Correspondence theories are frequently either too vaguely expressed – “true statements correspond to the way things are in the world,” or implausible – “true statements mirror raw, mind-independent reality.” I address this problem by developing features and roles that ought to characterize what I call ldquo;modest” correspondence theories. Of special importance is the role of correspondence in directing our responses to cases of suspected non-factuality; lack of straightforward correspondence shows the need for, and guides us in our choice of, various (...) kinds of reconstrual projects. This, I argue, is in contrast to the approaches suggested by deflationism and coherence, and thus modest correspondence theories are appropriately distinct from rivals. (shrink)

How do social movements respond to the ecological crisis? In this paper, we reframe social movements as 'more-than-social movements' to highlight the fact that many contemporary mobilisations do much more than target recognised social institutions and political governance; indeed, they are practically transforming eco-societies with and within both the human and the nonhuman world. What constitutes the core of more-than-social movements' action is the capacity to set up alternative ecologies of existence, or 'alterontologies', as we call them in the paper. (...) In what follows, we engage with the imaginaries and practices of agroecology, AIDS treatment activism and permaculture in order to rethink what autonomy and justice might look like in the context of today's ecological crisis. (shrink)

This article seeks to locate Louis Althusser’s late preoccupation with the status of Marxists in philosophy through a survey of archival and marginal texts written on and amid struggles within the French education system. This material evidences that Althusser held a long-term ambition to reconcile the demands of being a Marxist in his professional life with the demands of being a philosopher in his political life. On this basis, this article offers an expanded contextualisation of the stakes that weighed upon (...) Althusser’s shifting understanding and inhabitation of a Marxist position in philosophy. It aims to show that Althusser’s involvement with, and changing attitudes towards, the educational institution (and in particular the teaching of philosophy) played a significant role in forging the discontinuities in his conceptualisation of Marxist philosophy. The article additionally traces the afterlife of this practice in the work of Jacques Derrida and the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement de a philosophe (GREPH). (shrink)

No anthropologist has been as influential outside the own discipline as Lévi-Strauss. From philosophy to history, from politics to literary criticism, from linguistics to sociology, from psychoanalysis to poetry, from art to contemporary music, the œuvre of the author of Tristes Tropiques has fallen on these fields like a beneficial rain, giving them new life. Such a great influence has several reasons. The design of a wide-ranging anthropological project, its philosophical implications, an immense and precious erudition which allows to build (...) connections between the most different fields of humanistic and scientific knowledge, and lastly a great writing, rich of literary vibrations. All the great questions of the present, from the world’s overpopulation to cultural relativism, from the resurgence of the myth to the return of localisms, from the war of the veil to genetic manipulations, all subjects appear in the œuvre of Lévi-Strauss, always in a provocative and anticipatory formulation which represents the precious heritage of the last of the classics. (shrink)

No anthropologist has been as influential outside the own discipline as Lévi-Strauss. From philosophy to history, from politics to literary criticism, from linguistics to sociology, from psychoanalysis to poetry, from art to contemporary music, the œuvre of the author of Tristes Tropiques has fallen on these fields like a beneficial rain, giving them new life. Such a great influence has several reasons. The design of a wide-ranging anthropological project, its philosophical implications, an immense and precious erudition which allows to build (...) connections between the most different fields of humanistic and scientific knowledge, and lastly a great writing, rich of literary vibrations. All the great questions of the present, from the world’s overpopulation to cultural relativism, from the resurgence of the myth to the return of localisms, from the war of the veil to genetic manipulations, all subjects appear in the œuvre of Lévi-Strauss, always in a provocative and anticipatory formulation which represents the precious heritage of the last of the classics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 92 Heft: 2 Seiten: 442-467.

On Harrison Hall's reading, Kierkegaard uses the terms translated ?eternal happiness? and ?salvation? to refer to a quality of this?worldly life. As I understand him, the author denies that Kierkegaard believed in an afterlife. While acknowledging the vein of meanings that ?Love and Death . . .? point to, I argue that Kierkegaard did in fact look forward to an eternal life in the traditional, Biblical, and so?called common sense of the term. In connection with his views on the question (...) of salvation, Hall holds, and I take issue, that for Kierkegaard Christianity has a minimal objective content. (shrink)

African (Bantu) philosophy conceptualizes morality through ubuntu, which emphasizes the role of community in producing moral agents. This community is characterized by practices that respond to and value interdependence, such as care, cooperation, and respect for elders and ancestral knowledge. While there have been attributions of morality to nonhuman animals in the interdisciplinary animal morality debate, this debate has focused on Western concepts. We argue that the ubuntu conception of morality as a communal practice applies to some nonhuman animals. African (...) elephant communities are highly cooperative and structured around elders; they alloparent, protect their communities, mourn their dead, and pass on cultural knowledge between generations. Identifying these as important moral practices, ubuntu provides a theoretical framework to expand our ethical concern for elephants to their communities. In practice, this will deepen our understanding of the wrongness of atrocities like culling for population management or trophy hunting. (shrink)

In recent years, autonomous systems have become an important research area and application domain, with a significant impact on modern society. Such systems are characterized by different levels of autonomy and complex communication infrastructures that allow for collective decision-making strategies. There exist several publications that tackle ethical aspects in such systems, but mostly from the perspective of a single agent. In this paper we go one step further and discuss these ethical challenges from the perspective of an aggregate of autonomous (...) systems capable of collective decision-making. In particular, in this paper, we propose the Caesar approach through which we model the collective ethical decision-making process of a group of actors—agents and humans, as well as define the building blocks for the agents participating in such a process, namely Caesar agents. Factors such as trust, security, safety, and privacy, which affect the degree to which a collective decision is ethical, are explicitly captured in Caesar. Finally, we argue that modeling the collective decision-making in Caesar provides support for accountability. (shrink)

Geoerchaeological Study in the site of Aghios Ioannis, Thasos The geoarchaeological research conduct at Aghios Ioannis give information to reconstruct the environmental changes in a small coastal plain since the Late Neolithic. Despite the human impact testified by the development of land use by cattle breeding and cultivation since this period and until the Antiquity period, they underline the lasting stability of the area. Intensive land use had begun really during the Late Antiquity period but the cultivation have not deeply (...) altered the environment and enhanced the soil erosion. The development of cattle breeding and fires of the vegetation during the Byzantine and the early Ottoman periods have lastingly changed the environment responses. The geomorphic system become more sensitive and the direct or indirect consequences of the fire activity are more dramatic. This research reveals the high diversity of the environmental responses to human activities changes and demonstrates the impossibility to define a global model of environmental and landscape changes even at the scale of a small Aegean island. (shrink)

Biographical essays explore the careers of two major early photographers, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and William James Stillman. in addition, portfolios with works by Maxime Du Camp, John Beasley Greene, Francis Frith, Robert Macpherson, Adolphe Braun and others testify to the strength and consistency of other early photographers who captured the antique worlds around the Mediterranean."--BOOK JACKET.

The book starts with the assumption that vagueness is a fundamental property of this world. From a philosophical account of vagueness via the presentation of alternative mathematics of vagueness, the subsequent chapters explore how vagueness manifests itself in the various exact sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, computer science, and engineering.

In a Mental Imagery Brain-Computer Interface the user has to perform a specific mental task that generates electroencephalography components, which can be translated in commands to control a BCI system. The development of a high-performance MI-BCI requires a long training, lasting several weeks or months, in order to improve the ability of the user to manage his/her mental tasks. This works aims to present the design of a MI-BCI combining mental imaginary and cognitive tasks for a severely motor impaired user, (...) involved in the BCI race of the Cybathlon event, a competition of people with severe motor disability. In the BCI-race, the user becomes a pilot in a virtual race game against up to three other pilots, in which each pilot has to control his/her virtual car by his/her mental tasks. We present all the procedures followed to realize an effective MI-BCI, from the user's first contact with a BCI technology to actually controlling a video-game through her EEG. We defined a multi-stage user-centered training protocol in order to successfully control a BCI, even in a stressful situation, such as that of a competition. We put a specific focus on the human aspects that influenced the long training phase of the system and the participation to the competition. (shrink)

This study provides insight into factors that determine whether women in the college population who exhibit eating-disordered behavior during their college years recover during their postcollege years. The study assessed changes in the eating patterns of 21 women across a six-year time period, from sophomore year in college to two years postcollege. Eleven of the women get better during their postcollege year, whereas 10 of the women continue to struggle with disordered eating. The major differences between the two groups revolve (...) around the relationship between autonomy and relation. Women who get better negotiate the tension between autonomy and relatedness and are more likely to have higher selfesteem based on a more positive self-concept; this, in turn, leads to healthier relationships with food and body image. Two factors that appear to influence this negotiation include one's history of chronic physical or sexual abuse and the quality of familial messages about food, body image, relationship, and autonomy. (shrink)

1. Il problema della povertà evangelica e francescana nel sec. XIII e XIV. Origine del pensiero politico di G. d'Ockham.--2. Il potere come servizio. Dal Principatus dominativus al Principatus ministrativus.

1. La conoscenza -- 2. Dio -- 3. La natura -- 4. L'uomo.

Two aspects of consciousness are first considered: consciousness as awareness (phenomenological meaning) and consciousness as strategic control (functional meaning). As to awareness, three types can be distinguished: first, awareness as the phenomenal experiences of objects and events; second, awareness as meta-awareness, i.e., the awareness of mental life itself; third, awareness as self-awareness, i.e., the awareness of being oneself. While phenomenal experience and self-awareness are usually present during dreaming (even if many modifications are possible), meta-awareness is usually absent (apart from some (...) particular experiences of self-reflectiveness) with the major exception of lucid dreaming. Consciousness as strategic control may also be present in dreams. The functioning of consciousness is then analyzed, following a cognitive model of dream production. In such a model, the dream is supposed to be the product of the interaction of three components: (a) the bottom-up activation of mnemonic elements coming from LTM systems, (b) interpretative and elaborative top-down processes, and (c) monitoring of phenomenal experience. A feedback circulation is activated among the components, where the top-down interpretative organization and the conscious monitoring of the oneiric scene elicitates other mnemonic contents, according to the requirements of the dream plot. This dream productive activity is submitted to unconscious and conscious processes. (shrink)

RésuméC'est le premier d'une série d'articles comportant quatre textes composés entre le XIeet le XIIIesiècle, qui traitent de la proposition 5 du livre III desSphériquesde Ménélaüs. Le premier article comprend des commentaires historiques et mathématiques de l'œuvre d'Ibn ʿIrāq en géométrie sphérique et une édition critique des deux textes qu'il a consacrés à la rectification de la proposition III.5, ainsi que la traduction de ces deux textes. Le second article propose une édition critique des textes de Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī et (...) d'Ibn Abī Jarrāda sur le même sujet, cette fois aussi avec une traduction et des commentaires historiques et mathématiques. (shrink)

In this volume, political theorists, philosophers and legal scholars critically engage with this idealisation of Levinas ethics.