Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527-Criticism and interpretation ; Political science-Translating.

Wilderness valued as mere resource for human?interest satisfaction is challenged in favor of wilderness as a productive source, in which humans have roots, but which also yields wild neighbors and aliens with intrinsic value. Wild value is storied achievement in an evolutionary ecosystem, with instrumental and intrinsic, organismic and systemic values intermeshed. Survival value is reconsidered in this light. Changing cultural appreciations of values in wilderness can transform and relativize our judgments about appropriate conduct there. A final valued element in (...) wildness is its idiographic historical particularity, and most surprising is the emergence of a novel morality when humans learn to let values go wild. (shrink)

This paper explores how civic food networks (CFN) use public forums to engage with other initiatives and stakeholders in civil society. It develops the concept of social infrastructure to capture the assemblages of discourses, networking and spaces around agrifood forums. The research then examines how social infrastructures support CFNs’ capacity to organize communities and challenge power relations in the agrifood system. Two cases are compared: News&Market, a Taiwan-based agrifood news platform which also sells organic food products, and Foodthink, a collective (...) blog created by a farmers’ market in China. Both started in the late 2010s but one focuses on policy critiques while the other focuses on market critiques. A comparison finds that CFNs develop different critiques to address the specific challenges facing local alternative food networks (AFNs), and use networking and space creation to promote social dialogue with other stakeholders or build networks across AFNs and NGOs. The paper argues that a social infrastructure such as that built around agrifood forums enables CFNs to shape food democracy and food citizenship practices in new ways. (shrink)

On the scale of decades and centuries, ongoingscience is reconfigured into human history that must be interpreted. So I concluded two decades back: "Progressively reforming and developing theories are erected over observations.... This leads at a larger scale to progressively reforming and developing narrative models.... The story is ever reforming" (pp. 338 — 39). I faced the future with hopes and fears about the escalating powers of science for good and evil, finding it simultaneously powerless for the meaningful guidance of (...) life, the classical province of religion. So now„having turned the millennium, what's new in the story? If I had to give a sound-bite answer (as we now must do with the media), my reply would be: increasing concern about human uniqueness and human respon-. (shrink)

A set of constraints forces trade-offs which prevent us from achieving the best possible definitions of the ‘level’ and ‘unit’ of natural selection. This set consists in decisions concerning conflicting pre-analytic intuitions in problematic cases, the relative roles of various conceptual resources in the definitions, which facts need to be accounted for using the definitions, how the relation between selection and evolution orients the definitions, and the relation between the level and unit concepts. Systematic reconstruction and evaluation of leading analyses (...) along these dimensions favors a new functional analysis over Williams’ consequentialist analysis, Sober’s causal analysis, and Dawkins’ teleological analysis. (shrink)

Lawyers and the legal system have been much criticized in recent years. Despite popular perceptions, the legal system contains numerous mechanisms and rules designed to ensure fair results. This paper shows how the legal system tries to implement, in commercial transactions, the ethical principles of truthfulness and fairness. The Anglo-American development of Equity Courts is reviewed briefly. Several examples of the Law's enforcement of ethical principles are presented, in four different legal areas: Contracts, Securities, Goods, and Real Estate. The intent (...) here is to present an overview of the problem, with area-specific illustrations, rather than a comprehenisve examination of the cases in just one area. (shrink)

Few discussions of environmental conservation continue long without reaching the question "Why?", and the answers are seldom elaborated for long without reaching the question of values. What we wish to conserve depends on what we value. What we ought to conserve depends on what we ought to value. Environmental ethics is entwined with values carried by nature. What is of value there? How are values to be discovered and judged? That is a philosophical question.

The focus immediately shifted to cognitive psychology, to the cybernetic brain, with its neural genius for mental (or "spirited") experience. The ideational powers of the..

The paper interprets Nietzsche’s description of authentic human person.Based on the works of Nietzsche, commentaries and philosophical interpretationsof various authors, authentic human person evolves into a superman by usingthe principles of discipline and mastery of oneself. His authenticity, however,requires persistence, courage and strength to endure many forms of sufferingsand to overcome alienation brought about by his environment. Otherwise,man would become slave of his desires or alien to his own powers, talents andcapacities. Thus, Nietzsche’s thought of superman is an invitation to (...) overcomeoneself, the self that is influenced by the non-self or factors outside one self. Itis only possible by using the will to power. The will to power of man overcomesthe influences of the world’s modernization and industrialization that alienateshim to his true self, and this true self is best expressed by his will to power. Onthis note, the author suggests that the readers must use their potentials to face up to challenges of this new era. Keywords: Philosophy, language and literature, emergence, authentic human person,philosophy of the superman, authenticity, alienation, morality, descriptivedesign, Philippines. (shrink)

After so much scholarship has been devoted to the dispute between the defenders and critics of liberalism, it is reasonable to ask whether the topic has been exhausted or, at the very least, if the rival and incommensurable options have been so thoroughly defined that one simply has to pick a side. John Christman's new book, The Politics of Persons, demonstrates that this intuition is flawed. The central concern of this compelling work is to outline an alternative conception of autonomy (...) that incorporates a wide range of insights provided by the critics of liberalism. What emerges is not only a plausible philosophical compromise but also a politically relevant model for understanding how the policies and .. (shrink)