Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment explores the encounter between comedy’s rationalizing dimensions and those extra-rational aspects that elude demystification and exert affective power, an encounter between what is explicable and what is inexplicable. In the context of modernist disenchantment, Shakespeare’s comedies showcase the play of wonder and doubt, leaving behind a sense of residual re-enchantment. The argument thus broadens the perspective of studies that align early modern comedy with developments in science and jurisprudence. As the comic action advances, elements of mystery accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and wonders, fears, and doubts about the meaning of events—all of whose effects linger after reason has apparently answered the play’s questions, leaving an aura of wonder and wondering. Comic enchantment works through certain devices, tropes, and motifs explored in the chapters: magical clowns who introduce non-realistic stop-time moments that alter the action; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging destinies and opaque but providential outcomes; places with differing characteristics that frame encounters between the regulatory and the protean drives in human existence; desires, thoughts, and utterances that manifest comically monstrous realities, including objects and individuals; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings that traffic in harmony and dissonance, yet which can make possible the irrational action of forgiveness. These matters are discussed with extensive reference to Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, and with comparisons to Italian and Tudor comedy.

Understanding the motivations for open-source hardware entrepreneurship

Having upended the traditional software development, which historically was centred exclusively on proprietary, copyright-protected code, open-source has now entered the physical artefact world. In doing so, it has started to change not only how physical products are designed and developed, but also the commercialisation process. In recent years, authors have witnessed entrepreneurs intentionally choosing not to patent their product design and technologies but instead licencing the designs and technologies under open-source licences. The entrepreneurs share their product designs online with their community – people who congregated due to the shared interests in products’ technology or project’s social objectives. Founding a startup firm without excluding others from using their own invention is not a common practice. Therefore, there is reason to ask if this choice a strategic decision or irrational action due to short-sightedness or extreme altruism? Conducting interviews with 65 founders, we grounded a framework explaining that the driver of going open is a result of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In addition, we observed the change of identities over time among the entrepreneurs. We hope to use this paper as a pilot study of this emerging socio-technological phenomenon, which is understudied relative to the proprietary product commercialisation process.

O tak zwanym samooszustwie w świetle znaczeń wybranych czasowników.

This paper is dedicated to the analysis of semantic properties of three Polish verbs: okłamywać się, że [p] (to lie to oneself that [p]), oszukiwać się, że [p] (to deceive oneself that [p]) and wmówić//wmawiać sobie, że [p] (to convince oneself that [p]). The author presents arguments in favour of the thesis that these are separate lexical units, which cannot be reduced to appropriate addressative verbs. In their semantic structure, she distinguishes, apart from the agent (epistemic subject), also the position of the controller-sender (metasender), and uses a conceptual distinction between quotative speech (present in the structure of the examined units) and assertoric speech in her analysis. By clashing the properties of Polish exponents of ‘samooszustwo’ (self-deception) and two competing types of philosophical interpretation of the phenomenon, the author supports anti-reductionist approaches, which do not identify self-deception with a lie or deception. She emphasises that none of the lexical exponents referring to this phenomenon implies ‘oszustwo’ (a deception) or ‘kłamstwo’ (a lie). None implies such a characteristic of the agent as is a sine qua non condition for the occurrence of any of the two situations either. From the perspective of language, ‘samooszustwo’ (self-deception) is not deception. It is a kind of an irrational action that is inconsistent with the agent’s knowledge.

Performance Incentives To Increase Motivation; Potentials Of Meaningful Activities In Project Management

Authors: Dirk Zwerenz, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8677-6050 PhD Candidate, University Kaposvár, Hungary; Head of Major Project Service, German Doka formwork technology GmbH, Maisach, Germany Pages: 95-118 Language: English DOI: https://doi.org/10.21272/sec.4(4).95-118.2020 Download: Views: Downloads: 57 31 Abstract Performance incentives to increase motivation; potentials for meaningful activities in project management, the author will concretize this with meaningful activities in project management. The ideal project leader is described by Mark Twain in his novel “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (Twain, 1876) in the episode of Tom Sawyer painting the fence. Tom is able to motivate his friends for the actually boring activity in a way that they are willing to support him voluntarily. Regarding the law of human action discovered by Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain states: “To awaken a person’s desire, all that is needed is to make the object difficult to reach” (Twain, 1876). In 2006 Ariely, Loewenstein and Prelec examined the rules of irrational action described by Twain. They conclude that individuals make decisions based on their intrinsic motivation and sometimes not on “what is reasonable” (Ariely, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2006). This enthusiasm of a project leader is transformed in this article and is reflected as a component “project brand strength” in the performance assessment of a project leader (Zwerenz, 2019). The author’s experience as a project leader in the implementation of several major projects also takes up this enthusiasm and expands it to include the identification of the project teams with themselves and the aspect of meaningful activities as an incentive in project management. That identification and motivation are on the one hand necessary to enjoy one’s profession seems understandable, on the other hand the boundaries between vocation and exhaustion are quickly crossed. Schmalenbach describes this in the article “Sacrifice of passion” in “DIE ZEIT”, issue 2-2019 with the provocative sentence “If you break down, you are a better person”. Committed project managers develop a very similar passion for “their” project and thus a comparable identification with their profession. The tension between income, recognition and prosperity is discussed. Furthermore, the dependencies of meaningfulness, recognition and income are derived from the literature and presented as factors influencing personal well-being. Finally, this article contributes to the design of a motivating variable remuneration system for project managers and other exposed occupational groups. Keywords: variable compensation, value management, development of individual competences, knowledge management, team management, management of individuals – development, motivation and reward, leadership, management of stakeholders, management of human resources, engineering and construction, research theory on project management.

Why we Act Irrationally

Psychologists, cognitive experts, and philosophers alike have long been interested in why people go against their better judgement: why do people do y when they know all things considered x is better to do? Why does a student go out rather than working on his/her essay; the completion of which they know to be their top priority. The purpose of the presentation is twofold. First and foremost, it hopes to make digestible to the everyday thinker the philosophical research that has been conducted on this matter. Oftentimes when philosophers release ground-breaking work their paper is too dense and prose-filled to be comprehensible by non-philosophers. Secondly, this presentation hopes to locate not only the source of irrational action, which it finds to be the passions, but also present a solution to the problem of irrational action, which it argues is self-reflection. It is by having an honest and open conversation with oneself about 1) one's goals, aims, and ambitions and 2) one's values [what kind of person they want to be], that one is able to turn away from weakness and to act rationally. Moreover, this paper argues that acting rationally is an ongoing process, where the individual must continually assess their actions to ensure they are falling in line with their aims and values.

Reading The Idea of History through The Principles of Art: Collingwood on Communication and Emotions

While Collingwood’s Idea of History (ih) is an excellent resource for defending history’s autonomy, its invocation is not without problems. If history deals only in reflective thought, how can it encompass irrational action? How can history reconcile its subjective method of imagination with its claim to objectivity? The most successful solutions to these problems, such as those proposed by D’Oro and Mink, appeal to Collingwood’s greater philosophical system, but they typically attribute him a restrictive and unintuitive view of historical inquiry. We are left with a historical practice that is less equipped to address the problems we intuitively want it to solve – those dealing with past human experience as it actually occurred. Using The Principles of Art (pa), I present an interpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy of history in which emotions are communicable between individuals. His theory of art defines artistic creation as a process in which unconscious emotions are harnessed and transformed into conscious emotions, which can then draw another individual into an imaginative experience that ‘repeats’ or ‘is identical with’ the artist’s original experience. We therefore acquire an account of historical inquiry that permits the interpretation of emotionally-driven actions. In this interpretation, the a priori imagination becomes an irreducible faculty of everyday human activity, a means of interpreting fellow agents in our social environments; and the onus is transferred to the natural sciences to justify their encroachment into this irreducible activity at the foundation of human experience and society.

Explaining Irrational Actions

We sometimes want to understand irrational action, or actions a person under­takes given that their acting that way conflicts with their beliefs, their (other) desires, or their (other) goals. What is puzzling about all explanations of such irrational ac­tions is this: if we explain the action by offering the agent’s reasons for the action, the action no longer seems irrational, but only (at most) a bad decision. If we explain the action mechanistically, without offering the agent’s reasons for it, then the ex­planation fails to explain the behavior as an action at all. I focus on cases that result from compulsion or irresistible desire, especially addiction, and show that this problem of explaining irrational actions may be insurmountable because, given the constraints on action explanations, we cannot explain irrational actions both as irrational and as actions.

The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality

Christine Korsgaard has argued that Humean views about action and practical rationality jointly imply the impossibility of irrational action. According to the Humean theory of action, agents do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. According to the Humean theory of rationality, it is rational for agents to do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. Thus Humeans are committed to the impossibility of practical irrationality – an unacceptable consequence. I respond by developing Humean views to explain how we can act irrationally. Humeans about action should consider the immediate motivational forces produced by an agent's desires. Humeans about rationality should consider the agent's dispositional desire strengths. When (for example) vivid sensory or imaginative experiences of desired things cause some of our desires to produce motivational force disproportional to their dispositional strength, we may act in ways that do not maximize expected desire-satisfaction, thus acting irrationally. I argue that this way of developing Humean views is true to the best reasons for holding them.

LE CRISI FINANZIARIE DALLA TULIPANOMANIA ALLA BOLLA DEL 1987: LEZIONI DALLA STORIA

Human behavior played a crucial role in the evolution of financial crises over modern and contemporary age. This chapter sets out to show how irrational action – from mania to panic, from euphoria to mass hysteria – represents a key factor in the bubbles from the tulipmania of 1637 to the 1987 stock market crash. From the point of view of what really happened during the crises, investors’ rationality appears an a priori belief about the way the world should work rather than a true description of the way the world has actually worked. Indeed, the prevailing model of financial crises entails the boom and the ensuing bust and is based on the episodic nature of the manias and the subsequent crises. Hence, the lesson is that even if we can’t prevent someone to make a foolish of himself, the historical understanding of financial crises teaches as that it is a possible to avoid that speculative and fraudolent financial businesses ruin the less aware investors.