Everything essential for primary logic is provided.Though this is not the place to discuss it, it should be noted that the development of general logic with its (...) current theories of class, identity and natural numbers could take a very different course from the one it currently pursues.Human thought would have had to evolve to a high level of development before any systematic attempt to analyse it could have been made. It seems it was in the floruit of the Greek civilisation that this attempt was first made. The issues in this paper were of prime concern to those ancient thinkers and their achievements were considerable. Since those times further developments have occurred, many of which they would not have dreamed, but to this day there are still great issues that have not been resolved. The state of the art leaves much to be desired and it is my hope that this paper will contribute to its progress.If the ideas in this paper are true, then it seems we have come across the very origins of human rationality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:174 BOOK REVIEWS The Logic of Deterrence. By ANTHONY KENNY. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 101..$6.95 paper. Professor Kenny should have entitled his book "The Logic of Nuclear Deterrence ", for that is the subject he discusses. For Kenny the logic of nuclear deterrence cannot meet either the jus ad bellum or the jus in bello criteria of the just war tradition. It can (...) fulfill neither the former criteria because " there can be no hope of victory " nor the latter because implementation of the deterrent threat can be neither proportionate nor discriminate. Kenny does recognize a just cause for war; however, for him the death and destruction caused by the use of nuclear weapons in a just cause would be immoral. Thus, on the one hand Kenny states : The defence of the independence of the nations of the West against aggression from the Communist bloc would in itself provide a just cause for war. Leaving aside for the moment the nuclear issue, it would be right to risk our own lives, and to take those of enemy combatants, to preserve our independence and our traditions. On the other hand, he does not believe that there could he any actual use of nuclear weapons in defense of this just cause that would not involve the massive destruction of population areas. Thus Kenny concludes that the use of nuclear weapons can never be materially or morally proportionate. They can never be materially proportionate for : (T)he differences which at present exist between the United States and the Soviet Union would be insignificant in comparison with the difference between the United States as it now is and the United States as it would be after absorbing a full-scale nuclear attack, or the difference between the Soviet Union as it now is and the Soviet Union as it would be after such an attack. And they could never be morally proportionate:... for it is necessary to keep reminding people of what the world would be like after (a nuclear war) in order to bring home that there is no desirable goal which can rationally be pursued by launching such a war. For Kenny, the material and spiritual costs resulting from the use of nuclear weapons would always be disproportionate, whatever good was being protected : Respect for innocent human life and for international law is as much a part of what gives us a right to defend the values of Western democracy as is freedom of speech or rights against arbitrary arrest. To the extent to which we forfeit our respect for life and law we forfeit our claim to have any moral superiority to defend against communist threat. As for democratic institutions, few of these are likely to survive a war in which both sides suffer nuclear devastation. BOOK REVIEWS 175 Kenny's view about the disproportionality of the use of nuclear weapons, it should be noted, is a function of his belief that limited nuclear was is not possible, and so the just war criteria of " probability of success " (not " hope of victory", to use Kenny's formulation) cannot be met. For Kenny, "war is justifiable only if it can be limited". Concerning the use of nuclear weapons in a "limited war" context, Kenny holds that there are two principal questions to be asked: The first is whether, on the assumption that the war remains as limited as the strategists envisage, it would be in itself a morally acceptable option. The second is whether it is likely that a nuclear war, once begun, could be kept under control and remain within the limits which were planned at the outset. It appears that Kenny has already answered the first question by denying that it is possible, in practice, for any use of nuclear weapons to be either discriminate or proportionate, even in a " limited war" context. Perhaps Professor Kenny should have read what Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J., had to say on this subject: First, there are those who say that the limitation of nuclear war, or any war, is today impossible, for a variety of reasons-technical, political, etc. In the face of this position, the traditional doctrine... (shrink)

Discrepancies between an agent's goals and beliefs play an important, if implicit, role in determining what a rational agent is motivated to do. This is most obvious in cases where an agent achieves a complex goal incrementally and must deliberate anew as each milestone is reached. In such cases the concept of goal/belief discrepancy defines an appropriate space to which a degree-of-achievement yardstick can be applied. This paper presents soundness and completeness results concerning a logic for reasoning about goal/belief (...) discrepancy, and it is suggested that a certain species of goal/belief discrepancy captures the concept of desire. (shrink)

Five purposive relations are investigated: endeavoring, endeavoring for a certain purpose, bringing something about in a certain endeavor, bringing something about for a certain purpose, and bringing something about intentionally. No satisfactory analysis of these terms has yet been proposed, either in mentalistic -- belief, desire, intending -- or in action terms. While bringing something about for a certain purpose may seem too obscure to be taken as a primitive, there are at least two arguments in favor of it. (...) First, no analyses in terms of other primitives has worked; second, the rather natural definitions of the other notions which it makes possible take us some way toward understanding the structure of intentional action. (shrink)

We implement a recent characterization of metaphysical indeterminacy in the context of orthodox quantum theory, developing the syntax and semantics of two propositional logics equipped with determinacy and indeterminacy operators. These logics, which extend a novel semantics for standard quantum logic that accounts for Hilbert spaces with superselection sectors, preserve different desirable features of quantum logic and logics of indeterminacy. In addition to comparing the relative advantages of the two, we also explain how each logic answers Williamson’s (...) challenge to any substantive account of determinacy: For any proposition p, what could the difference between “p” and “it’s determinate that p” ever amount to? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME ON THE LOGIC OF DESIGN (i) Respectable Inductive Thinking Readers seeking to understand Hume's views concerning inductive reasoning often turn just to the obviously relevant sections of the Treatise and the 2 first Enquiry. In this paper I want to suggest that a broader approach is desirable, and specifically that the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion shed additional significant light on Hume's views about induction. In those well (...) known passages of the Treatise and the first Enquiry Hume presents his critique of the idea of necessary connection; central to this critique is his point that thinking which goes beyond its premises in order to arrive at non-trivial factual conclusions cannot be demonstrative reasoning. Does this lead Hume into a radical scepticism concerning factual knowledge? A majority of interpreters do regard him as holding that because this kind of thinking is not demonstrative reasoning it cannot have any justification for the conclusions it reaches. In this connection, Hume is said to be committed to "deductivism" — the assumption that only demonstrative (deductive) reasoning can succeed in justifying conclusions. Interpreted in this way, Hume holds that demonstrative reasoning cannot establish non-trivial factual conclusions and that non-demonstrative thinking cannot establish them either; Hume is therefore committed to the view that non-trivial factual claims cannot be established, and so cannot be known. Thus, Hume is a radical sceptic who denies that we can attain any knowledge of non-trivial factual conclusions. Of course Hume does not stop with this negative result, but proceeds to affirm that our human nature impels us to derive conclusions about matters of fact even when it is not rational to do so. This occurs in accordance with the innate propensity by which the imagination operates, so that we cannot help but 2. engage in a specific style of non-rational thinking about these matters. This style may be characterized roughly as that of expecting to have future experiences which resemble our past experiences. This way of interpreting Hume which I have just sketched has been quite widely accepted, and I think it represents the way of understanding Hume which most readers are likely to arrive at if they simply read those well known passages of the Treatise and first Enquiry. It does seem to me to be essentially correct as a reading of those passages. To be sure, this interpretation has been challenged by several writers, and recently it has been denounced with especial vigor by Beauchamp and 4 Rosenberg in their stimulating book. Beauchamp and Rosenberg maintain that nowhere in the Treatise or Enquiry does Hume voice any general scepticism about the drawing of conclusions concerning matters of fact. On their reading, Hume is merely rejecting the view that factual conclusions can be proved demonstratively; he is not at all suggesting that the drawing of such conclusions is in general unjustified. They see him as a staunch and consistent advocate of inductive reasoning. I shall not take time here to try to thresh out the complex details of this controversy. For present purposes I shall merely indicate where I stand. I believe that Beauchamp and Rosenberg have read the Treatise and the Enquiry too much in the light of what they think Hume ought to be saying in order for him to have a consistent and plausible position. I think they water down too much his acid remarks about the lack of rationality of thinking which reaches non-trivial factual conclusions, and I think they attach too little weight to the manner in which Hume aligns himself with ancient scepticism. Unlike Beauchamp and Rosenberg, I consider that Hume is not a highly consistent writer, I think he sometimes has not thought through the implications of what he says in one place so 3. as to reconcile it with what he says in some other places. (To say this is not to denigrate the value of his work; much of the excitement of his thought stems from his willingness to press his opinions to inconsistent extremes.) Therefore, I think it best in reading Hume to be alert for possibly conflicting lines of thought which are present in the texts and which should not be... (shrink)

In this paper Richard Jeffrey's 'Logic of Decision' is extended by examination of agents' attitudes to the sorts of possibilities identified by indicative conditional sentences. An expression for the desirability of conditionals is proposed and, along with Adams' thesis that the probability of a conditional equals the conditional probability of its antecedent given its consequent, is defended by informally deriving it from Jeffrey's notion of desirability and some weak constraints on rational preference for conditional possibilities. Finally a statement is (...) given of a representation theorem establishing the conditions under which a rational agent's preferences for conditionals determines the existence of unique measures (up to choice of scale) of her degrees of belief and desire. (shrink)

In The Logic of Decision Richard Jeffrey defends a version of expected utility theory that advises agents to choose acts with an eye to securing evidence for thinking that desirable results will ensue. Proponents of "causal" decision theory have argued that Jeffrey's account is inadequate because it fails to properly discriminate the causal features of acts from their merely evidential properties. Jeffrey's approach has also been criticized on the grounds that it makes it impossible to extract a unique probability/utility (...) representation from a sufficiently rich system of preferences (given a zero and unit for measuring utility). The existence of these problems should not blind us to the fact that Jeffrey's system has advantages that no other decision theory can match: it can be underwritten by a particularly compelling representation theorem proved by Ethan Bolker; and it has a property called partition invariance that every reasonable theory of rational choice must possess. I shall argue that the non-uniqueness problem can be finessed, and that it is impossible to adequately formulate causal decision theory, or any other, without using Jeffrey's theory as one's basic analysis of rational desire. (shrink)

For a long while Bayesian techniques in statistics in general, and decision theory in particular, were considered suspect at best, and to be avoided; but now along comes Jeffrey with a system of subjective probability and utility functions determined by the individual's preferences, and a strongly Bayesian approach to decision-making, and by so doing puts the whole matter in a new light and makes it quite important to reassess the prior rejection of Bayesian methods. There are twelve chapters, each with (...) exercises, which begin with the model of deliberation, progress though scaling and ranking desirability, preference and propositional attitudes, thence to probability and measurement of desirability, and finally to induction and confirmation. The author's theory bears some resemblances to that sketched by Ramsey, but it draws somewhat on the later work of Von Neumann and Morgenstern. The author examines probability as viewed both statically—when the agent's attitudes are constant—and dynamically-when desirability and, consequently, probability assignments change. This text is one of the small but growing library of works whose interest is induction and probability theory; in that library, it will occupy an important place.—P. J. M. (shrink)

I propose and articulate a novel theory of desire, called the Revised Reward Theory. As the name suggests, the theory is based—and expands—on Arpaly and Schroeder’s (2014) Reward Theory of Desire. The initial Reward Theory identifies desires with states of the reward learning system such that for an organism to desire some P is for its reward system to treat P as a reward upon receipt. The Revised Reward Theory identifies desires with a different state of the (...) same system, such that for an organism to desire some P is for its reward system to expect or predict that P will be rewarding (roughly) prior to receipt. The difference amounts to equating desires with what we ultimately find rewarding or satisfying versus those that underlie our motivations to obtain that which we take ourselves to desire. I argue that the structure of the reward system is incompatible with the original Reward Theory but compatible with the Revised Reward Theory. I demonstrate that this difference has important philosophical implications. I focus on moral responsibility and demonstrate Arpaly and Schroeder’s argument, that addiction can mitigate moral responsibility, turns on this precise difference. Arpaly, Schroeder, and I all ascribe to a meta-theory called ‘natural kindism’ which identifies mental kinds with neurocognitive kinds. This discussion, in addition to defending a theory of desire, is intended to act as a proof of concept for natural kindism as offering a powerful framework for relating empirical results to philosophical issues. (shrink)

This essay explores Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire as functioning according to the logic of tragedy and compares it with Alenka Zupančič’s concept of love as comedy, demonstrating however that the latter remains too caught up in the Lacanian worldview to truly capture the active side of love. The essay argues that Zupančič’s interpretation of Lacan can be reinterpreted again through the lenses of “messianic psychoanalysis” – psychoanalysis “slightly adjusted” – standing not on the side of the tragic (...) acceptance of fate, but of the promise of “more life.” Drawing from the reflections of Agata Bielik-Robson, Eric Santner and Jonathan Lear, this essay intends to demonstrate that Zupančič’s comedy of love can be reconciled with the more relational notion of love as a psychoanalytical counterpart of messianic Exodus. An example of such a liberating combination of eros and wit can be found in Freud’s interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. (shrink)

The aim is to fashion intuitive conditions of pragmatic consistency for the speech act of assertion into a formal theory, so as to exclude "pragmatically absurd" utterances (contradictory statements, versions of the liar, moore's paradox, etc.). a core theory i for a concept of pragmatic implication (tentatively identified with overt or covert assertion) and an added theory ib for implied belief are constructed on the pattern of a weak modal system, whose specific axiom is taken to explicate what it means (...) to perform a binding speech act. a model-theoretic interpretation is given. a theory of declarative expressions provides a bridge from ib to the desired results for explicit assertion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Logic of God Incarnate. By THOMAS V. MORRIS. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Pp. 220. $19.95. Thomas V. Morris, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, has written a technical yet provocative study on the Incarnation. As a faithful Christian he believes in and desires to defend the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation proclaimed in the New Testament and defined by (...) the early councils of the Church, especially Chalcedon, that is, that Jesus is the One eternal Son existing in two natures. He also holds that, while the truth of the Incarnation is revealed, it must nonetheless stand the test of logic and reason. The Incarnation cannot be illogicaJ or meaningless. " If the church has been guided by God in such matters as the formulation of its creeds, conciliar decrees, and catechisms,.... we would not expect glaring logical flaws in its central doctrinal affirmations" (p. 46). The stated purpose of Morris's study is to defend the traditional doctrine against those who would hold it to be logically incoherent and meaningless. "In the course of thinking about the Incarnation for some years now, I have come to see that a few simple metaphysical distinctions and a solid dose of logical care will suffice to explicate and defend the doctrine against all extant criticisms of a philosophical nature" (p. 9). Morris meticulously analyzes and critiques a number of arguments that oppose the possibility of coherence of the Incarnation by attempting to demonstrate that such arguments are.either false and illogical themselves, or that they do not apply to a true understanding of the Incarnation. Moreover, Morris proposes a novel understanding of the Incarnation which he believes is both logical and intelligible, and which conforms to the Christian tradition. This goal of upholding the intelligibility of the Incarnate leads Morris to a three-fold task. He first of all must refute his chief adversaries, those who would deny the sensibleness of saying God became man in Jesus. Such critics deny the validity of the Incarnation on the ground..'! that it is meaning·less, and the'l'efore impossible to juxtapose the incommensurable. attributes of divinity and humanity, e.g., perfection/imperfection, immutability/corruptibility. They hold that Jesus could not have had both these sets of properties at once (cf. p. 20). Morris refuses to capitulate to such arguments. He nevertheless insists that any solution to the issue which would undermine human logic or which would fail to uphold the Christian's belief is no solution at all (cf. p. 32). 367 368 BOOK REVIEWS Secondly, Morris's task leads him to refute any attempts at a " OneNature " solution, which would "squash" together the human and divine natures in Jesus to form a single nature. Such proposals jeopardize either the integrity of Jesus's divinity (Arianism) or his humanity (Docetism, Monophysitism), inevitably composing a mythical tertium quid (cf. pp. 33-38). Morris presents a clear case against such corruptions of the Incarnation. Thirdly, Morris's task brings him to analyze contemporary kenotic Christology. He thoroughly discusses this approach, for the reason that it is directly involved in the issue at hand, namely, the incompatibility between divine and human properties in Christ. Secondarily, however, Morris's interest in kenoticism reflects his own hope that some variation of the approach might posibly arrive at a Christological solution (cf. p. 92). While he ultimately rejects kenoticism, Morris flirts with the various alternatives, and, as we shall see, his own perception of the Incarnation remains tinged with a kenotic flavor. How then is it possible to predicate of one and the same individual divine and human attributes intelligibly and coherentlyT To use contemporary computer jargon, the question might be phrased: is it possible that God and man can he "incarnation-friendly¥" Morris believes so. Morris first of all sets out to define the terms-divine nature and human nature. He believes part of the incompatibility problem lies in attributing to Jesus's humanity unnecessarily hostile aspects. He distinguishes between being "merely human" and being "fully human"· To be " merely human " is to possess not only those properties that narrowly define one's nature or kind, such as rationality, but... (shrink)

From Letter to Phantasm. Some Remarks on Deleuze and Psychoanalysis in Logic of Sense. Our aim is to show how the two heterogeneous series of letter and phantasm make possible, through their convergence understood as the event of sense, a double passage. First, in the order of the Symbolic, the passage of the signifier into the signified. Second, the passage of the whole Symbolic order out of the desiring body. It will be shown that this amounts to a re-conceptualization (...) of causality as sense – event. (shrink)

This book offers an intelligent and thought-provoking analysis of the genealogy of Western capitalist 'development'. Jennifer Beard departs from the common position that development and underdevelopment are conceptual outcomes of the Imperialist Era and positions the genealogy of development within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of sin, salvation, and redemption are expounded. In doing so, she links the early Christian writings of theologians such as Augustine and , Anselm and Abelard to the processes of modern identity (...) formation of which the West, the First World, the Rule of Law and the individual subject and his or her freedoms are but a part. The concept of development is thus identified within western culture as a symptom of loss within the desire for completion; as the logic behind the economic restructuring of nations as underdeveloped is revealed as that ruthless imaginary by which First World nations maintain their ideal of themselves. Drawing upon anthropology, economics, historiography, philosophy of science, theology, feminism, cultural studies and development studies, this book contains the best of interdisciplinary work in international law. (shrink)

The basis of the paper is a logic of analytical consequential implication, CI.0, which is known to be equivalent to the well-known modal system KT thanks to the definition A → B = df A ⥽ B ∧ Ξ (Α, Β), Ξ (Α, Β) being a symbol for what is called here Equimodality Property: (□A ≡ □B) ∧ (◊A ≡ ◊B). Extending CI.0 (=KT) with axioms and rules for the so-called circumstantial operator symbolized by *, one obtains a system (...) CI.0*Eq in whose language one can define an operator ↠ suitable to formalize context-dependent conditionals (so to counterfactual conditionals) via the definition (Def ↠) A ↠ B = df *A ⥽ B ∧ Ξ (Α, Β).. The central problem of the paper is to identify inside CI.0*Eq + Def ↠ a set of axioms yielding the fragment consisting of all and only theorems in which only truth-functional operators and the two operators → and ↠ occur. This system, here called CI.0, is introduced in §3. In view of the intended purpose, it is introduced a complete and tableau-decidable system KTw, which is an extension of KT with axioms for the so-called quasi-variables w(A), w(B)… Three translation functions among the three languages used in the paper are then introduced. The first, Tr, maps every wff of form *A into wffs of form w(A) ∧ A and translates theorems of CI.0*Eq into theorems of KTw. The second, t°, translates theorems of CI.0 into theorems of CI.0*Eq by applying Def↠. A third one, t, translates theorems of CI.0 into theorems of KTw. As a consequence, it follows that t°A = TrtA. In §4 it is proved that CI.0 is complete w.r.t. the class of CI.0-models of form where f is a selection function and R an access relation. It is then proved (i) that CI.0 models may be converted into KTw-models; (ii) that the truth-value of a proposition in a world of a CI.0-model is preserved in the same world of the derived KTw-model; (iii) that A is a CI.0-thesis iff its translation tA is KTw-thesis. It follows that, if A is not a CI.0-thesis, tA is not a KTw-thesis, so also that TrtA is not a CI.0*Eq-thesis. Since t°A = TrtA and t°A is a function built on Def↠, this proves that every t°-translation of a CI.0-wff that is a CI.0*Eq-theorem is a CI.0-theorem. Since the converse proposition is proved in §2, their conjunction establishes the desired result. In the final section, it is proved that CI.0 is tableau-decidable, that ↠ is not a trivial operator and that ↠ enjoys the positive and negative properties required in §1 for context-dependent conditionals. Some final remarks suggest that studying the relations between CI.0 and systems of classical conditional logic may be a promising line of investigation. (shrink)

The authors evaluate the soundness of the ontological argument they developed in their 1991 paper. They focus on Anselm’s first premise, which asserts that there is a conceivable thing than which nothing greater can be conceived. After casting doubt on the argument Anselm uses in support of this premise, the authors show that there is a formal reading on which it is true. Such a reading can be used in a sound reconstruction of the argument. After this reconstruction is developed (...) in precise detail, the authors show that the conclusion, a reading of the claim “God exists”, does not quite achieve the end Anselm desired. (shrink)

This article considers the capacity of the military body to appropriate various modes of power, personnel and material, in terms of the tache. In particular we examine the (post)colonial military body, especially in Southeast Asia, and its intimate relations to the detachment of the colonial state from the colonial body and attachment to the global regimes of Cold War and neo-liberal post Cold War processes. We do so through a wide range of ‘texts’– including a Conrad novella, a Singaporean documentary (...) series, transformers (toys), and international money laundering – in which the defining logic that the (post)colonial military body deploys is its capacity to attach and detach at will. A series of related and homologous attachments and detachments proceed from this capacity: the power of sovereignty, the generation and circulation of capital, and the transformation of the colonial military body into the postcolonial military body. However, it is also the logic of this empowering connectivity that imposes intractable limits on the desire for ultimate control, as the tache always indicates something beyond the corpus, something outside the locus of control. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The World Of Desire:Lacan Between Evolutionary Biology and Psychoanalytic TheoryLorenzo Chiesa (bio)The primary aim of this paper is to analyse the biological foundations of Lacan's notion of desire as expounded in his first two Seminars (1953-1955). These works provide us with his most detailed discussion of the species-specific preconditions that allow Homo sapiens to speak and establish symbolic pacts among individuals. Despite its irreducibility to the domain (...) of animal instincts, human desire can only be adequately understood against the background of an evolutionary enquiry on the emergence of language, one that problematises both the implicit teleological assumptions of a certain Darwinism and the logical consistency of an investigation of origins. Drawing on organic and anatomical evidence endorsed by natural scientists as different as Stephen Jay Gould and Adolf Portmann, Lacan postulates a primordial biological discord between man and his environment, centred on premature birth and a subsequent disorder of the imagination, from which language and the Symbolic immanently arise.1 Desire is seen in this context as coextensive with what, especially in Seminar I, Lacan repeatedly refers to as "the world of the symbol," or "the symbolic world"—a crucial phrase, rich with philosophical implications, to which critics have not yet [End Page 200] paid sufficient attention.2 The most important point to be grasped here is that the symbolic order is a world in the sense that, in always presenting itself to man as a totality, a uni-verse, it compensates for the failure of a strictly 'natural' relationship between man as animal and his environment. Yet, in performing this function, the Symbolic also amounts to nothing other than 'human nature' tout-court.3 In other words, the Symbolic is an exceptional and to a certain extent autonomous pseudo-environment that must nevertheless be interpreted by means of biological concepts.4 For this reason, the very opposition between nature and culture is as such put into question and re-proposed at a different level.5Lacan's seminars and articles of the early to mid-1950s are usually read from the standpoint of the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech in their relation to the Kojèvian dialectic of the recognition of desire. While not underestimating the importance of this first formulation of desire as desire of the other, I intend to dwell especially on its biological presuppositions, since Lacan will maintain them—often to the point of taking them for granted—even after abandoning the notions of 'empty' and 'full' speech. This will also enable me to show that the supposedly Hegelian Lacan of this period is already preoccupied with a materialist explanation of language and of human desire as desire for recognition, both of which are framed within the context of a virulent anti-teleological, anti-humanist, and anti-vitalist polemics.It is, however, paramount to pre-emptively specify that my new approach to Seminars I and II does not intend to deny the impasses of Lacan's early notion of desire as a desire for recognition, which I have thoroughly discussed in Subjectivity and Otherness.6 In brief, the problem with Lacan's appropriation of Kojève is that, at this stage, the mutual recognition of one's desire is identified with the subject's fully successful integration into the symbolic order. What is not sufficiently stressed in this way—yet not entirely overlooked—is the incompleteness of the latter, the fact that man's pseudo-environment presents itself as a totality only insofar as it is structurally not-all. The [End Page 201] elaboration of a meticulous theoretical distinction between need, demand, and desire carried out in Seminars IV and V, as well as a direct confrontation with the Real as the not-all of the Symbolic in Seminar VII, will later oblige Lacan to reconsider this harmonic view. By the early 1960s, full integration in the Symbolic will be explicitly regarded as impossible and the dialectic of desire will consequently be focused on the level of the subject's mapping of himself as falling onto the object of the repressed fantasy.IIAccording to Lacan, man is born prematurely, that is, with "foetalised traits,"7 which are especially... (shrink)

The need for another study on the doctrine of analogy in the writings ofSt Thomas may not be obvious, since a complete bibliography in this area would doubtless assume depressing proportions. The present work is felt to be justified because it attempts a full-fledged alternative to the interpretation given in Cajetan's De nominum analogia, an interpretation which has provided the framework for subsequent discussions of the question. Recently, it is true, there has been growing dissatisfaction with Cajetan's approach; indeed there (...) have been wholesale attacks on the great commentator who is alleged to have missed the clef de voute of the metaphysics of his master. Applied to our problem, this criticism leads to the view that Cajetan was not metaphysical enough, or that he was metaphysical in the wrong way, in his discussion of the analogy of names. As its title indicates, the present study is not in agreement with Cajetan's contention that the analogy of names is a metaphysical doctrine. It is precisely a logical doctrine in the sense that "logical" has for St Thomas. We have no desire to be associated with attacks on Cajetan, the meta physician, attacks we feel are quite wrongheaded. If Cajetan must be criticized for his interpretation of the analogy of names, it is imperative that he be criticized for the right reasons. Moreover, criticism ofCajetan in the present study is limited to his views on the analogy of names. (shrink)

G.E. Moore famously observed that to say, ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did’ or ‘I believe that he has gone out, but he has not’. would be ‘absurd’. Moore-paradoxical omissive or commissive beliefs of the forms p & I do not believe that p and p & I believe that not-p. are also absurd, although their contents are possible truths. Can there be ‘Moorean desires’, namely desires of the forms I desire (...) both that and I desire both that that are ‘Moore-paradoxical’, in the sense that they are absurd roughly in the way Moore-paradoxical beliefs are absurd? I argue that the most promising approach to a yes is a normative account of doxastic Moore-paradoxicality that parallels a normative account of Moorean desire. It turns out that this won’t work, not because there are no norms of desire, but because the norms required are ones we should reject. Unlike Moorean belief, which is always irrational, Moorean desire, although often odd, is sometimes sensible. An interesting lesson to be learned along the way—and an important one for functionalism—is that the logic of desire differs from that of both belief and conscious belief. (shrink)

Rational agents are important objects of study in several research communities, including economics, philosophy, cognitive science, and most recently computer science and artificial intelligence. Crudely, a rational agent is an entity that is capable of acting on its environment, and which chooses to act in such a way as to further its own best interests. There has recently been much interest in the use of mathematical logic for developing formal theories of such agents. Such theories view agents as practical (...) reasoning systems, deciding moment by moment which action to perform next, given the beliefs they have about the world and their desires with respect to how they would like the world to be. In this article, we survey the state of the art in developing logical theories of rational agency. Following a discussion on the dimensions along which such theories can vary, we briefly survey the logical tools available in order to construct such theories. We then review and critically assess three of the best known theories of rational agency: Cohen and Levesque's intention logic, Rao and Georgeff's BDI logics, and the KARO framework of Meyer et al. We then discuss the various roles that such logics can play in helping us to engineer rational agents, and conclude with a discussion of open problems. (shrink)

Drawing on the well-established understanding of the zombie as metaphor for the deadening effects of consumer capitalism, this chapter seeks to account for three distinct changes that contextualise 21st century zombie fiction. The first is situational: the global economic crisis has amplified the anxieties that inspired Romero's critique of consumer capitalism in Dawn of the Dead (1978). The second is intellectual: as Chapman and Anderson (2011) note, there has been an “explosion of research on all aspects of disgust” in recent (...) years. The third concerns the subgenre itself: zombies have become increasingly sexualised since the late 1990s. These issues intersect in a numerous recent zombie films - including Zombie Strippers! (2008), Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (2008), Big Tits Zombie (2010), and Zombies Vs Strippers (2012) - that are centred around or within strip clubs. Stripping epitomises the logic of consumer capitalism, offering tantalising promises but little physical satisfaction. Stripping translates sexual desire into a voyeuristic transaction, evacuated of corporeal messiness. The zombie’s decomposing body epitomises disgust, and its presence in the strip-club disturbs the fantasy typically provided within that context. In the zombie infected strip-club, intimate contact is damaging rather than desirous. In these respects, zombies hypostatize numerous tensions that are usually masked by fantasy and financial exchange. In doing so, these zombies reify the horrors of late capitalism. Their disgusting bodies disrupt the foundational logic of consumerism qua desire. (shrink)

John D. Norton defends an empiricist epistemology of thought experiments, the central thesis of which is that thought experiments are nothing more than arguments. Philosophers have attempted to provide counterexamples to this claim, but they haven’t convinced Norton. I will point out a more fundamental reason for reformulation that criticizes Norton’s claim that a thought experiment is a good one when its underlying logical form possesses certain desirable properties. I argue that by Norton’s empiricist standards, no thought experiment is ever (...) justified in any deep sense due to the properties of its logical form. Instead, empiricists should consider again the merits of evaluating thought experiments more like laboratory experiments, and less like arguments. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce’s first rule of logic (EP 2.48, 1898) identifies the inception point of human inquiry. Taking a closer look at this principle, we find at its core a necessary relationship between emptiness and desire that underlies all genuine instances of human learning and adaptation. This composite relationship plays a critical role in the function or failure of learning but has received scant attention in the literature. As a result, the complexities of the first rule of (...) class='Hi'>logic are not well understood, often being mistakenly conflated with the rule’s famous corollary, ‘do not block the way of inquiry’, or passed over with cursory definitions, including ‘wonder’, ‘doubt’ and ‘the will to learn’. Following a background discussion highlighting the nature of reflexive inquiry and fallibilism that situate human consciousness both within and beyond animal being, I draw on multiple layers of evidence from a range of disciplines to better reveal the complex dynamics intrinsic to the first rule of logic. These layers include a closer reading and exegesis of the original passage and surrounding text; a semiotic reanalysis of this reading in light of recent advances in the semiotic theory of learning; a resituation of these distinctions within broader contemporary discussions of emptiness ontology to which I contribute in part via an original semantic/rhetorical analysis of a linguistic construction in Laozi; the introduction of a closely related pedagogical tool under development in the context of my own university-level teaching in ethnography and research methods; and the dialogic situation of this diagram within discourses of psychotherapy, philosophy and literature. Building on these principles and distinctions, the paper closes with a perspective shift on obstacles and desire in human learning and an expanded reformulation of the first rule of logic. (shrink)

No fruitful discussion of the logic of religious belief can afford to ignore George Mavrodes' classification of propositional concepts, i.e. concepts predicable of propositions singly or in sets , as an analytical tool for pinning down the ‘person-oriented’ and ‘content-oriented’ factors in such ‘epistemic activities’ as religious proving, experiencing, and verifying. Mavrodes shows in particular that the formal model of logical soundness, i.e. valid form and true premises, has but limited application to proving, experiencing, and verifying as ways of (...) giving good reasons for religious belief. In this essay, I will show how Mavrodes' analysis of the logic of religious belief can be extended by substituting a procedural model of logical soundness for the truth-functionally formal model that he adopts. I will show further why it is desirable and, in certain instances, vital to extend his analysis in this manner. Along the way, I will explain why the extension that I am advocating augments Mavrodes' original analysis without substantially altering it or sacrificing any of its original analytical virtues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68Ronald ShustermanLogics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ‘68, by Peter Starr; xi & 232 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.Failed revolt? For many people, current French theory is more a revolt of failed logic. Anyone yearning for a definitive refutation of these threatening foreign trends will get no satisfaction from Peter Starr’s volume. (...) His concept of the “logics of failed revolts” involves the obsession of revolutionaries with what they see as the inevitable return of the past. Starr proposes to examine the explanations given for the failure of revolutionary action “in representative texts by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and others” (p. 2). The “revolution” in question is the May 1968 uprising.George Orwell, as a defender of proper usage and an explorer of politics and the English language, always insisted that the title of his Nineteen Eighty-Four be written out in full; the informality of the abbreviation “May ‘68” is emblematic of the spirit of the events of that year: May ‘68 was supposed to be a liberation from useless tradition and constraint. That the movement was seen as a failure is the first premise of Starr’s argument; what he proposes to analyze is the theorization of the failure. Starr sees three “scenarios”: “the logic of specular doubling” is where “revolutionary action is doomed to repetition because revolutionaries inevitably construct themselves as mirror images of their rivals” (p. 2). There is also a “logic of structural repetition” and a “logic of recuperation” in which revolutionary actions actually reinforce established structures of power (pp. 2–3). Starr goes on to argue that “these logics served as argumentative pretexts, allowing Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous, and others to construct the existing political field as an impasse in order to justify significant displacements of political energies (including a politicization of the literary text)” (p. 7). This seems like a fancy way of saying that these thinkers used theory to find a decent way out of direct political commitment. Indeed, once one has understood and granted the point, there really is not much else in Starr’s book but fancy ways of repeating it.Starr tries to delineate a specific “theoretical moment” (p. 4) beginning in 1965 and ending in 1977, but it is difficult to be so definitive about the limits of a period when one is writing only twenty years later. This lack of temporal distance leads to certain debatable assertions. For example, Starr claims that tier-mondisme—France’s obsession with models taken from the Third World—“never recovered” from certain fatal “blows” (p. 4). Yet there is no actual evidence given for this claim. The problem with this kind of history is that it either makes concrete statements which are easy to contest, or it ends up vacuous: Starr sees in his period “a play of continuity and discontinuity” (p. 7). Who could deny such an assertion? All periods involve both continuity and discontinuity (except perhaps the period of the sinking of Atlantis...). Starr [End Page 191] mentions works on specific French thinkers by other theorists (such as Culler) and points out that his “aim has been to bridge the gap between such studies on the one hand and the work of historians and sociologists on the other” (pp. 10–11). The question is whether such an interdisciplinary project is feasible or even desirable. The theorists do not really care about the genealogy of the theory; the historians do not need to know if the theory is right. To take one example, Starr gives us statistics of the evolution of university enrollment in France (p. 113) a few pages after discussing Lacan’s “phallic comedy” (p. 104). How many readers are going to be equipped for, or interested in, a study which combines sociological statistics, political theory, general history, psychoanalytic principles, and feminist criticism?I was convinced by Starr’s basic argument that French thinkers were obsessed by this vision of the inevitable failure of revolt. Nevertheless, the point is both belabored and often tenuous. There are times when Starr’s... (shrink)

The majority of literature on Slow Food focuses on the organization or actors involved in the movement. There is a dearth of material analyzing Carlo Petrini’s aspirations for Slow Food, particularly in light of his desire within Slow Food Nation (2007) and Terra Madre (2010) to make “freewill giving a part of economic discourse.” This essay corrects the literature gap through historicizing and critiquing Petrini’s alternative to global capitalism while rooting it in actually existing practices. First, Petrini’s problematic conceptualization (...) of freewill giving will be compared to feminist theorizations and documentations of the gift economy. Second, Petrini’s avoidance of the toxic mimic of the gift, its subsumption to capitalism, will be amended by discussing how the gifting of food aid and emergency food networks actually reproduces inequality, poverty, and hunger. Third, Petrini’s example of gifting by a Trappist Monastery will be juxtaposed to the ongoing direct action strategies of Food Not Bombs, a much stronger example of an oppositional gift economy, one that is subsequently repressed by the state. In doing so, this essay seeks to expand discussion of the gift economy within the alternative food movement while amending many of the theoretical, historical, and political problems embedded within Petrini’s work, which performs a strong disservice to the politics of possibility embedded within gifting. (shrink)

We propose a model of an agent’s probability and utility that is a compromise between Savage (The foundations of statistics, Wiley, 1954) and Jeffrey (The Logic of Decision, McGraw Hill, 1965). In Savage’s model the probability–utility pair is associated with preferences over acts which are assignments of consequences to states. The probability is defined on the state space, and the utility function on consequences. Jeffrey’s model has no consequences, and both probability and utility are defined on the same set (...) of propositions. The probability–utility pair is associated with a desirability relation on propositions. Like Savage we assume a set of consequences and a state space. However, we assume that states are comprehensive, that is, each state describes a consequence, as in Aumann (Econometrica 55:1–18, 1987). Like Jeffrey, we assume that the agent has a preference relation, which we call desirability, over events, which by definition involves uncertainty about consequences. For a given probability and utility of consequences, the desirability relation is presented by conditional expected utility, given an event. We axiomatically characterize desirability relations that are represented by a probability–utility pair. We characterize the family of all the probability–utility pairs that represent a given desirability relation. (shrink)

After describing the three main kinds of probability theories, the author presents a new logical theory of probability. Probability, for him, is a logical relation between bodies of evidence and statements. The theory is an advance over Carnap's logical theory of probability in that it is not based on a formal language with strong completeness properties. The theory is formalized in Quine's protosyntax, which has two disadvantages: first, long formulas couched in terms of a large number of defined symbols disfigure (...) the book and obscure the exposition; and secondly, it is desirable to keep our theories of inductive logic and deductive logic independent. There seems to be no reason to burden one sort of theory with the other. There is no index.--J. R. W. (shrink)

My dissertation addresses the question "do desires provide reasons?" I present two independent lines of argument in support of the conclusion that they do not. The first line of argument emerges from the way I circumscribe the concept of a desire. Complications aside, I conceive of a desire as a member of a family of attitudes that have imperative content, understood as content that displays doability-conditions rather than truth-conditions. Moreover, I hold that an attitude may provide reasons only (...) if it has truth-evaluable content. Insofar as desires lack truth-evaluable content, I hold that the content of a desire has the wrong kind of logical structure to provide reasons. My second line of argument claims that even if a desire did have truth-evaluable content, it would not follow that desires provide reasons. This is because a desire has no more rational significance than a guess or coin-flip. My argument relies on what I call the non-substitutability principle, the thesis that (all things being equal) one cannot substitute something that lacks rational significance, relative to some attitude, A, for something that has rational significance, relative to A, and leave the rational standing of A unchanged. For example, one cannot substitute the guess that P (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the belief that P) for the perception that P (i.e., something that is rationally significant relative to the belief that P) without altering the rational standing of the belief. I argue that when the non-substitutability principle is applied to a desire that gives rise to an intention, it turns out that one can always substitute a guess or coin-flip (i.e., something that lacks rational significance relative to the intention) for the desire, without altering the rational standing of the intention. I take this to show that desires are not rationally significant relative to the intentions to which they give. (shrink)

This article reflects on the radical change in the meaning and role of the economy in relation to processes of subjectivation, and to the social and political bond. The genealogy of the theological-economic paradigm, accompanying the development of the theological-political, highlights how the meaning of economy cannot be exhausted in economy strictly defined, but rather fulfils the role of the logic of government. On this path, the turn towards the bio-economic production of lives is marked by a marginalizing perspective (...) that replaces the centrality of needs with desire, only so as then to rule desire through rational choice. (shrink)

In this paper, the logical structure of ethics and economics as one unified science is investigated and found to be inhomogeneously represented in Austroliberal literature. This structure is here built from axioms, deductions, and definitions: It is first established in its self-supportive bareness, secondly represented by pivotal passages of libertarian literature, and then widened by a third axiom in addition to the classical first axiom of action and the second axiom of variety. This third axiom and the deduction that follows (...) deal with supra-individual risks for the core of self-ownership and reflect on equality of inalienable, as opposed to alienable, property.Liberty is found to be a dispensable term. Instead, self-ownership is the pivotal notion on which civilized, contractual society is founded: the rock bottom of is propositions as opposed to ought propositions. Alienable property is identified as the only effective, coessential, and congeneric protective mantle around inalienable self-ownership. Equality, with respect to this core of self-ownership, could possibly turn out to be the philosophical foundation for the claim by any ethical norm to hold true for all equally.It is the present author’s hope that, by reinforcing and emphasizing the idea of self-ownership rather than the idea of liberty, this article will foster a greater acceptance for the libertarian desire for contractual solutions to social problems. (shrink)