In this article I place Jurgen Habermas' recent turn to a "post-secular society" in the context of his previous defence of a "postmetaphysical" view of modernity. My argument is that the concept of "postsecular" introduces significant normative tensions for the formal and pragmatic view of reason defended by Habermas in previous work. In particular, the turn to a "post-secular society" threatens the evolutionary narrative that Habermas espoused in The Theory of Communicative Action, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity or Postmetaphysical Thinking, (...) according to which modern "communicative" reason dialecticlly supersedes religion. If this narrative is undermined, I argue, the claim to universality of "communicative" reason is also undermined. Thus, the benefits Habermas seeks to obtain from translation of religion are offset by a destabilization of tenets central to a "postmetaphysical" view of modernity. (shrink)

In this study, we want to analyze the relation between two Romanian internationally-renowned men of culture: Mircea Eliade (often considered one of the greatest historians of religion of all times) and Nicolae Steinhardt (whose name and memory have been mentioned by Pope John the Second in his visit in Romania). Though they had about the same age (a difference of 5 years), they had little connections in the interwar period (a few meetings and, later, Steinhardt’s volume The Way of… (...) the Young [În genul… tinerilor] from 1934, where he parodies Eliade, among others). A strong influence (which changed destinies) occurred during 1958-1960, when Steinhardt was imprisoned for having read and spread writings of Romanians found in exile, including the novel Midsummer Night (The Forbidden Forest) [Noaptea de Sânziene (Pădurea interzisă)] by Eliade. After the release in 1964, Steinhardt was continuously watched by the communist Securitate and reports have been written about him, where his main guilt was his friendship with Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu, Virgil Ierunca, Monica Lovinescu, et al. Beyond these biographical intersections between Eliade and Steinhardt, there are also connections with regard to the Romanian culture, literary ideas, and visions on religious life. Steinhardt brings appreciations to the scholar in Chicago for the fact that he presents the beauty of the Romanian culture in the Western desecrated world and considers Eliade – and he’s one of the few who does this – influenced in his thinking by Christian ideals (in this direction, memorable are Steinhardt’s appreciations of the role played by Eliade in the Western culture, especially with his volume From Zamolxis to Genghis-Kahn [De la Zalmoxis la Genghis-Han], but also with his fiction, marking a direct reference to the novella A Fourteen Year Old Photograph [O fotografie veche de 14 ani]). (shrink)

From a behaviorist perspective, the desire to upload “minds” is already being realized on a mass, hyper-industrial scale thanks to the convergence of cognitive computing and Big Data. The accusation is that the “mind” is not an entity that exists intracranially. Instead, it is conceived as a process of individuation, which occurs in different modes and numbers. Some narratives of mind-uploading and technics in popular culture are explored: Transcendence (2014, dir. Wally Pfister) and Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. The discussed (...) issues consider Bernard Stiegler’s phenomenological notion of originary default and Thierry Bardini’s analysis of junk. Several questions are raised regarding miscalculations, accidents, in addition to Nicolas Agar’s discussion on the end of humanity, and Daniel Dennett’s Multiple Drafts theory within the context of exteriorization, which is considered as constitutive of interiority. (shrink)

Revista Cunoașterea Științifică este o publicație trimestrială din domeniile științei și filosofiei, și domenii conexe de studiu și practică. -/- Cuprins: -/- EDITORIALE / EDITORIALS -/- Dan D. FARCAȘ Limite ale cunoașterii în cuvânt, logică, matematică și teorii Limits of knowledge in words, logic, mathematics and theories Nicolae SFETCU Cunoașterea științifică – Metodologii Scientific knowledge – Methodologies Nicolae SFETCU Știința schimbărilor climatice The science of climate change Nicolae SFETCU Știință sau pseudoștiință? Science or Pseudoscience? -/- ȘTIINȚE NATURALE (...) / NATURAL SCIENCE -/- Nicolae SFETCU Epistemologia gravitației cuantice Epistemology of Quantum Gravity Nicolae SFETCU Fabrica de apă grea Drobeta Turnu Severin: Construcția Drobeta Turnu Severin Heavy Water Plant: Construction Nicolae SFETCU Fabrica de apă grea Drobeta Turnu Severin: Funcționarea și oprirea Drobeta Turnu Severin Heavy Water Plant: Functioning and Shutting Down Albert TORMA PandemiA: Femei și polițiste Pandemia: Women and Policewomen Adrian KLEIN, Robert Neil BOYD Interacțiuni între creier, biocâmpuri și lumea fizică Interactions between the brain, the biofields, and the physical Adrian KLEIN Conectivitatea psiho-neuronală The Psycho-Neural Connectivity Nicolae SFETCU Probleme cu teoria corzilor din gravitația cuantică Problems with String Theory in Quantum Gravity -/- ȘTIINȚE SOCIALE / SOCIAL SCIENCE -/- Miriam MIRCEA Manipularea ca fenomen corelativ al puterii politice – o sinteză Manipulation as a correlative phenomenon of political power – a synthesis Daniela Georgiana GOLES, Oana Ștefania COȘA Repetabilitatea istorica a problemelor de securitate manageriale și noile cerințe in contextul economic actual The historical repeatability of managerial security issues and the new requirements in the current economic context Ionuț IORDACHE Reglementări internaționale privind falimentul International bankruptcy regulations Vlad BARBU, Ionuț IORDACHE, Adrian-Călin CUCULIS, Naciu Costin MERGEANE Rolul statului în relațiile de muncă The Role of the State in Labour Relations Tiberiu TĂNASE 24 Ianuarie, o zi cu dublă semnificație națională January 24, a day with double national significance Stan PETRESCU Iuliu Maniu – Lumini și umbre: O viață închinată Marii Uniri și propășirii României Mari Iuliu Maniu – Lights and shadows: A life devoted to the Great Union and the prosperity of Greater Romania Dumitru MAZILU Parohia în textul sfintelor canoane și în practică bisericească The parish in the text of the holy canons and in church practice Dumitru MAZILU Despre calitatea de paroh-administrator în funcționarea unei unități parohiale moderne About the quality of parish administrator in the operation of a modern parish unit Alexandra MOCANU Cultura anime în România Anime culture in Romania Alexandra MOCANU Abandonul școlar în România School dropout rate in Romania Emilian M. DOBRESCU Importanța pământurilor rare pentru economia mondială The Importance of the Rare Earths for the World Economy Nicolae SFETCU Modele ale inteligenței emoționale în cercetare și educație Models of Emotional Intelligence in Research and Education Nicolae SFETCU Aventurile lui Pinocchio – Educația The Adventures of Pinocchio – Education Dan D. FARCAȘ Câteva opinii privind etnogeneza românilor (1) Some opinions regarding the ethnogenesis of the Romanians (1) Denisa Oana PĂTRAȘCU Sancțiunile internaționale, măsură suprastatală de coerciție International sanctions, supra-state measure of coercion Tiberiu TĂNASE Puncte de vedere asupra proiectului de democratizare a Orientului Mijlociu Extins Viewpoints on the project of democratization of Middle East Extended -/- ȘTIINȚE FORMALE / FORMAL SCIENCE -/- Alida Monica Doriana BARBU Aplicații ale AI, machine learning, deep learning și big data în domeniul militar Applications of AI, machine learning, deep learning and big data in the military field Nicolae SFETCU Identitatea și inteligența artificială în Aventurile lui Pinocchio Identity and Artificial Intelligence in The Adventures of Pinocchio Sebastian BIDAȘCĂ Etica în inteligența artificială: provocări și perspective Ethics in Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Prospects Nicolae SFETCU Măsurarea formei populației pentru înțelegerea tendințelor demografice Measuring population shape to understand demographic trends -/- FILOSOFIE / PHILOSOPHY -/- Adrian KLEIN Legea karmică – O abordare sinoptică Karmic Law – A Synoptic Approach Adrian KLEIN, Robert Neil BOYD Principiile subcuantice ale vieții și conștiinței Subquantum Principles of Life and Consciousness Silviu PETRE Pentru un realism al secolului XXI For a 21st century realism Dan D. FARCAȘ Câteva reflecții privind contactele extrasenzoriale Some reflections on extrasensory contacts Nicolae SFETCU Teorii cauzale ale referinței Causal theories of reference Nicolae SFETCU Filosofia inteligenței emoționale Philosophy of Emotional Intelligence -/- RECENZII CĂRȚI / BOOK REVIEWS -/- Traian OSTAHIE Nicolae Mavrocordat – disimulare și prudență la început de secol XVIII - Răgazurile lui Filotheu Nicolae Mavrocordat - concealment and prudence at the beginning of the 18th century - Răgazurile lui Filotheu Nicolae SFETCU Reconstrucția rațională a științei prin programe de cercetare The rational reconstruction of science through research programs Nicolae SFETCU Umanism, devenire și demiurgul în Aventurile lui Pinocchio Humanism, Becoming and the Demiurge in The Adventures of Pinocchio -/- ISSN 2971 – 9070 ISSN-L 2821 – 8086, DOI: 10.58679/CS49741. (shrink)

Revista Cunoașterea Științifică este o publicație trimestrială din domeniile științei și filosofiei, și domenii conexe de studiu și practică. -/- Cuprins: -/- EDITORIALE Cunoașterea, de Nicolae Sfetcu Cuvânt introductiv pentru (și despre) „Cunoașterea Științifică”, de Adrian Klein Viitorul științei – Știința științelor, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE NATURALE Teste gravitaționale, de Nicolae Sfetcu Inside, and Beyond „Nothingness”, de Adrian Klein și Robert Neil Boyd Anomalii ale relativității generale, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE SOCIALE Fondarea (...) Uniunii Europene și evoluția tratatelor comunității europene, de Alexandru Cristian Istoria eugeniei, de Nicolae Sfetcu Contextul intrării României în al Doilea Război Mondial, de Nicolae Sfetcu Dezvoltarea capabilităților europene în domeniul managementului crizelor, de Alexandru Cristian The Security Management System from the Perspective of the Global Energy Crisis and the Extended Black Sea Region Escalating Conflict, de Daniela Georgiana Golea, Andreea Florina Radu, și Tiberiu Tănase Closed Economies, Autarchy – Failure and Economic Disaster, de Darius-Antoniu Ferenț -/- ȘTIINȚE FORMALE Ontologii de intreprindere în tehnologia blockchain, de Nicolae Sfetcu Învățarea automată a regulilor de asociere în mineritul datelor (data mining), de Drew Bentley -/- FILOSOFIE Platon: Biografia, de Nicolae Sfetcu Karl Popper și problema demarcației între știință și ne-știință, de Nicolae Sfetcu A Scientifically Acceptable Mechanism for the Reincarnation Process of the Self, de Adrian Klein -/- RECENZII CĂRȚI Lebăda Neagră, un risc asumat – Merită?, de Nicolae Sfetcu Republica lui Platon, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ISSN 2971 – 9070 ISSN-L 2821 – 8086, DOI: 10.58679/CS83230. (shrink)

Revista Cunoașterea Științifică este o publicație trimestrială din domeniile științei și filosofiei, și domenii conexe de studiu și practică. -/- Cuprins: -/- EDITORIAL Viitorul științei – Știința științelor, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE NATURALE Anomalii ale relativității generale, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE SOCIALE Dezvoltarea capabilităților europene în domeniul managementului crizelor, de Alexandru Cristian The Security Management System from the Perspective of the Global Energy Crisis and the Extended Black Sea Region Escalating Conflict, de Daniela Georgiana Golea, Andreea (...) Florina Radu, și Tiberiu Tănase Closed Economies, Autarchy – Failure and Economic Disaster, de Darius-Antoniu Ferenț -/- ȘTIINȚE FORMALE Învățarea automată a regulilor de asociere în mineritul datelor (data mining), de Drew Bentley -/- FILOSOFIE Karl Popper și problema demarcației între știință și ne-știință, de Nicolae Sfetcu A Scientifically Acceptable Mechanism for the Reincarnation Process of the Self, de Adrian Klein -/- RECENZII CĂRȚI Republica lui Platon, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ISSN 2821– 8086 ISSN – L 2821 – 808, 10.58679/CS57085. (shrink)

Revista Cunoașterea Științifică este o publicație trimestrială din domeniile științei și filosofiei, și domenii conexe de studiu și practică. -/- Cuprins: -/- EDITORIAL Cunoașterea, de Nicolae Sfetcu Cuvânt introductiv pentru (și despre) „Cunoașterea Științifică”, de Adrian Klein -/- ȘTIINȚE NATURALE Teste gravitaționale, de Nicolae Sfetcu Inside, and Beyond „Nothingness”, de Adrian Klein și Robert Neil Boyd -/- ȘTIINȚE SOCIALE Fondarea Uniunii Europene și evoluția tratatelor comunității europene, de Alexandru Cristian Istoria eugeniei, de Nicolae Sfetcu Contextul (...) intrării României în al Doilea Război Mondial, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ȘTIINȚE FORMALE Ontologii de intreprindere în tehnologia blockchain, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- FILOSOFIE Platon: Biografia, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- RECENZII CĂRȚI Lebăda Neagră, un risc asumat – Merită?, de Nicolae Sfetcu -/- ISSN 2821– 8086 ISSN – L 2821 – 8086, DOI: 10.58679/CS18266 -/- EAN 743837007520 , Cod CS11P , ID 11130 . (shrink)

Aesthetics is thought of as not only a theory of art or beauty, but also includes sensibility, experience, judgment, and relationships. This paper is a study of Bernard Stiegler’s notion of Aesthetic War (stasis) and symbolic misery. Symbolic violence is ensued through a loss of individuation and participation in the creation of symbols. As a struggle between market values against spirit values human life and consciousness within neoliberal hyperindustrial society has become calculable, which prevents people from creating affective and meaningful (...) attachments to symbols in relation to our retentional apparatuses, technology and memory. Such tension can be thought of as a dissonance between overlapping domains of social life, private and public. New Media is a reflection of aesthetic dissonance, an experience such as being bored and entertained at the same time, between antagonistic experiences, values, and behavior. Moreover, new media is at once a medium of customizing aesthetic experience individually as well as the threat and practice of prioritizing calculability and modeling of consumer behavior in favor of capitalistic effectiveness, which results in the simultaneous categorization of an individual as a data point, putting those who do not fit an algorithm’s premises at a disadvantage. (shrink)

There remains no consensus among social scientists as to how to measure and understand forms of information deprivation such as misinformation. Machine learning and statistical analyses of information deprivation typically contain problematic operationalizations which are too often biased towards epistemic elites' conceptions that can undermine their empirical adequacy. A mature science of information deprivation should include considerable citizen involvement that is sensitive to the value-ladenness of information quality and that doing so may improve the predictive and explanatory power of extant (...) models. (shrink)

The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is automatic (...) and independent of belief rejection. Independent research supports the existence of a system of fragmented belief storage: one that relies on large numbers of causally isolated, context-sensitive stores of belief in memory. Finally, empirical and observational data support at least two systems of belief change. One system adheres, mostly, to epistemological norms of updating; the other, the psychological immune system, functions to guard our most centrally held beliefs from potential inconsistency with newly formed beliefs. Refining our under- standing of these systems can shed light on pressing real-world issues, such as how fake news, propaganda, and brainwashing exploit our psychology of belief, and how best to construct our modern informational world. (shrink)

We aim to do two things in this article. On the positive end, our goal is to explain how some seemingly incompatible aspects of belief live together, by presenting distinct mechanistic explanations of each of them: in particular we want to show how belief can be discerning, credulous, rational, and irrational. After clarifying our positive view, we take aim at some competitor views in the second half of the paper, particularly offering critiques of epistemic vigilance and social marketplace accounts of (...) belief. We conclude by inviting proponents to provide an architecture for belief that can be tested against existing models. (shrink)

Coincidenţa contrariilor reprezintă un punct esenţial în gândirea umanităţii, echivalând, în cele din urmă, cu dorinţa omului de a aduna într-un tot unitar pe cele ce se opun în univers. Această preocupare a stat la baza scrierilor unor gânditori importanţi, între care se numără Sfântul Dionisie Areopagitul, Meister Eckhart, Nicolaus Cusanus sau Mircea Eliade. Deşi au scris în perioade de timp diferite şi au aparţinut unor tradiţii diferite, operele lor stau mărturie faptului că motivul coincidentia oppositorum a fost şi continuă (...) să fie o constantă în viaţa omului în dorinţa acestuia de a atinge Absolutul. (shrink)

The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, (...) Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work? (shrink)

Mircea Eliade’s ideas developed in the scientific and literary works had considerable influence over the past century, both among historians of religions, imposing the discipline that he promoted in many prestigious universities from America and from around the world, and among other researchers in related fields of the history of religions. The question today is about what is left of Eliade’s work after a careful analysis according to the grids of thought of our century. The question that has not yet (...) found a definitive answer is of special interest, because the themes dealt by the Romanian scientist are universal and permanent. Among them, the problem of the timeliness of myth occupies the essential rank closely related with all the concepts developed by Eliade in his works. In this sense, the relationship between the man of archaic societies, often called homo religious, and the Christian man is also defined by how the myth is perceived by the two of them. Through its exact understanding human religiosity from forever and everywhere can always be redefined. (shrink)

Romanian pedagogical theory rests on the assumption that any educational content can be taught and learned faster and better by recourse to a battery of teaching methods. In the present study we question that assumption and show that the methods generally recommended have no didactic merits when it comes to teaching philosophy and the human sciences. In order to prove that we commence by rendering manifest the origins, the specificity and the presuppositions of the teaching methods described in the literature. (...) Afterwards we determine the specificity of the objects of study of philosophy and the human sciences in general. On these bases we develop a series of three arguments that show why, given the particularity of both, the recourse to methods for teaching philosophy and the human sciences is inadequate. (shrink)

Simbolismul religios a trezit mereu interesul cercetătorilor din domenii diferite de activitate, lumea întreagă reprezentând un mare simbol ce trebuie să fie descifrat. În dorința de a înțelege sensurile universului înconjurător, oamenii de știință au folosit descoperirile din domenii conexe pentru a-și formula propriile teorii. În acest sens, se pot realiza conexiuni pertinente între felurile în care istoricul religiilor Mircea Eliade și teologul ortodox Alexander Schmemann au definit simbolul și felul în care acesta este prezent în viața de zi cu (...) zi a oamenilor, redefinind astfel și strânsa legătură ce există între istoria religiilor și teologie ca discipline de studiu academic. (shrink)

In this two-part article, I propose a new materialist understanding of behavior. The term “mattering” in the title refers to sense-making behavior that matters, that is, to significant habits and materialized behaviors. By significant habits I mean protocols, practices and routines that generate ways of reading material signs and fixed accounts of movement. I advance a notion of behaving that stresses its materiality and sensory shaping, and I provide select examples from music. I note that current definitions of behavior do (...) not capture its material dimension. This is because behavioral science has mostly viewed matter as passive, and not as an active agency. Such an approach has metaphysically framed behavior as a phenomenon of presence that is external from its environment. The approach of behavioral science to matter where there are fixed borders between the internal and external is lacking, since it does not account for agential cuts as conceptualized by Karen Barad. Instead, I consider behavior performatively; as an ongoing iterative practice and as integral to the growth of immanently self-caused matter that spawns metastable relational formations that produce different possibilities for successive formations. In this regard, behavior matters, and matter behaves. One key aspect of my article advances Bernard Stiegler as a critical new materialist thinker. This advancement concerns the technical doings of artworks, which include the material activity that is generative of sensitivity: feelings and beliefs associated with a sense or meaning. I outline an example of the materiality of habits as constitutive of music. After that, I coin the transformative doings of matter on the artist as a “caripulation,” which is a desired movement or motion that transforms the mover and the moved. Finally, I raise “pharmacological” considerations in terms of the Stieglerian aspects of organic and inorganic organized matter. (shrink)

With a history of 2000 years, the dialogue between Orthodoxy and Judaism experienced difficult times that have left deep scars in the hearts of the followers of the two religions. In the modern and contemporary period, without forgetting the past, it is trying to find bridges between the two religions with the purpose to help the faithful to respond responsibly to the challenges of the present and future. The themes that have been analyzed in the past are of a great (...) interest to our times: the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, the place and the role of the Bible in the two monotheistic traditions, Jerusalem as a Holy City, the religious freedom, the quality and the responsibility of elected people, the problem of religious freedom. Finally, only through sincere cooperation one can find relevant answers to the faithful of the both religions. (shrink)

Beginning with the second decade of the last century, after a fierce critique of W. Dilthey and the Historical School’s epistemological approach, philosophical hermeneutics has assumed the position of “official” philosophy of history of our times. However, in our previous work we have shown that philosophical hermeneutics is not actually able to give a better answer to “What is history?” than that already offered by the Historical School. Now we would like to show that its answer to the other fundamental (...) question of the philosophy of history - “How is history to be known?” - is even more problematic, making historical science impossible. For if the being of history really is tradition as philosophical hermeneutics argues, and if the essence of tradition is language then, on the one hand, the very stability of historical meaning presupposed by any epistemological process will always be displaced by the play of what Derrida calls “différance,” the ceaseless differentiation of the signifiers and signifieds. And, on the other hand, even if historical meaning were stable enough so as to be known, it could not be grasped because, we will try to argue, the process of understanding as philosophical hermeneutics describes it is always permeated by misunderstanding. (shrink)

This article defends a relational account of personhood. I argue that the structure of personhood consists of dyadic relations between persons who can wrong or be wronged by one another, even if some of them lack moral competence. I draw on recent work on directed duties to outline the structure of moral communities of persons. The upshot is that we can construct an inclusive theory of personhood that can accommodate nonhuman persons based on shared community membership. I argue that, once (...) we unpack the internal relation between directed duties, moral status, and flourishing, relations can ground personhood and include nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s unduly neglected monograph New and Old Methods of Ethics (1877) advances a highly sophisticated and mathematized account of social well-being in the utilitarian tradition of his 19th-century contemporaries. This article illustrates how his usage of the ‘calculus of variations’ was combined with findings from empirical psychology and economic theory to construct a consequentialist axiological framework. A conclusion is drawn that Edgeworth is a methodological predecessor to several important methods, ideas, and issues that continue to be discussed in (...) contemporary social well-being studies. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical evidence suggests that folk knowledge attribution practices regarding some epistemological thought experiments differ significantly from the consensus found in the philosophical literature. More specifically, laypersons are likely to ascribe knowledge in the so-called Authentic Evidence Gettier-style cases, while most philosophers deny knowledge in these cases. The intuitions shared by philosophers are often used as evidence in favor (or against) certain philosophical analyses of the notion of knowledge. However, the fact that these intuitions are not universal, (...) as non-philosophers do not sympathize with verdicts made by philosophers, is problematic and requires some explanation. Recently, a promising theoretical approach emerged that could be used to explain away unexpected folk knowledge attributions. According to the protagonist projection hypothesis, when subjects answer questions about some hypothetical scenario, their judgments might result from adopting the cognitive perspective of the protagonist in the given scenario. Previous experimental findings suggest protagonist projection might be responsible for problematic knowledge attributions in Gettier-style cases. This paper reports data collected in an experiment which focused on five different Authentic Evidence Gettier-style scenarios and investigated the impact of protagonist projection on folk knowledge ascriptions in such cases. The results bring some support to the protagonist projection hypothesis, but do not allow to explain away a substantial number of problematic folk knowledge attributions. (shrink)

Various data from communication that does not occur face-to-face are taken to be problematic for Kaplan’s account of indexical expressions, as is the case with the so-called answering machine paradox. One fix, developed by Sidelle (1991) and Briciu (2018), is the remote utterance view: recording artifacts are means by which speakers perform utterances at a distance, just as by means of other artifacts agents performs other types of actions at a distance. This view has faced an important objection, namely that (...) remote utterances lead to Moorean paradoxes. In this paper, I defend the remote utterance view against this objection and further develop the view. I argue that worries about Moorean paradoxes can easily be dispelled if we take into consideration the artifactual nature of recording devices, their materiality, and the communicative affordances they bring about. In the first section, we’ll present the answering machine paradox and give a brief overview of the remote utterance view. The second section presents the objection against the view, while the third gives a detailed rejoinder to the objection. Answering this objection is important also because it allows us to explore some underdeveloped aspects of the remote utterance view. First, I will discuss how the theorist calibrates her model with the data she seeks to explain and predict. Secondly, I will argue that speech acts performed via recording devices have different felicity conditions than their oral counterparts. I conclude with a short discussion of some semantic and pragmatic consequences of the view. (shrink)

In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics of proposed research proposals (...) when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

‘Performative’ transcendental arguments exploit the status of a subcategory of self-falsifying propositions in showing that some form of skepticism is unsustainable. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between performatively inconsistent propositions and transcendental arguments, and then to compare performative transcendental arguments to modest transcendental arguments that seek only to establish the indispensability of some belief or conceptual framework. Reconceptualizing transcendental arguments as performative helps focus the intended dilemma for the skeptic: performative transcendental arguments directly confront the (...) skeptic with the choice of abandoning either skepticism or some other deep theoretical commitment. Many philosophers, from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas to Jaakko Hintikka, C.I. Lewis, and Bernard Lonergan, have claimed that some skeptical propositions regarding knowledge, reason, and/or morality can be shown to be self-defeating; that is to say, they have claimed that the very upholding of some skeptical position is in some way incompatible with the position being upheld, or with the implied, broader dialectical position of the skeptic in question. Statements or propositions alleged to have this characteristic also sometimes are called ‘self-falsifying,’ ‘self-refuting,’ ‘self-stultifying,’ ‘self-destructive,’ or ‘pointless.’ However, proponents of the strategy of showing skepticism to be self-defeating have not in general adequately distinguished between two types of self-defeating proposition: self-falsifying and self-stultifying. In the first part of this paper I distinguish between self-falsifying and self-stultifying propositions, and introduce the notion of performative self-falsification. In the second part I discuss classical transcendental arguments, ‘modest’ transcendental arguments, and objections to each. In the third part I introduce two types of transcendental argument—each labeled “performative”—corresponding to two types of performatively self-falsifying proposition, and I compare them to modest transcendental arguments. (shrink)

The history of economic thought witnessed several prominent economists who took seriously models and concepts in physics for the elucidation and prediction of economic phenomena. Econophysics is an emerging discipline at the intersection of heterodox economics and the physics of complex systems, with practitioners typically engaged in two overlapping but distinct methodological programs. The first is to export mathematical methods used in physics for the purposes of studying economic phenomena. The second is to export mechanisms in physics into economics. A (...) conclusion is drawn that physics transfer is often justified at the level of mathematical transfer but unjustified at the level of mechanistic transfer. (shrink)

According to the No-Luck-Thesis knowledge possession is incompatible with luck – one cannot know that p if the truth of one’s belief that p is a matter of luck. Recently, this widespread opinion was challenged by Peter Baumann, who argues that in certain situations agents do possess knowledge even though their beliefs are true by luck. This paper aims at providing empirical data for evaluating Baumann’s hypothesis. The experiment was designed to compare non-philosophers’ judgments concerning knowledge and luck in one (...) case that Baumann takes to be in favor of his claim and other cases where, according to him, absence of knowledge coincides with luck. The results show that the cases do not differ in a significant way between each other with respect to verdicts regarding knowledge and luck. In all cases subjects were more reluctant to judge that the ‘Gettierized’ belief is knowledge and more likely to judge that it is true by luck in comparison to a belief that is an uncontroversial instance of knowledge. However, the negative relationship between knowledge and luck ascriptions predicted by the No-Luck-Thesis was almost absent. The data raise some doubts about the No-Luck-Thesis, but the reasons for doubt are different than what Baumann expected. (shrink)

Do salient normative claims about politics require moral premises? Political moralists think they do, political realists think they do not. We defend the viability of realism in a two-pronged way. First, we show that a number of recent attacks on realism, as well as realist responses to those attacks, unduly conflate distinctively political normativity and non-moral political normativity. Second, we argue that Alex Worsnip and Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s recent attack on realist arguments for a distinctively political normativity depends on assuming moralism (...) as the default view, which places an excessive burden on the viability of realism, and so begs the question. Our discussion, though, does not address the relative merits of realism and moralism, so its upshot is relatively ecumenical: moralism need not be the view that all apt normative political judgments are moral judgments, and realism need not be the view that no apt normative political judgments are moral judgments. (shrink)

Multicellular organisms contain numerous symbiotic microorganisms, collectively called microbiomes. Recently, microbiomic research has shown that these microorganisms are responsible for the proper functioning of many of the systems of multicellular organisms. This has inclined some scholars to argue that it is about time to reconceptualise the organism and to develop a concept that would place the greatest emphasis on the vital role of microorganisms in the life of plants and animals. We believe that, unfortunately, there is a problem with this (...) suggestion, since there is no such thing as a universal concept of the organism which could constitute a basis for all biological sciences. Rather, the opposite is true: numerous alternative definitions exist. Therefore, comprehending how microbiomics is changing our understanding of organisms may be a very complex matter. In this paper we will demonstrate that this pluralism proves that claims about a change in our understanding of organisms can be treated as both true and untrue. Mainly, we assert that the existing concepts differ substantially, and that only some of them have to be reconsidered in order to incorporate the discoveries of microbiomics, while others are already flexible enough to do so. Taking into account the plurality of conceptualisations within different branches of modern biology, we will conduct our discussion using the developmental and the cooperation–conflict concepts of the organism. Then we will explain our results by referring to the recent philosophical debate on the nature of the concept of the organism within biology. (shrink)

One of the insights of dynamic semantics in its various guises (Kamp 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991, Kamp & Reyle 1993 among many others) is that interpretation is sensitive to left-to-right order. Is order sensitivity, particularly the default left-to-right order of evaluation, a property of particular meanings of certain lexical items (e.g., dynamically interpreted conjunction) or is it a more general feature of meaning composition? If it is a more general feature of meaning composition, is it a processing (...) ‘preference’ or should it be captured as a ‘harder’ constraint on the type of meanings and operations over meanings involved in natural language interpretation? This squib draws attention to the symmetrical A-too B-too construction (found in a variety of languages, e.g., Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian) in this context. It argues that any semantic analysis of its main ‘symmetrical-meaning’ characteristic should also allow for subtler interactions between this construction and items that are clearly sensitive to evaluation-order effects, e.g., anaphoric adjectives like next and other. We suggest that the notion of postsupposition embedded in a broader dynamic framework is better able to account for both the symmetric nature of this construction, its non-symmetric variant A-too, and its interaction with items that are evaluation-order sensitive. We briefly compare this proposal with a couple of possible alternative accounts. (shrink)

Current methods of operationalizing concepts of misinformation in machine learning are often problematic given idiosyncrasies in their success conditions compared to other models employed in the natural and social sciences. The intrinsic value-ladenness of misinformation and the dynamic relationship between citizens' and social scientists' concepts of misinformation jointly suggest that both the construct legitimacy and the construct validity of these models needs to be assessed via more democratic criteria than has previously been recognized.

According to contextualism, vast majority of natural-language expressions are context-sensitive. When testing whether this claim is reflected in Folk intuitions, some interesting methodological questions were raised such as: which experimental design is more appropriate for testing contextualism – the within- or the between-subject design? The main thesis of this paper is that the between-subject design should be preferred. The first experiment aims at assessing the difference between the results obtained for within-subjects measurements (where all participants assess all contexts) and between-subject (...) measurements (where respondents evaluating different contexts are distinct groups). It is shown that the within-subject design provides data that seems to support contextualism. However, I present an alternative, invariantist interpretation of these results, therefore showing that the within-subject design does not allow to empirically distinguish between contextualism and invariantism. The second experiment further elaborates the issue of how perceiving the contrast between contexts can affect subjects’ judgments – I show that certain kinds of contexts may elicit opposite intuitions when contrasted with different contexts. (shrink)

This chapter offers an indirect defence of the Evansian conception of egocentric space, by showing how it resolves a puzzle concerning the unity of egocentric spatial perception. The chapter outlines several common assumptions about egocentric perspectival structure and argues that a subject’s experience, both within and across her sensory modalities, may involve multiple structures of this kind. This raises the question of how perspectival unity is achieved, such that these perspectival structures form a complex whole, rather than merely disunified set (...) of individually, distinctively structured experiences. The shortcomings of variety of accounts are considered: switch accounts ; sensory accounts; transformation accounts; and ultimate accounts. These shortcomings are addressed by a further kind of account provided by the Evansian conception – an agentive account – according to which egocentrically structured experiences present the world in relation to parts of a single thing, the body as a dynamic unity. (shrink)

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's theory (...) of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage. (shrink)

World food production is facing exorbitant challenges like climate change, use of resources, population growth, and dietary changes. These, in turn, raise major ethical and political questions, such as how to uphold the right to adequate nutrition, or the right to enact a gastronomic culture and to preserve the conditions to do so. Proposals for utopic solutions vary from vertical farming and lab meat to diets filled with the most fanciful insects and seaweeds. Common to all proposals is a polarized (...) understanding of food and diets, famously captured by Warren Belasco in the contraposition between technological fixes and anthropological fixes. According to the first, technology will deliver clean, just, pleasurable, affordable food; future generations will not need to adjust much of their dietary cultures. According to the second, future generations should dramatically change their dietary habits (what they eat and how they eat it) to achieve a sustainable diet. The two fixes found remarkably distinct perspectives over dietary politics and the ethics of food production and consumption. In this paper we argue that such polarized thinking rests on a misrepresentation of the ontological status of food, which in turn affects the underlying ethical and political issues. Food is a socially constructed object that draws in specific ways on habits, norms, traditions, geographical, and climatic conditions. Although this thesis seems somewhat obvious, its consequences on the ethical and political perspectives on the future of food have not been derived properly. After introducing the issue at stake (¤1), we point out the polarities that characterize food utopias (¤2) and their ontological faults (¤3). We hence suggest that a socio-ontological analysis of food can better deliver the principles for a foundation of food utopias (¤4). (shrink)

Recording devices are generally taken to present problems for the standard Kaplanian semantics for indexicals. In this paper, I argue that the remote utterance view offers the best way for the Kaplanian semantics to handle the recalcitrant data that comes from the use of recording devices. Following Sidelle I argue that recording devices allow agents to perform utterances at a distance. Using the essential, but widely ignored, distinction between tokens and utterances, I develop the view beyond the initial sketch given (...) by Sidelle, and I answer the main objections raised against the view. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 gives a succinct presentation of Kaplanian semantics and of the problem raised by the use recording devices, Section 2 presents the remote utterance view and Section 3 answers the objections put forward against the view and further develops it. I conclude that the remote utterance view can handle the data that comes from the use of recording devices with only modest modifications of the Kaplanian semantics. (shrink)

My modest aim in this paper is to prove certain relations between some type of hyper-intensional operators, namely context shifting operators, and compositionality in natural languages. Various authors (e.g. von Fintel & Matthewson 2008; Stalnaker 2014) have argued that context-shifting operators are incompatible with compositionality. In fact, some of them understand Kaplan’s (1989) famous ban on context-shifting operators as a constraint on compositionality. Others, (e.g. Rabern 2013) take contextshifting operators to be compatible with compositionality but, unfortunately, do not provide a (...) proof, or an argument in favor of their position. The aim of this paper is to do precisely that. Additionally, I provide a new proof that compositionality for propositional content (intension) is a proper generalization of compositionality for character (hyper-intensions). (shrink)

The issue of time-awareness presents a critical challenge for empiricism: if temporal properties are not directly perceived, how do we become aware of them? A unique empiricist account of time-awareness suggested by Hume's comments on time in the Treatise avoids the problems characteristic of other empiricist accounts. Hume's theory, however, has some counter-intuitive consequences. The failure of empiricists to come up with a defensible theory of time-awareness lends prima facie support to a non-empiricist theory of ideas.

Much recent cognitive neuroscientific work on body knowledge is representationalist: “body schema” and “body images”, for example, are cerebral representations of the body (de Vignemont 2009). A framework assumption is that representation of the body plays an important role in cognition. The question is whether this representationalist assumption is compatible with the variety of broadly situated or embodied approaches recently popular in the cognitive neurosciences: approaches in which cognition is taken to have a ‘direct’ relation to the body and to (...) the environment. A “direct” relation is one where the boundaries between the body and the head, or between the environment and the animal are not theoretically important in the understanding of cognition. These boundaries do not play a theoretically privileged role in cognitive explanations of behavior. But representationalism appears to put a representational veil between the locus of cognition and that which is represented, making cognitive relations to the body and to the environment be indirect, with a high associated computational load. For this reason, direct approaches have tried to minimize the use of internal representations (Suchman 1987; Barwise 1987; Agre and Chapman 1987; Brooks 1992; Thelen and Smith 1994; van Gelder 1995; Port and van Gelder 1995; Clark 1997, 1999; Rupert 2009, p. 180). Does a cognitive neuroscience committed to direct relations rule out a representationalist approach to body knowledge? Or is direct representationalism possible? (shrink)

An understanding of the factors behind the evolution of multicellularity is one of today’s frontiers in evolutionary biology. This is because multicellular organisms are made of one subset of cells with the capacity to transmit genes to the next generation and another subset responsible for maintaining the functionality of the organism, but incapable of transmitting genes to the next generation. The question arises: why do somatic cells sacrifice their lives for the sake of germline cells? How is germ/soma separation maintained? (...) One conventional answer refers to inclusive fitness theory, according to which somatic cells sacrifice themselves altruistically, because in so doing they enhance the transmission of their genes by virtue of their genetic relatedness to germline cells. In the present article we will argue that this explanation ignores the key role of policing mechanisms in maintaining the germ/soma divide. Based on the pervasiveness of the latter, we argue that the role of altruistic mechanisms in the evolution of multicellularity is limited and that our understanding of this evolution must be enriched through the consideration of coercion mechanisms. (shrink)

In a recent reply to our article, “What is Interpretability?,” Prasetya argues against our position that artificial neural networks are explainable. It is claimed that our indefeasibility thesis—that adding complexity to an explanation of a phenomenon does not make the phenomenon any less explainable—is false. More precisely, Prasetya argues that unificationist explanations are defeasible to increasing complexity, and thus, we may not be able to provide such explanations of highly complex AI models. The reply highlights an important lacuna in our (...) original paper, the omission of the unificationist account of explanation, and affords us the opportunity to respond. Here, we argue that artificial neural networks are explainable in a way that should satisfy unificationists and that interpretability methods present ways in which ML theories can achieve unification. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the central role of the Socratic elenchus in the Sophist. In the first part, I defend the position that the Stranger describes the Socratic elenchus in the sixth division of the Sophist. In the second part, I show that the Socratic elenchus is actually used when the Stranger scrutinizes the accounts of being put forward by his predecessors. In the final part, I explain the function of the Socratic elenchus in the argument of the dialogue. By contrast (...) with standard scholarly interpretations, this way of reading the text provides all the puzzles about being (241c4–251a4) with a definite function in the dialogue. It also reveals that Plato’s methodology includes a plurality of method and is more continuous than what is often believed. (shrink)

I wish to defend the claim that given the content and structure of any moral theory we are likely to find palatable, there is no way of uniquely breaking down that theory into either consequentialist or deontological elements. Indeed, once we examine the actual structure of any such theory more closely, we see that it can be classified in either way arbitrarily. Hence if we ignore the metaethical pronouncements often made by adherents of the consequentialist-deontological distinction, we are quickly led (...) to the conclusion that this distinction contributes nothing of consequence to an understanding of moral theory. I will try to show that there are basically two reasons for this. First, what we mean by the terms endemic to the consequentialist-deontological distinction have no unique references to particular states of affairs in actual cases of moral decision making. Hence we may justify any such concrete moral decision by reference to typically consequentialist or deontological reasoning indifferently. Second, scrutiny of actual and viable moral theories reveals a much finer-grained structure than the consequentialist-deontological taxonomy can capture. And it is this structure, rather than simple attention to consequences or principles, that determines practical moral decision making. We would thus do better to develop the richer vocabulary of causes and constituents, goals and effects, states and events (mental, social, or physical). So in the end, the consequentialist-deontological distinction is irrelevant at the normative level of actual moral reasoning, whereas at the metaethical level it crudely schematizes two opposing types of dummy theory, neither of which is convincing, upon reflection, to any practicing moral philosopher. (shrink)

Although it might seem to elicit only a marginal interest for philosophical inquiry, in 20th century continental philosophy the experience of solitude and loneliness were shown to have unexpected importance and gravity. For philosophers such as M. Heidegger, H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer or P. Sloterdijk, solitude and loneliness are to be seen, on the one hand, as an ontological determination of our Being and, on the other, as a cause for some of the most worrisome problems of our times such, (...) as the birth of totalitarianism or the phenomenon of self-alienation wide-spread in the Western bureaucratic societies. But none of the philosophers dealing with these matters offers us a clear positive understanding of what solitude and loneliness actually are nor what the task of philosophy should be with regard to these experiences even though they give us to understand that philosophy has one. The present paper tarries upon this question, approaching it from the other end though an investigation of the status of alterity in Heidegger and Gadamer’s philosophy. (shrink)

Informally speaking, a truthmaker is something in the world in virtue of which the sentences of a language can be made true. This fundamental philosophical notion plays a central role in applied ontology. In particular, a recent nonorthodox formulation of this notion proposed by the philosopher Josh Parsons, which we labelled weak truthamking, has been shown to be extremely useful in addressing a number of classical problems in the area of Conceptual Modeling. In this paper, after revisiting the classical notion (...) of truthmaking, we conduct an in depth analysis of Parsons’ account of weak truthmaking. By doing that, we expose some difficulties in his original formulation. As the main contribution of this paper, we propose solutions to address these issues which are then integrated in a new precise interpretation of truthmaking that is harmonizable with. (shrink)

În lucrarea noastră despre însemnările lui Mircea Eliade cu privire la Sfântul Grigorie Palama şi la isihasm am încercat să propunem o altfel de abordare a învăţăturii ortodoxe, aşa cum a fost ea formulată în secolul al paisprezecelea. Dacă abordarea teologică este cea care scoate la iveală frumuseţea învăţăturii ortodoxe, ideile Sfântului Grigorie Palama fiind o continuare a tradiţiei creştine din primele secole, încercarea de a compara aceste învăţături, ca şi a tradiţiei isihaste, cu alte învăţături şi tradiţii, este un (...) subiect spre care se îndreaptă tot mai mulţi cercetători. Mircea Eliade, dincolo de formarea sa în spaţiul creştinismului ortodox, aşa cum remarcă din ce în ce mai mulţi cercetători ai operei sale, este un istoric al religiilor a cărui abordare este atât nouă, cât şi continuatoarea vechii cercetări fenomenologice. Mai mult decât atât, chiar dacă sunt destule voci care contestă acest lucru, Mircea Eliade rămâne unul dintre cei mai mari istorici ai religiilor din toate timpurile. În analiza operelor la care ne-am oprit în studiul nostru, Eliade scoate în evidenţă asemănările, dar mai ales deosebirile ce există între învăţătura isihastă şi anumite practici specifice altor tradiţii religioase. Astfel sunt însemnările despre Yoga, în care savantul, analizând practicile indiene, le compară cu cele din isihasm, subliniind diferenţele aşa cum se desprind din studiul celor două tradiţii. O părere asemănătoare se desprinde şi din analiza luminii mistice, prezentă în majoritatea religiilor lumii. Eliade evidenţiază asemănările, dar şi deosebirile cu privire la felul în care lumina mistică este percepută în creştinism şi în alte tradiţii. Studiul istoric asupra isihasmului şi a personalităţii Sfântului Grigorie Palama, prezent în Istoria credinţelor şi ideilor religioase, se îmbină cu studiul fenomenologic din celelalte surse. În ceea ce priveşte operele publicate după dispariţia savantului de origine română, Enciclopedia religiilor şi Dictionarul religiilor, se pot observa atât continuităţi cât şi discontinuităţi. Dicţionarul cuprinde, în mare parte, gândirea lui Culianu şi mai puţin pe cea a maestrului său, deşi urme ale acesteia sunt încă evidente. În Enciclopedie, capitolele despre Sfântul Grigorie Palama şi isihasm sunt semnate de cercetători ale căror opere au fost folosite de Eliade în scrierile precedente, subliniind astfel legăturile cu preocupările savantului în acest domeniu. Dincolo de concluziile studiului, trebuie să spunem că această cercetare este importantă şi dintr-un alt punct de vedere: în disciplina Istoria religiilor, a compara mai multe religii sau părţi din tradiţiile religioase ale lumii rămâne o metodă esenţială, evidenţiind importanţa creştinismului în lumea contemporană. (shrink)

Kant’s three Analogies of Experience, in his Critique of Pure Reason, represent a highly condensed attempt to establish the metaphysical foundations of Newtonian physics. His strategy is to show that the organization of experience in terms of a world of enduring substances undergoing mutual causal interaction is a necessary condition of the temporal ordering even of one’s own subjective states, and thus of coherent experience itself. In his Third Analogy—an examination of the necessary conditions of judgments of simultaneous existence—he argues (...) that certain conceptual presuppositions consistent with Newtonian physics are necessary to time-awareness. His argument, however, appears to be undermined by conventionalism in natural science generally, and by the conventionality of simultaneity in particular. In this paper I discuss Kant’s claims in light of contemporary relativity theory. I suggest that, while his project is obsolete in major respects, there may still be useful insights into time-awareness to be drawn from his work. (shrink)

We need modal imagination in order to extend our conception of reality - and, in particular, of human beings - beyond our immediate experience in the indexical present; and we need to do this in order to preserve the significance of human interaction. To make this leap of imagination successfully is to achieve not only insight but also an impartial perspective on our own and others' inner states. This perspective is a necessary condition of experiencing compassion for others. This is (...) the primary thesis I will try to defend in this discussion. (shrink)