The principle of necessity as applied to self-defence requires the use of the least harmful defensively effective means of thwarting a wrongful threat. Yet –so I argue – a harm can be excessive even when it is the least harmful way of dealing with the threat at the time of the attack. I therefore propose a historical view of the requirement of necessity. Historical necessity requires the selection of the least harmful means to thwart a future attack at the point (...) in time at which we have a solid presumption that the future attack will take place. This may happen considerably before the time of the attack. Once you fail to acquire or preserve the least harmful defensive option for thwarting a future attack you may come to be irrevocably in breach of necessity. The paper tackles a number of objections to the view proposed. (shrink)
Interpreters disagree on the origin that Francisco Suárez assigns to political obligation and correlative political subjection. According to some, Suárez, as other social contract theorists, believes that it is the consent of the individuals that causes political obligation. Others, however, claim that for Suárez, political obligation is underived from the individuals' consent which creates the city. In support of this claim they invoke Suárez's view that political power emanates from the city by way of "natural resultancy". I argue that analysis (...) of Suárez's less studied De voto and De iuramento reveals that, for Suárez, consent causes both the city and the citizen's political obligation. Moreover, close inspection of the notion of causation by natural resultancy within Suárez's metaphysics shows that what emanates from the body politic in this fashion is not, as claimed, political subjection and political obligation, but rather the city's right to self-mastership. Because for him political obligation does originate in consent it is not incorrect to regard Suárez as a social contract theorist. (shrink)
Ex-Jew, eternal Jew: early representations of the Jewish Spinoza -- Refining Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn's response to the Amsterdam heretic -- The first modern Jew: Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza and the beginnings of an image -- A rebel against the past, a revealer of secrets: Salomon Rubin and the east European Maskilic Spinoza -- From the heights of Mount Scopus: Yosef Klausner and the Zionist rehabilitation of Spinoza -- Farewell, Spinoza: I. B. Singer and the tragicomedy of the Jewish Spinozist.
If distributed cognition is to become a general analytic frame, it needs to handle more aspects of cognition than just highly efficient problem solving. It should also handle learning. We identify four classes of distributed learning: induction, repurposing, symbiotic tuning, and mutual adaptation. The four classes of distributed learning fit into a two-dimensional space defined by the stability and adaptability of individuals and their environments. In all four classes of learning, people and their environments are highly interdependent during initial learning. (...) At the same time, we present evidence indicating that certain types of interdependence in early learning, most notably mutual adaptation, can help prepare people to be less dependent on their immediate environment and more adaptive when they confront new environments. We also describe and test examples of learning technologies that implement mutual adaptation. (shrink)
The recent surge of interest in Bacon's own attempts at natural history has revealed a complex interplay with his speculative ideas in natural philosophy. This research has given rise to the concern that his natural histories are theory-laden in a way that Bacon ought to find unacceptable, given his prescription in the Parasceve for a reliable body of factual instances that can be used as a storehouse for induction. This paper aims to resolve this tension by elaborating a moderate foundationalist (...) account of Bacon's method and by appealing to a distinction he makes, in a letter to Father Fulgentio, between pure and impure natural histories. I argue that the discussions of causes and axioms in the published histories render them impure, since that material properly belongs to Part Four of the Instauratio, but that this interplay with Part Four is necessary for the sake of the continued refinement of Part Three (the natural historical part). Bacon ultimately aims for a storehouse of instances, to be attained at the culmination of this process of refinement, and at that point the history should be published in its pure form. (shrink)
Francisco Suárez is arguably the most important Neo-Scholastic philosopher and a vital link in the chain leading from medieval philosophy to that of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Long neglected by the Anglo-Saxon philosophical community, this sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian is now an object of intense scholarly attention. In this volume, Daniel Schwartz brings together essays by leading specialists which provide detailed treatment of some key themes of Francisco Suárez's philosophical work: God, metaphysics, meta-ethics, the human soul, action, ethics and law, (...) justice and war. The authors assess the force of Suárez's arguments, set them within their wider argumentative context and single out influences and appraise competing interpretations. The book is a useful resource for scholars and students of philosophy, theology, philosophy of religion and history of political thought and provides a rich bibliography of secondary literature. (shrink)
If distributed cognition is to become a general analytic frame, it needs to handle more aspects of cognition than just highly efficient problem solving. It should also handle learning. We identify four classes of distributed learning: induction, repurposing, symbiotic tuning, and mutual adaptation. The four classes of distributed learning fit into a two-dimensional space defined by the stability and adaptability of individuals and their environments. In all four classes of learning, people and their environments are highly interdependent during initial learning. (...) At the same time, we present evidence indicating that certain types of interdependence in early learning, most notably mutual adaptation, can help prepare people to be less dependent on their immediate environment and more adaptive when they confront new environments. We also describe and test examples of learning technologies that implement mutual adaptation. (shrink)
Frances Kamm's Principle of Secondary Permissibility specifies a class of exceptions to the general rule not to kill as a means. The principle allows us to harm as a means some of those who would have been otherwise harmed as side effects. ‘For example, suppose it is impermissible to paralyze A's legs as a means to a greater good. It would still be permissible to do this as the alternative to permissibly killing A as a mere indirect side effect.’ I (...) argue that, despite of its great appeal, PSP is incorrect; it is simply not true that the victims of substitutive harm are not worse off than they would otherwise permissibly have been. In fact, there is no moral difference between the purportedly substitutive harm licensed by PSP and the standard sort of harming as means repudiated by nonconsequentialists. (shrink)
Os intérpretes discordam quanto a origem que Francisco Suárez atribui a obrigação e a sujeição política. De acordo com alguns, Suárez, como outros contratualistas, acredita que é o consentimento dos indivíduos que causa a obrigação política; outros, porém, afirmam que para Suárez a obrigação política não deriva do consentimento dos indivíduos. Em respaldo a esta tese eles invocam a opinião de Suárez de que o poder político emana da cidade por meio de “decorrência natural.” Eu argumento que a análise de (...) obras menos estudada de Suárez, como o De voto e o De iuramento, mostra que, para Suárez, o consentimento causa tanto a obrigação política da cidade e quanto a dos cidadãos. Além do mais, uma inspeção mais acurada da noção de causalidade por decorrência natural dentro da metafísica suareziana mostra que o que emana do corpo político não é, como sustentado, a sujeição e a obrigação política, mas sim o direito à autonomia da cidade. E visto que para Suárez a obrigação política se origina no consentimento, então não é errado considerá-lo um contratualista. (shrink)
Few fields are as riddled with terminological indecision as “German Jewish thought.” One cannot invoke this sphere without immediately bumping up against essential questions of definition. Should membership within its bounds be reserved for those who wrote, primarily, as Jews for Jews, even if in a non-Jewish language? Or should its borders be expanded substantially to include Jewish contributions to secular German thought—or, perhaps more aptly put, secular thought in German, in order not to exclude the vast number of Central (...) European Jewish innovators who wrote in the language? If one takes the latter route, the problems only proliferate, for the question then ensues, what makes any of these supposed Jewish contributionsJewish? How is the Jewishness of a particular work, school of thought, or sensibility to be gauged and assessed? How does one avoid the risk of reading too much in—or too little? How does one steer clear of reducing Jewishness to some stable core or essence, without relying on a notion so broad and diffuse as to be effectively meaningless? And always lurking is the question whether, in imputing Jewishness to a cultural product or outlook, one has betrayed its creator, who would have recoiled at being labeled a “Jewish” author or artist. These problems are not peculiar to German Jewish intellectual history. They arise wherever and whenever Jews have been disproportionately prominent in the shaping of secular culture—for instance, in the writing of the “New York intellectuals” in the postwar United States. But the role of authors and artists of German Jewish background proved especially pronounced even after many, like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, emigrated to escape the Nazis. In their new environments, they remained active participants in intellectual life, and the question remains whether they were carrying on the tradition of German Jewish thought. (shrink)
Many of the policies that shaped Argentinean politics and society in the second half of the nineteenth century, most notably the project behind the 1853 constitution and its proposed immigration policies, can be traced to lawyer, publicist and political thinker Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-84). In this article I chart the modifications in the way Alberdi appropriates French Doctrinaire thought. I argue that while in the young Alberdi we see a strong emphasis on the historicist element of Doctrinarism, on later stages (...) Alberdi reduces Doctrinaire thought to its central sociological thesis. It is this impoverished version of French Doctrinaire thought conjoined with a number of negative appraisals about the Argentinean population, which led eventually to his proposal to rely on demographic engineering as a means for infusing life into Argentina's democratic constitution. (shrink)
Abstract: The natural lottery is a metaphor about the way luck affects the allocation of personal attributes, talents, skills, and defects. Susan Hurley has argued that it is incoherent to regard individual essential properties (IEPs) as a matter of lottery luck. The reason is that a lottery of identity-affecting properties generates the ‘non-identity problem’. For this reason among others she suggests substituting lottery luck with ‘thin luck’, i.e. luck as non-responsibility, which would allow us to coherently regard IEPs as a (...) matter of luck.I argue that we are not not-responsible for our IEPs. Therefore, the coherent range of ‘thin luck’ is not broader than that of lottery luck. Moreover, justice theorists need to be worried about the non-identity problem only to the extent that IEPs affect life prospects and it is far from evident that they do. After addressing some connected aspects of Hurley's analysis, I discuss the type of reasons that justify seeking to expand domain of justice and the ways of doing this, for instance by abandoning lottery luck. I close by suggesting, however, that if Parfit's view of ‘what matters about identity’ is correct, its application to the case of identity-affecting lotteries may prove the expansion of the domain of justice superfluous, as IEPs belong to it as it is. (shrink)
: The natural lottery is a metaphor about the way luck affects the allocation of personal attributes, talents, skills, and defects. Susan Hurley has argued that it is incoherent to regard individual essential properties as a matter of lottery luck. The reason is that a lottery of identity‐affecting properties generates the ‘non‐identity problem’. For this reason among others she suggests substituting lottery luck with ‘thin luck’, i.e. luck as non‐responsibility, which would allow us to coherently regard IEPs as a matter (...) of luck.I argue that we are not not‐responsible for our IEPs. Therefore, the coherent range of ‘thin luck’ is not broader than that of lottery luck. Moreover, justice theorists need to be worried about the non‐identity problem only to the extent that IEPs affect life prospects and it is far from evident that they do. After addressing some connected aspects of Hurley's analysis, I discuss the type of reasons that justify seeking to expand domain of justice and the ways of doing this, for instance by abandoning lottery luck. I close by suggesting, however, that if Parfit's view of ‘what matters about identity’ is correct, its application to the case of identity‐affecting lotteries may prove the expansion of the domain of justice superfluous, as IEPs belong to it as it is. (shrink)
