In 1830, members of the Belgian National Congress asserted that they would not attempt to create an ideal constitution. Rather, they wanted to frame a constitution which would take the existing order into account, which would be adapted to Belgian manners and customs. Their ‘pragmatic conservatism’, as it can be described in distinction to Burke's juridical conservatism, was to an important degree inspired by the writings of Montesquieu. Both the discussion on the monarchy and the debate on the senate were (...) influenced by the Esprit des lois. Indirectly, the debates in the National Congress give evidence of the enormous influence of the Esprit des lois on political thought in the Restoration period. (shrink)

To appear in Jean-Yves Béziau (ed.) Proc. First World Congress on the Square of Opposition.

Taking user’s role and features as milestones for an approach on scientific representation has become a growing trend. We shall investigate the implications that pragmatics bring in the relevant debate. Proponents of pragmatic approaches support that questions such as ‘how an object represents another’ or ‘which features of a certain object represent the target of the representation and in what way’ can be answered only within the given context of representation’s use. Thus, attention is drawn to the intentionality of (...) the representation, in contrast to the semantic tradition, according to which the representational function is based on morphic relations between the representation and the represented object. Given that scientific representations surrogate objects and phenomena in our studies, they should reproduce aspects, relations and interactions of them, possessing the appropriate features. Therefore, we support that user’s intention is not enough to build the representational relation on it. We claim that a) a sustainable and successful theory of scientific representations cannot be grounded on pragmatics b) pragmatic approaches undermine the objectivity of the knowledge inferred by representations c) the important role of the cognizing subject in a theory of scientific representation can be rescued without the burden coming with pragmatic approaches. (shrink)

Religious pluralism (the view that all the great world religions are equally true) is largely motivated by the fear that religious exclusivism ( the view that there is just one correct religion) leads to intolerance and oppression of those holding differing religious views. I claim that this suggests a false dichotomy: either be a tolerant pluralist or an intolerant exclusivist. I argue, first, that the seventeenth-century doctrine of toleration supports the claim that exclusivists of differing sects can peacefully coexist and, (...) second, that religious pluralism has harmful consequences. Exclusivism (tempered by toleration) is the best solution to the challenge of religious diversity. (shrink)

Religious pluralism (the view that all the great world religions are equally true) is largely motivated by the fear that religious exclusivism ( the view that there is just one correct religion) leads to intolerance and oppression of those holding differing religious views. I claim that this suggests a false dichotomy: either be a tolerant pluralist or an intolerant exclusivist. I argue, first, that the seventeenth-century doctrine of toleration supports the claim that exclusivists of differing sects can peacefully coexist and, (...) second, that religious pluralism has harmful consequences. Exclusivism (tempered by toleration) is the best solution to the challenge of religious diversity. (shrink)

This paper proposes a re-evaluation of the theism vs. atheism controversy from a Kantian transcendental perspective, connected with Jamesian pragmatism. Insofar as there is a morally vital human need to postulate the reality of God, and insofar as this theistic postulation can be regarded as rational or legitimate from the perspective of “practical reason”, metaphysical and ethical aspects of the theism issue turn out to be deeply entangled with each other. A Kantian-cum-pragmatist philosophy of religion will inevitably approach the question (...) of God’s existence from a standpoint that thoroughly synthesizes ethics and metaphysics – just as Kant’s defense of theism as a postulate of practical reason did. (shrink)

This is the second of two voumes designed to document a trend in Norwegian philosophy away from the empirical semantics represented by Arne Naess towards a more pragmatic and transcendental perspective. A number of the contributed essays examine the controversy between Wittgenstein and the philosophies of Habermas and Apel.

The Indian philosophers lay emphasis on mind-control. Mind-control is not only negative practice. For, we are not only required to check and curb our evil tendencies but also employ them for a better purpose. The lower constituents of human beings can not be annihilated but can only be tamed and reformed. Cessation of bad tendencies is coupled with cultivation of good tendencies and is followed by good actions. According to Jainism & Buddhism, the path of liberation from sufferings starts with (...) mind-control. The Jainas emphasize on right faith, right knowledge and right conduct which are regarded as Triratnas, three Jewels. Right conduct consists in abstinence from injury, falsehood, stealing, self-indulgence and attachment. According to Buddhism, way to Nirvan (cessation from suffering) consists in eight-fold path which is nothing but self-control. It starts from right views, right determination and right speech and proceeds through right conduct to right livelihood to right effort and to right mindfulness. This process of self-control finally culminates in right concentration. The Upanishadic thinkers and the systems based on Upanishadic traditions have also recognised the importance of self-control. In view of the importance of mind-control in familial, social, moral and spiritual lives we should consistently and constantly make endeavour to practice mind-control and should fight despondency with enthusiasm in the event of some initial failures. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that, in everyday life, we compare different people’s preferences with respect to content and strength. We typically make such comparisons with relatively little difficulty. Furthermore, we often do not find inter-personal comparisons of preferences more difficult than intra-personal comparisons, that is,comparisons involving our own preferences. This contrasts with the difficulties that comparing preferences across individuals pose at the theoretical level. Since preferences are typically represented numerically through a utility function, the problem is known as the problem (...) of interpersonal utility comparisons (IUCs for short). In this paper, I examine the most common solution to the problem of IUCs. According to it, we can assume that preferences are interpersonally comparable on pragmatic grounds (i.e. explanatory power, parsimony and simplicity) I argue that, contrary to our intuitions, the assumption of interpersonal comparability is not pragmatically advantageous. I conclude that this strategy to solve the problem of IUCs fails. (shrink)

Academic studies of Chinese Buddhist views of language generally focus on issues such as paradox, contradiction, and the limits of expression and thought. However, such studies seldom seem to focus on the fact that many Buddhist texts deliberately use an ambiguous mode of linguistic expression, one that actually constitutes their compositional patterns and is designed to enhance and promote the Mahāyāna Buddhist soteriological goal—namely, liberation from suffering via detachment from falseness. In fact, many of the Chinese masters’ treatises and exegetical (...) commentaries develop a textual pragmatics rooted in the ambiguous and paradoxical rhetoric of early Madhyamaka scriptures translated by Kumārajīva. This paper discusses the philosophical and soteriological significance of such a linguistic pragmatics as we find it in the early Chinese Madhyamaka scriptures. The Buddhist doctrines such as “the two truths of the conventional and ultimate,” “emptiness,” “non-duality,” “differentiation,” as well as “the middle way” are the focus of the present paper. (shrink)

Tarski’s assessment that natural language is inconsistent on account of the Liar Paradox is shown to be incorrect: what Tarski’s theorem in fact shows is that Truth is not a property of sentences but of propositions. By using propositions rather than sentences as the bearers of Truth, semantic closure within the same language is easily obtained. Tarski’s contrary assessment was partly based on confusions about propositions and their grammatical expression. But more centrally it arose through blindness to pragmatic factors in (...) language — a blindness that was common in his time, and it has continued to the present day, in discussions of ‘Open Pairs’, and Yablo-type paradoxes, for instance. For completeness, it is also shown that the Fixed Point Theorem does not apply to propositions, because of categorical differences between sentences and propositions — also predicates and properties. (shrink)

Logic and linguistics have engaged in a many-faceted dialogue since the very beginnings of both disciplines in Antiquity. While participants may have had diverse views over the ages, arguably, the dialogue has always revolved around the relationship between human thought and natural language. While there are those who see these two domains as one and the same, or as a case of one-directional influence , we beg to differ. To us, the long historical tradition of authors such as Arnauld, Boole, (...) Turing, or Jespersen demonstrates the much richer perspectives on language and reasoning that are needed, including connections with intelligence and computability.Another major historical theme in the above dialogue are similarities or convergences between natural and artificial languages. It is clear that natural languages are not only semantically broader, but also much closer to human communication than artificial languages, and so linguistic grammars have long dealt with a larger set of problems than logical formalism. This specal issue of JoLLI consists six selected papers presented in the "Logic and Linguisics" Workshop in UNI-LOG 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, plus two papers by invited authors: Johan van Benthem, and Marcus Kracht and Uno Klein. It contains a number of samples of what is intriguing and promising work at the interfaces of logic and language. (shrink)

Research on the human embryo is one of the most obstinately controversial issues of international bioethical debate. There has not been enough of a consensus on this issue to allow for more than a formal compromise within Europe. I argue in this paper for a pragmatic approach to the problem which accords priority to "want-regarding" considerations but does not fail, as most utilitarian approaches do, to give due weight to the "morality-dependent harms" caused by the practice of embryo research to (...) those rejecting it from other than want-regarding principles. I suggest that in deeply controversial bioethical issues a consistent want-regarding perspective should be prepared, under certain narrow conditions, to make pragmatic tradeoffs between the inherent merits of the practice in question and the averse emotions of the public. These conditions are that the averse emotions are widespread, felt to be of existential importance, and stable under additional information, and that the costs in terms of reduced freedom and foregone humane progress do not seem excessive. (shrink)

Fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl, the main founder of the phenomenological current of thought, we present to the public a four book collection showing in an unprecedented way how Husserl's aspiration to inspire the entire universe of knowledge and scholarship has now been realized. These volumes display for the first time the astounding expansion of phenomenological philosophy throughout the world and the enormous wealth and variety of ideas, insights, and approaches it has inspired. The basic commitment to (...) phenomenological concerns found in all this variety makes this collection a most signifi cant historical document. This second volume of the collection bears witness to a deliberate shift of attention from the earlier to the later phase of Husserl's reflections. We see how his issues - intersubjectivity, ethics, human encounter, the societal world, empathy, the sphere of the self, and the surpassing of dichotomies (bodylpsyche, etc.) - are now at the center of attention in the human sciences. Among the authors are H. Tellenbach, A. Rigobello, C. Balzer, C. Bjurvill, V. Molchanov, E. Syristova, O. Balaban, R. Boehm, M. Sancipriano, O. M. Anwar, Y. Okamoto, B. Holyst, T. Sodeika, and M. De Negri. The studies were gathered at the programs held by The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning in the commemorative year 1988/1989, chiefly at the First World Congress of Phenomenology at Santiago de Compos tela, Spain, with the aim of assessing the current state of phenomenology. A-T. T. (shrink)

This volume marks a phase of accomplishment in the work of the World Phenomenology Institute in unfolding a dialogue between Occidental phenomenology and the Oriental/Chinese classic philosophy. Going beyond the stage of reception, the Oriental scholars show in this collection of studies their perspicacity and philosophical skills in comparing the concepts, ideas, the vision of classic phenomenology and Chinese philosophy toward uncovering their common intuitions. This in-depth probing aims at reviving Occidental thinking, reaching to its intuitive sources, as well as (...) providing Chinese thinking with a precise apparatus of expression toward its rejuvenation in a new significance. Studies by Korean and Chinese phenomenologists: Nam-In Lee, Inhui Park, Benjamin I. Schwartz, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Sitansu Ray, Zhang Xian, Zhang Qingxiong, Tsung-I Dow, Ashok K. Gangadean, Yushiro Takei, Louise Sunderarajan, Gregory Tropea, James Sellmann, Tyong Bok Rhie, Sang-Ki Kim, Daniel Zelinski, Qingjie Wang, Calvin O. Schrag, Jung-Sun Han. (shrink)

In her introduction to this collection, Tymieniecka presents her phenomenology of life - the leitmotif of the three-volume anniversary publication of Analecta Husserliana - as something that stands out from preceding historical attempts to investigate life in an 'integral' or 'scientific' way. After an incubation lasting throughout the 2000 years of Occidental philosophy, this scientific phenomenology/philosophy of life at last uncovers the entire area of the 'inner workings of Nature', exposing the way in which the 'sufficient reason' and the 'ground' (...) of beingness as such crystallise out of the 'onto poietic' process. This onto-poietic process, continuing as it does in the human creative condition, also reveals the authentic genius of the works of the human spirit. This new and original philosophy, free of fallacious simplifications, speculations and reductionism, opens up a basic starting point for all philosophy. Life, 'the theme of our times', at last receives a profound philosophical treatment. (shrink)

Wild Ideas is a collection of essays that brings a fresh and refreshing perspective to the wilderness paradoxically at the center of our civilization.

The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. As those associated closely with the work of the Division over the years (...) know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

This collection is the final volume of a four book survey of the state of phenomenology fifty years after the death of Edmund Husserl. Its publication represents a landmark in the comprehensive treatment of contemporary phenomenology in all its vastness and richness. The diversity of the issues raised here is dazzling, but the main themes of Husserl's thought are all either explicitly treated, or else they underlie the ingenious approaches found here. Time, historicity, intentionality, eidos, meaning, possibility/reality, and teleology are (...) the main concerns of this collection devoted to studies in aesthetics, metaphysics and literary interpretation, written by such authors as, among others, R. Cobb-Stevens, C. Moreno Marquez, J. Swiecimski, Sitansu Ray and M. Kronegger. These original studies of phenomenological aesthetics and literary theory by scholars from all parts of the world were gathered by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learn ing during the year 1988/89 during its assessment of the phenomeno logical movement, fifty years after Husserl's death. IX A -T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana, Vol. XXXVII, ix. (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)

Papers presented at the IVR 11th World Congress, Helsinki, 1983.