Este trabajo está divido en dos partes: en la primera de ellas se aborda la novela decimonónica de Eça de Queirós El crimen del padre Amaro: Escenas de la vida devota, así como la adaptación cinematográfica de Carlos Carrera y el guión de Vicente Leñero para la película El crimen del padre Amaro. Y un particular retorno al género novelístico El padre Amaro de Vicente Leñero. La metodología que se usará en este primer apartado será: exégesis de la adaptación, resumen (...) y elementos característicos de la novela Eça de Queirós, la denuncia social, y la relación amorosa; en una segunda parte se realizará un análisis de El crimen del Padre Amaro bajo la perspectiva de semiótica de la cultura de Yuri M. Lotman basada en su texto Estructura del texto artístico. (shrink)

Alexej Remizov is usually regarded by literary critics as a Symbolist rather than a Futurist writer. However, I would posit that Remizov similarly to the Futurists viewed language as “logos,” bozhestvennii glagol. According to the mystical interpretation of the famous words “At the beginning there was Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, when God was creating the world he named the objects, and these abstract names became a force for the appearance of an object (...) in physical reality. In the light of these words, The Medieval mystical and magical philosophers claimed that one could restore the divine language of Creation, possess the ability to create objects anew, and thereby become Creator himself. One can argue that a major goal of Remizov was similar to that of hisMedieval predecessors: to reveal the mystical power of language in order to create, not to describe reality. The paper analyzes three chapters from Alexej Remizov’s Rossiya v pis’menah, a book which can be read as a manifesto of Remizov’s attitude toward language and reality, and discuss possible sourcesthat might have influenced Remizov in his attitude towards language. (shrink)

Alexej Remizov is usually regarded by literary critics as a Symbolist rather than a Futurist writer. However, I would posit that Remizov similarly to the Futurists viewed language as “logos,” bozhestvennii glagol. According to the mystical interpretation of the famous words “At the beginning there was Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, when God was creating the world he named the objects, and these abstract names became a force for the appearance of an object (...) in physical reality. In the light of these words, The Medieval mystical and magical philosophers claimed that one could restore the divine language of Creation, possess the ability to create objects anew, and thereby become Creator himself. One can argue that a major goal of Remizov was similar to that of hisMedieval predecessors: to reveal the mystical power of language in order to create, not to describe reality. The paper analyzes three chapters from Alexej Remizov’s Rossiya v pis’menah, a book which can be read as a manifesto of Remizov’s attitude toward language and reality, and discuss possible sourcesthat might have influenced Remizov in his attitude towards language. (shrink)

Alexej Remizov is usually regarded by literary critics as a Symbolist rather than a Futurist writer. However, I would posit that Remizov similarly to the Futurists viewed language as “logos,” bozhestvennii glagol. According to the mystical interpretation of the famous words “At the beginning there was Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, when God was creating the world he named the objects, and these abstract names became a force for the appearance of an object (...) in physical reality. In the light of these words, The Medieval mystical and magical philosophers claimed that one could restore the divine language of Creation, possess the ability to create objects anew, and thereby become Creator himself. One can argue that a major goal of Remizov was similar to that of hisMedieval predecessors: to reveal the mystical power of language in order to create, not to describe reality. The paper analyzes three chapters from Alexej Remizov’s Rossiya v pis’menah, a book which can be read as a manifesto of Remizov’s attitude toward language and reality, and discuss possible sourcesthat might have influenced Remizov in his attitude towards language. (shrink)

Alexej Remizov is usually regarded by literary critics as a Symbolist rather than a Futurist writer. However, I would posit that Remizov similarly to the Futurists viewed language as “logos,” bozhestvennii glagol. According to the mystical interpretation of the famous words “At the beginning there was Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God”, when God was creating the world he named the objects, and these abstract names became a force for the appearance of an object (...) in physical reality. In the light of these words, The Medieval mystical and magical philosophers claimed that one could restore the divine language of Creation, possess the ability to create objects anew, and thereby become Creator himself. One can argue that a major goal of Remizov was similar to that of hisMedieval predecessors: to reveal the mystical power of language in order to create, not to describe reality. The paper analyzes three chapters from Alexej Remizov’s Rossiya v pis’menah, a book which can be read as a manifesto of Remizov’s attitude toward language and reality, and discuss possible sourcesthat might have influenced Remizov in his attitude towards language. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta uma discussão acerca da percepção do imaginário da cultura africana e afro-brasileira e da construção da identidade étnico-racial no enredo escolar. A investigação foi realizada a fim de: 1- analisar os tipos de suportes e referenciais culturais que a escola fornece para a construção da identidade étnico-racial; 2- identificar as consequências do tipo de representação do negro construída e percebida na escola para o desenvolvimento da identidade étnico-racial dos alunos do Ensino Fundamental I. Para tanto, utilizou-se a (...) abordagem de pesquisa qualitativa, empregando o uso da modalidade pesquisa-participante e análise documental do Plano Municipal de Educação de Corrente-PI, município onde a pesquisa foi desenvolvida, Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais e a Base Nacional Comum Curricular. A participação direta ocorreu por meio da realização de uma oficina de leitura realizada em uma turma do 2º ano do ensino fundamental, contemplando a literatura fornecida pelo PNBE, que versa sobre a construção da identidade étnico-racial. Diante da problemática e da dificuldade de implementação das leis que regem o ensino da temática, a pesquisa torna-se relevante, pois, longe de se esgotar a uma conclusão final, este estudo reforça a necessidade do constante debate e a busca por efetivação de práticas educativas que formem cidadãos emancipados e forneçam subsídios para os negros se autoafirmarem e para a valorização da cultura de matriz africana. Assim como a necessidade da busca por adequação, implementação, monitoramento e avaliação constante das leis que regem o ensino de história e cultura africana e afro-brasileira. (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to explain the transdisciplinary training model developed at the National University of Education in Ecuador, based on the ancestral worldviews of Buen Vivir. Good Living is a philosophical and political concept of the Kichwa indigenous peoples in the Andean Region, where human beings are interconnected with planet Earth and the whole cosmos. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its Constitution, in order to (...) face climate change and to restore the ecological footprint. This article first unifies scientific knowledge with ancestral wisdom, creating an inter-epistemological dialogue using a transdisciplinary approach. Second, the article explores the epistemological notions of transdisciplinary education: self-training, hetero-training, eco-training, and onto-training. Third, the article argues that as a result, Educational Sciences of Good Living emerged to design regenerative cultures that face socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene age. In sum, the article argues that training transdisciplinary educators implies an intercultural, decolonial, and biocentric approach that promotes their inner spiritual self-awareness, among other perceptive, affective, emotional, rhetorical, poetic, epistemic, creative, artistic, cognitive, and philosophical dimensions. (shrink)

Aura & Transvestment is a transmedia project consisting of a series of generative images, an experimental form of cryptomedia and a video essay. By describing its own powers and contradictions, the work explores notions of value, ownership, authenticity, artificial scarcity and abundance in the digital realm. The project is a critical analysis of non-fungible tokens used as proof of ownership for digital art, taking Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura as a starting point. It argues that, for tokenized art, cryptography serves (...) as an artificial source of auratic power that reverts the political potential of reproducibility falling back to a magical and ritual notion of aura. This time around the ritual performed is that of property, authenticity, ownership, markets and commodification. Finally, the article outlines alternative uses of cryptography and distributed ledger technologies to support artistic labour and proposes transvestment as a temporary counter-action for the reallocation of value from capitalist forms of production and into commons-based models of social coordination. Submitted to this journal is an adaptation of the script for the video essay, alongside other elements of the project. Please visit: https://aura-transvestment.art/. (shrink)

El objeto de investigación del presente artículo es identificar y definir las diferentes perspectivas epistemológicas y metodológicas que han emergido desde la mitad del siglo XX: la multidisciplinariedad, la pluridisciplinariedad, la interdisciplinariedad y la transdisciplinariedad. También aborda la irrupción de la globalización y los procesos transfronterizos haciendo un acercamiento genealógico a la epistemología del sur latinoamericana, africana, islámica y asiática. Por último, reivindica la necesidad de crear puentes transculturales entre los pueblos de todo el mundo para superar la encrucijada paradigmática (...) en la que nos encontramos como sistema-mundo, con la finalidad de alcanzar los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible establecidos por los Naciones Unidas para el año 2030. (shrink)

The notion of epistemic responsibility applied to memory has been in general examined in the framework of the responsibilities that a collective holds for past injustices, but it has never been the object of an analysis of its own. In this article, I propose to isolate and explore it in detail. For this purpose, I start by conceptualizing the epistemic responsibility applied to individual memories. I conclude that an epistemic responsible individual rememberer is a vigilant agent who knows when to (...) engage in different kinds of mental and non-mental actions in order to monitor and update her memories, and who develops and nurture different kinds of virtuous attitudes that guide those actions. These (epistemic) virtuous attitudes are oriented not only towards herself but also towards others. Whereas this conception of epistemic responsibility does not pose a problem to understand shared memories of family members and friends, it may seem suspicious when applied to large-scale collective memories. These memories, which I name historical memories, are memories of events that have a traumatic impact for the community, are permeated by unequal relations of power, keep a complex relationship with historical science, and present other characteristics that distinguish them from individual memories. But despite these differences, the analysis undertaken in this work shows that the general principles that govern the epistemic responsibility of individual and (large-scale) collective rememberers are similar, and are based on similar grounds: pragmatic considerations about the consequences of misremembering or forgetting and a feeling of care. The similarities at the individual and collective scale of the epistemic vigilant attitude that is and should be taken toward our significant past may partially justify the use of the same epithet—“memory”—to refer to these different kinds of representations. (shrink)

Sigmund Freud sah die Anziehungskraft christlich-religiöser „Illusionen“ in der möglichen Aussöhnung des Menschen mit dem Tod begründet. Heute hat die moderne Industriegesellschaft die Religion jedoch weitestgehend hinter sich gelassen, die Vorstellungen von Tod und Sterben haben sich gewandelt. Marina Brandes untersucht, wie, in welchem Alter, an welchen Orten und unter welchen Umständen heute im Vergleich zu vormodernen Epochen normalerweise gestorben wird. Sie zeigt, welche Assoziationen mit dem Tod verknüpft sind und entwickelt vor dem Hintergrund der Medizinalisierung, der Institutionalisierung des (...) Sterbens und der Ausgrenzung der Sterbenden, Perspektiven für ein versöhntes, gutes Sterben. (shrink)

Die Hauptthese dieses Buches ist es, Krankheit und Gesundheit mit Nietzsche auf zwei verschiedenen Ebenen zu denken, nämlich als Ereignisse des Willens zur Macht in einem zirkulär-relationalen Modell, in dem sie sich gegenseitig behaupten, sowie die Metaebene der Konzeptualisierung anzuerkennen. Es behandelt die Schwierigkeit des begrifflichen Denkens, diese Ereignisse einzuholen, und diskutiert kritisch Modellbildungen, die darauf hinauslaufen, dass Krankheit zu überwinden und als lineares singuläres Ereignis zu verstehen sei. In Nietzsches Spätwerk wird die Figur des "dionysischen Künstlers" als Idealisierung der (...) Gesundheit gemäß seiner interpretierenden Sichtweise der Welt dargestellt. Die Relevanz des Buches liegt darin, eine Analyse der Begriffe von Gesundheit und Krankheit (tragischer und schlechter Pessimismus) in direkter Beziehung zu leiblichen Vorgängen vorzulegen, die sich von metaphysisch-dialektischen Voraussetzungen befreit. Zu diesem Zweck widmet die Untersuchung sich einer intertextuellen Lektüre der fünf Vorreden, die Nietzsche 1886/87 zu seinen früheren Schriften verfasste, und verknüpft sie mit der Interpretation des Nachlasses und weiterer Veröffentlichungen aus seiner letzten Schaffensphase. (shrink)

This paper develops a largely neglected parallel between prudence and population ethics. Prudence is generally understood to be concerned with the balancing of well-being over time. How, precisely, well-being ought to be balanced over time, however, is a fervently debated question. I argue that developing a standard guiding such evaluations is exceedingly challenging. This is due to an often overlooked fact about prudence, namely that it shares a structural similarity with population ethics: In both contexts, we assess the comparative value (...) of populations of personstages/people, which may vary in number and level of well-being. Based on this analogy, I show that the development of an adequate theory of prudence runs into very similar impossibility results as obtain in population ethics. In particular, I prove that Arrhenius’ fifth impossibility theorem can be applied to prudence. I develop and compare four possible answers to this challenge. First, I discuss the possibility of accepting the very repugnant conclusion intrapersonally. Second, I present and further develop Donald Bruckner’s Minimax Regret approach, which gives up Transitivity. Third, I apply Jacob Nebel’s Lexical Threshold View to prudence and critically evaluate it. Lastly, I introduce what I call the Negative Lexicality View, which is based on Lexical Threshold View but overcomes some of its problems. (shrink)

This handbook presents the conceptions and principles central to every aspect of Hegel’s systematic philosophy. In twenty-eight thematically linked chapters by leading international experts, The Palgrave Hegel Handbook provides reliable, scholarly overviews of each subject, illuminates the main issues and debates, and details concisely the considered views of each contributor. Recent scholarship challenges traditional, largely anti-Kantian, readings of Hegel, focusing instead on Hegel’s appropriation of Kantian epistemology to reconcile idealism with the rejection of foundationalism, coherentism and skepticism. Focused like Kant (...) on showing how fundamental unities underlie the profusion of apparently independent events, Hegel argued that reality is rationally structured, so that its systematic structure is manifest to our properly informed thought. Accordingly, this handbook re-assesses Hegel’s philosophical aims, methods and achievements, and re-evaluates many aspects of Hegel’s enduring philosophical contributions, ranging from metaphysics, epistemology, and dialectic, to moral and political philosophy and philosophy of history. Each chapter, and The Palgrave Hegel Handbook as a whole, provides an informed, authoritative understanding of each aspect of Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

It seems natural to think that emotional experiences associated with a memory of a past event are new and present emotional states triggered by the remembered event. This common conception has nonetheless been challenged at the beginning of the 20th century by intellectuals who considered that emotions can be encoded and retrieved, and that emotional aspects linked to memories of the personal past need not necessary to be new emotional responses caused by the act of recollection. They called this specific (...) kind of memories “affective memories” and defended their existence. My aim here is to expound the historical background of this debate as well as the characterization and development of the notion of affective memory since its first inception. I aim to show that although the debate was left unresolved and the term disappeared from academy around 1930, many of the characterizations of the nature of emotions and memory done by the advocates of affective memory have reappeared in the scientific agenda and been further developed during the last decades. (shrink)

Hegel's Philosophy of Nature constitutes the second part of his mature philosophical system presented in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and covers an exceptionally broad spectrum of themes and issues, as Hegel considers the content and structure of how humanity approaches nature and how nature is understood by humanity. The essays in this volume bring together various perspectives on Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, emphasizing its functional role within the Encyclopaedia and its importance for understanding the complexity of Hegel's philosophical (...) project. Together they illuminate the core ideas which form Hegel's philosophical framework in the realm of nature. (shrink)

Este artículo retoma la cuestión de los orígenes genealógicos del jurista mālikí y teólogo aš‘arí Ibn Rušd al-Ŷadd (m. 520/1126) —al que no hay que confundir con su famoso nieto, Ibn Rušd al-Ḥafīd o Averroes (m. 595/1198). Se aportan nuevas evidencias en apoyo de los argumentos presentados en mi “Explicit Cruelty, Implicit Compassion: Judaism, Forced Conversion and the Genealogy of the Banū Rushd” aparecido en Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (2010), trabajo en el que examinaba la genealogía de la familia (...) a la luz del trato dado a los dimmíes por parte de los almohades, de la caída en desgracia con ellos de Averroes y su posterior confinamiento en Lucena. (shrink)

Nadie sabe lo que quiere la Justicia porque la justicia no se deja escribir. Cuando digo escribir, digo instituir. La Justicia no se deja instituir. Con ello debe lidiar la actividad judicial, con el límite mismo, con la propia imposibilidad. Límite que exhibe oculto que hay algo allí que no hace cuerpo. Que hay algo que el orden de lo simbólico no logra apresar. Legendre decía: en occidente, instituir es escribir. Instituir a los hombres es ante todo, escribirlos, inscribirlos, ¿marcar (...) sus cuerpos? Kafka lo sabía bien. La democracia enfrenta también un desafío similar: asumir que el signo de lo ilimitado la acompaña en el regazo mismo que la dialéctica de la modernidad le ofrece. Los escritores, señala Milner, han descripto lo ilimitado para condenar sus consecuencias y sustraerse a ellas, como el caso de Rousseau, o para constatarlas y combatirlas mediante estrategias de inversión, de Baudelaire a Brecht.Arrasar con la diferencia es no soportar el límite, aquello que hace borde, aquello que no se deja decir. En otras palabras no aceptar la falta en el lenguaje. El presente trabajo pretende mostrar que es, precisamente, el punto de cruce que constituye el límite mismo, el lugar que aloja un encuentro posible entre justicia y democratización. El límite, lejos de clausurar, posibilita aquel enlace, lo augura. Es a nivel del lenguaje que esta relación requiere ser situada. Democratizar la lengua supone horizontalizarla, en otras palabras, abogar por la apertura y circulación del sentido. Son las teorías críticas del derecho las que aportan las herramientas necesarias para pensar esta articulación. Como señala Cárcova, es en el campo del sentido en donde el derecho adquiere su especificidad y produce los efectos que le son propios. Profundizar la democracia desde el campo jurídico exige, ante todo, democratizar al derecho mismo. (shrink)

We explore different ways in which the human visual system can adapt for perceiving and categorizing the environment. There are various accounts of supervised (categorical) and unsupervised perceptual learning, and different perspectives on the functional relationship between perception and categorization. We suggest that common experimental designs are insufficient to differentiate between hypothesized perceptual learning mechanisms and reveal their possible interplay. We propose a relatively underutilized way of studying potential categorical effects on perception, and we test the predictions of different perceptual (...) learning models using a two‐dimensional, interleaved categorization‐plus‐reconstruction task. We find evidence that the human visual system adapts its encodings to the feature structure of the environment, uses categorical expectations for robust reconstruction, allocates encoding resources with respect to categorization utility, and adapts to prevent miscategorizations. (shrink)

The essays in this volume address topics prominent in current debates about Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, which originally appeared as the third part of his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Together, a group of internationally recognized Hegel scholars presents a sophisticated, well-researched, and considered account of Hegel's text, approaching it from different perspectives, philosophical schools, and traditions. Each essay focuses on a specific issue relevant to Hegel scholarship, carefully and clearly setting out established views of the text and putting forward (...) incisive new interpretations. The essays will enable readers to obtain a broad yet analytically nuanced understanding of Hegel's thought and in particular of the Philosophy of Spirit, a rich and important work that has relevance for contemporary debates in philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of law and religion, ethics, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Canguilhem’s contemporary relevance lies in how he critiques the relation between knowledge and life that underlies Kantian rationality. The latter’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment represent life in the form of an exception: life is simultaneously included and excluded from understanding. Canguilhem’s critique can be grouped into three main strands of argument. First, his reference to concepts as preserved problems breaks with Kant’s idea of concepts regarding the living as a ‘unification of the manifold’. Second, Canguilhem’s vital (...) normativity represents life as the potential to resist normative orders that judge the living, relegating Kant’s ‘lawfulness of the contingent’ to a ‘mediocre regularity’. Third, Canguilhem’s introduction of the environment as a ‘category of contemporary thought’ decentres the living/knowing subject and introduces contingency. His idea of the ‘knowledge of life’ leads to the conclusion that life is the condition of possibility of rationality, rather than rationality’s ‘blind spot’. (shrink)

Criticism is a staple of the scientific enterprise and of the social epistemology of science. Philosophical discussions of criticism have traditionally focused on its roles in relation to objectivity, confirmation, and theory choice. However, attention to criticism and to criticizability should also inform our thinking about scientific pursuits: the allocation of resources with the aim of developing scientific tools and ideas. In this paper, we offer an account of scientific pursuitworthiness which takes criticizability as its starting point. We call this (...) the apokritic model of pursuit. Its core ideas are that pursuits are practices governed by norms for asking and answering questions, and that criticism arises from the breach of these norms. We illustrate and advertise our approach using examples from institutional grant review, neuroscience, and sociology. We show that the apokritic model can unify several indices of criticizability, that it can account for the importance of criticizing pursuits in scientific practice, and that it can offer ameliorative advice to erstwhile pursuers. (shrink)

We offer a new account of the role of values in theory choice that captures a temporal dimension to the values themselves. We argue that non-epistemic values sometimes serve as “inquiry tickets,” justifying scientists’ pursuit of certain questions in the short run, while the answers to those questions mitigate transient underdetermination in the long run. Our account of inquiry tickets shows that the role of non-epistemic values need not be restricted to belief or acceptance in order to be relevant to (...) hypothesis choice: the relevance of non-epistemic values to a particular cognitive attitude with respect to h vary over time. (shrink)

Marina McCoy explores Plato's treatment of the rhetoric of philosophers and sophists through a thematic treatment of six different Platonic dialogues, including Apology, Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic, Sophist, and Phaedras. She argues that Plato presents the philosopher and the sophist as difficult to distinguish, insofar as both use rhetoric as part of their arguments. Plato does not present philosophy as rhetoric-free, but rather shows that rhetoric is an integral part of philosophy. However, the philosopher and the sophist are distinguished by (...) the philosopher's love of the forms as the ultimate objects of desire. It is this love of the forms that informs the philosopher's rhetoric, which he uses to lead his partner to better understand his deepest desires. McCoy's work is of interest to philosophers, classicists, and communications specialists alike in its careful yet comprehensive treatment of philosophy, sophistry, and rhetoric as portrayed through the drama of the dialogues. (shrink)

Los escenarios de inequidad y exclusión que exhibe nuestra contemporaneidad agudizados por las complejidades sanitarias y habitacionales producidas por la pandemia, el lastre de los discursos xenófobos, el racismo persistente, las violencias sacrificiales que producen día a día más cuerpos desechables, la explotación creciente del medio ambiente, la crisis del capitalismo depredador expuesta con gran nitidez en este último 2020 en el mundo, nos demandan con urgencia desde el campo jurídico pero también académico y docente el intercambio colectivo de aportes (...) formativos críticos que posibiliten desarticular las racionalidades instrumentales que han venido a regazo de la modernidad misma. En ese marco, el presente trabajo pretende aportar dos conceptos para repensar la enseñanza y el lenguaje jurídico: una crítica del signo desde y con una crítica del ritmo, situada por Benveniste y retomada por Meschonnic. Y una lectura del concepto de Tiempo-ahora (Jetztzeit) de Walter Benjamin, que interroga el tiempo homogéneo y vacío propio del paradigma del progreso moderno; proponiendo una praxis ya no del proyecto por venir, sino de la interrupción como modo de acción. (shrink)

What, if anything, do the ‘square’ protests and ‘occupy’ movements of 2011 bring to contemporary democratic theory? And how can we, as political theorists, analyse their discourse and do justice to it? We address these questions through an analysis of the Greek and Spanish protest movements of the spring and summer of 2011, the so-called aganaktismenoi and indignados. We trace the centrality of the critique of representation and politics as usual as well as the ideas about horizontality and autonomy in (...) the protesters’ discourse. These ideas are not only important to their critique of the contemporary liberal democratic regimes in the two countries, but also important to the way in which the protesters organise themselves. Nonetheless, as we shall argue, the protesters are caught within a tension between horizontality and verticality, between autonomy and hegemony, or between moving beyond representation and accepting representational structures. Given this tension, we examine how the protesters negotiate it in three key areas: politics, representation and organisation. Drawing on Jacques Rancière, we further argue that the protesters can be seen as making a claim to equal voice. This is what Rancière refers to as politics proper, and the question is then whether such a politics is possible without falling back into traditional forms of politics. (shrink)

A founding figure of German idealism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte developed a radically new version of transcendental idealism. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Fichte follows his intellectual life and presents a comprehensive overview of Fichte's dynamic philosophy, from his engagement with Kant to his rigorously systematic and nuanced Wissenschaftslehre and beyond. Covering a variety of topics and issues in epistemology, ontology, moral and political philosophy, as well as philosophy of right and philosophy of religion, an international team of experts on Fichte explores (...) his important contributions to philosophy. Arranged chronologically, their chapters map Fichte's intellectual and philosophical development and the progression of his thought, identifying what motivated his philosophical inquiry and revealing why his ideas continue to shape discussions today. Alongside wide-ranging chapters advancing new insights into Fichte, there are topical discussions of conceptions and issues central to his philosophy. Featuring a chronology of Fichte's life, as well as a timeline of his publications and lectures, this is an invaluable research resource for all Fichte scholars and a reliable guide for anyone undertaking a study of Fichte and German idealism. (shrink)

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself. Moving from Wax to Film, the book also discusses key questions of imagination and cognition, and probes the perceived distinctions between fantasy and deception; it (...) uncovers a host of spirit forms--angels, ghosts, fairies, revenants, and zombies--that are still actively present in contemporary culture. It reveals how their transformations over time illuminate changing ideas about the self. Phantasmagoria also tells the accompanying story about the means used to communicate such ideas, and relates how the new technologies of the Victorian era were applied to figuring the invisible and the impalpable, and how magic lanterns (the phantasmagoria shows themselves), radio, photography and then moving pictures spread ideas about spirit forces. As the story unfolds, the book features the many eminent men and women--scientists and philosophers--who in the Society of Psychical Research applied their considerable energies to the question of other worlds and other states of mind: they staged trance seances in which mediums produced spirit phenomena, including ectoplasm. The book shows how this often embarrassing story connects with some of the important scientific discoveries of a fertile age, in psychology and physics. Over a sequence of twenty-eight chapters, with over thirty illustrations in color and black and white, Phantasmagoria thus tells an unexpected and often uncomfortable story about shifts in thought about consciousness and the individual person, from the first public waxworks portraits at the end of the eighteenth century to stories of hauntings, possession, and loss of self as in the case of the zombie, a popular figure of soulessness, in modern times. (shrink)

New technology develops with little attention to its impact upon human values. In particular, let us do what we can in this era of “the computer revolution” to see that computer technology advances human values. True enough, we could argue endlessly over the meanings of terms like “privacy,” “health,” “security,” “fairness,” or “ownership.” Philosophers do it all the time – and ought to. But people understand such values well enough to desire and even to treasure them. We do not need (...) absolute clarity or unattainable unanimity before we do anything to advance them. Professional groups are both technical and moral communities because in order to be self-regulatory the members must set shared goals and specify appropriate ways to achieve them. In order to specify these appropriatestandards it is necessary to detail what types of behavior are ethically acceptable or not. The three most important functions of a code, he notes, identify different types of codes. Codes are either primarily (1) aspirational, giving ideals to strive for, (2) educational, intending to educate or socialize some constituency, or (3) regulatory, hoping to sanction violations of the standards. Most codes are intended to achieve all three aims to some degree, but a careful examination may reveal a concentration upon one of these. Advancements in computer technology over the past twenty years have created ethical dilemmas, some similar toother professions and some unique to the computer field. Because of the questions that have been raised, and in some instances sensational news accounts of computer irregularities, including fraud, there is a growing perception that self-regulation may be the only means by which the computer professional associations will prevent governments from intervening to regulate the computer profession. (shrink)

The philosopher Lev Shestov aimed to establish a new free way of thinking, which manifested itself as a struggle against the delusion that we have a rational grasp of the necessary truths on matters that are of the greatest importance to us, such as the questions of life and death. Philosophy, as the Russian philosopher understood it, is not pure thinking, but ‘some kind of inner doing, inner regeneration, or second birth’ (Shestov in Lektsii po Istorii Grecheskoi Filosofii [Lectures on (...) the history of Greek philosophy], YMCA-PRESS, Moscow, 2001, p. 53). Having adopted the notion of the ‘regeneration of one’s convictions’ from Dostoevsky’s vocabulary in his earlier works, Shestov developed the idea of ‘awakening’ further in his mature thought, in which the motif of ‘awakening’ comprised one of the main ideas of his philosophy: the fight for the individual’s right to freedom and to creative transformation at a time when she is in despair or on the brink of death. In this article, I analyse Shestov’s idea of ‘awakening’ as one of the key tropes and developmental characteristics of his philosophical vision. In particular, I argue that, having stemmed from Shestov’s earlier interpretations of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Plotinus, in his later writings, the notion of ‘awakening’—the possibility of a fundamental, inner transformation of one’s worldview (probuzhdenie, pererozhdenie)—marked the beginning of a new salvific mode in his writing. (shrink)

White lies, lies that are beneficial to the addressee and uttered out of concern for them, are pervasive in daily life. This raises a prima facie question: if white lies are so common, are they still lies? I tackle this question from the perspective of speech act theory, using the case of white lies to shed light on the broader question of whether lying itself can be considered a type of speech act. Adopting Sbisà’s (Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution. Lodz (...) Papers in Pragmatics 5 33–52. Reprinted in Marina Sbisà (forthcoming), Essays on Speech Acts and Other Topics in Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) neo-Austinian approach that places the emphasis on the achievement of certain conventional effects, I claim that malicious lying cannot be a type of speech act. However, white lies are a type of speech act, a claim which finds support in three types of evidence: the conventionality of means by which white lies are performed, their online processing, and their acquisition. Moreover, the existence of a continuum between white (harmless) lies (which are a type of speech act) and malicious (harmful) lies (which are not) suggests that whether an utterance performs a certain type of speech act or not can be a matter of degree. In other words, the property itself of being a speech act of a certain kind, an utterance’s speech-act-hood, so to speak, may be graded. This is an interesting result, which applies to speech acts more generally, beyond lying. (shrink)

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study examines the curvilinear relationship between harmonious and obsessive work passion and organizational citizenship behavior as well as the moderating effect of collectivistic values. Using 233 paired supervisor-employee responses from Russia, I found that harmonious work passion and OCB are positively related up to a point, after which higher levels of harmonious work passion are associated with declining OCB. The main curvilinear effect of obsessive work passion on OCB was not significant. Collectivistic values (...) were found to significantly interact with obsessive work passion but not harmonious work passion in the way they affect OCB. Employees who score high on collectivistic values tend to engage more in OCB than those who score low on collectivistic values. Interestingly, at low levels of collectivism, the inverted U-shaped curve illustrates the relations between obsessive passion and OCB changes into a U-shaped curve, suggesting that the highest engagement in OCB will no longer be observed at intermediate levels of obsessive work passion but rather at its lowest and highest levels. The findings contribute to work passion research and suggest that curvilinear rather than linear relationships may exist between work passion and work outcomes, which may account for the existing inconsistencies in the previous studies in regards to whether work passion-outcomes relationships are either positive or negative. (shrink)