We comment on the last chapter of Henrich where the author offers a ‘key’ to Hegel’s Logic focusing on the problem of the passage from self-reference to determination in the beginning of the Logic. We argue that what he offers as a ‘key’ is actually a reduction of Hegel to the logic of understanding from the point of view of an autonomous Ego; consequently, he excludes dialectics. Contrarily, we present Hegel’s own solution, eliciting the remark where he shows that the (...) proposition “Being and Nothing are the same” negates itself insofar as it is uttered and reflected on the Other’s understanding. We conjecture that this remark offers a privileged point from which to consider the connection Hegel-Lacan, provided we recognize the Absolute in Hegel as the big Other in Lacan. We suggest that the dialectical identity of identity and difference is actually an operation in the Agora and that the Hegel-Marx-Lacan theory can be properly denominated dialectical materialism. We also offer an answer to Žižek’s question of how a “neutral medium of designation” can emerge within a “life-world practice” or out of a “universe of matter. (shrink)

One question in moral psychology concerns the role of emotions to motivate moral action. This question has recently become more urgent, because it is now clearer that cognitive developmental theories cannot offer a complete explanation of moral functioning. This paper suggests that emotion, as is typically understood in psychology, cannot be seen as the basis for an acceptable explanation of moral behaviour and motivation. However, it is argued that it is possible to understand emotions as embedded in agentic processes, and (...) regulated by conscious concerns. So understood, emotions acquire an important role in the person's moral life. These conclusions are reached through an extensive review of psychological and philosophical conceptions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Este artículo trata sobre la postura práctica de Aquino ante dos grandes dificultades filosóficas actuales que se encuentran en la base del debate ético contemporáneo. Como son la Is-ought thesis de Hume y la síntesis radical de Moore, la Open question. La posible solución tomista se puede encontrar en la triple función del intelecto humano, teórico y práctico a la vez: a) Aprehender las nociones ontológicas e intelectas ens, verum y bonum; b) Formular los primeros principios teóricos y prácticos; c) (...) E imperar que se haga el bien ontológico e intelecto y se evite lo contrario. (shrink)

This article explains how Aquinas understood: a) apprehension of the first intellectual concepts: ens, verum et bonum simpliciter (Ens is understood metaphysically as composed of human nature and the act of being, ordered according to the bonum); b) establishment of the first and the second practical commandments in a genuinely human or rational person; c) ethics and natural law as essentially derived from ontology. Therefore, natural law only makes sense from a metaphysical point of view, not merely a physical or (...) material one. (shrink)

Si le nom d’Albert Camus continue de s’imposer, aujourd’hui, comme une figure incontournable de la littérature et de la pensée françaises du XXe siècle, il n’en est pas moins demeuré une personnalité cosmopolite, sensible à ce que la culture ne s’accomplit véritablement qu’en l’absence de sectarisme, qu’en présence de l’autre — avec ou envers lui, peu importe. C’est aussi tout le sens de la collection « Exotopies » de l’Association portugaise des études françaises (A.P.E.F.) qu’inaugure ce volume : présenter des (...) travaux sur la langue et la culture françaises, mais d’un point de vue singulier, celui d’un autre pays. En lisant ce bouquet assez restreint, mais en même temps assez diversifié de travaux sur l’oeuvre d’Albert Camus, on relèvera donc qu’il ne s’agissait ni d’un hommage, ni d’une commémoration, si contraires au vif esprit de la littérature, mais de s’aviser de l’exceptionnelle variété et actualité de son oeuvre. En ce sens, il n’est de meilleure figure pour débuter cette collection à visée cosmopolite que celle d’Albert Camus, chez qui le geste d’écriture est totalement inscrit dans une vocation humaniste. Celle-ci ne s’entend pas dans un sens moraliste, mais dans un sens existentiel — sinon existentialiste —, qui veut que chacun se définisse par le souci qu’il a de l’autre, et que l’humanité s’apparaisse comme le perpetuum mobile de l’histoire, en même temps que son point fixe, son sens dernier. (shrink)

Este artículo se refiere a la doctrina práctica de Aquino sobre dos dificultades filosóficas que subyacen en gran parte del debate ético contemporáneo. Una es la Is-ought thesis de Hume y la otra es su consecuencia radical la Open-question argument de Moore. Estas paradojas éticas parecen tener sus raíces en un scepticismo epistemológico y en una antropología deficiente. La posible respuesta a ellas se puede encontrar en que: a) Tomás de Aquino defiende la esencial racionalidad y unidad del ser humano; (...) b) La ley natural tomista es una consecuencia natural del ser racional; c) La razón humana es esencialmente teórica y práctica al mismotiempo. El intelecto humano de Aquino naturalmente realiza tres operaciones principales: 1º) Aprehender las nociones inteligidas y universales ens, verum y bonum. 2º) Formular los primeros principios teóricos y prácticos. 3º) Ordenar que se haga el bien inteligido y universal y se evite lo contrario. Por estas razones,la respuesta filosófica de Aquino a ambas dificultades no es exclusivamente ética, sino que abarca armónicamente la ontología, antropología y epistemología. La ética de Tomás de Aquino es fundamentalmente diferente de las éticas que califican las acciones como buenas o por mero consenso social (contractualismo) o simplemente calculando sus consecuencias (consecuencialismo). (shrink)

Introduction - From the Illiad to the Studies on Hysteria: A chronology of the discovery of the unconscious mind - Freud's theories of the unconscious mind - Jung's collective unconscious - Lacan's linguistic paradigm.

Este artículo académico trata sobre cómo Aquino entendía: a) la aprehensión de las primeras nociones intelectas universales: ens, verum et bonum simpliciter; b) la fructificación de los primeros preceptos y de los segundos preceptos prácticos en la persona genuinamente humana o racional; c) la ética, ley moral natural, como esencialmente derivada de la ontología. Ens compuesto de naturaleza humana, entendida metafísicamente y acto del ser, ordenado al bonum; d) por tanto, la ley natural solo tiene sentido desde una visión metafísica, (...) no meramente física o material. (shrink)

This article explains how Aquinas understood: a) apprehension of the first intellectual concepts ens, verum et bonum simpliciter; b)establishment of the first and second commandments of natural law in a person, genuinely human or rational; and c) ethics as essentially derived from ontology.Metaphysically understood, Ens is a compound of human nature and act of being; d) therefore, natural law only makes sense from a metaphysical point of view, not a physical or material one.

Shared conceptualization, in the sense we take it here, is as recent a notion as the Semantic Web, but its relevance for a large variety of fields requires efficient methods of extraction and representation for both quantitative and qualitative data. This notion is particularly relevant for the investigation into, and construction of, semantic structures such as knowledge bases and taxonomies, but given the required large, often inaccurate, corpora available for search we can get only approximations. We see fuzzy description logic (...) as an adequate medium for the representation of human semantic knowledge and propose a means to couple it with fuzzy semantic networks via the propositional Łukasiewicz fuzzy logic such that these suffice for decidability for queries over a semantic-knowledge base such as “to what degree of sharedness does it entail the instantiation C(a) for some concept C” or “what are the roles R that connect the individuals a and b to degree of sharedness ε.” . (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende mostrar uma dupla perspectiva do ensino da filosofia proposto de forma disjuntiva: aprender a filosofar ou aprender a filosofia, representada, respectivamente, por Kant e por Hegel. A análise dessa questão será desenvolvida dentro do contexto da filosofia kantiana, nela destacando três aspectos: a) o ideal de perfectibilidade do gênero humano; b) o preceito da Aufklärung do pensar por si mesmo e o exercício crítico da razão, e c) a necessidade da coação como instrumento para o cumprimento (...) do caráter normativo da conduta humana. Estes aspectos serão, também, abordados na filosofia de Hegel, bem como as suas conseqüências para o ensino da filosofia, e da possibilidade de uma escolha não disjuntiva de uma ou de outra perspectiva. (shrink)

> Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster. The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference 26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature (...) and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the preindustrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2 3 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with COVID-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions. Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory. The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe’. In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5 6 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities and those with underlying health problems.2 4 Global heating is also contributing to the decline in …. (shrink)

Drawing on previously unknown or unassimilated sources, Donald C. Hodges here presents an entirely new interpretation of the politics and philosophy of Augusto C. Sandino, the intellectual progenitor of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution. The first part of the book investigates the political sources of Sandino's thought in the works of Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, Most, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Ricardo Flores Magón, and Lenin—a mixed legacy of pre-Marxist and non-Marxist authoritarian and libertarian communists. The second half of the study scrutinizes the (...) philosophy of nature and history that Sandino made his own. Hodges delves deeply into this philosophy as the supreme and final expression of Sandino's communism and traces its sources in the Gnostic and millenarian occult undergrounds. This results in a rich study of the ways in which Sandino's revolutionary communism and communist spirituality intersect—a spiritual politics that Hodges presents as more realistic than the communism of Karl Marx. While accepting the current wisdom that Sandino was a Nicaraguan liberal and social reformer, Hodges also makes a persuasive case that Sandino was first and foremost a communist, although neither of the Marxist nor anarchist variety. He argues that Sandino's eclectic communist spirituality was more of an asset than a liability for understanding the human condition, and that his spiritual politics promises to be more relevant than Marxism-Leninism for the twenty-first century. Indeed, Hodges believes that Sandino's holistic communism embraces both deep ecology and feminist spirituality—a finding that is sure to generate lively and productive debate. (shrink)

Our trust in the word of others is often dismissed as unworthy, because the illusory ideal of "autonomous knowledge" has prevailed in the debate about the nature of knowledge. Yet we are profoundly dependent on others for a vast amount of what any of us claim to know. Coady explores the nature of testimony in order to show how it might be justified as a source of knowledge, and uses the insights that he has developed to challenge certain widespread assumptions (...) in the areas of history, law, mathematics, and psychology. (shrink)

What is truly beautiful? For Søren Kierkegaard the beautiful is to be found in an integrated self, one that is freely chosen. This article explores Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" stage of existence through the character of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno's novel, Niebla. After establishing a solid link between Unamuno and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's "ethical" stage is used to critique the "aesthetic" stage on aesthetic grounds, on the basis of the beauty found in life's work, a calling. The conclusion (...) is that the sphere of the "aesthetic" does not achieve Kierkegaard's "aesthetics" of an integrated, fully existing self. (shrink)

What is truly beautiful? For Søren Kierkegaard the beautiful is to be found in an integrated self, one that is freely chosen. This article explores Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" stage of existence through the character of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno's novel, Niebla. After establishing a solid link between Unamuno and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's "ethical" stage is used to critique the "aesthetic" stage on aesthetic grounds, on the basis of the beauty found in life's work, a calling. The conclusion (...) is that the sphere of the "aesthetic" does not achieve Kierkegaard's "aesthetics" of an integrated, fully existing self. (shrink)

: What is truly beautiful? For Søren Kierkegaard the beautiful is to be found in an integrated self, one that is freely chosen. This article explores Kierkegaard's "aesthetic" stage of existence through the character of Augusto Pérez, the protagonist of Miguel de Unamuno's novel, Niebla. After establishing a solid link between Unamuno and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's "ethical" stage is used to critique the "aesthetic" stage on aesthetic grounds, on the basis of the beauty found in life's work, a calling. The (...) conclusion is that the sphere of the "aesthetic" does not achieve Kierkegaard's "aesthetics" of an integrated, fully existing self. (shrink)

Many philosophers have appealed to the PSR in arguments for a being that exists a se, a being whose explanation is in itself. But what does it mean, exactly, for something to have its explanation ‘in itself’? Contemporary philosophers have said next to nothing about this, relying instead on phrases plucked from the accounts of various historical figures. In this article, I analyse five such accounts – those of Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz – and argue that none are (...) satisfactory. Should we abandon or restrict the PSR, then? I think that would be hasty, for many reasons. I therefore consider the prospects of explaining everything, including God, given the constraints of certain features of good explanations, and conclude with several observations about future approaches. (shrink)

Political violence in the form of wars, insurgencies, terrorism and violent rebellion constitutes a major human challenge. C. A. J. Coady brings a philosophical and ethical perspective as he places the problems of war and political violence in the frame of reflective ethics. In this book, Coady re-examines a range of urgent problems pertinent to political violence against the background of a contemporary approach to just war thinking. The problems examined include: the right to make war and conduct war, terrorism, (...) revolution, humanitarianism, mercenary warriors, the ideal of peace and the right way to end war. Coady attempts to vindicate the contemporary relevance of the just war tradition to current problems without applying the tradition in a merely mechanical or uncritical fashion. (shrink)

Coady explores the challenges that morality poses to politics. He confronts the complex intellectual tradition known as realism, which seems to deny any relevance of morality to politics, especially international politics. He argues that, although realism has many serious faults, it has lessons to teach us: in particular, it cautions us against the dangers of moralism in thinking about politics and particularly foreign affairs. Morality must not be confused with moralism: Coady characterizes various forms of moralism and sketches their distorting (...) influence on a realistic political morality. He seeks to restore the concept of ideals to an important place in philosophical discussion, and to give it a particular pertinence in the discussion of politics. He deals with the fashionable idea of "dirty hands," according to which good politics will necessarily involve some degree of moral taint or corruption. Finally, he examines the controversial issue of the role of lying and deception in politics. Along the way Coady offers illuminating discussion of historical and current political controversies. This lucid book will provoke and stimulate anyone interested in the interface of morality and politics. (shrink)

The Three Papers comprising this series, together with my earlier [34] also published in this journal, constitute an attempt to set out the major issues in the theoretical domain of reduction and to develop a general theory of theory reduction. The fourth paper, [34], though published separately from this trio, is integral to the presentation and should be read in conjunction with these papers. Even so, the presentation is limited in scope – roughly, to intertheoretic reduction among empirical theories – (...) and informal in presentation – not least because a satisfying formal account of theories has yet to be offered. And despite the length, the treatment is still condensed; often corroborating and/or intuitively helpful detail has had to be consigned to footnotes or omitted. I approach the problem from within my own naturalistic realist philosophy of science and formal analysis of abstract hierarchy in theory. The sources for the former are [25], [29], [31], and [32] and those for the latter essentially [27] and [30]. Hierarchical notions played a significant role in the already published [34]. (shrink)

In the past thirty years, two fundamental issues have emerged in the philosophy of science. One concerns the appropriate attitude we should take towards scientific theories--whether we should regard them as true or merely empirically adequate, for example. The other concerns the nature of scientific theories and models and how these might best be represented. In this ambitious book, da Costa and French bring these two issues together by arguing that theories and models should be regarded as partially rather than (...) wholly true. They adopt a framework that sheds new light on issues to do with belief, theory acceptance, and the realism-antirealism debate. The new machinery of "partial structures" that they develop offers a new perspective from which to view the nature of scientific models and their heuristic development. Their conclusions will be of wide interest to philosophers and historians of science. (shrink)

C. A. J. Coady offers to clear up confusion about what terrorism is. His "tactical definition" focuses on terrorist acts as violent attacks upon non-combatants. He discusses what it means to be a non-combatant, considers various philosophical attempts to defend terrorism, and examines the idea of a connection between religion and terrorism.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I argue that beliefs about what appears possible are justified in much the same way as beliefs about what appears actual. I do so by chisholming, and then modalizing, the epistemic principle associated with phenomenal conservatism. The principle is tested against a number of examples, and it gives the intuitively correct results. I conclude by considering how it can be used to defend two controversial modal arguments, a Cartesian argument for dualism and an ontological argument for the existence of God.

I explore the view that the imago Dei is essential to us as humans but accidental to us as persons. To image God is to resemble God, and resemblance comes in degrees. This has the straightforward—and perhaps disturbing—implication that we can be more or less human, and possibly cease to be human entirely. Hence, I call it the spectrum view. I argue that the spectrum view is complementary to the Biblical data, helps explain the empirical reality of horrendous evil, and (...) offers an elegant rapprochement between the traditional view of hell and its rivals. (shrink)

When Huck Finn embarks upon his hilarious education of the slave Jim in the moral vagaries of the monarchies of Europe, he takes himself to be propounding the merest common sense. He may have thought large‐scale villainy restricted to autocracies, but his creator was clearly not so naive. More to the present point, Huck ends his discourse on princely rule with remarks that show he was not merely cataloguing the fact of widespread royal vice, but willing to countenance it as (...) necessary. As he puts it, ‘kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot’. (shrink)

Recent epistemology has been notable for an emphasis, or a variety of emphases, upon the social dimension of knowledge. This has provided a corrective to the heavily individualist account of knowledge previously holding sway. It acknowledges the ways in which an individual is deeply indebted to the testimony of others for his or her cognitive endowments, both with respect to capacities and information. But the dominance of the individualist model was connected with a concern for the value of cognitive autonomy. (...) It is unclear how due recognition of the social dimension can allow for this value. It is argued here that there are ways of construing intellectual autonomy that not only can make it consistent with these new emphases but also respect its status as an epistemic concept. The author’s approach is contrasted with Alvin Goldman’s recent development of an approach to social knowledge via the idea of maximising truths. This seems to leave insufficient scope for intellectual character and autonomy. So concepts of independence, mastery, intellectual self-creation and intellectual integrity are explored in order to develop a perspective on cognitive autonomy adequate to the insights of social epistemology.Author Keywords: Autonomy; Testimony; Ideals; Epistemology; Mackie; Goldman. (shrink)