The discussion of Heidegger's “destructive retrieve” of Aristotle has been intensified in recent years by the publication of Heidegger's courses in the years surrounding his magnum opus. Heidegger's explicit commentary on Aristotle in these courses permits one to read Being and Time with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics. My paper analyzes a network of differences between the two thinkers, focusing on the relationship between theory and praxis. From Aristotle to Heidegger, there is: (1) a shift from the priority of actuality to the priority of possibility. This shift, I argue, is itself the metaphysical ground of: (2) a shift from the priority of theory to the priority of praxis. This shift is seen most clearly in the way in which (3) Heidegger's notion of Theorie is a modification of his poíesis. The temporal ground of the reversal is seen in (4) Heidegger's notion of transcendence towards the world, and not towards an eternal being.

In what follows, I analyze the nature of work as human action. From there I discuss the triple dimension of human perfectibility through man's operative powers: the intellect, will and affections or emotions. After that, I focus on human work as the basis for the integration of ethics and practice: the root of human and cultural development of the individual and society.

Es este trabajo quisiera exponer las dificultades que el modelo de explicación de la acción propuesto por Donald Davidson tuvo a la hora de explicar la intención. En su primer modelo, Davidson había explicado la acción a partie de deseo y creencia, éstas no sólo racionalizaban sino que también causaban la acción; y acción e intención se identificaban. Sin embargo, Davidson repara posteriormente en que, por un lado, a veces el deseo y la creencia parecen tener como resultado la acción y, sin embargo, no se da entre ellos la relación causal 'adecuada,' por lo que no podemos decir de la acción que sea intencional. Son casos de cadenas causales irregulares o no estándar. Por otro lado, a veces tener un deseo y una creencia relacionada no nos conduce necesariamente a la acción. Y, aún en el caso de que nos conduzca a la acción, ésta puede ser contraria a lo que nuestro mejor juicio nos dicta. Este es el problema de las conductas irracionales. Ambos problemas causaron que introdujera algunos cambios en su modelo inicial. Sostengo que estos cambios no mejoraron el modelo. El problema de las cadenas causales irregulares no se resuelve, y el problema de las separación entre deseo-creencia y acción se reformula en términos lógicos, mediante un recurso técnico.

In this paper I attempt to give an account of the moral criticizability of motive by appeal to some insights in semantic theory. I maintain that the actions for which we hold persons responsible cannot strictly be understood as expressive of semantic meaning. However, I argue that morally responsible actions can be understood on analogy with a basic Gricean distinction between speaker's and sentence meaning. The analogy suggests that morally responsible actions require a competent moral agent to operate from within the confines of an interpretive moral framework of action assessment, a framework analogous to the framework required for sentence meaning.

In Davidson's example of causal deviancy, a climber knows that he can save himself from plummeting to his death by letting go of a rope connecting him to a companion who has lost his footing, but the thought of the contemplated act so upsets him that he lets go unintentionally. Causation of behavior by intentional states that rationalize it is not enough for it to count as acting. Therefore, the behavior must be caused in 'the right way' or by the Right Kind of Cause (RKC). The immediate cause in Davidson's and other examples of causal immediacy is the agent's awareness or contemplation of what he or she is intending or thinking of doing, which is either caused by, or implicit in the agent's awareness of, his or her intentions or beliefs and desires. I argue that RKC can only be a mechanism-the Will-whose operation we are not directly aware of, but only indirectly once the action is underway.

Spohn's decision model, an advancement of Fishburn's theory, is valuable for making explicit the principle used also by other thinkers that 'any adequate quantitative decision model must not explicitly or implicitly contain any subjective probabilities for acts.' This principle is not used in the decision theories of Jeffrey or of Luce and Krantz. According to Spohn, this principle is important because it has effects on the term of action, on Newcomb's problem, and on the theory of causality and the freedom of the will. On the one hand, I will argue against Spohn with Jeffrey that the principle has to be given up. On the other, I will try to argue against Jeffrey that the decision-maker ascribes subjective probabilities to actions on the condition of the given decision situation.

The theory of agency, it has been claimed, seems to involve two strange notions: on the one hand, that of a self who is not merely an event, but a substance; and that of causation, according to which an agent, who is a substance, can nevertheless be the cause of an event. The understanding of the conscious subject as constituted by the operations of experience, understanding, judgment and decision, proposed by the Canadian philosopher and theologian, Bernard Lonergan, might resolve the puzzle, and provide the basis for an understanding of human freedom that is the affirmation of neither determinism nor arbitrariness. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments in the proposal's favor is that any attempt to refute it in theory would entail its adoption in practice.

There are two distinctions of orientation or of intention of a subject toward any phenomenon: "to" or "from" it, attraction or repulsion, acceptance or rejection. The +/- acceptability or pleasantness/unpleasantness of a phenomenon to a subject is the term indicating his or her +/- orientation to the perceived phenomenon. There are six components of the stream of human consciousness: contact senses (smell, taste, tactile senses), distant senses (auditory, visual) and emotions. Only four of them (the three contact senses and emotions) possess their own acceptability or pleasantness. Pleasantness of Condition of a Subject (PCS) is a sum or an integral of acceptabilities of these four components. "Happiness" is the upper limit of the maximization of PCS; a subject is constantly striving to maximize PCS or to reach for happiness. An attitude of a subject to a phenomenon in the center of his or her attention is determined by the synchronous PCS. Belief/disbelief is a verbalized positive/negative attitude. Desire of a phenomenon x is a change of PCS (ΔPCSx) created by the act of perceiving/imagining the phenomenon; the strength of desire is the magnitude of this change |ΔPCSx|. Desire of a phenomenon characterizes power of the PCS maximization possessed by this phenomenon. Need is a periodic desire; the desire correspondent to need is a concrete form of existence of this need. Choice is determined by comparative strength of the desirabilities of the competing elements of choice; it includes choice of the phenomena to perceive or attend. The attention of a subject toward a perceived phenomenon x is proportional to the strength of its desirability: ATTx=k|ΔPCSx| = k|DESIREx|. The distribution of attention is a function of the desirabilities of (n) phenomena perceived at the time (t): ATTtotalt=k|DES1t|+k|DES2t|+…+|DESnt|. Will is an ability of the subject to influence the balance of desirabilities of elements of the subject's choice in the predetermined way. The nature of the will's effort is a self-inducement of suitable emotions through activation of memories by the concentration of the subject's attention to them.

In light of interpreting a paradox of irrationality, vaguely expressed by Donald Davidson in the context of explaining weakness of will, I attempt to show that it contains a significant thesis regarding the cognitive as well as motivational basis of our normative practice. First, an irrational act must involve both a rational element and a non-rational element at its core. Second, irrationality entails free and intentional violation of fundamental norms which the agent deems right or necessary. Third, "normative interpretation" is only possible for objects that are both natural events and capable of mental operations which presuppose some freedom of will as well as constructive representation of the surrounding reality. Fourth, there is always a question of whether we strike the best balance between fitting individual mental items consistently with the overall behavior pattern and keeping our critical ability in following certain normative principles which constitute our rational background. Fifth, the paradox of irrationality reflects and polarizes a deep-seated tension in the normative human practice under the ultimate constraints of nature. Finally, the ultimate issue is how we can find the best lines on which our normative rational standards are based-"best" in the sense that they are close enough to limits of human practical potentialities and are not too high as to render our normative standards idle or even disastrous.

This is an analysis of the ethico-cultural crisis of modernity and the emergence of the so-called postmodern aesthetic expressions (and conduct), examined principally from the point of view of Frederic Jameson and its coincidence with other authors (D. Lowe, G. Lipovetsky, and P. Virilio). I also investigate the relationship between the new sensitivities of the end of the century and the notion of justice, and its moral. This is seen by the authors as a consequence of the impact that mass-media technologies have produced in individuals leading to a new form of experience: the aesthetization of life and the fragmentation of the subject. The culture of the image is omnipresent, diluting art into aesthetization and the subject into the objectivization of consumption. We can see that there is a loss of historicity in the postmodern individual-originating from the speed of audiovisual information-upon perceiving, on a screen, the world in an instanct, without references to either a past or a future. The new technologies are the product of a new stage of capitalism, even more so than in the modernity of massive consumption. As a consequence of these three factors (aesthetization, ahistoricity, consumption), there has emerged a hedonistic ethos which differentiates itself from its modern vanguardist antecedents in that it is no longer the transgressor of a religious moral, or the secularism of duty, because pleasure is no longer forbidden. This framework, which is lacking in hard principles and is sustained by 'weak and conviction free' individuals is compatible with the liberal ethic of Rawls. In the face of the contradiction of modernity, we shall reconsider, as factors of socio-political construction, the moral values provided by the world's great religions.

Given that any society is endowed not only with a set of institutions but also with the particular pattern of self-reflection and self-description, postmodernity should be viewed as an epoch representing the climax of modernity and its self-refutation. Parting with traditional society, modernity represents the triumph of power-knowledge, the divorce between spheres of culture, the global social relations, the new institutions, the change in the understanding of space-time relations, the cult of the new, and the modernization process. While preserving the institutional set of modernity, the postmodern period casts into doubt the basic thought foundations of classical modernity. The horizons of the emerging cultural future should be viewed in the light of a positive synthesis of the postmodern reflexive pattern with the legacy of modernity.

A general problem of philosophical interests concerns the possibility of objective knowledge of other cultures and a past culture, as well as the adequacy of their reconstruction. The problem of cultural development is also crucial. By the criterion I develop, a culture which has expanded its potentialities in various independent forms is an open culture able to enter into dialogue with any other culture.

Traditionally, attempts to verify communications between individuals and cultures appeal to 'public' objects, essential structures of experience, or universal reason. Contemporary continental philosophy demonstrates that not only such appeals, but fortuitously also the very conception of isolated individuals and cultures whose communication such appeals were designed to insure, are problematic. Indeed we encounter and understand ourselves, and are also originally constituted, in relation to others. In view of this the traditional problem of communication is inverted and becomes that of how we are sufficiently differentiated from one another such that communication might appear problematic.

Andrew Bowie's recent Schelling and Modern European Philosophy claims that Schelling idealism is a critique of 'reflective reason' that can be brought to bear on the avatars of French postmodernism. Bower is careful not to intricate Schelling's Naturphilosophie and Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, in which both nature and freedom are fused into a single, unconscious series of natural drives or 'vortex of forces.' To take Schelling at word would turn the Naturphilosophie and Inquiries into a materialist physics of mental states, the basis of which are inaccessible to reflective consciousness. Best represented by philosophers such as Paul Churchland, however, why does Bowie avoid playing up this materialist Schelling when dealing with French 'Irrationalism?' Inadvertently, Bowie rekindles the Kantian critique in order to separate two aspects of recent French philosophy: the materialist (with which Paul Churchland notes that his eliminative, connectionist neuromaterialism has much in common) and the reflective (as inherited from the German Idealism Schelling represents, and mediated via Bergson and Heidegger). While French philosophy's recent adoptions in the Anglo world have been of this latter complexion, Bowie's anxious prophylaxia exposes a materialist current in French thought that has remained more or less beyond the range of Anglophone hearing.

China, with a large population, has its own characteristics in establishing new values for leisure. One of the most vital characteristics of leisure is that family is considered as its main subject. Therefore, strengthening the family culture has become a new conception of leisure. In the countryside, about 85 percent of the villages and towns have set up various entertainment and leisure places which reflect the family culture. In cities, people have a new conception of residence which pursues a community culture that respects people's rights and advocates an harmonious integration of human beings and nature. Meanwhile, the leisure culture has been enriched by a plan that includes bodybuilding for everyone, reading clubs, family politics studies, art appreciation and environmental protection organizations comprised mainly of volunteers. New value of the leisure of humankind is coming into being in various fields.

The aspiration of people almost everywhere to construct a public life on the basis of justice is the predominant tendency in the historical development of humankind. The natural world in which we dwell is, from the standpoint of our using its resources to satisfy our vital needs, one and indivisible. Thus, the public conditions of human activity in the economic, social, and political spheres should be brought into harmony with nature's conditions. This requires the consolidation of the efforts of nations and peoples-their mutual integration. The significance of spiritual and philosophical preconditions of this process is crucial, as the transformation of society on the principles of justice, from the standpoint both of history and of present-day reality, is possible only on the basis of knowledge of the foundations of human vital activity. I discuss efforts being made toward this end in the young, independent nation of Uzbekistan, there are certain.

I intend to motivate discussion on the ways of thought in art and philosophy in terms of a problem characteristic of contemporary culture diagnosed by Plato as the "loss of memory." He referred to the impoverishment of knowledge caused by an exclusive and excessive interest in information as well as by the loss of value in reflection. I examine the problem more closely by referring to a passage in the Phaedrus that shows what Plato meant by "a forgetfulness of the soul" is tantamount to the disconnection of intellectual knowledge from emotion and the body. I reflect on the relation between art and philosophy as well as on the character of philosophical thought as regards the need to "cultivate memory" in our time.

Classical Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, understood the soul as a necessary and constituent part of human life which manifests itself in the actualization of a dialectical relation between the philosophical life and virtue. Reflecting upon the Platonic and Aristotelian descriptions of soul along with the interpretation of this notion in Christianity, philosophers have continued to discuss soul in the modern period. The reliance on history has at the same time changed our understanding of soul, as in Hegelian idealism with its attempt to abrogate the traditional Kantian theory of knowledge which continued this trend towards an aporetic annulment of soul within the notion of history. Consequently, the traditional notion of paideia ceased to be a meaningful category for education, therefore, undermining the possibility of constructing an effective subjective identity for individuals as well as a theoretical access towards history. I will demonstrate how the traditional philosophical ideal that unified soul and paideia lost its appeal and scientific value, and will assess the ethical consequences of this pragmatic shift for future attempts to educate humanity. The analysis of this philosophical process will clearly indicate the conditions responsible for the demise of the notion of soul in philosophy, and will also consider the philosophers' options for a rehabilitation of soul in anticipation of the next century.

In European atomic theory, Euclid's geometry and Aristotle's logic complement each other and are generally acknowledged sources of Western science. In China, the book Zhou Yi is the source of Chinese science because it system contains a unity of philosophic, logical and mathematical thinking. These two systems form the core of the scientific models of the Western and Chinese cultural traditions. In political and ideological arenas, the Western is a contract model based on the individual, but the Chinese is an entirety one base on 'human administration.' In Western societies, the inner general tensile stress of contracts causes losses and breaks of action standards and values, but it also has features of reconstruction, regeneration, and recreation. Its breaks and losses could cause an entire collapse, but as it is far from a balanced condition, it has a tendency to stabilize its structures through inner-adjustment. These two traditions formed in the axial period of human history, and are still potent today. The proverb 'two poles are interlinked' still has a realistic significance for us to understand life in human society.

The problem of the relationship between natural and conventional symbolism shows Merleau-Ponty's concern with maintaining an 'organic link between perception and intellection.' For the body affords in itself and in its relation with the world the model on which the interpretation of symbolism is grounded. This paper develops the view that the architectonic of the body implies a silent structure which is the condition for expressive operations. The body is the 'primal expression,' and this means that it is so organized that it brings forth an institution (Stiftung) of meaning. As regards conventional symbolism, Merleau-Ponty turns aside from an intellectual interpretation by contending that the attempt to find in categoreal activity a common fundamental moment must not overlook the fact that meaningful structures cannot be separated from the materials which embody them because 'matter is pregnant with form.' This view opens up the possibility of considering the cultural formations which emerge in the relationship between persons in language, knowledge, society and history as a reprise of the aesthetic logos in a different architectonic.