Delaware’s famous corporate law and its highly respected specialized Court of Chancery attract entrepreneurs from all over the world, who choose the small state as their locus of incorporation and litigation forum, and global investors who choose Delaware law as the law governing their corporate investments and mergers and acquisitions. Other jurisdictions vie with Delaware in regard to these choices. This interjurisdictional competition makes Delaware a significant global norm exporter in the field of corporate law because jurisdictions emulate some of (...) its corporate law. Israel leads the global pack. For two decades, it has been approximating its corporate law to Delaware’s and emulating its principal institutions, including by establishing a specialized Chancery-like court whose judges seek guidance in Delaware’s case law in deciding open corporate law questions. This Article employs qualitative methods—interviews with M&A practitioners from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. We use the interviews to assess whether the project of approximating Delaware corporate law has succeeded in shifting incorporation decision preferences away from Delaware to Israel and watering down the natural reluctance of global investors to accepting an unfamiliar corporate law when engaging in cross-border corporate M&A transactions involving an Israeli party. Our findings indicate that the approximation project has countervailing effects, opinions about its success being polarized and nuanced; that approximation increases the familiarity of domestic practitioners with the foreign law being emulated, making the emulated law easier to implement; and that approximation creates more room for other aspects of interjurisdictional competition to influence private choices. (shrink)

In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought.

Kant announces that the Critique of the Power of Judgment will bring his entire critical enterprise to an end. But it is by no means agreed upon that it in fact does so and, if it does, how. In this book, Ido Geiger argues that a principal concern of the third Critique is completing the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. This includes both Kant's analysis of natural beauty and his discussion of teleological judgments of organisms (...) and of nature generally. Geiger's original reading of the third Critique shows that it forms a unified whole - and that it does in fact deliver the final part of Kant's transcendental undertaking. His book will be valuable to all who are interested in Kant's theory of the aesthetic and conceptual purposiveness of nature. (shrink)

Purpose This paper aims to formalize long-term trajectories of human civilization as a scientific and ethical field of study. The long-term trajectory of human civilization can be defined as the path that human civilization takes during the entire future time period in which human civilization could continue to exist. -/- Design/methodology/approach This paper focuses on four types of trajectories: status quo trajectories, in which human civilization persists in a state broadly similar to its current state into the distant future; catastrophe (...) trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant harm to human civilization; technological transformation trajectories, in which radical technological breakthroughs put human civilization on a fundamentally different course; and astronomical trajectories, in which human civilization expands beyond its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos. -/- Findings Status quo trajectories appear unlikely to persist into the distant future, especially in light of long-term astronomical processes. Several catastrophe, technological transformation and astronomical trajectories appear possible. -/- Originality/value Some current actions may be able to affect the long-term trajectory. Whether these actions should be pursued depends on a mix of empirical and ethical factors. For some ethical frameworks, these actions may be especially important to pursue. (shrink)

Previous studies suggested that emotions can be correctly interpreted from facial expressions in the absence of conscious awareness of the face. Our goal was to explore whether subordinate information about a face’s gender and race could also become available without awareness of the face. Participants classified the race or the gender of unfamiliar faces that were ambiguous with regard to these dimensions. The ambiguous faces were preceded by face-images that unequivocally represented gender and race, rendered consciously invisible by simultaneous continuous-flash-suppression. (...) The classification of ambiguous faces was biased away from the category of the adaptor only when it was consciously visible. The duration of subjective visibility correlated with the aftereffect strength. Moreover, face identity was consequential only if consciously perceived. These results suggest that while conscious awareness is not needed for basic level categorization, it is needed for subordinate categorization. Emotional information might be unique in this respect. (shrink)

Many of its students are first drawn to Kant's practical philosophy because it seems to promise a theory of morality both objective and practicable. Moral theory, as Kant conceives of it, must abst...

Many of its students are first drawn to Kant's practical philosophy because it seems to promise a theory of morality both objective and practicable. Moral theory, as Kant conceives of it, must abst...

Experiments may contribute to understanding the basic processes of cultural evolution. We drew features from previous laboratory research with small groups in which traditions arose during several generations. Groups of four participants chose by consensus between solving anagrams printed on red cards and on blue cards. Payoffs for the choices differed. After 12 min, the participant who had been in the experiment the longest was removed and replaced with a naı¨ve person. These replacements, each of which marked the end of (...) a generation, continued for 10 – 15 generations, at which time the day’s session ended. Time-out duration, which determined whether the group earned more by choosing red or blue, and which was fixed for a day’s session, was varied across three conditions to equal 1, 2, or 3 min. The groups developed choice traditions that tended toward maximizing earnings. The stronger the dependence between choice and earnings, the stronger was the tradition. Once a choice tradition evolved, groups passed it on by instructing newcomers, using some combination of accurate information, mythology, and coercion. Among verbal traditions, frequency of mythology varied directly with strength of the choice tradition. These methods may be applied to a variety of research questions. D 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Dieser Band versammelt (in vielen Fällen schwer zugängliche oder gänzlich unveröffentlichte) Vorträge, Aufsätze und Artikel von Manfred Baum zur theoretischen Philosophie Kants und zu ihrer Rezeption. Es handelt sich um historische und systematisch orientierte Studien zur kritischen Philosophie Kants, die die Forschungen von Julius Ebbinghaus und Klaus Reich fortführen.

The notion of aesthetic ideas is of great importance to Kant's thinking about art. Despite its importance, he says little about it. He characterizes aesthetic ideas as representations of the imagination and says that the gift of artistic genius is the inscrutable capacity to envision them. Furthermore, they are counterparts of rational ideas. Works of art thus sensibly present rational ideas; the pleasure they occasion is a consequence of the enriching process of reflection upon the wealth of content they sensibly (...) present. The purpose of this article is to ask whether all rational ideas have aesthetic ideas as counterparts, and so can be presented in art, or whether only some do and which. The answer should reveal what, for Kant, is the subject-matter of art. I argue that for Kant art is concerned with the range and variety of human freedom as well as with its highest fulfillment in morality. (shrink)

The National Science Foundation's Second Merit Criterion, or Broader Impacts Criterion , was introduced in 1997 as the result of an earlier Congressional movement to enhance the accountability and responsibility as well as the effectiveness of federally funded projects. We demonstrate that a robust understanding and appreciation of NSF BIC argues for a broader conception of research ethics in the sciences than is currently offered in Responsible Conduct of Research training. This essay advocates augmenting RCR education with training regarding broader (...) impacts. We demonstrate that enhancing research ethics training in this way provides a more comprehensive understanding of the ethics relevant to scientific research and prepares scientists to think not only in terms of responsibly conducted science, but also of the role of science in responding to identified social needs and in adhering to principles of social justice. As universities respond to the mandate from America COMPETES to “provide training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research”, we urge institutions to embrace a more adequate conception of research ethics, what we call the Ethical Dimensions of Scientific Research, that addresses the full range of ethical issues relevant to scientific inquiry, including ethical issues related to the broader impacts of scientific research and practice. (shrink)

Buddhist Manuscripts from Central Asia: The British Library Sanskrit Fragments, vol. II. Edited by Seishi Karashima and Klaus Wille. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, 2009. Vol. II.1: pp. 668. Vol. II.2: 382 plates.

Since his death in 1997, Isaiah Berlin's writings have generated continual interest among scholars and educated readers, especially in regard to his ideas about liberalism, value pluralism, and "positive" and "negative" liberty. Most books on Berlin have examined his general political theory, but this volume uses a contemporary perspective to focus specifically on his ideas about freedom and liberty. Isaiah Berlin and the Politics of Freedom brings together an integrated collection of essays by noted and emerging political theorists that commemorate (...) in a critical spirit the recent 50th anniversary of Isaiah Berlin's famous lecture and essay, "Two Concepts of Liberty." The contributors use Berlin's essay as an occasion to rethink the larger politics of freedom from a twenty-first century standpoint, bringing Berlin's ideas into conversation with current political problems and perspectives rooted in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, democratic theory, and critical social theory. The editors begin by surveying the influence of Berlin's essay and the range of debates about freedom that it has inspired. Contributors' chapters then offer various analyses such as competing ways to contextualize Berlin's essay, how to reconsider Berlin's ideas in light of struggles over national self-determination, European colonialism, and racism, and how to view Berlin's controversial distinction between so-called "negative liberty" and "positive liberty." By relating Berlin's thinking about freedom to competing contemporary views of the politics of freedom, this book will be significant for both scholars of Berlin as well as people who are interested in larger debates about the meaning and conditions of freedom. (shrink)

Kant's conception of moral agency is often charged with attributing no role to feelings. I suggest that respect is the effective force driving moral action. I then argue that four additional types of rational feelings are necessary conditions of moral agency: The affective inner life of moral agents deliberating how to act and reflecting on their deeds is rich and complex . To act morally we must turn our affective moral perception towards the ends of moral action: the welfare of (...) others ; and our own moral being . Feelings shape our particular moral acts . I tentatively suggest that the diversity of moral feelings might be as great as the range of our duties. (shrink)

According to Korsgaard’s very influential interpretation, moral normativity follows from a commonly accepted conception of rational agency, namely, the capacity to set ends and pursue them or humanity. The paper argues that humanity is not the source of moral normativity. Taking the exercise of your freedom in pursuit of your ends to be justified commits you to acknowledging the equal claim of others to see themselves as justified in the pursuit of their ends. This entails the equal restriction of the (...) freedom of each to ensure maximal freedom for all. But this is precisely what Kant thinks of as the state of right. In contrast, the paper claims that the second formula of the categorical imperative commands making the humanity of rational beings who are assumed to possess the capacity to act morally or personality, into our end, precisely because they are assumed to possess this distinct rational capacity. (shrink)

The article investigates the function and signification of doors in two silent films, Ernst Lubitsch's 1916 When I Was Dead and Charlie Chaplin's 1917 The Adventurer. Taking a theoretical perspective provided by the field of intellectual inquiry known as cultural techniques (Kulturtechniken), the door in these films is studied with respect to its procedural and functional operations. Specifically, the article focuses on the ways in which the employment of doors in each of the films relates to these films' configurations of (...) inside and outside as conceptual realms. The analysis presented shows that Lubitsch and Chaplin engage doors in uniquely different ways. It further reveals that, while the operation of the door in When I Was Dead reinforces an exclusive binary of inside and outside, which itself can be traced back to the film's concern with sexual difference, the operation of the door in The Adventurer essentially deconstructs the inside/outside binary, an act that can be linked to a critique of contemporary notions of industrial management and the treatment of humans as machines. (shrink)

This paper discusses means for promoting artificial intelligence that is designed to be safe and beneficial for society. The promotion of beneficial AI is a social challenge because it seeks to motivate AI developers to choose beneficial AI designs. Currently, the AI field is focused mainly on building AIs that are more capable, with little regard to social impacts. Two types of measures are available for encouraging the AI field to shift more toward building beneficial AI. Extrinsic measures impose constraints (...) or incentives on AI researchers to induce them to pursue beneficial AI even if they do not want to. Intrinsic measures encourage AI researchers to want to pursue beneficial AI. Prior research focuses on extrinsic measures, but intrinsic measures are at least as important. Indeed, intrinsic factors can determine the success of extrinsic measures. Efforts to promote beneficial AI must consider intrinsic factors by studying the social psychology of AI research communities. (shrink)

The article defends three claims regarding the relation between the different formulas of the categorical imperative. On its prevailing reading, FUL gives different moral guidance than FH; left answered, this problem is an argument for adopting a competing perspective on FUL. The prohibitions and commands of the formulas should be taken to be extensionally the same; but FKE adds a dimension missing from the others, gained by uniting their perspectives, namely, bringing the variety of moral laws into systematic unity. The (...) grammatically ambiguous phrase inGMS, 4: 436.9–10 claims that FA alone unites the other formulas in itself. (shrink)

In the Introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant claims that the Critique of Pure Reason accounted for the necessary conditions of experience and knowledge in general, but that it was not a complete transcendental account of the possibility of a particular empirical experience of objects and knowledge of empirical laws of nature. To fill this gap the third Critique puts forward, as an additional transcendental condition, the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature. In this paper, (...) I will attempt to show how Kant’s account of pure aesthetic judgment can be read as articulating an aesthetic non-conceptual condition of the search for the conceptual order of nature and so as constituting an essential part of the account of the transcendental conditions of empirical experience and knowledge. (shrink)

According to the received view, Kant and Hegel espouse diametrically opposed views of moral motivation. Kant holds that to act morally is to act out of reflective recognition that a proposed intention ought to be made into a universal law. Action of true moral worth can never be motivated by an immediate inclination. Hegel, in contrast, holds that the natural inclination of an agent, who has been successfully acculturated within a just society, is moral action. The received interpretation is right, (...) but it misses a critical part of Hegel's view and it is to this idea that the entire dissertation is devoted. Hegel does not reject Kant's claim that a necessary condition of morality is autonomous action, which is not determined immediately by natural inclinations or acquired habits. He thinks that precisely such action is the origin of any actual, shared form of ethical life. It is in his idea of a founding act of ethical life that Hegel claims Kant's inheritance. ;The founding act of ethical life does not, however, meet Kant's criterion of moral action. Modeled, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, on Antigone's tragedy, the founding agent acts without being conscious of the universal ethical significance of the act; nor does the community the act transforms acknowledge its significance. The lawmaker and the community are necessarily blind to each other. This tragic, mutual blindness is a condition of the most extreme violence. ;Are there, in reality, any such acts? Modern political life has its founding moment, according to Hegel, in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. The old world and its political structures and institutions has collapsed, leaving action doomed to go unacknowledged. The violence of the Revolution and its aftermath is the condition of the foundation of a new shape of life. Though to be condemned absolutely, it is the necessary condition of the foundation of modern states. The concluding claim of the Philosophy of Right is that war, more generally, is the collapse of the actual life of states and the call to found a new shape of ethical life. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas require evaluation of alternatives in light of conflicting principles. Because of the difficulty of making and defending such complex decisions, we may compromise the quality of our ethical decisions and debates. We need a methodology that combines the weighted effects of multiple ethical guidelines on the issue at hand. This paper describes how the Analytic Hierarchy Process can help us improve ethical decision making.

Cet ouvrage est construit autour d'un chapitre (texte original) de Judith Butler sur l'éthique de la non-violence. En réponse se construisent quatre réflexions philosophiques. Mylène Botbol-Baum présente le collectif à partir de sa traduction du texte de Judith Butler, et aborde la question du sujet et de la norme à partir de la lecture butlerienne de Levinas et Arendt, sur la question des limites de la légitimité de la violence pour une éthique de la relationalité. Jean de Munck traite (...) une lecture croisée de Benjamin et Butler sur la violence. Romildo Pineiro et Jose Erraruz off rent une lecture historique et politique du concept de violence et y confrontent l'interprétation de la non violence dans le texte de Butler. Trois textes plus sociologiques suivent sur l'impact de la non-violence, dans une perspective qui vise à " défaire le genre " dans le cadre sociopolitique critique des vulnérabilités, dans le cadre du travail des femmes migrantes (Ghaliya Dejelloul) ou du travail domestique non rémunéré (Anna Safuta), à partir d'une enquête sur la mobilité spatiale des femmes dans les zones pré-urbaines d'Alger ou de Bruxelles, off rant une analyse sur l'hostilité masculine et le rôle du discours religieux dans la légitimation de cette violence. Matthieu de Nanteuil conclut le volume sur la question de la violence et de la sensibilité politique en mettant à jour la théorie de la démocratie radicale chez Judith Butler. Il sera donc question dans ce volume de penser la non-violence à partir d'une approche fondée sur la normalisation des corps, en réintroduisant le sujet de la vie comme interlocuteur critique du sujet de la norme en démocratie. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article begins with an account of an improvised classroom in a refugee camp. From this account, and building on Heidegger's' analysis of spatiality, two fundamental characteristics are identified as: first, that classrooms are 'sanctioned-off' from the world, and secondly, that educational situations involve attention to the world.Arendt's distinction between education and politics is presented not only as a normative call to action, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a phenomenology of education as a basic human activity. The article turns (...) to Mollenhauer's account of the emergence of a pedagogical sphere in early modernity, and particularly to his notion of representation, to understanding the way things of the world appear in classrooms.The article proposes the concept of liminality to describe the classrooms as neither 'inside' nor 'outside' the world, and could therefore offer their inhabitants opportunities for imaginative exploration, as well as ethical encounters. (shrink)

This article examines forms of arbitration in commercial wine transactions known as ‘sales on delivery’. This category includes transactions by which the price was paid for a product which was delivered in a set future date. They also included a caveat by which the vendor guaranteed the quality of the wine and promised to replace it, if it fails to meet expectations. By juxtaposing papyrological evidence with that of the legal sources, and the identity of potential arbiters with other para-legal (...) authoritative figures, I hope to shed much needed light on the growing emergence of professional prowess in settling commercial disputes and then, assessing the implications of this form of arbitration on Roman judicature in general. (shrink)