My dissertation develops a defense of a right to self-defense against the state. I set aside anarchist theories and grant for the sake of argument that the state has legitimate political authority. My goal is to convince non-anarchists that the right to self-defense extends to individuals against the state and the state’s agents. I argue that the right to self-defense is a fundamental, negative, claim right. The right to self-defense has these characteristics: (1) it is fundamental, meaning that it is (...) not derivative of any other right—it doesn’t appeal to any other right for its justification (2) it is negative, meaning that it simply requires others to refrain from certain action, and (3) it is a claim right, rather than a permission right, which means that it logically entails correlative duties on others. I also challenge some basic tenets of the orthodox account of justified defensive force, including the imminence, necessity, and proportionality conditions. My argument is a controversial one; many will resist the idea that an individual could be justified in self-defense against the state for a variety of reasons, ranging from thinking the idea is absurd or dangerous, to thinking that even if it is morally permissible, it is impractical. I aim to rebut these objections and to provide strong moral reasons to show why individuals do in fact have this right. -/- This research explores the relationship between one of our most basic rights—the right to self-defense—with our most basic political relationship—the relationship between the individual and the state. Part of my aim is to convince non-anarchist readers of philosophical claims that are usually only supported by anarchists. The reason this is important, beyond being academically interesting, is that if I am successful, it could allow a great majority of individuals to rethink their relationship with the state; not just at a basic level, but also in other applied areas such as gun rights, drug laws, and issues surrounding punishment and imprisonment. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationships between organizational change and trust in management. It is argued that organizational change represents a critical episode for the production and destruction of trust in management. Although trust in management is seen as a semi stable psychological state, changes in organizations make trust issues salient and organizational members attend to and process trust relevant information resulting in a reassessment of their trust in management. The direction and magnitude of change in trust is dependent on a (...) set of change dimensions that reflect trust relevant experiences and information. We distinguish between dimensions related to trust relevant consequences of the change and trust relevant aspects of how the change process is performed. Empirical results indicate that increases in post change emotional stress and the use of referential accounts for justifying change are both negatively related to post change trust in management. The use of ideological accounts and participation were found to be positively related to post change trust in management, so was perceived decision quality. Findings also indicate that the effects of change on trust are negatively moderated by tenure. (shrink)

The phenomenon of shared intention has received much attention in the philosophy of mind and action. Margaret Gilbert (1989, 2000c, 2014b) argues that a shared intention to do A consists in a joint commitment to intend to do A. But we need to know more about the nature of joint commitments to know what exactly this implies. While the persistence of joint commitments has received much attention in the literature, their impersistence has received very little attention. In this paper, we (...) shed light on the impersistence of joint commitments by showing how joint commitments can be dissolved by unexpected events. (shrink)

In recent years, questions regarding the ontological status of the human have been raised with renewed interest and imagination within various fields of critical thought. In the face of biotechnological findings and increasingly advanced technologies that connect as well as disturb settled boundaries, whether geographical or bodily, not to mention philosophical questionings of traditional western humanism, the boundaries of the human subject have been contested. The human body, traditionally imagined as closed and autonomous, has been opened up to a world (...) of forces and agencies that are strange, other and often deeply disturbing when viewed from an anthropocentric standpoint. Rather than close down anxieties concerning such boundary transgressions and ontological uncertainties, scholars – not least within areas such as feminist, posthumanist and queer theory – have argued that here lie possibilities as well as an ethical urgency to rethink the human subject, its world(s) and its others. Indeed, what might it mean to view the world from positions that do not take the pure and autonomous human form as its starting point? And what ethical considerations does such a viewpoint demand of us? (shrink)

Trust has a great potential for furthering our understanding of organizational change and learning. This potential however remains largely untapped. It is argued that two reasons as for why this potential remains unrealized are: (i) A narrow conceptualization of change as implementation and (ii) an emphasis on direct and aggregated effects of individual trust to the exclusion of other effects. It is further suggested that our understanding of the effects of trust on organizational change, should benefit from including effects of (...) trust on the formulation stage. It should also benefit from exploring the structuring effects of trust in organizations. Throughout this chapter, ways to extend current research on trust in organizations are suggested. The chapter also provides examples of relevant contributions where available. In order to capture organizational effects of trust, it is suggested that trust should be studied over longer time intervals, and include several referents of trust, spanning both horizontal and vertical relationships in the organization. (shrink)

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in (...) person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present. -/- Edited for the State Of The Art Network by Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, Marietta Radomska and Line Thastum. -/- Produced and published by Bioart Society 2023. (shrink)

A history of the construction of number has been in line with the process of recognition about the properties of geometry. Natural number representing countability is exhibited on a straight line and the completeness of real number is also originated from the continuous property of the number line. Complex number on a plane off the number line is established and thereafter, the whole number system is completed. When the process of constructing a number with geometric features is investigated from (...) different perspectives, it provides a new insight into the fundamental principle of number, which leads to a novel methodology in mathematics. (shrink)

While it seems to be evident that the vision of the eternal return of the same is the solution to the riddle mentioned in "On the vision and the riddle," exactly what constitutes the riddle is anything but clear. Li ke all good riddles the solution demands a paradigm shift. Nietzsche's riddle is solved by a radical rethinking of the concept of time, from a straight line to a circle. I give a detailed account of how Nietzsche's riddle is (...) formulated in such a way tha t the eternal return of the same is the only possible solution. (shrink)

I highlight three features of P.F. Strawson’s later, neglected work on freedom and responsibility. First, in response to a criticism by Rajendra Prasad, Strawson explicitly rejects an argument put forward in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ against the relevance of determinism to moral responsibility. Second, his remarkable acceptance of Prasad’s criticism motivates him to take the ‘straight path’, that is, to be straightforward about the relation between determinism, freedom, the ability to do otherwise and the conditions of responsibility. He claims that (...) the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition of responsibility and provides a list of additional conditions, including a knowledge condition. Third, he clarifies the relation between responsibility, quality of will and the reactive attitudes. The latter do not figure essentially in his answer to the question, ‘What are the conditions of responsibility?’, but they do play an essential role in his answer to the question, ‘Why do we have the concept of responsibility?’ We have it, Strawson suggests, because of our natural concern about the quality of will with which people act, a concern expressed in our reactive attitudes. I argue that, although Strawson’s later work definitely involves a shift of emphasis when compared to ‘Freedom and Resentment’, his overall account of freedom and responsibility is coherent. The later work helps to better understand the nature and significance of Strawson’s contribution, and to identify problems with common interpretations of and objections to ‘Freedom and Resentment’. (shrink)

When this article was first planned, writing was going to be exclusively about two things - the origin of life and human evolution. But it turned out to be out of the question for the author to restrict himself to these biological and anthropological topics. A proper understanding of them required answering questions like “What is the nature of the universe – the home of life – and how did it originate?”, “How can time travel be removed from fantasy and (...) science fiction, to be made scientific and practical?”, and “How can the proposed young age of genus Homo be made to actually be reasonable – when simply stating it would be solid ground for instant rejection and dismissal?” The result is that the article also talks about subjects like Artificial Intelligence, General Relativity, and cosmology. -/- From where did life originate? God? Evolution? Panspermia? If the tendency of humans and scientists to regard undiscovered science as pseudoscience can be overcome, Einstein gave another alternative to consider when he introduced General Relativity. Time isn’t linear – progressing in a straight line from past to present to future. That assumption ignores Relativity which states that space AND TIME are curved. Where did life and the genetic code come from? Can the answer build AI? -/- The first question can be answered by the section of this article titled SETI, Evolution, and Time which says life (possibly multicellular and intelligent) and the genetic code came from humans acquiring knowledge of these things over the centuries, then applying that knowledge – via terraforming, accumulation of raw materials like amino acids and nucleic acids, genetic engineering - to a time in the past when life didn’t exist. From that origin, life evolved through innumerable mutations and adaptations, with humans once again acquiring knowledge of it in cyclic (nonlinear) time. -/- The second question is answered by saying artificial intelligence (AI) as the product of life is only half of the equation. The other half refers to Relativity’s curved space-time and violation of the notion that time always travels from past to future. We have always lived in an artificially intelligent, non-probabilistic universe where everything in time and space is connected into one thing by quantum entanglement – making the brain and genes products of binary-digit activity or artificial intelligence (life is not merely dependent on biology’s “lock and key” mechanisms but also possesses AI). -/- The earliest documented representative of the genus Homo is Homo habilis, which evolved around 2.8 million years ago. Scientists used to believe there was a straight line from H. habilis to us, Homo sapiens. This article will use the “advanced” waves loved by Physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, view the history of science through the lens of Conic Sections applied to Relativity’s curved space-time, and incorporate the necessity of so-called imaginary time * – popularized by Prof. Stephen Hawking. While the evolutionary proposals are more in agreement with this early straight line than with modern theories, Albert Einstein’s General Relativity is used to transform the straight line into a curved line, ultimately concluding that Homo habilis (H. habilis) originated only (and unbelievably, as far as today’s science and technology is concerned) ~250,000 years ago. Other branches and dead ends of Homo – e.g. Neanderthals – are the result of mutations and adaptations, with the resultant modifications to anatomy and physiology. The surprisingly young age of H. habilis allows nearly 200,000 years for habilis, or one of its descendants, to reach Australia … if this country’s indigenous Aboriginal population did, as claimed, reach this “island continent” 60,000 years ago. -/- * The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, is a failure of classical physics to predict observed phenomena: it can be shown that a blackbody - a hypothetical perfect absorber and radiator of energy - would release an infinite amount of energy, contradicting the principles of conservation of energy and indicating that a new model for the behaviour of blackbodies was needed. At the start of the 20th century, physicist Max Planck derived the correct solution by making some strange (for the time) assumptions. In particular, Planck assumed that electromagnetic radiation can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete packets, called quanta. Albert Einstein postulated that Planck's quanta were real physical particles (what we now call photons), not just a mathematical fiction. From there, Einstein developed his explanation of the photoelectric effect (when quanta or photons of light shine on certain metals, electrons are released and can form an electric current). So it appears entirely possible that another supposed mathematical trickery (imaginary time and the y-axis of Wick rotation) will find practical application in the future. -/- The article includes mathematical references to cosmology (spoiler alert – you’ll read about things like Vector-Tensor-Scalar Geometry, topology, the “eternal present”, Einstein’s Unified Field, the inverse-square law, and there being no Big Bang and no multiverse - but there will also be no equations). -/- The other subheadings in this essay are – -/- NONLINEAR TIME AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (about a 2009 electrical engineering experiment at America’s Yale University, and cosmic wormholes) -/- BITS AND TOPOLOGY (base-2 maths aka Binary digiTS, Mobius strips, and figure-8 Klein bottles) -/- WICK ROTATION, CAUSALITY, AND UNITING TIME (do past, present and future co-exist in an “eternal present”?) -/- DIGITAL BRAIN, DIGITAL UNIVERSE (if the brain and the universe are ultimately composed of binary digits, we'll someday be able to do the same things with the brain and universe that we now do with computers) -/- PROPOSAL: HUMAN AND ANIMAL INSTINCTS ARE THE RESULT OF THE UNIVERSE BEING UNIFIED BY BINARY DIGITS (AND TOPOLOGY) (If everything in the universe is ultimately composed of electronic BITS, then the universe must possess Artificial Intelligence - some prefer the term Cosmic Consciousness) -/- INFORMATION THEORY CONQUERS A RED GIANT (preserving Earth by keeping the Sun near today’s level of activity forever). 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This article would appeal to people interested in new ideas in sciences like physics, astronomy and mathematics that are not presented in a formal manner. -/- Biologists would also find the paragraphs about evolution interesting. I was afraid they'd think my ideas were a bit "out there". But I sent a short email about them last year to a London biologist who wrote an article for the journal Nature. She replied that it was "very interesting". -/- The world is fascinated (...) by electronics. Computer scientists, as well as computer buyers, would be intrigued by the fundamental role given to human electronics in creation of the universe. This obviously can only be done if time travel to the past is possible. I explain in scientific terms how it could be done (the world is also fascinated by the prospect of time travel). -/- My ideas on trips through time grew from the related topic of interstellar, and even intergalactic, travel (and those ideas are inspired by an electrical-engineering experiment at Yale University in 2009). After the ideas on time travel came the realization that this technology could be used to totally eliminate the problems of muscle and bone weakness, radiation exposure etc associated with a lengthy journey to Mars. -/- The exquisitely ordered cosmos proposed would have great appeal to religion and philosophy. Dealing as it does with time that does not exclusively operate in a straight line, the book could not only present a new view of evolution (present theory assumes time is always a straight line from past to future). Nonlinear time might also give religionists a new concept of who God is. This could possibly be that of humans from the remote future who are quantum entangled with all past, present and future states of the whole - infinite and eternal - universe; and thus have all God's powers. Such infinite power could be pantheistic but would naturally include the ability to manifest as an individual. (I know this article is very far removed from what is traditionally considered scientific. Just remember: science is the search for knowledge of how this universe works, and that search must be pursued wherever it leads - even if it leads into traditionally nonscientific areas such as religion.) -/- Finally - if we're entangled with the whole universe, we'd have to be entangled with each other. On a mundane level, this gives us extrasensory and telekinetic abilities. On a higher level, it eliminates crime and war and domestic violence since people don't normally desire to harm themselves in any way. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom's Four-Case Argument is among the most famous and resilient manipulation arguments against compatibilism. I contend that its resilience is not a function of the argument's soundness but, rather, the ill-gotten gain from an ambiguity in the description of the causal relations found in the argument's foundational case. I expose this crucial ambiguity and suggest that a dilemma faces anyone hoping to resolve it. After a thorough search for an interpretation which avoids both horns of this dilemma, I conclude (...) that none is available. Rather, every metaphysically coherent interpretation invites either a hard- or soft-line reply to Pereboom's argument. I then consider a recharacterization of the dilemma which seems to clear the way for the defence of a revised Four-Case Argument. I address this rejoinder by identifying a still more fundamental problem shared by all viable interpretations of the manipulation cases, showing that each involves a type of manipulation which undermines the victim's agency. Because this diagnosis supports a soft-line reply to every viable interpretation of the argument and can be endorsed by any compatibilist, I consider it the final piece of the Soft-line Solution to the Four-Case Argument. Finally, I suggest a new taxonomy of manipulation arguments, arguing that none that employs the suppressive variety of manipulation found in Pereboom's argument offers a threat to compatibilism. (shrink)

In 1596, in the Mysterium Cosmographicum, a twenty-five-year-old Johannes Kepler rashly banished lines from the universe. They “scarcely admit of order,” he wrote, and God himself could have no use for them in this “well-ordered universe.” Twenty-five years later, though, Kepler had come to repent the temerity of his youth. “O male factum!” he lamented in a 1621 second edition of the Mysterium – “O what a mistake” it was to dismiss lines, for linearity is revealed in those most perfect (...) and divine motions – the revolutions of the heavenly orbs. Why did Kepler come to lament the rashness of his youth? The answer lies deep in the details of Kepler’s discovery of elliptical orbits in 1605. Kepler struggled to find an empirically adequate description and physically plausible explanation of Mars’s path through the heavens. He realized, though, that his originally spherical notion of location and direction were insufficient to reconcile descriptions and explanations of the planet’s motion. Crucially inspired by the “magnetic philosophy” of William Gilbert, Kepler adopted an oriented conception of space, which finally allowed a plausible mechanism to be constructed for elliptical motion – the true path of the planet. Yet, this oriented space required the stipulation of straight lines. Without straight lines, even God could not construct the planets’ elliptical orbits. (shrink)

Development of the world economy bears numerous negative phenomena, and require constant need to rebalance socioeconomic interests of nations, transnational subjects, and individuals. Socialisation is an important and effective tool for balancing social and individual; however, despite socialisation is evolving rapidly, its scientific and practical potential is not duly uncovered. In the article theoretical and methodological foundations of socialisation of economy is surveyed in the context of globalisation, and etymology, explanations, scope, historical phases of development, theoretical aspects and practical forms (...) of use, consequences and prospects are analysed. The term «socialisation» was determined as a multidisciplinary, used in many scientific fields, increasingly involving various areas of research and is understood as inclusion, adaptation and development of human being in society. It was determined that the economy socialisation is implemented in different fields and semantic structures, contains a large number of methodological tools, is involved at all management levels, and is primarily identified with the increasing role of social component in the life of human resources. The assumptions were made about the future transformation of this category in line with the identified predictive trends. (shrink)

The current paper investigates two productive morphological processes, namely compounds and portmanteau words (or blends). While compounds, a productive, regular and predicable morphological process, have received much attention in the literature, little attention was paid to portmanteau words, a creative, irregular and unpredictable word formation process. The present paper aims to find the commonalities and differences between these morphological devices, using Rosch et al.’s (1975; 1976) theory of prototypes and basic-level categories to achieve this goal. This theory will also be (...) employed to discuss the literature on the word formation mechanisms under investigation and propose a new categorization approach to these neologisms. The analysis suggests that compounds and blends compare and contrast and that the distinctions between them are blurry. The analysis confirms that a prototypical approach is well suited to compounds and blends in English. This has implications for future research into English word-formation processes in general and compounds and blends precisely. (shrink)

When I was eleven, my form teacher, Mr Howard, showed some of my class how to punch. We were waiting for the rest of the class to finish changing after gym, and he took a stance that I would now call shizentai yoi and snapped his right fist forward into a head-level straight punch, pulling his left back to his side at the same time. Then he punched with his left, pulling back on his right. We all lined up (...) in our ties and sensible shoes (this was England) and copied him—left, right, left, right—and afterwards he told us that if we practised in the air with sufficient devotion for three years, then we would be able to use our punches to kill a bull with one blow. I worshipped Mr Howard (though I would sooner have died than told him that) and so, as a skinny, eleven-year-old girl, I came to believe that if I practised, I would be able to kill a bull with one blow by the time I was fourteen. This essay is about epistemic viciousness in the martial arts, and this story is illustrates just that. Though the word ‘viciousness’ normally suggests deliberate cruelty and violence, I will be using it here with the more old-fashioned meaning, possessing of vices. Vices (such as avarice, alcoholism and nail-biting) are common, and most of us struggle with a few, but ‘epistemic’ means ‘having to do with knowledge and the justification of belief’ and so epistemic viciousness is the possession of vices that make one bad at acquiring true beliefs, or give one a tendency to form false ones. My eleven-year-old self possessed the epistemic vice of gullibility and hence showed a streak of epistemic viciousness, which led to the formation of a false belief. Other kinds of epistemic vice can lead to us failing to form true beliefs when we ought to. Consider the internet-surfing karate-sensei who stumbles upon an article claiming that chocolate milk is better than water or sports drinks for promoting recovery after strenuous exercise, and describing an experiment using stationary bikes performed at the University of Indiana, purporting to support this claim.. (shrink)

The Gamer’s Dilemma refers to the philosophical challenge of justifying the intuitive difference people seem to see between the moral permissibility of enacting virtual murder and the moral impermissibility of enacting virtual child molestation in video games (Luck Ethics and Information Technology, 1:31, 2009). Recently, Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 has argued that the Gamer’s Dilemma is actually an instance of a more general “paradox”, which he calls the “paradox of treating wrongdoing lightly”, and he proposes a graveness resolution to (...) this paradox. In response, we argue for four key claims. First, we accept Luck’s expansion of the Gamer’s Dilemma to be applicable to a wider set of media, but give a novel recasting of this in terms of the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far. Second, we develop a novel criticism of Luck in Philosophia, 50:1287–1308, 2022 graveness resolution to this broader paradox. Third, we argue that the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far helps to expose an implicit moralism in the Gamer’s Dilemma literature when compared to relevant nearby literatures about other forms of media. Fourth, we consider a range of non-moral, cultural and media conventions that plausibly help to dissolve the intuitive moral gap between non-sexual and sexual violence that is central to this paradox. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the problem of the Kantian line. The problem arises because the locus of value in Kantian ethics is rationality, which (counterintuitively) seems to entail that there are no duties to groups of beings like children. I argue that recent attempts to solve this problem by Wood and O’Neill overlook an important aspect of it before posing my own solution.

In attempting to determine why the Enlightenment project had derailed and how this failure might be remedied, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both turned to canonical literary narratives. The resultant works, Benjamin’s major essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Adorno’s meditation on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, are centrally concerned with the very act of narration. The Saving Line reconstructs a hitherto unnoticed, wide-ranging dialogue between these foundational texts of the Frankfurt School. At the heart of Dornbach’s argument is (...) a critical model that Benjamin built around the concept of caesura, which Adorno subsequently reworked. Countering an obscurantism that would become complicit in the rise of fascism, the two theorists aligned moments of arrest in narratives mired in unreason. The Saving Line throws fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and the philosophical significance of literary narration. (See PDF file below for a more detailed précis). (shrink)

How should we think of the preferences of citizens? Whereas self-optimal policy is relatively straightforward to produce, socially optimal policy often requires a more detailed examination. In this paper, we identify an issue that has received far too little attention in welfarist modelling of public policy, which we name the "hidden assumptions" problem. Hidden assumptions can be deceptive because they are not expressed explicitly and the social planner (e.g. a policy maker, a regulator, a legislator) may not give them the (...) critical attention they need. We argue that ethical expertise has a direct role to play in public discourse because it is hard to adopt a position on major issues like public health policy or healthcare prioritisation without making contentious assumptions about population ethics. We then postulate that ethicists are best situated to critically evaluate these hidden assumptions, and can therefore play a vital role in public policy debates. (shrink)

Modal epistemologies that rely on a fallibilism about modal claims have been gaining traction over the years. This paper critically discusses the accounts of Kung (2009; 2010; 2016) and Dohrn (2018; 2019; 2020) and argues that they are invariably susceptible to being read as entailing claims of epistemic possibility. Both Kung and Dohrn seek to ground modal intuitions on non-modal ones, and primarily appeal to the modalizing capacity of imagination to aid in the discovery of modal truths. However, insofar as (...) inference from non-modal imagination to modal truths remains fallible, then no non-ad hoc distinction can be made between substantiation of fallible metaphysically modal claims and infallible epistemically modal ones. This is because, barring an agent’s infallible knowledge of modal truths, how these truths are asserted must attend the agent’s imperfect epistemic access thereof, therefore entailing claims of modality consistent with her epistemic state – i.e., claims of epistemic possibility. If modal epistemologies in general non-modally ground their modal assertions in this fallible fashion, then they seem inevitably interpretable in terms of epistemic possibility as opposed to some non-epistemic reading of metaphysical possibility. (shrink)

A philosophy with children community of inquiry encourage children to develop a philosophical sensitivity that entails awareness of abstract questions related to human existence. When it operates, it can allow insight into significant philosophical aspects of various situations and their analysis. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion of philosophical sensitivity by adducing an additional dimension—namely, the development of a socio-philosophical sensitivity by means of a philosophical community of inquiry focused on texts linked to these themes and an analysis (...) of them with the help of narratival tools that explain the children’s philosophical moves. (shrink)

The article explores embodied critical thinking (ECT) for engaging with the enfleshed and trans-corporeal self on an affectual and experiential level. By discussing three exemplifying affectual instances that expose the experiential level of processuality, emergence, and intercarnality, the article shows the methodological use of ECT as a fruitful approach to developing embodied ontologies and a toolkit for the experiential reflection of one's en-fleshment, as tuning into the body-environment.

Letters exchanged by scientists are a crucial source by which to trace the process that accompanies their scientific evolution. In this paper -accomplished through a historical approach- I aim to throw new light on Leibniz's continuing interest in classical geometry and to stress the significance of his correspondence with the Italian mathematician Vitale Giordano.

The Pythagorean tradition dominates the understanding of beauty up until the end of the 18th Century. According to this tradition, the experience of beauty is stimulated by certain relations perceived to be between an object/construct's elements. As such, the object of the experience of beauty is indeterminate: it has neither a determinate perceptual analogue (one cannot simply identify beauty as you can a straight line or a particular shape) nor a determinate concept (there are no necessary and sufficient conditions (...) for beauty at the semantic level). By the 13th Century in the West, the pleasure experienced in beauty is characterized as disinterested. Yet, on the basis that all cultural manifestations of the pythagorean theory of beauty recognize that judgments of beauty are genuine judgments, we would want to say that judgments of beauty are lawful. In addition, from ancient times, up until after Kant, philosophers of beauty within this tradition recognize two kinds of beauty: a universal, unchanging beauty coexisting with a relative, dynamic beauty. These two kinds of beauty and the tensions discussed above, are reconciled and dissolved respectively, according to the metaphysical/religious commitments of the particular author. As yet, however, these features of beauty have not been reconciled within a physicalist worldview. This is what I set out to do. (shrink)

This paper explores a middle way between realism and eliminativism about grounding. Grounding-talk is intelligible and useful, but it fails to pick out grounding relations that exist or obtain in reality. Instead, grounding-talk allows us to convey facts about what metaphysically explains what, and about the worldly dependence relations that give rise to those explanations.

The UK Government's Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill is currently progressing through Parliament. The bill is designed to strengthen free speech and academic freedom in higher education, in response to what former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson describes as ‘the rise of intolerance and cancel culture upon our campuses’. But is there really a crisis of academic freedom in British universities?To see that there is, say Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan, we need only look at the contemporary reality of suppression (...) of debate on sex and gender. The evidence they catalogue of suppression of research, of blacklisting, harassment and smear campaigns, of no-platforming, disinvitations and shutting down of events, is incontrovertible. The recent experience of scholars and students wishing to discuss the material reality and political salience of sex makes complacency about academic freedom a luxury we cannot afford.Suissa and Sullivan set out a powerful argument for the role of academic freedom in pursuing truth within the academy and developing democracy beyond it. They effectively counter attempts to narrow the scope of academic freedom so as to render it compatible with no-platforming. And they lay out a series of practical steps administrators can take to ensure that universities are places where an expansive and pluralistic intellectual climate prevails.This is a timely and compelling intervention in a vexed but urgent public debate. For their clear-sighted diagnosis of where and how academic freedom has been eroded in our universities, and for their judicious account of what must be done to rebuild it, Suissa and Sullivan deserve a wide and attentive hearing. (shrink)

Baseball is an exceptionally superstitious sport. But what are we to say about the rationality of such superstitious behavior? On the one hand, we can trace much of the superstitious behavior we see in baseball to a type of irrational belief. But how deep does this supposed irrationality run? It appears that superstitions may occupy various places on the spectrum of irrationality — from motivated ignorance to self-deception to psychological compulsion —depending on the type of superstitious belief at work and (...) on the means of formation and/or maintenance of that belief. In this paper, I first examine the various types of superstitions we find in baseball culture, in an attempt to see what these different kinds of superstitions might have in common. I then lay out a working definition of superstition within a baseball context by examining the general psychology underlying such behavior, in an attempt to ascertain the possible causal and/or motivational reasons for the acquisition of superstitious beliefs and practices in sports like baseball. Finally, I argue that, in addition to superstitions acquired merely via the workings of a type of biasing mechanism, there also appear to be genuine cases of superstition acquisition and maintenance, in which the agent may be said to be actively engaged. I claim that in at least some cases of superstitious belief, it is possible that agents are employing an awareness of their own rational epistemic standards to allow themselves to believe and act irrationally, and that the result of such “pseudo-rational” behavior is perhaps a form of self-deceptive superstitious belief. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine (2005)’s non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed (...) facts. In this way, we show how to reconcile a genuinely A-theoretic branching-time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world. (shrink)

We study the acceleration and collisions of rigid bodies in special relativity. After a brief historical review, we give a physical definition of the term ‘rigid body’ in relativistic straight line motion. We show that the definition of ‘rigid body’ in relativity differs from the usual classical definition, so there is no difficulty in dealing with rigid bodies in relativistic motion. We then describe The motion of a rigid body undergoing constant acceleration to a given velocity.The acceleration of a (...) rigid body due to an applied impulse.Collisions between rigid bodies. (shrink)

In this paper I propose an approach to thinking about religion and politics that should inform how we think about liberalism and religion. I also consider how the conception of political authority defended by the prominent Muslim public intellectual Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im is a paradigm example of liberalism. In Part I I consider two approaches to religion and politics. According to the reductionist view, whether values that are central to a religious tradition can be reconciled to liberalism is more a (...) matter of doctrine than practice. By contrast a non-reductionist approach emphasizes that the relationship between political and religious values is influenced by a number of variables in addition to religious doctrine, including ethnicity, historical memory, political economy, and local politics. On this view, the path between religious and political convictions is anything but a straight line. In Part II I examine central arguments in An-Na’im’s work that are central to his version of liberalism, with a focus on liberty of conscience and religious freedom. To illustrate An-Na’im’s liberalism I focus on examples of claims about morality and theology, politics, and history. I conclude in Part III by considering how An-Na’im’s position is one example of what we would expect from a non-reductionist understanding of religion and politics. (shrink)

Introduction Conatus is a specific concept within Descartes’s physics. In particular, it assumes a crucial importance in the purely mechanistic description of the nature of light – an issue that Des- cartes considered one of the most crucial challenges, and major achievements, of his natural phil- osophy. According to Descartes’s cosmology, the universe – understood as a material continuum in which there is no vacuum – is composed of a number of separate yet interconnected vortices. Each of these vortices consists (...) in a set of bands rotating around their centres. The bands are com- posed of corpuscles of the three elements, each distinguished on the basis of their different shapes and sizes. The small globules of the second element, although impeded by the other parts of heaven, strive to move away from the centre of the vortex around which they revolve, thus exerting a certain force against the surrounding bodies. This striving or conatus, though a mere force rather than a genuine motion, is transmitted instan- taneously and along straight lines from body to body. According to Descartes, then, the nature of light consists in this striving alone. This account must be understood as strictly connected to the fundamental laws that regulate the Cartesian world. It is particularly important to recall that for Descartes the centrifugal force exerted by a rotating body is understood to be a consequence of the intrinsic rectilinearity of every motion. As the second of the three Laws of Nature set forth in Book II of the Principles of Philosophy establishes, “all motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle tends to move away from the centre of the circle which it describes as proved by the fact that a stone rotating in a sling tends to move centrifugally along the tangent of each point described by a circle.1 Similarly, each of the globules of the second element “strives to recede with a great force from the centre of the vortex in which it rotates; it is in fact prevented by the other globules placed all around, not differently than a stone in a sling”. Within this framework, as I show later, conatus occurs when a body’s intrinsic tendency to rectilinear motion is impeded by an external constraint. As Stephen Gaukroger notes, the use of the term conatus in the Principles – like “vis” and “ action ” – shows that Descartes “cannot avoid dynamic terminology”, despite his declared intent “to construe motion in a purely kinematic way”. Indeed, Gaukroger observes that the notions of force action and striving are systematically employed in the Principles – appearing 290, 59 and 8 times, respectively. Also noteworthy, conatus was – together with the more familiar concepts of actio and vis – a significant element of the conceptual apparatus of Scholastic natural philosophy. As will be seen later – and this is the first goal of this paper – here the concept of conatus had a very specific function. Indeed, it was a central part of the Aristotelian- Scholastic account of gravitation. Conatus was used to refer to the striving of a body to move towards its natural place – especially in cases where its natural motion was hindered or impeded by an external mover. This specific use of the concept of conatus can be found in texts on natural philosophy from the end of the sixteenth through the late seventeenth century. Notably, it occurs in some of the late -Scho- lastic texts which held special significance for Descartes’s thought. Therefore, Descartes introduces conatus in a context in which this concept already had a very specific meaning, and one of which he was very probably aware. The possible relations between these two apparently very different con- cepts have therefore to be scrutinized. I thereby propose to undertake a comparison between the Scho- lastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. I hope to show that certain traits of the former are indeed echoed by the latter, although adapted to the much changed physical paradigm of Cartesian physics. In fact, Descartes’s conatus, though sharing some important similarities with the old one, underwent significant transformations in terms of both its meaning and its application. However, I hope to show that these concepts are both used to describe the behaviour of bodies in relation to their intrinsic motive tendency, and in particular when this tendency is impeded or prevented. Such a reconstruction offers two main areas of interest. On an immediate level, it furthers the general efforts of scholars over the past decades to reconstruct the full extent of the relations between Descartes’s thought and Scholastic philosophy. However, there is another significant reason for taking an interest in the ties between the Scholastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. Indeed, the Cartesian conatus must be seen as crucial to a proper understanding of the broader, diverse conceptualization that this idea enjoyed in the thought of many of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, namely Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibniz. In particular, Spinoza, were directly influenced by Descartes in their unique formulations of conatus. Thus a reconstruction of the context in which Descartes formulated his conatus and of its relations to a pre-existing Scholastic conception will enable us to better reconstruct the history of this idea in the early modern period. The paper is structured as follows: in the first part, I provide a thorough review of the Scho- lastic employment of the concept conatus – both its meaning and the extent of its usage. I then show that it occurs in some of the most prominent Cartesian sources. Finally, I shall provide an account of Descartes’s theory of circular motion and conatus with the specific aim of empha- sizing the elements of both continuity and discontinuity that justify the claim that Descartes’s con- ception of conatus is reminiscent of the Scholastic one. (shrink)

Following Freud’s analysis of the fragile line between the uncanny double and its comic redoubling, I identify the doubling of the double found in critical moments of Hegelian dialectic as producing a kind of comic effect. It almost goes without saying that two provides greater pleasure than one, the loneliest number. Many also find two to be preferable to three, the tired trope of dialectic as a teleological waltz. Two seems to offer lightness, relieving one from her loneliness and lacking (...) the complications of a third who comes in between. And yet, we learn through Marx and Freud that the double (even the double of tragedy and farce) borders on something closer to horror than comedy. -/- In the following, I would like to explore why four is funnier than two in my staging of dialectic as the doubling of the double or, to borrow a movie title from Laurel and Hardy, “Twice Two” (Roach et al. 1933a). I will begin by exploring the formulations of the double in the form of a pair of opposites and in the form of a pair of twins. The literary tropes of the double as the odd couple, on one side, and the twins, on the other, appear to serve very different narrative functions, which incite different kinds of affective responses from the audience. However, the form of the opposed double sometimes conceals the realization that the empty or fragmented content of the first is only reduplicated in the second. The “straight man” of the odd couple cannot see himself in his counterpart “the comic.” The redoubling of the double, however, forces not only the audience, but the original double on stage to confront what was already present, but unrealized, from the beginning. To illustrate this redoubling of the double within the opening of Hegel’s Science of Logic, I consider two short films by Laurel and Hardy in which the comic duo redoubles itself. The formula (2 x 2) produces a comic excess through the dialectical redoubling of there uncanny double. (shrink)

There seems to be a minimal core that every theory wishing to accommodate the intuition that the future is open must contain: a denial of physical determinism (i.e. the thesis that what future states the universe will be in is implied by what states it has been in), and a denial of strong fatalism (i.e. the thesis that, at every time, what will subsequently be the case is metaphysically necessary).1 Those two requirements are often associated with the idea of an (...) objective temporal flow and the non-reality of the future. However, at least certain ways to frame the “openness” intuition do not rely on any of these. Branching Time Theory (BTT) is one such: it is compatible with the denial that time flow is objective and it is couched in a language with a (prima facie) commitment to an eternalist ontology. BTT, though, urges us to resist certain intuitions about the determinacy of future claims, which arguably do not lead either to physical determinism or to fatalism. Against BTT, supporters of the Thin Red Line Theory (TRL) argue that their position avoids determinism and fatalism, while also representing the fact that there is a future which is “special” because it is the one that will be the case. But starting with Belnap and Green 1994, some have objected to the tenability of TRL, mainly on metaphysical grounds. In particular, those argue that “positing a thin red line amounts to giving up objective indeterminism,”2 and that “has unacceptable consequences, ranging from a mistreatment of actuality to an inability to talk coherently about what would have happened had what is going to happen not taken place.”3 In this paper, we wish to reframe the.. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

From classical mechanics, in particular the motion in a straight line, together set theory and ordinal number theory, we prove a not-classical behaviour, a discontinuous motion and emission.

Leibniz proposed the ‘Most Determined Path Principle’ in seventeenth century. According to it, ‘ease’ of travel is the end purpose of motion. Using this principle and his calculus method he demonstrated Snell’s Laws of reflection and refraction. This method shows that light follows extremal (local minimum or maximum) time path in going from one point to another, either directly along a straight line path or along a broken line path when it undergoes reflection or refraction at plane or spherical (...) (concave or convex) surfaces. The extremal time path avoided the criticism that Fermat’s least time path was subjected to, by Cartesians who cited examples of reflections at spherical surfaces where light took the path of longest time. Thereby it became the standard method of demonstration of Snell’s Laws. Ptolemy’s theorem is a fundamental theorem in geometry. A special case of it offers a method of finding the minimum sum of the two distances of a point from two given fixed points. We show in this paper that Leibniz’s calculus proof of Snell’s Laws violates Ptolemy’s theorem, whereby Leibniz’s proof becomes invalid. (shrink)

In the brain the relations between free neurons and the conditioned ones establish the constraints for the informational neural processes. These constraints reflect the systemenvironment state, i.e. the dynamics of homeocognitive activities. The constraints allow us to define the cost function in the phase space of free neurons so as to trace the trajectories of the possible configurations at minimal cost while respecting the constraints imposed. Since the space of the free states is a manifold or a non orthogonal space, (...) the minimum distance is not a straight line but a geodesic. The minimum condition is expressed by a set of ordinary differential equation ( ODE ) that in general are not linear. In the brain there is not an algorithm or a physical field that regulates the computation, then we must consider an emergent process coming out of the neural collective behavior triggered by synaptic variability. We define the neural computation as the study of the classes of trajectories on a manifold geometry defined under suitable constraints. The cost function supervises pseudo equilibrium thermodynamics effects that manage the computational activities from beginning to end and realizes an optimal control through constraints and geodetics. The task of this work is to establish a connection between the geometry of neural computation and cost functions. To illustrate the essential mathematical aspects we will use as toy model a Network Resistor with Adaptive Memory (Memristors).The information geometry here defined is an analog computation, therefore it does not suffer the limits of the Turing computation and it seems to respond to the demand for a greater biological plausibility. The model of brain optimal control proposed here can be a good foundation for implementing the concept of "intentionality",according to the suggestion of W. Freeman. Indeed, the geodesic in the brain states can produce suitable behavior to realize wanted functions and invariants as neural expressionsof cognitive intentions. (shrink)

The General Relativity understands gravity like inertial movement of the free fall of the bodies in curved spacetime of Lorentz. The law of inertia of Newton would be particular case of the inertial movement of the bodies in the spacetime flat of Euclid. But, in the step, from general to particular, breaks the law of inertia of Galilei since recovers apparently the rectilinear uniform movement but not the repose state, unless the bodies have undergone their collapse, although, the curved spacetime (...) becomes flat and the curved geodesies becomes straight lines. For General Relativity is a natural law, within of a gravitational field, the accelerated movement of the bodies, that leads to that a geometric curvature puts out to the bodies in such geodesic movement. In this paper this error of General Relativity, like generalization of the law of inertia of Galilei, is examined and it is found that it is caused by suppression of mass and force that allows conceiving acceleration like property of spacetime. This is a mathematical and non-ontological result. Indeed, mass and force are the fundament that the gravitational acceleration is independent of the magnitude of mass of the bodies but gravity not of the mass and the gravitational force. The action of the gravity force, on inertial and gravitational masses of a body, produces mutual cancellation during its free fallen but too its weight when this cease. By means of the third law of Newton it shows that gravity is a force since weight is caused by gravity. (shrink)

The General Relativity understands gravity like inertial movement of the free fall of the bodies in curved spacetime of Lorentz. The law of inertia of Newton would be particular case of the inertial movement of the bodies in the spacetime flat of Euclid. But, in the step, of the particular to the general, breaks the law of inertia of Galilei since recovers the rectilinear uniform movement but not the repose state, unless the bodies have undergone their union, although, the curved (...) spacetime becomes flat and the curved geodesies becomes straight lines. For General Relativity is a natural law, within of a gravitational field, the uniform accelerated movement of the bodies, that leads to that a geometric curvature puts out to the bodies of the repose state for animate them of the movement of free fallen. In this paper this error of General Relativity, like generalization of the law of inertia of Galilei, is examined and it is found that it is caused by suppression of mass and force that allows conceiving acceleration like property of spacetime. This is a mathematical and non-ontological result. Indeed, mass and force are the fundament that the gravitational acceleration is a constant value for all the bodies, independently of the magnitude of mass but not of the mass and the gravitational force. The action of the gravity force, on inertial and gravitational masses of a body, produces mutual cancellation during its free fallen. In addition, by means of the third law of Newton it demonstrates that gravity is a force since weight is caused by gravity force. (shrink)

A computational theory is developed that explains how line drawings of polyhedral objects can be interpreted rapidly and in parallel at early levels of human vision. The key idea is that a time-limited process can correctly recover much of the three-dimensional structure of these objects when split into concurrent streams, each concerned with a single aspect of scene structure.

Twenty-two experienced action video-game players (AVGPs) and 18 non-VGPs were tested on a pen-and-paper line bisection task that was untimed. Typically, right-handers bisect lines 2 % to the left of true centre, a bias thought to reflect the dominance of the right-hemisphere for visuospatial attention. Expertise may affect this bias, with expert musicians showing no bias in line bisection performance. Our results show that experienced-AVGPs also bisect lines with no bias with their right hand and a significantly reduced bias with (...) their left hand compared to non-AVGPs. Bisections by experienced-AVGPs were also more precise than those of non-AVGPs. These findings show the cognitive proficiencies of experienced-AVGPs can generalize beyond computer based tasks, which resemble their training environment. (shrink)

In Republic VI, Plato’s Socrates attempts to explain the nature of human understanding by means of a simile of a line divided into four unequal segments. Socrates directs Glaucon to accept as names for the four states ‘rational knowledge’ for the highest, ‘understanding’ for the second, ‘belief’ for the third, and for the last, ‘perception of images.’ He then directs Glaucon to arrange the four states in a proportion, ‘considering that they participate in saphēneia in the same degree to which (...) their objects participate in reality.’ Although saphêneia here is usually translated as ‘clarity, ’I argue that neither ‘clarity’ nor ‘truth’ nor ‘knowledge’ provides an entirely satisfactory translation. Rather, in this context saphêneia is best understood as ‘a full, accurate, and sure awareness.’ Plato’s simile, properly understood, provides not only an explanation of his rationalist theory of knowledge but also a coherent line of argument in support of that theory. (shrink)

Interview of Amina Kkhelufi, Kseniia Myroshnyk, Nataliia Reva with Natalia Viatkina.

This essay explores the intersection of racism, racial embodiment theory and the recent hostility aimed at immigrants and foreigners in the United States, especially the targeting of people of Latin American descent and Latino/as. Anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner sentiment is racist. It is the embodiment of racial privilege for those who wield it and the materiality of racial difference for those it is used against. This manifestation of racial privilege and difference rests upon a redrawing of the color line that is (...) meant towards preserving exclusive categories of political membership. The charge of racism, however, is elided by the fact that this hostility takes the form of a specious embracement of law and lawfulness. “Illegal” in this sense not only captures the actions of those who enter the United States through clandestine or informal means, but, in light of the history of immigration and citizen- ship law, the term operates as a racial trope that designates non-white status, thus marginalizing and alienating certain immigrants from ongoing nation-formation processes. I explain the source for anti-immigrant hostility in the United States, which I take to be connected to the longevity of white normativity as the basis for American identity. I then critically assess how the idea of national belonging is crucial to the perpetuation of white-ways-of-being, especially when citizenship has historically been a venue for the embodiment of racial and even colonial privilege. I conclude by posing several questions about the nature of racial identities and racism that suggest new avenues for further research on racial embodiment in a “postracial” era. pp. 65–90. (shrink)

The album Echo was produced in a depressed, drug-riddled phase when Tom Petty’s first marriage was ending and his physical condition so degraded that he took to using a cane. Petty filmed no videos, avoided playing the album’s songs on the follow-up tour and reported little memory of its making. The thoughtfulness and self-reflection that traumatic circumstances spur distinguish the album. So too does the tendency to look backwards in times of crisis, whether in hopes of finding solidity in the (...) past or just out of exhausted inability to cope with the present. -/- While melancholically creative, the album might be regarded as an echoing of past musical fragments. The sprightly mix of acoustic and electric guitars, the backing vocal harmonies and the stories of loss in songs such as “Won’t Last Long” and “This One’s for Me” harken to Petty’s albums from the late 80s to mid-90s. “Accused of Love” similarly contains echoes of Petty’s more upbeat work, but with depressing lyrical undertones. The production qualities and lyrics of “Rhino Skin” recollect “Asshole,” a Beck cover from Petty’s previous album. “I Don’t Wanna Fight”—a Heartbreakers performance composed and sung by Mike Campbell—returns to the hard driving rock of Damn the Torpedoes. The lyrics, straight-laced drums and layered drones of electric guitars of “Free Girl Now” go back further to “American Girl,” which itself was influenced by psychedelic music. At the same time, all of this typifies Petty’s oeuvre. Throughout his career, he made music steeped in past rock traditions. He was also a seminal figure in Southern rock, with its emphatically nostalgic character. -/- The crisis that Petty was experiencing echoes throughout the album in more specific ways, with many songs repeating the theme of being up or down, high or low. The theme of fighting or not wanting to has an especially strong echo, showing up in “Swingin’,” “Billy the Kid” and “I Don’t Wanna Fight.” These songs, in turn, exhibit nostalgia for past icons, with protagonists going down hard like Billy the Kid; or going down swinging like Sonny Liston; or again like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Sammy Davis in a punny reference to the swing era. -/- The retrospective feel of the album is one of looking to the past for the sake of self-preservation in the present, along lines discussed by Nietzsche. While symptomatic of illness, Nietzsche maintains this movement “springs from the protective instinct of a degenerating life which tries by all means to sustain itself and to fight for existence.” This seeming denial of growth can, as Nietzsche continues, be “among the greatest conserving and yes-creating forces of life.” Petty clearly associated Echo with personal grief, refusing to listen to it for years. As with many other examples of art, however, the album was also a way of surviving and growing beyond a present trauma, and one more specifically that compelled him to overcome an important part of his past, namely, his wife of 20-plus years. One can speculate that clinging to fragments of the past—musical and otherwise—was a way of coping with a difficult present and a fading past. (shrink)

Although the fast-growing literature on restorative justice is extensive, and in some regards repetitive, there is still no consensus as to the nature and extent of applicability of the restorative notion. This article claims that the restorative movement is experiencing a tension between normative abolitionist and pragmatic visions of restorative justice. It proceeds to identify six conceptual fault-lines that characterize this tension. These do not only refer to various definitional positions, but also disagreements that negatively affect both the theoretical and (...) practical development of restorative justice. These tensions also encourage a power-interest battle between different stakeholders within the restorative movement including practitioners, theoreticians, researchers and policy makers. To approach these controversies, there needs to be an acknowledgment of the multidimensional nature of the conceptual problem of restorative justice and the impact it has on its application. The article attempts to get to grips with this problem, and provide a common ground for the future development of restorative justice. (shrink)