A survey of democratic institutions and republics reveals the aristocratic origins of democracy.

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

This volume is a revised, enlarged, and broadened version of Gert's classic 1970 book, The Moral Rules. Advocating an approach he terms "morality as impartial rationality," Gert here presents a full discussion of his moral theory, adding a wealth of new illuminating detail to his analysis of the concepts--rationality/irrationality, good/evil, and impartiality--by which he defines morality. He constructs a "moral system" that includes rules prohibiting the kinds of actions that cause evil, procedures for determining when violation of the rules is (...) permitted, and ideals which encourage actions that prevent or relieve suffering. To be valid, Gert argues, any such system must be "a public system that applies to all rational persons." The book concludes with a discussion of medical ethics, demonstrating the link between moral theory and its application to real moral problems. (shrink)

The justification of Bayes' rule by cognitive rationality principles is undertaken by extending the propositional axiom systems usually proposed in two contexts of belief change: revising and updating. Probabilistic belief change axioms are introduced, either by direct transcription of the set-theoretic ones, or in a stronger way but nevertheless in the spirit of the underlying propositional principles. Weak revising axioms are shown to be satisfied by a General Conditioning rule, extending Bayes' rule but also compatible with others, and weak updating (...) axioms by a General Imaging rule, extending Lewis' rule. Strong axioms (equivalent to the Miller–Popper axiom system) are necessary to justify Bayes' rule in a revising context, and justify in fact an extended Bayes' rule which applies, even if the message has zero probability. (shrink)

I outline some of my work and results on my matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis, according to which the entropy of a closed quantum gravitational system is equal to the system’s matter-gravity entanglement entropy. The main arguments presented are: that this hypothesis is capable of resolving what I call the second-law puzzle, i.e. the puzzle as to how the entropy increase of a closed system can be reconciled with the asssumption of unitary time-evolution; that the black hole information loss puzzle may be (...) regarded as a special case of this second law puzzle and that therefore the same resolution applies to it; that the black hole thermal atmosphere puzzle can be resolved by adopting a radically different-from-usual description of quantum black hole equilibrium states, according to which they are total pure states, entangled between matter and gravity in such a way that the partial states of matter and gravity are each approximately thermal equilibrium states ; that the Susskind–Horowitz–Polchinski string-theoretic understanding of black hole entropy as the logarithm of the degeneracy of a long string cannot be quite correct but should be replaced by a modified understanding according to which it is the entanglement entropy between a long string and its stringy atmosphere, when in a total pure equilibrium state in a suitable box, which ) goes over, at strong-coupling, to a black hole in equilibrium with its thermal atmosphere. The modified understanding in is based on a general result, which I also describe, which concerns the likely state of a quantum system when it is weakly coupled to an energy-bath and the total state is a random pure state with a given energy. This result generalizes Goldstein et al.’s ‘canonical typicality’ result to systems which are not necessarily small. (shrink)

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Hobbes has served for both philosophers and political scientists as the paradigm case of someone who held an egoistic view of human nature. In this article I shall attempt to show that the almost unanimous view that Hobbes held psychological egoism is mistaken, and further that Hobbes's political theory does not demand an egoistic psychology, but on the contrary is incompatible with psychological egoism. I do not maintain that Hobbes was completely consistent; in fact, I shall show that there was (...) a continuous development in Hobbes's works away from an egoistic psychology. But I do think that the main outlines of Hobbes's political theory, i.e., his account of the laws of nature, the right of nature, the obligations imposed by laws and covenants, and the rights and duties of citizen and sovereign, are essentially the same in The Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan. I thus hold that even in his earliest work, The Elements, the only one where a charge of egoism is justifiable, the political theory does not depend on egoism. But the first and most important point to be established is that Hobbes did not hold an egoistic psychology. (shrink)

Paul Ricœur, with Rawls, Walzer, and Habermas as some of his main interlocuters, has developed a substantial and distinctive body of political thought. On the one hand, it articulates a rich conception of the paradoxical character of the domain of politics. On the other, it provides a fresh approach to such major topics as the relationship among politics, economics, and ethics and between concern for universal human rights and respect for cultural plurality. His work, rooted as it is in Aristotle, (...) Kant, and Hegel, also provides resources for a fruitful rethinking of the issues at stake in the liberal-communitarian debate. (shrink)

This article situates the emergence of cybernetic concepts in postwar French thought within a longer history of struggles surrounding the technocratic reform of French universities, including Marcel Mauss’s failed efforts to establish a large-scale centre for social-scientific research with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the intellectual and administrative endeavours of Claude Lévi-Strauss during the 1940s and 1950s, and the rise of communications research in connection with the Centre d’Études des Communications de Masse (CECMAS). Although semioticians and poststructuralists used cybernetic discourse (...) critically and ironically, I argue that their embrace of a ‘textocratic’ perspective – that is, a theory of power and epistemology as tied to technical inscription – sustained elements of the technocratic reasoning dating back to these 1920s efforts to reform French universities. (shrink)

Leon Chwistek's 1924 paper ?The Theory of Constructive Types? is cited in the list of recent ?contributions to mathematical logic? in the second edition of Principia Mathematica, yet its prefatory criticisms of the no-classes theory have been seldom noticed. This paper presents a transcription of the relevant section of Chwistek's paper, comments on the significance of his arguments, and traces the reception of the paper. It is suggested that while Russell was aware of Chwistek's points, they were not important in (...) leading him to the adoption of extensionality that marks the second edition of PM. Rudolf Carnap seems to have independently rediscovered Chwistek's issue about the scope of class expressions in identity contexts in his Meaning and Necessity in 1947. (shrink)

Block's cases of superblindsight, the pneumatic drill, and the Sperling experiments do not show that P-consciousness and Aconsciousness can come apart. On certain tendentious but not implausible construals of the concepts of P- and A-consciousness, they refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

I show that the recursive structure of Leibniz's Law requires agents to perform infinitely many operations to psychologically identify the referents of phenomenal and physical concepts, even though the referents of ordinary concepts (e.g. Hesperus and Phosphorus) can be identified in a finite number of steps. The resulting problem resembles the hard problem of consciousness in the fact that it appears (and indeed is) unsolvable by anyone for whom it arises, and in the fact that it invites dualist and eliminativist (...) responses. Moreover, if this is the hard problem then we can predict that regardless of the strength of the argument for physicalism, and regardless of physicalism's truth, an ineliminable dissatisfaction is bound to accompany any physicalist theory of consciousness. Accordingly, I suggest that this is the hard problem of consciousness, and therefore that the hard problem arises from a recursively degenerate application of Leibniz's Law. (shrink)

This paper attempts to refute the familiar sceptical argument based upon the theoretical possibility of systematic transpositions of colours in different observers? colour?vision. The force of this argument lies in its apparent demonstration that cases of transposed colour?vision would be on a quite different cognitive footing from ordinary cases of colour?blindness; since colour transposition, unlike colour?blindness, could not possibly have any effect on the use of language by a person who suffered from it. It is argued (1) that this demonstration (...) works only if we assume the truth of a certain theory of the logical nature of our colour vocabulary, and (2) that this theory is false. (shrink)

We trace the genealogy of wisdom to show that its status in epistemological and management discourse has gradually declined since the Scientific Revolution. As the status of wisdom has declined, so the status of rational science has grown. We argue that the effects on the practice of management of the decline of wisdom may impede management practice by clouding judgment, degrading decision making, and compromising ethical standards. We show that wisdom combines transcendent intellection and rational process with ethics to provide (...) a balanced and integrated way of knowing, deciding, and acting for managers in a complex and uncertain business environment. Finally, we discuss the role and value of wisdom across a range of business functions including knowledge management, strategic management, leadership and international business. (shrink)

We provide a suitable theoretical foundation for the notion of the quantum coherent state which describes the electrostatic field due to a static external macroscopic charge distribution introduced by the author in 1998 and use it to rederive the formulae obtained in 1998 for the inner product of a pair of such states. (We also correct an incorrect factor of 4π\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$4\pi$$\end{document} in some of those formulae.) Contrary to what one might expect, (...) this inner product is usually non-zero whenever the total charges of the two charge distributions are equal, even if the charge distributions themselves are different. We actually display two different frameworks that lead to the same inner-product formulae, in the second of which Gauss’s law only holds in expectation value. We propose an experiment capable of ruling out the latter framework. We then address the problem of finding a product picture for QED—i.e. a reformulation in which it has a total Hamiltonian, arising as a sum of a free electromagnetic Hamiltonian, a free charged-matter Hamiltonian and an interaction term, acting on a Hilbert space which is a subspace (the physical subspace) of the full tensor product of a charged-matter Hilbert space and an electromagnetic-field Hilbert space. (The traditional Coulomb gauge formulation of QED isn’t a product picture in this sense because, in it, the longitudinal part of the electric field is a function of the charged matter operators.) Motivated by the first framework for our coherent-state construction, we find such a product picture and exhibit its equivalence with Coulomb gauge QED both for a charged Dirac field and also for a system of non-relativistic charged balls. For each of these systems, in all states in the physical subspace (including the vacuum in the case of the Dirac field) the charged matter is entangled with longitudinal photons and Gauss’s law holds as an operator equation; albeit the electric field operator (and therefore also the full Hamiltonian) while self-adjoint on the physical subspace, fails to be self-adjoint on the full tensor-product Hilbert space. The inner products of our electrostatic coherent states and the product picture for QED are relevant as analogues to quantities that play a rôle in the author’s matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis. Also, the product picture provides a temporal gauge quantization of QED which appears to be free from the difficulties which plagued previous approaches to temporal-gauge quantization. (shrink)

1. L'immense régression -- 2. La lec̨on de Greta Thunberg.

The term « subsidiarity » started to appear in managerial literature in the last few years, to advocate innovative managerial practices. The resurgence of this concept that originated from a political context can create problems. The goal of this paper is to expose the main difficulty of translating this concept from the political field to a corporate situation. Indeed, subsidiarity gives its inherent power back to the lower echelons of a political community. But the economic approach of organization theory assumes, (...) mainly by the means of agency theory, a top-down conception of the firm. Thus, it is not the lower echelons which delegates power to the higher echelons. Consequently, the subsidiarity principle seems not to be applicable to a corporate setting, unless we reverse the assumptions of economic approach of organization theory. Then, the principle of subsidiarity could be used as an illusion to con employees into believing they have legitimate power, in order to manipulate their freedom, and domesticate it for managerial ends. (shrink)

Financial relationships between physicians and industry are widespread. Highly publicized financial relationships between physicians and industry raised disturbing questions about the trustworthiness of clinical research, practice guidelines, and clinical care decisions. Recent incidents spurred calls for stricter conflict of interest policies and led to new federal laws and NIH regulations. These stricter policies have evoked praise, concerns, and objections. Because these new federal requirements need to be interpreted and implemented, spirited discussions of conflicts of interest in medicine will continue.

In this paper, we analyze the astronomical tables in al-Zīj al-Muqtabis by Ibn al-Kammād (early twelfth century, Córdoba), based on the Latin and Hebrew versions of the lost Arabic original, each of which is extant in a unique manuscript. We present excerpts of many tables and pay careful attention to their structure and underlying parameters. The main focus, however, is on the impact al-Muqtabis had on the astronomy that developed in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib and, more generally, on (...) the transmission and diffusion of Indian astronomy in the West after the arrival of al-Khwārizmī’s astronomical tables in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in the tenth century. This tradition of Indian origin competed with the Greek tradition represented by al-Battānī’s astronomical tables and was much more alive in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib than previously thought. From Spain, the Indian tradition entered mainstream European astronomy, where we find echoes of it in all versions of the Alfonsine Tables, both in manuscript and in the printed editions (beginning in 1483), as well as in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, published in 1543. (shrink)

Although Hobbes talks about the laws of nature as prescribing the virtues, it is easier to think of them as proscribing the vices. The nine vices that are proscribed by the laws of nature are injustice, ingratitude, greed or inhumanity, vindictiveness , cruelty, incivility or contumely, pride, arrogance, and unfairness . The corresponding virtues that are prescribed by the laws of nature are justice, gratitude, humanity or complaisance, mercy, , civility, humility, , modesty, and equity. The difficulty of coming up (...) with names for some of the virtues, and even for some of the vices, shows that they are not all among the most common moral virtues and vices. Nonetheless, as described by Hobbes, they are genuine moral virtues and vices, traits of character such that all impartial rational persons would favor everyone having the virtues and no one having the vices. All of these virtues are such that they benefit everyone impartially by promoting peace, and are not primarily of benefit to the person having them. This is what makes them moral virtues and distinguishes them from the personal virtues of courage, prudence, and temperance. The laws of nature are the dictates "of right reason, conversant about those things which are either to be done or omitted for the constant preservation of life and members, as much as in us lies." But the law of nature "dictating peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes;" is also the moral law because "in the means to peace, [it] commands also good manners, or the practice of virtue; and therefore it is called moral." Hobbes correctly sees both that peace benefits all persons impartially and that impartiality is essential to morality. His account of the moral virtues correctly makes them traits of character that would be favored by all impartial persons. His argument for the rationality of these moral virtues is that one's self-interest, which for Hobbes is primarily one's long-term preservation, is enhanced by having these virtues. There is no incompatibility between morality and self-interest as long as what is in one's own self-interest is equally in the interest of everyone else. Hobbes sees this point quite clearly and it is at the heart of his justification of the moral virtues. (shrink)

Initial demarcations i This study is an exercise in political philosophy. Though no concise, comprehensive definition of political philosophy is readily ...

Which traveler, passing through the rural communities of Asia, has not been intrigued by the existence, on the periphery of the village, of shrines, piles of stones, trees, or caverns ornamented with offerings which, at certain key moments during the year, become the focal points of an intense religious activity? These sites are in fact consecrated to chthonian forces that, next to the ancestors, occupy a high rank in the relationship that the peasants of Asia or other regions around the (...) world establish with the divine. To be sure, the earth gods and the ancestors do not put themselves at the top of the pantheon that each society neatly builds for itself; but they nevertheless dominate the immediate sphere of individuals and social groups. They are at the center of their most routine cultic activities, and they are bestowed with a crucial role in the perpetuation of the groups with which they are identified and whose unity they symbolize. (shrink)

This paper reports the social and medical characteristics of women resident in Aberdeen city who were sterilized in 195162 and 197152 women were offered sterilization, the majority being lower social class mothers with five or more children who were sterilized concurrently with abortion; the small number of upper social class women had one or two children and were sterilized for medical or obstetric reasons. By 196172, women themselves requested sterilization, the two–three child family was the norm, the proportion of upper (...) social class women continued to increase, and interval sterilization was gaining ground. (shrink)

In this article, I would like to show that, concerning this era of ubiquitous technology and its teleologics, the stakes concern the constitution of a new milieu of psychic and collective individuation, which is at least as radically new as the writing of language was in its time; second, I attempt to show that what is at stake relates to the way technology changes the télos, that is, the rule of ends which shape the social organization of collective desire as (...) a system of care and remedies; and, third, I argue that this era requires a new libidinal economy, if we admit that there can be no télos without desire. I will argue that new ubiquitous digital networks operating as new technical associated milieus have fundamental effects for symbolic and psychical associated milieus, and thus for new ways of being. (shrink)