Providing equitable food security for a growing population while minimizing environmental impacts and enhancing resilience to climate shocks is an ongoing challenge. Here, we quantify the resource intensity, environmental impacts and nutritional output of a small (0.075 ha) low-input subsistence Mediterranean agroecological farm in a developed nation that is based on intercropping and annual crop rotation. The farm provides one individual, the proprietor, with nutritional self-sufficiency (adequate intake of an array of macro- and micro-nutrients) with limited labor, no synthetic fertilizers (...) or herbicides, and zero waste, effectively closing a full farm-table-farm cycle. We find that the agroecological farm outperforms conventional farming as practiced in the same country in terms of both lower environmental burdens, across all examined environmental metrics (63% lower on average) per kg produce, and higher nutritional score (66% higher on average). Per equal farmland, the environmental lopsidedness was even higher (79% lower than conventional farming on average), with nearly the same nutritional score (3% lower on average). Moreover, when considering total land area, which includes farmland and supporting non-agricultural lands, as well as postgate impacts and food losses, the advantage of the agroecological system over conventional farming is even more pronounced. Situated within a Mediterranean region that is undergoing rapid climate change, this food system is a unique case study of nutrition- and environment-oriented food production system. While its deployment potential is limited by lack of supportive policies, it nonetheless represents one of the most starkly bold alternatives to current food systems. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between belief-like imaginings and the establishment of imaginary worlds (often called fictional worlds). After outlining the various assumptions my argument is premised on, I argue that belief-like imaginings, in themselves, do not render their content true in the imaginary world to which they pertain. I show that this claim applies not only to imaginative projects in which we are instructed or intend to imagine certain propositions, but also to spontaneous imaginative projects. After arguing that, like (...) guided imaginative projects, spontaneous projects involve specific imaginary truths, I conclude that imaginative projects, whether spontaneous or deliberate, comprise not only imaginings, but also mental acts of determining such truths. (shrink)

Criminal sanctions are typically inflicted by the state. The central role of the state in determining the severity of these sanctions and inflicting them requires justification. One justification for state-inflicted sanctions is simply that the state is more likely than other agents to determine accurately what a wrongdoer justly deserves and to inflict a just sanction on those who deserve it. Hence, in principle, the state could be replaced by other agents, for example, private individuals. This hypothesis has given rise (...) to recent calls to reform the state's criminal justice system by introducing privately inflicted sanctions, for example, shaming penalties, private prisons, or private probationary services. This paper challenges this view and argues that the agency of the state is indispensable to criminal sanctions. Privately inflicted sanctions sever the link between the state's judgments concerning the wrongfulness of the action and the appropriateness of the sanction and the infliction of sufferings on the criminal. When a private individual inflicts punishment, she acts on what she and not the state judges to be a justified response to a criminal act. Privately inflicted sanctions for violations of criminal laws are not grounded in the judgments of the appropriate agent, namely the state. It is impermissible on the part of the state to approve, encourage, or initiate the infliction of a sanction on an alleged wrongdoer on the basis of a private judgment. Such an approval grants undue weight to the private judgment of the individual who inflicts the sanction. (shrink)

A recent paper suggested that if Galilean covariance was extended to signals and interactions, the resulting theory would contain such anomalies as would have impelled physicists towards special relativity even without empirical prompts. I analyze this claim. Some so-called anomalies turn out to be errors. Others have classical analogs, which suggests that classical physicists would not have viewed them as anomalous. Still others, finally, remain intact in special relativity, so that they serve as no impetus towards this theory. I conclude (...) that Galilean covariance is insufficient to derive special relativity. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.

This paper argues against the view, proposed in Langland-Hassan (2020), that attitudinal imaginings are reducible to basic folk-psychological attitudes such as judgments, beliefs, desires, decisions, or combinations thereof. The proposed reduction fails because attitudinal imaginings, though similar to basic attitudes in certain respects, function differently than basic attitudes. I demonstrate this by exploring two types of cases: spontaneous imaginings, and imaginings that arise in response to fiction, showing that in these cases, imaginings cannot be identified with basic attitudes. I conclude (...) that imagining is a distinct attitude: it enables us to freely conjure up scenarios without being bound by the restrictions that govern basic folk-psychological attitudes. (shrink)

This paper puts forward an account of imaginative immersion. Elaborating on Kendall Walton’s thesis that imagining aims at the fictional truth, it first argues that imaginings are inherently rule- or norm-governed: they are ‘regulated’ by that which is presented as fictionally true. It then shows that an imaginer can follow the rule or norm mandating her to imagine the propositions presented as fictional truths either by acquiring explicit beliefs about how the rule (norm) is to be followed, or directly, without (...) acquiring such beliefs. It proceeds to argue that to the extent that an imaginer follows this rule (norm) without holding such beliefs, she is more immersed in her imaginings. The general idea is that immersion in an activity is a matter of following rules or norms that apply to that activity without explicitly thinking about how to follow them, that is, without ‘doxastic mediation.’ Lastly, the paper shows that this thesis can explain various features associated with imaginative immersion, such as the sort of attentiveness it involves, the emotional response it generates, and its relation to spoilers. (shrink)

This paper explores the sense in which correctness applies to belief-like imaginings. It begins by establishing that when we imagine, we ‘direct’ our imaginings at a certain imaginary world, taking the propositions we imagine to be assessed for truth in that world. It then examines the relation between belief-like imagining and positing truths in an imaginary world. Rejecting the claim that correctness, in the literal sense, is applicable to imaginings, it shows that the imaginer takes on, vis-à-vis the imaginary world, (...) the first-person perspective of a believer. Imaginings, it concludes, ‘mimic’ beliefs with respect to the property of being correct or incorrect by virtue of having true or false content. (shrink)

Spoilers provide advance knowledge of crucial facts about how a work of fiction unfolds or ends. This is often the reason given for our dislike of spoilers. I begin by showing that, on generally accepted philosophical accounts of fiction and imagination, the phenomenon of spoilers is puzzling, and the lay explanation of our dislike of spoilers is inadequate. To resolve the puzzle, I first argue that imaginings are inherently constrained or norm-governed. In imagining, we take on a (fictional) doxastic role: (...) our aim is to imagine that which a work of fiction presents as true at each stage of its unfolding. Then, distinguishing between two ways in which we can follow norms or rules, I show that although spoilers do not completely thwart our experience of fiction, they can significantly diminish the degree to which we are engrossed in fiction, hence we dislike them. (shrink)

Why Law Matters argues that public institutions and legal procedures are valuable and matter as such, irrespective of their instrumental value. Examining the value of rights, public institutions, and constitutional review, the book criticises instrumentalist approaches in political theory, claiming they fail to account for their enduring appeal.

Works of fiction are alleged to differ from works of nonfiction in instructing their audience to imagine their content. Indeed, works of fiction have been defined in terms of this feature: they are works that mandate us to imagine their content. This paper examines this definition of works of fiction, focusing on the nature of the activity that ensues in response to reading or watching fiction. Investigating how imaginings function in other contexts, I show, first, that they presuppose a cognitive (...) infrastructure encompassing at least one additional kind of mental state, whose role is to determine, to some degree, truth in an imaginary world. I then discuss the implications for the definition of fiction, showing that the definition should be refined to accommodate the structure that imagining presupposes: a work counts as fiction just in case it mandates us, not only to imagine, but to engage in a more complex mental activity, an activity that in addition to imagining, involves positing a backdrop for our imaginings. (shrink)

A commonly-discussed feature of perceptual experience is that it has ‘assertoric’ or ‘phenomenal’ force. We will start by discussing various descriptions of the assertoricity of perceptual experience. We will then adopt a minimal characterization of assertoricity: a perceptual experience has assertoric force just in case it inclines the perceiver to believe its content. Adducing cases that show that visual experience is not always assertoric, we will argue that what renders these visual experiences non-assertoric is that they are penetrated by belief-like (...) imaginings. Lastly, we will explain why it is that when belief-like imaginings—as opposed to beliefs (and other cognitive states)—penetrate visual experience, they render visual experiences non-assertoric. (shrink)

Unconscious processes are mental states that occur in the absence of subjective awareness. We offer a focused historical survey of the robust debate about the nature of unconscious mental processing, from ancient and medieval theories that allow for bodily functions without subjective awareness to the 20th century acceptance of autonomous unconscious processing. The background introduction culminates with the rise of cognitive science in the latter half of the 20th century, as dual systems theories claimed that the mind had two forms (...) of processing: an unconscious system that is associative, fast, and automatic and a conscious system that performs sequential, deliberative, and slow mental functions. More recently, the “cognitive unconscious” has been discovered to perform most if not all cognitive functions including higher-level cognitive processing, such as addition and subtraction. Despite a rich history of experimental methods and findings, recent criticisms are forcing scientists to reexamine these advancements. We are optimistic that the field will develop novel techniques that answer these criticisms, including measures for studying subjective reports in the absence of subjective awareness of the content of the unconscious state and the act of reporting. (shrink)

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs. cups, tables vs. chairs) is a core principle of language and higherlevel reasoning. But does such role-filler independence also arise in automatic visual processing? (...) Here, we show that it does, by exploring a surprising error that such independence can produce. In four experiments, participants saw a stream of images containing different objects arranged in forcedynamic relations — e.g., a phone contained in a basket, a marker resting on a garbage can, or a knife sitting in a cup. Participants had to respond to a single target image (e.g., a phone in a basket) within a stream of distractors presented under time constraints. Surprisingly, even though participants completed this task quickly and accurately, they false-alarmed more often to images matching the target’s relational category than to those that did not — even when those images involved completely different objects. In other words, participants searching for a phone in a basket were more likely to mistakenly respond to a knife in a cup than to a marker on a garbage can. Follow-up experiments ruled out strategic responses and also controlled for various confounding image features. We suggest that visual processing represents relations abstractly, in ways that separate roles from fillers. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyze certain aspects of imaginative content, namely the content of the representational mental state called “imagining.” I will show that fully accounting for imaginative content requires acknowledging that, in addition to imagining, an imaginative project—the overall mental activity we engage in when we imagine—includes another infrastructural component in terms of which content should be explained. I will then show that the phenomenon of imaginative immersion can partly be explained in terms of the proposed infrastructure of (...) imaginative projects. (shrink)

We give a complete characterization of the class of upward monotone generalized quantifiers Q1 and Q2 over countable domains that satisfy the scheme Q1 x Q2 y φ → Q2 y Q1 x φ. This generalizes the characterization of such quantifiers over finite domains, according to which the scheme holds iff Q1 is ∃ or Q2 is ∀ (excluding trivial cases). Our result shows that in infinite domains, there are more general types of quantifiers that support these entailments.

The central thesis (CT) that this paper upholds is that a picture depicts an object by generating in those who view the picture a visual experience of that object. I begin by presenting a brief sketch of intentionalism, the theory of perception in terms of which I propose to account for pictorial experience. I then discuss Richard Wollheim’s twofoldness thesis and explain why it should be rejected. Next, I show that the socalled unique phenomenology of pictorial experience is simply an (...) instance of perceptual indeterminacy. Lastly, I discuss a phenomenon associated with pictures that could be considered a problem for CT, and account for it by invoking the thesis that visual experience is cognitively penetrable. (shrink)

מאמר זה עוסק בדמיון דמוי-אמונה. אפתח בדיון במאפייניו הייחודיים של דמיון מסוג זה, ואתמקד במאפיינים שבגינם הוא שונה מהנחה או מחשבה סתמית מחד גיסא, ומאמונה מאידך גיסא. אראה כי למרות שדמיון זה, בניגוד לאמונה, לא "מחויב" לייצג את האמת, יש בסיס ראשוני לומר שהוא מחויב לייצג את מה שנקבע כאמיתי בפרויקט הדמיוני שבו הוא עולה, ובמובן זה הוא אנלוגי לאמונה. לאחר שאראה שאנלוגיה זו בין דמיון לאמונה אינה מדויקת, אציג עמדה מתונה יותר, לפיה דמיון כולל נקיטת פרספקטיבה דוקססטית כלפי עולם (...) דמיוני. כלומר, דמיון אינו אלא העמדת פנים להאמין, או משחק בתפקיד מאמין, ביחס לעולם דמיוני כלשהו. מסקנתי תהיה שניתן להגדיר דמיון מהסוג הנדון על בסיס מושג של העמדת פנים (או משחק בתפקיד), וזאת בניגוד לעמדה המקובלת, לפיה העמדת פנים מוגדרת על בסיס דמיון. הגדרה זו מסבירה את מאפייניו דמויי-האמונה של הדמיון, תוך שימוש במושג הפרימיטיבי, אך הרווח מאד, של העמדת פנים. ---------------------- This paper explores belief-like imagination. I start by discussing the characteristic features of imagination of this kind, focusing on features that differentiate it from a mere supposition or a thought on the one hand, and from belief on the other hand. I will show that, although imagining, unlike believing, is not committed to represent the truth, it initially seems to be committed to represent that which is stipulated to be true in the imaginative project in which the imagining arises; in this sense, it is analogous to belief. After showing that this analogy between imagination and belief is not warranted, I will present a more moderate view on which imagination involves the positing of a doxastic perspective toward the imaginary world. That is to say, imagination is nothing but pretending to believe, or playing the role of a believer, toward a certain imaginary world. My conclusion will be that, unlike the commonly-held view on which pretense is defined in terms of imagination, imagination is defined in terms of pretense (or role-playing). This definition explains the various belief-like features of imagination by invoking the primitive, but widely-used, notion of pretense. (shrink)

This paper develops Kendall Walton's account of pictorial experience. Walton argues that the key feature of that experience is that it is imaginatively-penetrated experience. I argue that this idea, as put forward by Walton, has various shortcomings. After discussing these limitations, I suggest, on the basis of a more general phenomenon of cognitive penetration, a refinement of Walton's account. I then show how the revised account explains various features of pictorial experience. Specifically, I show that, given the manner in which (...) imaginings influence perceptual experience, Walton can dispense with the thesis that pictorial experience is twofold. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Nature of Rights: Logic, Substance, and Strength Rights and Their Role in Moral Theory Conclusion References.

Bertand’s paradox is a fundamental problem in probability that casts doubt on the applicability of the indifference principle by showing that it may yield contradictory results, depending on the meaning assigned to “randomness”. Jaynes claimed that symmetry requirements solve the paradox by selecting a unique solution to the problem. I show that this is not the case and that every variant obtained from the principle of indifference can also be obtained from Jaynes’ principle of transformation groups. This is because the (...) same symmetries can be mathematically implemented in different ways, depending on the procedure of random selection that one uses. I describe a simple experiment that supports a result from symmetry arguments, but the solution is different from Jaynes’. Jaynes’ method is thus best seen as a tool to obtain probability distributions when the principle of indifference is inconvenient, but it cannot resolve ambiguities inherent in the use of that principle and still depends on explicitly defining the selection procedure. (shrink)

AI-based algorithms are used extensively by public institutions. Thus, for instance, AI algorithms have been used in making decisions concerning punishment providing welfare payments, making decisions concerning parole, and many other tasks which have traditionally been assigned to public officials and/or public entities. We develop a novel argument against the use of AI algorithms, in particular with respect to decisions made by public officials and public entities. We argue that decisions made by AI algorithms cannot count as public decisions, namely (...) decisions that are made in the name of citizens and that this fact should be taken into consideration when utilizing AI to replace public officials. (shrink)

The state has a duty to protect individuals from violations of their basic rights to life and liberty. But does the state have a duty to criminalize such violations? Further, if there is a duty on the part of the state to criminalize violations, should the duty be constitutionally entrenched? This paper argues that the answer to both questions is positive. The state has a duty not merely to effectively prevent violations of our rights to life and liberty, but also (...) to criminalize such violations. Further, the duty to criminalize ought to be constitutionally entrenched. In the absence of criminal prohibitions on violations of the right to life and liberty individuals live ‘at the mercy’ of others. In the absence of a constitutional duty to criminalize, life and liberty of individuals is contingent upon the judgments and inclinations of the legislature. In both cases citizens’ rights are ‘at the mercy of others’. I also show that the decisions of the German Constitutional Court concerning abortion can be justified on such grounds. (shrink)

What is it for a picture to be more realistic, or more depictive, than another? Without committing to any thesis as to what depiction consists in, I show that degrees of depictiveness are grounded in a certain relation between two basic kinds of differences between pictures: configurational differences and content differences. A picture is thus more depictive just in case it is seen as having fewer nondepictive features, whereas a nondepictive feature is individuated through the susceptibility of the picture's configuration (...) to change without entailing any change in the picture's content. (shrink)

Suppose you’re imagining that it’s raining hard. You then proceed to imagine, as part of the same imaginative project, that you believe that it isn’t raining. Such an imaginative project is possible if the two imaginings arise in succession. But what about simultaneously imagining that it’s raining and that you believe that it isn’t raining? I will argue that, under certain conditions, such an imagining is impossible. After discussing these conditions, I will suggest an explanation of this impossibility. Elaborating on (...) the view outlined in Walton (1990), I will argue that the impossibility follows from the fact that imaginings ‘mimic’ beliefs in aiming at the fictionally true, just as beliefs aim at the true. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman argued that the pictorial relation is reducible to reference. After explaining why previous attempts to refute this thesis of reduction have failed, I argue that in order to show that the thesis is indeed wrong we must find an aspect of pictures that is incompatible with it. I proceed to argue that there is indeed such an element to pictures. Ordinarily, a picture depicts its subject as having aesthetic properties. I show that the depiction of these properties requires (...) the picture’s engagement of our aesthetic judgement. Yet if according to the thesis of reduction a picture refers to these aesthetic properties, they must be inaccessible to aesthetic judgement, because reference is based on arbitrary correlation rules. Since pictures do engage our aesthetic judgement, we must conclude that the pictorial relation is irreducible to reference. (shrink)

Home and exile -- Progress: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Georges Sorel and Martin Heidegger -- Franz Baader: Cogitor Ergo Sum -- Edmund Husserl: the crisis of the European man -- Martin Heidegger: Homo Est Brutum Bestiale -- Franz Borkenau: Cartesianism and the exploitation of man and nature -- Franz Böhm: German philosophy at war with Cartesianism.

This paper discusses a counterexample to the thesis that visual experience is cognitively impenetrable. My central claim is that sometimes visual experience is influenced by the perceiver’s beliefs, rendering her experience’s representational content indeterminate. After discussing other examples of cognitive penetrability, I focus on a certain kind of visual experience— that is, an experience that occurs under radically nonstandard conditions—and show that it may have indeterminate content, particularly with respect to low-level properties such as colors and shapes. I then explain (...) how this indeterminacy depends on the perceiver’s beliefs or thoughts. Finally, I attempt to generalize the case and show how other sorts of visual experiences can also be penetrated by beliefs and, hence, be indeterminate. (shrink)

This chapter explores a noteworthy, as-yet-unanalysed normative aspect of imagining. It begins by examining cases where imaginings are deemed erroneous, showing that imaginings can “go wrong” not only by failing to represent that which the imaginer intends to imagine, or is asked to imagine by an external source (e.g. a work of fiction), but also when imaginings arise unbidden. That unintended, non-deliberate imaginings can be erroneous shows that there must be a norm or commitment that is inherent to imagining, a (...) norm or commitment that, if violated, renders imaginings erroneous. Invoking Kendall Walton’s thesis about the normativity of imagining, I adduce a first-pass account of this normative aspect; the account pivots on the idea that imagining aims at, or is committed to representing, that which is fictionally true. After showing that this account is inadequate, I revise Walton’s thesis, arguing that in imagining, we are not committed to representing the fictional truth. Rather, taking on a quasi-doxastic role vis-à-vis the fictional world, we are committed to representing that which is (merely) presented as fictionally true. I proceed to explain the error in question in terms of this thesis, showing that when the quasi-doxastic role we take on in our capacity as imaginers is not carried out properly, our imaginings are rendered erroneous. (shrink)

This article analyzes the category of extreme cases—cases involving catastrophic consequences the avoiding of which requires severe measures (e.g., torture, shooting a plane in 9/11 situations). Our proposal maintains that what is most pernicious is not the violation of moral rules as such but their principled or rule-governed violation. Maintaining a normative distinction between acts performed under the direction of principles/rules, on the one hand, and unprincipled, context-generated acts, acts performed under the force of circumstances, on the other, allows for (...) accommodating the necessity of infringements in extreme cases within a (non-conventional) deontological framework. Agents who perform acts in extreme cases ought not to be guided by rules or principles. Instead, they ought to make particular judgments not governed by rules. (shrink)

Judgments of visual resemblance (‘A looks like B’), unlike other judgments of resemblance, are often induced directly by visual experience. What is the nature of this experience? We argue that the visual experience that prompts a subject looking at A to judge that A looks like B is a visual experience of B. After elucidating this thesis, we defend it, using the ‘phenomenal contrast’ method. Comparing our account to competing accounts, we show that the phenomenal contrast between a visual experience (...) that induces the judgment that A looks like B, and a visual experience that does not induce this judgment, is best explained by the fact that the former visually represents B, whereas the latter does not. (shrink)

Billot et al. (Econometrica 73:1125–1136, 2005) (BGSS) propose a model for constructing a prior probability over states of nature based on past data. According to their model, the evaluator possesses a similarity function over observations and, given a database, adopts the prior that is the similarity-weighted frequency of outcomes within that database. BGSS thus simplifies the task of forming a prior probability over states, reducing it to the question of forming a similarity function over observations. Still, the task of creating (...) a similarity function remains and may not always be straightforward. We characterize two relatively simple procedures for forming a similarity function, one which requires placing observations on an integer scale and the other which is essentially ordinal. These procedures could assist in the implementation of the BGSS model in certain real-life situations. (shrink)

A key emergent property of group social dynamic is synchrony–the coordination of actions, emotions, or physiological processes between group members. Despite this fact and the inherent nested structure of groups, little research has assessed physiological synchronization between group members from a multi-level perspective, thus limiting a full understanding of the dynamics between members. To address this gap of knowledge we re-analyzed a large dataset comprising physiological and psychological data that were collected in two laboratory studies that involved two different social (...) group tasks. In both studies, following the group task, members reported their experience of group cohesion via questionnaires. We utilized a non-linear analysis method-multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis that allowed us to represent physiological synchronization in cardiological interbeat intervals between group members at the individual-level and at the group-level. We found that across studies and their conditions, the change in physiological synchrony from baseline to group interaction predicted a psychological sense of group cohesion. This result was evident both at the individual and the group levels and was not modified by the context of the interaction. The individual- and group-level effects were highly correlated. These results indicate that the relationship between synchrony and cohesion is a multilayered construct. We re-affirm the role of physiological synchrony for cohesion in groups. Future studies are needed to crystallize our understanding of the differences and similarities between synchrony at the individual-level and synchrony at the group level to illuminate under which conditions one of these levels has primacy, or how they interact. (shrink)

The case of blurry vision has been cited by many as a counterexample to representationalism in the theory of perception. Specifically, it is claimed that the phenomenon of blurry vision is incompatible with the supervenience thesis which is at the root of representationalism. Michael Tye, a leading representationalist, has responded to such objections by giving an account of blurry vision in a way that, allegedly, renders it compatible with representationalism. In this paper I argue that Tye’s account of blurry vision, (...) though blocking one line of objection, cannot save representationalism. I then assimilate cases of blurry vision as well as similar cases to the more general category of indeterminate experiences. (shrink)

This Article develops a theory of “inherently governmental functions” and argues that these functions concern powers designed to execute or implement fundamental state decisions—e.g., the decision to criminalize certain behavior, the decision to inflict a certain sanction, or to the decision to initiate or end a war. While most theorists agree that fundamental state decisions of the types described above ought only to be made by the State, some believe that the power to execute or implement these decisions can be (...) transferred to private entities. Thus, for instance, theorists maintain that while only the State can criminalize behavior, private prisons can execute the punishment; while only the State can declare a war, mercenaries can carry it out, etc. This Article disputes this claim. By transferring powers of “execution” or “implementation” of fundamental state decisions to private entities, the State severs the link between its fundamental societal decisions and the actions designed to execute or implement these decisions. Private entities that imprison people or soldiers hired to fight a war ought to be regarded not merely as executing or implementing public decisions. Instead, they ought to be regarded as private entities whose own private judgments concerning the justness of the sanctions they inflict or the justifiability of the wars they fight are prerequisite for the performance of their jobs. The contribution to the genesis of the action of the private entity made by the court’s decision to inflict a sanction or the State’s decision to go to war is, so to speak, superseded by the individual’s own judgment. The Article further argues that being punished by another private individual—rather than by the State—infringes upon one’s dignity as it subjects the will of one person to the will of another. The justifiability of the exertion of violence hinges upon the agent performing it. Hence, I maintain that it is impermissible on the part of the State to privatize the execution or implementation of some fundamental societal decisions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine Heidegger’s critique of Hegel and to determine whether it is justified. Heidegger claims that Hegel tries to reduce everything to a single absolute entity, to the absolute knowing subject. The result is the identification of being and nothing, as Hegel formulates it at the beginning of his Logic. Hegel identifies being with nothing because being has no references, no predicates, no properties. Heidegger agrees with Hegel that being and nothing are the same, (...) but in completely different respects. They are the same because only entity actually exists, i.e. as an existent being. But Being itself does not exist, and should be conceived in an utterly different way from entity. And since Being cannot “be” it is a non-entity and therefore nothing. (shrink)

This article defends the claim that the institutional source of a legal norm—be it the constitution, legislation or whatever—affects its nature and value. We argue that institutions are not merely vessels through which norms get public recognition. When different institutions use identically worded norms, say, ‘everyone is equally entitled to X’, they may nevertheless produce different norms and provide different goods. For instance, a constitutional protection of a basic right differs from a statutory right to the same right not (only) (...) because the former is less likely to be changed, but (also) because a constitutional decision marks the right in question as one that makes no essential reference to the actual choice of the majority of the political community. We extend this argument to other institutional settings, especially the common law tradition of judge-made law. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Background, Sources Tradition Biography Teachings Conclusions.

Ang pag-aaral na ito ay tungkol sa Kagamitan ng Eupemismong Meranaw at Tungkuling Panlipunan nito. Ito ay dinesenyuhan ng diskriptibong uri ng pananaliksik na gamit ang Politeness at Sex and Politeness bilang teorya. Layunin ng pag-aaral na ito na makalap ang mga eupemismong ginagamit ng mga Meranaw; matukoy ang mga kagamitang taglay ng eupemismong Meranaw; malaman ang tungkuling panlipunan ng mga eupemismong Meranaw; at mailahad ang implikasyon ng eupemismong Meranaw sa pang- araw-araw na pakikipagkomunikasyon sa lipunan. Ang paggamit ng mga (...) eupemismo ay nag-uugnay sa kagamitan at tungkulin nito sa lipunan. At ang mga kagamitan na ito ay maaring sa larangan ng pakikipagtalastasan sa araw-araw, sa magka-ibang kasarian, antas ng lipunan, at pananaw ng bawat indibidwal. Sa mga kagamitan na ito nakatago ang mga tungkulin nito sa lipunan gaya ng tungkulin ng kagandahang asal, pagtakpan ang katotohanan, umiwas sa paggamit ng mga salitang taboo, at magkaila. Ang paggamit ng eupemismo sa pakikisalamuha sa harap ng isang tao o maging sa pampublikong lugar ay tanda ng pagkakaroon ng magandang ugali at pagiging marespeto sa kapwa. Layunin ng mga salitang eupemismo na pagaanin ang mga bagay o sitwasyon na para sa iba ay masakit at nakakasaling damdamin. Sa pamamagitan ng pagbihis dito ng mga kaaya- ayang salita na kung hindi man nakasisiya ay nakakabawas naman ng sakit na nararamdaman. (shrink)

This article examines communication between a human being and God in the Jewish philosophy of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). The article focuses on two distinct forms of biblical communication: lyrical psalms and a godly revelation in a still small voice. It investigates Cohen’s Jewish philosophy in light of communication theories to deepen the philosophical and theoretical discussion. The article examines previously unexplored ideas in Cohen’s writings, analyzes his religious perceptions in terms of communication, and at the same time expands the concept (...) of communication. This new perspective sheds new light on Cohen’s Jewish philosophy and offers a new philosophic perception of divine-human communication. (shrink)