Several publications with healthcare professionals, such as psychotherapists, have shown a significant difference in personality styles in practitioners using hypnosis compared to those not using hypnosis. To investigate differences in personality styles, dentists were contacted to participate in a personality-inventory [Personality Style and Disorder Inventory ] online survey. Dentists using hypnosis were compared to dentists not using hypnosis. Results show that hypnosis-practicing dentists score significantly higher in the intuitive/schizotypal ST personality style compared to non-hypnosis-practicing dentists. Female dentists scored significantly higher (...) in intuitive/schizotypal ST and unselfish/self-sacrificing SL in the HYP DGZH sample but only in unselfish/self-sacrificing SL in the NONHYP DENT sample. The percentage of women was similar in both samples. Intuitive/schizotypal ST was found to be the predominant personality style of men who are interested in or use hypnosis, metaphorically so-called “homo hypnoticus.” Within the limitations of this cross-sectional non-interventional observational online-questionnaire study, results expand this notion to the so-called “homo hypnoticus dentalis.” However, further research on the subject is needed to investigate and confirm this personality type in other than the German-speaking DACH countries. (shrink)

Corporate reputation is decisive for stakeholders’ supporting or repelling behavior and, therefore, one of firms’ most valuable intangible resources. Drawing on signaling theory, this paper focuses on the usefulness of voluntarily provided corporate reputation disclosures (CRDs) and examines their impact on stakeholders’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Our experimental vignette studies reveal that CRDs reduce stakeholders’ information asymmetries, which positively affects perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation as well as stakeholders’ purchase, investment, and employment intentions. The relationships between CRDs and stakeholders’ (...) behavioral intentions are sequentially mediated by changes in the perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation. This implies that stakeholders use the signals transmitted by CRDs to adjust their perceptions of a firm’s organizational performance and corporate reputation, which ultimately induces their behavioral outcomes. Overall, our empirical results show the usefulness of CRDs for firms in effectively developing stakeholder relationships and, thereby, contributing to assure their going concern. For stakeholders, CRDs improve efficiency in evaluating a firm’s future development. (shrink)

This paper argues that the interventionist account of causation faces a dilemma concerning macroscopic causation – i.e., causation by composite objects. Interventionism must either require interventions on a composite object to hold the behavior of its parts fixed, or allow such interventions to vary the behavior of those parts. The first option runs the risk of making wholes causally excluded by their parts, while the second runs the risk of mistakenly ascribing to wholes causal abilities that belong to their parts (...) only. Using as starting point Baumgartner’s well-known argument that interventionism leads to causal exclusion of multiply realized properties, I first show that a similar interventionist exclusion argument can be mounted against the causal efficacy of composite objects. I then show that Woodward’s (2015) updated interventionist account (explicitly designed to address exclusion worries) avoids this problem, but runs into an opposite issue of over-inclusion: it grants to composites causal abilities that belong to their parts only. Finally, I examine two other interventionist accounts designed to address Baumgartner’s argument, and show that when applied to composites, they too fall on one horn (exclusion) or the other (over-inclusion) of the dilemma. I conclude that the dilemma constitutes an open and difficult issue for interventionism. (shrink)

Der vorliegende zweite Band der Veroffentlichten Schriften enthalt die zwei Schriften Brentanos Uber ein optisches Paradox, sowie Zur Lehre von den optischen Tauschungen, Zur Lehre von der Empfindung, Von der psychologischen Analyse der Tonqualitaten in ihre eigentlich ersten Elemente, und die Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie. Eine Einleitung von Wilhelm Baumgartner eroffnet den Zugang zu den vorliegenden Schriften.".

Thomas Sattig develops a novel philosophical picture of ordinary objects such as persons, tables, and trees. He carves a middle way between classical mereology and Aristotelian hylomorphism, and argues that objects lead double lives. They are compounds of matter and form, and each object's matter and form have different qualitative profiles.

In Natural Minds Thomas Polger advocates, and defends, the philosophical theory that mind equals brain -- that sensations are brain processes -- and in doing so brings the mind-brain identity theory back into the philosophical debate about consciousness. The version of identity theory that Polger advocates holds that conscious processes, events, states, or properties are type- identical to biological processes, events, states, or properties -- a "tough-minded" account that maintains that minds are necessarily indentical to brains, a position held (...) by few current identity theorists. Polger's approach to what William James called the "great blooming buzzing confusion" of consciousness begins with the idea that we need to know more about brains in order to understand consciousness fully, but recognizes that biology alone cannot provide the entire explanation. Natural Minds takes on issues from philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and metaphysics, moving freely among them in its discussion.Polger begins by answering two major objections to identity theory -- Hilary Putnam's argument from multiple realizability and Saul Kripke's modal argument against mind-brain identity. He then offers a detailed account of functionalism and functional realization, which offer the most serious obstacle to consideration of identity theory. Polger argues that identity theory can itself satisfy the kind of explanatory demands that are often believed to favor functionalism. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka presents the first full historical study of an important strand in the development of modern moral philosophy. His subject is a series of British ethical theorists from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, who shared key assumptions that made them a unified and distinctive school. The best-known of them are Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and W. D. Ross; others include Hastings Rashdall, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and A. C. Ewing. They disagreed on (...) some important topics, especially in normative ethics. Thus some were consequentialists and others deontologists: Sidgwick thought only pleasure is good while others emphasized perfectionist goods such as knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and virtue. But all were non-naturalists and intuitionists in metaethics, holding that moral judgements can be objectively true, have a distinctive subject-matter, and are known by direct insight. They also had similar views about how ethical theory should proceed and what are relevant arguments in it; their disagreements therefore took place on common ground. -/- Hurka recovers the history of this under-appreciated group by showing what its members thought, how they influenced each other, and how their ideas changed through time. He also identifies the shared assumptions that made their school unified and distinctive, and assesses their contributions critically, both when they debated each other and when they agreed. One of his themes is that that their general approach to ethics was more fruitful philosophically than many better-known ones of both earlier and later times. (shrink)

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit (...) und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl. (shrink)

Thomas Kjeller Johansen presents a new account of Aristotle's major work on psychology, the De Anima.

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these -- and the press of subtler questions (...) hidden in their amibiguities -- deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the program of the geometrization of nature on the other. (shrink)

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit (...) und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. -/- Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl. (shrink)

"De ente et essentia" from Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), sanctus, doctor Ecclesiae catholicae, theologus italianus et philosophus mediaevalis.

Thomas Nagel is widely recognized as one of the top American philosophers working today. Reflecting the diversity of his many philosophical preoccupations, this volume is a collection of his most recent critical essays and reviews.

DIVBased on a series of lectures delivered in 1840, Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History considers the creation of heroes and the ways they exert heroic leadership. From the divine and prophetic to the poetic to the religious to the political, Carlyle investigates the mysterious qualities that elevate humans to cultural significance. By situating the text in the context of six essays by distinguished scholars that reevaluate both Carlyle’s work and his ideas, David Sorensen and (...) Brent Kinser argue that Carlyle's concept of heroism stresses the hero’s spiritual dimension. In Carlyle’s engagement with various heroic personalities, he dislodges religiosity from religion, myth from history, and truth from “quackery” as he describes the wondrous ways in which these “flowing light-fountains” unlock the heroic potential of ordinary human beings. /div. (shrink)

This article argues that Carol Gilligan's research in moral development psychology, work which claims that women speak about ethics in a "different voice" than men do, is applicable to business ethics. This essay claims that Gilligan's "ethic of care" provides a plausible explanation for the results of two studies that found men and women handling ethical dilemmas in business differently. This paper also speculates briefly about the management implications of Gilligan's ideas.

This new translation of Thomas Aquinas’s most important study of Aristotle casts bright light on the thinking of both philosophers. Using a new text of Aquinas’s original Latin commentary, Robert Pasnau provides a precise translation that will enable students to undertake close philosophical readings. He includes an introduction and notes to set context and clarify difficult points as well as a translation of the medieval Latin version of Aristotle’s _De anima _ so that readers can refer to the text (...) Aquinas had at hand. In his _De anima commentary_, Aquinas offers the first and most original of his studies of Aristotle. His influential, cogent reading of Aristotle’s notoriously difficult text not only contributes to our understanding of the Greek philosopher but also expresses in full detail Aquinas’s own views on central philosophical topics. Writing at the height of his intellectual powers, Aquinas considers in full detail the nature of the soul, the mind-body problem, the role of the intellect, the character of sensation, and many other related issues. (shrink)

The fourteenth-century thinker Thomas Bradwardine is well known in both the history of science and the history of theology. The first of the Merton Calculators (mathematical physicists) and passionate defender of the Augustinian doctrine of salvation through grace alone, he was briefly archbishop of Canterbury before succumbing to the Black Death in 1349. This new edition of his Insolubilia, made from all thirteen known manuscripts, shows that he was also a logician of the first rank. The edition is accompanied (...) by a full English translation. In the treatise, Bradwardine considers and rejects the theories of his contemporaries about the logical puzzles known as 'insolubles,' and sets out his own solution at length and in detail. In a substantial introduction, Stephen Read describes Bradwardine's analysis, compares it with other more recent theories, and places it in its historical context. The text is accompanied by three appendices, the first of which is an extra chapter found in two manuscripts (and partly in a third) that appears to contain further thoughts by Bradwardine himself. The second contains an extract from Ralph Strode's Insolubilia, composed in the 1360s, repeating and enlarging on Bradwardine's text; and the third consists of an anonymous text that applies Bradwardine's solution to a succession of different insolubles"--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

The major point of contention among the philosophers and mathematicians who have written about the independence results for the continuum hypothesis (CH) and related questions in set theory has been the question of whether these results give reason to doubt that the independent statements have definite truth values. This paper concerns the views of G. Kreisel, who gives arguments based on second order logic that the CH does have a truth value. The view defended here is that although Kreisel's conclusion (...) is correct, his arguments are unsatisfactory. Later sections of the paper advance a different argument that the independence results do not show lack of truth values. (shrink)

Professor Thomas Pogge, Professorial Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy, LPO Box 8260, Canberra. Tel.: +61 261255485; Email: tp6{at}columbia.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract I would pay three million to go into space, says the banker to his attorney. — I wouldn't go if you paid me, the latter laughs, for me the French Riviera is quite exciting enough. Ah, I would pay a million for an extra year of life , the elderly tourist (...) effusively tells his lover. — We have never had even a hundred dollars , the Cambodian teenager replies, we are a large family. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

This textbook introduces undergraduate students of language and linguistics to the basic ideas, insights, and techniques of contemporary semantic theory. The book starts with everyday observations about word meaning and use and then gradually zooms in on the question of how speakers manage to meaningfully communicate with phrases, sentences, and texts they have never come across before. Extensive English examples provide ample illustration.

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

How can I know something? How can I convince someone of the rightness of my position? How does reality function? What is artistic creativity? What is the role of the state? It is well known that people from various cultures give dissimilar answers to such philosophical questions. After three decades in the cross-cultural study of ideas and values, Thomas Kasulis found that culture influences not only the answers to these questions, but often how one arrives at the answers. In (...) generalizing cultural difference, Kasulis identifies two kinds of orientation: intimacy and integrity. Both determine how we think about relations among people and among things, and each is reasonable, effective, and consistent. Yet the two are so incompatible in their basic assumptions that they cannot successfully engage each other. Cultural difference extends beyond nations. Cultural identities crystallize in relation to religion, occupation, race, gender, class. Rather than attempt to transcend cultural difference, Kasulis urges a deeper awareness of its roots by moving beyond mere cultural relativism toward a cultural bi-orientationality that will allow us to adapt ourselves to different cultural contexts as the situation demands. Wonderfully clear and unburdened by jargon, Intimacy or Integrity is accessible to readers from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. By analyzing the synergy between thought and culture, it increases our understanding of cultural difference and guides us in developing strategies for dealing with orientations different from our own. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Regarded as the father of existentialist philosophy, he was also a political critic, moralist, playwright, novelist, and author of biographies and short stories. Thomas R. Flynn provides the first book-length account of Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, mapping the intellectual development of his ideas throughout his life, and building a narrative that is not only philosophical but also attentive to the political and literary dimensions (...) of his work. Exploring Sartre's existentialism, politics, ethics, and ontology, this book illuminates the defining ideas of Sartre's oeuvre: the literary and the philosophical, the imaginary and the conceptual, his descriptive phenomenology and his phenomenological concept of intentionality, and his conjunction of ethics and politics with an 'egoless' consciousness. It will appeal to all who are interested in Sartre's philosophy and its relation to his life. (shrink)

This latest volume in the acclaimed Ruffin Series in Business Ethics brings together the contributions to the annual Ruffin Lecture series, in which some of the leading scholars in business ethics addressed the question: Can business, and business education, be considered one of the humanities, or is it in a class by itself? At a time when business is coming under attack for its apparent transgressions, this book iluminates the special values that inhere in the business world. Arguing all sides (...) of the issue, the distinguished contributors include Richard DeGeorge, Ronald Green, Thomas Dunfee, Robert Solomon, Edwin Hartman, Peter French, Patricia Werhane, Clarence Walton, W. Michael Hoffman, David Fedo, Kenneth Andrews, Joanne Ciulla, Manuel Velasquez, and George Brenkert. The editors contribute an informative Introduction and an Epilogue to set the debate in its proper context. (shrink)

[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the statement (...) relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan is the greatest work of political philosophy in English and the first great work of philosophy in English. In addition, it presents the fundamentals of his beliefs about language, epistemology, and an extensive treatment of revealed religion and its relation to politics. Beginning with premises that were sometimes controversial, such as that every human action is caused by the agent's desire for his own good, Hobbes derived shocking conclusions, such as that the civil government enjoys absolute (...) control over its citizens and that the sovereign has the right to determine which religion is to be practiced in a commonwealth. Hobbes's contemporaries recognized the power of the arguments in Leviathan and many of them wrote responses to it. Selections from books by John Bramhall, Robert Filmer, Edward Hyde, George Lawson, William Lucy, Samuel Pufendorf and Thomas Tenison are included in this edition. Leviathan is divided into four parts: In the first part, Of Man, Hobbes presents a view of human beings and of the natural world in general that is materialistic and mechanistic. In the second part, Of Commonwealth, he defends the theory of absolute sovereignty, the view that the government has all the political power and has the right to control any aspect of life. In the third part, Of a Christian Commonwealth, he critiques concepts like revelation, prophets, and miracles in such a way that it becomes doubtful whether they can be rationally justified. In the fourth part, Of the Kingdom of Darkness, he explains various ways in which priestly religion has corrupted religion and transgressed the rights of the sovereign. In this revised edition of Hobbes's classic work, A.P. Martinich improves Hobbes's punctuation for the sake of clarity. He has also added new notes for readers, extensive cross references, and substantial part of Hobbes's reply to Bramhall's The Catching of Leviathan. (shrink)

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection (...) interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational and an experimental field study. Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so. (shrink)

In his ethical writings, Duns Scotus emphasized both divine freedom and natural goodness, and these seem to conflict with each other in various ways. I offer an interpretation of Scotus which takes seriously these twin emphases and shows how they cohere. I argue that, for Scotus, all natural laws obtain just by the natures of actual things. Divine commands, such as the Ten Commandments, contingently track natural laws but do not make natural laws to be natural laws. I present textual (...) evidence for this claim. I also show how this view of Scotus on the natural law is consistent with a number of troubling passages. Scotus’s ethical theory implies that there are genuinely moral reasons for acting which are not absolutely binding (because subject to a divine command or permission otherwise) and also some moral reasons for acting which are absolutely binding (because not thus subject). (shrink)

This essay explores how the scientific community interpreted the discoveries of extinct giant birds during the mid-nineteenth century on the islands of New Zealand and Madagascar. It argues that the Aepyornis of Madagascar was understood through the moa of New Zealand because of the rise of global networks and theories. Indeed, their global connections made giant birds a sensation among the scientific community and together forged theories and associations not possible in isolation. In this way, this paper argues for a (...) closer look at how the creation of science emerged from a world framework that involved multiple sites of discovery and interpretation that continually influenced and reshaped scientific theories. It also stresses the importance of local naturalists in participating in this global exchange of knowledge. (shrink)

Thomas Alured Faunce, College of Law, Fellows Road, Acton, Canberra ACT 0200, Australian National University, Fax: 61 2 61253971, Email: Thomas.Faunce{at}anu.edu.au ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//-->This paper sets out to analyse three different academic proposals for addressing the needs of the poor in relation to new, rather than ‘essential’ medicines. It focuses particularly on research and development prize funds, a health impact fund system and a multilateral treaty on health technology cost-effectiveness evaluation and (...) competitive tender. It compares the extent to which each responds to the ‘market fundamentalist’ philosophy and begins to analyse their respective strengths and weaknesses. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Reprinted by permission of Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Chicago, IL, from Sartre’s two ethics: from authenticity to integral humanity by Anderson, Thomas C., copyright © 1993 by Open Court Publishing Company.

Although normative systems, or social laws, have proved to be a highly influential approach to coordination in multi-agent systems, the issue of compliance to such normative systems remains problematic. In all real systems, it is possible that some members of an agent population will not comply with the rules of a normative system, even if it is in their interests to do so. It is therefore important to consider the extent to which a normative system is robust, i.e., the extent (...) to which it remains effective even if some agents do not comply with it. We formalise and investigate three different notions of robustness and related decision problems. We begin by considering sets of agents whose compliance is necessary and/or sufficient to guarantee the effectiveness of a normative system; we then consider quantitative approaches to robustness, where we try to identify the proportion of an agent population that must comply in order to ensure success; and finally, we consider a more general approach, where we characterise the compliance conditions required for success as a logical formula. We furthermore introduce a logic for specifying properties of norm compliance in general and norm robustness in particular. (shrink)

Thomas Baldwin; III*—The Original Choice In Sartre and Kant, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pages 31–44, https://doi.

It is a widespread view that Marx did not apply dialectics to nature, and that Engels’s writings on this subject are a distortion of his outlook. This paper examines Marx’s discussion of elliptical motion and some other physical phenomena, and shows that he did indeed find contradictions and oppositions in nature, and thus recognised a dialectics of nature. In addition to analysing relevant passages in Marx’s texts, his study of the physics and mathematics of elliptical motion is reviewed and compared (...) with Hegel’s position. Marx’s conception of how dialectical contradictions are resolved is reviewed in order to interpret his claim that the contradiction in elliptical motion is ‘solved’ but not ‘overcome’ by that motion. Textual evidence is presented that Marx regarded ‘real contradictions’ as resolved only by ‘development’, a process in which the conflict between the opposing sides of the contradiction becomes more intense. The consequences of this interpretation for Marx’s analysis of elliptical motion are explored, and some alternative interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

In some passages Scotus seems to endorse a thoroughgoing voluntarism, holding not merely that the moral law is established entirely by God's will, but even that there is no reason why God wills in one way rather than another. In other passages, however, Scotus insists that reason plays an important role in morality—that right reason is an essential element in the moral goodness of an action, and that moral truth is accessible to natural reason. -/- Many commentators have supposed that (...) these two views are incompatible, and so they have seen only three options for interpreting Scotus: (i) one can simply concede that Scotus is inconsistent, (ii) one can deny that Scotus in fact allows reason a place in morality, or (iii) one can deny that Scotus is really a thoroughgoing voluntarist. We can find all three of these views in print. By laying out Scotus's view of the role of reason in morality and showing how it coheres with his voluntarism, I show that there is in fact no difficulty here. (shrink)