This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

This collection of essays, originally published in 1970 by Random House, gathers together some of the best initial responses to the problems raised by Edmund Gettier's celebrated critique of the traditional analysis of knowledge. Designed for upper-level courses and seminars in undergraduate philosophy programs and is intended as an introduction to epistemology from the analytic point of view.

Other people in our culture actively transform our behavioral dispositions and mental states by shaping them in various ways. In the following, we highlight three points which Veissière et al. may consider in leveraging their account to illuminate the dynamics by which this occurs, and in particular, to shed light on how social cognition supports, and is supported by, enculturation.

A review by Samantha Power in the Sunday New York Times Book Review of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance constitutes the most sympathetic, comparatively fair and balanced discussion of Chomsky's political writing in years appearing in these pages, with only a hint of Chomsky bashing.

“One moral truism that should not provoke controversy is the principle of universality: We should apply to ourselves the same standards we apply to others—in fact, more stringent ones,†writes Chomsky (Khaleej Times, August 6, 2004).

The main aim of this article is to give an assessment of prediction error minimization as a unifying theoretical framework for the study of social cognition. We show how this framework can be used to synthesize and systematically relate existing data from social cognition research, and explain how it introduces new constraints for further research. We discuss PEM in relation to other theoretical frameworks of social cognition, and identify the main challenges that this approach to social cognition will need to (...) address. (shrink)

Mainstream forms of psychiatric talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy do not reliably generate lasting recovery for eating disorders. We discuss widespread assumptions regarding the nature of eating disorders as fundamentally psychological disorders and highlight the problems that underlie these notions, as well as related practical problems in the implementation of mainstream treatments. We then offer a theoretical and practical alternative: a dynamical systems model of eating disorders in which behavioral interventions in general are foregrounded as powerful mediators between psychological (...) and physical states. We go on to present empirical evidence for behavioral modification of eating speed in the treatment of eating disorders, and a hypothesis accounting for the etiology and progression, as well as the effective treatment, of the full spectrum of eating problems. A dynamical systems approach mandates that in any dietary and lifestyle change as profound as recovery from an eating disorder, acknowledgement must be made of the full range of pragmatic (psychological, cultural, social, etc.) factors involved. However, normalizing eating speed may be necessary if not sufficient for the development of a reliable treatment for the full spectrum of eating disorders, in its role as a mediator in the complex feedback loops that connect the biology and the psychology with the behaviors of eating. (shrink)

Although death by neurologic criteria is legally recognized throughout the United States, state laws and clinical practice vary concerning three key issues: the medical standards used to determine death by neurologic criteria, management of family objections before determination of death by neurologic criteria, and management of religious objections to declaration of death by neurologic criteria. The American Academy of Neurology and other medical stakeholder organizations involved in the determination of death by neurologic criteria have undertaken concerted action to address variation (...) in clinical practice in order to ensure the integrity of brain death determination. To complement this effort, state policymakers must revise legislation on the use of neurologic criteria to declare death. We review the legal history and current laws regarding neurologic criteria to declare death and offer proposed revisions to the Uniform Determination of Death Act and the rationale for these recommendations. (shrink)

El propósito del artículo es explicar el genocidio de la Unión Patriótica en clave de la economía nacional y su ubicación estratégica a partir de una aproximación teórica desde algunos elementos propuestos por Antonio Negri y Michael Hardt. Como conclusión se destaca que el genocidio de la up fue consecuencia de su poderío local, que ponía en riesgo la continuidad de las clases políticas dominantes en razón de sus propuestas como colectivo político. Así mismo, este hecho produjo que a (...) raíz de su origen se construyera sobre ellos un relato negativo de enemigos de la sociedad civil. Por último, las propuestas de memoria que se identificaron son consecuencia de la conquista y de la lucha social por parte de las víctimas. (shrink)

Die Auslegungen zweier byzantinischer Gelehrter, Johannes Italos und Leon Magentinos, zur aristotelischen Philosophie sind in der vorliegenden Textausgabe von Sofia Kotzabassi vereint. Konkret geht es um die Topik, die als die allgemeinen Gesichtspunkte, die zur Erörterung eines Themas dienen, erklärt werden können. Die Wichtigkeit dieses Teiles der Philosophie des Stageiriten manifestiert sich in der großen Anzahl überlieferter Handschriften (den Text enthalten 90 Kodizes [S. 3]), während man Kommentare und Scholien in 124 Textzeugen findet.

Book reviewed in this article: Not In Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature. By R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin.

In this paper, I focus on an influential account of phenomenal concepts, the recognitional account, and defend it from some recent challenges. According to this account, phenomenal concepts are recognitional concepts that we use when we recognize experiences as “another one of those.” Michael Tye has argued that this account is viciously circular because the relevant recognitional abilities involve descriptions of the form “another experience of the same type,” which is also a phenomenal concept. Tye argues that we avoid (...) the circularity worry if we explain the reference-fixing of phenomenal concepts in terms of dispositions to re-identify tokens of the same type without appealing to any further phenomenal concepts. However, he argues, this account is incompatible with the intuitive claim that phenomenal concepts seem to involve rich modes of presentation of their referents. Philip Goff and others have similarly argued that a recognitional account of phenomenal concepts would make phenomenal concepts opaque, that is, unable to reveal anything about their referents, which seems problematic. In this paper, I present a new version of the recognitional account that avoids the circularity worry without entailing that phenomenal concepts are opaque. (shrink)

This article explores phenomena of marginality in different areas of medieval culture. The introduction explains medieval concepts of the “margin”. In the first part, the author analyzes the tension between the “centre” and the “margin” as found in medieval conceptions of the world such as labyrinths and the mappae mundi. Secondly, he examines the interdependency of social and textual marginalization as it occurs in the 14th century Hausbuch of Michael de Leone. The third part of the article is dedicated (...) to the Munich manuscript of Wolframs von Eschenbach Titurel, a text situated on the margins of the famous Parzival-novel both in terms of its physical location and also its poetic thought. The survey of these examples shows that margins often refer to the centre of cultural constellations despite their allegedly subsidiary role. (shrink)

Additional Contributor Is Michael J. Walsh.

Michael Jackson ’s _Lifeworlds_ is a masterful collection of essays, the culmination of a career aimed at understanding the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. Seeking the truths that are found in the interstices between examiner and examined, world and word, and body and mind, and taking inspiration from James, Dewey, Arendt, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, and, especially, Merleau-Ponty, Jackson creates in these chapters a distinctive anthropological pursuit of existential inquiry. More important, he buttresses this philosophical approach with committed empirical research. (...) Traveling from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone to the Maori in New Zealand to the Warlpiri in Australia, Jackson argues that anthropological subjects continually negotiate—imaginatively, practically, and politically—their relations with the forces surrounding them and the resources they find in themselves or in solidarity with significant others. At the same time that they mirror facets of the larger world, they also help shape it. Stitching the themes, peoples, and locales of these essays into a sustained argument for a philosophical anthropology that focuses on the places between, Jackson offers a pragmatic understanding of how people act to make their lives more viable, to grasp the elusive, to counteract external powers, and to turn abstract possibilities into embodied truths. (shrink)

Michael Walzer, der im westlichen Diskurs wohl als der bekannteste Theoretiker in Sachen »gerechter Krieg« angesehen werden kann, plädiert in aller Entschiedenheit für eine Ethik der humanitären Intervention. Obwohl es ohne Zweifel besser ist, wenn ein tyrannisches Regime durch das eigene Volk vertrieben wird, so gibt es nach Walzer dennoch Fälle extremer Gewalt, wie z.B. die Killing Fields der Roten Khmer, die Anarchie in Sierra Leone oder die »ethnischen Säuberungen« im Kosovo, wo militärische Interventionen zur Rettung der Opfer auch (...) ohne Beschluss des UN-Sicherheitsrates gerechtfertigt werden können. Zwar bestehe keine moralische Pflicht zur Intervention, dennoch zögert Walzer, humanitäre Interventionen bloß den »unvollkommenen Pflichten« zuzuordnen. Nach Walzer sollte im Fall von massenhaften Tötungen jeder handeln, der dazu in der Lage ist, d. h. Staaten, nicht Einzelne. Dass Staaten immer auch Interessen verfolgen, ist nach Walzer kein zwingendes Argument gegen humanitäre Interventionen. Denn absolute Reinheit der moralischen Motive sei weder im privaten noch im politischen Handlungsfeld vollkommen verwirklichbar. Wichtige Klärungen sind allerdings in der Frage der Auswahl der Mittel vorzunehmen, in denen die Risken der intervenierenden Soldaten und der Zivilbevölkerung abzuwägen sind. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “The Plasticity of the Bodily Self: Head Movements in Bodily Illusions and Their Relation to Gallagher’s Body Image and Body Schema” by Marte Roel Lesur, Michael Gaebler, Philippe Bertrand & Bigna Lenggenhager.: In my commentary, I raise some questions about the applicability of Gallagher’s distinction between body image and body schema to the experimental research reported and discussed in the target article. I suggest that the distinction between body image and body schema is (...) of limited help in this context, and that Gallagher’s distinction between sense of ownership and sense of agency provides a more natural and fruitful theoretical framework to discuss that research. (shrink)

Como reacción a la recuperación académica de un Marx completamente desvinculado de la tradición marxista-leninista realizada a finales del siglo xx, las dos últimas décadas han presenciado un nuevo intento, propiamente filosófico, de rescatar partes del pensamiento de Lenin, si bien se han llevado a cabo desde posiciones epistemológicas, y con objetivos políticos, altamente divergentes. El presente artículo analiza y compara las que consideramos que son las dos líneas principales de esta recuperación: La liderada por Slavoj Žižek desde posiciones sociosimbólicas (...) post-althusserianas, y la desarrollada por Antonio Negri y Michael Hardt a partir de la ontología deleuzoguattariana y el post-operaísmo. (shrink)

RESUMEN Como reacción a la recuperación académica de un Marx completamente desvinculado de la tradición marxista-leninista realizada a finales del siglo XX, las dos últimas décadas han presenciado un nuevo intento, propiamente filosófico, de rescatar partes del pensamiento de Lenin, si bien se han llevado a cabo desde posiciones epistemológicas, y con objetivos políticos, altamente divergentes. El presente artículo analiza y compara las que consideramos que son las dos líneas principales de esta recuperación: La liderada por Slavoj Žižek desde posiciones (...) sociosimbólicas post-althusserianas, y la desarrollada por Antonio Negri y Michael Hardt a partir de la ontología deleuzo-guattariana y el post-operaísmo. ABSTRACT Towards the end of the 2oth century there took place an academic recovery of a Marx completely detached from the Marxist-Leninist tradition. As a reaction, in the last two decades there has been a new properly philosophical attempt to rescue pieces of Lenin's thinking. This recovery has been carried out from epistemological positions and with clearly divergent political objectives. This article analyzes and compares what we consider to be the two main lines of this recovery: the one led by Slavoj Žižek from post-Althusserian socio-symbolic positions, and the one developed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt from Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology and post-operaism. (shrink)

Leon Kass's often-cited essay, “Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life,” provides the basis for a case study in the rhetorical function of definition in debates concerning bioethics. The study examines the way a particular definition of “human dignity” is used to maintain an advantage of power in the debate over the morality of physician-assisted suicide. It also considers sources of human dignity that are deflected from attention by the rhetoric of Kass's formulation.

WE SCHOLARS WHO WRITE ABOUT THE Republic have found much to say about the education of Plato’s warriors. We carefully and thoughtfully relate their virtues to those of the Republic ’s philosopher-kings, and even to those of Plato’s Socrates. We have found much less to say about Plato’s peculiar account of that for which they are educated— war. I agree with Leon Craig that war and spiritedness are central to the argument of the Republic. Indeed, I will contend, Socrates’ (...) three different accounts of war reflect and, in a way, complete the central argument of the Republic. Yet Craig and other modern scholars of the cultivation of Plato’s warriors have very little to say on Socrates’ three accounts of the city at war. (shrink)

All left-libertarians believe that natural resources should be governed by an egalitarian principle of distribution. In my own case, this belief gains its support from what I take to be the most defensible interpretation of the Lockean principle of justice in acquisition, according to which one may privatize land and other worldly resources in a state of nature so long as one leaves enough and as good for others. Axel Gosseries is right to press the question of the moral status (...) of worldly resources in a state of nature prior to private acquisition. For Locke, that status was one of common ownership, underwritten by God’s gift of the earth to humankind in common. For Léon Walras, to whom Vincent Bourdeau draws our attention, the earth both initially and inalienably belongs to humanity, and such collective ownership is grounded, not in theistic assumptions, but in the “scientific observation” that human beings are by nature social beings. By contrast, I regard the earth as initially unowned. This supposition should not, however, be understood, as it is by some, as the claim that each is equally free at the outset to privatize any bit of the world as he sees fit as a matter of right. Rather, it should be understood as an initial non-presumption of any rights with respect to the world. Rather than asserting the existence of rights that, as a moral default position, we have with respect to pristine wilderness, I am making a claim that is motivated by the methodological impropriety of presuming any rights with respect to the world at the outset. (shrink)

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such (...) as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others. (shrink)

In recent years a number of books have been published that offer short autobiographical essays of academics, focusing on their research and how their life history affected their scholarly development. These could be labeled as "intellectual journey narratives." Some volumes focus on philosophers and their religious faith or lack thereof (e.g., Clark, 1997, Antony, 2007). Psychology has its own version of the intellectual journey narrative, in T. S. Krawiec's (1972, 1974, 1978) multivolume set of autobiographical essays by contemporary psychologists. In (...) 1987, Rosemary Pilkington edited her first volume of essays entitled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections, Esprit Volume 1. It contains autobiographical essays by Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab and Bernard Grad. The second (2013) volume contains autobiographical essays by Mary Rose Barrington, Eberhard Bauer, William Braud (now deceased), Stephen Braude, Richard S. Broughton, Larry Dossey, Sally Rhine Feather, Erlendur Haraldsson, Arthur Hastings, Stanley Krippner, Lawrence LeShan, Roger Nelson, John Palmer, Guy Leon Playfair, William G. Roll (now deceased), Serena Roney-Dougal, Stephan A. Schwartz, Rex G. Stanford, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, and Walter von Lucadou. Between the two volumes almost every significant contemporary parapsychologist is represented, with the major exceptions being the late John Beloff and the late Ian Stevenson. (shrink)

The term neoclassical economics delineates a distinct and relatively homogenous school of thought in economic theory that became prominent in the late nineteenth century and that now dominates mainstream economics. The term was originally introduced by Thorstein Veblen to describe developments in the discipline (of which Veblen did not entirely approve) associated with the work of such figures as William Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras. The ambition of these figures, the first neoclassicists, was to formalize and mathematize the (...) subject in the aftermath of the so-called marginalist revolution. Economics is, according to one definition, the science that studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses. Neoclassical economics pursues this study by means of supply and demand models that determine prices based on the subjective preferences of producers and consumers. Neoclassical economics relies on subjective preferences for determining prices in order to escape from the so-called objective value theory of classical economics, according to which the value of goods could be established by reference to some basic commodity (usually corn) or the labor input required to produce a good. Neoclassicists hoped that by jettisoning objective value, economics could be placed on a more scientific basis as an essentially descriptive and predictive theory of human behavior. Political theory, by contrast, involves both positive and normative elements. It is a positive science to the extent to which it aims to describe and predict political behavior. It is a normative science to the extent to which it prescribes how agents should behave in the political arena and what the best political institutions are. Neoclassical economics is relevant to both of these elements. (shrink)

The concept of truth is now a major research subject in analytic philosophy. At the same time, working in different areas, mathematical logicians have developed sophisticated theories of truth and its formal paradoxes. Recent developments of semantical paradoxes in logical theories are highly relevant for philosophical research on the notion of truth. And conversely, philosophical guidance is necessary for the development of logical theories of truth and the paradoxes. From this perspective, this volume intends to reflect and promote deeper interaction (...) and collaboration between philosophers and logicians investigating the concept of truth than has existed so far. In addition to an extended introductory overview of recent work in the theory of truth, the volume includes articles by leading philosophers and logicians on subjects and debates that interface logical and philosophical theories of truth. The volume is intended for graduate students in philosophy and in logic who want an introduction to contemporary research in this area, as well as for professional philosophers and logicians. Topics covered include a defense of minimalism, metaworlds, the role of correspondence theory, and truth, provability and its criteria. The volume includes contributions by John P. Burgess, Paul Horwich, and Michael Sheard. The contributors are united in their belief that at present the connections between truth and intentional notions are poorly understood, and the entire area is in an unsatisfactory state. Controversy abounds: Is truth a logical-mathematic concept or a properly philosophical one? Does truth pertain to temporal events or possible worlds? Axiomatic theories do not seem to possess the naturalness and elegance intentional notions of truth. The editors intend this volume to offer semantical guidance to those who would construct interesting axiomatic systems concerning intentional notions. Volker Halbach is on the faculty of philosophy of the Universitt Konstanz in Germany. He has contributed articles for Mind, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Synthese, and other leading publications in philosophy. Leon Horsten is in the Department of Philosophy, University of Leuven. His work on the subject of this book has appeared in the Journal of Philosophical Logic. (shrink)

Leon Goldstein’s critical philosophy of history has suffered a relative lack of attention, but it is the outcome of an unusual story. He reached conclusions about the autonomy of the discipline of history similar to those of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but he did so from within the Anglo-American analytic style of philosophy that had little tradition of discussing such matters. Initially, Goldstein attempted to apply a positivistic epistemology derived from Hempel’s philosophy of natural science to (...) historical knowledge, but gradually formulated an anti-realistic epistemology that firmly distinguished historical knowledge of the past not only from the scientific perspective but also from fictional and common-sense attitudes to the past. Among his achievements were theories of the distinctive nature of historical evidence and historical propositions, of the constructed character of historical events, and of the relationship between historical research and contemporary culture. Taken together, his ideas merit inclusion among the most important twentieth-century contributions to the problem of historical knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLeon Goldstein's critical philosophy of history has suffered a relative lack of attention, but it is the outcome of an unusual story. He reached conclusions about the autonomy of the discipline of history similar to those of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but he did so from within the Anglo‐American analytic style of philosophy that had little tradition of discussing such matters. Initially, Goldstein attempted to apply a positivistic epistemology derived from Hempel's philosophy of natural science to historical (...) knowledge, but gradually formulated an anti‐realistic epistemology that firmly distinguished historical knowledge of the past not only from the scientific perspective but also from fictional and common‐sense attitudes to the past. Among his achievements were theories of the distinctive nature of historical evidence and historical propositions, of the constructed character of historical events, and of the relationship between historical research and contemporary culture. Taken together, his ideas merit inclusion among the most important twentieth‐century contributions to the problem of historical knowledge. (shrink)

In a recent book, Secular Translations: Nation State, Modern State and Calculative Reason, Talal Asad is concerned with how the language of calculation and abstraction, inaugurated by modernity and accelerated by our current algorithmic reality, erodes the language of cultivated embodiment typical of religious worldviews and the virtues that such embodiment seeks to develop. These languages are predicated upon and cultivate different types of selves that are fundamentally at variance with each other. It is not that that one cannot cultivate (...) the worshipful, virtuous self in our algorithmic reality, but Asad’s pessimistic conclusion is that the conditions for such cultivation are being made increasingly difficult as we seemingly hasten towards a posthuman future. Asad here echoes thinkers such as Leon Kass and Michael Sandel who have also expressed disquiet about the loss of cultivated embodiment in such a future, but in an important meta sense, he goes beyond them by interrogating the underlying language we use to frame our discussions in this area. The purpose of this article is to bring an awareness to this Asadian argument, which, I believe, should at the very least give us some pause for thought as technology plunges us into new and unknowing horizons.Contribution: Despite the many laudable accomplishments of modernity in the techno-scientific sphere, vital questions remain about its ability to bring about overall human flourishing. Among others, the thought of Talal Asad provides a way to think about why the promised potential of modernity in this regard has not been realised and, concomitantly, why traditional, embodied teachings of religion continue to be critical in thinking about the future. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.