In this article, we explore the implications of a Rawlsian theory for intergenerational issues. First, we confront Rawls's way of locating his `just savings' principle in his Theory of Justice with an alternative way of doing so. We argue that both sides of his intergenerational principle, as they apply to the accumulation phase and the steady-state stage, can be dealt with on the bases, respectively, of the principle of equal liberty and of the difference principle. We then proceed by focusing (...) on the implications of applying maximin to his steady-state stage. One central claim is that, in principle, Rawlsians should consider not only generational dissavings, but also generational savings, as unfair. This principle suffers a series of exceptions on which we focus in the fourth section of the article. In some cases, growth can be maximin compatible. (shrink)

The idea of creation as the free, spontaneous, and joyous play (līlā) of the gods has been a pervasive motif in Indian thought since Vedic times. In the tradition of Advaita Vedānta, however, where the sole Reality is Brahman alone, divine playfulness is given an illusionistic interpretation and līlā becomes an expression of the deceptive power of māyā.

Contemporary capitalism is in effect, if not in intent, Deleuzian. As a network of networks, it is rhizomatic, flexible, chaosmotic, evolving, expanding. In the negativist spirit that characterizes the work of the Frankfurt School, this article shows via an analysis of the goverment of the self, the commodification of culture and the modification of nature, how contemporary capitalism does colonize not only the life-world but also life itself.

A view inherited from Max Weber states that purposive rational action, value rational action and affective action are three distinct types of social action that can compete, oppose, complement or substitute each other in social explanations. Contrary to this statement, I will defend the view that these do not constitute three different types of social actions, but that social actions always seem to concurrently involve rationality, normativity and affectivity. I show this by discussing the links between rational actions and consequentialism (...) and non-consequentialism, and by elaborating on certain major relationships between rationality, normativity and emotions. (shrink)

Some writers have noted that valuation is often focused on foreseen changes. They say that we often don't value situations in terms of what we would have in them only but also in terms of the gains or losses that they offer us — that we then focus on departures from our status quo. They argue that such thinking conflicts with basic economic analysis, and also that it violates logic: they say that it is irrational. I agree that it seems (...) to be common. But is such a way of setting one's values a challenge to economics? And does it conflict with being rational? (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self, of which the attribution of agency is a major component. In this article, we review current theories of the Sense of Agency, their relevance to schizophrenia, and propose a novel framework for future research. We explore some of the models of agency, in which both bottom-up and top-down processes are implicated in the genesis of agency. We further this line of inquiry by suggesting that ongoing neurological activity (the brain’s resting state) in self-referential (...) regions of the brain can provide a deeper level of influence beyond what the current models capture. Based on neuroimaging studies, we suggest that aberrant activity in regions such as the default mode network of individuals with schizophrenia can lead to a misattribution of internally/externally generated stimuli. This can result in symptoms such as thought insertion and delusions of control. Consequently, neuroimaging can contribute to a more comprehensive conceptualization and measurement of agency and potential treatment implications. (shrink)

Fengshui is a practice and skill whose origins go back to Chinese antiquity. It is about finding the best possible arrangement in space to position a grave or a habitation in such a way that human beings who have a link with that place might have success and happiness. The basic idea is that a good geomantic site will fill the distant ancestors with peace in their grave and that they will thus do everything to help their family. The text (...) deals with the history of fengshui, its methods as well as its conception of nature. (shrink)

Reading the Communist Manifesto against the contemporary background of massive unemployment, the author argues that Marx's theory of work is no longer adequate to tackle the problem of `workers without work' and suggests that it has to be reformulated in such a way that its normative intuitions and its critical impulses can be maintained. In the first part, he presents a philosophical critique of Marxism that is inspired by Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. In the second part, he presents a (...) sociological critique of Marxism and argues that the theory of the alienation of work implies a justification of work and the work society. Finally, in the last part, the author presents an ideological critique of Marxism that is inspired by Marcel Mauss' sociology of the gift. Criticising the contractualist assumptions of workfare solutions, he proposes a package solution for a radical decommodification of the labour market by means of a disjunction of income and work. (shrink)

Buddhism was not really known in the West until a little more than 150 years ago. Although since the thirteenth century there had been numerous contacts with local Buddhist traditions, the travellers and missionaries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had not yet brought to light the history of Buddhism and its unity across this immense diversity of worship and doctrine, disseminated through most of the countries of Asia. Of course, since the seventeenth century some Europeans had guessed at (...) the Indian origin of the Buddha and they succeeded in pinning down his historical existence after a fashion. In 1691 and 1693 Simon de la Loubère, Louis XIV's envoy at the court of the king of Siam, published remarkable research which established the possibility of a link between the different regions of Siam, Ceylon, Japan and China and conjured up the possible existence of a single founder long before Christ. But this far too isolated knowledge had scarcely any impact in Europe. It was only with the foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 that orientalism was to enjoy a rapid and decisive expansion. The word ‘Buddhism’ appeared from the 1820s onwards, and with it the first conceptualization of a tree with many branchings. But it was not until the publication, in 1844, of Eugène Burnouf's magisterial Introduction l'histoire du buddhisme indien, that more detailed knowledge became available, thanks to a critical scrutiny of the most varied sources. The works of the French scholar and of other pioneers in Buddhist studies - mainly Alexander Csoma de Koros and Edmond Foucaux on Tibet, Jean-Pierre Abel-Remusat and Stanislas Julien on China, Christian Lassen and Spence Hardy on Ceylon - were to give rise to a tremendous craze for Buddhism in Europe. Since then there has been no break in the successive waves disseminating it right up to the present day, when the majority of Western countries appear to be so receptive to the message of the Buddha that for some years the media have been insistently questioning the reasons for this ‘Buddhist wave’. (shrink)

In a conflict between two people, one person wants one thing and the other wants something else and they think they can't both have what they want. Suppose that what they want can only be the outcome of some joint action. Adam must do either y or z and Eve either y ' or z ' – here y -and- y ' would be one joint action, y -and- z ' would be another, and so on. Adam wants the outcome (...) of his doing z while Eve is doing y '. Eve wants the outcome of her doing z ' while Adam is doing y. Each thinks that these outcomes can't both be had. (shrink)

We resolve a useful formulation of the question how a statistician can coherently incorporate the information in a consulted expert’s probability assessment for an event into a personal posterior probability assertion. Using a framework that recognises the total information available as composed of units available only to each of them along with units available to both, we show: that a sufficient statistic for all the information available to both the expert and the statistician is the product of their odds ratios (...) in favour of the event; that the geometric mean of their two probabilities specifies a contour of pairs of assertions in the unit-square that yield the same posterior probability; that the information-combining function is parameterised by an unknown probability for the event conditioned only on the unspecified information common to both the statistician and the expert; and that an assessable mixing distribution over this unspecified probability allows an integrable mixture distribution to represent a computable posterior probability. The exact results allow the identification of the subclass of coherent probabilities that are externally Bayesian operators. This subclass is equivalent to the class of combining functions that honour the principles of uniformity and compromise. (shrink)

The controversy over judicial activism is as old as the question whether law is “made” or “found” by the courts, and is die quintessential living question for legal philosophers. Here the practical meets the abstract, as Supreme Court justices must, explicitly or not, adopt some philosophical viewpoint in deciding how general constitutional propositions do, or do not, decide current concress te controversies.

The study of human origins is a kaleidoscopic field, a multitude of objects, reflections, and disciplines a swirl in an ever-changing tumult. The extreme diversity of the elements of information that are indispensable to this field of study (teeth, bones, apes, genes, ancient objects, present-day objects, biomechanical factors, cultural constructions …) appears all by itself to be enough to consign any attempt at synthesis to the realm of the Utopian. It hardly seems reasonable to expect the disparate sciences that fuel (...) the field (paleoanthropology, archaeology, molecular biology, physics, psychology, and others) and the contradictory conceptions of scientific activity that they defend (human sciences, natural sciences, experimental sciences, exact sciences) to be joined with any regularity. As for formulating an overall problematics of the interdependent phenomena encountered in the field, one would have to be more than optimistic to entertain such dreams. And yet this is exactly the program that prehistory and paleoanthropology are laboring to construct tinder the label “the study of the origins of man,” an expression that includes both diachronic processes (human evolution) and activities or behaviors from particular moments, elements that are exceedingly difficult to compare given the separation of their geographic and temporal contexts. (shrink)

"Die Tat" concerns the effort to recapture a particular memory. In searching to recover that memory trace the writer discovers that the memory datum itself diffuses and breaks up into the present remembering action of the one who remembers. The essay anatomizes that process of diffusion, and tries to come up with a definition of memory.

Le titre de ce recueil indique trois fonctions et une période. Heureux complément au très beau volume, plus historique, dirigé par Ran Halévi (Le savoir du Prince du Moyen Age aux Lumières, Paris, Fayard, 2002), son intérêt repose sur le jeu permis par cette triade problématique. Du conseiller professionnel au pur littéraire, de nombreux auteurs et textes aux statuts différents sont examinés. Au-delà de la question classique de l’engagement du philosophe dans un domaine qui n’est pas pour lui..

Cet article vise à établir un lien entre l’occurrence pratique du terme daimon dans le fragment B 115 d’Empédocle, généralement associée à un sens propre, et son usage dans le contexte simplement physique de B 59. Afin de trancher la question de l’indépendance, de la subordination ou de l’équivalence entre les deux usages, nous menons une analyse lexicologique des deux occurrences dans leur contexte syntaxique : l’importance de l’individualité comme relation à d’autres entités de même ordre fait signe dans les (...) deux cas vers une notion unique de daimon, rendant possible de fonder une analogie entre démons physiques et démons pratiques. (shrink)

La publication de cet Aristoteles-Lexikon, sous la direction d’Otfried Höffe, fournit au lecteur germaniste un instrument de travail pratique et accessible, qui témoigne de la vitalité des études aristotéliciennes outre-Rhin, puisque pas moins de vingt-huit chercheurs, dans différentes universités, ont contribué à cet ouvrage. Plutôt que d’un index, c’est-à-dire d’une liste de citations regroupées par termes, sans prétention interprétative, il s’agit d’un dictionnaire visant à éclairer les co...

Cet article propose la critique d’un concept relativement nouveau en jeu dans la détention et l’exclusion des migrants « irréguliers », à savoir que l’État-nation a une « capacité d’accueil » limitée et objective quant à l’accueil des étrangers – une capacité qui, lorsqu’elle est dépassée, justifie une défense militarisée. Distincte des rationalités gouvernementales plus explicitement racistes qui ont sous-tendu les premiers quotas d’immigration aux États-Unis, la notion de « capacité d’accueil » nationale a une logique propre dans laquelle écologie (...) et économie sont rendues fatalement inextricables. L’expression « charge maximale » d’un territoire donné s’est développée dans le contexte de l’environnementalisme américain comme moyen de régulation des populations de gibier non humain et s’est ensuite transformée en un langage pour évaluer le potentiel des marchés émergents. La théorie de Freud sur les blessures psychiques commence par postuler par contre une « capacité de réception » infinie [Aufnahmefähigkeit] propre au système perceptif humain – une capacité illimitée à accueillir ce qui est extérieur, qui est à la fois la condition d’origine de la vie incarnée et ce qui doit être géré et régulé pour survivre. Les spéculations de Freud dans Au-delà du principe de plaisir aident à dissoudre une conception mythopoétique de la Vie qui est depuis devenue centrale dans l’imaginaire racial anti-immigrant. (shrink)

In his book "Organic Chemistry in its Application to Agriculture and Chemistry." Justus Liebig attacked "the plant physiologists" for their support of the humus theory and for their general ignorance of chemistry. Two leading botanists, Matthias Schleiden and Hugo von Mohl, responded by sharply criticizing Liebig for his lack of knowledge of plants and his misrepresentation of the views of plant physiologists. The origin and character of this debate can be understood in part through the temperaments of Liebig and Schleiden, (...) but can be viewed also as a contest for control between the well-established discipline of chemistry and a potential discipline of plant physiology that had as yet acquired no stable institutional foundations. (shrink)

At the phenomenal level, consciousness can be described as a singular, unified field of recursive self-awareness, consistently coherent in a particualr way; that of a subject located both spatially and temporally in an egocentrically-extended domain, such that conscious self-awareness is explicitly characterized by I-ness, now-ness and here-ness. The psychological mechanism underwriting this spatiotemporal self-locatedness and its recursive processing style involves an evolutionary elaboration of the basic orientative reference frame which consistently structures ongoing spatiotemporal self-location computations as i-here-now. Cognition computes action-output (...) in the midst of ongoing movement, and consequently requires a constant self-locating spatiotemporal reference frame as basis for these computations. Over time, constant evolutionary pressures for energy efficiency have encouraged both the proliferation of anticipative feedforward processing mechansims, and the elaboration, at the apex of the sensorimotor processing hierarchy, of self-activating, highly attenuated recursively-feedforward circuitry processing the basic orientational schema independent of external action output. As the primary reference frame of active waking cognition, this recursive i-here-now processing generates a zone of subjective self-awareness in terms of which it feels like something to be oneself here and now. This is consciousness. (shrink)

In this book Frederic Schick develops his challenge to standard decision theory. He argues that talk of the beliefs and desires of an agent is not sufficient to explain choices. To account for a given choice we need to take into consideration how the agent understands the problem, how he sees in a selective way the options open to him. The author applies his new logic to a host of common human predicaments. Why do people in choice experiments act so (...) often against expectations? Why do people cooperate in situations where textbook logic predicts that they won't? What exactly is weakness of will? What are people reporting when they say their lives have no meaning for them? This book questions the foundations of technical and philosophical decision theory and will appeal to all those who work in that field, be they philosophers, economists and psychologists. (shrink)

. Computational chemistry grew in a new era of “desktop modeling,” which coincided with a growing demand for modeling software, especially from the pharmaceutical industry. Parameterization of models in computational chemistry is an arduous enterprise, and we argue that this activity leads, in this specific context, to tensions among scientists regarding the epistemic opacity transparency of parameterized methods and the software implementing them. We relate one flame war from the Computational Chemistry mailing List in order to assess in detail the (...) relationships between modeling methods, parameterization, software and the various forms of their enclosure or disclosure. Our claim is that parameterization issues are an important and often neglected source of epistemic opacity and that this opacity is entangled in methods and software alike. Models and software must be addressed together to understand the epistemological tensions at stake. (shrink)

This is an important new book about human motivation, about the reasons people have for their actions. What is distinctively new about it is its focus on how people see or understand their situations, options, and prospects. By taking account of people's understandings, Professor Schick is able to expand the current theory of decision and action. The author provides a perspective on the topic by outlining its history. He defends his new theory against criticism, considers its formal structure, and shows (...) at length how it resolves many currently debated problems: the problems of conflict and weakness of will, Allais' problem, Kahneman and Tversky's problems, Newcomb's problem, and others. The book will be of special interest to philosophers, psychologists, and economists. (shrink)

The following text is a translation of Semyon Frank’s “L’intuition fondamentale de Bergson” published in Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages inédits, edited by Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1941. In this article, Frank addresses Bergson’s notion of intuition, his anti-intellectualism, his mysticism, his closeness to Lebensphilosophie, the notion of lived experience, the distinction between intuition as pure contemplation and intuition as living knowledge, the distinction between cognition of the atemporal essence of reality and cognition of (...) the world of becoming, pragmatism, the disinterested and open intuitive spiritual attitude vs the utilitarian attitude of social groups closed in on themselves, the transrational vs the irrational, spiritual life, psychic life, the Absolute, and the temporal flux. The article contains criticisms of Bergson on the issues of time and intuition: the durée, the intuitive time, is incomprehensible without an atemporal foundation. Therefore, according to Frank, Plato was correct—contra Bergson—to define time as the moving image of eternity. And, if there is such an atemporal foundation, then, contrary to what Bergson seems to think, intuition as living knowledge cannot be the sole mode of intuition. Moreover, unlike what Bergson appears to think, an intuition of the Absolute would be an intuition of the transrational rather than of the irrational. The translation is preceded by an introduction tracing the genesis of the article, which was commissioned by the Swiss philosopher Pierre Thévenaz. (shrink)

The mystery surrounding consciousness as subjectivity dissipates dramatically when understood in its biological context. The core characteristics of consciousness can be seen to derive from its functionality, and the fundamental function of cognition, given the equivalence of mental activity and brain process, is to advance the survival and thus the self-regulative capacity of the organism of which the brain is a part. These core elements of consciousness are comprised of a self-locational data structure which serves to configure ongoing experience in (...) terms of controllable spatial and temporal parameters, and a processing regime for this orientational schema which has evolved from the feedback architecture necessary for regulating behavior in relation to homeostatic needs. These two self-regulative constituents yield a primitive form of consciousness as subjectivity — simple reflexive awareness — which provides the basis for the subsequent development of metacognitive mechanisms which monitor and control the cognitive processes which regulate behavior in relation to metabolic requirements. (shrink)

This is _the_ leading introduction 200to professional values and ethics in social work. Frederic G. Reamer provides social workers with a succinct and comprehensive overview of the most critical issues relating to professional values and ethics, including the nature of social work values, ethical dilemmas, and professional misconduct. Conceptually rich and attuned to the complexities of ethical decision making, _Social Work Values and Ethics_ is unique in striking the right balance between history, theory, and practical application. For the third edition, (...) Reamer has updated the content and strengthened the relevance of the case material. Also new to the third edition: o Discussion of the moral dialogue between practitioner and cliento Coverage of virtue ethicso Practical discussion of concepts underlying social work ethicso Expanded application of the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics to ethical dilemmas in the professiono A look at the historical evolution of ethical standards in social worko New vignettes, illustrating difficult ethical decisionso More guidance on informed consent and termination of serviceso Discussion questions at the end of each chaptero A section on how to conduct a social work ethics audit. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAs a comment on the debate between Dave Elder-Vass and Leigh Price, I propose a dialogue between Bhaskar and Habermas. If we could introduce critical realism into critical theory, we might...