This paper investigates the effects of Buddhist ethics on consumers’ materialism, that is, the propensity to attach a fundamental role to possessions. The literature shows that religion and religiosity influence various attitudes and behaviors of consumers, including their ethical beliefs and ethical decisions. However, most studies focus on general religiosity rather than on the specific doctrinal ethical tenets of religions. The current research focuses on Buddhism and argues that it can tame materialism directly, similar to other religions, and through the (...) specific Buddhist ethical doctrines of the Four Immeasurables: compassion, loving kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity. The empirical results show the following: (1) Buddhism reduces materialism directly and through some of the Four Immeasurables, and (2) despite the doctrine of non-existence of the self, positive emotions toward the self are still present, and the self absorbs the effects of Buddhist ethics on materialism. The latter finding suggests a “resistance of the self” that is coherent with the idea of a consumer who leverages the self to go beyond it. (shrink)

The new dilemmas and responsibilities which arise in bioethics both because of the unprecedented pace of scientific development and of growing moral pluralism are more and more difficult to grapple with. At the ‘global’ level, the call for the universal nature at least of some fundamental moral values and principles is often being contended as a testament of arrogance, if not directly as a new kind of subtler imperialism. The human rights framework itself, which provided the basis for the (...) most relevant international declarations and documents, is not exempt from the charge. However, the refusal of a top-down conception of the universal as a sort of product for exportation should not be confused with a relativistic landscape, where all the cows can be indifferently black or white. This contribution aims at outlining an approach, which reconciles universalism as enshrined in founding human rights declarations with respect for cultural diversity. In order to do so, two conceptual frameworks are discussed: the ‘tool-kit’ model and the morals/ethics difference. The example of the right to quality health care confirms the argument that striking a balance between cherishing pluralism and defending some fundamental rights and obligations does not amount to an assertion of moral imperialism. (shrink)

My chapter deals with an important part of how Wolff pursued the normative ambitions of his ethics in giving practical guidance with regard to specific moral issues. I first consider how Wolff’s ethics tackles the duties to others, which traditionally represent a difficult issue for moral perfectionism. In this regard, I argue that Wolff’s strategy combines two aspects: (a) he includes in perfection non-active aspects and (b) operates with an agent-neutral notion of perfection, in spite of important passages that might (...) suggest differently. I then focus on Wolff’s treatment of the duties concerning veracity and lying, and show how it follows that general strategy. Combining its two aspects, Wolff examines specific moral issues by adopting a non-welfarist notion of benefit and harm as the standard that can give guidance about practical cases. (shrink)

The concern of this book is to see whether the phenomenological effervescence of politics is still possible to retrace the nucleolus of the political in its archetypical form.

This book argues against the widely celebrated utopia of -transparency- by showing, across a panorama of postwar French thought, how attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted.

Die Epitome physica des Nikephoros Blemmydes (1197 – nach 1269) gilt als eines der meistverbreiteten Lehrbücher aristotelischer Naturphilosophie in der byzantinischen und nachbyzantinischen Welt. Dennoch blieb die handschriftliche Überlieferung bisher gänzlich unerforscht und der Text wurde nie in Form einer kritischen Edition zugänglich gemacht. Die Epitome physica stellt das zweite Buch der Εἰσαγωγικὴ ἐπιτομή (Einführendes Kompendium) dar, deren erstes Buch der Logik gewidmet ist. Als Grundlage dienten Blemmydes im Wesentlichen Aristoteles und seine Kommentatoren (sowie für den astronomischen Teil den Stoiker (...) Kleomedes), wobei er versuchte, eine Synthese der antiken Naturphilosophie mit der christlichen Weltanschauung zu erreichen. Von den über 120 erhaltenen Manuskripten der Epitome, die vom 13. bis ins 19 Jh. datieren, werden im vorliegenden Buch die Handschriften aus der Palaiologenzeit sowie die Mehrheit derjenigen aus der Renaissance manuskriptologisch und philologisch untersucht sowie ihre textgeschichtlichen Beziehungen rekonstruiert. Daneben kommen auch die Verbreitung und der kulturelle Stellenwert der Epitome physica in der byzantinischen Welt und in der europäischen Renaissance zur Darstellung. (shrink)

1. Sviluppi critici della fenomenologia.--2. Fenomenologia e sapere scientifico.

The five-volume set Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense contains the proceedings of the Eleventh International Kant Congress, which took place in Pisa in 2010. The proceedings consist of 25 plenary talks and 341 papers selected by a team of international referees from over 700 submissions. The contributions span 14 sections: Kant’s Concept of Philosophy; Theory of Cognition and Logic; Ontology and Metaphysics; Ethics; Law and Justice; Religion and Theology; Aesthetics; Anthropology and Psychology; Politics and History; Science, Mathematics, and (...) the Philosophy of Nature; Kant and the Leibnizian Tradition; Kant and the Philosophical Tradition; Kant and Schopenhauer; and Kant’s Heritage. Thanks to cooperation from the Schopenhauer Gesellschaft, the 2010 conference was the first in the history of the International Kant Congress to include a session on Kant and Schopenhauer. -/- . (shrink)

The set of unary functions of complexity classes defined by using bounded primitive recursion is inductively characterized by means of bounded iteration. Elementary unary functions, linear space computable unary functions and polynomial space computable unary functions are then inductively characterized using only composition and bounded iteration.

This book explores what it means to exist in virtual worlds. Chiefly drawing on the philosophical traditions of existentialism, it articulates the idea that — by means of our technical equipment and coordinated practices — human beings disclose contexts or worlds in which they can perceive, feel, act, and think. More specifically, this book discusses how virtual worlds allow human beings to take new perspectives on their values and beliefs, and explore previously unexperienced ways of being. Virtual Existentialism will be (...) useful for scholars working in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, media studies, and digital game studies. (shrink)

While agent-based modelling languages naturally implement concurrency, the currently available languages for argumentation do not allow to explicitly model this type of interaction. In this paper we introduce a concurrent language for handling agents arguing and communicating using a shared argumentation space. We also show how to perform high-level operations like persuasion and negotiation through basic belief revision constructs, and present a working implementation of the language and the associated web interface.

Iterative characterizations of computable unary functions are useful patterns for the definition of programming languages based on iterative constructs. The features of such a characterization depend on the pairing producing it: this paper offers an infinite class of pairings involving very nice features.

The set, the closure of F, is the closure with respect to substitution and concatenation recursion on notation of a set of basic functions comprehending the set F. By improving earlier work, we show that is the substitution closure of a simple function set and characterize well‐known function complexity classes as the substitution closure of finite sets of simple functions.

A basis for a set C of functions on natural numbers is a set F of functions such that C is the closure with respect to substitution of the projection functions and the functions in F. This paper introduces three new bases, comprehending only common functions, for the Grzegorczyk classes ℰ_n with n ≥ 3. Such results are then applied in order to show that ℰ_{n+1} = K_n for n ≥ 2, where {K_n}n∈ℕ is the Axt hierarchy.