Howard Thurman (1899?1981) touched the lives of many leaders in and beyond the US civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Thurman earned his degree in politics/economics at Morehouse College and in theology at Rochester Theological Seminary. He served as dean of the chapel at Boston University from 1953 to 1965. At once mystic, pacifist and integrationist, his thought was vitally impacted by experience of oppression in America?s Deep South. Thurman was an isolated child in an aggrieved community, forced (...) back upon a deep inner spirituality to cope with material deprivation and indifference. He explored the importance of ?sites of memory? as a means of recovering emotion, not least grief. For Thurman, the individual is the point of departure, but is only fully constituted in ?the crucible of relationship?; the purpose of knowledge is action; and the object of action is to secure loving relationships. (shrink)

Walter Kendrick traces the relatively recent concept of pornography—the word was not coined until the late 18th century—which became a public issue once the printing press gave ordinary people access to the erotica of the Greeks and Romans, the art and literature of the French enlightenment, and the poems of the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland's _Fanny Hill_. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of _Madame Bovary_ and _Lady Chatterly's Lover_, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and (...) the Internet, Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. (shrink)

The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well‐informed ideological elites whose passionate political debates find (...) little echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to “saving” democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse‐inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real‐world political events, but in pulling together and stimulating new lines of research into what moves the “creative synthesizers” of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems and attempt to transmit them to the public; and into the long‐term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. (shrink)

This paper discusses the theories underlying Walter Gropius’ conception of science. Starting with “Is There a Science of Design?” written by Gropius in 1947, the influences of Ganzheitspsychologie and the New Look on Perception are traced. In particular, the contribution of Earl C. Kelley is analyzed. Subsequently, Gropius’ phenomenological approach, insights on expressive qualities, and the relationship between man- environment are discussed. Finally, the influences of Gestalt theory and spiritualistic psychology on Gropius’s conception of science and perception are (...) outlined. (shrink)

As a result of the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic, an internal tension in the goals of medicine has come to the forefront of public debate. Medical professionals are continuously faced with a tug of...

"The central task of phenomenology is to investigate the nature of consciousness and its relations to objects of various types. The present book introduces students and other readers to several foundational topics of phenomenological inquiry, and illustrates phenomenology's contemporary relevance. The main topics include consciousness, intentionality, perception, meaning, and knowledge. The book also contains critical assessments of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method. It argues that knowledge is the most fundamental mode of consciousness, and that the central theses constitutive of Husserl's "transcendental (...) idealism" are compatible with metaphysical realism regarding the objects of thought, perception, and knowledge. Helpful tools include introductions that help the reader segue from the previous chapter to the new one, chapter conclusions, and suggested reading lists of primary and some key secondary sources. Key Features: Elucidates and engages with contemporary work in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind. Provides clear prose explanations of the necessary distinctions and arguments required for understanding the subject. Places knowledge at the center of phenomenological inquiry"--. (shrink)

Contribución de eruditos autores sobre aspectos trascendentales de la teoría pura del derecho. Esta obra debe verse como una expresión de esa renovada ocupación con los problemas de la doctrina de Kelsen.

This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarian social evaluation. Sufficientarianism has emerged as an increasingly important notion of distributive justice. We propose a class of principles that we label generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings. The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels of well-being that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. (...) When combined with the well-known strong Pareto principle and the assumption that there be a constant critical level, the axiom implies that the critical level cannot be below the threshold. The main results of the paper are characterizations of our new class and an important subclass. As a final observation, we identify the generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that permit us to avoid the repugnant conclusion and the sadistic conclusion, which are known as two fundamental challenges in population ethics. (shrink)

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Bandes stehen aktuelle Themen politischer Ethik, die sich den drei Bereichen Migration, Europa und Populismus zuordnen lassen. Die ethischen Herausforderungen, die die internationale Migration mit sich bringt, erfordern das Zusammenspiel nationaler und europäischer Ebenen. Entsprechend ist der große Rahmen der hier versammelten Beiträge eine transnational zu denkende Sozialethik in den Strukturen Europas. Zu den Reaktionen auf die Migration gehört unter anderem der erstarkende Rechtspopulismus, der sich in der Regel dezidiert europaskeptisch positioniert. Insofern ergeben sich aus dem Nachdenken (...) über Europa, Migration und Populismus Spannungsfelder und Argumentationsmuster, die mit grundlegenderen Fragen politischer Ethik verbunden sind. (shrink)

Proponents of situated affectivity hold that “tools for feeling” are just as characteristic of the human condition as are “tools for thinking” or tools for carpentry. An agent’s affective life, they argue, is dependent upon both physical characteristics of the agent and the agent’s reciprocal relationship to an appropriately structured natural, technological, or social environment. One important achievement has been the distinction between two fundamentally different ways in which affectivity might be intertwined with the environment: the “user-resource-model” and the “mind-invasion-model.” (...) The twofold purpose of this paper is to complement the debate about situated affectivity in general and about “mind invasion” in particular by, firstly, connecting it to situationist research in social psychology and, secondly, broadening the perspective to not only accommodate decidedly detrimental “invasions” but also potentially beneficial forms of “mind shaping” that include the manipulation of an agent’s experiential life and behaviour through the moulding of both the agent’s environment and the agent’s body. (shrink)

Proponents of situated affectivity hold that “tools for feeling” are just as characteristic of the human condition as are “tools for thinking” or tools for carpentry. An agent’s affective life, they argue, is dependent upon both physical characteristics of the agent and the agent’s reciprocal relationship to an appropriately structured natural, technological, or social environment. One important achievement has been the distinction between two fundamentally different ways in which affectivity might be intertwined with the environment: the “user-resource-model” and the “mind-invasion-model.” (...) The twofold purpose of this paper is to complement the debate about situated affectivity in general and about “mind invasion” in particular by, firstly, connecting it to situationist research in social psychology and, secondly, broadening the perspective to not only accommodate decidedly detrimental “invasions” but also potentially beneficial forms of “mind shaping” that include the manipulation of an agent’s experiential life and behaviour through the moulding of both the agent’s environment and the agent’s body. (shrink)

In his theory of time Aristotle does not often mention the present time and nowhere gives a detailed account of it. Nonetheless, present time plays an important role in his conception. I primarily argue for the following claims: (1) According to Aristotle there is a perception of motion and there is a perception of time. These combined perceptions can neither occur in the past nor in the future nor in an indivisible now. Thus, there must be a present time. (2) (...) Aristotle acknowledges the passage of time. This passage of time can only be understood as a passing present. And since an indivisible now cannot pass, the passage of time delivers a further argument for the basic assumption of a present time. – For the most part I simply follow Aristotle’s argument in Physics IV 10 and 11. In doing so, I distinguish present time and now in the introductory puzzles, investigate the passing present in the co-perception of change and time, discuss the relation between change and the passage of time as well as the relation between the passing present and the different nows. (shrink)

We examine the impact of Suzumura’s (Economica 43:381–390, 1976) consistency property when applied in the context of collective choice rules that are independent of irrelevant alternatives, neutral, and monotonic. An earlier contribution by Blau and Deb (Econometrica 45:871–879, 1977) establishes the existence of a vetoer if the collective relation is required to be complete and acyclical. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities that result if completeness and acyclicity are dropped and Suzumura consistency is imposed instead. A (...) conceptually similar but logically independent version of the combined axiom that requires the collective decision mechanism to be independent, neutral, and monotonic is employed. In the case of a finite population, we obtain an alternative impossibility theorem if a collective choice rule is assumed to be non-degenerate and a modified no veto requirement is imposed instead of Blau and Deb’s (1977) condition. If the population is countably infinite, the impossibility can be avoided but it resurfaces if our new no veto property is extended to a coalitional variant. (shrink)

Neural prosthetics are systems or devices connected to the brain that can restore damaged or lost sensory, motor, and cognitive functions. This book explores the neuroscientific and philosophical implications of neural prosthetics.

The workshop will discuss new insights in the interaction between logic and law, and more precisely the study of different answers to the question: What role does logic play in legal reasoning? It will present both current challenges and historical perspectives in the relation between logic and law. The perspectives to be discussed involve the interface of the following studies.

Public-policy choices frequently have to be carried out in the presence of incommensurabilities. These incommensurabilities may manifest themselves in the form of incompleteness—that is, some of the options under consideration are not comparable by a decision maker. As a consequence, it may be impossible to select policies that are at least as good as all competing proposals. When faced with incommensurabilities of this nature, transitivity can be considered too demanding a requirement. An attractive weakening of transitivity consists of a property (...) that Kotaro Suzumura (Economica, 43:381–390, 1976) introduced under the label of consistency. Suzumura consistency postulates that goodness cycles with at least one instance of betterness are to be avoided thus strengthening the well-known acyclicity condition that precludes the existence of betterness cycles. The property is compared to alternative weakenings of transitivity, and it is shown that it has numerous advantages over other contenders. For instance, Suzumura consistency is precisely what is needed to avoid a money pump. The issue of rational choice in the context of public decision-making is discussed in order to provide an illustration of the usefulness of Suzumura consistency. (shrink)

This paper provides a characterization of a new class of ordinal poverty measures that are defined by means of the aggregate generalized poverty gap. To be precise, we propose to use the sum of the differences between the transformed fixed poverty line and the transformed level of income of each person below the line as our measure. If the transformation is strictly concave, the resulting measure is strictly inequality averse with respect to the incomes of the poor. In analogy to (...) some existing results on inequality measurement, we show that the only relative (scale-invariant) members of our class are based on strictly concave power functions or the natural logarithm. Moreover, we show that our measures allow for a useful decomposition that is akin to those examined in some earlier contributions. In an empirical analysis, we compare the logarithmic variant of our index to two well-established alternative orderings. Unlike numerous indices that appear in the earlier literature, ours do not explicitly depend on the number of poor or on the total population size, thereby ruling out any direct influence of the head-count ratio on poverty comparisons. (shrink)

Accompanied by an introductory monograph and a full critical apparatus, this English-language edition of Karel van Mander’s _Grondt der edel, vry schilderconst_ (Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting) provides unprecedented access to this crucially important art treatise on _schilderconst_ (the art of painting / picturing).