scholarly journals Non Defuit Materia

Author(s):  
Stefano Visentin

The relationship between politics and metaphysics in Spinoza’s philosophy has been highlighted by Antonio Negri in The Savage Anomaly. But the determinism of God’s power, implying the identity between freedom and necessity, has not been analysed in its political effects. This chapter will show by whom the imaginary reality of free will can be politically employed; that due to the identity between reality and perfection, a ‘real’ tyranny can be considered a ‘perfect’ regime; how a free multitude, living in a democratic regime, differentiates itself from an enslaved one, and how its freedom can be necessary.


Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz

The article explores the political effects of popular consultations as a means of direct democracy in struggles over mining. Building on concepts from participatory and materialist democracy theory, it shows the transformative potentials of processes of direct democracy towards democratization and emancipation under, and beyond, capitalist and liberal democratic conditions. Empirically the analysis is based on a case study on the protests against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia. The analysis reveals that although processes of direct democracy in conflicts over mining cannot transform existing class inequalities and social power relations fundamentally, they can nevertheless alter elements thereof. These are for example the relationship between local and national governments, changes of the political agenda of mining and the opening of new spaces for political participation, where previously there were none. It is here where it’s emancipatory potential can be found.



2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-150
Author(s):  
Eleonora Rai

AbstractThis article retraces the intra-Jesuit theological debates on the theology of salvation, including the relationship between the elements of predestination, God’s foreknowledge, Grace, and free will, in the delicate passage between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and within the debates on Augustine’s theological legacy. Specifically, it explores the Flemish Jesuit Leonard Lessius’ theology and the discussions raised by it within the Society of Jesus, in order to show how soteriology has been central in the process of self-definition of the Jesuit identity in the Early Modern Age. This is particularly clear from the internal debates developed between Lessius, on the one hand, and General Claudio Acquaviva and curial theologian Roberto Bellarmino, on the other hand. Not only does the article investigate little known aspects of intra-Catholic theological debate in the post Tridentine period, but it also shows how deep pastoral and moral concerns strongly contributed to the rise of Lessius’ open-minded theology of salvation, which seemed to deprive God’s sovereign authority in favour of humankind’s free will, and human agency in the process of salvation.



2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adi Parush

To prevent any misunderstanding, I first would like to clarify that I am not a historian dealing with classical studies; my main disciplines are philosophy and law. However, following a seminar I gave dealing with several philosophical-legal aspects of Greek tragedy, and an article I wrote about the relationship between the concept of guilt in Oedipus Tyrannus and the principle of strict liability in modern criminal law, I have found myself in recent years becoming increasingly interested in the unique culture which emerged in Athens during the classical period, particularly in the 5th century BCE. In the course of that century, Athens was involved in many wars – against the Persians in the early decades, against Sparta (the Peloponnesian War) in the latter decades, and other “minor” wars. And yet despite these wars, during the 5th century BCE Athens was in a state of cultural-social-political ferment that left its mark on the whole history of western culture. In the course of that century, there was in Athens a burgeoning of independent-critical thought in the philosophical domain, nature and medicine were systematically studied, tragedies by the Athenians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were written and performed, and the democratic regime took shape.



2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodrigo Schneider ◽  
Kelly N. Senters

AbstractScholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.



2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-379
Author(s):  
Andrey Korotayev ◽  
Ilya Vaskin ◽  
Daniil Romanov

Abstract This article proposes a new explanation of the positive correlation between democracy and terrorism detected in many previous studies. It is shown that this might be accounted for by the fact that factional democracies are subjected to more terrorist attacks than the other political regimes. A positive relationship between the democratic regime and the level of terrorist activity can be obtained due to the inclusion of factional democracies in the sample of democratic states. If factional democracies are excluded from the sample, the relationship between the level of terrorist activity and the democratic regime is negative. The analysis allows to maintain that factional democracy is a rather powerful factor of a high level of terrorist activity, while non-factional democracy turns out to be rather a statistically significant predictor of a relatively low intensity of terrorist attacks.



Author(s):  
Brian Leiter

Moral psychology, for purposes of this volume, encompasses issues in metaethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, including questions concerning the objectivity of morality, the relationship between moral judgment and emotion, the nature of the emotions, free will, and moral responsibility, and the structure of the mind as that is relevant to the possibility of moral action and judgment. Nietzsche’s “naturalism” is introduced and explained, and certain confusions about its meaning are addressed. An overview of the volume follows



2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
JASON VREDENBURG

In the forty years since its publication, Hunter S. Thompson's most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has received relatively little attention from scholars, in spite of its continuing popularity and acknowledged influence. Because the narrative is so thoroughly rooted in what Thompson called “this foul year of Our Lord, 1971,” the novel is generally approached (when it is discussed at all) as a historical artifact, a gonzo first draft of history, with its fortunes rising and falling with the counterculture of the 1960s. This article argues that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, far from being merely an epitaph for the 1960s, actually anticipates the more recent work of political theorists Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Thompson's work, like Agamben's, concerns the emergence of the state of exception and the homo sacer as new paradigms for the relationship between citizen and state; and, like Hardt and Negri, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas attempts to formulate a response to the emergence of global empire.



2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 624-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregmar I. Galinato ◽  
Asif Islam

AbstractThe authors develop a theoretical model that elucidates the relationship between the quality of governance, the composition of government spending and pollution as a by-product of the consumption process. In particular, they determine the impact of government spending that alleviates market failure such as subsidies to the poor which reduce credit market failure and environmental regulations to correct for pollution externality. It is found that a shift in government spending towards goods that alleviate market failure has countervailing effects – consumption pollution rises due to increases in income, but consumption pollution also falls due to increasing environmental regulations. Conditional on the government adopting a democratic regime, the effect through environmental regulations outweighs the effect through income leading to lower consumption pollution. The authors estimate an empirical model and find that the results support their theoretical predictions.



2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gilad Feldman ◽  
Jiing-Lih Farh ◽  
Kin Fai Ellick Wong

In three studies, we examined the relationship between free will beliefs and job satisfaction over time and across cultures. Study 1 examined 252 Taiwanese real-estate agents over a 3-months period. Study 2 examined job satisfaction for 137 American workers on an online labor market over a 6-months period. Study 3 extended to a large sample of 14,062 employees from 16 countries and examined country-level moderators. We found a consistent positive relationship between the belief in free will and job satisfaction. The relationship was above and beyond other agency constructs (Study 2), mediated by perceived autonomy (Studies 2-3), and stronger in countries with a higher national endorsement of the belief in free will (Study 3). We conclude that free-will beliefs predict outcomes over time and across cultures beyond other agency constructs. We call for more cross-cultural and longitudinal studies examining free-will beliefs as predictors of real-life outcomes.



2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew E. Monroe ◽  
Garrett L. Brady ◽  
Bertram F. Malle

According to previous research, threatening people’s belief in free will may undermine moral judgments and behavior. Four studies tested this claim. Study 1 used a Velten technique to threaten people’s belief in free will and found no effects on moral behavior, judgments of blame, and punishment decisions. Study 2 used six different threats to free will and failed to find effects on judgments of blame and wrongness. Study 3 found no effects on moral judgment when manipulating general free will beliefs but found strong effects when manipulating the perceived choice capacity of the judged agent. Study 4 used pretested narratives that varied agents’ apparent free will and found that perceived choice capacity mediated the relationship between free will and blame. These results suggest that people’s general beliefs about whether free will exists have no impact on moral judgments but specific judgments about the agent’s choice capacity do.



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