While current doctrines try to separate conflicts within two distinct categories – conventional versus irregular, there are, however, a series of contemporary conflicts that challenge this western view on war showing that the disjunctive manner of classification in ‘big and conventional’ versus ‘small and irregular’ is limited and simplistic. The military strategists as well as the academics used a series of concepts in order to describe the main shifts in the character of war – from the Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) (...) and ‘new wars’ to hybrid wars. This article aims to identify these mutations in war evolution in the new, post-Cold War international context. The traditional image we have on this well-known ‘labor division’ within the military field no longer reflects reality. (shrink)

As law originates in violence, it is always haunted by its constitutive trauma. Recourse to law's origin, which is implicitly or explicitly sought in adjudication, thus requires a way to deal with law's trauma. What is needed is a cover, to be provided through interpretation. Four such interpretive ‘cover up’ operations, all necessarily somewhat duplicitous, are discussed. The first three represent main currents in legal theory. First, the standard legal view, which denies the trauma but relies on traditional authority to (...) cover it. Second, a ‘neurotic’ solution, in which trauma is also denied but nevertheless cover is produced through collective interpretation. In the third, ‘perverse’ solution, trauma is admitted, and even enjoyed; on the other hand, it is denied that cover can be produced by any interpretive authority. The fourth option provides an alternative: recognition of law's trauma, covering it through the collectively shared practice of interpretation. It is shown that an example of such a collective effort can be found in the Dutch practice of gedogen, the deliberate under-enforcement of law, which is capable of creating an ‘informal rule of law’ that deals with intractable social problems more successfully than attempts formally to enforce applicable law. (shrink)

The set-theoretic axiom WISC states that for every set there is a set of surjections to it cofinal in all such surjections. By constructing an unbounded topos over the category of sets and using an extension of the internal logic of a topos due to Shulman, we show that WISC is independent of the rest of the axioms of the set theory given by a well-pointed topos. This also gives an example of a topos that is not a predicative topos (...) as defined by van den Berg. (shrink)

We combine intuitionistic logic and classical logic into a new, first-order logic called polarized intuitionistic logic. This logic is based on a distinction between two dual polarities which we call red and green to distinguish them from other forms of polarization. The meaning of these polarities is defined model-theoretically by a Kripke-style semantics for the logic. Two proof systems are also formulated. The first system extends Gentzenʼs intuitionistic sequent calculus LJ. In addition, this system also bears essential similarities to Girardʼs (...) LC proof system for classical logic. The second proof system is based on a semantic tableau and extends Dragalinʼs multiple-conclusion version of intuitionistic sequent calculus. We show that soundness and completeness hold for these notions of semantics and proofs, from which it follows that cut is admissible in the proof systems and that the propositional fragment of the logic is decidable. (shrink)

This paper provides a partial solution to the completeness problem for Joyal's axiomatization of open and etale maps, under the additional assumption that a collection axiom holds.

Preparing the journey -- Consciousness -- Self-consciousness -- Reason -- Spirit -- Religion -- Absolute knowing.

During the Italian Renaissance, artists and anatomists compared man to various mechanical devices, in an attempt to uncover knowledge about the structure and processes of the human body. In so doing, they drew on ancient Greek notions of instrumentality and proportion. During the early Scientific Revolution, the metaphor of Man the machine played a key role in the development of mechanistic philosophy. During the Enlightenment, it served views on materialism and atheism. By the nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution was (...) in full swing, a fundamental change in the relationship of man to machine had come about. Whereas, for Protagoras, man had been the measure of all things, now suddenly the machine was the standard by which the capacities and limits of man were judged. Man the machine was a key feature in the development of the totalitarian ideology of Communism. Moreover, for over a century now, the technocratic viewpoint has guided many technological innovations. Tracing a history of this metaphor, through Leonardo, Vesalius, Harvey, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Marx and Wells, places man's relationship with technology and his gradual loss of identity since the Renaissance in a new context. (shrink)

Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as <i>some apples</i> or <i>a quantity of milk</i>, differ from bare noun phrases like <i>apples</i> or <i>milk</i> in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed (...) throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal <i>for</i>-adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial <i>for</i>-adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier <i>all</i>. (shrink)