This book is a historical-critical study of American conservatism as a post-war social phenomenon. Its thesis is that conservatism failed to have a lasting impact on American culture beyond the increased acceptance of the conservative label itself: "the most enduring accomplishment of the post-war conservative movement" is the fact that "by the 1980s a great many Americans were willing to identify themselves as 'conservative'". The authors show that American conservatives generally treated conservative theoretical assumptions as politically irrelevant. Like their liberal (...) opponents, conservatives acted as if theory were subordinate to practice. The hollowness of their political success suggests that ideas do indeed have consequences. (shrink)

This book is a reprint of the English translation of the author's La grande crise de la république française. It was written in 1941 as a contribution to the Allied war effort. Simon's aim is to unmask the Vichy regime. "The government of Marshall Pétain," he writes, "is a political form of transition, destined to make possible the complete control of the international Nazis over the French people". National liberation, Simon predicts, will sweep away Vichy and institute the Fourth French (...) Republic. (shrink)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an open access, dynamic reference work designed to organize professional philosophers so that they can write, edit, and maintain a reference work in philosophy that is responsive to new research. From its inception, the SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they (...) are made public. (shrink)

This book examines the criticism that modern business schools face and how these obstacles have evolved throughout history. Through historical, resource, and professional school contexts, it sheds light on the operating environment of the business school and the challenges endemic to various university-based professional schools, exploring the likelihood that potential interventions will result in success or failure. Business schools are often accused of inhibiting the practice of business by producing research that is irrelevant and does not address real concerns facing (...) managers. This book investigates these accusations by outlining the historical values on which academic institutions are based, the resources and funding available today, and comparisons to other professional schools which undergo a similar level of scrutiny. This extensive coverage will help academics, administrators, faculty, and policy makers with the tools to understand better the ill-will towards business schools in today's university structure, and ultimately to deliver on the benefits they provide to stakeholders. (shrink)

Explores "why we find spontaneity so elusive and shows how early Chinese philosophy points the way to happier, more authentic lives"--Dust jacket flap.

Mind and Body in Early China critiques Orientalist accounts of early China as a radical "holistic" other, which saw no qualitative difference between mind and body. Drawing on knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Edward Slingerland demonstrates that seeing a difference between mind and body is a psychological universal, and that human sociality would be fundamentally impossible without it. This book has implications for anyone interested in comparative religion, early China, cultural studies, digital humanities, or science-humanities (...) integration. (shrink)

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese thought. The article reviews empirical evidence supporting the claims that human thought is fundamentally imagistic; that sensorimotor schemas are often used to structure our understanding (...) of abstract concepts; that these schemas can be selectively combined to result in novel structures; and that there are inextricable connections between body, emotion, and thought in both everyday and philosophical cognition. It also provides a review of a recent trend where, explicitly or not, scholars from a variety of backgrounds have begun to take metaphor more seriously as a foundational bearer of philosophical meaning in early China. (shrink)

Wu-wei as conceptual metaphor. -- At ease in virtue: Wu-wei in the Analects. -- So-of-itself: Wu-wei in the Laozi. -- New technologies of the self: Wu-wei in the "inner training" and the Mohist rejection of Wu-wei. -- Cultivating the sprouts: Wu-wei in the Mencius. -- The tenuous self: Wu-wei in the Zhuangzi. -- Straightening the warped wood: Wu-wei in the Xunzi. -- Appendix 1: The "many-Dao theory" -- Appendix 2: Textual issues concerning the Analects. -- Appendix 3: Textual issues concerning (...) the Laozi. -- Appendix 4: Textual issues concerning the Zhuangzi. (shrink)

Omniscience is the divine attribute of possessing complete or unlimited knowledge. This article examines motivations for taking such a property to be a divine attribute, attempts to define or analyse omniscience, possible limitations on the extent of divine knowledge, and, finally, objections either to the coherence of the concept or to its compatibility with other divine attributes or with widely accepted claims.

Deleuze and jurisdiction : expressionism in jurisprudence -- Personal jurisdiction : the "method of dramatization" in the law of persons -- Minority and personal jurisdiction : judging sex in re alex -- Persons of animal law -- Deleuze, the law of things and subject-matter jurisdiction -- To put to flight : the right of possession -- The activity of judgment : law of actions and the procedural genre of jurisprudence -- Jurisdiction of control : judgment and procedural forms in Thomas (...) v Mowbray -- The locality of law : jurisdiction in Deleuze. (shrink)

RésuméL'authenticité et la diversité font aujourd'hui figure de slogans dans les sociétés contemporaines de part et d'autre de l'Atlantique nord. En revanche, on a peu exploré les liens entre ces deux idées. À cette fin, cet article aborde les écrits tantôt convergents, tantôt divergents de Charles Taylor et Martin Heidegger pour prolonger leurs réflexions respectives sur l'authenticité et montrer en quoi elles peuvent servir defondement à une nouvelle forme de diversité culturelle. Pour tous deux, l'être-au-monde authentique nous permet d'accider au (...) tréfonds du matériel culturel dont nous devons disposer pour que se nouent des rapports fructueux avec les autres cultures. (shrink)

A discussion of American pragmatism through the writings of its three major advocates: Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Examines how each applied pragmatism to, respectively, the theory of reality, the notion of truth, and the concept of the good.

Science provides us with representations of atoms, elementary particles, polymers, populations, genetic trees, economies, rational decisions, aeroplanes, earthquakes, forest fires, irrigation systems, and the world’s climate. It's through these representations that we learn about the world. This entry explores various different accounts of scientific representation, with a particular focus on how scientific models represent their target systems. As philosophers of science are increasingly acknowledging the importance, if not the primacy, of scientific models as representational units of science, it's important to (...) stress that how they represent plays a fundamental role in how we are to answer other questions in the philosophy of science (e.g. the scientific realism debate). This entry begins by disentangling ‘the’ problem of scientific representation, before critically evaluating the current options available in the literature. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy are often challenged to discern the relative impacts of the ideas and the actions of ancient philosophers. The ideas of these thinkers often stand alone in an almost disembodied fashion, set apart from the physicality of a philosopher, his or her personality, and even their intellectual development over time. This article considers the tension between the people, the ideas, and the social context in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria and investigates the way in which genial and difficult (...) personalities influence the fate of Neoplatonic schools in the two cities in the late fifth and early sixth centuries AD. (shrink)

The so-called ergodic hierarchy (EH) is a central part of ergodic theory. It is a hierarchy of properties that dynamical systems can possess. Its five levels are egrodicity, weak mixing, strong mixing, Kolomogorov, and Bernoulli. Although EH is a mathematical theory, its concepts have been widely used in the foundations of statistical physics, accounts of randomness, and discussions about the nature of chaos. We introduce EH and discuss its applications in these fields.

In questo articolo l’autore analizza il tema del muro statale a partire da una prospettiva interdisciplinare che connette ontologia, filosofia della tecnologia e filosofia politica. La tesi principale del saggio è che vi sia una differenza ontologica fra il muro e il confine su cui esso si inscrive. Dopo una breve discussione di alcune note teorie ontologiche, l’autore argomenta a favore della tesi per cui il muro non sia un oggetto sociale, bensì un artefatto. Più specificamente, il muro è un (...) “artefatto politico”, poiché è uno strumento che inscrive materialmente nello spazio una complessa relazione di potere. Al fine di concettualizzare l’emergente razionalità politica globale, gli studiosi francesi Florine Ballif e Stéphane Rosière hanno coniato un nuovo termine: teicopolitica. Il termine deriva dal greco teichos, che letteralmente significa “il muro della polis”. La teicopolitica, dunque, indica la politica di costruzione di muri, nella maggior parte dei casi per scopi securitari. Il saggio affronta alcuni aspetti della teicopolitica da un punto di vista filosofico. Nella prima parte del saggio, l’autore critica l’idea postmoderna di uno spazio globale fluido e virtuale, e la relativa idea di una consumazione storica e politica delle categorie moderne (Stato, sovranità, territorio); nella seconda parte, analizza approfonditamente la differenza ontologica fra muro e confini, nonché alcuni aspetti fenomenologici che vi si collegano; nella terza parte, mostra come e perché un muro studiato in quanto dispositivo implichi il riconoscimento di differenti forme di potere (sovrano, disciplinare, governamentale); nell’ultima parte, sostiene che il tema del muro statale debba essere affrontato attraverso quella che può essere definita una “ontologia politica degli artefatti”. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of the ontology of political artefacts. A political artefact is a material object that produces certain effects on the social and political environment. The philosophical question I would like to answer is if such an artefact is political because its materiality imposes a social or political norm, or because it simply describes and reproduces certain relations of power. Therefore, I discuss and criticize some of the most relevant theories (technological determinism, social constructivism, Actor-Network-Theory) that (...) deals with the problem of political artefacts and the relation between humans and things. After that, I defend an approach that I define “material contextualism”. In the conclusion, I show why a philosophical theory of the wall, namely a material object that inscribes on the space a relation of power, must be grounded on the material contextualism. (shrink)

In 1759, at the height of the Seven Years' War, when Great Britain was suffering a series of military reversals, Montagu considered his country's plight in an historical context formed by the study of five ancient republics: Sparta, Athens, Thebes, Carthage, and Rome. Montagu's focus on the ancient republics gives his contribution a distinctive twist to the chorus of voices lamenting Britain's decline, and his analysis exerted influence in three momentous eighteenth-century crises: the Seven Years' War, the American War of (...) Independence, and the French Revolution. This is the first modern edition of Montagu's work. Edward Wortley Montagu (1713 -1776) was the son of a wealthy British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. He was a student of oriental languages at the University of Leiden, which apparently proved useful during the peace negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle which concluded the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. He has published widely on English literature from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. He is the editor of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (2012) for Cambridge University Press. (shrink)