In its comprehensive overview of Alain Locke's pragmatist philosophy this book captures the radical implications of Locke's approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke's works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed.

_The essential companion to Simone de Beauvoir's celebrated novel._.

In this paper, I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of festivals appropriates Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s own account of the festival and its place in understanding freedom. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau’s conflicting accounts of the festival from his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Mankind and the Letter to M. D’Alembert. The contrast of these two texts reveals Rousseau’s conception of freedom as circumscribed by the community. Although Rousseau has an idealized virtuous community in mind, the (...) central insight regarding a community’s involvement in the development of freedom is nevertheless echoed in Beauvoir’s description of the festival in the Ethics of Ambiguity. I explore some of the implications of reading Beauvoir’s account of freedom and the festival as influenced by Rousseau and suggest how doing so impacts our understanding of Beauvoirian politics. (shrink)

Nativists inspired by Chomsky are apt to provide arguments with the following general form: languages exhibit interesting generalizations that are not suggested by casual (or even intensive) examination of what people actually say; correspondingly, adults (i.e., just about anyone above the age of four) know much more about language than they could plausibly have learned on the basis of their experience; so absent an alternative account of the relevant generalizations and speakers' (tacit) knowledge of them, one should conclude that there (...) are substantive "universal" principles of human grammar and, as a result of human biology, children can only acquire languages that conform to these principles. According to Pullum and Scholz, linguists need not suppose that children are innately endowed with "specific contingent facts about natural languages." But Pullum and Scholz don't consider the kinds of facts that really impress nativists. Nor do they offer any plausible acquisition scenarios that would culminate in the acquisition of languages that exhibit the kinds of rich and interrelated generalizations that are exhibited by natural languages. As we stress, good poverty-of-stimulus arguments are based on specific principles - - confirmed by drawing on (negative and crosslinguistic) data unavailable to children -- that help explain a range of independently established linguistic phenomena. If subsequent psycholinguistic experiments show that very young children already know such principles, that strengthens the case for nativism; and if further investigation shows that children sometimes "try out" constructions that are unattested in the local language, but only if such constructions are attested in other human languages, then the case for nativism is made stronger still. We illustrate these points by considering an apparently disparate -- but upon closer inspection, interestingly related -- cluster of phenomena involving: negative polarity items, the interpretation of 'or', binding theory, and displays of Romance and Germanic constructions in child- English.. (shrink)

American bankruptcy law has offered a "fresh start" in every state for over one hundred years. As a result, econometric studies of consumer bankruptcy often focus on one of the few aspects of the law that has varied significantly across time and across states: exemptions. Professors Gropp, Scholz and White published the first article to test the effect of exemptions on credit markets. Consistent with theory, they found that residents of states with larger exemptions pay higher interest rates than those (...) in states with lower exemptions and face an increased probability that they will be denied credit. These effects were most pronounced for poor households. This result is surprising because exemptions only allow a household to keep what it has. The difference between a $100,000 exemption and an exemption with no dollar limit should not matter if the household has little or no assets to exempt. This essay examines alternative explanations for why exemptions appear to have a disproportionate impact on the poor. Unfortunately, however, none of these alternative explanations proves entirely satisfactory. (shrink)

As is well known, Heinrich Scholz and his academic society maintained good scientific contacts with Polish logicians before, during, and after the Second World War. My interest here is to examine the details of their collaboration by presenting Scholz’s unpublished correspondence with Fr. Józef M. Bocheński. The following topics are discussed here: Polish logicians who survived the war and their current place of work; reorganization of the scholarly environment, didactic activities, duties, scholarly trips; current research topics, prospects for post-war publications, (...) and future publishing plans; information about Jan Łukasiewicz, Bolesław Sobociński, and Joachim Metallmann; personal matters. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between trust and solidarity. Juxtaposing trust and solidarity reveals how they are different and how they recursively build on each other. By looking specifically at trust in political solidarity, I argue for an account of trust within solidarity movements for social change, one that suggests avenues for creating and building trust, rather than merely presuming it. Finally, reflecting on the interplay between trust and solidarity, I end with a nod to the transformative impact of solidarity (...) on communities. (shrink)

Musik & Werturteil -- Musik & Toleranz -- Musik & Kunst -- Musik & Moral -- Schluss -- Literatur.

When we attempt to understand a person we make use of a body of practices called “folk psychology”. After clarifying the status and the content of folk psychology, the paper focuses on the current debate about its form. A version of the ‚theory theory’ is sketched that tries to do justice to the holism of the mental and to the constraining role of presumptions of coherence for the ascription of intentional states. Against this background, it is argued that radical simulationism, (...) the main competitor of the ‚theory theory’, is untenable. Understanding a person cannot be solely a matter of mental simulation. (shrink)

This contributed volume is the result of a July 2010 workshop at the University of Wuppertal Interdisciplinary Centre for Science and Technology Studies which brought together world-wide experts from physics, philosophy and history, in order to address a set of questions first posed in the 1950s: How do we compare spacetime theories? How do we judge, objectively, which is the “best” theory? Is there even a unique answer to this question? -/- The goal of the workshop, and of this book, (...) is to contribute to the development of a meta-theory of spacetime theories. Such a meta-theory would reveal insights about specific spacetime theories by distilling their essential similarities and differences, deliver a framework for a class of theories that could be helpful as a blueprint to build other meta-theories, and provide a higher-level viewpoint for judging which theory most accurately describes nature. But rather than drawing a map in broad strokes, the focus is on particularly rich regions in the “space of spacetime theories.” -/- This work will be of interest to physicists, as well as philosophers and historians of science working with or interested in General Relativity and/or Space, Time and Gravitation more generally. (shrink)

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind, reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral intention; participants (...) made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction, and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent. These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information. (shrink)

It is essential for the strategy of open access self-archiving that scientific authors are given comprehensive information on publisher copyright policies. DINI, the German Initiative for Networked Information, has developed a German (and potentially multilingual) interface to the English SHERPA/RoMEO service to provide additional information on German publishers' open access policies. As a next step, this interface was enhanced to an integration layer combining different sources on publisher copyright policies. This integration layer can be used in many different contexts. Together (...) with the SHERPA/RoMEO team, DINI aims to build an international support structure for open access information. (shrink)

Alles, was der Mensch von sich wissen kann, lässt sich an den Werkzeugen und Medien ablesen, die er gebraucht. Diese These steht im Mittelpunkt des Werks von Ernst Kapp (1808-1896), Gymnasiallehrer für Geschichte und Erdkunde, Technikphilosoph und Farmer in Texas. Obwohl Ernst Kapp unbestritten als Begründer der modernen Technikphilosophie gilt, ist sein anthropologischer Ansatz bislang kaum systematisch rezipiert worden. Zwar wird sein Werk in Überblicken meist als wichtiger Ausgangspunkt für die Technikphilosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts genannt, sein heuristisches Theorem der Organprojektion (...) wird dabei jedoch oft falsch als Vorläufer der Prothesentheorie von Freud bis McLuhan eingeordnet und nicht als kulturhistorische Erkenntnistheorie verstanden. Bei dem vorliegenden Buch handelt es sich um den ersten Forschungsband zum Werk von Ernst Kapp. Mit Beiträgen von Suzana Alpsancar, Christine Blättler, Lorenz Engell, Volker Gerhardt, Frank Hartmann, Christoph Hubig, Friedrich A. Kittler, Harun Maye, Alfred Nordmann, Birgit Recki, Hans-Martin Sass, Leander Scholz, Johanna Seifert, Christiane Voss und Niels Werber"--Back cover. (shrink)

While evolutionary thinking is increasingly becoming popular in fields of investigation outside the biological sciences, it remains unclear how helpful it is there and whether it actually yields good explanations of the phenomena under study. Here we examine the ontology of a recent approach to applying evolutionary thinking outside biology, the generalized Darwinism approach proposed by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen. We examine the ontology of populations in biology and in GD, and argue that biological evolutionary theory sets ontological criteria (...) that GD fails to meet. We suggest two options to revise the population concept in GD: reformulating the concept in terms of inheritance and reproduction such that it comes to pick out individuals similar to evolving populations, or trying to build an adequate population concept on a principle of differential retention instead of differential reproduction. 1 Introduction2 Generalized Darwinism2.1 What is generalized Darwinism?2.2 Darwinian principles3 The Ontology of Generalized Darwinism: What Are Populations?3.1 The population concept of generalized Darwinism3.2 The population concept in evolutionary theory4 Locating Evolving Systems in Generalized Darwinism5 Conclusion. (shrink)

Writing from a scientifically and philosophically informed perspective, the authors provide a critical overview of the conceptual difficulties encountered in many current neuroscientific and psychological theories.

Organizational ecology is commonly seen as a Darwinian research program that seeks to explain the diversity of organizational structures, properties and behaviors as the product of selection in past social environments in a similar manner as evolutionary biology seeks to explain the forms, properties and behaviors of organisms as consequences of selection in past natural environments. We argue that this explanatory strategy does not succeed because organizational ecology theory lacks an evolutionary mechanism that could be identified as the principal cause (...) of organizational diversity. The “evolution” of organizational populations by means of selection, which organizational ecologists put forward as the mechanism responsible for the extant diversity of organizational forms, is not evolution in any proper sense, because organizational populations do not have what it takes to participate in evolutionary processes. This implies that organizational ecology is not a Darwinian research program and that it cannot explain organizational diversity. (shrink)

Early analytic philosophy -- Radical translation and intersubjective practice -- Critical outcome.

Biology and history are often viewed as closely related disciplines, with biology informed by history, especially in its task of charting our evolutionary past. Maximizing the opportunities for cross-fertilization in these two fields requires an accurate reckoning of their commonalities and differences-precisely what this volume sets out to achieve. Specially commissioned essays by a team of recognized international researchers cover the full panoply of topics in these fields and include notable contributions on the correlativity of evolutionary and historical explanations, applying (...) to history the latest causal-mechanical approach in the philosophy of biology, and the question of generalized laws that might pertain across the two subjects. The collection opens with a vital interrogation of general issues on explanation that apart from potentially fruitful areas of interaction (could the etiology of the causal-mechanical perspective in biology account for the historical trajectory of the Roman Empire?) this volume also seeks to chart relative certainties distinguishing explanations in biology and history. It also assesses techniques such as the use of probabilities in biological reconstruction, deployed to overcome the inevitable gaps in physical evidence on early evolution. Methodologies such as causal graphs and semantic explanation receive in-depth analysis. Contributions from a host of prominent and widely read philosophers ensure that this new volume has the stature of a major addition to the literature. (shrink)

We criticize a view of maternity that equates the natural with the genetic and biological and show how such a practice overdetermines the maternal body and the maternal experience for women who are mothers through adoption and ART . As an alternative, we propose a new framework designed to rethink maternal bodies through the lens of feminist embodiment. Feminist embodied maternity, as we call it, stresses the particularity of experience through subjective embodiment. A feminist embodied maternity emphasizes the physical relations (...) of the subjective lived-body rather than the genetic or biological connections. Instead of universalizing claims about the maternal body, embodied maternity looks to communicable experiences and empathetic understanding. (shrink)