Ethics in post-medieval responses to the Middle Ages form the main focus of this volume. The six opening essays tackle such issues as the legitimacy of reinventing medieval customs and ideas, at what point the production and enjoyment of caricaturizing the Middle Ages become inappropriate, how medievalists treat disadvantaged communities, and the tension between political action and ethics in medievalism. The eight subsequent articles then build on this foundation as they concentrate on capitalist motives for melding superficially incompatible narratives in (...) medievalist video games, Dan Brown's use of Dante's Inferno to promote a positivist, transhumanist agenda, disjuncturesfrom medieval literature to medievalist film in portrayals of human sacrifice, the influence of Beowulf on horror films and vice versa, portrayals of war in Beowulf films, socialism in William Morris's translation of Beowulf, bias in Charles Alfred Stothard's Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, and a medieval source for death in the Harry Potter novels. The volume as a whole invites and informs a much larger discussion on such vital issues as the ethical choices medievalists make, the implications of those choices for their makers, and the impact of those choices on the world around us."--Back cover. (shrink)

It has been argued that Kant's all-consuming efforts to place autonomy at the center of philosophy have had, in the long-run, the unintended effect of leading to the widespread discrediting of philosophy and of undermining the notion of autonomy itself. The result of this 'Copernican revolution' has seemed to many commentators the de-centring, if not the self-destruction, of the autonomous self. In this major reinterpretation of Kant and the post-Kantian response to his critical philosophy, Karl Ameriks argues that such (...) a view of Kant rests on a series of misconceptions. By providing the first systematic study of the underlying structure of the reaction to Kant's critical philosophy in the writings of Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel, Karl Ameriks challenges the presumptions that dominate popular approaches to the concept of freedom, and to the interpretation of the relation between the Enlightenment, Kant and post-Kantian thought. (shrink)

This paper uses two techniques to build a socially responsible portfolio of U.S. equities and examines prospective performance using publicly available data. The first technique eliminates stocks from consideration using categorical exclusions with a restrictive Environment, Social and Governance screen. The paper shows that stocks surviving the screen have a significantly higher average projected Value Line alpha and are more likely to have a Morningstar 5-star rating. Using categorical exclusions, however, introduces a sector bias in that the ESG screen is (...) more likely to restrict stocks from the manufacturing sector than the service sector. The second technique does not introduce a sector bias because it uses a best-in-class optimization approach in place of screening. The paper introduces a linear programming model called Data Envelopment Analysis to the application of SRI portfolio development to find the best financially and socially performing companies within each industry sector. When compared to a categorical exclusions portfolio, a DEA portfolio is rated significantly higher by Morningstar and Value Line. Depending on the specific needs of a socially responsible investor, the DEA technique could be a better tool in developing a financially and socially balanced equity portfolio. (shrink)

Homo aestheticus -- The Greeks -- The Age of Enlightenment -- A time of consolidation -- A period of expansion -- The present : the use of music : the transformation of aesthetics.

This article aims principally at a reflection on the discursive reading of democracy and the democratic state of law as conceived by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, with a view to confront them with some sociological theories concerning democracy. In these models, Habermas seeks to identify elements that put under risk all that he understands as deliberative processes opinion formation and as the citizens will, emphasizing his model of a deliberative democracy.

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 343-368.

This article argues the following points. The Hobbesian hypothesis, which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it, is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. It is an essential premise in most contractarian justifications of government sovereignty. Many small-scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from them provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject it entirely. Therefore, contractarian theory has not (...) done what it claims to do: it has not justified state sovereignty to each person subject to it by demonstrating that they benefit from that authority. To be justified in contractarian terms, states have to do something to improve the living standards of disadvantaged people under their rule. (shrink)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the search for the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation by biochemists paralleled the description of mitochondrial form by George Palade and Fritiof Sjöstrand using electron microscopy. This paper explores the extent to which biochemists studying oxidative phosphorylation took mitochondrial form into account in the formulation of hypotheses, design of experiments, and interpretation of results. By examining experimental approaches employed by the biochemists studying oxidative phosphorylation, and their interactions with Palade, I suggest that use of mitochondrial form (...) as a guide to experimentation and interpretation varied considerably among investigators. Most notably, Peter Mitchell, whose chemiosmotic hypothesis was ultimately the basis of the correct mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation, incorporated crucial aspects of mitochondrial form into his model that others failed to recognize. I discuss these historical observations in terms of the background and training of the biochemists, as well as a proposed heuristic of form, whose use may increase the possibility that biologically meaningful molecular mechanisms will be discovered. (shrink)

In this volume, Karl Ameriks explores 'Kantian subjects' in three senses. In Part I, he first clarifies the most distinctive features-such as freedom and autonomy-of Kant's notion of what it is for us to be a subject. Other chapters then consider related 'subjects' that are basic topics in other parts of Kant's philosophy, such as his notions of necessity and history. Part II examines the ways in which many of us, as 'late modern,' have been highly influenced by Kant's (...) philosophy and its indirect effect on our self-conception through successive generations of post-Kantians, such as Hegel and Schelling, and early Romantic writers such as Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis, thus making us 'Kantian subjects' in a new historical sense. By defending the fundamentals of Kant's ethics in reaction to some of the latest scholarship in the opening chapters, Ameriks offers an extensive argument that Hölderlin expresses a valuable philosophical position that is much closer to Kant than has generally been recognized. He also argues that it was necessary for Kant's position to be supplemented by the new conception, introduced by the post-Kantians, of philosophy as fundamentally historical, and that this conception has had a growing influence on the most interesting strands of Anglophone as well as Continental philosophy. -/- . (shrink)

This archive manuscript is an English translation of a 25-page excerpt from Marx’s Manuscript of 1867–68, which was published for the first time in German in 2012 in the MEGA, Volume II/4.3. This excerpt is Marx’s first and only attempt to incorporate unequal turnover times across industries into his theory of the equalisation of the profit rate and prices of production. The excerpt considers three cases: unequal turnover times across industries, unequal compositions of capital across industries, and both of these (...) inequalities together. It also emphasises two concepts of the rate of profit: rate of profit on capital advanced and rate of profit on the cost price. (shrink)

1. Definition und Reduktion.--2. Theorie und Erfahrung.

This paper argues that a guaranteed income is not only consistent with the principle of reciprocity but is required for reciprocity. This conclusion follows from a three-part argument. First, if a guaranteed income is in place, all individuals have the same opportunity to live without working. Therefore, those who choose not to work do not take advantage of a privilege that is unavailable to everyone else. Second, in the absence of an unconditional income, society is, in effect, applying the principle, (...) “(S)he who does not work, will not eat.” If the application of this principle is to be consistent with reciprocity, it must be applied to everyone. Most modern industrial societies exempt many citizens from that choice. For example, the owners of external assets do not face the work-or-starve choice and do take advantage of a privilege that is not available to others. An unconditional guaranteed income is one way to eliminate that violation of reciprocity. Third, this paper addresses the criticism that the guaranteed income exploits middle-class workers by demonstrating that a basic income will have a positive effect on wages, which will at least partially counteract the effect of the taxes needed to pay for it. (shrink)

Research suggests that institutions affect the levels of corruption in a country. We take these arguments a step further and examine whether it is the presence of inclusive institutions and/or the credible and consistent implementation of institutions that matter, as regards corruption. We use a novel approach to theoretically conceptualise and empirically operationalise institutions along two analytically distinct dimensions: the nature of the institutions (the de jure dimension), and the extent to which they are credibly and consistently implemented over time (...) (the de facto dimension), using a panel dataset for 148 countries covering 2012 to 2018. We find that formal institutions are most effective in reducing corruption when the rules are credibly and consistently implemented. Furthermore, this effect appears to operate differently at different levels of national income. The nature of the formal institutions appears important across income levels, but particularly so at the upper middle income level, while the credible and consistent implementation of these institutions is primarily influential at upper middle income levels. We explain why this may be the case and elaborate on the policy implications. (shrink)

Like many other recent Hegelian accounts, Stephen Houlgate's severe critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy contends that, in contrast to Hegel, Kant's Critical system, especially because of its doctrine of transcendental idealism, presupposes a subjectivist and therefore inadequate position. On the basis of a moderate interpretation of Kant's idealism and his general Critical procedure, I defend Kant from the charge of subjectivism, and also give an account of how subjectivist interpretations in general can arise from a series of understandable misunderstandings of (...) difficult passages in Kant's first Critique. (shrink)

We explore the nature of forgetting in a corpus of 125,000 students learning Spanish using the Rosetta Stone® foreign-language instruction software across 48 lessons. Students are tested on a lesson after its initial study and are then retested after a variable time lag. We observe forgetting consistent with power function decay at a rate that varies across lessons but not across students. We find that lessons which are better learned initially are forgotten more slowly, a correlation which likely reflects a (...) latent cause such as the quality or difficulty of the lesson. We obtain improved predictive accuracy of the forgetting model by augmenting it with features that encode characteristics of a student's initial study of the lesson and the activities the student engaged in between the initial and delayed tests. The augmented model can predict 23.9% of the variance in an individual's score on the delayed test. We analyze which features best explain individual performance. (shrink)

Durante los años 1853 y 1854 surgió una ola de huelgas en varios distritos industriales de Inglaterra, especialmente en los sectores textiles de Lancashire y Manchester. Este ciclo de luchas, que pugnaba principalmente por un aumento de los salarios, fue visto por Ernest Jones y el movimiento Cartista como una oportunidad para organizar una asociación obrera a escala nacional. Karl Marx, que compartía la visión de los cartistas, analizó el movimiento desde el New York Tribune, brindando apoyo a la (...) iniciativa a la que dio lugar: el Parlamento Obrero. A continuación, se ofrece la traducción de cuatro textos periodísticos que Marx publicó en apoyo a la institución obrera –la mayoría inéditos en español–, seguidos de «Las luchas por la organización obrera en la época victoriana (1853-1854)», un estudio crítico sobre el ciclo de huelgas y las expectativas de organización obrera durante aquellos años, donde se defiende que este fallido intento de organización constituye un precedente de la sección británica de la Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores. La traducción y edición de los textos de Marx, y el estudio crítico que los acompaña, han sido realizados por Mario Espinoza Pino (Universidad de Granada). (shrink)

The introduction (pp. 7-29) discusses Nazi denigration of "Jewish philosophy, " from Spinoza to Bergson and Husserl, and the elevation of "German" philosophers, particularly Eckhart and Nietzsche, to the role of forerunners of Nazism. The chapters on the work of the four Jewish philosophers mention briefly their murder by the Nazis (in the case of Benjamin, his death while fleeing the Nazis).

In this article the author tries to give an answer - from the point of view of the transcendental pragmatic foundation of discourse ethics - to the title question, which was raised by the Unesco conferences entitled `Universal Ethics' in Paris (27 March 1997) and Naples (December 1997). The article should be understood as a supplement to the empiristic-comparative responses of S. Bok and H. Küng, and especially to the communitarian approach of M. Walzer, proposed at the first conference. Unlike (...) traditional rationalism, this approach does not try to deduce concrete moral norms from axiomatic first principles; it begins with transcendental reflection on the undeniable moral presuppositions of argumentative discourse (which is not circumventable in philosophy). The approach first deduces from these presuppositions only the ideal procedures for the moral discourses through which all concrete moral problems ought to be solved, if possible. The second step provides a strategic-counter-strategic supplementation principle for those cases where undistorted moral discourses are not possible. (shrink)