This latest volume of BACAP Proceedings contains some innovative research by international scholars on Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. It covers such themes as Plato on the philosopher ruler, and Aristotle on essence and necessity in science. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy. In The Tragedy of Philosophy Andrew Cooper challenges the prevailing idea of the death of tragedy, arguing that this assumption reflects a problematic view of both tragedy and philosophy—one that stifles the profound contribution that tragedy could provide to philosophy today. To build this case, Cooper presents a novel reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Although this text is normally understood as the final attempt to seal philosophy from the (...) threat of tragedy, Cooper argues that Kant’s project is rather a creative engagement with a tragedy that is specific to philosophy, namely, the inevitable failure of attempts to master nature through knowledge. Kant’s encounter with the tragedy of philosophy turns philosophy’s gaze from an exclusive focus on knowledge to matters of living well in a world that does not bend itself to our desires. Tracing the impact of Kant’s Critique of Judgment on some of the most famous theories of tragedy, including those of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Cooper demonstrates how these philosophers extend the project found in both Kant and the Greek tragedies: the attempt to grasp nature as a domain hospitable to human life. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

This book argues that the negotiation of agency is central not only to the experience of war but also to its representation in cultural expressions, ranging from a notion of disablement, expressed in victimization, immobilization, traumatization, and death, to enablement, expressed in the perpetration of heroic, courageous, skillful, and powerful actions of assertion and dominance. In order to illustrate this thesis, it provides a comprehensive analysis of literary representations of the American War of Independence from 1775, the beginning of the (...) war, up until roughly 1860, when the Civil War marked a decisive historical turning point. As the first national war, it has an unquestionably exemplary status for the development of American conceptions of war. The in-depth study of exemplary texts from a variety of genres and by authors like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville, demonstrates that the overall character of Revolutionary War literature presents the war as a forum in which collective and individual agency is expressed, defended, and cultivated. It uses the military environment in order to teach the values of discipline and self-subordination to a communal good, which are perceived as basic principles of a Republican virtue to guide the actions of the autonomous individual in a popular democracy. (shrink)

Abstract.I chart the considerable changes in the status and conception of the Lenz-Ising model from 1920 to 1950 in terms of three phases: In the early 1920s, Lenz and Ising introduced the model in the field of ferromagnetism. Based on an exact derivation, Ising concluded that it is incapable of displaying ferromagnetic behavior, a result he erroneously extended to three dimensions. In the next phase, Lenz and Ising’s contemporaries rejected the model as a representation of ferromagnetic materials because of its (...) conflict with the new quantum mechanics. In the third phase, from the early 1930s to the early 1940s, the model was revived as a model of cooperative phenomena. I provide more detail on this history than the earlier accounts of Brush (1967) and Hoddeson, Schubert, Heims, and Baym (1992) and question some of their conclusions. Moreover, my account differs from these in its focus on the development of the model in its capacity as a model. It examines three aspects of this development: (1) the attitudes on the degree of physical realism of the Lenz-Ising model in its representation of physical phenomena; (2) the various reasons for studying and using it; and (3) the effect of the change in its theoretical basis during the transition from the old to the new quantum mechanics. A major theme of my study is that even though the Lenz-Ising model is not fully realistic, it is more useful than more realistic models because of its mathematical tractability. I argue that this point of view, important for the modern conception of the model, is novel and that its emergence, while perhaps not a consequence of its study, is coincident with the third phase of its development. (shrink)

Abstract Proportional quantifiers have played a central role in the development of formal semantics because they set a benchmark for the expressive power needed to describe quantification in natural language (Barwise and Cooper Linguist Philos 4:159–219, 1981). The proportional quantifier most, in particular, supplied the initial motivation for adopting Generalized Quantifier Theory (GQT) because its meaning is definable as a relation between sets of individuals, which are taken to be semantic primitives in GQT. This paper proposes an alternative analysis (...) of most that does not treat it as a lexical item whose meaning is accessible without the help of compositional processes. Instead, proportional most is analyzed as the superlative of many (cf. Bresnan Linguist Inq 4(3):274–344, 1973). Two types of empirical evidence are presented in support of this view, both exploiting the fact that only a decompositional analysis of proportional quantifiers provides the means to generate different logical forms for seemingly equivalent statements of the form most A B and more than half of the A B. (shrink)

‘Reactionary modernism’ is a term happily coined by the historian and sociologist Jeffrey Herf to refer to a current of German thought during the interwar years. It indicates the attempt to ‘reconcil[e] the antimodernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism’ with that ‘most obvious manifestation of means–ends rationality … modern technology’. Herf's paradigm examples of this current of thought are two best-selling writers of the period: Oswald Spengler, author of the massive domesday scenario The Decline of the West (...) in 1917 and, fifteen years later, of Man and Technics, and Ernst Jünger, the now centenarian chronicler of the war in which he was a much-decorated hero, whose main theoretical work was Der Arbeiter in 1932. The label is also applied by Herf to such intellectual luminaries as the legal theorist and apologist for the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, and more contentiously Martin Heidegger. At a less elevated level, reactionary modernism also permeated the writings of countless, now forgotten engineers, who were inspired at once by the new technology, Nietzschean images of Promethean Übermenschen, and an ethos of völkisch nationalism. (shrink)

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)

The model of incomplete cooperative games incorporates uncertainty into the classical model of cooperative games by considering a partial characteristic function. Thus the values for some of the coalitions are not known. The main focus of this paper is 1-convexity under this framework. We are interested in two heavily intertwined questions. First, given an incomplete game, how can we fill in the missing values to obtain a complete 1-convex game? Second, how to determine in a rational, fair, and efficient way (...) the payoffs of players based only on the known values of coalitions? We illustrate the analysis with two classes of incomplete games—minimal incomplete games and incomplete games with defined upper vector. To answer the first question, for both classes, we provide a description of the set of 1-convex extensions in terms of its extreme points and extreme rays. Based on the description of the set of 1-convex extensions, we introduce generalisations of three solution concepts for complete games, namely the τ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\tau $$\end{document}-value, the Shapley value and the nucleolus. For minimal incomplete games, we show that all of the generalised values coincide. We call it the average value and provide different axiomatisations. For incomplete games with defined upper vector, we show that the generalised values do not coincide in general. This highlights the importance and also the difficulty of considering more general classes of incomplete games. (shrink)

This article examines the ethical dilemmas that can occur due to university and industry cooperative arrangements. The values that Conant (1952) and Merton (1942) ascribed to university science are used as a measure of the evolving university-industry relations in the 1980s. Examples of the types of relations being forged are discussed and possible conflicts of interest are explored. The author argues that the goals of the university are and must remain different from those of industry for the good of the (...) entire society. The transformation of the university into a research institution for industry could result in the university not adequately training the scientists of tomorrow, and simultaneously, not discharging its duty to do basic research as it focuses on the more applied research that industry desires and funds. (shrink)

Prominent radical democrats have in recent times shown a vivid interest in the commons. Ever since the publication of Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom, the commons have been associated with a self-governing and self-sustaining scheme of production and burdened with the responsibility of carving out an autonomous social space independent from both the markets and the state. Since the commons prove on a small empirical scale that self-governance, far from being a utopian ideal, is and long has been a (...) lived reality, a few authors have attempted to turn them into the conceptual matrix of their own account of radical democracy. Negri and Hardt, on one hand, Laval and Dardot, on the other, have jointly coined the term ‘the common’ to suggest that the self-governance quintessential to the commons could be turned into a general democratic principle. Though this is an attractive theoretical prospect, I will contend that it fails to account for an important contradiction between the two theoretical frameworks it connects. Whereas the governance of the commons depends on harmonious cooperation between all stakeholders which in turn relies on a strong sense of belonging to a shared community, radical democracy is highly suspicious of any attempt to build a totalizing community and constantly emphasizes the decisive role of internal agonistic conflicts in maintaining a vibrant pluralism. I will further contend that the short-sightedness of radical democrats on this issue may be partially explained by the strong emphasis in the commons literature on a related but distinct conflict, that which opposes the commoners to the movement of enclosures. I will argue, however, that this conflict is not of an agonistic nature and does little to preserve the dynamism and the constant self-criticism proper to the radical democrat regime. (shrink)

The first case of COVID-19 infection in Africa was recorded in Egypt on 14 February 2020. Following this, several projections of the possible devastating effect that the virus can have on the population of African countries were made in the Western media. This paper presents evidence for Africa’s successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and under-reporting or misrepresentation of these successes in Western media. It proceeds to argue for accounting for these successes in terms of Africa’s communitarian way of life (...) and conceptions of self, duty, and rights; and that a particular orientation in theorizing on global justice can highlight the injustices inherent in the misrepresentation of these successes and contribute shared perspectives to formulating a framework of values and concepts that would facilitate the implementation of global policy goals for justice. The paper is thus grounded in a rejection of the insular tenets of theorizing prevalent in the global justice debate and to persistent inclinations in Western scholarship to the thinking that theorizing in the African context that draws inspiration from the cultural past has little to contribute to the quest for justice globally. On the contrary, it argues that reflexive critique of cultural history is a necessary source of normative ideals that can foster tolerant coexistence and a cooperative endeavour toward shared conceptions of justice in the contemporary world. (shrink)

This paper argues that the allure of conspiracy theories lies in their evolutionary origins, specifically in our capacity to communicate unrepresented threats. Drawing on threat-detection psychology and error management theory, it posits that these theories serve as adaptive responses to perceived threats and social coalition-building, rather than as flaws in reasoning.

The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference’s thematic focus on new trends and neglected themes in psychology of religion, I argue that psychology of religion should strive for firmer integration with evolutionary theory and its associated methodological toolkit. Employing evolutionary theory enables to systematize findings from individual psychological studies within a broader framework that could resolve lingering (...) empirical contradictions by providing an ultimate rationale for which results should be expected. The benefits of evolutionary analysis are illustrated through the study of collective rituals and, specifically, their purported function in stabilizing risky collective action. By comparing the socio-ecological pressures faced by chimpanzees, contemporary hunter-gatherers, and early Homo, I outline the selective pressures that may have led to the evolution of collective rituals in the hominin lineage, and, based on these selective pressures, I make predictions regarding the different functions and their underlying mechanisms that collective rituals should possess. While examining these functions, I echo the Early Career Award and focus mostly on my past work and the work of my collaborators, showing that collective rituals may stabilize risky collective action by increasing social bonding, affording to assort cooperative individuals, and providing a platform for reliable communication of commitment to group norms. The article closes with a discussion of the role that belief in superhuman agents plays in stabilizing and enhancing the effects of collective rituals on trust-based cooperation. (shrink)

Volume 18, Issue 4, December 2019, Page 353-353.

This article derives from data collected over a six-month period between February and August 2022. Its sampling pertains to members of two general Twitter Lists of philosophy professionals: “Philosophers on Twitter”, limited to a maximum of 4500 active accounts, and “Philosophers”, restricted to accounts surpassing 1000 followers and currently including over 1,100 individuals. The totality of members of these two Lists is referenced in this article as “Philosophy Twitter”. -/- Data was collected in five principal ways from members of these (...) two Lists: 1) Monitoring the List streams, 2) addressing members, including following, retweeting, liking, endorsing, asking, commenting, and replying, 3) probing members’ Twitter activities in their Profiles (“Tweets & replies”), 4) reviewing members’ Twitter Bios, CVs, professional profiles, and websites, and 5) network analysis of members’ quantitative and qualitative association and interaction profiles. -/- The study of this material aimed at revealing interpersonal social structures and processes of philosophy professionals by their Twitter conduct. Its personal purview focused on creators, teachers, researchers, and students and thus excepted schools, colleges, universities, formal associations, and publishers. Particular attention was given to gaining insights on substantive orientation, cooperation, and constructive dialogue versus hierarchic and tribal characteristics. (shrink)

This article examines Grotius’ lifelong support for Dutch expansion overseas. As noted in other publications of mine, Grotius cooperated closely with the directors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the years 1604–1615. Right up to his arrest for high treason in August 1618, he contributed towards Dutch government discussions about the establishment of a West India Company (WIC). Three years of imprisonment at Loevestein Castle and, following his escape, long years of exile could not weaken his dedication to (...) the cause. His relatives in Holland, in particular his brother Willem de Groot and his brother-in-law Nicolaas van Reigersberch, kept him up-to-date on the fortunes of the VOC and WIC. His expertise on maritime affairs was in high demand. For example, Cardinal Richelieu invited him in November 1626 to become actively involved in the establishment of a French East India Company. As itinerant ideologue of empire, Grotius sought to further his own career and those of his nearest family members, without damaging the interests of the United Provinces. Through Willem de Groot and Nicolaas van Reigersberch, he provided informal advice on Dutch imperial policy to the VOC directors and government officials in The Hague. He was rewarded with the appointment of his brother and his second son, Pieter de Groot, as VOC lawyers (ordinaris advocaten) in 1639 and 1644, respectively. They served as his proxies in diplomatic disputes involving the VOC, the States General and the Portuguese ambassador in autumn 1644, when Pieter and Willem de Groot wrote a defense of VOC claims to the cinnamon-producing areas of Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), liberally citing De Jure Belli ac Pacis. Grotius’ vision of empire hardly changed in the course of 40 years. In his view, the Dutch had gone to the Indies as merchants, not conquerors, and should regulate themselves according to natural law and the law of nations. Thus he contributed to the creation of two political orders, one for Europe and one for the Indies. European diplomatic relations counted for little beyond the Line. VOC and WIC officials could act as judges and executioners in their own cause, without reference to indigenous rulers, other colonial powers, or even the political authorities back home. (shrink)

Human beings are peculiar. In laboratory experiments, they often cooperate in one-shot prisoners’ dilemmas, they frequently offer 1/2 and reject low offers in the ultimatum game, and they often bid 1/2 in the game of divide-the-cake All these behaviors are puzzling from the point of view of game theory. The first two are irrational, if utility is measured in a certain way.1 The last isn’t positively irrational, but it is no more rational than other possible actions, since there are infinitely (...) many other Nash equilibria besides the one in which both players bid 1/2. At the same time, these behaviors seem to indicate that people are sometimes inclined to be cooperative, fair, and just. In his stimulating new book, Brian Skyrms sets himself the task of showing why these inclinations evolved, or how they might have evolved, under the pressure of natural selection. The goal is not to justify our ethical intuitions, but to explain why we have them.2.. (shrink)

The concept of individualism has gone through a fundamental change, according to distinguished political theorist Nadia Urbinati. In the nineteenth century, individualism was a philosophical and ethical perspective that permitted each person to respect and cooperate with others as equals in rights and dignity for the betterment of the community as a whole. Today, the individualist is a more self-interested entity whose maxim might best be expressed as “I don’t give a damn.” This contemporary form of individualism is possessive and (...) conformist, litigious and docile, all too prone to manipulate norms and to submit to the tyrannical sway of private interests. As such, Urbinati believes, it represents the most radical risk that modern democracy currently faces. This well-reasoned and thought-provoking polemic is an attempt to detect the “tyranny of the moderns,” with the ultimate aim of recovering the role of the individual citizen as a free and equal agent of democratic society. It explores the concept of communitarianism as a form of individualism applied to the group itself, and advances the idea that the rescue of true individualism from the current ideology is a basic condition for the defense of democratic citizenship. (shrink)

En este texto se recoge la experiencia y el estudio realizado en el Grado de Educación Infantil del Centro Universitario Cardenal Cisneros (Madrid), ante la necesidad de mostrar a los estudiantes del 2º curso, matriculados en la asignatura “La Innovación Educativa” otra forma de aprender y enseñar, basándose en su propia experiencia. Pero para poder valorar esta experiencia, era necesario encontrar un modelo a seguir y desde el que recoger información, indagar sobre lo que ocurría en la propia aula y (...) ofrecer un proceso formativo e investigador flexible. Para ello se utilizó la metodología de la investigación-acción. (shrink)

Biotopes and Bioethics are highly complex and adaptable systems of Bios. Individual bios is terminal, but the stream of Bios goes on. Basic properties of Bios such as communication and cooperation, competence and competition, contemplation and calculation, compassion and cultivation come in different shades of light and dark in individuals and species, in history and ecology. Hans-Martin Sass discusses the territories of Bios and Bioethics, based on his involvement in decades of consulting in academia, business and politics. Special attention (...) is given to the vision and role of Bioethics in research and training, in religious and cultural traditions, and in the survival, happiness, and health of corporate, social and political bodies. Hans-Martin Sass is Senior Research Scholar Emeritus at Georgetown University, Washington DC, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Ruhr University, Bochum. (Series: Practical Ethics - Studies / Ethik in der Praxis - Studien, Vol. 40) [Subject: Bioethics]. (shrink)

Within the Participatory Design community as well as the Computer Supported Cooperative Work tradition, a lot of effort has been put into the question of letting field studies inform design. In this paper, we describe how game-like approaches can be used as a way of exploring a practice from a design point of view. Thinking of ethnographic fieldwork as a base for sketching, rather than descriptions, creates openness that invites collaborative authoring. The concept of playful collaborative exploration suggests certain ways (...) of interacting with material from field studies so that it becomes a design material for an open-ended design process. We have carried out field studies, transformed the field material into design material, and set up a design game for working with it together with the people we followed in the field. The design game builds on an idea about the power of narratives and the benefits of constraining rules. We believe that this framework for collaboration opens for playfulness, experimentation, and new design ideas. (shrink)

I will explore possibilities for formulating linguistic semantics in terms of records and record types of the kind used in recent developments of Martin-L¨of type theory (Betarte, 1998, Betarte and Tasistro, 1998, Coquand, Pollock and Takeyama, 2003, Tasistro, 1997). I will suggest that they give us the tools to develop a theory which includes aspects of Montague semantics, using the lambda calculus1, Discourse Representation Theory (DRT)2, situation semantics3 and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG)4 in a single theory. I will (...) also argue that formulating these theories in terms of record types may provide us not only with a unified approach but also with certain improvements over the individual theories. (shrink)

Little has been written recently about the obligations of lay people in professional relationships. Yet the Code of Medical Ethics adopted by the American Medical Association in 1847 included an extensive statement on ‘Obligations of patients to their physicians’. After critically examining the philosophical foundations of this statement, I provide an alternative account of lay obligations in professional relationships. Based on a hypothetical social contract and included in a full specification of professional as well as lay obligations, this account requires (...) lay people to honor commitments and disclose relevant information. Ethically, the account assumes that all parties in lay-professional relationships should be given equal consideration and respect in determining rights and obligations. Factually, it assumes that the treatment of many illnesses and injuries requires collaboration and cooperation among lay persons and health professionals, that medical resources and personnel are limited, and that medicine, nursing, and related health professions, are, in MacIntyre's sense, practices. Keywords: patient-physician relationship, moral responsibility of patients, health professionals' duties, contract theory and lay-health professional relationship, health professions as "practices", commitments, truth-telling CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Just peacemaking proposes that it is a creative "third way" between just war and pacifism for Christian engagement with international affairs. It claims that its proposals result from the convergence of a number of important characteristics of the contemporary international scene that cumulatively make this a "kairos" for novel and creative modes of reflection and action. Further, it claims to offer workable and realistic counsel for action in the contemporary world of international relations. This paper critically assesses both claims. It (...) reviews various interpretations of the direction of contemporary international affairs and raises some cautions about too enthusiastic an embrace of just peacemaking's vision of cooperative internationalism. It then focuses specifically on situations that invite intervention in the name of humanitarian concerns. There, the author finds some elements of just peacemaking to be an important supplement to the capabilities of military forces to intervene effectively and to transition successfully to nation-building activities that are necessary if intervention is to have a lasting positive effect. (shrink)

A statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the ones to which it ‘refers’) is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions.

Is the Right to the City (RTTC) still a useful framework for a transformative urban politics? Given recent scholarly criticism of its real-world applications and appropriations, in this paper, we argue that the transformative promise in the RTTC lies beyond its role as a framework for oppositional struggle, and in its normative ends. Building upon Henri Lefebvre's original writing on the subject, we develop a “radical-cooperative” conception of the RTTC. Such a view, which is grounded in the lived experiences of (...) the current city, envisions an urban society in which inhabitants can pursue their material and social needs through self-governed cooperation across social difference. Growing and diversifying spaces and sectors of urban life that are decoupled from global capitalism are, we argue, necessary to create space for this inclusionary politics. While grassroots action is essential to this process, so is multi-scalar support from the state. (shrink)