Un modèle pour artiste, valide du XIIIe siècle aux XVIe-XVIIe siècle, veut que la mariée, quelle qu’elle soit, soit systématiquement représentée, au banquet du mariage, immobile, yeux baissées, les mains croisées dans son giron, bouche close, alors que tous discutent et consomment autour d’elle. Quelle réalité recouvre ce topos? Chaque image du mariage est une leçon et un avertissement donnés au deuxième sexe.

Les Parisiennes du XIIIe siècle ont mauvaise réputation. Non contentes de mal se tenir à table, elles se gavent et s’enivrent, parlent des vins en professionnelles de l’œnologie, suggérant une longue expérience de beuveries, et, surtout, se passent des hommes pour festoyer. Exclus de la convivialité féminine, ceux-ci se vengent en vers : c’est l’objet d’un poème comique, un fabliau, qui leur promet un sort funeste : le coma éthylique des trois dames de Paris les fait enterrer vives au cimetière (...) des Innocents! Encore une leçon de morale, sous couvert d’en rire, aux femmes qui ne veulent pas se contenir…. (shrink)

Un modèle pour artiste, valide du XIIIe siècle aux XVIe-XVIIe siècle, veut que la mariée, quelle qu’elle soit, soit systématiquement représentée, au banquet du mariage, immobile, yeux baissées, les mains croisées dans son giron, bouche close, alors que tous discutent et consomment autour d’elle. Quelle réalité recouvre ce topos? Chaque image du mariage est une leçon et un avertissement donnés au deuxième sexe.

Un modèle pour artiste, valide du XIIIe siècle aux XVIe-XVIIe siècle, veut que la mariée, quelle qu’elle soit, soit systématiquement représentée, au banquet du mariage, immobile, yeux baissées, les mains croisées dans son giron, bouche close, alors que tous discutent et consomment autour d’elle. Quelle réalité recouvre ce topos? Chaque image du mariage est une leçon et un avertissement donnés au deuxième sexe.

Les Parisiennes du XIIIe siècle ont mauvaise réputation. Non contentes de mal se tenir à table, elles se gavent et s’enivrent, parlent des vins en professionnelles de l’œnologie, suggérant une longue expérience de beuveries, et, surtout, se passent des hommes pour festoyer. Exclus de la convivialité féminine, ceux-ci se vengent en vers : c’est l’objet d’un poème comique, un fabliau, qui leur promet un sort funeste : le coma éthylique des trois dames de Paris les fait enterrer vives au cimetière (...) des Innocents! Encore une leçon de morale, sous couvert d’en rire, aux femmes qui ne veulent pas se contenir…. (shrink)

Les Parisiennes du XIIIe siècle ont mauvaise réputation. Non contentes de mal se tenir à table, elles se gavent et s’enivrent, parlent des vins en professionnelles de l’œnologie, suggérant une longue expérience de beuveries, et, surtout, se passent des hommes pour festoyer. Exclus de la convivialité féminine, ceux-ci se vengent en vers : c’est l’objet d’un poème comique, un fabliau, qui leur promet un sort funeste : le coma éthylique des trois dames de Paris les fait enterrer vives au cimetière (...) des Innocents! Encore une leçon de morale, sous couvert d’en rire, aux femmes qui ne veulent pas se contenir…. (shrink)

L'entrée des enfants médiévaux dans la collection de « La Vie Quotidienne » vaut reconnaissance. Ce petit ouvrage clot la polémique née il y a trente ans, quand Philippe Ariès avait avançé l'idée que la rareté des sources concernant l'enfance médiévale révélait un désintérêt des gens de cette époque pour leurs enfants. L'ouvrage que nous proposent ces deux spécialistes de l'enfance médiévale, Danièle Alexandre-Bidon et Didier Lett, offre une synthèse des connaissance acquises sur les...

Neste artigo procuramos apresentar os elementos que possibilitam a constituição das identidades coletivas a partir de quatro conceitos fundamentais: a demanda, o significante vazio, a identificação e o gozo. Primeiro, revisitamos Freud trazendo a noção de identificação pensada em sua determinação política. Em seguida, buscamos justificar a especificidade da noção lacaniana de significante vazio, repensado por Ernesto Laclau enquanto um conceito político fundamental implicado na constituição e formação das identidades coletivas. Avançamos na lógica do significante e das demandas insatisfeitas que (...) se organizam basilarmente na composição das identidades coletivas a partir de casos específicos e formalizações. Com este trabalho, temos como objetivo contribuir com a reflexão e debate psicanalítico, filosófico e político acerca das identidades políticas, sociais, de gênero, de diversidade sexual, étnicas e culturais em suas mais variadas formas. (shrink)

A Língua Portuguesa surgiu na Península Ibérica e se espalhou pelo mundo por meio do processo de colonização. Após o contato entre o português e as línguas autóctones em Angola iniciou uma nova configuração linguística, com características peculiares ou próprias o que contribuiu para o surgimento da variedade angolana do português. O artigo 19º da Constituição da República de Angola (2010) estabelece a LP como a única língua oficial. A variedade angolana do português distanciou-se do Português Europeu ao longo do (...) tempo, daí que é de suma importância que haja debates que visem caracterizar e descrever esta nova realidade sociolinguística. Este ebook tem como objetivo atiçar debates sobre a variedade angolana do português buscando refletir as peculiaridades da variedade por forma a que se possa caminhar para a normalização e criação de dicionários e gramáticas que possam ser utilizadas no ensino de português em Angola. (shrink)

This multidisciplinary volume explores the relationship between human rights and the subject. Each chapter considers how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the non-human world, drawing on the best work on human rights in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy.

Through his photographic work, Bruno Serralongue carries a certain discomfort in representation through a reappropriation of « information », of the conditions of production and publication of images. This discomfort opens the stage to a displacement that goes against the grain of the logic that structures common sensitivity, thus asserting other forms of relation. Identifying this discomfort, this displacement and this relation leads to re-think the tension between art and politics.

© 2015 Elsevier Inc.Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan pathogen in the phylum Apicomplexa that resides within an intracellular parasitophorous vacuole that is selectively permeable to small molecules through unidentified mechanisms. We have identified GRA17 as a Toxoplasma-secreted protein that localizes to the parasitophorous vacuole membrane and mediates passive transport of small molecules across the PVM. GRA17 is related to the putative Plasmodium translocon protein EXP2 and conserved across PV-residing Apicomplexa. The PVs of GRA17-deficient parasites have aberrant morphology, reduced permeability to (...) small molecules, and structural instability. GRA17-deficient parasites proliferate slowly and are avirulent in mice. These GRA17-deficient phenotypes are rescued by complementation with Plasmodium EXP2. GRA17 functions synergistically with a related protein, GRA23. Exogenous expression of GRA17 or GRA23 alters the membrane conductance properties of Xenopus oocytes in a manner consistent with a large non-selective pore. Thus, GRA17 and GRA23 provide a molecular basis for PVM permeability and nutrient access. (shrink)

The objective of Working Group 4 of the COST Action NET4Age-Friendly is to examine existing policies, advocacy, and funding opportunities and to build up relations with policy makers and funding organisations. Also, to synthesize and improve existing knowledge and models to develop from effective business and evaluation models, as well as to guarantee quality and education, proper dissemination and ensure the future of the Action. The Working Group further aims to enable capacity building to improve interdisciplinary participation, to promote knowledge (...) exchange and to foster a cross-European interdisciplinary research capacity, to improve cooperation and co-creation with cross-sectors stakeholders and to introduce and educate students SHAFE implementation and sustainability. To enable the achievement of the objectives of Working Group 4, the Leader of the Working Group, the Chair and Vice-Chair, in close cooperation with the Science Communication Coordinator, developed a template to map the current state of SHAFE policies, funding opportunities and networking in the COST member countries of the Action. On invitation, the Working Group lead received contributions from 37 countries, in a total of 85 Action members. The contributions provide an overview of the diversity of SHAFE policies and opportunities in Europe and beyond. These were not edited or revised and are a result of the main areas of expertise and knowledge of the contributors; thus, gaps in areas or content are possible and these shall be further explored in the following works and reports of this WG. But this preliminary mapping is of huge importance to proceed with the WG activities. In the following chapters, an introduction on the need of SHAFE policies is presented, followed by a summary of the main approaches to be pursued for the next period of work. The deliverable finishes with the opportunities of capacity building, networking and funding that will be relevant to undertake within the frame of Working Group 4 and the total COST Action. The total of country contributions is presented in the annex of this deliverable. (shrink)

Les paysages méditerranéens? La construction de leur histoire comme l'expérience de leur aventure esthétique sont fécondées par les migrations, les nomadismes, les rencontres et les commerces géographiques (Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée). Dans cette perspective, cet essai rend d'abord compte d'une poétique à l'oeuvre dans l'espace méditerranéen, puis d'une représentation en excès où se manifeste un goût des artistes méditerranéens pour l'art des contraires... Les paysages y apparaîtront, dès lors, comme une plate-forme de rencontres inter-sémiotiques, comme une mer des passages entre (...) les images, les textes et les sons dont l'espace et son expression seraient, ici, les dépositaires, le miroir et l'arborescence. Logique de la mappemonde, note sur l'espace (pourquoi méditerranéen?) est accompagné d'un cahier iconographique de photographies de Florence Chevallier, Bernard Guillot, François Méchain, Corinne Mercadier, Bernard Plossu, ainsi que de photogrammes extraits de films de Jean-Luc Godard et de Jean-Daniel Pollet. (shrink)

Abstract: Alienation and slavery from Precious or what we don't want to see. It is our purpose to establish, in a parallel reading, these two films (highly rewarded), namely The Fence and Precious, that apparently being so different, are an illustration of the reality of life and the modern democratic world: the social uprooting and slavery. If in the movie of Phillip Noyce and Christone Olsen The Fence, is told a story of three young Aboriginal girls who are forcibly taken (...) to be transformed into domestic slaves, in the movie of Lee Daniels Precious, the young woman is already a servant in her own home and seeks the transformation of her life. Uniting these two stories, we find fundamental elements: illiteracy, ill-treatment, the idea of a migration (real or metaphysical), among others, but whose fundamental notion is the journey. If the film The Fence, the fence itself is used to conduct the three young Aboriginal to a real reunion with the family, in Precious, the metaphorical ‘fence’ is the limit of her world. From this interpretation, we will undertake our reflection about what we consider to be the alienation of the modern world and the silence we produce about them. (shrink)

L’article s’emploie à comparer la doctrine de l’Incarnation dans les trois grandes œuvres spéculatives de saint Thomas : Scriptum super Sententiis, Summa contra Gentiles, Summa theologiae. Il examine d’abord le plan suivi dans les trois ouvrages pour traiter ce thème ; puis la façon dont saint Thomas remédie à deux lacunes de la christologie du Lombard (convenances de l’Incarnation, mystères de la vie du Christ) ; ensuite, les deux opinions christologiques du Lombard rejetées par les docteurs parisiens et concernant, l’une, (...) l’âme séparée du corps et, l’autre, la question de savoir si, durant le triduum mortis, le Christ était un homme ; enfin, dix-sept des articuli in quibus. Malgré son caractère pointilliste, cette recherche permet d’explorer les aspects essentiels de la christologie de saint Thomas, de souligner les progrès de sa pensée et aussi de relever quelques positions problématiques de son enseignement. (shrink)

In the years after the first circulation of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo’s Padua anti-Copernican colleague, the staunch Aristotelian philosopher, Cesare Cremonini, published a book on ‘traditional’ cosmology, Disputatio de coelo in tres partes divisa which puzzled the Roman authorities of the Inquisition and the Index much more than any works on celestial novelties and ‘neo-Pythagorean’ astronomy. Cremonini’s disputation on the heavens has the form of an over-intricate comment of Aristotle’s conceptions, in the typi­cally argumentative style of Scholasticism. Nonetheless, it immediately raised (...) the concern of Cardinal Bellarmin, the Pope and other Inquisitors. At a close reading, Cremonini’s interpretation of Aristotle’s cosmos proved radically anti- Christian. It represented a radicalization of Pomponazzian Alexandrism. In fact, Cremonini did not only circulate Aristotelian principles used by Pom­ponazzi to argue for the soul’s mortality. He also wiped away all transcendence from the Aristotelian cosmos. In fact, he marginalized the function of the motive Intelligences by explaining heavenly motions through the action of animal-like inseparable souls although he did not erase nor reduced all Intelligences to only one, in accordance with Alexander. Also, he put at the center of Aristotle’s cosmos the idea of its eternity, a thesis which he explicitly connected with the rejection of the idea of God the Creator. Cremonini assumed that the univer­sal efficiens, that is the efficient cause of all motion and change in the world, is nothing but the first heaven. As a result of this radically naturalist reading of Aristotle, he banned God from the cosmos, reduced Him to the final cause of the world, and deprived Him of any efficiency and will. This essay on less ex­plored sources of Renaissance astronomical debates considers the institutional, cultural and religious setting of Cremonini’s teaching and conceptions. It as­sesses the reasons for his troubles with the religious authorities, and the politi­cal support he was granted by the Serenissima Republic of Venice inspite of the scandalous opinions he circulated as a university professor. My reconstruction of his views is based on the Disputatio de coelo of 1613 and later works, which are directly connected with cosmo-theological polemics with the religious au­thorities: his Apologia dictorum Aristotelis de quinta coeli substantia and the unpublished book De coeli efficientia, two manuscript copies of which are preserved in the libraries of Padua and Venice. (shrink)

Resenha do livro Indivíduo e Comunidade em Spinoza, de Alexandre Matheron.

Tout au long des années trente, un groupe de jeunes intellectuels non conformistes réunis dans le mouvement " Ordre Nouveau " ont lancé dans le débat une pensée radicalement nouvelle en rupture avec les idées dominantes du collectivisme conquérant et du capitalisme traditionnel. Ils avaient nom Denis de Rougemont, Robert Aron, Arnaud Dandieu, Daniel-Rops, Emmanuel Mounier. Alexandre Marc, philosophe jeté hors de sa Russie natale par la victoire des bolcheviques, était leur fédérateur et animateur principal.0De ces idées, il fit (...) une doctrine, le fédéralisme personnaliste, à l'approfondissement et à la diffusion de laquelle il consacra toute sa vie. On pourrait la croire aujourd'hui oubliée. Et pourtant, c'est en elle qu'ont germé des réalisations et des propositions, révolutionnaires en ces temps et très présentes dans les débats actuels : fédéralisme européen, crise de civilisation, allocation universelle, subsidiarité et régionalisme, etc.0Il en est jusqu'à la pensée dialectique du " en même temps ", chère au macronisme, qui apparaît comme une transposition hasardeuse de la dialectique inclusive, théorisée par Alexandre Marc. Sa disparition, voilà vingt ans, appelle une évaluation de cette doctrine et une tentative d'appréciation critique de sa pertinence. Ce livre s'efforce d'illustrer cette ambition au travers des réflexions des auteurs sur certains de ses aspects névralgiques comme le personnalisme, la crise, la dialectique ou l'action politique.0Certains ont été des élèves et des proches collaborateurs d'Alexandre Marc ; d'autres ne l'ont connu qu'au travers de ses écrits ou de ses conférences. Tous se reconnaissent dans le personnalisme, fondement de cette doctrine méconnue et pourtant, étonnamment actuelle. (shrink)

What proper role should considerations of risk, particularly to research subjects, play when it comes to conducting research on human enhancement in the military context? We introduce the currently visible military enhancement techniques (1) and the standard discussion of risk for these (2), in particular what we refer to as the ‘Assumption’, which states that the demands for risk-avoidance are higher for enhancement than for therapy. We challenge the Assumption through the introduction of three categories of enhancements (3): therapeutic, preventive, (...) and pure enhancements. This demands a revision of the Assumption (4), alongside which we propose some further general principles bearing on how to balance risks and benefits in the context of military enhancement research. We identify a particular type of therapeutic enhancements as providing a more responsible path to human trials of the relevant interventions than pure enhancement applications. Finally, we discuss some possible objections to our line of thought (5). While acknowledging their potential insights, we ultimately find them to be unpersuasive, at least provided that our proposal is understood as fully non-coercive towards the candidates for such therapeutic enhancement trials. (shrink)

According to a common philosophical intuition, the deep nature of things is hidden from us, and the world as we know it through perception and science is, just like a dream, shadows, or a computer simulation, somehow shallow and lacking in reality. This “intuition of unreality” clashes with a strong, but perhaps more naive, intuition to the effect that the world as we know it seems perfectly real. Shadows, dreams, or informational structures appear too unreal to be identical to the (...) world as we know it! This clash between the two intuitions forms the basis of the “problem of reality.” In the late nineteenth century psychiatrists encountered patients they referred to as “metaphysician doubters” who constantly questioned the reality of the world. This essay draws on studies of these patients in order to reject, and indeed diagnose, the intuition of unreality and recent metaphysical doctrines drawing on it, such as structuralism, digitalism, and virtual realism. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

I ask you to X. You now have a reason to X. My request gave you a reason. How? One unpopular theory is the epistemic account, according to which requests do not create any new reasons but instead simply reveal information. For instance, my request that you X reveals that I desire that you X, and my desire gives you a reason to X. Peter Schaber has recently attacked both the epistemic account and other theories of the reason-giving force of (...) requests. Schaber defends a new theory of the reason-giving force of requests according to which request give reasons because it is valuable for requesters and requestees that requests have this power. In this paper I argue that Schaber's attack on the epistemic account fails, and that his own theory ought to be rejected because it faces compelling objections. (shrink)

“X-Firsters” hold that there is some normative feature that is fundamental to all others (and, often, that there’s some normative feature that is the “mark of the normative”: all other normative properties have it, and are normative in virtue of having it). This view is taken as a starting point in the debate about which X is “on first.” Little has been said about whether or why we should be X-Firsters, or what we should think about normativity if we aren’t (...) X-Firsters. Hence the chapter’s two main goals. First, to provide a simple argument that one shouldn’t be an X-Firster about the normative domain, which starts with the observation that analogous views have dubious merits in analogous domains. Second, to offer an alternative view—taking normativity to be a determinable explained in terms of its determinates—that offers an interesting way to think about the structure and unity of normativity. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits of (...) knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

Supporters of open borders sometimes argue that the state has no pro tanto right to restrict immigration, because such a right would also entail a right to exclude existing citizens for whatever reasons justify excluding immigrants. These arguments can be defeated by suggesting that people have a right to stay put. I present a new form of the exclusion argument against closed borders which escapes this “right to stay put” reply. I do this by describing a kind of exclusion that (...) has not been discussed in depth, which I call “territorial exclusion.” Territorial exclusion is the process according to which the group that wishes to exclude current citizens secedes from the territory in which those citizens reside. I argue that the wrongness of territorial exclusion explains why there is no pro tanto right for a state to exclude immigrants, because otherwise there would be a pro tanto right for the state to kick people out by seceding from the territory they inhabit. Because kicking people out like this is typically wrong, borders cannot be closed. (shrink)

Depersonalization is a pathological condition consisting in a deep modification of the way things appear to a subject, leading him to feel estranged from his body, his actions, his thoughts, his mind and even from himself. In this article, I argue that the study of depersonalization raises three challenges for recent theories of the sense of bodily ownership. These challenges—which I call the centrality challenge, the dissociation challenge and the grounding challenge— thwart most of these theories and suggest that the (...) sense of bodily ownership hinges on a phenomenal mark of mineness that can not be accounted for in terms of our sensory, interoceptive, agentive, cognitive or affective dispositions and that is psychologically primitive. In short: that mineness is first. (shrink)

Motion—and, in particular, local motion or change in location—plays a central role in Kenelm Digby’s natural philosophy and in his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Despite this, Digby’s account of what motion consists in has yet to receive much scholarly attention. In this paper, I advance a novel interpretation of Digby on motion. According to it, Digby holds that for a body to move is for it to divide from and unify with other bodies. This is a view (...) of motion—as change in relations of parthood—that Alison Peterman attributes to Digby’s contemporary and acquaintance, Margaret Cavendish. Having shown that Digby’s presentation of the view predates Cavendish’s by more than a decade, I make a case that Digby’s work influenced Cavendish’s on this topic. In developing and defending my reading, I consider to what extent the Digbean account of motion and the arguments for it accord with the ideals of the mechanical philosophy emerging in the early modern period. (shrink)

This collection of six essays centers on Professor Koyre's great theme: the relative importance of metaphysics and observation, with controlled experiment a kind of marriage between the two. Professor Koyre's thesis might be summed up as a claim that when one is seeking to explain the scientific revolution, attention must be concentrated on the philosophical outlook of the scientist and away from speculative theories. At the time of his death, Alexandre Koyre was a professor at the Ecole Pratique des (...) Hautes Etudes (Sorbonne) and a memeber of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (shrink)

Abstract This paper offers an appraisal of Phillip Pettit's approach to the problem how a merely finite set of examples can serve to represent a determinate rule, given that indefinitely many rules can be extrapolated from any such set. I argue that Pettit's so-called ethnocentric theory of rule-following fails to deliver the solution to this problem he sets out to provide. More constructively, I consider what further provisions are needed in order to advance Pettit's general approach to the problem. I (...) conclude that what is needed is an account that, whilst it affirms the view that agents' responses are constitutively involved in the exemplification of rules, does not allow such responses the pride of place they have in Pettit's theory. (shrink)

In a previous article on cosmological arguments, I have put forward a few examples of complete infinite and circular explanations, and argued that complete non-wellfounded explanations such as these might explain the present state of the world better than their well-founded theistic counterparts (Billon, 2021). Although my aim was broader, the examples I gave there implied merely causal explanations. In this article, I would like to do three things: • Specify some general informative conditions for complete and incomplete non-wellfounded causal (...) explanations that can be used to assess candidate explanations and to generate new examples of complete non-wellfounded explanations. • Show that these conditions, which concern chains of causal explanations, easily generalize to chains of metaphysical, grounding explanations and even to chains involving other “determination relations” such as supervenience. • Apply these general conditions to the recent debates against the existence of nonwellfounded chains of grounds and show, with a couple of precise examples, that the latter can be complete, and that just like in the case of causal explanations, non-wellfoundedness can in fact be an aset rather than a liability. (shrink)

This book is a study of the role of intellect in human action as described by Thomas Aquinas. One of its primary aims is to compare the interpretation of Aristotle by Aquinas with the lines of interpretation offered in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. The book seeks to clarify the problems involved in the appropriation of Aristotle's theory by a Christian theologian, including such topics as the practical syllogism and the problems of akrasia. Westberg argues that Aquinas was much closer to Aristotle (...) than is often recognized, and he puts forward important new interpretations of the relation of intellect and will in the stages of intention, deliberation, decision, and execution. In the concluding section of the book, he shows how this new interpretation yields fruitful insights on a range of theological topics, including sin, law, love, and the moral virtues. (shrink)

The problem known as Buridan’s Ass says that a hungry donkey equipoised between two identical bales of hay will starve to death. Indecision kills the ass. Some philosophers worry about human analogs. Computer scientists since the 1960s have known about the computer versions of such cases. From what Leslie Lamport calls ‘Buridan’s Principle’—a discrete decision based on a continuous range of input-values cannot be made in a bounded time—it follows that the possibilities for human analogs of Buridan’s Ass are far (...) more wide-ranging and securely provable than has been acknowledged in philosophy. We are never necessarily decisive. This is mathematically provable. I explore four consequences: first, increased interest of the literature’s solutions to Buridan’s Ass; second, a new asymmetry between responsibility for omissions and responsibility for actions; third, clarification of the standard account of akrasia; and, fourth, clarification of the role of credences in normative decision-theory. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an (...) interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an (...) interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea. (shrink)

This essay considers the critical response to Hegel's view of Socrates we find in Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony. I argue that this dispute turns on the question whether or not the examination of particular thinkers enters into Socrates’ most basic aims and interests. I go on to show how Kierkegaard's account, which relies on an affirmative answer to this question, enables him to provide a cogent defence of Socrates' philosophical practice against Hegel's criticisms.

Can a liberal state exclude illiberal immigrants in order to preserve its liberal status? Hrishikesh Joshi has argued that liberalism cannot require a commitment to open borders because this would entail that liberalism is committed to its own demise in circumstances in which many illiberal immigrants aim to immigrate into a liberal society. I argue that liberalism is committed to its own demise in certain circumstances, but that this is not as bad as it may appear. Liberalism’s commitment to its (...) own demise is merely a reflection of the fact that it must take into account the rights of outsiders, not just the rights of existing citizens, and of the fact that circumstances of injustice can sometimes leave liberal societies with no correct choice. (shrink)

Mandatory minimum sentencing provisions have been a feature of the U.S. justice system since 1790. But they have expanded considerably under the war on drugs, and their use has expanded considerably under the Trump Administration; some states are also poised to expand drug-related mandatory minimums further in efforts to fight the current opioid epidemic. In this paper I outline and evaluate three prominent arguments for and against the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs—they appeal, respectively, to proportionality, (...) consistency, and efficiency. I ultimately defend the view that the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs is unjust. -/- . (shrink)