This paper has three tasks. First, I offer an interpretation of Jeremy Bentham’s theory of language which I hope can conciliate or integrate the three rival interpretations of its epistemological implication: reductionist realist, pragmatist, and fictionalist. It is accompanied by an interpretation of Bentham’s strategy for improving the state of language, which characterizes it as a “two-level” strategy. Second, by focusing on the linguistic thoughts of three philosophers, Locke, Condillac, and Tooke, I inquire into the sources of Bentham’s theory of (...) language, and then try to evaluate the originality of Bentham’s theory in the context of the empiricist tradition of linguistic thought of the age of the Enlightenment. The inquiry also enables us to understand how Bentham’s theory came to have such a complex structure as is revealed in the first part of this paper. Third, I ask the question as to why Bentham, after about a thirty-year hiatus, suddenly resumed writing on the problems of language and logic around 1811. Through exhibiting the outline of my answer to this question, I argue that his discovery of “delusion” led him to fight the “war of words” in various fields of society, and his awareness of the strong force of delusion for aggravating the state of language made him realize the urgent necessity to develop at length “an entirely new system of Logic, in which shall be comprehended a theory of language, considered in the most general point of view.”. (shrink)

Deleuze’ün Spinozacı yaşam tahayyülünde ‘ne yapmalıyız?’ sorusuna normatif, ahlaki ya da siyasi bir yanıt bulamıyoruz ama varoluşu düşünmenin içkin bir olanağını keşfediyoruz. Düşünmeye 'dışarıdan' yani dünyadan başlamak insani (kurgusal) bir dünyaya değil, içinde yaşadığımız gerçek dünyaya inanmak demektir. İçkinliğin politik anlamı düşünceyi dünyaya getirmektir.

Исследование посвящено философскому осознанию природы духовности человека. Автор рассматривает духовность внутреннего мира человека как единство высших чувств души и нравственного сознания. Для специалистов в области философии, методологии науки.

How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets (...) the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture. (shrink)

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts (...) the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

The first thorough study in English of the multi-faceted system of Mou Zongsan, this book examines key influences on the New Confucian thinker and introduces his Kantian- and Mahāyāna Fo-inflected moral metaphysical reading of the Lu-Wang Learning of the Mind.

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" _Star Trek_-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In _How We Became Posthuman,_ N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost (...) its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel _Limbo_ by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, _How We Became Posthuman_ provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here. (shrink)

We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim that (...) our account could be fruitfully used in appraising other models in philosophy and science. (shrink)

Some researchers claim that uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experiences because uncertainty toward an emotion-eliciting event prolongs attention to that event. However, some results contradict this claim. We assumed that curiosity rather than uncertainty prolongs the duration of emotional experience via attention, and that attention and emotional experience are prolonged only when uncertainty elicits curiosity. This assumption is based on the information gap theory, which proposes that curiosity increases with uncertainty, but that curiosity decreases at a certain level of (...) uncertainty. We conducted a survey study to investigate the relationships among curiosity, uncertainty, attention and duration of positive and negative emotional experiences. The results showed that curiosity, but not uncertainty, prolonged the duration of emotional experiences and the process was completely mediated by attention both for positive and negative emotions. Moreover, uncertainty prolonged the duration of emotional experiences only when uncertainty elicited curiosity, which in turn prolonged attention to the emotion-eliciting event. (shrink)

Crupi and Tentori (2012) propose a condition of adequacy for any Bayesian measure of explanatory power, which they call Explanatory Justice. They criticize a measure recently defended by Schupbach and Sprenger(2011) for failing to satisfy this condition, and they offer a new explanatorily just measure of explanatory power. In this paper, we investigate Explanatory Justice’s merits as a condition of adequacy. We offer three arguments against this condition, thus supporitng the idea that a measure of explanatory power should rather be (...) unjust. Then, in order to ensure that the debate advances beyond a mere battle of intuitions, we offer some new results derived from the empirical study described in (Schupbach, 2011a). All of this strengthens the case for Schupbach and Sprenger’s measure while simultaneously posing new challenges to Crupi and Tentori’s alternative proposal. (shrink)

A look at political ethics covers cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy, and is accompanied by a description of modern public opinion about ...

Tipy mirovozzreniĭ -- Chuvstvennai︠a︡, intellektualʹnai︠a︡ i misticheskai︠a︡ intuit︠s︡ii︠a︡ -- Ideal-realizm.

Introduction to the Spanish Universalist School offers a presentation of the main concepts, works and authors of the Spanish Universalist School, formed mostly by ex-Jesuits exiled to Italy at the end of the 18th century. The Universalist School is a Hispanic Enlightenment of great singularity, one that is not political but humanistic and scientific, with a cultural and educational orientation. In their different disciplinary fields, Juan Andrés, Lorenzo Hervás and Antonio Eximeno are the most relevant universalists of a School, whose (...) recent reconstruction has entailed an important contribution to the History of European Sciences and Letters, as well as to the History of Ideas and to the ideas of Universality and Globalization. (shrink)