Davydov’s mathematics curriculum was designed according to the principles of the Cultural Historical Activity Theory. In this study, we analyzed some developmental effects of its realization in Grade 1, in relation to the children’s school readiness level, and their teacher’s experience. We assessed two groups of developmental effects: some general math abilities ; and some abilities, which are very specific to Davydov’s mathematics curriculum. At the beginning of the Grade 1, we divided all participants into three groups according to their (...) level of motivation, voluntary regulation, and logical preservation in terms of J. Piaget. After 1 year we measured general effects again and also measured specific effects. The results showed that all the children became significantly better in all general math abilities. It was also found that progress in math abilities does not depend on the initial level of school readiness of children. Children with different levels of voluntary regulation, motivational readiness, and the level of logical preservation show improvements in general math abilities. As for the mathematical skills specific to the Davydov’ program, the achieved level of their development is also not related to the initial parameters of readiness for school. Also, there were no differences in improvements in general effects and in specific effects between the classes with experienced and not-so-experienced teacher. So, there are some reasons to believe that the level of the child’s actual development does not play a fundamental role for education, which built in accordance with the principles of CHAT. (shrink)

Contemporary debates on God’s emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God’s emotionality on the basis of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us. Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent (...) with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy. (shrink)

Contemporary literature on the divine im/passibility debate has been concerned, among other things, with the intellectual and cultural context in which twentieth century passibilism arose. Foremost among the cultural and intellectual factors cited as occasioning the rise of passibilism are the moral evils and consequent suffering that have occurred during the twentieth century and which have become focal for both theology and the philosophy of religion. This paper seeks to clarify the way in which the modern experience of and response (...) to suffering has affected modern theology and philosophy of religion with respect to the im/passibility debate. The paper begins by establishing the unintelligibility of the claim that the rise of passibilism is due to an increase in suffering, and criticising other models of the relationship between the rise of passibilism and the experience of suffering. Having concluded that existent models of the relation between passibilism and suffering are unsatisfactory, the paper suggests that belief in a suffering God has arisen as a response to the psychological need, in the face of suffering, for a transcendent fellow sufferer, previously fulfilled by prayers to the saints and reflections upon the particular sufferings of Christ. In so doing, the paper highlights some of the frequently overlooked deep-rooted issues inherent in the im/passibility debate, and points to essentially Protestant qualities found in passibilist theology and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

We offer an analysis of future morphemes as epistemic operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower tense. (...) Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class. (shrink)

It has been widely accepted that Kant holds the “Opacity Thesis,” the claim that we cannot know the ultimate grounds of our actions. Understood in this way, I shall argue, the Opacity Thesis is at odds with Kant's account of practical self-consciousness, according to which I act from the (always potentially conscious) representation of principles of action and that, in particular, in acting from duty I act in consciousness of the moral law's determination of my will. The Opacity Thesis thus (...) threatens to render acting from duty unintelligible. To diffuse the threat, I argue, first, that we need not attribute the Opacity Thesis to Kant. Kant's concern with the ubiquity of moral self-opacity does not imply the strong skeptical conclusion that knowledge of the grounds of one's action is impossible. Second, I show how moral self-opacity in cases of morally bad action emerges from the intrinsic inability of representing oneself, insofar as one is pursuing the indeterminate end of “happiness.” Thus, moral self-opacity does not undermine the will's self-consciousness but is born of it. (shrink)

This volume is dedicated to an intriguing Platonic work, the Laws. Probably the last dialogue Plato wrote, the Laws represents the philosopher's most fully developed views on many crucial questions that he had raised in earlier works. Yet it remains a largely unread and underexplored dialogue. Abounding in unique and valuable references to dance and music, customs and norms, the Laws seems to suggest a comprehensive model of culture for the entire polis - something unparalleled in Plato. This exceptionally rich (...) discussion of cultural matters in the Laws requires the scrutiny of scholars whose expertise resides beyond the boundaries of pure philosophical inquiry. The volume offers contributions by fourteen scholars who work in the broader areas of literary, cultural and performance studies. (shrink)

The evidence on gender discrimination in lending remains controversial. To capture gender biases in banks’ loan allocations, we observe the impact on the applicants of a microfinance institution and exploit the natural experiment of a regulatory change imposing a strict EUR 10,000 loan ceiling on microcredit. Descriptive statistics indicate that the presence of the ceiling is associated both with bank-MFI co-financing and with harsher treatment of female borrowers. To investigate causal links, we develop an econometric approach that addresses the concerns (...) of selection biases, multicollinearity, and endogeneity. Our empirical findings suggest that the change in the MFI’s gender-related attitude was triggered by banks through co-financing. Hence, we speculate that co-financing pushes ceiling-constrained MFIs to import whatever biases in loan granting that the banks are prone to. Overall, this paper stresses that apparently benign regulations such as loan ceilings can significantly harm the women’s empowerment efforts made by MFIs. (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is that a general theory of negative concord (NC) should allow for the possibility of NC involving scoping of a universal quantifier above negation. I propose that Greek NC instantiates this option. Greek n-words will be analyzed as polarity sensitive universal quantifiers which need negation in order to be licensed, but must raise above negation in order to yield the scoping ∀¬. This gives the correct interpretation of NC structures as general negative statements. The (...) effect is achieved by application of QR, and the account is fully compositional, as only sentence negation is the vehicle of logical negation ¬. Greek n-words are also compared to nwords in Romance, Slavic, and Hungarian. This analysis, if correct, has two important.. (shrink)

Nudging is considered a promising approach for behavioural change. At the same time, nudging has raised ethical concerns, specifically in relation to the impact of nudges on autonomous choice. A complexity is that in this debate authors may appeal to different understandings or dimensions of autonomy. Clarifying the different conceptualisations of autonomy in ethical debates around nudging would help to advance our understanding of the ethics of nudging. A literature review of these considerations was conducted in order to identify and (...) differentiate between the conceptualisations of autonomy. In 33 articles on the ethics of nudging, we identified 280 autonomy considerations, which we labelled with 790 unique autonomy codes and grouped under 61 unique super-codes. Finally, we formulated three general conceptualisations of autonomy. Freedom of choice refers to the availability of options and the environment in which individuals have to make choices. Agency involves an individual's capacity to deliberate and determine what to choose. Self-constitution relates to someone's identity and self-chosen goals. In the debate about the ethics of nudging, authors refer to different senses of autonomy. Clarifying these conceptualisations contributes to a better understanding of how nudges can undermine or, on the other hand, strengthen autonomy. (shrink)

Moralising accounts of depression include the idea that depression is a sin or the result of sin, and/or that it is the result of demonic possession which has occurred because of moral or spiritual failure. Increasingly some Christian communities, understandably concerned about the debilitating effects these views have on people with depression, have adopted secular folk psychiatry’s ‘medicalising’ campaign, emphasising that depression is an illness for which, like (so-called) physical illnesses, experients should not be held responsible. This paper argues that (...) both moralising and medicalising models of depression are intellectually and practically (pastorally and therapeutically) problematic, gesturing towards more promising emphases. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a (...) mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity. (shrink)

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of (...) affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of uncertainty, scientific attention has focused primarily on probabilistic approaches, which predominantly rely on the assumption that uncertainty can be measured and expressed numerically. At the same time, the increasing amount of research from a range of areas including psychology, economics, and sociology testify that in the real world, people’s understanding of risky and uncertain situations cannot be satisfactorily explained in probabilistic and decision-theoretical terms. In this article, we offer a theoretical overview of an alternative approach to (...) uncertainty developed in the framework of the ecological rationality research program. We first trace the origins of the ecological approach to uncertainty in Simon’s bounded rationality and Brunswik’s lens model framework and then proceed by outlining a theoretical view of uncertainty that ensues from the ecological rationality approach. We argue that the ecological concept of uncertainty relies on a systemic view of uncertainty that features it as a property of the organism–environment system. We also show how simple heuristics can deal with unmeasurable uncertainty and in what cases ignoring probabilities emerges as a proper response to uncertainty. (shrink)

While the impassibility debate has traditionally been construed in terms of whether God suffers, recent philosophy of religion has interpreted it in terms of whether God has emotions more generally. This article surveys the philosophical literature on divine im/passibility over the last 25 years, outlining major arguments for and against the idea that God has emotions. It argues that questions about the nature and value of emotions are at the heart of the im/passibility debate. More specifically, it suggests that presuppositions (...) about the dichotomy between emotions and reason (or the ‘heart and the head’) have negatively impacted the debate. It contends that the debate can only move forward in response to serious reflection on our affects as we experience them, aided by historical and anthropological as well as contemporary philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

We explore this question in three domains: subjunctive in Greek relative clauses, progressives, and nonveridical verbs like prospatho ‘try’. We find that: • Existence fully depends on (i.e. follows from) the truth of the proposition in the case of mood choice in the relative clause: if a sentence is true in a doxastic model (set of worlds), existence of the event participants will be guaranteed in the model . We call this existentiality.

The papers in this volume are updated versions of talks that were presented at the workshop QP structure, Nominalizations, and the role of DP that we organized at Saarland University, Germany, in December 2005. Although the connection between QP structure and definiteness, on the one hand, and nominalizations and definiteness on the other, were long observed in the literature, there has never been an attempt to bring the three together, and our aim at the workshop was to do exactly this: (...) to address recent developments in the area of quantifier phrase structure, nominalizations, and the linking definite determiner D. We invited discussions among the central approaches in syntax, morphology, semantics, and typology, paving the way towards a more comprehensive understanding of how quantification, definiteness and nominalizations are encoded in the grammar. (shrink)

White Thunder, a man around 40, speaks less English than Menomini, and that is a strong indictment, for his Menomini is atrocious. His vocabulary is small, his inflections are barbarous, he constructs sentences of a few threadbare models. He may be said to speak no language tolerably.

This is my response as key discussant to papers presented at the workshop on Polarity at this year’s LSA meeting in Anaheim, CA.

It has already been discussed extensively in the literature that wh-elements in Chinese (as in Japanese and Korean) can have non-interrogative interpretations, i.e., they are the socalled “wh-indeterminates” à la Kuroda 1965 (see Huang 1982, Cheng 1991, Li 1992, Lin 1998 among others). (1a-c) illustrate the typical examples.

In this paper, we contrast English and Greek resultative secondary predication, showing that Greek lacks the productive syntactic strategy which English employs. We propose that the difference in productivity should be attributed to properties of the morphology in the two languages (namely, to the differing productivity of certain verbal affixes). Finally, we give a compositional semantics for the complex event formation in the morphology/syntax that accounts for the contrasts between resultatives in English and Greek.

This article discusses the main trends of Georgian philosophy: its basic principles and perspectives, the importance of the Western, especially the European cultural heritage, and the Georgian contribution to the history of ideas in a global perspective. Metaphysical questions of cognition, truth, identity, virtue and value, wisdom and power, as well as issues of ethical, social, political and aesthetic values, phenomenological, philosophical-theological and linguistic research are central to Georgian philosophy and exemplify its continuing relevance vis-à-vis the Western tradition in its (...) broadest sense. Although philosophical ideas in Georgia rarely matured into a well-balanced, selfsufficient system, one may distinguish as original conceptions some ideas of Christian Neo-Platonism and Aletheological Realism. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and interpretation of free choice items (FCIs) in Greek, a language exhibiting a lexical paradigm of such items distinct from that of negative polarity items. Greek differs in this respect from English, which uniformly employs any. FCIs are grammatical only in certain contexts that can be characterized as nonveridical (Giannakidou 1998, 1999), and although they yield universal-like interpretations in certain structures, they are not, I argue, universal quantifiers. Evidence will be provided that FCIsare (...) indefinites; the quasi-universal effect is shown to be the result of binding by an operator with universal force. Additionally, the limited distribution of FCIs in non veridical contexts can be accounted for by analyzing them as indefinites which must always be interpreted in an intensional type. The difference between ``regular'' indefinites and FCIs, therefore, is reduced to a type difference which captures the fact that only the latter exhibit limited distribution: because of their intensional type, FCIs will be grammatical only in contexts providing alternatives (worlds or situations), and nonveridical contexts do exactly this. By contrast, FCIs are excluded from veridical and episodic contexts because these provide no alternatives and hence do not satisfy the lexical semantic requirement ofFCIs. The proposed analysis is supported by data from other languages as well (Spanish, Catalan,French) and has important consequences regarding the analysis of English any. If FCIs are not universal quantifiers but indefinites, then the usual ambiguity thesis (free choice any being universal, negative polarity any an existential) can no longer be maintained, at least not as one in terms of quantificational force. (shrink)

Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...) but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

Even a morally good practical agent does not act solely from the recog- nition of the abstract demands of moral duty. Often, she acts to satisfy desires for particular ends that are not intrinsically moral. But if freedom, as Kant claims, consists in acting from universal principles one adopts from respect for the moral law, how can agents freely act to satisfy desires for particular ends? The standard answer to this question, the so-called Incorporation Thesis, is, I argue, unsatisfactory both (...) as an interpretation of Kant and on philosophical grounds. I propose instead that, for Kant, the capacity to act freely for the sake of a particular, non-intrinsically moral end is not exhausted by the ability to step back, reflect and decide whether a desire is or can provide a reason to act. Rather, Kant shows, the place for the pursuit of particular ends is determined by practically rational agents’ spontaneous constitution of their moral character, whereby they subordi- nate the pursuit of material, particular ends to the pursuit of formal, moral ones or vice versa. (shrink)

This paper explores the role that the scalar properties and presuppositions of even play in creating polarity sensitive even meanings crosslinguistically (henceforth EVEN). I discuss the behavior of three lexically distinct Greek counterparts of even in positive, negative, subjunctive sentences, and polar questions. These items are shown to be polarity sensitive, and a three-way distinction is posited between a positive polarity (akomi ke), a negative polarity (oute), and a ‘flexible scale’even(esto) which does not introduce likelihood, but is associated with scales (...) made salient by the context. The analysis is a refinement of Rooth’s original idea that negative polarity is involved in the interpretation of English even, and establishes further that the “negative” polarity domain of EVEN includes a sensitivity that is not strictly speaking negative (flexible scale esto). The distributional restrictions of EVEN items are shown to follow from distinct presuppositions (positive polarity and flexible scale EVEN), or from their lexical featural specification (negative polarity EVEN), a result that squares neatly with the fact that ill-formedness is systematic pragmatic deviance in the former case but robust ungrammaticality in the latter. This result supports the by now widely accepted view that polarity dependencies are not of uniform nature, and that we need to distinguish presupposition failures (which are weaker and possibly.. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the properties of a novel kind of nominal ellipsis in Greek, which we call indefinite argument drop (IAD), concentrating on its manifestation in object positions. We argue that syntactically these null objects are present as pro, and we show that semantically they are licensed only by weak DP antecedents (in the sense of Milsark 1974). We compare IAD with NP- internal ellipsis, as attested also in English among many other languages, and show that IAD has (...) distinct syntactic and semantic properties. Finally, we compare our account with a number of proposals regarding null objects in the literature, and show that IAD cannot be reduced to any of these. (shrink)

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, (...) it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs. (shrink)

One of the most powerful tendencies of the World scientific thought development of XIX – the first half of XX century was analysing all sorts of knowledge, accumulated by mankind in the form of universal synthetic system combining science, religion and philosophy into the Universal Sphere of Knowledge that gives the humanity the possibility to achieve a new deeper level of understanding the reality. By the founder of the Classical Russian Systematic School of Philosophy (according to me – A.Sh.) V.S.Soloviev (...) - for the first time in history - the Idea of the Universal Sphere of Knowledge which is depicted by the Greek term Θεω-Σοφιαwas descriptively defined. The followers of V.S. Soloviev’s school in the middle of XIX – the beginning of XX century worked out many aspects of the Concept of Ontological Synthesis of dispersed Spheres of knowledge, among which the Philosophy is an important and homogeneous part of synthesis of Science and Theology. This Spheres of Knowledge look different and it was aggravated in the course of historically developed separation of their methods, spheres ofexperience and types of thinking. Nevertheless to find the new ways to reach the new level of knowledge for the mankind they must be concentrated on the investigation of the Absolute Elements of the World : TrulyExisting [Λογος] (suprasystematic Element) in its real manifestation. The main (or the basic) method of knowledge is the inner experience of mystic origin. The findings of Russian Philosophers are confirmed by the studies of scientific methods which made it possible to achieve great staggering discoveries and inventions which will for a long time remain mysterious for the majority of human beings. (shrink)

In this paper we reconsider the issue of free choice and the role of the wh-morphology employed in it. We show that the property of being an interrogative wh-word alone is not sufficient for free choice, and that semantic and sometimes even morphological definiteness is a pre-requisite for some free choice items (FCIs) in certain languages, e.g. in Greek and Mandarin Chinese. We propose a theory that explains the polarity behaviour of FCIs cross-linguistically, and allows indefinite (Giannakidou 2001) as well (...) as definite-like FCIs. The difference is manifested as a lexical distinction in English between any (indefinite) and wh-ever (definite); in Greek it appears as a choice between a FCI nominal modifier (taking an NP argument), which illustrates the indefinite option, and a FC free relative illustrating the definite one. We provide a compositional analysis of Greek FCIs in both incarnations, and derive in a parallel manner the Chinese FCIs. Here the definite versus indefinite alternation is manifested in the presence or absence of dōu, which we take to express the maximality operator. It is thus shown that what we see in the morphology of FCIs in Greek is reflected in syntax in Chinese. Our analysis has important consequences for the class of so-called wh-indeterminates. In the context of current proposals, free choiceness is taken to come routinely from interrogative semantics, and wh-indeterminates are treated as question words which can freely become FCIs (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). Our results from Mandarin and Greek emphasize that wh-indeterminates do not form a uniform class in this respect, and that interrogative semantics alone cannot predict either sensitivity of free choice to definiteness, or the polarity behaviour of FCIs. (shrink)

Some ideas expressed in the collective monograph Universality in Morality (2020), edited by Ruben Apressyan, are here critically examined. The book is based on the results of a large-scale study by professional ethical philosophers devoted to the question of the nature of universality in morality and the mechanisms of universalisation of individual maxims and norms from antiquity to modern ethical theories, represented above all by the analytical tradition in philosophy. Of great interest is the analysis of related phenomena in morality, (...) which makes it possible to determine the causes and nature of the transformation of morality in different eras and the accompanying change in the terminological apparatus of absolute ethical universalism, considered to be the starting point in the analysis of key modern concepts of moral universality. The article also suggests possible avenues for continued research in this area which could prompt modifications not only to the history of the concept of universality in morality, but also to our assessment of the contribution of individual authors and entire eras to the progress of human civilisation. This concerns above all the moral theory of contractarianism and the Enlightenment. Focus on their ideas goes a long way to determining the direction of current historical-philosophical research that reconstructs the history of ethical teachings and individual concepts. The importance attached today to a new view of the theory of the social contract, considered not only from socio-political but also from moral positions, forces us to approach in a new way the question concerning the universality of the key philosophical categories developed within this theory throughout its history. Elaborating the ideas set forth in the monograph, the author also stresses the relevance of the problem of justifying the thesis about the moral law as an analogue of the universal law of nature in the modern context. (shrink)

Polarity phenomena in language are pervasive and quite diverse. A quite familiar polarity item (PI) is any. Any a PI because it exhibits limited distribution: it is ungrammatical in positive sentences, but becomes fine with negation, in questions, with modal verbs, and in the scope of downward entailing quantifiers like few.

This paper critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It does so by defining this approach to justice as predominantly pathological, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in our contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy the concept of ‘dys-appearance’ used by Drew Leder in the context of his theory of embodiment to (...) discuss how, in western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced and paid attention to when it appears negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we only become conscious of justice in our lived experiences through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. This phenomenological quality of justice, we argue, is intrinsically linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. (shrink)

In this chapter, we discuss the distribution and lexical properties of common varieties of negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs). We establish first that NPIs can be licensed in negative, downward entailing, and nonveridical environments. Then we examine if the scalarity approach (originating in Kadmon and Landman 1993) can handle the attested NPI distribution and empirical variation. By positing a unitary lexical source for NPIs—widening, plus EVEN— scalarity fails to capture the fact that a significant number of (...) NPIs are not scalar, and does not predict correctly NPI distribution in nonveridical contexts. It also misses the variation within the scalar class between broader (any) and narrow NPIs (either). Finally, scalarity predicts weaker effects (contradictions, presupposition failures) with ill-formed NPIs than is actually the case. The variation approach (Giannakidou 1998, 2001, 2007), on the other hand, posits that besides scalarity, NPIs can be created because of the presence of a variable in the NPI that cannot be interpreted deictically. This approach, by allowing more lexical sources for NPIs, is consistent with the diversity of NPIs, and extends easily to PPIs, which, as a class, appear to be non-scalar (Szabolcsi 2004 for some). Here one can again advance the argument that PPI-status is due to various sources including referentiality (some), and speaker commitment (with PPI adverbs; Ernst 2008). (shrink)