The mental health of young people is a growing public health concern. With socio-emotional difficulties in youth often resulting in psychiatric disorders later in life and most with mental health conditions rather stabilizing in time, it is essential to support healthy socio-emotional development. With a comprehensive definition of mental health, since emotion regulation plays a critical role in prevention, it becomes imperative to better understand how children effectively manage their emotions from an early age. Determining effective use of ER skills (...) relies on adequate measurements. Typical methods of data collection in children present consistent shortcomings. This review addresses research findings considering the suitability of the late positive potential measured through electroencephalogram as a neural indicator of ER in children and youth. There is growing evidence, as reported in this review, that indicates that the late positive potential may be a reliable neural indicator of children's cognitive reappraisal abilities more specifically. Results generally suggest that the late positive potential amplitudes are sensitive to directed reappraisal in children. However, given the scant research, questions remain regarding developmental trends, methodology, interindividual variability, reappraisal of various stimuli, and how the late positive potential may relate to more traditional measures of ER. Directions for future research are provided, which are expected to address unanswered research questions and fill literature gaps. Taken together, the findings reviewed indicate that the late positive potential is generally sensitive to directed cognitive reappraisal in children and that there is promise of establishing this neural marker as an indicator of ER. (shrink)

Processing the motivational relevance of a visual scene and reacting accordingly is crucial for survival. Previous work suggests the emotional content of naturalistic scenes affects response speed, such that unpleasant content slows responses whereas pleasant content accelerates responses. It is unclear whether these effects reflect motor-cognitive processes, such as attentional orienting, or vary with the function/outcome of the motor response itself. Four experiments manipulated participants’ ability to terminate the picture and, thereby, the response’s function and motivational value. Attentive orienting was (...) manipulated via picture repetition, which diminishes orienting. A total of N = 81 participants completed versions of a go/no-go task, discriminating between distorted versus intact pictures drawn from six content categories varying in positive, negative, or neutral valence. While all participants responded faster with repetition, only participants without offset control exhibited slower responses to unpleasant and accelerated responses to pleasant content. Emotional engagement, measured by the late positive potential, was not modulated by attentional orienting, suggesting that the interaction between repetition and offset control is not due to altered emotional engagement. Together, results suggest that response time changes as a function of emotional content and sensitivity to attention orienting depends on the motivational function of the motor response. (shrink)

In the late eighteenth century the principle of accommodation became so closely associated with the historical-critical approach of Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), a prominent theologian at the University of Halle, that he has on occasion been deemed its originator. As some scholars have, however, noted, accommodation as a principle of scriptural hermeneutics has a far longer history, extending back to the patristic writings. What by contrast has eluded closer investigation is the affinity that this principle exhibits to notions of (...) deception. Nor has much consideration been given to the manner in which accommodation as an interpretative scheme has on occasion inspired accommodation as a form of strategic action. This article uses the opportunity provided by Semler in his interaction with a number of other figures associated with the late Enlightenment in Protestant Germany to explore these neglected aspects of accommodation. (shrink)

Purpose. Research of the phenomenon of human destructiveness in the context of metaphysical images and violence practices of late Modernism. Theoretical basis. The problem is that the philosophical reflection of violence as objectified, realized destructiveness of man is usually contextual in nature and is on the periphery of understanding its external manifestations. Accordingly, anthropological crisis remains behind the scenes, as evidenced by the devaluation of the humanistic potential of modern culture. That is why one should turn the focus from (...) the obvious, objectively conditioned incarnations of violence in the XXI century to the internal factors that are in the realm of existential. The departure from the consideration of violence as an abstract, faceless or ideologically colored evil allowed us to focus on man, his way of thinking, life and social orientations, feelings and internal contradictions, which find their expression in one or another form of destructiveness. Originality. Based on the works of M. Scheler and E. Fromm defining for philosophical anthropology and psychoanalysis, for the first time the conceptualization of positive and negative forms of manifestation of human destructiveness against the background of sociocultural transformations of late Modernism was carried out. It has been proved that its ontological principles are rooted in specifically human existence and relations with other members of society, while anthropological ones are directly connected with the endless struggle of the life, the vital with the spirit in man. Conclusions. Violence is a tool and a product of man’s transition to more mature and complex forms of existence. The interdependence of the violence and nonviolence practices ensures the progressive movement of humanity towards society humanization. This progress is accompanied by a natural internal conflict of personality, which can be both progressive and regressive. At the metaphysical level, destructiveness appears as a connection between the entropy of world existence as a whole and the instability of human existence itself, which is a complexly organized and open to the world system. Self-transcendence as an anthropological prerequisite for human destructiveness has a dual nature and combines negative and positive characteristics, the content and significance of which were revealed in the study. The authors are convinced that there is no other way to overcome the negative, malignant destructiveness, except for the incessant, daily gathering of life meanings around them and their development. After all, the loss of such core structures of the existence as the meaning, purpose and value of life has become a truly global problem for the modern world. Emphasis is placed on the need to keep in harmony the trinity of body-soul-spirit, which will allow a person in any social transformation to preserve and increase his integrity. (shrink)

This book presents and evaluates the late philosophy (Spätphilosophie) of F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) across a wide range of issues, ranging from relation between pure thinking and being, to the philosophy of mythology and religion, to the philosophy of history, to questions concerning the philosophy of nature and freedom. Simultaneously, it discusses Hegel's treatment of similar issues, and systematically compares the two thinkers. This is the first time, in an English-language publication, that these two major German Idealists have (...) been compared in such detail along such a broad front. The book begins with three chapters exploring the development of Schelling's thinking concerning transcendental philosophy, nature and teleology, human freedom, and the theory of history, from his earliest publications up to his middle years. Against this background, the book then presents Schelling's distinction between "positive" and "negative" philosophy, the defining mark of his late philosophy. It explores his theory of pure a priori thinking (negative philosophy), and his account of the transition from negative to positive philosophy. The major components of Schelling's positive philosophy, including his conception of "un-pre-thinkable being", and his theories of mythology and revelation, are then discussed. Throughout, a comparative assessment of Hegel's approach similar issues is sustained. Schelling emerges as a philosopher who traced his own highly distinctive path through the thicket of problems bequeathed by Kant, and whose systematic responses to these problems still merit serious consideration as alternatives to those of Hegel. (shrink)

Between 1423 and 1435 the Flemish cities of Ypres and Ghent engaged in a protracted struggle over a waterway called the Ieperleet, which connected Ypres to the sea. The struggle was played out in the courtroom, in brawls along canal banks, and even in a quasi-military expedition. This series of legal battles and fistfights—what I will call the Ieperleet Affair—is a graphic example of the changing economic and political fortunes of the cities of Flanders during the unsettled conditions of the (...) fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Recently Marc Boone has described the case to highlight the changing balance of ducal and urban power in late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders. Willem Blockmans has used it to demonstrate how conflicting interests could paralyze efforts to govern Flanders by representative assembly and thereby favor the accretion of power by the central government. David Nicholas has cited it to illustrate Ghent's aggressive and successful struggle for economic survival, complementing Henri Pirenne's mention of the Affair in a discussion of the decline of fifteenth-century Ypres. (shrink)

This book argues that the distinction between positive and negative freedom remains highly pertinent today, despite having fallen out of fashion in the late twentieth century. It proposes a new reading of this distinction for the twenty-first century, building on the work of Constant, Green and Berlin who led the historical development of these ideas. The author defends the idea that freedom is a dynamic interaction between two inseparable, yet sometimes fundamentally, opposed positive and negative concepts - the yin (...) and yang of freedom. Positive freedom is achieved when one succeeds in doing what is right, while negative freedom is achieved when one is able to advance one's wellbeing. In an environment of culture wars, resurging populism and challenge to progressive liberal values, recognising the duality of freedom can help us better understand the political dilemmas we face and point the way forward. The book analyses the duality of freedom in more philosophical depth than previous studies and places it within the context of both historical and contemporary political thinking. It will be of interest to students and scholars of liberalism and political theory. (shrink)

Altruism (a costly action that benefits others) and reciprocity (the repayment of acts in kind) differ in that the former expresses preferences about the outcome of a social interaction, whereas the latter requires, in addition, ascribing intentions to others. Interestingly, an individual’s behavior and neurophysiological activity under outcome- versus intention-based interactions has not been compared directly using different endowments in the same subject and during the same session. Here, we used a mixed version of the Dictator and the Investment games, (...) together with electroencephalography, to uncover a subject’s behavior and brain activity when challenged with endowments of different sizes in contexts that call for an altruistic (outcome-based) versus a reciprocal (intention-based) response. We found that subjects displayed positive or negative reciprocity (reciprocal responses greater or smaller than that for altruism, respectively) depending on the amount of trust they received. Furthermore, a subject’s late frontal negativity differed between conditions, predicting responses to trust in intentions-based trials. Finally, brain regions related with mentalizing and cognitive control were the cortical sources of this activity. Thus, our work disentangles the behavioral components present in the repayment of trust, and sheds light on the neural activity underlying the integration of outcomes and perceived intentions in human economic interactions. (shrink)

This essay positions the figure and thought of T.W. Adorno in relation to Mulk Raj Anand, and the latter’s foundational contributions to the modern Indian novel in English. In Adorno’s musical writings, “late style” features as a methodological premise, or an expository mode that removes the work from conventional norms of evaluation. Late style is directed especially toward canonized works that seem to lack current artistic or social relevance, despite their culturally privileged standing. The essay approaches Adorno and (...) Anand, accordingly: Their affiliations with European modernism and postcolonial realism, respectively, are read in late style, or, as largely obsoleted formations of the previous century. Focussing on Anand’s historical fiction, Across the Black Waters, my essay recuperates the novel’s vision of a single if internally differentiated twentieth-century: By imagining the Great War as world-historical crisis, Anand’s novel stage... (shrink)

The late antique rabbis of Roman Palestine were seasoned jurists, experts on exegesis and legal interpretation. Yet rabbinic literature does not theorize. A positive account of rabbinic conceptions of language therefore remains a desideratum. I choose an alternative approach. Legal reasoning relies on language to ground the determinacy of the law. Jurists must thus confront language when it threatens to undermine the latter. Conversely, they may hold language to safeguard legal determinacy. Drawing on insights from legal theory, I turn (...) to an unusual rabbinic rule of inference. Its earliest attested version suggests a universal possibility of inference “from the category of yes that of no, from the category of no that of yes.” I show that the ever-evolving uses of this rule allow us to observe a shift in linguistic attitude, increasingly acknowledging linguistic uncertainty. My findings tie in with recent advances in the study of rabbinic exegesis. (shrink)

The paper addresses three late Hegelian philosophers from northern Europe: Norwegian M.J. Monrad (1816–97), Swede J.J. Borelius (1823–1909) and Finn Th. Rein (1838–1919). The focus is on their views on the crisis of Hegelian speculative philosophy. The popularity of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy in Germany declined rapidly since the 1840s. The decline was influenced by e.g. new scientific discoveries. Hegelianism maintained a strong position in northern Europe (especially in Norway and in Finland) several decades longer than in Germany. Rein, Monrad (...) and Borelius, all professors of philosophy, endorsed Hegel’s philosophy and agreed that it has to be reformed in order to meet the new challenges. They disagreed with each other, however, about the extent of this reform. They had conflicting interpretations of Hegel’s method too. (shrink)

This article examines an uncommon materialist argument preserved in late medieval Prague quodlibets by Matthias of Knín (1409) and Prokop of Kladruby (1417). The argument connects the Galenic claim that the human body has the noblest and best-balanced complexion possible with the Alexandrist claim that the human rational soul emerges from such well-balanced matter without any supernatural intervention. Of the various medieval renderings of these claims, John Wyclif’s De compositione hominis is singled out as the most probable source of (...) the argument. Far from attributing plain materialism to Wyclif, the article highlights a semimaterialist position, mentioned in two fifteenth-century De anima commentaries of Prague origin, grafting the immortal spirit postulate onto an Alexandrist-like doctrine of the intellect as educed from the harmoniously complexioned body. Finally, it is argued that this semimaterialist position may not only encapsulate how Bohemian masters read Wyclif, but also be close to Wyclif’s actual anthropological stance. (shrink)

: The transfer of modes of thought, concepts, models, and metaphors from Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary biology played a significant role in the mergence, constitution, and legitimization of sociology as an autonomous discipline in France at the end of the nineteenth century. More specifically, the Durkheimian group then came to be recognized as "French sociology." In the present paper, I analyze a facet of the struggle among various groups for this coveted status and demonstrate that the initial adherence to and (...) subsequent abandonment of "the biological" played an important, but complex, role in the outcome of that struggle. Furthermore, the choice of biological model, whether Darwinian or Lamarckian, had repercussions on one's position in that cultural field. The outcome of the "battle" between René Worms' group that supported and contributed to the Revue Internationale de Sociologie (RIS) on the one hand, and Emile Durkheim's group and those committed tothe L'Année Sociologique (AS) on the other—from which the Durkheimians emerged victorious—was due not only to internal scientific factors, but also to a particular juxtaposition of developments within sociology and anthropology and their relation to and interaction with French culture and politics at large. (shrink)

We attempt to understand the personal incentives that motivate corporate insiders to engage in unethical behavior such as delayed trade disclosure. Delayed disclosure affects corporate transparency and other shareholders in the firm potentially suffer investment losses because they are unaware of insiders’ activities. Using archival data from the 300 largest Australian firms between 2007 and 2011, the results show that risk factors such as insider age and tenure and wealth effects in the form of insider shareholdings affect the likelihood of (...) delayed reporting. Governance positions such as committee membership mitigate this behavior. Our study highlights the importance of considering individual insider’s wealth and risk factors. The self-monitoring role of governance positions is also indicative of the effectiveness of internal corporate governance in the prevention of illegal insider behavior. (shrink)

Schelling’s late philosophy is characterized by its division of philosophy into a “negative” and a “positive” approach. After developing positive philosophy, Schelling goes back in his last work (Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie) to a negative philosophy that is to play a critical role within Schelling’s late system by showing pure rationally the limits of pure reason. This critical task requires the failure and crisis of negative philosophy. In the article, I show why Schelling understands his late negative (...) project as a radicalization of Kantian criticism, undertaken by recourse to Aristotle and his notion of actuality. By taking the Aristotelian inspiration into account, I propose a new way of understanding two problems of Schelling scholarship: the need for a late negative philosophy, and the problem of the transition from negative into positive philosophy. (shrink)

I argue against current deflationary trends in Schelling scholarship that positive philosophy is not negative philosophy by other means but exceeds it in content and form. While nature-philosophy gives to positive philosophy the means to think the positive, the latter is not “natural” but revealed. I situate the turn to the positive in Schelling’s 1809 Freedom essay, which introduces the possibility of a real distinction between nature and God for the first time in Schelling’s thought, a possibility which becomes actual (...) in the positive philosophy as the difference between creation and its creator. Without this distinction revelation is a meaningless concept. (shrink)

In early German ecology, the key concept used to refer to a synecological unit was Biozönose. Taken together with the concept of the Biotop, it was also understood as an integrated higher-order unit of life, sometimes called a “Holozön”. These units were often perceived as having properties similar to those of individual organisms, and they informed the mainstream of German ecology until at least the late 1960s. Here I ask how “organismic” these concepts really were and what conceptual problems (...) they entailed. To do so, I focus on some almost forgotten dissident positions, especially those of Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer and Fritz Peus, which I contrast with the mainstream German ecology of the time. In a radical paper published in 1954 that postulated the “dissolution of the concepts of biocoenosis and biotope”, Peus in particular elicited a forceful response from many prominent German ecologists. An analysis of the ensuing debate, including especially a colloquium held in 1959 that was partly inspired by Peus’ paper, is helpful for sifting the various arguments proffered with respect to a quasi-organismic perception of the biocoenosis in German speaking ecology. Although German mainstream ecologists rejected the notion of the biocoenosis as a superorganism, ontological holism was quite common among them. Additionally, the mainstream concept of the biocoenosis was plagued by several methodological problems and much conceptual confusion, to which the “dissidents” rightly pointed. Some of these problems are still pertinent today, e.g. in connection with more modern concepts such as “ecosystem”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and (...) more generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

One of the main issues that dominates Neoplatonism in late antique philosophy of the 3rd–6th centuries A.D. is the nature of the first principle, called the ‘One’. From Plotinus onward, the principle is characterized as the cause of all things, since it produces the plurality of intelligible Forms, which in turn constitute the world’s rational and material structure. Given this, the tension that faces Neoplatonists is that the One, as the first cause, must transcend all things that are characterized (...) by plurality—yet because it causes plurality, the One must anticipate plurality within itself. This becomes the main mo- tivation for this study’s focus on two late Neoplatonists, Proclus (5th cent. A.D.) and Damascius (late 5th–early 6th cent. A.D.): both attempt to address this tension in two rather different ways. Proclus’ attempted solution is to posit intermediate principles (the ‘henads’) that mirror the One’s nature, as ‘one’, but directly cause plurality. This makes the One only a cause of unity, while its production of plurality is mediated by the henads that it produces. Damascius, while appropriating Proclus’ framework, thinks that this is not enough: if the One is posed as a cause of all things, it must be directly related to plurality, even if its causality is mediated through the henads. Damascius then splits Proclus’ One into two entities: (1) the Ineffable as the first ‘principle’, which is absolutely transcendent and has no causal relation; and (2) the One as the first ‘cause’ of all things, which is only relatively transcendent under the Ineffable. -/- Previous studies that compare Proclus and Damascius tend to focus either on the Ineffable or a skeptical shift in epistemology, but little work has been done on the causal framework which underlies both figures’ positions. Thus, this study proposes to focus on the causal frameworks behind each figure: why and how does Proclus propose to assert that the One is a cause, at the same time that it transcends its final effect? And what leads Damascius to propose a notion of the One’s causality that no longer makes it transcendent in the way that a higher principle, like the Ineffable, is? The present work will answer these questions in two parts. In the first, Proclus’ and Damascius’ notions of causality will be examined, insofar as they apply to all levels of being. In the second part, the One’s causality will be examined for both figures: for Proclus, the One’s causality in itself and the causality of its intermediate principles; for Damascius, the One’s causality, and how the Ineffable is needed to explain the One. The outcome of this study will show that Proclus’ framework results in an inner tension that Damascius is responding to with his notion of the One. While Damascius’ own solution implies its own tension, he at least solves a difficulty in Proclus—and in so doing, partially returns to a notion of the One much like Iamblichus’ and Plotinus’ One. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and (...) more generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

This enlightening text analyses the origins of Western complaints, prevalent in the late nineteenth century, that Japan was characterised at the time by exceptionally low standards of ‘commercial morality’, despite a major political and economic transformation. As Britain industrialised during the nineteenth century the issue of ‘commercial morality’ was increasingly debated. Concerns about standards of business ethics extended to other industrialising economies, such as the United States. Hunter examines the Japanese response to the charges levelled against Japan in this (...) context, arguing that this was shaped by a pragmatic recognition that Japan had little choice but to adapt itself to Western expectations if it was to establish its position in the global economy. The controversy and criticisms, which were at least in part stimulated by fear of Japanese competition, are important in the history of thinking on business ethics, and are of relevance for today’s industrialising economies as they attempt to establish themselves in international markets. (shrink)

'Those most capable of being moved by passion are those capable of tasting the most sweetness in this life.'Descartes is most often thought of as introducing a total separation of mind and body. But he also acknowledged the intimate union between them, and in his later writings he concentrated on understanding this aspect of human nature. The Passions of the Soul is his greatest contribution to this debate. It contains a profound discussion of the workings of the emotions and of (...) their place in human life - a subject that increasingly engages the interest of philosophers and intellectual and cultural historians. It also sets out a view of ethics that has been seen as a radical reorientation of moral philosophy.This volume also includes both sides of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, one of Descartes's keenest disciples and shrewdest critics, which played a crucial role in the genesis of The Passions, as well as the first part of The Principles of Philosophy, which sets out the key positions of Descartes's philosophical system.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

This article reports a follow-up study of Norwegian nursing students entitled ‘The helping motive -an important goal for choosing nursing education’. It presents and discusses a significant ambiguity within the altruistic helping motive of 301 nursing students in the light of classical and modern virtue ethics. A quantitative longitudinal survey design was used to study socialization and building professional identity. The follow-up study began after respondents had completed more than two-and-a-half years of the three-year educational programme. Data were collected using (...) a questionnaire with closed questions, supplemented by 18 semi-structured, in-depth, audiotaped interviews. A motive such as ‘desire for human contact/to help others’ appeared to be highly significant. The research questions employed were: What motivates nursing students at the end of their studies to help other people? What does helping others mean for nursing students? Factor analysis revealed two factors. Factor 1 can be expressed as an altruism factor and factor 2 can be interpreted as an ‘acknowledgement-from-the-patient factor’ that in fact indicates an ambiguity within the helping motive itself. Findings from the interviews also reveal ambiguous helping motives. On one hand the students want to be altruistic and on the other they wish to receive positive feedback from patients when giving help. The findings indicate that this positive feedback is essential to the students in order for them to provide altruistic care. (shrink)

My article concerns constitutional interpretation and substantive due process, issues that played a central role in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), one of the two same-sex marriage cases. (The other same-sex marriage case was United States v. Windsor (2013).) -/- The late Justice Scalia consistently maintained that the Court “invented” substantive due process and continues to apply this legal “fiction” not because the Constitution supports it but simply because the justices like it. Two theories underlay his cynical conclusion. First is (...) the theory of “Constitutional Textualism”—or just plain “Textualism”—which says that the meaning of the Constitution lies entirely within the “four corners” of the document. Second is the theory of “Originalism,” which says that this meaning was fixed at the time of ratification. (Likewise, the meanings of the amendments were fixed at the time of their ratification.) -/- While Justice Scalia helped to inspire a Textualist/Originalist (and anti-substantive-due-process) movement, his Originalism has received far more attention than his Textualism. Since Judge Robert Bork first introduced Originalism to the general public during his Supreme Court nomination hearings in 1987, this theory has ignited passions on all sides and effectively re-framed the entire debate about how to interpret the Constitution. Constitutional scholars, left and right, now define themselves as either for or against Originalism. Meanwhile, Textualism has merely retreated into the background. -/- Part of the reason for this disparate treatment is that many who reject Originalism still consider themselves to be Textualists. They agree with Justice Scalia (and Judge Bork) that the text is all-important. They disagree, however, that its meaning was fixed for eternity at ratification. Instead, they maintain that either the meaning of the text or applications of this meaning to new cases can change as society changes. -/- In this Article, I bring Textualism out of Originalism’s shadow and into broad daylight. I argue that once we dig just a little deeper into the proposition that all of the meaning in the Constitution inheres in its words, we find that this theory simply cannot work. In order to interpret the nation’s foundational document, we must resort to assumptions that it does not explicitly state. (Indeed, even Textualism itself is a theory that the Constitution does not explicitly endorse.) And the notion that “extra-textual” assumptions necessarily inform our interpretations of the Constitution poses a direct and insurmountable threat to Textualism. -/- The Constitution actually requires each judge, when faced with a case concerning the right to privacy, not merely to consider the text but also to anticipate and evaluate the moral, social, and political consequences of both possible decisions before choosing between them. While this position may initially sound counterintuitive, it turns out to be a much more realistic theory of constitutional interpretation than Textualism (and Originalism). -/- I ultimately conclude that, contrary to Justice Scalia, the Constitution most certainly does protect a right to privacy. For what it’s worth, the Obergefell majority agree with me (and oppose Justice Scalia). I aim to show exactly why they are correct. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe by John SkorupskiJ. P. MessinaJohn Skorupski. Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 560. Hardcover, $130.00.John Skorupski's Being and Freedom traces the development of modern ethics in France, Germany, and England, as set in motion by two great revolutions: the French Revolution and Kant's methodological revolution in the Critique (...) of Pure Reason. I begin this review by offering [End Page 714] a brief summary of the book (which consists of eight lengthy chapters, an introduction, and a brief conclusion). I then raise some interpretive worries and offer an overall assessment.In chapter 1, Skorupski reminds us that the French Revolution, a physical struggle between opposing factions, was also a battleground of ideas. In opposing the ancien régime, revolutionaries took aim at the "Catholic-feudal order" (27). Underlying this order was an ethical view, "holism," according to which a person lives well through excellent performance of community roles assigned by family, state, and church. When individual interests conflict with these social roles, the latter take precedence. Revolutionaries (partially inspired by Rousseau) railed against this. On their view, persons were born for freedom, not the chains of traditional life. To realize such freedom demanded a radical democratic state. Here, too, fidelity to the ethical whole (the Republic) sometimes required sacrifices on the part of individuals. But in a properly constituted republic, these sacrifices would be self-imposed requirements of the general will.As revolution turned to terror and blood became the regular currency of sacrifice, critics like Guizot saw the ancien régime's parochialism as a symptom of a larger problem with its underlying ethics, one it shared with the radicals aligned against it: its commitment to holism. Holism says that some social entities have a good not reducible to the good of their members. Additionally, these social wholes have their own rights that sometimes override individual rights (28, 59). These features make it easy for holist orders to justify sacrificing individuals for collective goods. If this is the disease, individualism of the sort associated with Kantian ethics can seem to be the cure.Chapter 2 argues that the new critical philosophy resulting from Kant's "Copernican" Revolution is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Kant offers no good reason for positing a noumenal world and locating freedom there (77–79). On the other hand, there is lasting promise in the idea that morality follows from each person's individual autonomy. And yet, in the end, Kant's arguments fail here, too. For deriving morality from autonomy requires an explicit commitment to impartiality, which does not follow from autonomy (83–102). And, even when suitably modified, Kant's ethical principles risk emptiness if they fail to take content from our relationships and social roles (112, 148). Unfortunately, Kant suggests that doing so would perpetrate heteronomy, making such emptiness inevitable (102).By chapter 3, the tension between holist and individualist conceptions of ethics has become Skorupski's central leitmotif. On the one hand, individualists are well positioned to resist oppression and terror. On the other hand, individualism risks atomism and alienation from our attachments and feelings. Such alienation leads Schiller to reject Kant's views on freedom and virtue (161). For our author, this is as it should be.Skorupski next turns to Fichte. Although Fichte takes a step away from transcendental idealism by making intellectual intuition the hallmark of our subjectivity (173), he agrees with Kant that morality follows from autonomy. Indeed, for Fichte, autonomy commits us to striving for full self-sufficiency, which appears to court a similar atomism. Yet this impression is corrected when Fichte turns to politics. There, Fichte grounds rights (as permissible demands) in mutual recognition (182–83). This positions him to see the state and the family as ethical wholes (187–88), pointing away from Kantian individualism back toward holism.Hegel takes these steps away from Kant to their logical conclusion. As Skorupski explains in chapter 4, Hegel argues that the individualist systems grounded in autonomy and abstract right (Moralität) mark but stages on the way to moral... (shrink)

The paper explores the status of the proposition "God exists" in late scholastic debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in some key authors of the era. A proposition is said to be self-evident if its truth is known solely from the meaning of the terms and is not inferred from other propositions. It does not appear to be immediately evident from the terms that God exists, for the concept expressed by "God" is based on the relation to creatures (...) and negation of imperfection and does not reach to the divine essence. Thomas Aquinas maintains that there are two types of self-evident propositions: those self-evident in themselves but not to us and those self-evident in themselves as well as to us. "God exists" is of the fi rst type. For Scotus a self-evident proposition is such that if its terms are conceived by any intellect, the truth of the proposition becomes known from the terms, non-inferentially. In his view there is no distinction between a self-evident proposition in itself and that in relation to us, because any proposition self-evident in itself is known to be such to any intellect, even though it might not be actually known; it would be known, provided that the terms are conceived. So for Scotus the sentence "God exists" expresses diff erent propositions for the blessed in heaven, the angels and God on the one hand and humans on the other. The former is self-evident, the latter is not. While later scholastics accept either the solution of Thomas or that of Scotus, according to which "God exists" is not self-evident for humans, Thomas de Argentina diff ers in that for him "God exists" is self-evident for humans too. The position of Thomas Aquinas was defended by Domingo Ban¯ez, Francisco Zumel and Gregorio de Valentia. In contrast, Johannes Poncius was a famous adherent of Scotus. There is a fair number of scholastics harmonizing the doctrine of Thomas and Scotus: Bernard Sannig, Luis de Molina, Gabriel Vázquez, Rodrigo de Arriaga and Jean Lalemandet. According to these authors, when Thomas says that "God exists" is self-evident in itself, he speaks about the extensional proposition, i.e. the state of affairs being conceptualized, which does not contradict Scotus’s teaching. © FILOSOFIA, 2013. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the “De Anima.” by H.J. BlumenthalLloyd P. GersonH.J. Blumenthal. Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity: Interpretations of the “De Anima.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 244. Cloth, $57.50.The label ‘Neoplatonism’, coined in the eighteenth century to indicate a putative and rather ill-defined development within the Platonic tradition, is to this day applied in sundry ways. (...) Presumably, ‘Neoplatonic’ is supposed to be distinguished from ‘Platonic’, but the problem with this is that most of those ancient philosophers called ‘Neoplatonic’ thought of themselves simply as Platonists, that is, as authentic interpreters and continuators of Plato. Nevertheless, there are several important and relatively clear differentiations to be made among those within this tradition. One such refers to those Platonists who attempted to appropriate Aristotle’s philosophy. This was done principally in two ways. For Plotinus, Aristotelian concepts and distinctions were employed to defend Plato against Peripatetic attacks. For Porphyry and the later Platonic commentators on the works of the Aristotelian corpus, Aristotle was co-opted as an authority on the philosophy of the sensible world, leaving the higher, intelligible world to Plato. The commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima are particularly revealing in this regard. For one would assume that in matters regarding the soul it would be extremely difficult to see Aristotle and Plato as anything other than irreconcilable. Aristotle’s hylomorphism and explicit denial of the immortality of the soul hardly seem to be compatible with that which can be called, even on the most charitable interpretation, genuinely Platonic. In fact, the reconciliation of Aristotelian and Platonic soul doctrines is one of the central tasks late Platonists set for themselves. As Blumenthal notes: “Whatever the historical truth about the relation of Aristotle’s thought to Plato’s may have been, the Neoplatonist regarded it as propaedeutic to Plato’s as well as aiming at the same goal” (25).H. J. Blumenthal’s long-anticipated monograph explores in minute detail the extant commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima written by late Platonic or, if one insists, Neoplatonic philosophers. This book builds upon a large body of frequently groundbreaking work by the author on various facets of late Greek philosophy. The main commentaries studied are those of John Philoponus and the unknown authors dubbed ‘Pseudo-Philoponus’ and Pseudo-Simplicius’, though there is also considerable attention paid to Themistius, the last Peripatetic commentator on De Anima and, of course, [End Page 315] Alexander of Aphrodisias, whose commentary on De Anima has not survived but whose own immensely influential Peripatetic treatise on the soul does.This book is divided into two parts: I. Commentaries and Commentators and II. Interpretations of the De Anima. The first part provides the essential background to the second. Anyone approaching the Aristotelian commentators for the first time will find here a most useful guide. Even those who have some familiarity with this material will benefit from the author’s extensive knowledge of detail and judicious examination of some of the difficult issues of dating, authorship, philosophical lineage, and so on.The second section of the book concentrates on the De Anima commentaries. Here the author, following the order of the text of De Anima, systematically surveys the positions of the commentators on some of the central issues taken up in Aristotle’s work. These include the commentators’ efforts to reconcile Aristotle’s definition of the soul with Platonic assumptions about its nature and Plato’s tripartite division of the soul with Aristotle’s not entirely clear divisions. One of the instructive features of this comparative study of the commentaries is to see frequently how the issues that seize the imagination of modern commentators trouble the ancients not at all and vice versa.Most readers will be mainly interested in the chapters on the commentaries on the latter part of Book Two and Book Three of De Anima. From Plotinus onward, some of the most original philosophizing in the Platonic tradition focuses on self-consciousness, memory, imagination, and the integrative operation of the rational and arational powers. The last two chapters are filled with material about these issues as well as the... (shrink)

Favoring individual entrepreneurial freedom and free-market competition, neoliberalism has reshaped the social and discursive practices of higher education institutions (HEIs) around the world. In this paper, I draw on methods from critical multimodal discourse studies and an analytic concept from linguistic anthropology to examine several sets of student service materials circulating on the campus of a Hong Kong university between 2016 and 2017. While these materials are purportedly designed with student welfare in mind, I demonstrate how they effectively position students (...) as (1) consumers of tailored services or experiences provided by the university; and (2) entrepreneurial selves, that is, socio-economically competitive and self-managed young individuals. I conclude by arguing that these service materials are shaped by and espouse a neoliberal governmentality that (re)orients HEIs and their students towards an all-pervasive marketization, competitiveness, and assertion of class privilege in a globalizing, particularly Westernized late capitalist society in Asia. (shrink)

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger's late work. This period of Heidegger's philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism--namely the position according to which some contradictions are true--and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent (...) nor logically trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger's concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

Logical empiricism and the Austrian School of economics are two of the internationally most influential intellectual movements with Viennese roots. By and large independently of each other, both have been subject to detailed historical and philosophical investigations for the last two dec-ades. However, in spite of numerous connections and interactions be-tween the two groups, their relationship has captured surprisingly sparse attention. My dissertation focuses on the many-faceted juxtaposition of two supposedly antagonistic championsof Viennese Late Enlightenment: logical empiricist Otto Neurath (...) and Austrian economist Ludwig Mises. I rationally reconstruct and critically compare their epistemological, meth-odological, and economic positions and demonstrate that a closer look reveals more compatibilities and similarities than acknowledged by the received view and by the protagonists themselves. Over and above the historiographic task of challenging and amending this received view, the analytic components of my thesis inform contemporary debates in phi-losophy, politics, economics, and other sciences. (shrink)

In the first half, I suggest that Kant’s conception of our moral life goes through a significant shift after 1793, with reverberations in his eschatology. The earlier account, based on the postulate of immortality, describes our moral life as an endless pursuit of the highest good, but all this changes in the later account, and I point out three possible reasons for this change of heart. In the second half, I explore how the considerations Kant brings up to argue for (...) his accounts can inform our process of formulating positions with respect to the afterlife. I argue that, in the absence of a convincing theoretical proof for or against the afterlife as well as apodictically certain knowledge of how demanding the moral law is, the Kantian strategy would be to ask which account of our moral life delivers the kind of contentment that can sustain our moral resolve. I also point out a way theists might be able to find contentment despite their moral failures by imagining God’s moral kenosis. (shrink)

Social exclusion has a significant impact on cognition, emotion, and behavior. Some behavioral studies investigated how social exclusion affects pain empathy. Conclusions were inconsistent, and there is a lack of clarity in identifying which component of pain empathy is more likely to be affected. To investigate these issues, we used a Cyberball task to manipulate feelings of social exclusion. Two groups participated in the same pain empathy task while we recorded event-related potentials when participants viewed static images of body parts (...) in painful and neutral situations. The results showed early N2 differentiation between painful and neutral pictures in the central regions in both groups. The pattern at the late controlled processing stage was different. Parietal P3 amplitudes for painful pictures were significantly smaller than those for neutral pictures in the social exclusion group; they did not differ in the social inclusion group. We observed a parietal late positive potential differentiation between painful and neutral pictures in both groups. LPP amplitudes were significantly smaller in the social exclusion group than those in the social inclusion group for painful stimuli. Our results indicate that social exclusion does not affect empathic responses during the early emotional sharing stage. However, it down-regulates empathic responses at the late cognitive controlled stage, and this modulation is attenuated gradually. The current study provides neuroscientific evidence of how social exclusion dynamically influences pain empathy. (shrink)

This essay responds to the characterization Ted Miller offers (in his December 2008 essay in Political Theory) of the kind of nonfoundationalism I have referred to as "weak ontology," and that Gianni Vattimo frequently calls "weak thought." Miller argues that such a position embodies, first, a philosophy of history in which strong ontologies (e.g., religion) are assessed categorically as passé, and, second, are associated essentially with violence. I show that while these characterizations may be appropriate for Vattimo's thought, they are (...) not for weak ontology as I understand it. Finally, I suggest that the former might more usefully be categorized as "antifoundationalism" and the latter as "nonfoundationalism.". (shrink)

Summary This article approaches post-war debates about the relationship between normative political theory and empirical political science from a French perspective. It does so by examining Raymond Aron's commentaries on a series of articles commissioned by him for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique on this theme as well as through an analysis of his wartime dialogue with the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Following a consideration of Aron's critique of contemporary approaches to this issue in France, (...) we discuss his own distinctive attempt to draw normative theory and empirical science into the same orbit by tracing the interaction of these two elements in his work from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLate Enlightenment German materialism has hardly attracted any scholarly attention in the past, in spite of the fact that there were quite a few exponents of it. In this paper, I identify the philosophically most important ones and examine to what extent they were connected with each other. In fact, there are local concentrations of materialists at universities and academic circles in Göttingen, Halle, and Gießen. I then discuss the spectrum of materialist positions held by them, from empiricist naturalism in (...) the case of Michael Hißmann to emergentism and Spinozism in the case of Karl von Knoblauch. Finally, I examine how German materialists conceived of the nature of soul and its immortality. It turns out that most of them were mortalists, with the exception of August Wilhelm Hupel, and some of them also endorsed Socinianism. (shrink)

Whether in characterizing Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender as itself pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its promises, Wendy Brown pursues a central question: how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize the state: such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of governmental protection. "Whether one (...) is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands," writes Brown, "the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection.Refusing any facile identification with one political position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics, from the basis of litigiousness in political life to the appearance on the academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power. These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and political life provide an occasion for rethinking the value of several of the last two centuries' most compelling theoretical critiques of modern political life, including the positions of Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, and Foucault. (shrink)