The book begins with an overview of globalization, showing how wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a transnational elite while ever increasing numbers of people are being marginalised. Institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund are intent upon exercising a new hegemony over individuals as the role of the traditional nation state is transformed. At the centre of this power shift is a group of high-tech robber barons who dominate the Information Age (...) and exploit the technologies of globalization for their own narrow interests. The second part of the book explores the rise of the new grass roots oppositional movements around the world. Manifest in such diverse struggles as the uprising of the Zapatistas in Mexico and the battle of Seattle against the World Trade Organisation, this new postmodern politics is "de-centred" and has little interest in the old ideologies that dominated much of the twentieth century. The final section of the book contextualizes postmodern politics by drawing on contemporary examples. The authors discuss the demise of socialist and proto-socialist experiments in Chile, Grenada, Nicaragua and Cuba and the emergence of postmodern movements in Latin America. The final two chapters take a specific look at the Zapatista movement and its significance for revolutionary struggles around the world. (shrink)

The principle of exchange seems to be limited in its application, and it cannot serve as a link between utilitarianism and the idea of a market for interpersonal relations. Our preferences concern the inner states of other people as well as their overt behavior. The neglect of this aspect of our preferences is a result of the coupling of utilitarianism with behaviorism. The problem is thus behaviorism, not consequentialism. It might be argued that commensurability is wrong because it sanctions impure (...) practices - aside from any principle of exchange. In reply, it may be argued that the principle of purity is an intuitive one, which must be justified at a higher level. At the intuitive level, the purity principle competes with the view that practices are in some cases too pure already, and that blind purity cannot be maintained without educational deception. The apparent difficulty of making tradeoffs among different kinds of consequences is a problem in practice, not a problem in principle. The difficulty may indeed justify certain prescriptive rules, but a blanket prohibition against impure practices would seem to require considerable defense. (shrink)

the symmetry of our evidential situation. If our confidence is best modeled by a standard probability function this means that we are to distribute our subjective probability or credence sharply and evenly over possibilities among which our evidence does not discriminate. Once thought to be the central principle of probabilistic reasoning by great..

We argue that supererogation cannot be understood just in terms of reasons for action. In addition to reasons, a theory of supererogation must include prerogatives, which can make an action permissible without counting in favor of doing it.

Many philosophers have thought that our folk, or pre-reflective, view of persistence is one on which objects endure. This assumption not only plays a role in disputes about the nature of persistence itself, but is also put to use in several other areas of metaphysics, including debates about the nature of change and temporal passage. In this paper, we empirically test three broad claims. First, that most people (i.e. most non-philosophers) believe that, and it seems to them as though, objects (...) persist by enduring rather than perduring. Second, that most people have a view of change on which enduring but not perduring objects count as changing. Third, that one reason why the folk represent time as dynamical is because it seems to them, and they believe that, they endure through time. We found no evidence to support these claims. While there are certainly plenty of ‘folk’ endurantists in the population we tested, there are also plenty of ‘folk’ perdurantists. We did not find robust evidence that a majority of people believed that, or it seemed to them as though, objects endure rather than perdure. We conclude that many arguments in favour of endurantism that appeal to folk beliefs about, or experiences of, persisting objects and change rest on views about those beliefs and experiences that are empirically unsupported. There is no evidence to suggest that endurantism is the folk friendly view of persistence, and so we should stop treating it as such without argument. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, Roger's masterwork of intellectual history situates the life sciences within the larger context of French Enlightenment thought and the history of institutions.

Univocalist analyses of the modal auxiliary verbs ('ought'/'must'/'can') and the adjective 'right'/'wrong'.

It is widely believed that a person's traits can function as reasons for loving her. Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait-based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will (...) discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait-based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait-based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait-based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait-based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait-based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait-based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait-based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love. (shrink)

Roger Eberhard, Swiss-born and American-educated photographer, conceives his works as series, taking-up impulses and inspirations for new projects from any possible source, such as a story he learns about or media reports catching his attention. He is pa.

Examines the aims and tools of science for creating theories and explanations of phenomena, with an eye to answering the question of whether or not science ...

Features Leibniz's writings including letters, published papers, and fragments on a variety of philosophical, religious, mathematical, and scientific questions.

Mr. Kimball, one of the best of our cultural critics, offers a lively and penetrating study of genius and pseudo-genius at work, and investigates the use and abuse of intelligence. Drawing on figures as various as Plutarch and Hegel, Kierkegaard and P.G. Wodehouse, Elias Canetti and Anthony Trollope, he provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration. "A master of the genre, as collections of his pieces attest, none more impressively than this set." Booklist Starred Review.".

Molecular genetic testing has increasingly been incorporated into clinical medicine, and this trend is likely to accelerate in the future. The introduction of genetic testing into medical practice is beginning to collide head on with patents that claim ownership of correlations between human genetic variants and predisposition to disease, response to therapeutic drugs, and susceptibility to pharmacologic side effects. Patent holders or licensees of genes, genetic variants, and their genotype-phenotype correlations are already using the threat of litigation to monopolize genetic (...) tests for important well-known syndromes like Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and inherited breast and ovarian cancer, in addition to a host of less commonly discussed conditions. (shrink)

L’activité entrepreneuriale génère l’activité entrepreneuriale. Cet article développe cette idée dans une perspective autrichienne. Nous envisageons les entrepreneurs kirznériens sous l’angle de l’apprentissage hayékien. L’activité entrepreneuriale développe l’activité entrepreneuriale de deux manières. Premièrement, la mise en oeuvre d’une nouvelle tentative crée de nouvelles opportunités pour d’autres nouvelles tentatives. Deuxièmement, chaque acte entrepreneurial kirznérien est un exemple incitant les autres à faire de même. Nous mettons l’accent sur le second point. Chaque nouvelle tentative entrepreneuriale modifie les perceptions des autres quant à (...) l’émergence des opportunités, aux gens qui peuvent les saisir, etc. Elle rend les gens plus vigilants. Ainsi, l’action entrepreneuriale crée des externalités positives. Ces externalités expliquent que des communautés, par ailleurs identiques, donnent lieu à des niveaux différents de tentatives entrepreneuriales.Entrepreneurship breeds entrepreneurship. This insight is developed within the context of Austrian economics. We view Kirznerian entrepreneurs as Hayekian learners. Entrepreneurship breeds entrepreneurship two ways. First, the founding of a new venture creates new opportunities for other new ventures. Second, each act of Kirznerian entrepreneurship is a favorable example for others to follow. We concentrate on the second point. Each act of newventure entrepreneurship changes the perceptions of others about how new ventures are founded, what sort of person might do it, and so on. It makes people more alert. Thus, entrepreneurship creates a network externality. This externality explains the fact that otherwise similar communities produce dissimilar levels of new-venture entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Propose une philosophie ontologique du rock, et de l'enregistrement musical.

_Rationality and Religion_ deals with the perennial question of how far religious faith needs reason.

The eighteenth century notion of the “picturesque” has been misunderstood by many contemporary environmental aestheticians. This has contributed both to amisunderstanding of the history of environmental aesthetics and, within the discipline, to a misunderstanding of English garden design. This essay contains a discussion of the term as it appears in environmental aesthetics literature and an examination of the history of the term as used in eighteenth-century garden design literature. This history is used to contest the account of the term as (...) used by contemporary environmental aestheticians and to develop a philosophically more interesting interpretation of it. (shrink)