The French philosopher and intellectual historian Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) is known primarily for his conception of philosophy as spiritual exercise, which was an essential reference for the later Foucault. An aspect of his work that has received less attention is a set of methodological reflections on intellectual history and on the relationship between philosophy and history. Hadot was trained initially as a philosopher and was interested in existentialism as well as in the convergence between philosophy and poetry. Yet he chose (...) to become a historian of philosophy and produced extensive philological work on neo-Platonism and ancient philosophy in general. He found a philosophical rationale for this shift in his encounter with Wittgenstein's philosophy in the mid-1950s (Hadot was one of Wittgenstein's earliest French readers and interpreters). For Hadot, ancient philosophy must be understood as a series of language games, and each language game must be situated within the concrete conditions in which it happened. The reference to Wittgenstein therefore supports a strongly contextualist and historicist stance. It also supports its exact opposite: presentist appropriations of ancient texts are entirely legitimate, and they are the only way ancient philosophy can be existentially meaningful to us. Hadot addresses the contradiction by embracing it fully and claiming that his own practice aims at a coincidence of opposites (a concept borrowed from the Heraclitean tradition). For Hadot the fullest and truest way of doing philosophy is to be a philosopher and a historian at the same time. (shrink)

Self-Interest before Adam Smith inquires into the foundations of economic theory. It is generally assumed that the birth of modern economic science, marked by the publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776, was the triumph of the 'selfish hypothesis'. Yet, as a neo-Epicurean idea, this hypothesis had been a matter of controversy for over a century and Smith opposed it from a neo-Stoic point of view. But how can the Epicurean principles of orthodox economic theory be reconciled with the (...) Stoic principles of Adam Smith's philosophy? Pierre Force shows how Smith's theory refutes the 'selfish hypothesis' and integrates it at the same time. He also explains how Smith appropriated Rousseau's 'republican' critique of modern commercial society, and makes the case that the autonomy of economic science is an unintended consequence of Smith's 'republican' principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:166 HUME'S INTEREST IN NEWTON AND SCIENCE Many writers have been forced to examine — in their treatments of Hume's knowledge of and acquaintance with scientific theories of his day — the related questions of Hume's knowledge of and acquaintance with Isaac Newton and of the nature and extent of Newtonian influences upon Hume's thinking. Most have concluded that — in some sense — Hume was acquainted with and (...) influenced by Newton's thought in particular and scientific thought in general. The genesis of this paper is the recent point of view put forward by Peter Jones which challenges the many permutations of this almost ritualistic standard line by removing Hume entirely from the Newtonian and the scientific scenes of thought. Jones argues that Hume knew less about Newton and science, and needed to know less about Newton and 2 science, than he believes is required by the above interpretation. Indeed, Jones argues that Hume's fundamental assumptions, which, according to Jones, derive ultimately from a form of Ciceronian humanism, drive a "wedge" between Newton's thought and that of 3 Hume. Even Hume's introductory remarks in the Treatise about his universal "science of man" are, for Jones, a declaration of independence from the materialistic trend (as Jones sees it) of Newtonian 4 science and not, as so many commentators have maintained — however tenuously or strongly evidence for linkage of Hume's project with Newtonian or scientific thought. Jones baldly argues that Hume totally lacked interest in science in general and in Newton and Newtonian science in particular. Following J. H. Burton's observation that Hume's work is surprisingly free from the "opinions" of contemporary scientists, 167 Jones states there is no evidence that Hume ever studied science at the University of Edinburgh or that he "pursued" scientific studies of any formal sort. Regarding Newtonian scientific thought, he emphasizes the paucity of specifically Newtonian scientific textbooks in the early eighteenth century 7 which might have been available for Hume to study and argues that nowhere in Hume's writings is there evidence of precise and detailed knowledge of Newton's science beyond what is available in Q Chamber's Cyclopaedia. Jones acknowledges that, in the Introduction to the Treatise, Hume utilizes a "general version" of Newton's "Regulae Philosophandi" from the beginning of Book III of Newton's Principia. Nevertheless, in Jones' view, Hume's fundamentally humanistic orientation separates him completely from g any Newtonian influence. Finally, according to Jones, Hume does not betray the least bit of knowledge of Newton's mathematics and its role in Newton's experimental methodology. On this evidence Jones grounds his central claim of Hume's "total lack of interest in contemporary science." What references there are to Newton and to science in Hume's works Jones finds "traceable to essentially literary predecessors such as Fontenelle or Montesquieu, or to standard works of theologians ] 2 or free-thinkers." The absence of clearly direct references to what Jones feels are scientific works results both from Hume's "total lack of interest in science" and from his commitment to a form of Ciceronian humanism which is "inimical" to what Jones finds to be the obvious materialistic tendencies of 13 science in the early modern period. Jones' account of the Ciceronian and French contexts of Hume's thought is excellent. But his claim that Hume had no interest whatsoever in science 168 is simply too strong and finally forces us to view science in Hume's day as equivalent to science in our own time, a manifestly anachronistic point of view. Throughout this paper, my argument will be conditioned by my view that Hume's interest in science cannot be separated from his epistemology or his religious scepticism. Hume's interest in science was precisely that of a man of letters of the eighteenth century vitally engaged in determining the proper use of scientific methodology in establishing the limits of the secular science of man once it has 14 been freed from the fetters of theology. Hume's interest in theological and epistemological issues inevitably gave rise to a strong interest on his part in the science of his day and in Newton's contributions... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Montaigne and the Coherence of EclecticismPierre ForceSince the publication of Pierre Hadot's essays on ancient philosophy by Arnold Davidson in 1995,2 Michel Foucault's late work on "the care of the self"3 has appeared in a new light. We now know that Hadot's work was familiar to Foucault as early as the 1950s.4 It is also clear that Foucault's notion of "techniques of the self" is very close to what (...) Hadot calls "spiritual exercises." At the same time, there are important differences between the views of these two philosophers, and Hadot has often expressed his regret that Foucault's untimely death prevented them from exploring these differences.5 One important point of disagreement was the status of eclecticism. In Foucault's interpretation of ancient philosophy, the "constitution of the self" implied a personal choice among disparate philosophical references: "Writing as a personal exercise done by the self and for the self, is an art of disparate truth."6 In a 1989 article Hadot argued from a historical point of view that, so far as Stoicism and Epicureanism were concerned, [End Page 523] eclecticism had no place in a mature practice of philosophy. Foucault's favorite example, Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, in which Stoic arguments were invoked along with Epicurean arguments, was a work for beginners. In a mature practice of Stoicism, one would stick to the arguments of the Stoic school, choose them for their coherence, and instead of trying to forge a spiritual identity for oneself through writing, one would "liberate oneself from one's individuality in order to raise oneself up to universality."7 Hadot added that "it is only in the New Academy—in the person of Cicero, for instance—that a personal choice is made according to what reason considers as most likely at a given moment."8 This discussion of Foucault may give the impression that Hadot was somewhat dismissive of eclecticism. Yet in a 2001 interview Hadot claimed that he had always admired Cicero's intellectual independence, and he proposed a reappraisal "of an attitude that has always had a bad reputation: eclecticism."9Something very similar is a stake in the work of Alexander Nehamas, as Lanier Anderson and Joshua Landy showed in their study of his Art of Living. In the conception of philosophy as a "way of life" (Hadot) or "care of the self" (Foucault) or "self-fashioning" (Nehamas), a central issue is the relationship between theoretical coherence and the coherence of the person who theorizes. Elaborating on Nehamas's chapter on Montaigne, Anderson and Landy argue that there is a move in Montaigne away from doctrinal coherence and towards a coherence of the self. As they put it, "the harmonious whole Montaigne commends [... ] is not a coherent body of fact or theory; it is the unified self of the theorizer."10 Anderson and Landy show that this brings up all kinds of difficulties: can this unified self be other than a fiction? If that is the case, how can philosophy be a way of life? Nehamas's answer is very much in the spirit of the late Foucault: there is a coherence of the self in Montaigne, and this coherence is the product of writing as a philosophical activity. The self is fashioned through writing.Because Montaigne writes in the ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life, one may recall Hadot's suggestion that Foucault's notion of [End Page 524] "writing the self" is an intriguing but historically inaccurate description of ancient philosophical practice. But perhaps Hadot agrees with Foucault after all, since in his most recent interviews, he speaks favorably of eclecticism, a notion that is central to Foucault's analysis of self-fashioning through writing. The case of Montaigne is particularly interesting for these purposes, not only because the Essays seem to be the prototypical example of "writing the self," but also because eclecticism is both discussed and practiced throughout the Essays. I propose to take a fresh look at this issue by investigating the status of eclecticism in Montaigne's Essays. This must start with an examination of the philosophical tradition most closely associated with... (shrink)

The author presents Simone Weil’s theory that force, an inherent part of the human condition, generates and regenerates its own existence. She examines three essays by Weil: ‘The Iliad or a Poem of Force’, ‘Reflections on War’, and ‘The Power of Words’. Doering situates the essays historically: their publication in French journals, as World War Two was looming, and again in the mid-1940s when translations of the essays appeared in Dwight Macdonald’s New York journal: politics. She applies to modern times (...) Weil’s conviction that the escalation of war preparations on grounds of national security inexorably undermines the belief in the supreme value of the individual. Major issues include the hyping of war as an act of interior politics, fear as a means of social control, freedom of thought in a permanent war economy, Dorothy Day on violence, the media in a democracy and the Greek concept of nemesis. (shrink)

Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) are valuable legal tools to access information held by public authorities but during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic time frames to reply to requests were de jure or de facto suspended in many countries. However, the lack of effective legal tools to achieve transparency was not automatically paired with governmental secrecy. This research paper analyses which are the factors that prompted some governments to move from secrecy to transparency while the essential legal tool (...) to achieve disclosure of information was not available. It focuses on the role of ‘ecologies of transparency’, a concept developed by Seth Kreimer to describe how FOIA needs to be understood as functioning within a collection of factors and actors. Yet, can transparency ecologies still force disclosure of information when FOIA is suspended? Research focuses on a comparative case study about transparency of scientific committees advising governments on Covid-19 in the UK and in Spain. In both countries, members and minutes were initially secret, but the British government published information before being forced by FOIA, while the Spanish executive only released partial information when FOIA was reactivated. The paper argues that information disclosure processes can be understood as supply and demand models. On the demand side, it highlights the role of adversarial press, scientific community, whistle-blowers, the opposition and critics within the governing party as decisive factors within the transparency ecology. On the supply side, it focuses on legitimation needs from the government to explain different outcomes. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including (...) the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

Cartesian method both organizes and impoverishes the domains to which Descartes applies it. It adjusts geometry so that it can be better integrated with algebra, and yet deflects a full-scale investigation of curves. It provides a comprehensive conceptual framework for physics, and yet interferes with the exploitation of its dynamical and temporal aspects. Most significantly, it bars a fuller unification of mathematics and physics, despite Descartes' claims to quantify nature. The work of his contemporaries Galileo and Torricelli, and of his (...) successor Newton, illustrates conceptual possibilities Descartes left aside, due to his attachment to method. (shrink)

Long‐range correlation is a general class of coordination pattern found to be common to the intrinsic dynamics of complex systems, including human behavior. Balasubramaniam, Hove, and Médé investigate intrinsic dynamics in repeated finger movements, and they find that different measures of movement dynamics yield different long‐range correlations. Results shed light on the way that coordination patterns are expressed as a function of measurement context.

This book celebrates the investigative power of phenomenology to explore the phenomenological sense of space and time in conjunction with the phenomenology of intentionality, the invisible, the sacred, and the mystical. It examines the course of life through its ontopoietic genesis, opening the cosmic sphere to logos. The work also explores, on the one hand, the intellectual drive to locate our cosmic position in the universe and, on the other, the pull toward the infinite. It intertwines science and its grounding (...) principles with imagination in order to make sense of the infinite. This work is the first of a two-part work that contains papers presented at the 62nd International Congress of Phenomenology, The Forces of the Cosmos and the Ontopoietic Genesis of Life, held in Paris, France, August 2012. It features the work of scholars in such diverse disciplines as biology, anthropology, pedagogy, and psychology who philosophically investigate the cosmic origins of beingness. Coverage in this first part includes: Toward a New Enlightenment: Metaphysics as Philosophy of Life, Transformation in Phenomenology: Husserl and Tymieniecka, Biologically Organized Quantum Vacuum and the Cosmic Origin of Cellular Life, Plotinus "Enneads" and Self-Creation, The Creative Potential of Humor, Transcendental Morphology - A Phenomenological Interpretation of Human and Non-Human Cosmos, and Cognition and Emotion: From Dichotomy to Ambiguity.. (shrink)

Efforts from diverse disciplines, including evolutionary studies and biomechanical experiments, have yielded new insights into the genetic, signaling, and mechanical control of tooth formation and functions. Evidence from fossils and non‐model organisms has revealed that a common set of genes underlie tooth‐forming potential of epithelia, and changes in signaling environments subsequently result in specialized dentitions, maintenance of dental stem cells, and other phenotypic adaptations. In addition to chemical signaling, tissue forces generated through epithelial contraction, differential growth, and skeletal constraints act (...) in parallel to shape the tooth throughout development. Here recent advances in understanding dental development from these studies are reviewed and important gaps that can be filled through continued application of evolutionary and biomechanical approaches are discussed. (shrink)

This work celebrates the investigative power of phenomenology to explore the phenomenological sense of space and time in conjunction with the phenomenology of intentionality, the invisible, the sacred, and the mystical. It examines the course of life through its ontopoietic genesis, opening the cosmic sphere to logos. The work also explores, on the one hand, the intellectual drive to locate our cosmic position in the universe and, on the other, the pull toward the infinite. It intertwines science and its grounding (...) principles with imagination in order to make sense of the infinite. This book is the second of a two-part work that contains papers presented at the 62nd International Congress of Phenomenology, The Forces of the Cosmos and the Ontopoietic Genesis of Life, held in Paris, France, August 2012. It features the work of scholars in such diverse disciplines as biology, anthropology, pedagogy, and psychology who philosophically investigate the cosmic origins of beingness. Coverage in this second part includes: Communicative Virtues of A-T. Tymieniecka’s Phenomenology of Life, Intentionality of Time and Quantum – Phenomenological Sense of Space, Consciousness of the Cosmos: A Thought Experiment Through Philosophy and Science Fiction, The Cosmos and Bodily Life on Earth Elucidated within the Historicity of Human Existence, Novel as Path - Mamardashvili's Lectures on Proust, and Comments on Max Scheler's Thought and Philosophical Counseling. (shrink)

Resumen En este artículo de investigación trataré de repensar, dentro de la intuición marcada por Heidegger en su interpretación de Kant, el papel que juega la noción de imaginación, en su vinculación inexorable, por un lado, con la apercepción trascendental, y con el tiempo, por otro, a fin de alcanzar, al menos, un esbozo temático de tal imaginación en términos de auto-afección radical del sí-mismo. Y todo ello para mostrar la posibilidad de una lectura interpretativa que haga valer la importancia, (...) justamente, de un sí mismo y/o mismidad.In this paper, I will try to rethink Heidegger’s interpretation of the role of transcendental imagination within his understanding of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. My paper focuses on the connection between transcendental apperception on the one hand and the time on the other. In this sense, I will try to develop a thematic outline of such imagination in terms of radical self-affection of Selfhood. And this in order to show the possibility of an interpretative reading that asserts the importance, precisely, of a self and/or selfhood. (shrink)

This volume advances discussions between critics and defenders of the force-content distinction and opens new ways of thinking about force and speech acts in relation to the unity problem. -/- The force-content dichotomy has shaped the philosophy of language and mind since the time of Frege and Russell. Isn’t it obvious that, for example, the clauses of a conditional are not asserted and must therefore be propositions and propositions the forceless contents of forceful acts? But, others have recently asked in (...) response, how can a proposition be a truth value bearer if it is not unified through the forceful act of a subject that takes a position regarding how things are? Can we not instead think of propositions as being inherently forceful, but of force as being cancelled in certain contexts? And what do indicators of assertoric, but also of directive and interrogative force mean? (shrink)

While experience tells us that time flows from the past to the present and into the future, a number of philosophical and physical objections exist to this commonsense view of dynamic time. In an attempt to make sense of this conundrum, philosophers and physicists are forced to confront fascinating questions, such as: Can effects precede causes? Can one travel in time? Can the expansion of the Universe or the process of measurement in quantum mechanics define a direction in time? In (...) this book, researchers from both physics and philosophy attempt to answer these issues in an interesting, yet rigorous way. This fascinating book will be of interest to physicists and philosophers of science and educated general readers interested in the direction of time. (shrink)

Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...) here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Present Moment Sterner on Returning to the Present Clock Time and Experienced Time Notes.

[This is an old version which is superseded by the published version. I keep it here for the record, as it has been cited.] A strict dichotomy between the force / mode of speech acts and intentional states and their propositional content has been a central feature of analytical philosophy of language and mind since the time of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Recently this dichotomy has been questioned by philosophers such as Peter Hanks (2015, 2016) and Francois Recanati (2016), (...) who argue that we can't account for propositional unity independently of the forceful acts of speakers and propose new ways of responding to the notorious 'Frege point' by appealing to a notion of force cancellation. In my paper I will offer some supplementary criticisms of the traditional view, but also a way of reconceptualizing the force-content distinction which allows us to preserve certain of its features, and an alternative response to the Frege point that rejects the notion of force cancellation in favor of an appeal to intentional acts that create additional forms of unity at higher levels of intentional organization: acts such as questioning a statement or order, or merely putting it forward or entertaining it; pretending to state or order; or conjoining or disjoining statements or orders. This allows us to understand how we can present a forceful act without being committed to it. In contrast, the Frege point confuses a lack of commitment to with a lack of commitment or force in what is put forward. (shrink)

Speech act theorists tend to hold that the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by one interlocutor alone: either the speaker or the hearer. Yet experience tells us that the force of our utterances is not determined unilaterally. Rather, communication often feels collaborative. In this paper, I develop and defend a collaborative theory of illocutionary force, according to which the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by an agreement reached by the speaker and the hearer. This theory, which (...) builds upon linguistic and sociological work on adjacency pairs and conversational interaction, can accommodate the complexity of speaker intentions (which may be disjunctive, indeterminate, and/or inconsistent over time), and renders speech act theory more compatible with theories of common ground. (shrink)

In ancient times, when persuasion played the role of public force, eloquence was necessary. Of what use would it be today, when public force has replaced persuasion. One needs neither art nor metaphor to say such is my pleasure. Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Darwin and feminism: preliminary investigations into a possible alliance -- Darwin and the ontology of life -- The Nature of culture -- Law, justice, and the future -- The Time of violence: Derrida, deconstruction, and value -- Drucilla Cornell, identity, and the "Evolution" of Politics -- Philosophy, knowledge, and the future -- Deleuze, Bergson, and the virtual -- Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the question of ontology -- The thing -- Prosthetic objects -- Identity, sexual difference, and the future -- The Time (...) of thought -- The Force of sexual difference -- (Inhuman) forces: power, pleasure, and desire -- The future of female sexuality. (shrink)

In an ideal democracy, people from all walks of life would come together to talk meaningfully and respectfully about politics. But we do not live in an ideal democracy. In contemporary democracies, which are marked by deep social divisions, different groups for the most part avoid talking to each other. And when they do talk to each other, their speech often seems to be little more than a vehicle for rage, hatred, and deception. -/- Democratic Speech in Divided Times argues (...) that we should nevertheless not give up on the ideal of democratic public speech. Drawing on the resources of political theory, epistemology, and philosophy of language, this book develops a sustained account of the norms that should govern public discourse in deeply divided circumstances. Should we try to find common ground when we talk to our political opponents, even though they seem unreasonable? Should we refrain from expressing anger, if we want to get things done? How can we use our speech to fight hate speech and disinformation? And is it even possible to speak to 'the other side,' in settings where different groups dislike one another, live apart from one another, and don't know much about one another? By tackling these questions, Lepoutre demonstrates that, when governed by the right set of norms, public speech can be a powerful force for good even amidst profound social divisions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXV, Numbers 1 and 2, April/November 1999, pp. 83-99 Force and Vivacity in the Treatise and the Enquiry FRANCIS W. DAUER Hume's appeal to "force and vivacity" presents a challenge to those of us who try to render his views as plausible as possible. Of course, if we reject "folk psychology " or an appeal to our consciousness, the challenge becomes insurmountable. Fortunately, in today's philosophical (...) climate such appeals are no longer universally rejected, and at least in some quarters there may be interest in discerning what such appeals may reveal. But even granting such an appeal, is there anything given to our consciousness that will do the kind of work Hume intends for force and vivacity? I shall attempt to make an affirmative answer as plausible as I can. Recall that Hume appeals to force and vivacity to distinguish (1) impressions from ideas, (2) memory from other ideas, and (3) beliefs from fictions of the fancy. In my defense of Hume, I shall urge that, taken separately, each of these appeals has some plausibility and to this extent provides some tentative suggestions on what it is like to perceive, remember, and believe. Before proceeding to this defense, several preliminaries are called for. Hume's view on force and vivacity underwent changes in his writings, and no one view can be said to be his account of force and vivacity. His initial view occurs in Book I of the Treatise (which was published along with Book II). By the time the Appendix of the Treatise was published with Book III, we see Hume shifting away from his initial view. Further changes, as well as a full appreciation of the shift, can be found in the Enquiry. For most of this paper I shall primarily be concerned with his later views, though earlier views will Francis W. Dauer is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, South Hall, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93105, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 84 Francis W. Dauer occasionally be mentioned for contrast. In the final section, I shall address the more exegetical issues concerning Hume's change of mind over the years. While space constraints prevent a discussion that will do justice to the views of other commentators, a few words may be in order to indicate what I think is needed to render Hume's views plausible. Leaving aside commentators finding fatal defects with his account, those trying to salvage a tolerable reading of Hume more or less identify force and vivacity with belief (which Hume on one occasion says is the true and proper name for the feeling). One group focuses on Hume's use of 'force' and proposes a functionalist account of force and vivacity whereby it is a causal property of "perceptions" (in the wide sense) to produce such states as passions and actions which are functionally related to beliefs.1 At least on the face of it, this is at odds with force and vivacity being available to consciousness, and I shall take it that Hume took force and vivacity to be so available. Beyond this, while I shall take it that Hume appealed to force and vivacity to distinguish impressions from ideas, a functionalist account has difficulties in preventing impressions from degenerating into mere beliefs (unless something quite foreign to the Humean framework is appealed to).2 A second line of thought is due to Wayne Waxman, who identifies force and vivacity with something like a felt sense of reality or truth, with impressions having this quality in the highest degree.3 While this avoids the first defect of the functionalist account, I believe it fails to avoid a variant of the second problem: without appealing to something quite un-Humean, some impressions can become mere beliefs, and vice versa.41 shall assume that force and vivacity must be consciously available, and that appealing to them, at least in one guise, must allow impressions and ideas to be distinguished. Impressions Hume introduces the distinction between impressions and ideas in the Treatise by saying: The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness with which... (shrink)

This essay proposes a new interpretation of a central, and yet overlooked, argument Leibniz offers against Descartes’s power-free ontology of the corporeal world. Appealing to considerations about the successiveness of motion, Leibniz attempts to show that the reality of motion requires force. It is often assumed that the argument is driven by concerns inspired by Zeno. Against such a reading, this essay contends that Leibniz’s argument is instead best understood against the background of an Aristotelian view of the priority of (...) real being over time. The essay also shows how this alternative interpretation can help to shed new light on the difference between Leibnizian forces and Aristotelian powers, as well as on Leibniz’s famous claim that accounting for force leads us beyond the mechanistic corporeal realm. (shrink)

Speech act theorists tend to hold that the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by one interlocutor alone: either the speaker or the hearer. Yet experience tells us that the force of our utterances is not determined unilaterally. Rather, communication often feels collaborative. In this paper, I develop and defend a collaborative theory of illocutionary force, according to which the illocutionary force of an utterance is determined by an agreement reached by the speaker and the hearer. This theory, which (...) builds upon linguistic and sociological work on adjacency pairs and conversational interaction, can accommodate the complexity of speaker intentions (which may be disjunctive, indeterminate, and/or inconsistent over time), and renders speech act theory more compatible with theories of common ground. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Non‐Euclidean Geometry The General Theory Superluminal Constraints and the GTR Lorentz Invariance and the GTR Quantum Theories in Non‐Minkowski Space‐times The GTR to the Rescue?

This chapter contains sections titled: Coordinate Systems: Euclidean Space Invariant Quantities Classical Space‐times Special Relativity Consequences of the Lorentz Transformation Lorentz Invariant Quantities.

Forced population migration is not a modern phenomenon. It is often an integral part of totalitarian policies and has been used repeatedly to ensure the survival of political regimes or achieve specific political ambitions. Violent migration is present practically throughout history when considering the time scope and everywhere, practically in all continents of the world, with a specter of variations depending on the context imposed by the political circumstances, we can encounter it under different names. These variations have also reflections (...) in the terminology used, among others, they are also indicators that speak of the different methods applied in order to achieve particular policies. Individuals, families, or even whole peoples are forced to migrate violently, abandon their homes and leave behind them all their lives, including the material goods created up to that moment. Seen from a normal retrospective, forced migration represents the culmination of a regime’s goals to dominate the territory without hindrance from any possible resistance. This fact has brought so many tragedies to humanity, and even worse, it has often ended with “legitimization” by international treaties or has even been the product of inter-state agreements. Forced population migration has clearly brought to the surface the evil purpose and has revealed territorial ambitions. (shrink)

This paper defends a realist account of the composition of Newtonian forces, dubbed ‘residualism’. According to residualism, the resultant force acting on a body is identical to the component forces acting on it that do not prevent each other from bringing about its acceleration. Several reasons to favor residualism over alternative accounts of the composition of forces are advanced. (i) Residualism reconciles realism about component forces with realism about resultant forces while avoiding any threat of causal overdetermination. (ii) Residualism provides (...) a systematic semantics for the term ‘force’ within Newtonian mechanics. (iii) Residualism allows us to precisely apportion the causal responsibility of each component force in the ensuing acceleration. (iv) Residualism handles special cases such as null forces, single forces, and antagonistic forces in a natural way. (v) Residualism provides a neat picture of the causal powers of forces: each force essentially has two causal powers⎯the power to bring about accelerations (sometimes together with other co-directionnal forces) and the power to prevent other forces from doing so⎯exactly one of which is manifested at a time. (vi) Residualism avoids commitment to unobservable effects of forces: forces cause either stresses (tensile or compressive) or accelerations. (shrink)

This paper considers Kant’s conception of force and causality in his early pre-Critical writings, arguing that this conception is best understood by way of contrast with his immediate predecessors, such as Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier, Martin Knutzen, and Christian August Crusius, and in terms of the scientific context of natural philosophy at the time. Accordingly, in the True estimation Kant conceives of force in terms of activity rather than in terms of specific effects, such as motion. Kant’s (...) explicit arguments in the Nova dilucidatio for physical influx are directed primarily against the conception of grounds and existence held by Wolff, Baumgarten, and Meier, and only secondarily against Leibniz. Finally, Kant’s reconciliation of the infinite divisibility of space and the unity of monads in the Physical monadology is designed to respond to objections that could be raised naturally by Wolff and Baumgarten.Author Keywords: Kant; Pre-Critical; Force, Causality; Wolff; Leibniz. (shrink)

Schütz’ tuning-in relationship designates sharing time as the ground of we-experiences, but the Husserlian account of time that he relies upon for this argument seems to undermine the very possibility of doing so. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s conception of temporality offers a more plausible account of shared time via the ‘transferability’ of the body schema. Disability theorists and critical phenomenologists, however, would remind us that any account of we-experiences must recognize bodily difference. I argue that bodies of diverse motilities can (...) come to share a body schema without risk of ‘forced time compliance’ if we jettison synchronization and embrace improvisation as a paradigm for schematic sharing: I use the example of collective free improvisation to illustrate flexible, emergent, and bidirectional body schemas that, I claim, circumvent the assimilationist tendencies looming in any account of we-experiences premised upon bodily sameness. (shrink)

Roughly 20 percent of organic cropland wasdevoted to produce compared to only 3 percent forconventional agriculture in 1995. At the otherextreme, only 6 percent of organic cropland was incorn production while 25 percent of all croplandproduced corn. Only 30 percent of all organicfarmland was in pasture and rangeland compared to 66percent of all farmland. Clearly, these differencesreflect the greater importance of meat and dairyproduction in agriculture overall than in the organicsubsector. In recent years, the organic industry hasgrown not only in (...) volume but in products offered,moving well beyond fresh produce into dairy, snacks,and frozen foods. The estimated growth in retail salesof organic foods averaged over 20 percent a year forthe last eight years compared to only two percent inthe food industry overall, reaching an estimated $4.5billion in 1998. The mix of commodities produced atthe farm level have and will continue to change inresponse to several dynamic forces, including consumerdemand, regulation, and consolidations, mergers, andmainstream entrants at the farm, manufacturing, andretail levels. Consumer demand for organic foods hasbeen spurred by a number of factors including concernsover pesticide residues on foods, food produced usinggenetically modified organisms (GMOs), and hormones indairy and meat products. These concerns coupled withthe overall increase in demand for convenience foodsexplain the phenomenal recent growth of over 70 percent in sales of organic snacks, candy, and frozenfoods. The result has been increased demand forGMO-free grains for snacks, cereals, soy products, andfeed for dairy cows. The recent allowance by USDA forthe labeling of meat and poultry as organic willaccelerate already heightened demand for organic grainand feed from the organic dairy industry. Although thefastest growth in organic foods has been in categoriesother than produce, clearly produce plays an importantrole in the consumers decision on where to shop, anddemand should increase with the overall increase inthe number of organic consumers. Market outlets nowinclude sophisticated natural food store chains,gourmet specialty stores, and e-commerce, allowing fora broadened array of products. Mainstream agriculturalproducers, manufacturers, and supermarket chains haveentered the organic marketplace at a time of lowprices for commodities at the farm gate, fiercecompetition for retail shelf space, and increasinglysophisticated targeting of consumers. Inevitably,these changes in food products offered and in retailoutlets will lead to an organic agriculture thatincreasingly resembles the conventional foodindustry. (shrink)

To understand the variations in the financial characteristics, we examine the dynamical behaviors by considering the chaotic financial model with external force. First, the dynamical characteristics are analyzed by introducing the external driven force in the price index with commodity demand. We discover that the presence of an external force causes the alternate occurrence of oscillatory and steady states as a function of time. Interestingly, we find the existence of bifurcation delay during the transition from oscillatory to steady state or (...) vice versa. Bifurcation delay is a phenomenon in which the bifurcation does not occur at the actual bifurcation point but rather at a later time, which is referred to as bifurcation delay. To confirm the delay in bifurcation, we estimate the actual bifurcation point and compare it to the observed bifurcation transition. Furthermore, to understand the variations in the bifurcation delay, we estimate the delay time between each consecutive cycle and find random fluctuations in the BD. Following that, the BD is virtualized via a transformed phase portrait. In addition, we show decreasing the value of average BD while increasing the frequency of external forcing. Second, the presence of BD is explored by incorporating external forces into the investment demand with unit investment cost. We discover the existence of a similar phenomenon with a constant bifurcation delay. (shrink)

From widespread unemployment and mounting international hostilities, every day we are swept into more political chaos--so one brave man looks to the Star Wars universe for answers to our most urgent problems. "You can't stop the change -- anymore than you can stop the sun from setting." Anakin Skywalker was never able to live with this wisdom shared by his mother on the day he left home to train as a Jedi Knight. That failure led him to becoming the fearsome (...) villain we all know as Darth Vader. We're living in a time of unprecedented and rapid change. An age of chaos. Democracies are in decline worldwide. Dictators are ascendant. Civic organizations are crumbling. People feel lonelier and more rudderless than in any other time in recent history. We've tried to slow down, and in some cases we, like Anakin, have tried stop the change, but failed at every turn. The fears that come with living in an age of disruption have produced public anger, and that anger has swelled movements of hate. Author Stephen Kent believes part of the solution is hiding in plain sight. A story that binds together multiple generations with a common language, a moral framework, and a sense of wonder. It's Star Wars. What if we looked to Star Wars for more than just entertainment? How the Force Can Fix the World takes this challenge on by analyzing the core principles of the Star Wars franchise: HOPE, CHOICE, HUMILITY, EMPATHY, REDEMPTION, BALANCE and rejecting FEAR. Together, these are the Star Wars roadmap for living better lives, and maybe even fostering a better politics. The path that we're on -- where fear leads to anger, and anger to hatred -- will only end in suffering. But Star Wars shows us the way back from the brink. Shared stories of virtue that are beloved across cultures and political divides are hard to come by, but Star Wars is one such story. Turn on the news; things are pretty broken right now -- but the Force can fix the world. (shrink)