The introduction of self-driving vehicles gives rise to a large number of ethical issues that go beyond the common, extremely narrow, focus on improbable dilemma-like scenarios. This article provides a broad overview of realistic ethical issues related to self-driving vehicles. Some of the major topics covered are as follows: Strong opinions for and against driverless cars may give rise to severe social and political conflicts. A low tolerance for accidents caused by driverless vehicles may delay the introduction of driverless systems (...) that would substantially reduce the risks. Trade-offs will arise between safety and other requirement on the road traffic system. Over-reliance on the swift collision-avoiding reactions of self-driving vehicles can induce people to take dangerous actions, such as stepping out in front of a car, relying on its fast braking. Children travelling alone can violate safety instructions such as the use of seatbelts. Digital information about routes and destinations can be used to convey commercial and political messages to car users. If fast passage can be bought, then socio-economic segregation of road traffic may result. Terrorists and other criminals can hack into a vehicle and make it crash. They can also use self-driving vehicles for instance to carry bombs to their designed places of detonation or to wreak havoc on a country’s road system. (shrink)

Street vendors are prominent on public streets and in traditional markets in most developing countries. They raise significant problems for public authorities, residents, pedestrians, and formal retailers. Their informal business is problematic, leading to conflicts and sometimes violence. Moreover, unlicensed street vendors employ children and women and are accused of counterfeiting and drug trading. However, they participate in reducing poverty and unemployment. The current data article aims to formulate a public perception on the problematic issue of street vending pervasiveness by (...) describing a survey dataset on street vending and its main driving factors. Street vending has traditionally be examined by linking it with one or more determinants; thus, the dataset covers poverty, lack of education, immigration, unemployment, urban culture, low-income consumption, resistance, and lack of microfinance as latent constructs. Five measurable variables are introduced that reflect each construct. All variables are measured via seven-point Likert scales. Using a Google Form, 425 responses were collected that reflect the attitudes of the general public in Baghdad, Iraq. This dataset is useful for research on socio-economic problems; more specifically, it introduces reliable measurement models for street vending and the eight factors driving it. (shrink)

Human performance in natural environments is deeply impressive, and still much beyond current AI. Experimental techniques, such as eye tracking, may be useful to understand the cognitive basis of this performance, and “the human advantage.” Driving is domain where these techniques may deployed, in tasks ranging from rigorously controlled laboratory settings through high-fidelity simulations to naturalistic experiments in the wild. This research has revealed robust patterns that can be reliably identified and replicated in the field and reproduced in the lab. (...) The purpose of this review is to cover the basics of what is known about these gaze behaviors, and some of their implications for understanding visually guided steering. The phenomena reviewed will be of interest to those working on any domain where visual guidance and control with similar task demands is involved. The paper is intended to be accessible to the non-specialist, without oversimplifying the complexity of real-world visual behavior. The literature reviewed will provide an information base useful for researchers working on oculomotor behaviors and physiology in the lab who wish to extend their research into more naturalistic locomotor tasks, or researchers in more applied fields who wish to bring aspects of the real-world ecology under experimental scrutiny. Part of a Research Topic on Gaze Strategies in Closed Self-paced tasks, this aspect of the driving task is discussed. It is in particular emphasized why it is important to carefully separate the visual strategies driving from visual behaviors relevant to other forms of driver behavior. There is always a balance to strike between ecological complexity and experimental control. One way to reconcile these demands is to look for natural, real-world tasks and behavior that are rich enough to be interesting yet sufficiently constrained and well-understood to be replicated in simulators and the lab. This ecological approach to driving as a model behavior and the way the connection between “lab” and “real world” can be spanned in this research is of interest to anyone keen to develop more ecologically representative designs for studying human gaze behavior. (shrink)

This paper questions the taken-for-granted moral portrayal depicted in the extant literature and popular media of the devoted social entrepreneurial hero with a priori good ethical and moral credentials. We confront this somewhat ‘idealistic’ and biased portrayal with insights from unique large-scale data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2009 survey on social entrepreneurship covering Belgium and The Netherlands. Binary and multinomial logistic regressions indicate that the intention and dominance of perceived social value creation over economic value creation is indeed what (...) makes social entrepreneurs unique. In contrast to the extant literature, however, our empirical investigation points at a reluctant attitude of social entrepreneurs toward entrepreneurship in terms of confidence in their skills to start and manage a business, their perception of entrepreneurship as a desirable career choice and their involvement in their activities. While the extant literature points at a strong entrepreneurial orientation as a source of ethical issues, the main contribution of this study lies in the reverse observation: ethical issues are also likely to emanate from a frail entrepreneurial profile. We formulate empirically grounded propositions that may serve as a basis for theory-building and testing purposes. (shrink)

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, many states in the United States issued stay-at-home orders that prohibited people from leaving their homes except to access essential services. Upon reopening, a number of those states passed mask mandates requiring people to wear face coverings while in public, but as I write this, in October of 2020, there remain a substantial number of states that have not outlawed what I'll call ‘mask-less shopping’. This is a mistake. After describing the standard, public health (...) argument for outlawing mask-less shopping and explaining why it fails, I give a better argument for outlawing mask-less shopping that depends on the claim that mask-less shopping is analogous to drunk driving. It follows that every state should outlaw it. (shrink)

Chris Stewart’s account of his experiences after purchasing a farm in Andalusia, in an isolated farmhouse in the mountains adjacent to Granada, are far from the traditionally bucolic depictions of a pastoral landscape, in which the drawbacks of agricultural life become unquestionably compensated by the bliss of life in nature. Even though, as the title indicates, he seems to be a born romantic and optimist, undefeated by the inconveniences of a life without the everyday commodities of a First-World country in (...) the twenty-first century, his memoir narrative is soon balanced by his own testimony, which provides a realistic counterbalance to Stewart’s initial idealistic portrayal of life in rustic Alpujarras. Nonetheless, as this article intends to demonstrate, it is precisely this necessary demystification of the rural setting prevailing in certain areas in Andalusia that becomes crucial for the establishment of an essential complicity with the audience, thereby trained to appreciate—and even become enthralled by—the reality of the rural surroundings which the contemporary reader can no longer envision as merely a place of “vales and hills” softly covered by “a host of golden daffodils”. El relato que lleva a cabo Chris Stewart acerca de sus experiencias tras adquirir una finca en Andalucía, en un lugar apartado de la sierra lindante con Granada, se aleja de las descripciones bucólicas de paisajes pastorales en los que las desventajas de la vida agrícola quedaban incuestionablemente compensadas por el gozo de la vida en mitad de la naturaleza. Incluso pese a que, tal y como el título de su novela indica, Chris Stewart parece ser un romántico y un optimista de nacimiento, que no se deja vencer por los inconvenientes de una vida sin las comodidades cotidianas de un país del primer mundo en el siglo xxi, su memoria-narrativa se ve inmediatamente equilibrada por su propio testimonio, que proporciona un contrapunto realista al idealizado retrato inicial de la vida en las rústicas Alpujarras. No obstante, como el presente artículo pretende demostrar, es precisamente esta necesaria desmitificación del entorno rural de ciertas zonas de Andalucía lo que resulta crucial para poder establecer una esencial complicidad con el lector, que llega, de este modo, a valorar, e incluso, a sentirse fascinado, por la realidad del contexto agrario, el cual deja ya de percibir meramente como un lugar de «valles y colinas» delicadamente cubierto por «una cohorte de dorados narcisos». (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy: 1637–1739J. A. CoverKenneth Clatterbaugh. The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy: 1637–1739. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xi + 239. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $21.00.Over the scholastics and earliest moderns, Hume had an advantage of hindsight in declaring that "There is no question, which on account of its importance, as well as difficulty, has caus'd more disputes both among ancients and modern (...) philosophers, than this concerning the efficacy of causes, or that quality which made them be followed by their effects" (Treatise I.iii.14). Between the scholastics and Hume fell (i) Descartes, (ii) classical mechanists such as Hobbes and Gassendi, (iii) the Cartesians Le Grand and Malebranche, (iv) the explanatory rationalists Spinoza and Leibniz, (v) later experimental mechanists such as Boyle, Rohault and Newton, and (vi) the so-called empiricists Locke and Berkeley. This book presents an accessible and admirably broad overview of the modern debate about causation, without sacrificing serious attention to textual details. With two chapters on (i) and one apiece on (ii) - (vi), Clatterbaugh earns for himself and his reader a helpfully synoptic picture of philosophical shifts in the causation debate in the hundred years separating Descartes' Discourse and Hume's Treatise. By the end of the (modern) day, (1) the four-fold causes of Aristotelian-Scholasticism have given way to efficient causation alone; (2) no pre-existing forms in efficient causes are to be found, nor indeed any substantial active powers whatever; (3) there is no deep sense in which causes communicate reality to effects; (4) necessary connection has gone by the board; (5) divine causation has no place in a natural philosophy of causation. No surprises there, but Clatterbaugh's effort reminds us afresh of the varied and torturous routes to such shifts, helping advanced students better (or newly) appreciate them in the comfortable space of 200 pages.Of those pages, a third are devoted to Descartes and the Cartesians. That's not inappropriate, given the importance and difficulty of Descartes's response to Aristotelian-Scholastic accounts of causation, and its influence on occasionalist sentiments on the Continent. The tenor and value of this book may be illustrated by reflecting on the first of these—a rich and frustrating business, both in Descartes's texts and in Clatterbaugh's book. Suppose we grant Descartes the back of his hand to substantial forms and active formal causes as at best "unexplanatory" (counseling Regius): his "at-least-as-much-reality-in-the-cause-as-in-the-effect" principle might be treated as the basis of "an alternative" metaphysical account of causation (19-32). Well, it might be so-treated: but three versions of the principle later, the reader will be excused for judging it little more than a necessary condition for some event-pair x,y counting as a cause-effect pair. If the scholastic appeal to active forms is unexplanatory, then Descartes's [End Page 600] principle—which isn't Descartes's principle at all but a scholastic commonplace—can scarcely fill the explanatory gap. Glossed as a predictable consequence of some strong form of influxus physicus, it is embarrassed by Foucher's objection (that mind bears no likeness to body) and by the weight of texts urging that accidents are individual to their bearers. Having offered us no deep metaphysical story about what in the world answers to 'vis,' Descartes is at best a bungling "interactionist" (here appropriating Clatterbaugh's word for someone whose apparent talk of secondary causes we are asked to respect as expressing a strict and considered philosophical commitment). One can only side with Voetius in reckoning Descartes's replacement of forms by purely quantitative, mechanical principles of motion as expressing a mere "disposition of the movable to move... not an activity of an efficient cause, but merely a necessary condition and a causa sine qua non" (my emphasis: Selectarum Disputationum I [1648-59], 873). Descartes has no deep theory about the nature of causation.Is that too harsh? Had this book a different target, one could fairly complain that the author too infrequently steps away from the texts and commentators to offer and defend a... (shrink)

This book offers a sustained re-evaluation of the most central and perplexing themes of Leibniz's metaphysics. In contrast to traditional assessments that view the metaphysics in terms of its place among post-Cartesian theories of the world, Jan Cover and John O'Leary-Hawthorne examine the question of how the scholastic themes which were Leibniz's inheritance figure - and are refigured - in his mature account of substance and individuation. From this emerges a fresh and sometimes surprising assessment of Leibniz's views on (...) modality, the Identity of Indiscernibles, form as an internal law, and the complete-concept doctrine. As a rigorous philosophical treatment of a still-influential mediary between scholastic and modern metaphysics, their study will be of interest to historians of philosophy and contemporary metaphysicians alike. (shrink)

“Spinoza's Extended Substance: Cartesian and Leibnizian Reflections” This essay examines Woolhouse's interpretation of Spinoza's extended substance. According to that interpretation, the extended substance is a quasi‐Platonic form, and Spinoza's substance is not actually extended. This essay argues that the burden of defending such an interpretation is very great indeed, and requires that we read Spinoza's understanding of Descartes and Leibniz's understanding of Spinoza in unusual and awkward ways.

Temporal analyses of causal directionality fail if causes needn't precede their effects. Certain well-known difficulties with alternative (non-temporal) analyses have, in recent accounts, been avoided by attending more carefully to the formal features of relations typically figuring in philosophical discussions of causation. I discuss here a representative of such accounts, offered by David Sanford, according to which a correct analysis of causal priority must issue from viewing the condition relation as nonsymmetrical. The theory is shown first to be an implicitly (...) counterfactual treatment at its base: this provides for an explicit reformulation of several key notions in the theory. An argument is then presented, independent of these modal considerations, for the conclusion that causal priority is possible only given certain implausible assumptions about the asymmetric character of causal laws which, I claim, are not met. The best objection to this argument is shown to fail on several counts, partly in light of the counterfactual results offered earlier. It is concluded that, if laws are symmetric, analyses of the sort discussed must look elsewhere for the source of causal priority; but if laws are not symmetric, resting causal priority so heavily on nomological asymmetry is no analysis at all. (shrink)

Many areas of genetic research, genetic forensics and genetic essentialism are treated in public sphere debate as suspicious and problematic or are subject to waves of moral panic. In cultural theory, likewise, strong critiques of the genetic essentialism emerge as part of a broader critical assessment of the discourses of the biological sciences and the assertion of a connection between genes and human behavior. However, the scientific and popular claim to the existence of a “gay gene” is not treated in (...) the same way, and has been widely celebrated both within lesbian/gay culture and more broadly in liberal-humanist speech. This essay suggests that it is not enough to presume that this is a result of the extension of essentialism into new popular understandings of human biology. Rather, this essay examines five reasons which have made the popular acceptance of a “gay gene” tenable: the dominance of “gay personage” arguments, the continued influence of early sexology, the suspicion of psychological and constructionist approaches to lesbian/gay sexualities, the effectiveness of genetic essentialism in“ethnic rights” political approaches and the continued centrality of “fixed subjecthood” in contemporary western culture. (shrink)

Precipitated largely by publication of the Theodicy in 1706, requests for a systematic exposition of Leibniz’s philosophy led to his self-described Éclaircissement sur les monades, begun in the summer of 1714 at the request of Remond. Unlike the treatise on philosophical theology, Leibniz’s Monadology is at once broadly systematic but sketchy and compressed: so it is useful, but then not so useful, as an introduction to his philosophy. Leibniz later decompressed it somewhat by adding references to the Theodicy, where certain (...) issues received fuller treatment. Rescher’s new book goes several steps further, still reckoning Leibniz as his own best commentator: in addition to those passages from the Theodicy, other passages from the Leibniz corpus are brought alongside each section of the Monadology, letting them pretty much speak for themselves about the ideas of that section, with a miminum of added commentary. This is a swell idea, and I think Rescher succeeds in executing it. The result is a useful work for students, who in a single edition get Leibniz’s original effort at carving his system at its joints—the principles of philosophy, he called them—and enough additional text to flesh out a full-bodied picture of his mature philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence by Ezio VailatiJan A. CoverEzio Vailati. Leibniz & Clarke: A Study of Their Correspondence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii + 250. Cloth, $45.00.When Leibniz received the 1710 issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in early 1711, he read John Keill’s public charge that he had stolen the calculus from Newton. Leibniz twice sought amends (...) from the Society in the form of a retraction, in response to which a committee was formed to investigate and issue a report. The resulting Commercium epistolicum, written by the good Isaac Newton himself and condemning Leibniz, was published in early 1713. In Vienna at the time, Leibniz learned of its contents in a June letter from Johann Bernoulli, who complained about this “scarcely civilized way” of holding what was in effect a tribunal from which the chief witness was absent. By year’s end Leibniz had enlisted Wolff to see into print Leibniz’s anonymous statement—overstatement, in fact—of his case, and nine months later Keill replied with an equally overstated rejoinder. Late autumn of 1714 found Leibniz back in Hannover, suffering from gout and the tiresome pressure to advance his work on the history of the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg. If only he felt better and had more free time, he could collect his mathematical papers and set an end to the dispute by writing his own Commercium epistolicum: as it was (Leibniz told Wolff in the spring of 1715), he had no intention of giving Newton’s cronies the luxury of his time.The Leibniz-Clarke exchange began in the shadows of this dispute, contributing to Leibniz’s already established distaste for parts of British philosophy. Already in 1690 he was describing (to Huygens and others) Newton’s gravitational attraction as “inexplicable.” Soon after Leibniz was surprised to discover that Locke had accepted Newtonian attraction in the second edition of the Essay—surprised, at least, until he came to see it as part and parcel of the dangerous idea that God could attach any old property whatever to matter if He chose, including thought. Materialism and frequent miracles [End Page 533] were just around the corner, and from there it was a short distance to the mortality of the soul, and a mean view of God’s power; the decay of natural theology itself could only follow. Leibniz’s misgivings didn’t see the light of day in the early 1700s, when he penned them in the Preface to the Nouveaux Essais; but he went out of his way to work an explicit complaint about Mr. Newton and Mr. Locke into the Théodicée of 1710 (§19 of the Preliminary Discourse). The calculus dispute followed. By the time Leibniz got round to writing Princess Caroline about the dispute in a letter of May 1715, he was insisting that the Newtonians deserved public censure, and that the Britons deserved Leibniz as historiographer of England. For her own part, Caroline now wondered if Samuel Clarke, who had translated Newton’s Opticks into Latin, would in the end be unbiased enough to translate Leibniz’s Théodicée into English. Moreover Caroline doubted that Clarke’s notion of the soul was theologically innocent. Replying in November, Leibniz summarized his view that natural religion was in great decline in England, and the famous exchange began.Despite there being no monograph devoted to it until now, the Correspondence ıs (and was) famous. If a book-length study is overdue, so perhaps are three reminders—that a significant portion of the Correspondence is devoted to issues other than space and time and gravitation, that the depth to which its issues are pursued was compromised by impatience on the side of both parties, and that Clarke’s philosophical views aren’t so well-understood as Leibniz’s own. Nowhere does Vailati set out to make these points explicitly, but they emerge over the course of his book, and together with exegetical soundness are its chief contributions. While this volume makes no historical or philosophical waves, it indirectly (perhaps unwittingly) explains why none are readily forthcoming in a book... (shrink)

Since the appearance of Bertrand Russell’s A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Leibniz’s theory of relations has been a topic of considerable discussion and controversy. Russell himself argued that Leibniz cannot consistently assert both the primary motivation for his denial of relations—that all propositions are of subject-predicate form—and also that relations are to be understood as somehow mental, their foundations being guaranteed by the divine mind. For on the one hand, God must know all relational truths about numbers, (...) aggregates, and relations among monads; but on the other hand, any judgment lacking a subject and predicate will be meaningless. (shrink)

While dominant medico-psychological approaches in suicidology depict suicide as resulting from individual psychic/corporeal pathologies, suicides of minority groups are frequently understood in muc...

Adherents of traditional western Theism have espoused CONJUNCTION: God is essentially perfectly good and God is thankworthy for the good acts he performs. But suppose that (i) God’s essential perfect goodness prevents his good acts from being free, and that (ii) God is not thankworthy for an act that wasn’t freely performed. Together these entail the denial of CONJUNCTION. The most natural strategy for defenders of CONJUNCTION is to deny (i). We develop an argument for (i), and then identify two (...) ways for the defender of CONJUNCTION to respond. Next we turn to a considerably different, rather less obvious route toward defending CONJUNCTION that is compatible with (i)—one which instead denies (ii). Here too we identify two ways for the defender of CONJUNCTION to proceed, yielding a total of four ways for the theist to respond. Because the last of these represents an important and underappreciated alternative for the theist, we devote the second half of the paper to developing and defending it. We argue that divine responsibility is sufficient for divine thankworthiness and consistent with the absence of divine freedom. We do this while insisting on the view that both freedom and responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

Contents Preface General Introduction 1 | Science and Pseudoscience Introduction Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations Thomas S. Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudoscience Paul R. Thagard, Why Astrology Is a Pseudoscience Michael Ruse, Creation-Science Is Not Science Larry Laudan, Commentary: Science at the Bar---Causes for Concern Commentary 2 | Rationality, Objectivity, and Values in Science Introduction Thomas S. Kuhn, The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn, Objectivity, Value Judgment, and (...) Theory Choice Ernan McMullin, Rationality and Paradigm Change in Science Larry Laudan, Kuhn’s Critique of Methodology Helen E. Longino, Values and Objectivity Kathleen Okruhlik, Gender and the Biological Sciences Commentary 3 | The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination Introduction Pierre Duhem, Physical Theory and Experiment W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism Donald Gillies, The Duhem Thesis and the Quine Thesis Larry Laudan, Demystifying Underdetermination *Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, The Duhem Problem Commentary 4 | Induction, Prediction, and Evidence Introduction Peter Lipton, Induction Karl Popper, The Problem of Induction Wesley C. Salmon, Rational Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Criteria of Confirmation and Acceptability Peter Achinstein, Explanation v. Prediction: Which Carries More Weight? *Nelson Goodman, The New Riddle of Induction Commentary 5 | Confirmation and Relevance: Bayesian Approaches Introduction Wesley C. Salmon, Rationality and Objectivity in Science *Deborah G. Mayo, A Critique of Salmon’s Bayesian Way *Alan Chalmers, The Bayesian Approach Paul Horwich, Therapeutic Bayesianism Commentary 6 | Models of Explanation Introduction Rudolf Carnap, The Value of Laws: Explanation and Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Two Basic Types of Scientific Explanation Carl G. Hempel, The Thesis of Structural Identity Carl G. Hempel, Inductive-Statistical Explanation Peter Railton, A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation *Philip Kitcher, Explanatory Unification *James Woodward, The Manipulability Conception of Causal Explanation Commentary 7 | Laws of Nature Introduction A. J. Ayer, What Is a Law of Nature? Fred I. Dretske, Laws of Nature D. H. Mellor, Necessities and Universals in Natural Laws Nancy Cartwright, Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts? Commentary 8 | Intertheoretic Reduction Introduction Ernest Nagel, Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations Paul K. Feyerabend, How to Be a Good Empiricist *Jerry A. Fodor, Special Sciences Philip Kitcher, 1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences Commentary 9 | Empiricism and Scientific Realism Introduction Grover Maxwell, The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities Bas C. van Fraassen, Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism Alan Musgrave, Realism versus Constructive Empiricism Larry Laudan, A Confutation of Convergent Realism *Juha T. Saatsi, On the Pessimistic Induction and Two Fallacies Ian Hacking, Experimentation and Scientific Realism David B. Resnik, Hacking’s Experimental Realism *Martin Carrier, What Is Right with the Miracle Argument Arthur Fine, The Natural Ontological Attitude Alan Musgrave, NOA’s Ark---Fine for Realism Commentary Glossary Bibliography Name Index Subject Index. (shrink)

The revival of Leibniz studies in the past twenty-five years has cast important new light on both the context and content of Leibniz's philosophical thought. Where earlier English-language scholarship understood Leibniz's philosophy as issuing from his preoccupations with logic and language, recent work has recommended an account on which theological, ethical, and metaphysical themes figure centrally in Leibniz's thought throughout his career. The significance of these themes to the development of Leibniz's philosophy is the subject of increasing attention by philosophers (...) and historians. This collection of new essays by a distinguished group of scholars offers an up-to-date overview of the current state of Leibniz research. In focusing on nature and freedom, the volume revisits two key topics in Leibniz's thought, on which he engaged both contemporary and historical arguments. Important contributions to Leibniz scholarship in their own right, these articles collectively provide readers a framework in which to better situate Leibniz's distinctive philosophy of nature and the congenial home for a morally significant freedom that he took it to provide. (shrink)

Purdue University and Syracuse University.

Purdue University and Syracuse University.

This article examines the ways in which contemporary western cultures have attempted to legitimize certain sites of bodily nakedness (such as communal showers, bathing children and other `public' displays) by maintaining a contextual space or frame which attempts to exclude the sexual. Noting the ways in which that legitimacy has broken down in recent decades, the article suggests that the slippage between the sexual and the naked results from both a breakdown in the `heterosexual matrix' as well as a postmodern (...) crisis of `the context'. (shrink)

Unsere Diskussion soil eine Alternative zu der allgemein anerkannten Interpretation der Leibnizschen Auffassung von De-re-Modalitat verteidigen. Insbesondere versuchen wir zu zeigen, dafi Leibniz nicht die Lehre von der Weltgebundenheit der Einzelsubstanzen akzeptierte, obwohl er annahm, dafi die inneren Bestimmungen den Dingen wesentlich zukommen. Wir versuchen weiterhin zu erweisen, dafl Leibniz eine duplikat-theoretische Behandlung des ublichen modalen Diskurses vornahm und dafi dies in keiner Weise seinen Ansichten iiber zwischenweltliche Identitat widerspricht. Im ersten Teil skizzieren wir kurz die allgemein anerkannte Interpretation, wahrend (...) wir im zweiten Teil unsere Alternative dazu verteidigen.Dabei nehmen wir besondere Riicksicht auf Robert C. Sleigh Jr. s Interpretation von Leibnizens Modaltheorie. (shrink)

A partire dal commento ad una sentenza sul problema della discriminazione razziale in una scuola privata, Cover presenta una teoria del pluralismo normativo fondata sulla distinzione fra autorità e significato. A tale dicotomia è dovuta la “proliferazione” dei mondi normativi e delle interpretazioni costituzionali. L’autore descrive i processi di formazione dei significati giuridici – la cosiddetta “giusgenesi” – ed offre una teoria della giurisdizione adatta ad un universo giuridico connotato da un radicale pluralismo. Così facendo, Cover intende mettere (...) in luce il potenziale trasformativo del diritto e in particolare del costituzionalismo. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

In the treatise On the Change of Names (part of his magnum opus, the Allegorical Commentary), Philo of Alexandria brings his figurative exegesis of the Abraham cycle to its fruition. Taking a cue from Platonist interpreters of Homer's Odyssey, Philo reads Moses's story of Abraham as an account of the soul's progress and perfection. Responding to contemporary critics, who mocked Genesis 17 as uninspired, Philo finds instead a hidden philosophical reflection on the ineffability of the transcendent God, the transformation of (...) souls which recognize their mortal nothingness, the possibility of human faith enabled by peerless faithfulness of God, and the fruit of moral perfection: joy divine, prefigured in the birth of Isaac. (shrink)

El objeto de este estudio es analizar un nuevo potencial fragmento de Quaestiones in Exodum en las recientemente descubiertas Homiliae in Psalmos de Orígenes. Para esto, primero sopesaré la evidencia a favor y en contra de una procedencia filónica de latradición citada por Orígenes. A continuación, ofreceré algunas consideraciones léxicas, temáticas y críticas, que sugieren que Orígenes está citando una interpretación filónica de las Quaestiones en lugar de parafrasear el Comentario alegórico.

Precipitated largely by publication of the Theodicy in 1706, requests for a systematic exposition of Leibniz’s philosophy led to his self-described Éclaircissement sur les monades, begun in the summer of 1714 at the request of Remond. Unlike the treatise on philosophical theology, Leibniz’s Monadology is at once broadly systematic but sketchy and compressed: so it is useful, but then not so useful, as an introduction to his philosophy. Leibniz later decompressed it somewhat by adding references to the Theodicy, where certain (...) issues received fuller treatment. Rescher’s new book goes several steps further, still reckoning Leibniz as his own best commentator: in addition to those passages from the Theodicy, other passages from the Leibniz corpus are brought alongside each section of the Monadology, letting them pretty much speak for themselves about the ideas of that section, with a miminum of added commentary. This is a swell idea, and I think Rescher succeeds in executing it. The result is a useful work for students, who in a single edition get Leibniz’s original effort at carving his system at its joints—the principles of philosophy, he called them—and enough additional text to flesh out a full-bodied picture of his mature philosophy. (shrink)

Precipitated largely by publication of the Theodicy in 1706, requests for a systematic exposition of Leibniz’s philosophy led to his self-described Éclaircissement sur les monades, begun in the summer of 1714 at the request of Remond. Unlike the treatise on philosophical theology, Leibniz’s Monadology is at once broadly systematic but sketchy and compressed: so it is useful, but then not so useful, as an introduction to his philosophy. Leibniz later decompressed it somewhat by adding references to the Theodicy, where certain (...) issues received fuller treatment. Rescher’s new book goes several steps further, still reckoning Leibniz as his own best commentator: in addition to those passages from the Theodicy, other passages from the Leibniz corpus are brought alongside each section of the Monadology, letting them pretty much speak for themselves about the ideas of that section, with a miminum of added commentary. This is a swell idea, and I think Rescher succeeds in executing it. The result is a useful work for students, who in a single edition get Leibniz’s original effort at carving his system at its joints—the principles of philosophy, he called them—and enough additional text to flesh out a full-bodied picture of his mature philosophy. (shrink)