This dissertation asks the question of how ownership over property in museums is decided. It concludes that for a range of candidate concepts of property, none of them oblige museums to repatriate artefacts unless we weaken Young’s theory to repatriate through how much artefacts are valued by a culture. However, this dissertation rejects the Ownership Argument as a defence for repatriation. To do this, it will be considering three options of how we understand ‘property’ through three scholars: (...) Locke, Young and Thompson. This dissertation will discuss the difference between cultural internationalism and cultural nationalism to flip the question, and attempt to defend a view that museums should retain the artefacts under their possession. To do this dissertation justice, this work has been interdisciplinary, exploring museums, law, applied philosophy, applied ethics, epistemic and metaphysical concepts, to discuss the ways in which repatriation is defended through property. It must be noted that property theories are in vast abundance, however, to keep the project manageable, it does not include prominent philosophers such as Nozick, Hobbes, and Rosseau. Although, given that the three concepts this dissertation discusses do not work, it seems unlikely that a different version would due to similar objections. (shrink)

Cultural epidemiology is a theoretical framework that enables historical studies to be informed by cognitive science. It incorporates insights from evolutionary psychology (viz. cultural evolution is constrained by universal properties of the human cognitive apparatus that result from biological evolution) and from Darwinian models of cultural evolution (viz. population thinking: cultural phenomena are distributions of resembling items among a community and its habitat). Its research program includes the study of the multiple cognitive mechanisms that cause the (...) distribution, on a cultural scale, of representations and material cultural items. By a detailed analysis of the social cognitive causal chain that occurred in the past, one can find out – and specify – which are the factors of attraction that account for cultural stability as well as historical cultural change. After reviewing recent research and developments in cognitive history, I present the concept of cultural attractor and explain why cultural attractors are historically variable. In doing so, I emphasize the role of historically constituted cognitive mechanisms, which account for much of historical cultural developments. I argue that the framework of cultural epidemiology can better account for these important historical phenomena than either evolutionary psychology accounts of culture or dual inheritance theory. I conclude that describing and explaining the history of cultural attractors is a good research goal for historians. (shrink)

What could ground normative restrictions concerning cultural appropriation which are not grounded by independent considerations such as property rights or harm? We propose that such restrictions can be grounded by considerations of intimacy. Consider the familiar phenomenon of interpersonal intimacy. Certain aspects of personal life and interpersonal relationships are afforded various protections in virtue of being intimate. We argue that an analogous phenomenon exists at the level of large groups. In many cases, members of a group engage in (...) shared practices that contribute to a sense of common identity, such as wearing certain hair or clothing styles or performing a certain style of music. Participation in such practices can generate relations of group intimacy, which can ground certain prerogatives in much the same way that interpersonal intimacy can. One such prerogative is making what we call an appropriation claim. An appropriation claim is a request from a group member that non-members refrain from appropriating a given element of the group’s culture. Ignoring appropriation claims can constitute a breach of intimacy. But, we argue, just as for the prerogatives of interpersonal intimacy, in many cases there is no prior fact of the matter about whether the appropriation of a given cultural practice constitutes a breach of intimacy. It depends on what the group decides together. (shrink)

Current treatments of cultural heritage as an object of moral concern (whether it be the heritage of mankind or of some particular group of people) have tended to treat it as a means to ensure human wellbeing: either as ‘cultural property’ or ‘cultural patrimony’, suggesting concomitant rights of possession and exclusion, or otherwise as something which, gaining its ethical significance from the roles it plays in people’s lives and the formation of their identities, is the beneficiary (...) at most of indirect moral obligations. In contrast, I argue that cultural heritage, as something whose existence can go well or badly, can itself qualify as a moral patient towards which we may have obligations which need not be accounted for in terms of subsequent benefits to human beings. Drawing inspiration from environmental ethics and suggesting that heritage, like an ecosystem, is a complex network of interrelations which invites a holistic understanding, I develop a framework for thinking about cultural heritage which shows how such a thing can feature in our ethical reflections as intrinsically worthy of respect in spite of its most obvious differences from the ‘natural’ world: the very human origins of cultural heritage and its involvement with human life in all its forms. As part of the development of this framework I consider the epistemic difficulties which arise when for all our holistic sophistication we do find ourselves in the predicament of having to judge the moral worth of some item of heritage, possibly someone else’s heritage and possibly something which we find ourselves disposed to value more because of than despite any mysteries surrounding it. I conclude by offering some tentative illustrations of how such a framework might operate in the practical course of normative moral reasoning about what should be done with items of cultural heritage. -/- [Erratum note: p. 30 conflates the Kumasi palace looting of 1874 with that of 1896.]. (shrink)

It is widely thought that stealing, trading and destroying cultural artifacts in time of war are inherently immoral actions, and that it is right that they be treated as war crimes, which, indeed, they currently are. But oppressive cultures have their heritage and cultural artifacts too, in the form of monuments, sites of worship, and so on; and for the oppressed, these things may be awful reminders of their subordination, and may even perpetuate it. This chapter suggests that, (...) since cultural objects can be both tools and symbols of unjust oppression, their theft and destruction ought to be seen as appropriate when this would be a means of overcoming oppression. Whatever current law may say, in these instances, it would be morally inappropriate to count such acts as war crimes. Furthermore, it is bizarre that theft and destruction of cultural property are counted as war crimes when soldiers killing each other is not (due to combatant immunity). Surely killing is worse than property destruction and theft. It is therefore argued that, where possible, it would be better for conflicts to be fought using the latter methods. Finally, the chapter responds to many objections to using theft and destruction of cultural property as a method of warfare. E.g. to the objection that such property has timeless, trans-cultural, aesthetic, historical and scientific value, it is replied that justice is a more important value; and to the objection that these practices amount to cultural genocide it is replied that unjust cultures have no right to exist unmodified. (This chapter was formerly entitled: "Culture Weaponized: A Contrarian Theory of the Sometime Appropriateness of the Destruction, Theft and Trade of Art and Cultural Artifacts in Armed Conflict." The PhilPapers archived version is a pre-penultimate version of the published version.). (shrink)

Material culture and technoculture not only provide openings to study culture, but raise questions about contemporary materialism and technology more generally as well. Material culture tells a story, though usually not the whole story. The meanings of things are various, and finding out what they are requires a variety of approaches, from simply asking people what their things mean or observing how they use or don’t use them, to backtracking their history, or contextualizing them in broader cultural context. The (...) transition from hunter-gatherer life to that of agriculturally-based civilization some twelve thousand or so years ago was a great watershed of consciousness, not only radically altering the relation to the living environment, but also producing the origins of materialism. One of civilization’s dubious distinctions was to introduce poverty as well as property and wealth. Consumption is clearly a driving force on the globe today, powering economies, promising identities, providing a cornucopia of commodities. Technoculture is at its center, both in material devices and in the ideas they communicate about how what one has affects what one is and can be. The problem of materialism is not whether to have materials for living, but in allowing them to become goals in themselves. (shrink)

Defenders of intellectual property rights argue that these rights are justified because creators and inventors deserve compensation for their labour, because their ideas and expressions are their personal property and because the total amount of creative work and innovation increases when inventors and creators have a prospect of generating high income through the exploitation of their monopoly rights. This view is not only widely accepted by the general public, but also enforced through a very effective international legal framework. (...) And it is endorsed by most academic researchers and commentators in this field. In this essay, I will show that the classical arguments for the justification of private intellectual property rights can be contested, and that there are many good reasons to abolish intellectual property rights completely in favour of an intellectual commons where every person is allowed to use every cultural expression and invention in whatever way he wishes. I will first give a short overview of the classical arguments for the justification of intellectual property as they are usually stated. We will then discuss the question of whether the creator or inventor deserves his de jure monopoly, by using John Christman’s categories of income and control rights to analyse property rights. The aim here is to show that it does not make sense to create control rights for abstract objects, as they are not scarce, and that there is no logical connection between the surplus which may be generated through income rights and the labour which has been put into a cultural artefact or an invention, and therefore it is not justified to grant monopoly rights on the basis of Lockean natural rights arguments for self-ownership and the just appropriation of worldly resources. As it is possible to reject Christman’s property rights categories, I will then go on to show on the basis of Richard Dawkins’ postulation of the ‘meme’ and Ludwik Fleck’s theory of the ‘thought collective’ that creative processes should be interpreted as interpersonal or collective processes, and therefore it is not justified to grant intellectual property rights to individuals on the basis of the idea that the individual who has put labour into the creative work or the invention should be the one to whom the contents of the work belong exclusively. As it is still possible to postulate the utilitarian argument that intellectual property rights are just because they increase the amount of creative works and inventions, I will argue in the last chapter that, from a libertarian as well as from an egalitarian point of view, the justification of intellectual monopoly rights on utilitarian grounds cannot be maintained. Therefore it is time to abolish the current global intellectual property law regime in favour of an intellectual commons for the good of all human beings and societies. (shrink)

In the context of animal cognitive research, anthropomorphism is defined as the attribution of uniquely human mental characteristics to animals. Those who worry about anthropomorphism in research, however, are immediately confronted with the question of which properties are uniquely human. One might think that researchers must first hypothesize the existence of a feature in an animal before they can, with warrant, claim that the property is uniquely human. But all too often, this isn't the approach. Rather, there is an (...) a priori argument against attributing some properties to animals. Which features are thought to be uniquely human on a priori grounds? The class can be quite large, including psychological states such as beliefs and desires, personality traits such as confidence or timidity, emotions such as happiness or anger, social organizational properties such as culture or friendship, moral behavior such as punishment or rape. For convenience, I will refer to the members of the class as "psychological properties". One critic includes feeling, purpose, intentionality, consciousness, and even cognition in his list of psychological properties that are incorrectly attributed to animals (Kennedy 1992). Among the critics, there is quite a bit of disagreement about what counts as an anthropomorphic attribution, and this alone should raise questions about the charge. We can identify two different questions about the practice of attributing psychological properties to animals within a scientific context. First we can ask whether it is scientifically respectable to examine questions about the mental, psychological, cultural, etc. states of animals. Those who bemoan anthropomorphism think that we ought not even ask such questions. I will look at the worries about asking the question, and argue that there is no special problem with it. The second question arises with an affirmative answer to the first. Given that it is scientifically respectable to examine whether an animal has a psychological property, there must be some scientifically respectable method for doing the examination.. (shrink)

Art is saturated with cultural significance. Considering the full spectrum of ways in which art is colored by cultural associations raises a variety of difficult and fascinating philosophical questions. This curriculum guide focuses in particular on questions that arise when we consider art as a form of cultural heritage. Organized into four modules, readings explore core questions about art and ethics, aesthetic value, museum practice, and art practice. They are designed to be suitable for use in an (...) introduction to philosophy of art, as well as in more topically focused courses, particularly on topics concerning the ethics and politics of art. (shrink)

Based on the properties and mechanism of serendipity presented in former chapters, this chapter discusses how to create an environment for higher serendipity encounters and attainment possibilities. We examine four types of environments with different navigational and useful information concentration combinations. Building a pro-serendipity culture will help create environments that value and supports serendipity across fields. Additionally, we also address the notion that serendipity is a skill. Thus, it can produce either good or bad impacts on a collective level, depending (...) on the ultimate purposes behind it. (shrink)

As Allaire and Firsirotu (1984) pointed out over a decade ago, the concept of culture seemed to be sliding inexorably into a superficial explanatory pool that promised everything and nothing. However, since then, some sophisticated and interesting theoretical developments have prevented drowning in the pool of superficiality and hence theoretical redundancy. The purpose of this article is to build upon such theoretical developments and to introduce an approach that maintains that culture can be theorized in the same way as structure, (...) possessing irreducible powers and properties that predispose organizational actors towards specific courses of action. The morphogenetic approach is the methodological complement of transcendental realism, providing explanatory leverage on the conditions that maintain for cultural change or stability. (shrink)

Values related to culture, identity, community cohesion and sense of place have sometimes been downplayed in the climate change discourse. However, they have been suggested to be not only important to citizens but the values most vulnerable to climate change. Here we test four empirical consequences of the suggestion: at least 50% of the locations citizens' consider to be the most important locations in their municipality are chosen because they represent these values, locations representing these values have a high probability (...) of being damaged by climate change induced sea level rise, citizens for which these values are particularly strongly held less strongly believe in the local effects of climate change, and citizens for which these values are particularly strongly held less strongly believe that they have experienced the effects of climate change. The tests were made using survey data collected in 2014 from 326 citizens owning property in Höganäs municipality, Sweden, and included values elicited using a new methodology separating instrumental values from end values, and using the former as stepping stones to pinpoint the latter, that represent the true interests of the respondents. The results provide the first evidence that, albeit frequent, values related to culture, identity, community cohesion and sense of place are not the values most vulnerable to climate change. This in turn indicates a need to further investigate the vulnerability of these values to climate change, using a methodology that clearly distinguishes between instrumental and end values. (shrink)

This article repudiates the dichotomy that African ethics is communitarian (relational) and Western ethics is individualistic. ‘Communitarianism’ is the view that morality is ultimately grounded on some relational properties like love or friendship; and, ‘individualism’ is the view that morality is ultimately a function of some individual property like a soul or welfare. Generally, this article departs from the intuition that all morality including African ethics, philosophically interpreted, is best understood in terms of individualism. But, in this article, I (...) limit myself to the literature in the African moral tradition; and, I argue that it is best construed in terms of individualism contrary to the popular stance of communitarianism. I defend my view by invoking two sorts of evidences. (1) I invoke prima facie evidence, which shows that both secular and religious moral thinkers in the tradition tend to understand it in individualistic terms. And, (2) I invoke concrete evidence, I show that the two terms that can be said to be definitive features of African ethical framework, namely: personhood and dignity, are individualistic. I conclude by considering possible objections against my defense of individualism as a central feature of African ethics. (shrink)

Disciplinary issues -- Field studies -- Appendix: Theory of law : legal ethnography, or, the theoretical fruits of the inquiries into folkways. /// Reedition of papers in English spanning from 1995 to 2008 /// DISCIPLINARY ISSUES -- LAW AS CULTURE? [2002] 9–14 // TRENDS IN COMPARATIVE LEGAL STUDIES [2002] 15–17 // COMPARATIVE LEGAL CULTURES: ATTEMPTS AT CONCEPTUALISATION [1997] 19–28: 1. Legal Culture in a Cultural-anthropological Approach 19 / 2. Legal Culture in a Sociological Approach 21 / 3. Timely Issues (...) of Central and Eastern Europe 24 // COMPARATIVE LEGAL CULTURES? [2001] 29–48: 1. Legal Comparativism Challenged 29 / 2. Comparative Legal Cultures versus Comparative Law 34 / 3. Contrasting Fields 40 [a) The Historical Understanding of Socialist Law 42 / b) Convergence of Civil Law and Common Law 44] 4. Concluding Remarks 46 // THEATRUM LEGALE MUNDI: ON LEGAL SYSTEMS CLASSIFIED [2005] 49–75: 1. Preliminaries 49 / 2. Proposals 50 / 3. Impossible Taxonomy, or the Moment of Practicality in Legal Mapping 69 / 4. Diversity as a Fundamental Quality of Human Existence 74 // LEGAL TRADITIONS? IN SEARCH FOR FAMILIES AND CULTURES IN LAW [2004] 77–97: 1. Comparative Law and the Comparative Study of Legal Traditions 78 / 2. ‘System’, ‘Family’, ‘Culture’, and ‘Tradition’ in the Classification of Law 80 / 3. Different Traditions, Differing Ways of Thinking 85 / 4. Different Expectations, Differings Institutionalisations in Law 88 / 5. Different “Rationalities”, Differing “Logics” 92 / 6. Mentality in Foundation of the Law 94 / 7. Defining a Subject for Theoretical Research in Law 96 // SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING OLD IN THE EUROPEAN IDENTITY OF LAW? [1995] 99–102 --- FIELD STUDIES -- MEETING POINTS BETWEEN THE TRADITIONS OF ENGLISH–AMERICAN COMMON LAW AND CONTINENTAL-FRENCH CIVIL LAW: DEVELOPMENTS AND EXPERIENCE OF POSTMODERNITY IN CANADA [2002] 105–130: I. Canadian Law in General 105 / II. Canadian Legal Developments in Particular [1. The Transformation of the Role of Precedents 112 / 2. The Transformation of Law-application into a Collective, Multicultural and Multifactorial Search for a Solution 116 / 3. Practical Trends of Dissolving the Law’s Positivity 120 / 4. New Prerogatives Acquired by Courts 125 {a) Unfolding the Statutory Provisons in Principles 126 / b) Constitutionalisation of Issues 127 / c) The Supreme Court as the Nation’s Supreme Moral Authority 129}] // MAN ELEVATING HIMSELF? DILEMMAS OF RATIONALITY IN OUR AGE [2000] 131–163: I. Reason and its Adventures 1. Progress and Advance Questioned 131 / 2. The Human Search for Safety Objectified 133 / 3. Knowledge Separated from Wisdom 135 / 4. Pure Intellectuality thereby Born 137 / II. The Will-Element Formalised in Law 5. Mere Voluntas in the Foundation of Legal Positivism 141 / 6. Formalism with Operations Fragmented 145 / III. The State of America Exemplified 7. “Slouching into Gomorrah” 147 / IV. Consequences 8. Utopianism-cum-Voluntarism 154 / 9. With Logic in Posterior Control of Human Formulations Only 159 / V. Perspectives 10. And a Final Resolution Dreamed about 161 // RULE OF LAW? MANIA OF LAW? ON THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND ANARCHY IN AMERICA [2002] 165–180: {Transformation of American Law and Legal Mentality 165 / With Repercussions on the Underlying Ethos 168 / Legislation through Processualisation 170 / With Hyperrationalism Added 172 / Example: Finding Lost Property 172 / Practicalness Veiled by Verbal Magic 173 / Ending in Jurispathy 175 / Transubstantiating the Self-interest of the Legal Profession 178 / Post-modernity, Substituting for Primitiveness 178} // TRANSFERS OF LAW: A CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS [2003] 181–207: 1. Terms 182 / 2. Technicality 190 / 3. Contrasts in Transfers of Law 200 {Contrasts 200 / Criticisms 202 / Alternatives205} 4. Conclusions 206 // THE DANGERS FOR THE SELF OF BEING SELF-CENTRED: ON STANDARDS AND VALUES [2002] 209–212 --- APPENDIX -- THEORY OF LAW – LEGAL ETHNOGRAPHY, OR THE THEORETICAL FRUITS OF THE INQUIRIES INTO FOLKWAYS [2008] 213–234 1. Encounters 213 / 2. Disciplines 218 / 3. The Lawyerly Interest 223 / 4. Law and/or Laws 226 / 5. Conclusion 233 --- Index of Subjects 235 / Index of Normative Materials 242 / Index 244 . (shrink)

The role of the cultural assets as one of the pillars of sustainable development is undeniably of great significance in the cultural sustainability of cities. Indeed, the way users understand and interpret cultural heritage sites would be highly critical to managing cultural organizations properly. It means by improving users’ perception of these sites, it can expect a fair distribution of comprehensive awareness among generations about the values of cultural assets. Past studies in spatial psychology have (...) demonstrated that environmental properties can positively Influence human emotions. On the other hand, using computational–mathematical methods used to examine spatio-visual properties have rarely been compared to human perceptions. This paper examines the impact of spatio-visual properties on human perception as a clever cultural management strategy to promote cultural sustainability. It is discussed how environmental features in general, and visibility in particular, can shape the way users interpret cultural heritage. Results indicate that not only visibility of users’ paths within cultural heritage sites can be an influential factor for the development of users’ perception, but also the visibility of the entrance of these complexes can change their understanding. This means that decision-makers, architects, and managers of the cultural organizations can apply these findings as cultural management framework by defining predefined paths in these sites in the way that they possess high visibility and visible entrance. Consequently, the distribution of public awareness among generations can be improved to strengthen the role of cultural aspects in sustainable development. (shrink)

One of the best ways to pursue and go beyond the programme of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), I suggest, takes as its point of departure the cognitive anthropology of anthropology. Situating Writing Culture with regard to this field of research can contribute to its further development. It is, after all, sensible to start the anthropological study of anthropology with an analysis of its own cultural productions: ethnographic texts. The analyst can then identify the relevant properties of such (...) cultural products and track down their causes. These causes include especially the cognitive processes of working ethnographers. Starting with textual analysis, I will argue that some of the rhetorical conventions that are viewed critically by contributors to Writing Culture, rather than being misleading, actually serve to inform the reader about the cognitive genesis of the ethnography. The information conveyed when complying with these conventions enables readers to evaluate the reliability of ethnographic accounts and anthropological analyses. Following the textual analysis, I specify some of the cognitive processes at work in the production of ethnographies. These include, for example, a reflexive and critical cognition that is distributed among the community of anthropologists and also 'mind-reading' – a cognitive process, much studied by cognitive psychologists, that enables ethnographers to make sense of the behaviour of indigenous people by attributing mental states to them (beliefs, intentions, desires, feelings). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 215-232 [Access article in PDF] Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the "Truth" of Fictional Narrative Lisa Zunshine As a session entitled "Truth" at a recent Modern Language Association of America annual convention has demonstrated, the obsession with the epistemologies of truth is alive and well. Our "familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth," as one of the speakers, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, observed, remain "theoretically (...) elusive, discursively slippery, and hard or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other current concepts and ideas" 1 --an irresistible invitation to further thinking and talking on the subject. My essay enters this conversation by attempting to contemplate truth not as a stable attribute but as a ongoing attribution, that is, not as an inherent property but rather as a dynamic process predicated upon functional idiosyncrasies of our evolved cognitive architecture. The broad question posed here is this: What if our never-ending quest for truth is itself cognitively constructed and the various forms that this quest takes manifest the (not necessarily harmonious) interaction between our evolved cognitive capacities and the ever-changing specifics of our cultural environment?Consider just one of the forms of such an interaction, namely, our age-long preoccupation with the "truth" of literary narrative. In many respects, this preoccupation is counterproductive: the most "fantastic" story contains a number of contingently useful "truths" about the world, whereas the most "factual" narrative manipulates facts by virtue of being a narrative or a subjective arrangementof information. Still, we persevere in wanting to put the label "fiction" or "nonfiction" onto any story that comes our way. As I will argue, the bookstore's organization of its sections satisfies this species of "cognitive" craving as well as [End Page 215] reinforces it, making it seem culturally inevitable. Viewed from this perspective, our culture appears to be a multifaceted feedback mechanism engaged in the process of satisfying, reinforcing, struggling with, and manipulating our cognitive predispositions.The cultural manipulation of our cognitive predispositions is the topic of the present essay, which discusses several examples of such manipulation that respond to our desire to assign a certain "truth-value" to a given narrative, i.e., to attach a label to it announcing its "factuality" or "fictionality." "Truth-value" is a loaded term, resisting definition, and liable to lead me into trouble. Imperfect as it is, however, I need it in order to shuffle between two scholarly discourses that do not (yet) have much vocabulary in common: literary criticism and cognitive science. The reason for turning to cognitive science in my discussion of literary narrative is that cognitive anthropologists and psychologists frequently engage the same problems that we do when we ask, What is "Fiction"? How is it different from "History"? How do we decide whether what we are reading is "true?" The key difference between the two approaches is, however, that whereas the literary critic focuses on specific texts produced and read in specific cultural circumstances, the cognitive anthropologist pays attention to the cross-cultural insistence with which people wish to and often claim to distinguish "truth" from "fiction" and inquires into the possible evolutionary history of the cognitive architecture implicated in our never-ending quest for "truth." The latter perspective can thus be useful for literary studies because, by suggesting that our evolved cognitive architecture often "encourages" us to construe the world as a negotiation of "truths" and "nontruths," this perspective begins to account--at least on some level--for the fact that people may approach a complex cultural artifact, such as a novel, with a "truth"/"non-truth" binary in mind that is ultimately not very productive. 2 Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists frequently point to disjunctions between the tasks that our brain evolved to solve and the tasks that we have to deal with in the modern environment; our vexed insistence on determining the truth-value of the 500-page printed narrative--not an object one would come across in the Pleistocene--can be seen as yet another instance of such a disjunction.Thus, I suggest that, on the... (shrink)

Purpose. This article is devoted to the case study of relevant linguacultural stereotypes of the particular organization’s managerial culture and based on corresponding results the inquiry of the discourses formation features associated with the lexico-semantic meanings dispersion of (Foucault). -/- Methods and Procedure of Research. Top managers of a large Ukrainian enterprise (67 respondents) were asked to arbitrarily describe the following concepts – “manager”, “subordinate”, “managerial style”. Each concept was differentiated according to the principle of the lexico-semantic opposition (“productive – (...) counterproductive”). The obtained set of texts was lemmatized and a frequency analysis of the lemmas was carried out as well. Collocations were also evaluated, in particular, repeated n-grams were identified. In the further analysis were used all detected n-grams and those lemmas, the observed frequencies of which statistically significantly exceeded the expected ones. -/- Results. Discourse formation features are determined by the paradigmatic relations of lexico-semantic units (words) and their semantic linear compatibility. The paradigmatic dispersion of a discourse is represented by the quality of connections between lemmas according to the criterion of the paradigm types to be found. Also informative is the assessment of the lemmas number (granularity of the discourse) and the spectrum diversity of paradigmatic relations in the discourse. These parameters reflect the properties of homogeneity/complexity of discourse meanings dispersion. The syntagmatic dissemination of discourse is manifested by the features of the words semantic linear interrelationship in each n-gram. This parameter reflects the quality of rationalizations (verbal-logical chains) associated with the corresponding discourses. The length of n-grams (the number of words) is also indicative – the higher n, the more differentiated the discourse is and vice versa. Matching the words semantics in n-grams with lemmas allows one to draw a conclusion regarding the internal consistency (integration) of the discourse. -/- Conclusions. Psycholinguistic tools can be effectively used in an organizational phenomena study. In particular, the frequency analysis of lemmas, their lexico-semantic evaluation, as well as the qualitative analysis of n-grams in the problem-targeted texts of respondents allows one to solve applied research issues related to the assessment of current linguacultural trends in an organization and understanding their possible causes. Managerial culture, as a linguacultural phenomenon, is represented by a set of stably reproduced discourses in the process of the organization’s functioning. At the same time, discourses are constituted by the dispersion of meanings (words), which is being realized in two linguistic dimensions – paradigmatic and syntagmatic ones. (shrink)

“Human relations and the relations to other beings in our age.” There are three components to this theme: human-to-human relationships, human-to-other being relationships, and the temporal focus of our age. In the following, I will both discuss theoretical concerns among these components as well as present case studies to illustrate my points. In asking why a duck cannot sign a contract, I hope to demonstrate inherent insufficiencies in relations between humans and other beings in our age when they are characterized (...) as legal property relations. Among the possible forms that could relate humans to other humans and other beings, global society often resorts to law. Relationships in other, more culturally-dependent arenas, are more difficult to navigate when the cultures speak different languages, follow different religions, and build different family structures. Indeed we are not globalized in these cultural areas. We are globalized economically. And insofar as law facilitates globalization, the economic norms it uses become the common denominator among the cultures and even the relationship between humans and other beings. (shrink)

This thesis studies the enabling properties of ICT and their effects and potential for social change, and prepares the ground for a sustainability-oriented ethico-political assessment of this technology. It primarily builds on interdisciplinary scholarship to describe and explain the multifaceted co-evolution between the global deployment of ICTs and the emergence of the Information Society, understood as a socioeconomic restructuring of capitalism. Beyond the role of ICTs in this regime transition, the thesis delivers other philosophical insights about crucial aspects of ICT (...) development, applications and management. These include arguments about how we should conceptualize ICTs on the basis of their different roles in extending human communication and in performing or facilitating the remote control of humans and animals, machines and systems operations; about the entanglement between telecommunications, transport networks, urban development and work and organization; and about the relations between ICTs, culture and human values. Examples are offered to illustrate the potential that these empirical and philosophical lessons may hold for the construction of a framework for the ethico-political assessment of ICTs. (shrink)

Development economist Hernando de Soto Polar has effectively advocated for property rights in the Third World, as his ideas have influenced the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations Development Programme. He envisions land titling as a means of lifting the poor out of poverty. I argue that his classical liberal interpretations of property and the good life are dangerously naive. One can see the dangers of de Soto’s imperialist and one-dimensional vision after considering (...) the cultural destruction that results from his brand of development in pastoral Kenya. Also, this article demands a reframing of standardized development approaches. It argues that the conventional view is prone to creating unstable, culturally hegemonic relationships between the government and entrepreneurs, and the people of the land. Asymmetrical lawfare is another nondemocratic feature of de Soto’s development. This article emphasizes that Kenyan pastoralists are not inherently vulnerable people but that they have been rendered vulnerable by society. Lastly, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is the basis for an alternative to de Soto’s development design. UNDRIP was a hard-fought legal protection for the world’s indigenous peoples that makes human dignity central to development. The Global North and Global South produce differing visions of development. This article points to Kenya as an example of how the Global North’s vision has fundamentally failed because it disenfranchises pastoralists—the very people policymakers and policy supporters claim it is intended to benefit. (shrink)

Ruins are evocative structures, and we value them in different ways for the various things they mean to us. Ruins can be aesthetically appreciated, but they are also valued for their historical importance, what they symbolize to different cultures and communities, and as lucrative objects, i.e., for tourism. However, today an increasing number of ancient ruins have been damaged or completely destroyed by acts of war. In 2001 the Taliban struck a major blow to cultural heritage by blasting the (...) Bamiyan Buddhas out of existence. They were not easy to destroy. This direct targeting of cultural property might change our attitudes toward conservation practices. Francesco Bandarin, the UNESCO assistant director-general for culture, states, “Deliberate destruction has created a new context. At the time, Bamiyan was an exceptional case.” Bandarin’s comments notwithstanding, the destruction of cultural property in times of war is not new. Not only is there relatively settled international law prohibiting the looting of cultural property during times of war, we can find examples of intentional destruction of cultural property from thousands of years ago. In this paper I would like to focus on one particular case, that of the Mỹ Sơn Archaeological Sanctuary, in the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam. Mỹ Sơn is the foremost Champa archaeological site and the largest archaeological site in Việt Nam. The largest temple (kalan) at Mỹ Sơn, A1, was destroyed in a US bombing raid in 1969. In this paper I highlight different approaches to architectural cultural heritage preservation in terms of reconstruction, restoration, and ruination -- with an eye to applying these approaches to the remains of the A1 temple in Mỹ Sơn. I briefly discuss the history of Mỹ Sơn before providing some reasons to believe that we should allow A1 to ruinate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The philosophical tradition approaches to morals have their grounds predominantly on metaphysical and theological concepts and theories. Among the traditional ethics concepts, the most prominent is the Divine Command Theory (DCT). As per the DCT, God gives moral foundations to the humankind by its creation and through Revelation. Morality and Divinity are inseparable since the most remote civilization. These concepts submerge in a theological framework and are largely accepted by most followers of the three Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and (...) Islam: the greatest part of the human population. Holding faith and Revelation for its grounds, the Divine Command Theories are not strictly subject to the demonstration. The opponents to the Divine Command conception of morals, grounded in the impossibility of demonstration of its metaphysical and religious assumptions, have tried for many centuries (albeit unsuccessfully) to devalue its importance. They held the argument that it does not show material evidence and logical coherence and, for this reason, cannot be taken into account for scientific nor philosophical purposes. It is just a belief and, as so, should be understood. Besides these extreme oppositions, many other concepts contravene the Divine Command theories, in one or another way, in part or in full. Many philosophers and social scientists, from the classic Greek philosophy up to the present date, for instance, sustain that morality is only a construct, and thus culturally relative and culturally determined. However, this brings many other discussions and imposes the challenge to determine what is the meaning of culture, which elements of culture are morally determinant, and finally, what are the boundaries of such relativity. Moral determinists claim that everything related to human behavior, including morality, is determined, once free will does not exist. More recently, modern thinkers argued that there is a strict science of morality. However, the scientific method alone, despite explaining several facts and evidence, cannot enlighten the entire content and full meaning of ethics. Morals’ understanding requires a broader perception, and an agreement among philosophers, which they have never achieved. All of these questions have many different configurations depending on each philosophical strand, and start complex analysis and endless debates, as long as many of them are reciprocally conflictive. The universe and the atmosphere involving this thesis are the dominions of all these conceptual conflicts, observed from an objective and evolutionary standpoint. Irrespective of this circumstance and its intrinsic importance, however, these questions are far distant from the methodological approach of an analytical discussion on objective morals, what is, indeed, the aim and scope of this work. We should briefly revisit these prominent traditional theories because this thesis shelters a comparative study, and its assumptions at least differ profoundly from all traditional theories. Therefore, it becomes necessary offering direct and specific elements of comparison to the reader, for the right criticism, dispensing interruptive researches. However, even revisiting the traditional theories, for this comparative and critical exposure purpose, they will be kept by the side of our main concerns, as “aliena materia.” Irrespective of the validity of any or all of the elements of this discussion, and their meaning as the philosophical universe of this thesis, the purpose of this work is demonstrating and justifying the existence and meaning of prehistoric moral archetypes arisen directly from the very first social needs and efforts for survival. These archetypes are the definition of the essential foundation of ethics, its aggregation to the collective unconscious and corresponding logic organization and transmission to evolutionary stages of the human genome and different relations space-time, irrespective of any contemporary experience of the individuals. The system defined by these archetypes composes an evolutionary human social model. Is this a metaethical position? Yes, it is. Moreover, as in any metaethical reasoning, we should look carefully for the best and coherent routes, as the Analytical Philosophy offers them. Thus, this work should reasonably demonstrate that morals are not a cultural product of the civilized men or modern societies and that despite being subject to several cultural relative aggregations and subtractions, its essential foundations are archetypal and have never structurally changed. This reasoning induces that morality is an original attribute of the “homo sapiens”; it is not a property and nor an accident: it integrates the human essence and belongs to the realm of the ontological human identity. The human phenomena is a continuing process, playing its role between random determination and free will, and we need to question how morality began and how did it come to us in the present. (shrink)

The third issue of the Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts is centered on a series of questions related to the nature of images. What properties characterize them? Do they exist also in our minds? What relationship do they have with phenomena such as perception, memory, language and interpretation? The authors participating in this issue have been asked to answer these and other questions starting from and in dialogue with the two philosophical perspectives that have most (...) enriched the study of our object of research since the second half of the twentieth century: analytical philosophy and visual culture studies. The first four essays address problems related to ontology (Didi-Huberman, Prinz, Bantinaki, Manzotti). In their pages the question will be asked not only about the nature of images but also about what it means for an image to represent an object or an action realistically. The second part contains discussions related to the topics of perception, appreciation and creation of pictures (Ferretti; Gavaler, Goldberg; Pigoni, Coraci, Carlenzi). The third section goes through the problems related to the very concept of representing by images (Biggs; Weichert; Derby). The last section of the issue is devoted to two cases in which images are used not so much and not only to represent something, but also to convey ethical-political values (Fasnacht; Olesiejuk). (shrink)

The idea of a new aestheticism is now explicit in both philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory with the publication of Gary Iseminger's The Aesthetic Function of Art and an anthology of essays edited by John Joughin and Simon Malpas critiquing the anti-aestheticism of literary theory. Both are significant in marking a wider trend reacting to, broadly speaking, intellectualised and historicised accounts of art, refocusing on the idea of appreciation itself, and working away from the emphasis on ideology and disregard (...) for the particularity of works in, especially, literary theory. This broader context also includes renewed debates running within philosophical aesthetics about non-perceptual aesthetic properties and the aesthetic experience of conceptual artworks, and about beauty in art, considerations that have engaged two philosophers normally identified by their commitment to art theoretical and historical (and by extension, non-aesthetic) accounts of artistic making and viewing, namely Noël Carroll and Arthur Danto. So Carroll acknowledges that what's at stake is an aesthetic theory of art that is potentially 'back in business', while Danto's 'surprising' theoretic re-engagement with the concept of beauty has been noted by Diarmuid Costello. (shrink)

The purpose of the following study is that of providing a critical anal‑ ysis of Intellectual Property (IP), with a closer look on copyright, in the context of human rights. My main conjecture is the following : the legal infrastructure stemming from the implications of copyrights which states created has nega‑ tive consequences if we have a closer look at some human rights specified by The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). For example, copyrights are, in my view, incompatible (...) with the human rights which specify that (1) hu‑ man beings have a right to freely take part in the cultural and scientific life of the communities which they inhabit and (2) human beings have a right to own property. My main hypothesis is the following : if copyrights are, in fact, more difficult to ground from a moral perspective, then this considerations must trump the provision of the 27th article of the UDHR, which states that creators, be they artists or researchers, have a human right to have their moral and mate‑ rial interests protected with regard to their intellectual products, if this amounts to a justification for a copyright. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a revision of international versions of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale and to describe the psychometric properties of a Portuguese version of the UWES-9 developed simultaneously for Brazil and Portugal, the validity evidence related with the internal structure, namely, Dimensionality, measurement invariance between Brazil and Portugal, and Reliability of the scores. This is the first UWES version developed simultaneously for both countries, and it is an important instrument for understanding employees' work engagement (...) in the organizations, allowing human resources departments to better use workforces, especially when they are migrants. A total of 524 Brazilian workers and 522 Portuguese workers participated in the study. Confirmatory Factor Analysis, group comparisons, and Reliability estimates were used. The use of workers who were primarily professionals or administrative support, according to ISCO-08, reinforced the need to collect data on other professional occupations. Confirmatory factor analysis showed acceptable fit for the UWES-9 original three-factor solution, and a second-order factor structure has been proposed that presented an acceptable fit. Full-scale invariance was obtained between the Portuguese and Brazilian samples, both for the original three-factor first-order and second-order models. Data revealed that Portuguese and Brazilian workers didn't show statistically significant differences in the work engagement dimensions. This version allows for direct comparisons of means and, consequently, for performance of comparative and cross-cultural studies between these two countries. (shrink)

When it comes to works of art, intellectual property rights (IPR) are often argued to be natural rights, for each work of art, so we are told, is the expression of the particular ingenuity of an individual artist. The account of creativity to which such arguments allude, however, is that of Romanticism, so that one may question whether these arguments hold valid for contemporary artistic practices. Thus, this chapter will construct a Hegelian justification for IPR that goes along with (...) the Romantic concept of creative work and then assess this justification drawing on the analysis of the modern culture industry by Adorno and Horkheimer. (shrink)

Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society. -/- Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive (...) human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mecha- nisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

Universal social institutions, such as marriage, commons management and property, have emerged independently in radically different cultures. This requires explanation. As Boyer and Petersen point out ‘in a purely localist framework would have to constitute massively improbable coincidences’ . According to Boyer and Petersen, those institutions emerged naturally out of genetically wired behavioural dispositions, such as marriage out of mating strategies and borders out of territorial behaviour. While I agree with Boyer and Petersen that ‘unnatural’ institutions cannot thrive, this (...) one-sided explanation of universal social institutions in terms of genetic human nature is unsatisfactory. Drawing on the literature on multi-level selection and gene-culture coevolution, I argue that universal social institutions are first and foremost the products of cultural selection. They occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of cultural possibilities, much in the same way that biological adaptations occupy fitness peaks in the landscape of biological possibilities. To show this, I use game-theory. By modelling the domains of social interaction in which marriage, commons management, and property emerged as Prisoner’s dilemma situations, it becomes clear how an institutional framework allows the group to move to an interactive equilibrium with a larger payoff. Institutions do so by incentivising all parties to adopt a cooperative strategy. They are culturally selected ways of optimising genetically constrained domains of human social interaction. (shrink)

In this essay, I’ll argue, first, that an art object's aesthetic value (or merit) depends not just on its intrinsic properties, but on the response it evokes from a consumer who shares the producer's cultural background. My question is: what is the role of culture in relation to this response? I offer a new account of aesthetic pleasure that answers this question. On this account, aesthetic pleasure is not just a “feeling” or “sensation” that results from engaging with a (...) work of art. It is rather a mental state that facilitates engagement with an artwork, and (in the long run) enables a consumer to learn how to maximize this kind of pleasure. This is where culture comes in. If you belong to a culture, you know how to engage pleasurably with an artwork that is produced so you can engage with it in just this way. The aesthetic value of an artwork is that it plays into such a culture-pleasure nexus. -/- . (shrink)

The International Bill of Rights enshrines a right to health, which includes a right to access essential medicines. This right frequently appears to conflict with the intellectual property regime that governs pharmaceutical patents. However, there is also a human right that protects creative works, including scientific productions. Does this right support intellectual property protections, even when they may negatively affect health? -/- This article examines the recent attempt by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to (...) resolve this issue and argues that it fails. This is problematic because it means defenders of the present patent regime can continue using human rights documents to support their position. I offer a new framework for resolving the problem by examining the values that underlie human rights. (shrink)

There are contradictory results regarding how students' learning outcomes can be predicted by various family and community inputs among previous studies, creating an evidence gap. Furthermore, previous studies have mostly concentrated on the cognitive aspect of students' learning outcomes, ignoring the affective and psychomotor dimensions, creating key knowledge gaps. Bridging these gaps, this predictive correlational study was conducted to understand how cultural capital, parental involvement (family inputs), support for schools, security network and school reforms (community inputs) jointly and partially (...) predict students' overall, cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning outcomes in the context of Calabar Education Zone, Nigeria. A random sample of principals (?? = 78) and students (?? = 915) recruited through a multistage approach, participated in the study. Data were collected through the physical administration of three sets of questionnaires designed by the researchers. The psychometric properties of the questionnaires (such as validity, dimensionality, reliability and goodness of fit) were all analysed and found acceptable based on pilot data. Data analysis was performed using SPSS version 27 and AMOS version 26 software. Results from the main study proved, among others, that family inputs (family social capital and parental involvement) jointly and individually had a significant contribution to students' overall, cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning outcomes. Similarly, community inputs (support for school, security network and school reforms) have significant composite and partial contributions to students' overall, cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning outcomes in public secondary schools. This result implies that parents and host community leaders must strengthen their partnerships with secondary schools and contribute their quota to institutions' curricular and co-curricular activities. (shrink)

The norm of monogamy is pervasive, having remained widespread, in most Western cultures at least, in spite of increasing tolerance toward more diverse relationship types. It is also puzzling. People willingly, and often with gusto, adhere to it, yet it is also, prima facie at least, highly restrictive. Being in a monogamous relationship means agreeing to give up certain sorts of valuable interactions and relationships with other people and to severely restrict one’s opportunities for sex and love. It is this (...) restrictiveness which has led for calls among some philosophers for the justification of the norm, and some have argued that it cannot be justified. John McMurtry, for example, writing in 1972, compared monogamy to private property and argued that it serves the capitalist order (McMurtry 1972, 596–97). More recently, Harry Chalmers (2019) has argued that monogamy is morally impermissible. In this chapter we argue that rather than justify the norm, we ought to explain and understand its pervasiveness. Not everyone who follows the norm is doing so blindly, irrationally, or immorally. Indeed, many people are monogamous because being monogamous supports their needs and best enables them to flourish. We suggest that the human need for trust and attachment could underlie many people’s desires for monogamy and, therefore, explain monogamy’s pervasiveness. Focusing on the human need for trust and attachment security can also help us to understand why sexual infidelity can feel like such a betrayal. It can make sense to mutually agree to exclusivity in relationships, in spite of the apparent restrictions this brings. In a sense, not all restrictions are restrictive, because holding ourselves to limits on our behavior can in fact help us to invest in and experience the things we value most. (shrink)

It is very well known that from the late-1960s onwards Feyerabend began to radically challenge some deeply-held ideas about the history and methodology of the sciences. It is equally well known that, from around the same period, he also began to radically challenge wider claims about the value and place of the sciences within modern societies, for instance by calling for the separation of science and the state and by questioning the idea that the sciences served to liberate and ameliorate (...) human societies. But what is less known is how, if at all, these two sets of challenges were connected, and why Feyerabend felt it important to raise them at all. In this chapter, my aim is to explore these issues by considering why Feyerabend used radical strategies to challenge the authority of science, and what purpose, if any, they were supposed to serve. Why, for instance, did Feyerabend defend alternative medicine, psychical abilities, astrology, magic and witchcraft and why did he argue that ‘Western science’ is complicit in environmental destruction, intellectual imperialism, social oppression, and spiritual destitution. Located in their historical and political context, such defences and arguments seem peculiar, not least because science was recognised not only as a central site of the intellectual and ideological competition between the West and the Soviet Union, but also because Western victory in that site was considered inevitable. What, then, did Feyerabend think he was trying to achieve by raising radical challenges to a central component of the cultural and intellectual prestige of the Western world grounded in appeals to practices and traditions which most would regard as eccentric at best and absurd at worst? My suggestion is that Feyerabend was making a subtler point than one might suppose. For the purpose of these radical challenges was to determine if the members of Western societies would in fact honour the epistemic standards – of tolerance, critical enquiry – which were identified as being characteristic of science and definitive of the social and political values of Western liberal democracy. I suggest that Feyerabend was trying to demonstrate that scientists were, too often, guilty of the same intolerant and dogmatic attitudes which were, according to prevailing propaganda, the property of illiberal totalitarian societies. Science does not reflect the superior epistemic and political values of Western societies but are, in fact, reflective of the same vices ascribed to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then the sciences are not symbols of our epistemic and political values, but quite the reverse, hence Feyerabend’s talk of the ‘dogmatic’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘ratiofascist’ nature of modern science. But there is a positive upshot to Feyerabend’s challenge. For even if the sciences do not yet reflect the epistemic and political values of liberal democratic Western societies, they might yet be reformed so that they are. And there is a parallel between Feyerabend’s strategy and that of many of the other radicals of the time – student activists, environmentalists, and pacifists – namely to test the commitment to tolerance and deliberative debate of the establishment by asking it to seriously engage with ideas and convictions opposed to its own. For both science and society can become ‘tyrannical’ through the same means: by exempting themselves from critical scrutiny, by promoting self-serving ‘myths’ about themselves, and by derogating and excluding alternatives, including the ‘outsider’ perspectives they offer. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Feyerabend is distinctive in virtue of his willingness to offer radical criticisms of the authority of science such that it can fulfil its legitimate ideological role – namely, of symbolising and instantiating our core epistemic and political values – such that we can offer a sincere and meaningful answer to Feyerabend’s question ‘what’s so great about science?’. (shrink)

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, the (...) central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts. (shrink)

According to the orthodox account of meaning and translation in the literature, meaning is a property of expressions of a language, and translation is a matching of synonymous expressions across languages. This linguistic account of translation gives rise to well-known skeptical conclusions about translation, objectivity, meaning and truth, but it does not conform to our best translational practices. In contrast, I argue for a textual account of meaning based on the concept of a TEXT-TYPE that does conform to our (...) best translational practices. With their semantic function in view, text-types are Archimedean points for their respective disciplines. The text-type of philosophy is no exception. Culture-transcendent conceptual analysis can proceed on firm footing without having to deny the reality of radical cultural and linguistic difference by treating components of text-types as the concepts to be analyzed. Analyses of central philosophical concepts are provided as a means of adjudicating philosophical controversy. (shrink)

Memory technologies are cultural artifacts that scaffold, transform, and are interwoven with human biological memory systems. The goal of this article is to provide a systematic and integrative survey of their philosophical dimensions, including their metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dimensions, drawing together debates across the humanities, cognitive sciences, and social sciences. Metaphysical dimensions of memory technologies include their function, the nature of their informational properties, ways of classifying them, and their ontological status. Epistemological dimensions include the truth-conduciveness of external (...) memory, the conditions under which external memory counts as knowledge, and the metacognitive monitoring of external memory processes. And lastly, ethical and normative dimensions include the desirability of the effects memory technologies have on biological memory, their effects on self and culture, and their moral status. Whilst the focus in the article is largely philosophical and conceptual, empirical issues such as the way we interact with memory technologies in various contexts are also discussed. We thus take a naturalistic approach in which philosophical and empirical concepts and approaches are seen as continuous. (shrink)

This chapter demonstrates that G.W. Leibniz and Michal Polanyi’s creative work in multiple fields of attention may serve a twenty first century in need of scholars willing to put daring and speculative imaginative inter–disciplinary risks in play. Such a cultural development would activate a general and cross–cultural sensibility that may salvage knowledge work, which is often predicated on property and power, for instead intellectual work that would serve the production of multiple truths that may enliven the world (...) and inspire it. (shrink)

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in (...) fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable. (shrink)

"Time. Perception. Imagination. Phenomenological Studies on the Question of Time by Augustine, Kant and Husserl". (rus), SPb, 2013. Summary: The monograph is devoted to the key elements of the philosophy of time which determine the necessity of historicism in the analysis of subjectivity. The main idea which defined the composition and design of this work is to trace how the Kantian definition of time as the “form of inner sense” is revealed in Husserl’s phenomenology. The original intention was to understand (...) all three components of this definition. Firstly, what is the inner form, in terms of phenomenology, what are the principles of its constitution and how one can talk about the property of formation? Secondly, what is the meaning of the term "inner" in philosophy, where the division into internal and external has always been a formality, not affecting the essence of things? And finally, what sort of “sensibility” is assumed in transcendental science, bound to become the basis of understanding the history and culture. Presumably, these three Kantian concepts constituted the original plan to analyze the nature of cognitive capabilities of the subject, claiming the gnoseological stage on which the philosophy of time is unfolded. In other words, this work deals with the historical and philosophical analysis of the phenomenological principles by which the concept of time as developed in the twentieth century emerged in the framework of phenomenology. The analyze of the structure of the subject assumes that time, perception and imagination combine in a special type of inner synthesis, which may not be relevant to certain aspects of the method but maintain the basis for a kind of anthropology of time, in continuation of the traditional “inner” contemplation. I consider the inner structure of time with the account of philosophy of St. Augustine, who in many respects not only anticipated the conclusions of phenomenology, but also in his reflections encompassed deeper layers of inner experience. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of St. Augustine, in which the theory of time is analyzed in conjunction with the doctrine of “inner word”, specifics of memory representations and notion of inner sense. Additionally, I consider St. Augustine’s reflections about numbers that constitute the basis of aesthetic perception of music (De Musica). Thus, the philosophy of St. Augustine already covers the whole spectrum of anthropology of time, including the question of relation between time and eternity, which remains practically unexplored in phenomenology and serves as the proof of that in interactions between philosophy and theology the tradition remains important. The second chapter of this study is devoted to analysis of the transcendental aesthetic of Kant, which includes all the methodological possibilities of considering the category of time as a formal condition for any experience, consequentially serving as a foundation for further logical development by Husserl, which includes the critical disengagement of the founder of phenomenology from Kant's transcendentalism. Particular attention is paid to the origin of the concept of inner sense, as well as possible interpretations of the function of imagination, which as a transcendental ability remains the most interesting type of synthesis. Handwritten fragments of Kant’s works are also of interest to the character of the imagery as considered in detail by Husserl. Chapter three discusses the phenomenology of inner time consciousness, represented in those important aspects, without which it is impossible to speak about the internal structure of temporal experience - the subjectivity of time, retention, "living present", and the character of synthesis. Particular attention is paid to Husserl's polemics with those representatives of psychological branch in the studies of consciousness, whose ideas greatly influenced the very motivation for creating the method. Apart from the well-known criticism of Brentano, the third chapter highlights the rarely analyzed psychological ideas that motivated the choice of Husserl’s terminology - the "Präsenzzeit” by W. Stern, the "psychological analysis" by A. Meinong, and the “fusion” (Verschmelzung) by K. Stumpf. Chapter four deals with the need to analyze the specifics of image as an element of consciousness and imagery as such, which includes a system of objectified acts. Thus is revealed the very nature of synthetic connections in the acts of consciousness, as well as the presumably imaginative character of the constitution of temporal form. (shrink)

The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘human nature’, together with seven (...) reasons why we disagree about human nature. In the main, this chapter focuses on the explanatory concept of human nature, which is related to one of the seven reasons for disagreement, namely, the scientific authority inherent in the term ‘nature’. I will examine why, in a number of historical contexts, it was attractive to refer to ‘nature’ as an explanatory category, and why this usage has led to the continual contestation of the term within the sciences. The claim is that even if the contents of talk about ‘nature’ varied historically, the term’s pragmatic function of demarcation stayed the same. The term ‘nature’ conveys scientific authority over a territory; ‘human nature’ is a concept used to divide causes, as well as experts, and thereby conquer others who threaten to invade one’s epistemic territory. Analysing this demarcation, which has social as well as epistemic aspects, will help us to understand why the explanatory role has been important and why it is unlikely that people will ever agree on either the meaning or the importance of ‘human nature’ as an explanatory category. (shrink)

Within the immigration debate, libertarians have typically come down in favor of open borders by defending two main ideas: i) individuals have a right to free movement; and ii) immigration restrictions are economically inefficient, so that lifting them can make everyone better off. This entry describes the rationale for open borders from a libertarian perspective (in part by analogy to the debate around minimum wage laws). Three main objections within the immigration literature are then discussed: i) the view that states (...) may restrict immigration to protect the interests (e.g. jobs) of their domestic needy; ii) the claim that restrictions are justified as a means of preserving culture; and iii) the influential argument that the right to freedom of association entails a right to exclude. These arguments are well-known, and I describe some of the compelling responses to be found in the recent literature. The essay then turns to more neglected critiques. The first concerns how liberal regimes should think about immigration from countries where the dominant norms are illiberal. The second examines the idea that political and economic institutions are sensitive to immigration policy, especially in the long run. Both of these critiques approach the topic from a non-ideal theory perspective, emphasizing the “public choice” dimensions of immigration policy. The entry closes by suggesting that this form of critique is especially important for open-borders libertarians to respond to given their general commitments to non-ideal, non-romantic theorizing in the context of government institutions and policy. (shrink)

In accordance with the contemporary state of the natural sciences, Wolfgang Sohst here presents an extended ontological model where the process is the first cosmological category, not objects. Her starts with very few primordial categories of becoming that even precede the fundamental concepts of physics and mathematics. Since Democritus, ie. for about 2,400 years, all cultures of European descent rest mainly on the presupposition that substances and their properties provide the inventory of our world. This, however, contradicts the formerly and (...) still today lively intuition (intellectually up to Heraclitus, again in Aristotle and only then resurgent with Hegel) that objects are not the dominating aspect of what we are living in. Rather, the basis of our cosmos is a world process as the result of the complementary relationship of particular objects and their mutual efficiencies. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the Great Ideas are integral to Mortimer J. Adler’s Great Books Movement in much the same way that the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path are integral to Buddhism. Both use ‘Great’ and ‘Noble’ to point toward human excellence. For Adler, the Great Ideas are the metaphysical and moral concepts out of which Western civilization developed. They are the main topics in an ongoing great conversation that shapes Western culture. Precisely because these Great Ideas (...) are great, insofar as they point toward human excellence (virtue), they ought not be considered the exclusive property of the West. Instead, as Adler recognized, they should be utilized in the analysis of other cultural traditions. This chapter uses two of Adler’s Great Ideas, freedom and religion, to analyze Buddhism as it is encountered in the early Indian Buddhist texts. It asserts all human philosophy and culture, including that of Buddhism, is ultimately based in religion, thereby making religion the greatest of Adler’s and the Buddha’s Great philosophical and cultural ideas. (shrink)

Darwin provided us with a powerful theoretical framework to explain the evolution of living systems. Natural selection alone, however, has sometimes been seen as insufficient to explain the emergence of new levels of selection. The problem is one of “circularity” for evolutionary explanations: how to explain the origins of Darwinian properties without already invoking their presence at the level they emerge. That is, how does evolution by natural selection commence in the first place? Recent results in experimental evolution suggest a (...) way forward: Paul Rainey and his collaborators have shown that Darwinian properties could be exogenously imposed via what they call “ecological scaffolding.” This could solve the “black box” dilemma faced by Darwinian explanations of new levels of organization. Yet, despite “scaffolding” recently becoming a popular term in the study of cognition, culture, and evolution, the concept has suffered from vagueness and ambiguity. This article aims to show that scaffolding can be turned into a proper scientific concept able to do explanatory work within the context of the major evolutionary transitions. Doing so will allow us to once again extend the scope of the Darwinian model of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)

Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility (...) – which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

This article looks at some of the metaphysical properties of cognitive artefacts. It first identifies and demarcates the target domain by conceptualizing this class of artefacts as a functional kind. Building on the work of Beth Preston, a pluralist notion of functional kind is developed, one that includes artefacts with proper functions and system functions. Those with proper functions have a history of cultural selection, whereas those with system functions are improvised uses of initially non-cognitive artefacts. Having identified the (...) target domain, it then briefly looks at the multiple usability of physical structures and the multiple realizability of cognitive function. Further developing insights from the “dual nature of artefacts thesis”, the article ends with conceptualizing the structure–function relations of cognitive artefacts. More specifically, it unpacks the relation between physical structure, representational structure, information, and cognitive function. (shrink)