This paper focuses on the materialistic account of the blending and the way it shapes an original organism model. I aim to shed light on the threads of connections we can gather between the Presocratic and the Stoic views on the physical krasis of the body. The Stoics share with Parmenides and Empedocles the idea of a single material cosmic continuum in which thought and perception depend on the various blendings of the physical constituents of the body. Both of these (...) naturalistic traditions are committed to the view that substance is continuous and undergoes constant and qualitative change. My point is to underline how this view of a sympathetic cosmos presupposes a model of the individuality that is radically open. Thus, by taking off the notion of the krasis, the Stoics take off a problem – namely, that of the organism – that is first fleshed out by the Presocratics – Parmenides and Empedocles in particular – philosophers. In this respect, the Stoic view of relational identity indebts to the Presocratic account, beyond and against the Aristotelian one. (shrink)

El objetivo del presente trabajo es mostrar, a través de un análisis del primer curso académico dictado por Heidegger en 1919, las deudas teóricas que el filósofo contrajo con la fenomenología de Husserl. La construcción por parte de Heidegger de una fenomenología hermenéutica se vale de conceptos elaborados por Husserl tanto en las Investigaciones lógicas como en Ideas para una fenomenología pura y una filosofía fenomenológica. En efecto, se mostrará cómo Heidegger, gracias al auxilio de la noción metodológica de desconexión, (...) puede superar la ingenuidad de la actitud natural, por un lado, y comprender la riqueza preteórica de sentido de la vivencia, por el otro. La novedad de este curso académico, que caracteriza la autonomía de la propuesta filosófica de Heidegger, es la crítica a Husserl por haber construido una filosofía basada en la primacía de la mirada teórica. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed light on Plato’s myth of Er contribution to the emergence of a conception of choice as a principle of identity. Our hypothesis is that this myth brings out what is a real choice and that only philosophy enable us to make it. Philosophy as a way of life is that according to it our choice of life become a free choice and a principle of identity — because this first choice determines all the others in (...) the entire life. From this view, I propose to assign Cicero’s voluntas and Epictetus’s prohairesis — as faculty of choice and principle of personal identity — to this point of the myth : philosophy appears as the way to make the choice to choose. In this regard, we are our choices. (shrink)

Marion Bourbon Que l’activité philosophique chez la plupart des philosophes antiques ait prétendu disposer d’une fonction thérapeutique, psychothérapeutique, nous le savons bien, tant cette dernière s’est explicitement pensée sur le modèle médical. Il ne faut néanmoins pas oublier qu’alors, dans le même temps, c’est la médecine elle-même qui s’est trouvée apparentée à la philosophie en ce qu’elle suppose intrinsèquement un usage du logos, ce que Platon le premier pose sans ambages. Cette métaphore de la philosophie comme thérapie a aussi (...) ressurgi plus récemment en philosophie analytique, sous la plume de Wittgenstein pour lequel « la philosophie traite une question comme une maladie ». Mais jusqu’à quel point s’agit-il de dire la même chose? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein’s PrefaceBrett BourbonIn his preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein admits his failure to make his book anything more than an interrelated collection of remarks: "After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into... a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks." The fragmented character of Investigations is matched by its other formal oddities and difficulties: (...) its metaphors, its cryptic evocative obscurity about some things and its linguistic precision about others, its dramatization of philosophical positions in stories, in hypothetical worlds, and in the role of the interlocutor(s). Our initial and continual problem in reading Investigations is to understand the reason for its form, and to justify this form relative to its philosophical concerns and methods. I will argue that the justification of the form of Investigations comes down to a single question: how do we take up Wittgenstein's example—in thinking and in confusion—without mimicking him?IThe justification pursued in the preface bears affinities with theological justification, defined as our becoming righteous relative to God, as Calvin characterizes it, "an acceptation, whereby God receiving us into [End Page 428] favour, taketh us for righteous" (Institutes III. xi. §2).1 Righteousness as a mark of acceptation, the very tone of "righteousness" and God's power of acceptation, have no direct counterparts in Wittgenstein's philosophy. Philosophical justification does not have a doctrinal foundation that would establish any particular content nor any special relation between the pursuit of that justification (through philosophy) and its fulfillment, even hypothetically, in some possible acknowledgment of righteousness. The seriousness betrayed by Investigations need for justification, however, is expressed in the moral fervor of Wittgenstein's philosophizing. It is also his philosophical goal to encourage a kind of acceptation that the ground of our involvement in the world, in what constrains and confuses us, is no more than how we live and what we are: "Instead of the unanalyzsable, specific, indefinable; the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g. punish certain actions, establish the state of affairs thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colours, take an interest in other's feelings. What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living" (Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, §630; c.f. PI, p. 226d).2 The translators comment in a footnote that a variant for "facts of living" in Wittgenstein's manuscript is "forms of life." What has to be accepted are forms of life.The form of Investigations is justified as part of a discovery, with or without a supporting theology, of how to move ourselves toward some greater form of perfection (although not to reach it). The Protestant cast of this justification, in Wittgenstein's case, is just (and I wouldn't want to extend it further) that while this justification is achieved by virtue of our effort, it is not effort towards the world, but towards our intransigent will, and that the grace that might enable our work is less a gift, than a condition within which we can struggle.3 Thus, "what has to be overcome," in philosophy, "is not the difficulty of the understanding but of the will" (CV, p.17).4 Philosophy for Wittgenstein is a form of self-education. One works on the will in order to see differently: but the will is neither a thing nor a faculty. Working on the will is not a psychological project of self-reform, but a reconstitution of our attitude toward what we take as necessary. We can describe such attitudes with the vocabulary of the passions by which express or curb our will: devotion, derision, hope, fear, confidence, indignation, pride, repentance, emulation, gratitude, consternation, daring, timidity, and so on. And thus "philosophy is a work on the will" is kind of maxim to help us remember a kind of attitude, purpose, and justification.I will derive an agnostic notion of justification from its Protestant [End Page 429] theological form, retaining its moral force and claim on our person, but without psychologizing it, with minimal doctrinal content, and without God. This is... (shrink)

Nous défendons ici l’hypothèse que l’irruption de la langue du vouloir ( uelle ) chez Sénèque n’est pas sans effet sur la représentation stoïcienne du telos, contre un certain nombre d’interprétations qui dénient à cette innovation lexicale la moindre originalité par rapport à la psychologie stoïcienne hellénistique. Le telos est réinscrit dans la perspective de la traversée de la conflictualité psychique dont le vouloir ( uelle ), dans sa constance, constitue la résolution. C’est dire combien la subjectivation engage le destin (...) du désir, celui d’un conflit porté par la uoluntas, envisagée donc dans toute son historicité, et à ce titre devenue principe d’identité personnelle. Le telos fait apparaître plus explicitement qu’avant un sujet du vouloir, tout à la fois comme principe et comme effet du processus de subjectivation. (shrink)

A poem is not particular in the way a painting is particular. A copy of a poem is still the poem, while a copy of a painting is not the painting. But a poem is still particular, since it seems to be constituted by a specific set of words in a specific order such that to alter that order or any of those words is to make a new poem. Marianne Moore begins her poem “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in (...) the Shape of a Fish” in the following way: She might have revised this and replaced “perpendicularity” with “verticality.” This says the same thing, but it is not the same poem. The particularity of a poem, relative to the words that make it up, constitutes a... (shrink)

The primary aim of this chapter is to explain the nature of evidential reasoning, the characteristic difficulties encountered, and the tools to address these difficulties. Our focus is on evidential reasoning in criminal cases. There is an extensive scholarly literature on these topics, and it is a secondary aim of the chapter to provide readers the means to find their way in historical and ongoing debates.

Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this ...

The academic dominance of cultural studies and the increasing interest and significance of cultural conflict in our world has encouraged various theories of culture, the most pervasive being theories of transculture and hybrid cultural forms and entities. In this guest column, Bourbon argues that all such trans theories are fundamentally flawed and distort the very idea of culture. His essay analyzes the concept of transobjects and transcultures, looking both at the assumptions supporting such objects and ideas and at their (...) explanatory uses. This discussion leads to one on the relationship between texts and contexts. Most cultural theories, and all transcultural theories, confuse the relationship between texts and contexts, specifically misusing the idea of the conditions of possibility, while relying on various forms of personification. Bourbon both criticizes these ideas and also offers a more modest idea of culture, along with specific suggestions on how to study and understand what we call “products of culture,” including fictions and ourselves. (shrink)

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic language for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of viability. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than those given (...) so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored. (shrink)

A proposal for the biological grounding of intrinsic teleology and sense-making through the theory of autopoiesis is critically evaluated. Autopoiesis provides a systemic lan- guage for speaking about intrinsic teleology but its original formulation needs to be elaborated further in order to explain sense-making. This is done by introducing adaptivity, a many-layered property that allows organisms to regulate themselves with respect to their conditions of via- bility. Adaptivity leads to more articulated concepts of behaviour, agency, sense-construction, health, and temporality than (...) those given so far by autopoiesis and enaction. These and other implications for understanding the organismic generation of values are explored. (shrink)

Jane Austen and the powers of description. Disciplines of description -- Reading ignorance into sense -- Elizabeth Bennet, the Socrates of descriptive reason -- Frank and impertinent: paradiastolic descriptions -- An excursus on Richard Rorty and Lady Catherine -- Fanny's garden thoughts -- Reasoning by description -- Coda: "Part hawk, part man" -- The apprehension of power and life. The cook and the count: a psychological anthropology of tyranny -- Is power coercive? -- A parable of action and event -- (...) The afflictions of life: Montale's poetic description of flux -- What is a life? -- A concluding postscript. (shrink)

Advances in neuroscience implicate reentrant signaling as the predominant form of communication between brain areas. This principle was used in a series of masking experiments that defy explanation by feed-forward theories. The masking occurs when a brief display of target plus mask is continued with the mask alone. Two masking processes were found: an early process affected by physical factors such as adapting luminance and a later process affected by attentional factors such as set size. This later process is called (...) masking by object substitution, because it occurs whenever there is a mismatch between the reentrant visual representation and the ongoing lower level activity. Iterative reentrant processing was formalized in a computational model that provides an excellent fit to the data. The model provides a more comprehensive account of all forms of visual masking than do the long-held feed-forward views based on inhibitory contour interactions. (shrink)

RésuméLa tradition manuscrite duKitāb al-Kašf, conserve la trace matérielle de trois phases de rédaction et de révision de l'ouvrage. Cette étude vise à expliciter les relations entre les deux versions arabes et la traduction hébraïque anonyme du XIVesiècle, en prenant en compte les additions et remaniements qui les différencient. Je conclus que la traduction hébraïque représente un stade intermédiaire de réélaboration: elle atteste d'importants ajouts et modifications philosophiques, spécialement dans les arguments portant sur la création du monde, au début de (...) l'ouvrage, mais précède l'achèvement de la révision du traité, qui a conduit aux remaniements dont témoigne la dernière version arabe, dans les chapitres abordant les questions épineuses de la corporéité divine et de la direction. L'étude des ajouts et des arguments du point de vue du contenu, du contexte et de l'argumentation contribue également à comprendre l'histoire de la stratification des phases rédactionnelles de l'ouvrage et la manière dont l'ouvrage a été transmis. (shrink)

Los cinco estudios que componen este volumen estan dedicados a mostrar que es posible abordar el estudio de un film y por extension del cine en su conjunto a partir de fragmentos minimos extraidos de una obra concreta. Concebidos con una metodologia unitaria intentan, limitando al maximo el uso de esa jerga especializada que suele hacer de muralla entre el analista y el lector, proporcionar instrumentos operativos para todos aquellos que conciben el cine como territorio donde saber y placer no (...) solo no estan renidos sino que se refuerzan mutuamente. Los ejemplos han sido tomados, conscientemente, de obras al mismo tiempo muy conocidas y suficientemente representativas de determinadas maneras de hacer. Se ha huido de toda normatividad con la finalidad de hacer buena la frase de S.M. Eisenstein cuando recordaba a sus discipulos que el no podia ensenarles nada, pero ellos si que podian aprender mucho. Equidistante del moderno analisis formalista y de la tradicion clasica que reivindicaba la primacia del contenido, el tipo de trabajo patente en estas paginas reivindica el lugar central del texto filmico y sus texturas singulares en los nuevos estudios cinematograficos. (shrink)

The metaphysical question presupposes the ontological one: are there forms of social unit that can be recognized as real groups and, if so, what are they? The ontological answer can be affirmative only if we are able to identify real collective entities, that is, social wholes that are not reducible to the mere sum of their individual parts. Through an ontological comparison between different types of social interaction, this paper shows the ontological properties of a real collective subject. It is (...) such, only if relations between its constituent parts generate an intrinsic normative structure, which gives existence to a higher order of social units. In this order members are bound to each other and are collectively bound to their group. They are bearers of collective intentionality. Their actions contribute to collective agency. Their responsibility is more complex and stratified than that of an independent individual. Moreover, all types of real wholes depend on ontological constitution processes, which give them the following: an intrinsic structural unit, a typological identity and emerging properties. The latter can be both new characteristics and new causal powers, which constituent parts do not have. Therefore, a right understanding of these ontological constitution processes is capable of overcoming reductionist isomorphism. It also offers the fundamental criterion for proposing a metaphysical theory that, being rooted in a rigorous ontology, is not an arbitrary exercise of imagination. (shrink)

Recent animal research suggests that it may soon be possible to support the human fetus in an artificial uterine environment for part of a pregnancy. A technique of extending gestation in this way (“ectogestation”) could be offered to parents of extremely premature infants (EPIs) to improve outcomes for their child. The use of artificial uteruses for ectogestation could generate ethical questions because of the technology’s potential impact on the point of “viability”—loosely defined as the stage of pregnancy beyond which the (...) fetus may survive external to the womb. Several medical decisions during the perinatal period are based on the gestation at which infants are considered viable, for example decisions about newborn resuscitation and abortion, and ectogestation has the potential to impact on these. Despite these possible implications, there is little existing evidence or analysis of how this technology would affect medical practice. In this paper, we combine empirical data with ethical analysis. We report a survey of 91 practicing Australian obstetricians and neonatologists; we aimed to assess their conceptual understanding of “viability,” and what ethical consequences they envisage arising from improved survival of EPIs. We also assess what the ethical implications of extending gestation should be for newborn and obstetric care. We analyze the concept of viability and argue that while ectogestation might have implications for the permissibility of neonatal life‐prolonging treatment at extremely early gestation, it should not necessarily have implications for abortion policy. We compare our ethical findings with the results of the survey. (shrink)

In this paper we prove that the category of abelianl-groups is equivalent to the category of perfect MV-algebras. Furthermore, we give a finite equational axiomatization of the variety generated by perfect MV-algebras.

Discerning the motives that lead businesspeople to make ethical decisions in economic contexts is important, for it aids the moral evaluation of such decisions. But conventional economic theory has for too long assumed an egoist model of motivation, to which many contrast an altruist view of ethical choices. The result is to see business decision making as implying dilemmas. On the other hand, we argue, if one assumes multiple motives, economic and ethical, in ordinary business decisions, a more fruitful model (...) of ethical motivation in such decisions emerges. In this paper multiple motives are assumed to be the norm in a world of large organizations, complex decisions and stakeholder management. An example of a technology acquisition decision, with environmental overtones is presented in illustration of this approach. A method for discerning motives, primarily in terms of behavioural efficacy is presented. On this basis a two step approach to morally evaluating mixed motives in business decisions is proposed. First, the fit of motives with substantive ethical values should be ascertained, and then the efficacy of moral motives in yielding ethical behaviour and outcomes should be determined. This approach, we conclude, offers a much more concrete model of the actual role of moral motives in business decision making. It also signals the importance of moral learning in organizations. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Solidarität und allgemeine Menschenliebe.--Bd. 2. Gegen den Krieg.