This study is based on the self-reporting by circus artists’ concerning their injuries. We refer to the theoretical framework of emersiology and argue that circus artists may be able to soothe their distress and pain by learning through their body. We will draw further on the comparison between our therapeutic approach and the techniques of self-care introduced by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality.

v. 1. Vedic religion, philosophic schools, from Vedism to Hinduism.

I wish to correlate Bernard Lonergan’s functional specialty Communications with Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of novelistic discourse with the goal of teasing out how the Bakhtinian notion of discourse furthers on-going reflection on inculturation. Theology as a highly differentiated and specialized reflection on religion bears fruit in the final stage (Communications) of theological reflection. This fruit – inculturation – can be explained using different constructs. This paper privileges the Bakhtinian construct in that it addresses “the life and behavior of discourse (...) in a contradictory and multi-languaged world” in ways that Lonergan’s differentiated and specialized reflection on theology accounts for multiplicity of cultural traditions in an ever-changing world church. (shrink)

The theme of “presence” holds an ambivalent place in Gerald O'Collins’ Christology. On the one hand the theme is O'Collins’ “most creative contribution to contemporary Christology” and on the other hand the notion itself is a difficult and stubborn concept that can be best understood in an evolutionary way. This deeper analysis of “presence,” which is not offered by O'Collins, occupies a center stage in Bernard Lonergan's Christology. This essay mediates O'Collins’ account of “presence” with Lonergan's evolutionary understanding of (...) the term—a scientific theological account Lonergan worked out in dialogue with phenomenology and the sciences. The paper argues that such a mediation is necessitated by the fact that the meaning of “presence” is key to understanding the Chalcedonian definition of the union of the two natures of Christ, an important Christian dogmatic teaching that both O'Collins and Lonergan consider sacrosanct, and that a clarification of this meaning advances not only Christian understanding of Christ's presence in history, but also Christ's presence in non-Christian religions. (shrink)

This article revisits ideas of Charles Peirce, who wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, and Bernard Lonergan, who wrote at the turn of the twentieth, with the purpose of connecting important dots in their thinking. The goal of this comparison is to show how the two ground metaphysics in the practices of the sciences and common sense. The article argues that the metaphysical framework the two scholars developed in opposition to nominalism can be used to overcome the (...) reductionism that hinders modern efforts to think metaphysically as well to as promote fruitful dialogue between theology and philosophy. (shrink)

With a new foreword by Jonathan Lear 'Remarkably lively and enjoyable…It is a very rich book, containing excellent descriptions of a variety of moral theories, and innumerable and often witty observations on topics encountered on the way.' -_ Times Literary Supplement_ Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Drawing on (...) the ideas of the Greek philosophers, Williams reorients ethics away from a preoccupation with universal moral theories towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. This edition also includes a commentary on the text by A.W.Moore. At the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was hailed by the Times as 'the outstanding moral philosopher of his age.' He taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley and Oxford and is the author of many influential books, including _Morality; Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry_ and _Truth and Truthfulness_. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the (...) ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for (...) his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)

Descartes has often been called the 'father of modern philosophy'. His attempts to find foundations for knowledge, and to reconcile the existence of the soul with the emerging science of his time, are among the most influential and widely studied in the history of philosophy. This is a classic and challenging introduction to Descartes by one of the most distinguished modern philosophers. Bernard Williams not only analyzes Descartes' project of founding knowledge on certainty, but uncovers the philosophical motives for (...) his search. With acute insight, he demonstrates how Descartes' _Meditations _are not merely a description but the very enactment of philosophical thought and discovery. Williams covers all of the key areas of Descartes' thought, including God, the will, the possibility of knowledge, and the mind and its place in nature. He also makes profound contributions to the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and philosophy generally. With a new foreword by John Cottingham. (shrink)

Provides a critical and analytical history of ancient Greek theories on the nature of pleasure, and of its value and rolein human lfie, from the ealriest times down to the period of Epicurus and the early Stoics.

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the (...) ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenological properties of a perceptual experience supervene on its intentional properties. The paper presents a counter-example to this claim, one that concerns visual grouping phenomenology. I argue that this example is superior to superficially similar examples involving grouping phenomenology offered by Peacocke (Sense and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press), because the standard intentionalist responses to Peacocke’s examples cannot be extended to mine. If Intentionalism fails, it is impossible to reduce the phenomenology of an experience (...) to its content. (shrink)

his book develops an account of legal reasoning based on underlying narrative patterns, and compares other such approaches in legal philosophy, psychology and history. Download full ToC and Preface from http://www.legaltheory.demon.co.uk/books_lfnc.html.

A computable structure $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {x}$-computably categorical for some Turing degree $\mathbf {x}$ if for every computable structure $\mathcal {B}\cong\mathcal {A}$ there is an isomorphism $f:\mathcal {B}\to\mathcal {A}$ with $f\leq_{T}\mathbf {x}$. A degree $\mathbf {x}$ is a degree of categoricity if there is a computable structure $\mathcal {A}$ such that $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {x}$-computably categorical, and for all $\mathbf {y}$, if $\mathcal {A}$ is $\mathbf {y}$-computably categorical, then $\mathbf {x}\leq_{T}\mathbf {y}$. We construct a $\Sigma^{0}_{2}$ set whose degree (...) is not a degree of categoricity. We also demonstrate a large class of degrees that are not degrees of categoricity by showing that every degree of a set which is 2-generic relative to some perfect tree is not a degree of categoricity. Finally, we prove that every noncomputable hyperimmune-free degree is not a degree of categoricity. (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.

Abstract The idea of a purely civic nationalism has attracted Western scholars, most of whom rightly disdain the myths that sustain ethnonationalist theories of political community. Civic nationalism is particularly attractive to many Americans, whose peculiar national heritage encourages the delusion that their mutual association is based solely on consciously chosen principles. But this idea misrepresents political reality as surely as the ethnonationalist myths it is designed to combat. And propagating a new political myth is an especially inappropriate way of (...) defending the legacy of Enlightenment liberalism from the dangers posed by the growth of nationalist political passions. (shrink)

According to orthodox views of philosophical methodology, when philosophers appeal to intuitions, they treat them as evidence for their contents. Call this “descriptive evidentialism.” Descriptive evidentialism is assumed both by those who defend the epistemic status of intuitions and by those, including many experimental philosophers, who criticize it. This article shows, however, that the idea that philosophers treat intuitions as evidence struggles to account for the way philosophers treat intuitions in a variety of philosophical contexts. In particular, it cannot account (...) for philosophers' treatment of a priori intuitions, for nonpropositional uses of intuition, and for philosophers' failure to use intuition to exclude the counterintuitive. The article concludes that alternatives to descriptive evidentialism (some of which are sketched) must be developed, and that much of the recent debate between traditionalists and skeptics from, for example, experimental philosophy is probably based on a false presupposition. (shrink)

No understanding of morality has more zealous or influential defenders among academic philosophers than Kant’s. Yet as Michael Rosen demonstrates in The Shadow of God, there is a sense in which Kant’s critics take his conception of freedom more seriously nowadays than his defenders. As a result, contemporary versions of “Kantian ethics” often end up challenging what Rosen calls “the ethics of Kant,” not just the claims of rival moral theories. Rosen supports this surprising conclusion with some powerful arguments, showing (...) that we cannot make sense of Kantian moral philosophy or its extraordinary impact on modern philosophy while detaching it from Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom. But Rosen overstates the continuity between Kant and the Idealist philosophers that he inspired. Thinkers like Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel took Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom far more seriously than defenders of Kantian ethics do today. But precisely because they did so, they felt compelled to address a whole new set of problems, which could be solved only by radically transforming the conception of freedom that they received from Kant. (shrink)

The cybernetic definition of a living individual proposed previously (Korzeniewski, 2001) is very abstract and therefore describes the essence of life in a very formal and general way. In the present article this definition is reformulated in order to determine clearly the relation between life in general and a living individual in particular, and it is further explained and defended. Next, the cybernetic definition of a living individual is confronted with the real world. It is demonstrated that numerous restrictions imposed (...) on the cybernetic definition of life by physical reality imply a number of particular properties of life that characterize present life on Earth, namely: (1) a living individual must be a dissipative structure (and therefore a low-entropy thermodynamic system out of the state of equilibrium); (2) spontaneously-originated life must be based on organic compounds; (3) evolutionarily stable self-dependent, free-living individuals must have some minimal level of complexity of structure and function; (4) a living individual must have a record of identity separated from an executive machinery; (5) the identity of living individuals must mutate and may evolve; (6) living individuals may collect and accumulate information in subsequent generations over very long periods of time; (7) the degree of complexity of a living individual reflects the degree of complexity of its environment (ecological niche) and (8) living individuals are capable of supple adaptation to varying environmental conditions. Thus, the cybernetic definition of a living individual, when confronted with the real physical world, generates most of the general properties of the present life on Earth. (shrink)

Writing in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the moral philosopher Bernard Williams considers the opposing claims of Rawlsian liberalism, with its emphasis on pluralism and procedural fairness, and communitarianism, which instead promotes more or less culturally homogeneous societies formed around shared values. Williams shares the communitarians’ critique of Rawls’s theory as excessively abstract, questioning whether a rational commitment to pluralism as the most just social arrangement can serve as a sufficiently binding social force. (...) He simultaneously resists, however, the conservative tendencies of the communitarians, particularly their dismissal of ethically motivated social critique. Grounded in the late philosophy of Wittgenstein, communitarians reject foundationalism, the notion that beliefs can be philosophically justified, instead regarding ideologically driven social arrangements as the result of inherently particular historical and environmental conditions. This perspective precludes rational reevaluation of a society’s status quo; if a society’s adoption of values does not depend on philosophically grounded principles, neither can those values be altered through a process of collective moral reasoning. For Williams, however, because pluralism is a condition of modern life with which even culturally homogenous communities must contend, members of modern societies are aware of alternatives to their own social model, leaving a space for self-critical reassessment. Finally, Williams suggests that the desire of cultural minorities for separate states in the post-Soviet geopolitical landscape underscores the limits of both pluralism and communitarianism, limits that all of us will need to grapple with as we confront the immediate social and political realities of modernity. (shrink)

This book reviews the classical schools of jurisprudence with particular reference to their linguistic presuppositions, and summarises an alternative account based on Paris school semiotics. Detailed ToC available from linked web page. NOT available from Amazon.

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the arguments of my book, The Longing for Total Revolution, in response to the thoughtful analyses collected in this symposium. It restates the book’s main genealogical and critical arguments about the philosophical sources of uniquely modern forms of social discontent, while distinguishing those arguments from recent attempts to uncover the deeper, theological sources of discontent. It focuses, in particular, on the role played in modern social discontent by the group of thinkers I describe as the “Kantian (...) left”: a long line of social critics who sought to “realize” Kant’s understanding of human autonomy in society, thereby gaining what Marx called “control and conscious mastery” over our social world, not just over our wills. (shrink)

The main idea -- The functioning of a neuron -- Brain structure and function -- The general structure of the neural network -- Instincts, emotions, free will -- The nature of mental objects -- The rise and essence of (self-)consciousness -- Artificial intelligence -- Cognitive limitations of man.

Williamson (2000) [Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press] argues that attempts to substitute narrow mental states or narrow/environmental composites for broad and factive mental states will result in poorer explanations of behavior. I resist Williamson.

I do not propose to attempt in this article to make any exact or exhaustive definition of religion, but rather to call attention to one of its outstanding psychological characteristics. At the outset, then, I take it for granted that religion is primarily a feeling experience. We make use of the term ‘religion,’ it is true, for many things in addition to immediate feeling experiences, and it is inevitable that we should do so. But it will be well to bear (...) in mind that when we describe Buddhism or Christianity as ‘a religion’ we are using the term in a secondary fashion. A man may accept the tenets, and to some extent practise the commandments, of a religion in this sense without being religious. (shrink)

O pensamento político-constitucional do Marquês de Caravelas -- Extratos de discursos parlamentares do Marquês de Caravelas.

This article attempts to present an X-ray of reactionary populism in power by describing how several ideological elements of Brazilian and international political culture that have gathered by the far rightwing movement led by Jair Bolsonaro. The authors hark back to the politological debate on right-wing populism and conclude with an analysis of bolsonarismo as “lulismo in reverse” [às avessas].

The transparency argument concludes that we're directly aware of external properties and not directly aware of the properties of experience. Focusing on the presentation used by Michael Tye (2002) I contend that the argument requires experience to have content that it cannot plausibly have. I attribute the failure to a faulty account of the transparency phenomenon and conclude by suggesting an alternative understanding that is independently plausible, is not an error-theory and yet renders the transparency of experience compatible with mental-paint (...) style views. (shrink)

The Prague Philosopher Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) has long been admired for his groundbreaking work in mathematics: his rigorous proofs of fundamental theorems in analysis, his construction of a continuous, nowhere-differentiable function, his investigations of the infinite, and his anticipations of Cantor's set theory. He made equally outstanding contributions in philosophy, most notably in logic and methodology. One of the greatest mathematician-philosophers since Leibniz, Bolzano is now widely recognised as a major figure of nineteenth-century philosophy. Praised by Husserl as “one (...) of the greatest logicians of all times,” he has also been recognised by Michael Dummett as one of the first modern analytic philosophers and by Alberto Coffa as the founder of the “semantic tradition.” This volume contains English translations of the essay “On the Mathematical Method,” a concise introduction to Bolzano’s logic and philosophy of mathematics, as well as substantial selections from his correspondence with Franz Exner, Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague in the 1830s and 40s. It will be of interest to students of Austrian philosophy, the development of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, and the history and philosophy of logic and mathematics. (shrink)

This paper uses E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End to help articulate what I describe as a moral pluralist approach to moral conflict. Moral pluralism, I argue here, represents a way of responding to the moral conflicts we encounter in our lives, rather than the mere acknowledgment of their inevitability, as suggested by value pluralists like Isaiah Berlin. The tragic view of moral conflict epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone and endorsed by most theories of value pluralism, tells us that we must (...) choose between moral commitments and reconcile ourselves to the moral regrets that inevitably follow from moral choice. The moral pluralist view, in contrast, suggests that we should seek means, however imperfect, of satisfying conflicting moral commitments and minimizing causes for moral regret. That view, I argue, drives the words and actions of Forster’s heroine in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel. Confronted with a battle between a willful patriarch and a self-righteous sister, a conflict that maps neatly onto the central conflict in Sophocles’ tragedy, Margaret refuses to take sides without refusing to make moral choices. And in doing so, she comes to exemplify an unexpected kind of moral heroism. (shrink)

The paper argues that in our usage of moral language we relate three concepts: guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This assumes that we can distinguish between external actions and internal executions, because guilt as well as forgiveness and reconciliation are realities that first affect our inner humanity. When a relationship has been damaged by culpable actions (sometimes even by both sides), forgiveness is the precondition of reconciliation. As long as people accuse each other, there can be no talk of true reconciliation. (...) Although these are attitudes, that is, inner engagements, reconciliation also becomes outwardly recognizable as peace. However, these relationships can only be explained well in the connections of individual persons to each other. When political communities confront each other, our moral sense becomes fuzzy, because it is not so easy to say how such collectives (e.g., peoples) are to be determined in their inside and outside. Who can and may forgive, if other persons have become victims of culpable actions, but cannot forgive themselves? Here, then, the difficulty of individuality and collectivity is added. The essay pleads for maintaining the conceptual conjunction between individual and collective forgiveness. However, this should not be done at the price of a complete socio-ontological dissolution of collectives. Therefore, one must also be cautious about rash universalistic appropriation of the Other or the other group, because this is usually accompanied by a failure to recognize and endure the selfhood of the Other. Before it comes to a “false” reconciliation in this way, it is better to at least recognize each other – also in diversity. This should also be reflected in the rules of conflict, which must above all be oriented toward ensuring that conflicts are not carried out in such a way that the manner in which the conflict is carried out makes reconciliation impossible. But in both collective and individual reconciliation, the person does not have the outcome of the process entirely in his or her own hands. Reconciliation is not a technique, but a relational event that is carried out in an “open space.”. (shrink)

We define the bounded jump of $A$ by $A^{b}=\{x\in \omega \mid \exists i\leq x[\varphi_{i}\downarrow \wedge\Phi_{x}^{A\upharpoonright \!\!\!\upharpoonright \varphi_{i}}\downarrow ]\}$ and let $A^{nb}$ denote the $n$th bounded jump. We demonstrate several properties of the bounded jump, including the fact that it is strictly increasing and order-preserving on the bounded Turing degrees. We show that the bounded jump is related to the Ershov hierarchy. Indeed, for $n\geq2$ we have $X\leq_{bT}\emptyset ^{nb}\iff X$ is $\omega^{n}$-c.e. $\iff X\leq_{1}\emptyset ^{nb}$, extending the classical result that $X\leq_{bT}\emptyset '\iff (...) X$ is $\omega$-c.e. Finally, we prove that the analogue of Shoenfield inversion holds for the bounded jump on the bounded Turing degrees. That is, for every $X$ such that $\emptyset ^{b}\leq_{bT}X\leq_{bT}\emptyset ^{2b}$, there is a $Y\leq_{bT}\emptyset ^{b}$ such that $Y^{b}\equiv_{bT}X$. (shrink)

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (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)

ABSTRACT A factor that may account for the largely unanticipated victory of Brexit in 2016 is the difference in engagement, mobilization, and, ultimately, turnout between those for whom the question of Brexit was a valence issue and those for whom it was a positional issue. The declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may help to explain the newly resurgent populism (...) characteristic of Western liberal democracies. (shrink)