From Modal Uniformity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander R. Pruss ◽  
Joshua L. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Finite Degree ◽  
Necessary Being ◽  
Additional Support ◽  
The Way

This chapter gives a ‘modal uniformity’ tool for assessing claims about what is possible. This tool is based upon the general principle that differences in mere finite degree do not normally make a difference with respect to possibility or necessity. The tool is sharpened by the provision of some conditions for exceptions to the general principle. The way to use this sharpened tool to provide additional support for previous arguments for a necessary being is then shown. A critical assessment follows of whether one could use the tool to construct a ‘subtraction’ argument against the existence of a necessary being; and then there is an explanation of why the argument against a necessary being faces asymmetric challenges.

Discourse of Kingship in Late Republican Invective

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yelena Baraz
Keyword(s):  
Political Discourse ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the anti-monarchical discourse that was indigenous to Rome since the expulsion of the kings. Through a study of the lexicographic range of the words rex (king) and regnum (kingship), it parses the accusations of ‘regal aspirations’ abounding in political writings of the late Republic. Although associated with the last Roman king, the ‘tyrannical’ Tarquin, these terms were not indicative of constitutional positions. Rather, in the rhetoric of faction politics, they suggest the traits of arrogance and rampant ambition. Thus refining our understanding of political discourse in the final years of the Republic, the chapter also paves the way for a new understanding of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and its critical assessment before and after his assassination.

Opulence and Oblivion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Watts Belser
Keyword(s):  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Powerful Source ◽  
The Way ◽  
Social Privilege

This chapter analyzes Bavli Gittin’s self-critical assessment of the ethical failings of the rabbis and other Jewish elites. Through tales of feasting in the shadow of catastrophe, Bavli Gittin articulates striking concerns about the collateral costs of opulent wealth, calling attention to the way that extravagant luxury isolates and insulates those who dine at the fanciest tables from the gritty realities of violence and danger. Key moments in Bavli Gittin’s narrative center around food: the shame of Bar Qamtsa at a feast sparks his eventual betrayal of the Jews, the tale of Marta bat Boethus recounts the starvation of the wealthiest woman in Jerusalem, and Caesar destroys Tur Malka in retaliation for an opulent banquet. This chapter argues that stories of luxurious eating serve as a powerful source of rabbinic social critique, illuminating the way wealth, luxury, and social privilege distance elites from the awareness of suffering in their midst.

Dooyeweerd’s Problematic Idea of Cosmic Time

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
James W. Skillen
Keyword(s):  
Cosmic Time ◽  
Temporal Coherence ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Philosophical Theory ◽  
Temporal Aspect ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
God's Image ◽  
The Way

Abstract Herman Dooyeweerd (1953, 28) writes that “the idea of cosmic time constitutes the basis of the philosophical theory of reality in [A New Critique to Theoretical Thought].” My aim is to present and defend the hypothesis that Dooyeweerd’s idea of time is, in part, mistaken at its foundation. His idea of a cosmic temporal coherence of diverse modal aspects arose from the absolutization of a concept of temporal universality that he adopted uncritically as the transcendental basic Idea of cosmic time. My immanent-critical assessment leads to the hypothesis that temporality should be recognized as the first modal aspect, which, for Dooyeweerd, has been lost to view. Recovering both the sphere sovereignty of the temporal aspect and the equal universality of all aspects opens the way to a resolution of Dooyeweerd’s temporal/supratemporal dialectic and to a new perspective on naive experience and the meaning of humans as God’s image.

Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire

PMLA ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 100 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela S. Moger
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Romantic Love ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Thematic Content ◽  
Sign System ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the dynamics of framed narrative through readings of two Maupassant stories that illustrate the range of potential in the frame. Scrutiny of “La rempailleuse” and “En voyage” reveals, in particular, how a frame modifies the effect of, and reaction to, the narrative it surrounds. The more general principle that emerges is that the seemingly gratuitous border consisting of the “extra” narrator and his addressees operates, paradoxically, against closure, casting the reader into a metacommunicative realm where a second sign system springs from the first. Thus, in “En voyage,” romantic love, the thematic content, serves as the basis for a poetics of narrative and illuminates the larger implications of the interminability of the paratactic structure. Issues addressed are the strategies latent in the frame and the way the form itself calls into question the very nature and function of narrative.

scholarly journals Law, Shared Activities, and Obligation

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Bertea
Keyword(s):  
Structural Feature ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Legal Obligation ◽  
Shared Activity ◽  
Limited Scope ◽  
The Way

This paper offers a critical assessment of the way the influential “conception of law as a shared activity” explains the normative component of law in general and legal obligation in particular. I argue that the conception provides a bipartite account of legal obligation: we have full-blooded legal obligation, carrying genuine practical force, and legal obligation in a perspectival sense, the purpose of which is not to engage with us in practical reasoning, but simply to state what we ought to do if we should take the perspective of individuals subject to the jurisdiction of the legal system. This structural feature makes the whole account disjointed, giving it a lack of unity from which stem what I take to be its three main problems, namely, its limited scope, its failure to recognize the moral features of obligation when made to arise out of law as a shared activity, and its failure to illustrate the sense in which law is widely recognized to be a practical institution.

Conflict of law 1921–1971 the way ahead

1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Lipstein
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Conflict Of Laws ◽  
Sixth Edition ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
Long Time ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Conflict Of Law ◽  
The Way

(1) Legal BasisWhen the first issue of the Cambridge Law Journal appeared in 1921, the English rules of the conflict of laws were those stated and reformulated by Dicey and by the editors of Westlake and Foote. Their progress between 1858 and 1912 had been charted by Dicey himself in a survey published in 1912. The legal basis for the application of foreign law in England was and remained Lord Mansfield's pronouncement in Holman v. Johnson: “Every action here must be tried by the law of England, but the law of England says that in a variety of circumstances … the law of the country where the cause of action arose shall govern.” Dicey never waivered in his adherence to this rule of English law, but he supplemented it with an argument drawn from the doctrine of acquired rights which bedevilled English lawyers for a long time, until in 1949 the editors of the sixth edition of Dicey took what they believed to be a bold, but substantially honest, step by restricting the concept to its proper boundaries and thus by depriving it of its capacity to serve as a general principle of the Conflict of Laws.

scholarly journals A critical assessment of reconsolidation interference as a tool for therapeutic forgetting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Schroyens ◽  
Tom Beckers ◽  
Laura Luyten
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Clinical Treatment ◽  
Memory Representation ◽  
Prior Experiences ◽  
The Way

Re-exposure to elements of prior experiences can create opportunities for inducing amnesia for those events. The dominant theoretical framework posits that such re-exposure can result in memory destabilization, making the memory representation temporarily sensitive to disruption while it awaits reconsolidation. If veritable, a mechanism that allows for memories to be permanently changed could have important implications for the treatment of several forms of psychopathology. However, the way reconsolidation theory is currently formulated and applied to account for empirical data hampers scientific and clinical progress. Theoretical and methodological advances are essential for a fruitful translation of reminder-dependent amnesia into clinical treatment.

From Possible Causes II

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander R. Pruss ◽  
Joshua L. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Causal Principle ◽  
Necessary Being ◽  
Previous Argument

The chapter searches for the logically weakest causal principle that can be found that would establish the existence of a necessary being. First the most general principle of causation is presented and then a series of increasingly weaker versions are proposed. The goal of the chapter is to provide one of the most modest causal principles on which there is at least some causal order. It is then shown how to use such a principle to construct an argument for a necessary being. As usual, various objections and replies are considered, and an advantage is drawn out of this argument with a demonstration of how someone could have reason to accept the very weak causal principle even if they do not accept any causal principle in any previous argument for a necessary being.

The Presidential Illusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Gilad-Gutnick ◽  
Pawan Sinha
Keyword(s):  
Visual System ◽  
General Principle ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Facial Features ◽  
Critical Information ◽  
Facial Identity ◽  
Facial Attributes ◽  
Facial Representation ◽  
The Way

The effectiveness of the presidential illusion underscores the important point that by excluding external facial features, such as the head and hair shape, we lose critical information about the way faces are represented in real life. This chapter considers the question of whether whole-head processing is a general principle that can be extended to all face processes or if it specifically reflects the nature of facial encoding used by the visual system for the identification of individuals. For example, would supplementing the internal features of one face with those of another affect the perception of other common facial attributes, such as gender, race, or age? The eyes, nose, and mouth are believed to be the primary purveyors of facial identity. The presidential illusion challenges this dogma and suggests that external head features (the hair and jawline) are also crucial constituents of facial representation and strongly influence identity judgments.

Parmenides of Elea, Presocratic philosopher, c. 515–post-450 BCE

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Higher Order ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Necessary Being ◽  
The Way

Parmenides of Elea is one of the most profound and challenging of the early Greek philosophers. He wrote a didactic poem treating metaphysical and cosmological themes presented in the form of a mystical revelation. It comprised a proem describing his journey to the Halls of Night, where a goddess greets him and presents this revelation in two main parts, which have come to be known as the Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion. The Way of Truth presents a tightly structured sequence of arguments that What Is must be “ungenerated and deathless, | whole and uniform, and still and perfect” (28B8.3–4 DK). The Way of Opinion comprised a cosmology based on the elemental principles Light and Night that contained numerous innovations, including identification of the sun as the source of the moon’s light. Parmenides’ thought inspired diverse reactions and appropriations in antiquity, and both its details and ultimate significance have continued to be intensely controversial. Modern interpretations divide into three main types: those that view Parmenides as a strict monist who denied the existence of the sensible world, those that view him as providing a higher-order characterization of the principles of any acceptable cosmology, and those that understand him as pursuing the distinctions between necessary being, necessary non-being or impossibility, and mutable or contingent being.

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