In this paper we examine whether and how powers ontologies can back formal causation. We attempt to answer three questions: i) what is formal causation; ii) whether we need formal causation, and iii) whether formal causation need powers and whether it can be grounded in powers. We take formal causal explanations to be explanations in which something's essence features prominently in the explanans. Three kinds of essential explanations are distinguished: constitutive, consequential, and those singling out something's propria. This last kind (...) of explanation has been somewhat overlooked in the literature, but we argue that it features in much of the most relevant uses of formal explanations in philosophy and science. These are the explanations for why an object has certain propertis that are not, properly speaking, parts of its essence, but that belong to it more intimately than just being part of its consequential essence: they are the properties that ‘flow’ from something's essence. It is argued that a powers metaphysics is uniquely placed to make sense of this last phenomenon. We then distinguish three grades of involvement in which powers might be salient for formal causal explanations: i) powers might be the subject matter of the essence operator, ii) the essence of something might include (or be exhausted) by powers, or iii) powers can explain how propria can flow from something's constitutive existence. (shrink)

A standard way of representing causation is with neuron diagrams. This has become popular since the influential work of David Lewis. But it should not be assumed that such representations are metaphysically neutral and amenable to any theory of causation. On the contrary, this way of representing causation already makes several Humean assumptions about what causation is, and which suit Lewis’s programme of Humean Supervenience. An alternative of a vector diagram is better suited for a powers ontology. Causation should be (...) understood as connecting property types and tokens where there are dispositions towards some properties rather than others. Such a model illustrates how an effect is typically polygenous: caused by many powers acting with each other, and sometimes against each other. It models causation as a tendency towards an effect which can be counteracted. The model can represent cases of causal complexity, interference, over-determination and causation of absence (equilibrium). (shrink)

In this paper a dispositional account of meaning is offered. Words might dispose towards a particular or ‘literal’ meaning, but whether this meaning is actually conveyed when expressed will depend on a number of factors, such as speaker’s intentions, the context of the utterance and the background knowledge of the hearer. It is thus argued that no meaning is guaranteed or necessitated by the words used.

Omissions are sometimes linked to responsibility. A harm can counterfactually depend on an omission to prevent it. If someone had the ability to prevent a harm but didn’t, this could suffice to ground their responsibility for the harm. Michael S. Moore’s claim is illustrated by the tragic case of Peter Parker, shortly after he became Spider-Man. Sick of being pushed around as a weakling kid, Peter became drunk on the power he acquired from the freak bite of a radioactive spider. (...) When a police officer called to Spider-Man to stop an escaping burglar, which he could have done easily, he failed to act. He was through taking orders. The omission was followed by a crime. That very same burglar later robbed Peter’s own house and when challenged he shot dead Peter’s Uncle Ben. Later, Spider-Man tracked down the killer and, when seeing his face close up, the possibility of prevention dawned on him. He could have stopped this crook and had he done so Uncle Ben would still be alive. Stan Lee’s tale of power finished with a Shakespearean twist. Young Peter realised the truth of the WGPCGR-thesis: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. We too will endorse the WGPCGR-thesis. There is a close connection between our notions of moral and legal responsibility and the powers we have as causal agents. This will be particularly important when it comes to the case of omissions: where we had the power to act but failed to do so. We hope to show the connections between the notions of power, cause, act, omission and responsibility but also some of the nuances. We will do so with particular reference to Moore’s account in Causation and Responsibility. (shrink)

This study asserts that W.V.O. Quine’s eliminative philosophical gaze into mereological composition affects inevitably his interpretations of composition theories of ontology. To investigate Quine’s property monism from the account of modal eliminativism, I applied to his solution for the paradoxes of de re modalities’ . Because of its vital role to figure out how dispositions are encountered by Quine, it was significantly noted that the realm of de re modalities doesn’t include contingent and impossible inferences about things. Therefore, for him, (...) all the intrinsic forces and elements of entities such as powers and causal or teleological dispositions for ontology demand to be seen necessarily as bound variables from a monist perspective. Although his denial of analyticity and the elimination of dispositional field of ontology, S. Mumford criticizes the monist perspective of Quine’s paradoxical approach to superveniences. Because superveniences create problems while determining type-type identities from a monist mereological perspective. It is observed that Quine faces with a reduction again in terms of his dispositional monism despite his critiques to repulse vagueness from the ontology in his well-known article Two Dogmas of Empiricism. -/- . (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the close link between technology and death in the philosophical writings of Lewis Mumford. Mumford famously argued that throughout the history of western civilization we find intertwined two competing forms of technics; the democratic biotechnic form and the authoritarian monotechnic form. The former technics were said to be strongly compatible with an organic form of life while the latter were said to be allied to a mechanical power complex. What is (...) perhaps less well known is the extent to which Mumford characterizes the authoritarian technical form as being a technics of death. This article will argue that the connection between death and technics is a key theme in Mumford’s philosophy of technology. In addition to elaborating this theme and detailing how it informs Mumford’s other positions on the nature of technology, this article will also argue that Mumford’s theory of a technics of death bears witness, both implicitly and explicitly, to the influence of Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death instinct. Freud’s account of the death instinct will be outlined briefly and its influence on Mumford’s writings will be explained. Death, in Mumford’s technological writings, has a generally negative function and serves to warn humanity of the perilous course that its technological civilization is set upon. However it also has a positive function in that it encourages man to transcend its biological existence in acts of creativity and purpose. Death, in this positive sense, serves the purpose of life whereas, in the negative sense, it hinders it. The role of death, in both aspects, will be explored and related to Mumford’s overall perspective on technics and life. It is argued that Mumford’s philosophy of technology cannot be fully understood without an awareness of his views on death and its role in the life of technological society. (shrink)

There seems to be widespread agreement that there are two modal values: necessity and possibility. X is necessary if it is not possible that not-X; and Y is possible if it is not necessary that not-Y. In their path-breaking book, Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford defend the radical idea that there is a third modal value, weaker than necessity and stronger than possibility. This third value is dubbed 'dispositional modality' (DM) or 'tendency' and is taken to be an (...) irreducible and sui generis worldly modality: "the modality that's everywhere" (5). The source of DM is the causal powers of particulars; hence, DM is constitutively involved in causation: "a cause tends or disposes towards its effect, and can sometimes succeed in producing it" (9). Accordingly, DM is involved in all causal processes, from fundamental physics to the social and moral realm. This "deeply tendential view" (11) of the metaphysics of nature is advanced as distinct from both extant neo-Aristotelian and Humean views. Its key feature is that there is neither pure contingency nor necessitation in nature. (shrink)

In this book, Mumford and Anjum advance a theory of causation based on a metaphysics of powers. The book is for the most part lucidly written, and contains some interesting contributions: in particular on the necessary connection between cause and effect and on the perceivability of the causal relation. I do, however, have reservations about some of the book’s central theses: in particular, that cause and effect are simultaneous, and that causes can fruitfully be represented as vectors.

Hume thought that if you believed in powers, you believed in necessary connections in nature. He was then able to argue that there were none such because anything could follow anything else. But Hume wrong-footed his opponents. A power does not necessitate its manifestations: rather, it disposes towards them in a way that is less than necessary but more than purely contingent. -/- In this paper a dispositional theory of causation is offered. Causes dispose towards their effects and often produce (...) them. But a set of causes, even though they may succeed in producing an effect, cannot necessitate it since the effect could have been counteracted by some additional power. This would require a separation of our concepts of causal production and causal necessitation. The most conspicuous cases of causation are those where powers accumulate and pass a requisite threshold for an effect to occur. -/- We develop a model for representing powers as constituent vectors within an n-dimensional quality space, where composition of causes appears as vector addition. Even our resultant vector, however, has to be understood as having dispositional force only. This model throws new light on causal modality and cases of prevention, causation by absence and probabilistic causation. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of powers or real dispositions in the past decade, but there remains an issue that has been inadequately treated. This concerns the precise modal value that comes with dispositionality. We contend in this paper that dispositionality involves a non-alethic, sui generis, irreducible modality. Dispositions only tend towards their manifestations; they do not necessitate them. Tendency is, of course, a dispositional term itself, so this last statement offers little by way of illumination. But given our thesis (...) on the irreducible nature of dispositionality, we maintain that it cannot be explicated correctly in non-dispositional terms. Nevertheless, we all have experience of dispositionality at work, through the exercise or our own powers and the action of other powers upon us. The notion of dispositionality that we acquire is one that involves a modality stronger than pure contingency but weaker than necessity. The recognition of this distinct modal value for dispositionality is one of the biggest oversights in the growing literature in the area. Yet it is there for all to see in even the most mundane example. (shrink)

Does A cause B simply if A prevents what would have prevented B? Such a case is known as double prevention: where we have the prevention of a prevention. One theory of causation is that A causes B when B counterfactually depends on A and, as there is such a dependence, proponents of the view must rule that double prevention is causation.<br><br>However, if double prevention is causation, it means that causation can be an extrinsic matter, that the cause and effect (...) need not be connected by a continuous chain of events, that there can be causation by absence, and that there can be causation at a distance. All of these implications jar with strong intuitions we have about the nature of causation. There is, on the other hand, a theory of causation based on an ontology of real dispositions, where causation involves the passing around of powers. This theory in contrast entails that double prevention is not causation and, on this issue, it can claim a victory over the counterfactual dependence account. (shrink)

In 1873, 75 years before Karl Jaspers published his theory of the Axial Age in 1949, unknown to Jaspers and to contemporary scholars today, Scottish folklorist John Stuart Stuart-Glennie elaborated the first fully developed and nuanced theory of what he termed “the Moral Revolution” to characterize the historical shift emerging roughly around 600 BCE in a variety of civilizations, most notably ancient China, India, Judaism, and Greece, as part of a broader critical philosophy of history. He continued to write on (...) the idea over decades in books and articles and also presented his ideas to the fledgling Sociological Society of London in 1905, which were published the following year in the volume Sociological Papers, Volume 2. This article discusses Stuart-Glennie’s ideas on the moral revolution in the context of his philosophy of history, including what he termed “panzooinism”; ideas with implications for contemporary debates in theory, comparative history, and sociology of religion. It shows why he should be acknowledged as the originator of the theory now known as the axial age, and also now be included as a significant sociologist in the movement toward the establishment of sociology. (shrink)

This chapter offers a proceduralist argument against capital punishment. More specifically, it contends that the possibility of irrevocable mistakes precludes the just administration of the death penalty. At stake is a principle of political morality: legal institutions must strive to remedy their mistakes and to compensate those who suffer from wrongful sanctions. The incompatibility of remedy and execution is the crux of the irrevocability argument: because the wrongly executed cannot enjoy the morally required compensation, execution is impermissible. Along with defending (...) his key premises, Yost explains the complicated role that sentencing uncertainty plays in the argument. He concludes by noting some of the flaws in substantive consequentialist and retributivist justifications of capital punishment. (shrink)

Define teleology as the view that requirements hold in virtue of facts about value or goodness. Teleological views are quite popular, and in fact some philosophers (e.g. Dreier, Smith) argue that all (plausible) moral theories can be understood teleologically. I argue, however, that certain well-known cases show that the teleologist must at minimum assume that there are certain facts that an agent ought to know, and that this means that requirements can't, in general, hold in virtue of facts about value (...) or goodness. I then show that even if we grant those 'ought's teleology still runs into problems. A positive justification of teleology looks like it will require an argument of this form: O(X); if X, then O(Y); therefore O(Y). But this form of argument isn't in general valid. I conclude by offering two positive suggestions for those attracted to a teleological outlook. (shrink)

What is the connection between dispositions and ethics? Some might think very little and those who are interested in dispositions tend to be metaphysicians whose interests are far from value. However, we argue in this paper that dispositions and dispositionality are central to ethics, indeed a precondition. Ethics rests on a number of notions that are either dispositional in nature or involve real dispositions or powers at work. We argue for a dispositional account of value that offers an alternative to (...) the traditional fact-value dichotomy. We explain the place of value within a structure that explains the possibility of ethics. Elsewhere in this structure, we argue that moral responsibility is a precondition for ethics and that it is a dispositional notion depending critically on what Mumford and Anjum have called the dispositional modality. Moral responsibility in turn depends on there being both agency and normativity. We argue that intentionality and agency are preconditions for agency and that value is a precondition of normativity. All these notions are dispositional and make best sense if there are real dispositions or causal powers of agents. (shrink)

Scientists have the ability to influence policy in important ways through how they present their results. Surprisingly, existing codes of scientific ethics have little to say about such choices. I propose that we can arrive at a set of ethical guidelines to govern scientists’ presentation of information to policymakers by looking to bioethics: roughly, just as a clinician should aim to promote informed decision-making by patients, a scientist should aim to promote informed decision-making by policymakers. Though this may sound like (...) a natural proposal, I show it offers guidance that conflicts with standard scientific practices. I conclude by considering one cost of the proposal: that it would prevent scientists from acting as advocates in a way that is currently common in certain fields. I accept that the proposal would restrict scientists’ political advocacy rights, but argue that the benefits of adopting it — promoting democratic governance — justify the restriction. (shrink)

My paper addresses a topic--the implications of Rawls's justice as fairness for affirmative action--that has received remarkably little attention from Rawls's major interpreters. The only extended treatments of it that are in print are over a quarter-century old, and they bear scarcely any relationship to Rawls's own nonideal theorizing. Following Christine Korsgaard's lead, I work through the implications of Rawls's nonideal theory and show what it entails for affirmative action: viz. that under nonideal conditions, aggressive forms of formal equality of (...) opportunity (e.g., sensitivity training, outreach efforts, external monitoring and enforcement) and compensating support (e.g., special fellowship programs, childcare facilities, mentoring, co-op opportunities, etc.) can be justified, but that "hard" and even "soft" quotas are difficult to defend under any conditions. I conclude the paper by exploring the implications of these surprising results for contemporary liberalism more broadly and for constitutional law and public policy. (shrink)

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

Abstract: Pistachio nuts are a valuable source of nutrition and are widely cultivated for commercial purposes. The accurate classification of different pistachio varieties is important for quality control and market analysis. In this study, we propose a new model for the classification of different pistachio varieties using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We collected a dataset of pistachio images form Kaggle depository with two varieties (Kirmizi and Siirt). The images were then preprocessed and used to train a CNN model based on (...) VGG16. We evaluated the performance of the VGG16 on a held-out test set. Our results show that the CNN-based model VGG16 performed very well in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The VGG16 model was able to accurately classify different pistachio varieties with an accuracy of over 99.91%. Additionally, the VGG16 was able to generalize well to new and unseen data, demonstrating its ability to handle variability in the pistachio images. This study highlights the potential of CNNs for the classification of different pistachio varieties, and has important implications for the pistachio industry. The results suggest that this approach can be used to improve the quality control process and enhance market analysis. (shrink)

This paper argues that the technical notion of conditional probability, as given by the ratio analysis, is unsuitable for dealing with our pretheoretical and intuitive understanding of both conditionality and probability. This is an ontological account of conditionals that include an irreducible dispositional connection between the antecedent and consequent conditions and where the conditional has to be treated as an indivisible whole rather than compositional. The relevant type of conditionality is found in some well-defined group of conditional statements. As an (...) alternative, therefore, we briefly offer grounds for what we would call an ontological reading: for both conditionality and conditional probability in general. It is not offered as a fully developed theory of conditionality but can be used, we claim, to explain why calculations according to the RATIO scheme does not coincide with our intuitive notion of conditional probability. What it shows us is that for an understanding of the whole range of conditionals we will need what John Heil (2003), in response to Quine (1953), calls an ontological point of view. (shrink)

The ongoing pandemic caused by COVID-19 virus has paralysed everyday life across the globe. To limit spread of infection, the Government of various countries issued a Nation-wide lockdown, with increase in COVID cases, more and more biomedical wastes were also produced. With a halt in manufacturing industries and automobiles plying, air pollution levels drops drastically and rare animal sightings were recorded by the media. Water Pollution levels were also recorded to be on the down trend.

The republican tradition has long been ambivalent about markets and commercial society more generally: from the contrasting positions of Rousseau and Smith in the eighteenth century to recent neorepublican debates about capitalism, republicans have staked out diverse positions on fundamental issues of political economy. Rather than offering a systematic historical survey of these discussions, this chapter will instead focus on the leading neo-republican theory—that of Philip Pettit—and consider its implications for market society. As I will argue, Pettit’s theory is even (...) friendlier to markets than most have believed: far from condemning commercial society, his theory recognizes that competitive markets and their institutional preconditions are an alternative means to limit arbitrary power across the domestic, economic, and even political spheres. While most republican theorists have focused on political means to limit such power—including both constitutional means (e.g., separation of powers, judicial review, the rule of law, federalism) and participatory ones (democratic elections and oversight)—I will examine here an economic model of republicanism that can complement, substitute for, and at times displace the standard political model. Whether we look at spousal markets, labor markets, or residential markets within federal systems, state policies that heighten competition among their participants and resource exit from abusive relationships within them can advance freedom as non-domination as effectively or even more effectively than social-democratic approaches that have recently gained enthusiasts among republicans. These conclusions suggest that democracy, be it social or political, is just one means among others for restraining arbitrary power and is consequently less central to (certain versions of) republicanism than we may have expected. So long as they counteract domination, economic inroads into notionally democratic territory are no more worrisome than constitutional ones. (shrink)

Hôm nay là ngày Khoa học Công nghệ Việt Nam (KHCN). Có rất nhiều chuyện để bàn vì có biết bao thứ cần tới lao động KHCN. Nhưng có lẽ một chủ đề đang rất nóng chính là bảo vệ và phục hồi môi trường sinh thái trong bối cảnh đa dạng sinh học bị tác động tiêu cực nghiêm trọng và biến đổi khí hậu đang làm trầm trọng hóa thêm.

Many scholars have argued that the Protestant Reformation generally departed from virtue ethics, and this claim is often accepted by Protestant ethicists. This essay argues against such discontinuity by demonstrating John Calvin’s reception of ethical concepts from Augustine and Aristotle. Calvin drew on Augustine’s concept of eudaimonia and many aspects of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics , including concepts of choice, habit, virtue as a mean, and the specific virtues of justice and prudence. Calvin also evaluated the problem of pagan virtue in (...) light of traditional Augustinian texts discussed in the medieval period. He interpreted the Decalogue as teaching virtue, including the cardinal virtues of justice and temperance. Calvin was not the harbinger of an entirely new ethical paradigm, but rather a participant in the mainstream of Christian thinkers who maintained a dual interest in Aristotelian and Augustinian eudaimonist virtue ethics. (shrink)

Tong Shijun holds a concept of dialectics which can also be found in Mao’s writings and in classical Chinese philosophy. Tong, however, is ambivalent in his attitude to dialectics in this sense, and for this reason he recommends Chinese philosophy to focus more on formal logic. My point will be that with another concept of dialectics Tong can have dialectics without giving up on logic and epistemology. This argument is given substance by an analysis of texts by Mao, Tong and (...) Hegel. (shrink)

Summing up, we note that the business environment has high dynamism, information uncertainty and unpredictability of events and results of their activities, which requires a revision of traditional approaches to the formation of competitive strategies and management in the global economic space.

Commercial republicanism is the idea that a properly-structured commercial society can serve the republican end of minimizing the domination of citizens by states (imperium) and of citizens by other citizens (dominium). Much has been written about this idea in the last half-century, including analyses of individual commercial republicans (e.g., Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant) as well as discussions of national traditions of the same (e.g., in America, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Italy). In this chapter, I review five kinds of (...) arguments that have been historically offered for how commercial society so understood advances the republican ideal of non-domination: first, by simply realizing non-dominating relationships in the marketplace itself (Instantiation); second, by encouraging the growth of a wide middle class that can offer a counterweight to other, dominating classes (Internal Check-and-Balance); third, by increasing the wealth and power of republics vis-à-vis other, dominating states in the international arena (External Check-and-Balance); fourth, by helpfully nurturing bourgeois-civic virtues in republican citizens (Cultivating Virtue); and finally, by transforming dangerous passions into more readily regulable, even socially beneficial material interests (Sublimating Vice). I end the chapter by briefly considering commercial republicanism’s prospects as a continuing research program. (shrink)

This chapter reviews four books published in 2018 which are not readily categorized as works in ‘modern European philosophy’: Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancloğlu, and Dalia Gebrial’s edited volume Decolonising the University, Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99%, and Andreas Malm’s The Progress of this Storm. Yet their uneasy relationship to this philosophy is precisely the reason they constitute a significant contribution to it. The philosophical originality and critical purchase (...) of these books proceed from the fact that each is a singular case of philosophy’s dependence on ‘non-philosophy’; each exposes the impossibility of viewing philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. In particular, they are a timely reminder that the best political philosophy is produced through actually existing social movements to change (which ecologically now means simply saving) the world. The chapter is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Decolonizing Philosophy: Decolonising the University; 3. Anti-Post-Politics: For a Left Populism; 4. Anti-Post-Marxism: Feminism for the 99%; 5. Anti-Postmodernism: The Progress of This Storm; 6. Conclusion. (shrink)

Рассмотрена историческая периодизация формирования цивилизационного подхода. Определен потенциал локальных цивилизаций в ХХІ веке. Исследована цивилизационная структура мировой экономики. Предложен подход к идентификации принадлежности стран к современным локальным цивилизациям. Определены доминирующие локальные цивилизации и их влияние на социально-экономическое развитие общества.

Kant famously insists that free will is a condition of morality. The difficulty of providing a demonstration of freedom has left him vulnerable to devastating criticism: critics charge that Kant's post-Groundwork justification of morality amounts to a dogmatic assertion of morality's authority. My paper rebuts this objection, showing that Kant offers a cogent demonstration of freedom. My central claim is that the demonstration must be understood in practical rather than theoretical terms. A practical demonstration of x works by bringing x (...) into existence, and what the demonstration of freedom brings into existence is a moral will, a will regulated by the moral law and capable of acting in accordance with it. Since to act morally is to act freely, bringing a moral will into existence actualizes our capacity for freedom and demonstrates that we possess it. To confirm the viability of such a demonstration, Kant must establish that agents can regulate their wills by practical principles, and that practical judgments are efficacious of themselves (i.e., that non-Humean motivational internalism is true). Kant, I argue, is successful on both counts. (shrink)

This interview with Professor Dr Jürgen Stolzenberg, board member of the Kant-Gesellschaft and co-editor of the Kant-Lexikon (2015), explores a wide range of topics — from Leibniz and Wolff to Heidegger and Husserl. The leading idea of Stolzenberg’s philosophical research is the justification of the principle of modern subjectivity in Kant’s philosophy and its transformations until our days. He discusses the meaning and development of the concept of self-consciousness and the understanding of subjectivity in Kant’s ethics as well as in (...) Fichte’s philosophy. Stolzenberg shows the significance of Heidegger’s philosophical relations with Kant, Fichte, and the Neo-Kantians. He outlines the reasons which explain the different structures of the philosophical theories after Kant in comparison with the structure of Kant’s philosophy itself. Answering the question of Kant’s role in affirming the value of human dignity, he emphasises the non-empirical essence of this concept as it is presented in Kant’s ethics and as it should be defended against recent critics. According to Stolzenberg, the principle of modern subjectivity proves to be fruitful in understanding the development of the history of modern music, too. (shrink)

Nếu như năm 2022, Truyện ngụ ngôn Bói Cá bản tiếng Anh hoàn tất và đến được quầy hàng, thì năm 2023, bài viết có nguồn gốc suy nghĩ từ ngụ ngôn, kèm theo chương trình nghiên cứu về môi trường, biến đổi khí hậu với bóng dáng Bói Cá hiện diện rõ nét, cũng ra đời.

Dmitri Nikulin is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have devoted books to the topic of dialogue and the dialogical self, especially in the last fifteen years. Yet his work on dialogue and the dialogical has received scant attention by philosophers, and this neglect has hurt the ongoing development of contemporary philosophical work on dialogicality. I want to address this lacuna in contemporary philosophical scholarship on dialogicality and suggest that, although Nikulin’s account is no doubt insightful and thought-provoking, it (...) is problematic for two main reasons: first, his account fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; and second, his enumeration of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies. (shrink)

Capital punishment—the legally authorized killing of a criminal offender by an agent of the state for the commission of a crime—stands in special need of moral justification. This is because execution is a particularly severe punishment. Execution is different in kind from monetary and custodial penalties in an obvious way: execution causes the death of an offender. While fines and incarceration set back some of one’s interests, death eliminates the possibility of setting and pursuing ends. While fines and incarceration narrow (...) one’s routes to happiness, death eliminates its possibility. Not surprisingly, there is much debate about the moral permissibility of capital punishment. This entry maps the terrain of this debate. The first section discusses justifications of the death penalty as they appear in major theories of punishment. The second section surveys moral objections to execution that apply to most justifications. The third addresses procedural criticisms, which do not target the morality of execution so much as the justice of its implementation. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease that causes respiratory illness in human and has now become a major challenge for all over the world. In spite of all their efforts to restore the nature during the last few decades, humans could only move a few steps forward. But during the last few months, consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic have successfully recovered the environment to a large extent that should definitely set positive impact on global climate change. The COVID-19 (...) spread around the world and severely affected the world's education, economy, social interactions and other global impacts. We have come across one of the most daunting problems of the modern times, which is, educational crisis. One of the many challenges faced by the students due to COVID-19 is loss of learning. Distance learning has been a failure throughout this period, due to the fact that the educators are unsupported and they lack the practical experience of teaching online through technology. On the other hand, not all students have the technology infrastructure at home to support their ongoing learning. Many of them are economically backward and find it difficult to support their education without internet or a learning tablet. (shrink)

Whether it was John Searle’s Chinese Room argument (Searle, 1980) or Roger Penrose’s argument of the non-computable nature of a mathematician’s insight – an argument that was based on Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem (Penrose, 1989), we have always had skeptics that questioned the possibility of realizing strong Artificial Intelligence (AI), or what has become known by Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But this new book by Landgrebe and Smith (henceforth, L&S) is perhaps the strongest argument ever made against strong AI. It is (...) a very extensive review of what building a mind essentially amounts to drawing on insights and results from biology, physics, linguistics, computability, philosophy, and mathematics. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core parts of the scientific process involve non-epistemic values. This undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In this article I consider two proposals for justifying public trust in value-laden science. According to the first, scientists can promote trust by being transparent about their value choices. On the second, trust requires that the values of a scientist align with the values of an individual member of the public. I (...) argue that neither of these proposals work and suggest an alternative that does better. When scientists must appeal to values in the course of their research, they should appeal to democratic values: the values of the public or its representatives. (shrink)

Here we present what we believe is a novel account of what languages are, along with an axiomatically rich representation of languages and language-related data that is based on this account. We propose an account of languages as aggregates of dispositions distributed across aggregates of persons, and in doing so we address linguistic competences and the processes that realize them. This paves the way for representing additional types of language-related entities. Like demographic data of other sorts, data about languages may (...) be of use to researchers in a number of areas, including biomedical research. Data on the languages used in clinical encounters are typically included in medical records, and capture an important factor in patient-provider interactions. Like many types of patient and demographic data, data on a person’s preferred and primary languages are organized in different ways by different systems. This can be a barrier to data integration. We believe that a robust framework for representing language in general and preferred and primary language in particular – which has been lacking in ontologies thus far – can promote more successful integration of language-related data from disparate data sources. (shrink)

Philosophers of science now broadly agree that doing good science involves making non-epistemic value judgments. I call attention to two very different normative standards which can be used to evaluate such judgments: standards grounded in ethics and standards grounded in political philosophy. Though this distinction has not previously been highlighted, I show that the values in science literature contain arguments of each type. I conclude by explaining why this distinction is important. Seeking to determine whether some value-laden determination meets substantive (...) ethical standards is a very different endeavor from seeking to determine if it is politically legitimate. (shrink)

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a genuine human right? This chapter offers a new answer: human beings have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life are certain goods, capacities, and options that human beings qua human beings need whatever else they qua individuals might need in order to pursue a characteristically good human life. This chapter explains how this Fundamental Conditions Approach is (...) better than James Griffin’s Agency Approach as well as Martha Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities Approach. It also shows how it can be compatible with the increasingly popular Political Conceptions of human rights defended by John Rawls, Charles Beitz, and Joseph Raz. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

Abstract - The aim of the study is to identify the degree of administrative transparency in the Palestinian higher educational institutions in the Gaza Strip. In the study, the researchers adopted a descriptive and analytical method. The research population consisted of administrative staff, whether academic or administrative, except for those in senior management or the university council. The study population reached 392 employees. A random sample was selected (197). The number of questionnaires recovered was (160) with a recovery rate of (...) (81.2%). The researchers used a questionnaire for the data collection and were treated using SPSS to obtain the results. The results show that there is no significant difference between male responses and female responses due to gender variable. The results also confirm that there is no significant difference between respondents' responses due to the age variable. The results also showed a significant difference between respondents' responses attributed to the university variable. There is a fundamental difference between respondents' responses attributed to the scientifically qualified variable. The results also confirmed a significant difference between respondents' responses attributed to the management level variable. The results also confirmed a significant difference between respondents' responses due to variable years of service. The research reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is: The necessity of Palestinian universities to adhere to the application of transparency standards in all university activities. The need to benefit from regional and international experience in the application of transparency systems within universities and to examine the possibility of applying these systems in our universities. As well as the need to engage in the program of teaching transparency in universities, as it is confirmed that only five universities participated in this experiment. The importance of raising awareness among the employees of Palestinian universities to clarify the foundations of building transparency and its dimensions to represent the active supporter through workshops and seminars. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the learning and business incubation processes and their impact on developing the performance of business incubators in Gaza Strip, and the study relied on the descriptive analytical approach, and the study population consisted of all employees working in business incubators in Gaza Strip in addition to experts and consultants in incubators where their total number reached (62) individuals, and the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool to collect data through the comprehensive survey method, (...) where (55) questionnaires were retrieved with a recovery rate of (88.7%). The results of the study showed that there is a high approval of the variables of the study, where the dimension of incubation operations came with a relative weight (84.89%), followed by the learning dimension which got a relative weight (82.50%), while the performance level of the incubators got a relative weight (80.12%) and as the study results showed There is a positive relationship statistically between the two dimensions of learning and business incubation processes and performance development in business incubators, and the linear regression analysis model showed that the main effect in improving the performance of business incubators is "after business incubation operations" while it showed weak effect after learning. The study came out with several recommendations, the most important of which is that business incubators seek to reinforce the learning process and incubation processes for business, and the need to periodically evaluate their performance, and that a more effective mechanism be designed to follow up with companies after the end of the incubation period and monitor the progress of these companies. (shrink)

This paper explores how the diagnosis of mental disorder may affect the diagnosed subject’s self-concept by supplying an account that emphasizes the influence of autobiographical and social narratives on self-understanding. It focuses primarily on the diagnoses made according to the criteria provided by the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and suggests that the DSM diagnosis may function as a source of narrative that affects the subject’s self-concept. Engaging in this analysis by appealing to autobiographies and memoirs written by (...) people diagnosed with mental disorder, the paper concludes that a DSM diagnosis is a double-edged sword for self- concept. On the one hand, it sets the subject’s experience in an established classificatory system which can facilitate self-understanding by providing insight into subject’s condition and guiding her personal growth, as well as treatment and recovery. In this sense, the DSM diagnosis may have positive repercussions on self-development. On the other hand, however, given the DSM’s symptom-based approach and its adoption of the Biomedical Disease model, a diagnosis may force the subject to make sense of her condition divorced from other elements in her life that may be affecting her mental- health. It may lead her frame her experience only as an irreversible imbalance. This form of self-understanding may set limits on the subject’s hopes of recovery and may create impediments to her flourishing. (shrink)

Abstract: This study aimed to identify the reality of using a balanced scorecard in business incubators in Gaza Strip, and the study relied on the descriptive analytical approach, and the study population consisted of all employees working in business incubators in Gaza Strip in addition to experts and consultants in incubators, where their total number reached (62) Individually, the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool for collecting data through the comprehensive survey method, where (55) questionnaires were retrieved with (...) a recovery rate (88.7%.). The results of the study showed that there is a high approval of all dimensions of the balanced scorecard, as it obtained a relative weight (81.44%), and the order of its dimensions came as follows, first came the incubation dimension with a relative weight (84.89%), followed by the learning dimension, which got a relative weight (82.50%), and in the third place came the entrepreneur dimension with a relative weight (80.66%), and in the last place was the societal development dimension with a relative weight (78.18%). The study came out with several recommendations, the most important of which is that business incubators seek to adopt the application of the balanced scorecard as a method for managing it and a tool for measuring and evaluating its performance, and the need to periodically evaluate its performance, and the need to hold training courses for workers in incubators to introduce them to the balanced scorecard and how to apply it. (shrink)

Scientists are frequently called upon to “democratize” science, by bringing the public into scientific research. One appealing point for public involvement concerns the nonepistemic values involved in science. Suppose, though, a scientist invites the public to participate in making such value-laden determinations but finds that the public holds values the scientist considers morally unacceptable. Does the argument for democratizing science commit the scientist to accepting the public’s objectionable values, or may she veto them? I argue that there are a limited (...) set of cases in which scientists can, consistently with a commitment to democratized science, set aside the public’s judgments. (shrink)

The major competing statistical paradigms share a common remarkable but unremarked thread: in many of their inferential applications, different probability interpretations are combined. How this plays out in different theories of inference depends on the type of question asked. We distinguish four question types: confirmation, evidence, decision, and prediction. We show that Bayesian confirmation theory mixes what are intuitively “subjective” and “objective” interpretations of probability, whereas the likelihood-based account of evidence melds three conceptions of what constitutes an “objective” probability.

Theorists of health have, to this point, focused exclusively on trying to define a state—health—that an organism might be in. I argue that they have overlooked the possibility of a comparativist theory of health, which would begin by defining a relation—healthier than—that holds between two organisms or two possible states of the same organism. I show that a comparativist approach to health has a number of attractive features, and has important implications for philosophers of medicine, bioethicists, health economists, and policy (...) makers. (shrink)

Metaphors for describing the introduction, impacts, and management of non-native species are numerous and often quite outspoken. Policy-makers have adopted increasingly disputed metaphorical terms from scientific discourse. We performed a critical analysis of the use of strong metaphors in reporting scientific findings to policy-makers. Our analysis shows that perceptions of harm, invasiveness or nativeness are dynamic and inevitably display multiple narratives in science, policy or management. Improving our awareness of multiple expert and stakeholder narratives that exist in the context of (...) non-native species management, as well as metaphorical alternatives, is critical. (shrink)

Như vậy, tổng lượng downloads của bayesvl bản 0.8.5 từ các servers CRAN giai đoạn tháng 7-2021 tới tháng 6-2023 đạt 7930. (Số thống kê này không bao gồm lượng downloads từ Github, như đã nêu trên.).