54 research outputs found
It only takes two to tango: against grounding morality in interaction
Most Kantian constructivists try to ground universal duties of interpersonal morality in certain interactions between individuals, such as communication, argumentation, shared action or the second-person standpoint. The goal of this paper is to present these, which I refer to as arguments from the second-person perspective, with a dilemma: either the specific kind of interaction that is taken as a starting point of these arguments is inescapable, but in that case the argument does not justify a universal principle of interpersonal morality. Or interaction does have a principle of interpersonal morality among its necessary conditions of possibility, but such forms of interactions are merely optional. I argue that proponents of arguments from the second-person perspective have failed to provide a convincing response to this dilemma and that this failure is systematic. This suggests that the success of Kantian constructivism depends on the success of arguments from the first person
Reflections inside an elliptical dielectric lens antenna,â
Abstract: The reflections inside the elliptical lens of a typical millimetre wave antenna are investigated. In particular, it is seen that these reflections may significantly affect the input impedance of a radiating element which is located at the lens focus, owing to the presence there of a point caustic of doubly reflected rays. The presence of a caustic prevents the field prediction inside the lens by a direct application of geometrical optics. Consequently, the field inside the lens is calculated by means of the physical optics currents associated with singly and doubly reflected rays
Development of large radii half-wave plates for CMB satellite missions
The successful European Space Agency (ESA) Planck mission has mapped the
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy with unprecedented
accuracy. However, Planck was not designed to detect the polarised components
of the CMB with comparable precision. The BICEP2 collaboration has recently
reported the first detection of the B-mode polarisation. ESA is funding the
development of critical enabling technologies associated with B-mode
polarisation detection, one of these being large diameter half-wave plates. We
compare different polarisation modulators and discuss their respective
trade-offs in terms of manufacturing, RF performance and thermo-mechanical
properties. We then select the most appropriate solution for future satellite
missions, optimized for the detection of B-modes.Comment: 16 page
Thinking About Justice: A Traditional Philosophical Framework
This chapter describes a philosophical approach to theorizing justice, mapping out some main strands of the tradition leading up to contemporary political philosophy. We first briefly discuss what distinguishes a philosophical approach to justice from other possible approaches to justice, by explaining the normative focus of philosophical theories of justice â that is, a focus on questions not about how things actually are, but about how things ought to be. Next, we explain what sorts of methods philosophers use to justify theories of justice. Following this, in the longest section, we highlight major questions about justice that have drawn the attention of philosophers, and indicate how competing conceptions of justice have arisen from differing answers to these questions. The goal here is not to answer but to elucidate some of the larger questions about justice, as well as to establish a framework for understanding and distinguishing different kinds of claims about justice and some of the relations between them
Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells for Space Applications: Radiation Hardness and Applications for an Integrated SOLANT (SOLar cell -ANTenna) Module
Facts, Principles, and (Real) Politics
Should our factual understanding of the world influence our normative theorising about it? G.A. Cohen has argued that our ultimate normative principles should not be constrained by facts. Many others have defended or are committed to various versions or subsets of that claim. In this paper I dispute those positions by arguing that, in order to resist the conclusion that ultimate normative principles rest on facts about possibility or conceivability, one has to embrace an unsatisfactory account of how principles generate normative political judgments. So political theorists have to choose between principles ostensibly unbiased by our current understanding of human motivation and political reality, or principles capable of reliably generating political judgments. I conclude with wider methodological observations in defence of the latter option, and so of a return to political philosophyâs traditional blend of normative and descriptive elements
Korsgaardâs Other Argument for Interpersonal Morality: the Argument from the Sufficiency of Agency
Christine Korsgaardâs (1996, 2009) argument for the claim that one should not only value oneâs own humanity but also the humanity of all other persons, âthe publicity of reasons argumentâ, has been heavily criticized and I believe rightly so. However, both in an early paper (1986) and in her most recent work (forthcoming), Korsgaard does not rely on controversial, Wittgensteinian ideas regarding the publicity of reasons, but instead she uses a different argument to justify interpersonal morality, which I will refer to as âthe argument from the sufficiency of agencyâ. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the argument from the sufficiency of agency can succeed where the publicity of reasons argument fails. I will argue that although the argument from the sufficiency of agency is potentially more promising, it fails to justify a categorical and universal principle of interpersonal morality. I argue, however, that this failure has less to do with the argument from the sufficiency of agency itself and more with Korsgaardâs specific version of it. This leaves open the possibility that other Kantian constructivist arguments from the sufficiency of agency might be more successful
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