The special theory of relativity (STR) is widely supposed to be in tension with A-theories of time, those giving special significance to the present moment. A-theories are diverse in the features they regard as distinctive of the present, but all agree that there is an absolute fact of the matter about which events have the feature of presentness. Famously, the standard notion of simultaneity operationalised within the theory of relativity is not absolute. If A-theorists accept relativistic physics, they must either (...) refine their A-theory and sever joint presentness from simultaneity (‘conciliatory’ responses to the problem), or supplement standard relativity by adding further spacetime structure that grounds a relation of absolute simultaneity (‘supplementing’ responses). This chapter considers the prospects for such approaches, concluding that while there is no knock-down argument from relativity against the A-theory, attempts to marry the A-theory with STR are more trouble than they are worth. (shrink)

Causation appears to present us with an interpretative difficulty. While arguably a redundant relation given fundamental physics, it is nevertheless apparently pragmatically indispensable. This chapter revisits certain arguments made previously by the author for these claims with the benefit of hindsight, starting with the role of causal models in the human sciences, and attempting to explain why it is not possible to straightforwardly ground such models in fundamental physics. This suggests that further constraints, going beyond physics, are needed to legitimate (...) such models. These supplementary constraints could be reified, but that would seem to conflict with the completeness of physics. A response is to emphasize the practical role of causal talk, and the author suggests that a fictionalist approach might be worth exploring. After clarifying fictionalism as a general approach, they carry out in some detail the project of clarifying what a fictionalist attitude to causation would involve. (shrink)

Building on the discussion between Stephen Darwall and Michael Tomassello, we propose an alternative evolutionary account of moral motivation in its two-pronged dimension. We argue that an evolutionary account of moral motivation must account for the two forms of moral motivation that we distinguish: motivation to be partial, which is triggered by the affective relationships we develop with others; and motivation to be impartial, which is triggered by those norms to which we give impartial validity. To that aim, we present (...) the second-person standpoint of morality, first as Darwall conceives of it, and then as we reinterpret it from a naturalistic approach. Then we synthesize Tomasello’s evolutionary account of morality, and Darwall’s objections to it. To reply to those objections, building on Tomasello’s proposal, we argue that the motivation to be impartial, and the feeling of obligation to comply with normative requirements, appeared when humans anticipated and, critically, internalized others’ sanctions to the violation of social norms. Consequently, we posit that social norms and sanctions appeared first at the community level, and only after that were they internalized in the form of self-directed reactive attitudes. Finally, we derive some corollaries that follow from our proposal. (shrink)

I sketch a new constraint on chance, which connects chance ascriptions closely with ascriptions of ability, and more specifically with 'CAN'-claims. This connection between chance and ability has some claim to be a platitude; moreover, it exposes the debate over deterministic chance to the extensive literature on (in)compatibilism about free will. The upshot is that a prima facie case for the tenability of deterministic chance can be made. But the main thrust of the paper is to draw attention to the (...) connection between the truth conditions of sentences involving 'CAN' and 'CHANCE', and argue for the context sensitivity of each term. Awareness of this context sensitivity has consequences for the evaluation of particular philosophical arguments for (in) compatibilism when they are presented in particular contexts. (shrink)

Recently, Cody Gilmore has deployed an ingenious case involving backwards time travel to highlight an apparent conflict between the theory that objects persist by perduring, and the thesis that wholly coincident objects are impossible. However, careful attention to the concepts of location and parthood that Gilmore’s cases involve shows that the perdurantist faces no genuine objection from these cases, and that the perdurantist has a number of plausible and dialectically appropriate ways to avoid the supposed conflict.

A previously unrecognised argument against deterministic chance is introduced. The argument rests on the twin ideas that determined outcomes are settled, while chancy outcomes are unsettled, thus making cases of determined but chancy outcomes impossible. Closer attention to tacit assumptions about settledness makes available some principled lines of resistance to the argument for compatibilists about chance and determinism. Yet the costs of maintaining compatibilism may be higher with respect to this argument than with respect to existing incompatibilist arguments.

Following the pattern set by the early German Romantics, Kierkegaard conveys many of his insights through literature rather than academic prose. What makes him a valuable member of this tradition is the theory he develops to support it, his so-called “theory of indirect communication.” The most exciting aspect of this theory concerns the alleged importance of indirect communication: Kierkegaard claims that there are some projects only it can accomplish. This paper provides a critical account of two arguments Kierkegaard offers in (...) defense of this claim. The first argument is that he needs to use indirect communication in order to discourage people from losing themselves in the “crowd”. The second argument is that he needs to use it in order to help people out of a “monstrous illusion”. It is shown that while both arguments justify Kierkegaard’s decision to use indirect communication, neither one supports the original claim about its indispensability. (shrink)

This volume sets the agenda for future work on time and chance, which are central to theemerging sub-field of metaphysics of science.

This article discusses two arguments in favor of perdurance. The first is Sider’s argument from vagueness, “one of the most powerful” in favor of perdurantism. I make the observation that endurantists have principled grounds to claim that the argument is unsound, at least if endurance is formulated in locative rather than mereological terms. Having made this observation, I use it to emphasize a somewhat neglected difference between endurantists and perdurantists with respect to their views on material objects. These views, in (...) the case of endurantists, lead to a further, less than conclusive but nevertheless interesting argument against endurantism—the anti-fundamentality argument—which I discuss and tentatively endorse. That argument posits that endurantists must take location to be a fundamental relation, and that this has as a consequence the metaphysical possibility of some rather unwelcome scenarios. Perdurantists may avoid this consequence by denying that location is fundamental, perhaps by embracing supersubstantivalism. (shrink)

Illusions are thought to make trouble for the intuition that perceptual experience is "open" to the world. Some have suggested, in response to the this trouble, that illusions differ from veridical experience in the degree to which their character is determined by their engagement with the world. An understanding of the psychology of perception reveals that this is not the case: veridical and falsidical perceptions engage the world in the same way and to the same extent. While some contemporary vision (...) scientists propose to draw the distinction between veridical experience and illusion in terms of the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of “hidden assumptions” deployed in the course of normal perceptual inference, I argue for a different approach. I contend that there are, in a sense, no illusions – illusions are as “open” as veridical experiences. Percepts lack the kinds of intentional content that would be needed for perceptual misrepresntation. My view gives a satisfying solution to a philosophical problem for disjunctivism about the good case/bad case distinction: with respect to illusions, every "bad case" of seeing an X can be equally well construed as a "good case" of seeing some Y (different from X). -/- . (shrink)

The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical literature, and when philosophers have thought about it, they have usually acquiesced in views about the concept that are fundamentally flawed. After indicating the ways in which these accounts are flawed, I propose that randomness is to be understood as a special case of the epistemic concept of the unpredictability of a process. This proposal arguably captures the intuitive desiderata for the concept of randomness; at least it should suggest (...) that the commonly accepted accounts cannot be the whole story and more philosophical attention needs to be paid. 1. Randomness in science1.1Random systems1.2Random behaviour1.3Random sampling1.4Caprice, arbitrariness and noise2. Concepts of randomness2.1Von Mises/church/martin-löf randomness2.2KCS-randomness3. Randomness is unpredictability: preliminaries3.1Process and product randomness3.2Randomness is indeterminism?4. Predictability4.1Epistemic constraints on prediction4.2Computational constraints on prediction4.3Pragmatic constraints on prediction4.4Prediction defined5. Unpredictability6. Randomness is unpredictability6.1Clarification of the definition of randomness6.2Randomness and probability6.3Subjectivity and context sensitivity of randomness7. Evaluating the analysis[R]andomness … is going to be a concept which is relative to our body of knowledge, which will somehow reflect what we know and what we don't know. Henry E. Kyburg, Jr ([1974], p. 217)Phenomena that we cannot predict must be judged random. Patrick Suppes ([1984], p. 32). (shrink)

The declared goal of this paper is to fill this gap: “... cognitive systems research needs questions or challenges that define progress. The challenges are not (yet more) predictions of the future, but a guideline to what are the aims and what would constitute progress.” – the quotation being from the project description of EUCogII, the project for the European Network for Cognitive Systems within which this formulation of the ‘challenges’ was originally developed (http://www.eucognition.org). So, we stick out our neck (...) and formulate the challenges for artificial cognitive systems. These challenges are articulated in terms of a definition of what a cognitive system is: a system that learns from experience and uses its acquired knowledge (both declarative and practical) in a flexible manner to achieve its own goals. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has argued that concept acquisition cannot be a psychological or “rational-causal” process, but can only be a “brute-causal” process of acquisition. This position generates the “doorknob  DOORKNOB” problem: why are concepts typically acquired on the basis of experience with items in their extensions? I argue that Fodor’s taxonomy of causal processes needs supplementation, and characterize a third type: what I call “intelligible-causal processes.” Armed with this new category I present what I regard as a better response than (...) Fodor’s to the doorknob  DOORKNOB problem. (shrink)

Early work on the frequency theory of probability made extensive use of the notion of randomness, conceived of as a property possessed by disorderly collections of outcomes. Growing out of this work, a rich mathematical literature on algorithmic randomness and Kolmogorov complexity developed through the twentieth century, but largely lost contact with the philosophical literature on physical probability. The present chapter begins with a clarification of the notions of randomness and probability, conceiving of the former as a property of a (...) sequence of outcomes, and the latter as a property of the process generating those outcomes. A discussion follows of the nature and limits of the relationship between the two notions, with largely negative verdicts on the prospects for any reduction of one to the other, although the existence of an apparently random sequence of outcomes is good evidence for the involvement of a genuinely chancy process. (shrink)

Gödel argued that intuition has an important role to play in mathematical epistemology, and despite the infamy of his own position, this opinion still has much to recommend it. Intuitions and folk platitudes play a central role in philosophical enquiry too, and have recently been elevated to a central position in one project for understanding philosophical methodology: the so-called ‘Canberra Plan’. This philosophical role for intuitions suggests an analogous epistemology for some fundamental parts of mathematics, which casts a number of (...) themes in recent philosophy of mathematics (concerning a priority and fictionalism, for example) in revealing new light. (shrink)

Russell famously argued that causation should be dispensed with. He gave two explicit arguments for this conclusion, both of which can be defused if we loosen the ties between causation and determinism. I show that we can define a concept of causation which meets Russell’s conditions but does not reduce to triviality. Unfortunately, a further serious problem is implicit beneath the details of Russell’s arguments, which I call the causal exclusion problem. Meeting this problem involves deploying a minimalist pragmatic account (...) of the nature and function of modal language. Russell’s scruples about causation can be accommodated, even as we partially legitimise the pervasive causal explanations in folk and scientific practice. (shrink)

Utterances within the context of telling fictional tales that appear to be assertions are nevertheless not to be taken at face value. The present paper attempts to explain exactly what such 'pseudo-assertions' are, and how they behave. Many pseudo-assertions can take on multiple roles, both within fictions and in what I call 'participatory criticism' of a fiction, especially when they occur discourse-initially. This fact, taken together with problems for replacement accounts of pseudo-assertion based on the implicit prefixing of an 'in (...) the fiction' operator, suggest that pseudo-assertion is best understood as a kind of make-believe. This proposal is elaborated and defended, and some applications to fictionalism are tentatively explored. (shrink)

A ‘might’ counterfactual is a sentence of the form ‘If it had been the case that A, it might have been the case that C’. Recently, John Hawthorne has argued that the truth of many ‘might’ counterfactuals precludes the truth of most ‘would’ counterfactuals. I examine the semantics of ‘might’ counterfactuals, with one eye towards defusing this argument, but mostly with the aim of understanding this interesting class of sentences better.

Reasoning from inconclusive evidence, or ‘induction’, is central to science and any applications we make of it. For that reason alone it demands the attention of philosophers of science. This Element explores the prospects of using probability theory to provide an inductive logic, a framework for representing evidential support. Constraints on the ideal evaluation of hypotheses suggest that overall support for a hypothesis is represented by its probability in light of the total evidence, and incremental support, or confirmation, indicated by (...) an increased probability given the evidence than otherwise. This proposal is shown to have the capacity to reconstruct many canons of the scientific method and inductive inference. Along the way, significant objections are discussed, such as the challenge from inductive scepticism and the objection that the probabilistic approach makes evidential support arbitrary. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One striking feature of On the Genealogy of Morals is how it is written. Nietzsche employs a literary style that provokes his readers' emotions. In Beyond Selflessness, Christopher Janaway argues that such a literary approach is integral to Nietzsche's philosophical goals. Feeling the emotions Nietzsche's style arouses is necessary for understanding the views he defends. I argue that Janaway's position is mistaken. The evidence at our disposal fails to establish that emotion is ever necessary for cognition. However, I maintain (...) that we do have good evidence for a slightly weaker claim. The emotionally sensitive person is epistemically better off than the cold and dispassionate person. There are some truths he or she will be more likely to believe and will have better reasons for believing. I conclude that Janaway is right to defend the philosophical importance of Nietzsche's literary writing style. His error is simply that he overstates the case. (shrink)

In ‘Location and Perdurance’ (2010), I argued that there are no compelling mereological or sortal grounds requiring the perdurantist to distinguish the molecule Abel from the atom Abel in Gilmore’s original case (2007). The remaining issue Gilmore originally raised concerned the ‘mass history’ of Adam and Abel, the distribution of ‘their’ mass over spacetime. My response to this issue was to admit that mass histories needed to be relativised to a way of partitioning the location of Adam/Abel, but that did (...) not amount to relativising any fundamental natural intrinsic properties—the latter are all had unrelativised, and (so most perdurantists would say). (shrink)

It is a commonly held view that the existence of moral value somehow depends upon the existence of God. Some proponents of this view take the very strong position that atheism entails that there is no moral value; but most take the weaker position that atheism cannot explain what moral value is, or how it could have come into being. Call the first position Incompatibility, and the second position Inadequacy. In this paper, I will focus on the arguments for Inadequacy. (...) There are two main arguments for this position: the Argument from Arbitrariness and the Screening-Off Argument. I’ll discuss each in turn., and argue that neither is successful. To conclude, I’ll sketch what I think is a promising beginning to a naturalistic account of morality. (shrink)

Like many 19th c. thinkers, Kierkegaard embraces a cognitivist view of art. He thinks works of art matter because they can teach us in important ways. This chapter defends two striking features of Kierkegaard’s version of this theory. First, works of art do not teach “directly” by telling us truths and offering us evidence. Instead, they educate us “indirect-ly” by helping us make our own discoveries. Second, the fact that art does not teach in a straightforward manner is no defect. (...) On the contrary, it is precisely because art teaches indirectly that it teaches better than philosophy and science do. (shrink)

In Religion of Existence, Noreen Khawaja suggests that Kierkegaard is an “ascetic” thinker. By this, she means that he regards religious striving as (1) requiring ceaseless renewal and (2) being an end in itself rather than a means to some further end. In this paper, I raise challenges to both parts of Khawaja’s proposal. I argue that the first part stands in tension with Kierkegaard’s assertion that his infinitely demanding account of religious existence is meant merely as a “corrective.” The (...) second part, I maintain, does not fit well with his claim that our eternal salvation is at stake in religious striving. (shrink)

This dissertation concerns Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication. A central aspect of this theory is what I call the “indispensability thesis”: there are some projects only indirect communication can accomplish. The purpose of the dissertation is to disclose and assess the rationale behind the indispensability thesis. -/- A pair of questions guides the project. First, to what does ‘indirect communication’ refer? Two acceptable responses exist: (1) Kierkegaard’s version of Socrates’ midwifery method and (2) Kierkegaard’s use of artful literary devices. Second, (...) for what end does Kierkegaard use indirect communication? There are two acceptable responses here as well: (1) helping others become religious and (2) making others aware of the nature of existence. -/- These responses are interrelated. First, Kierkegaard’s notion of religion places restrictions on the means he can use to get readers to become religious. These restrictions ultimately entail that the only viable form of religious pedagogy is the midwifery method. Second, Kierkegaard engages in the midwifery method in part by making readers aware of the nature of existence (especially religious existence). But given the problems plaguing his readers, he thinks a straightforward approach to this project will likely fail. An approach that used artful literary devices such as deception and humor would be more successful. Third, Kierkegaard believes that there is one aspect of religious existence (viz. subjectivity) that people can come to know only first-hand. As such, he cannot directly impart knowledge of subjectivity to his readers. He argues that this means he must use the midwifery method. And he thinks the most productive way to do so is to provide readers with the kind of fictional narratives found in his early pseudonymous writings. Thus artful rhetorical devices play a role here as well. -/- All of Kierkegaard’s arguments for the indispensability thesis turn on debatable assumptions. But the arguments concerning artful rhetorical devices have the additional defect of being merely probabilistic in nature. They lack the strength to support the indispensability thesis even if we grant the relevant background assumptions. Therefore, to the degree that the indispensability thesis has merit, it lies with the arguments concerning the midwifery method. (shrink)

On one standard view, paraphrasing Kierkegaard requires no special literary talent. It demands no particular flair for the poetic. However, Kierkegaard himself rejects this view. He says we cannot paraphrase in a straightforward fashion some of the ideas he expresses in a literary format. To use the words of Johannes Climacus, these ideas defy direct communication. In this paper, I piece together and defend the justification Kierkegaard offers for this position. I trace its origins to concerns raised by Lessing and (...) Mendelssohn about the relationship between form and content in works of art. I maintain that Kierkegaard follows early German Romantic thinkers in applying these aesthetic concerns to philosophical writing. By way of conclusion, I discuss the implications of Kierkegaard’s position for contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

Kierkegaard faces an apparent dilemma. On the one hand, he concurs with the biblical injunction: we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. He takes this to imply that self-love and neighbor-love should be roughly symmetrical, similar in kind as well as degree. On the other hand, he recommends relating to others and to ourselves in disparate ways. We should be lenient, charitable, and forgiving when interacting with neighbors; the opposite when dealing with ourselves. The goal of my paper is (...) to solve this puzzle. I first consider addressing it by appealing to Gene Outka’s idea that equal love does not entail identical treatment. After rejecting this solution, I offer my own: Asymmetry between the two loves is not a moral ideal for Kierkegaard but a rehabilitative strategy. He recommends being more latitudinarian with others than with ourselves to correct against a common tendency toward the opposite extreme. (shrink)

For Locke, an idea is ‘the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding’ (§8).1 Perhaps this is something like a concept: he goes on to give examples of white, cold, and round, which look like they have some representational content. What do these ideas represent? Locke defines a quality: ‘the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is’ (§8). The natural thought is that these ideas represent some quality of the (...) object, which quality just is the power that the object has to produce that idea in us. Though the idea is in us, the power or quality is clearly in the object. Sometimes, it is true, we speak loosely and refer to the quality of the object by the same name that we use to refer to the idea in us, and talk of white being in the object, for example. Locke cautions that when we speak like this, we should ‘be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which produce them [the ideas] in us’ (§8). (shrink)

Recent attention to the relationship between aesthetic value and cognitive value has focused on whether the latter can affect the former. In this article, I approach the issue from the opposite direction. I investigate whether the aesthetic value of a work can influence its cognitive value. More narrowly, I consider whether a work's aesthetic value ever contributes to or detracts from its philosophical value, which I take to include the truth of its claims, the strength of its arguments, and its (...) internal consistency. I argue that aesthetic value does have such an impact, at least sometimes and to some degree. The aesthetic merits of some works help to preserve their consistency, and the aesthetic defects of other works render them self-contradictory. (shrink)

English title: The Reception of Søren Kierkegaard’s Thought in Józef Tischner’s Philosophy. The aim of this article is to indicate sources of Józef Tischner’s philosophical inspiration in Søren Kierkegaard’s texts. For Tischner Kierkegaard apperared as a great expert of human matters and as a exquisite, subtle romantic writer. In his refined use of metaphors Tischner searches material to describe a network of almost imperceptible connections of values, norms and customs, by which a human being is wrapped in his/her everyday life. (...) This network Tischener calls a „little axiology of everyday life”. He does not penetrate in all the structure of the very complicated existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, but using his quasi-fenomenological descriptions our philosopher performs his own analises in the sphere of philosophy of drama and philosophy of meeting. Tischner devotes a lot of attention to a phenomenon of existential dispair, and to a certain degree he has a dispute with Kierkegaard. In the last part of this article were indicated philosophical divergences of both philosophers, which have the source in different Christian profession and in historical differences of national cultures. (shrink)

This paper illuminates the central arguments in Sartre's UNESCO address, 'The Singular Universal." The address begins by asking whether objective facts tell us everything there is to know about Kierkegaard. Sartre's answer is negative. The question then arises as to whether we can lay hold of Kierkegaard's "irreducible subjectivity" by seeing him as alive for us today, i.e., as transhistorical. Sartre's answer here is affirmative. However, a close inspection of this answer exposes a deeper level to the address. The struggle (...) to find a place for Kierkegaard within the world of objective knowledge is an allegory. It mirrors Sartre's struggle to find a place for his existentialism within the Marxism that dominates his later thinking. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of Kierkegaard’s central criticism of the Danish Hegelians. Contrary to recent scholarship, it is argued that this criticism has a substantive theoretical basis and is not merely personal or ad hominem in nature. In particular, Kierkegaard is seen as criticizing the Hegelians for endorsing an unacceptable form of intellectual elitism, one that gives them pride of place in the realm of religion by dint of their philosophical knowledge. A problem arises, however, because this criticism threatens (...) to apply to Kierkegaard himself. It is shown that Kierkegaard manages to escape this problem by virtue of the humorous aspect of his work. (shrink)

The concept of anticipation, on the one hand, has received a considerable treatment in classical phenomenology, particularly in Husserl. The Zhuangzi, on the other hand, has not been explored with the help of Husserl’s concept of anticipation. Broadly construed, anticipation, due to its association with robust proclivity to seeing and conjuring up possibilities issuing from a phenomenon, shall have no place in the Zhuangzi. Against such backdrop, I argue that—albeit the Zhuangzi does not develop an explicit discourse on anticipation—a delimited (...) form of anticipation (‘d-anticipation’), that is, one which is inspired by Husserl’s concept of anticipation evident in his genetic phenomenology, can work in concert with the thoughts articulated in the Zhuangzi. I demonstrate this via examining death, desire, and freedom evident in the Zhuangzi. That ‘d-anticipation’ can work in concert with the thoughts articulated in the Zhuangzi can be apprehended in a variety of ways. Firstly, it can be seen in our natural response to death and the way in which we handle desires. Secondly, it points to Zhuangzi’s reductionistic manner of appreciating the richness of reality. Thirdly, it offers a way in which we can live life according to our nature. Fourthly, it points to an exercise of freedom which opens up the possibility of transcending conventional standards. Fifthly, it is inherently constitutive of the process of comportment with the Dao. Finally, it is in essence constitutive of a phenomenon or circumstance. In setting out to demonstrate these contentions, I seek to show that ‘d-anticipation’ can fill in a lacuna brought about by the negative appraisal of anticipation in the Zhuangzi and can assume a pivotal role in one’s comportment with the Dao. (shrink)

An essay review of Richard Johns "A Theory of Physical Probability" (University of Toronto Press, 2002). Forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Fideism, as a philosophical and theological view, is defined in various manners. Sometimes it is defined as the priority of faith over accounts of all kinds of cognition based on human reason. The Geneva reformer John Calvin (1509–1564) was a fideist, and he simultaneously admired Saint Augustine — traces of that admiration can be found very easy in the chief Calvin’s work Institutio christianae religionis. However, this does not mean that he shared Augustinian views on faith‑reason relations. John Calvin adopted (...) late‑Augustinian interests, and was especially concerned with the issue of predestination. The Geneva reformer was the author of the double predestination doctrine. The chief claim of this doctrine is that: God intended one part of humanity for salvation; and the other one for damnation. This conclusion was supported with numerous quotations from the Old and the New Testament, and followed from the accepted exegetic principle that all words of the Holy Scripture are to be understood literally. Calvin also acted selectively and did not take into account other passages of the Bible contrary to them in sense. These different, even contradictory words and quotations create an incoherent image of God, which Calvin left unexplained as one of God’s mysteries. According to this image, God is a petulant despot, who by his irrational will treats people with unequal measure. God has settled a priori who would be saved and who would be damned, so the will of concrete man to act well or badly is without importance. In consequence, God is responsible for the evil and sins committed by people. Calvin’s God is unfair because he is merciful for one man, but not for other one. In approving a voluntaristic image of God, Calvin started becoming, particularly in the doctrine of double predestination, an extreme fideist, much more than his master Augustine. However, in later decades (especially in the seventeenth century), Calvin’s version of Christianity gaverise a rebellion against the double predestination doctrine, first in the ranks of the Dutch Calvinistic theologians (Armenians), and later in the circles of the English philosophers (Cambridge Platonics). In the end, Calvinism became a compromised Christianity and essentially contributed to the development of deism and atheism in Western European Countries in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Negotiation research primarily focuses on negotiators? interests in order to understand negotiation and offer advice about the prospective outcome. Win-win outcomes, i.e., outcomes that serve the interests of all negotiating parties, have been established and promoted as the ultimate goal for any negotiation situation. We offer a perspective that draws on Aristotle's philosophical program and discuss how the outcome is not defined by the parties? interests, but by the intersubjective validity of claims, which can essentially be treated as representative of (...) the ?truth.? (shrink)

In the classical Turing test, participants are challenged to tell whether they are interacting with another human being or with a machine. The way the interaction takes place is not direct, but a distant conversation through computer screen messages. Basic forms of interaction are face-to-face and embodied, context-dependent and based on the detection of reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies. Our idea is that interaction detection requires the integration of proprioceptive and interoceptive patterns with sensorimotor patterns, within quite short time lapses, so that (...) they appear as mutually contingent, as reciprocal. In other words, the experience of interaction takes place when sensorimotor patterns are contingent upon one’s own movements, and vice versa. I react to your movement, you react to mine. When I notice both components, I come to experience an interaction. Therefore, we designed a “minimal” Turing test to investigate how much information is required to detect these reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies. Using a new version of the perceptual crossing paradigm, we tested whether participants resorted to interaction detection to tell apart human from machine agents in repeated encounters with these agents. In two studies, we presented participants with movements of a human agent, either online or offline, and movements of a computerized oscillatory agent in three different blocks. In each block, either auditory or audiovisual feedback was provided along each trial. Analysis of participants’ explicit responses and of the implicit information subsumed in the dynamics of their series will reveal evidence that participants use the reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies within short time windows. For a machine to pass this minimal Turing test, it should be able to generate this sort of reciprocal contingencies. (shrink)

Negotiation is mainly treated as a process through which counterparts try to satisfy their conflicting interests. This traditional, subjective approach focuses on the interests-based relation between subjects and the resources which are on the bargaining table; negotiation is viewed as a series of joint decisions regarding the relation of each subject to the negotiated resources. In this paper, we will attempt to outline an intersubjective perspective that focuses on the communication-based relation among subjects, a relation that is founded upon communicative (...) rationality mechanisms which are inherent in social activity. Much in contrast to the concept of interests which describe the relationship of each subject alone to the resources, we will use the concept of ?claim-rights? which are properly formed and validated only vis-à-vis negotiating partners and on the basis of the communication that develops among them. We will offer a step-by-step account of the creation of claim-rights and argue that their validation does not necessarily lie in the parties? interests, but in the communication mechanisms that induce consensus and result in mutually acceptable outcomes. (shrink)

The goal of the 2010 Ontology Summit was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the training of ontologists in the future. We developed recommendations for the body of knowledge that should be taught and the skills that should be developed by future ontologists; these (...) recommendations are intended as guidelines for institutions and organizations that may consider establishing a program for training ontologists. Further, we recommend a number of specific actions for the community to pursue. (shrink)

This implementation framework bridges the theoretical concepts of the Instructional Modular Approach with the practical development of Science Teaching Competency. It offers prospective teachers a structured, adaptive, and technology-enhanced pathway to becoming competent and innovative science educators. Each unit is meticulously designed to not only equip teachers with theoretical knowledge but also to hone their practical skills and competencies essential for a dynamic science teaching environment.

In 2012, choreographer and dancer Jill Sigman of jill sigman/thinkdance and visual artist Janine Antoni collaborated to produce Wedge, a live performance at the Albright-Knox Gallery. In this essay, I describe the collaboration and the resulting work and examine the benefits and challenges of the collaboration. The discussion touches on broader issues pertaining to collaboration, co-authorship, artists' intentions, and interpretation.

From the European point of view Zbigniew Antoni Jordan as a historian of the newest Polish philosophy In his article, the author presents Zbigniew Jordan’s works in the area of the history of philosophy, which are not well known in Poland. This representative of Lvov and Warsaw School was abroad, writing his habilitation thesis, when the World War II broke out. The war did not prevent him from active participation in the political life of Polish emigrants in Great Britain. For (...) the needs of current political activity he accomplished a lot of reliable and objective analyses of some geopolitical phenomena, which were a consequence of just finished war. Such kind of works made him take up serious historical studies and he started to use obtained experience to analyze the state and works of modern Polish philosophy, and especially the works of Lvov and Warsaw School. Furthermore, the article is an attempt to show the significance of Jordan’s works in propagating the history of Polish philosophy abroad. (shrink)

El estudio de los grafitis de Antoni Tàpies que se lleva a cabo en este artículo pretende profundizar en un aspecto poco considerado de la obra del autor y, sin embargo, crucial para comprender el conjunto de su obra. Esta perspectiva permite destacar el interés del artista por superar la separación entre arte y vida, recontextualizándolo más allá de la corriente informalista en las que se le ha encasillado y acercándolo a los movimientos internacionales del arte de acción. Para explicar (...) esta recontextualización se examinará, en primer lugar, la aparición del muro en su obra, para poder ver, posteriormente, cómo surge el grafiti. Dentro del segundo apartado se diferenciarán dos etapas distintas que ayudan a ver cómo el desarrollo de los grafitis de Tàpies está en relación con las transformaciones acontecidas en el terreno del grafiti a nivel internacional. De este modo, el artículo pretende ampliar el marco interpretativo de la obra de Tàpies, que adquiere así una coherencia mayor y abre su obra a nuevos significados. (shrink)

Tato studie se věnuje rané fázi mikroskopického zkoumání přírody Antoni van Leeuwenhoeka, které představil ve své korespondenci členům Royal Society. Studie se zaměřuje na období od navázání styku s Royal Society až do roku 1680, kdy byl Leeuwenhoek zvolen členem společnosti. Z metodologického hlediska studie uplatňuje na Leeuwenhoekovy dopisy členům Royal Society přístup, který představili autoři Steven Shapin a Simon Schaffer v knize Leviathan and the Air-Pump. Pokouší se zjistit, jestli se v Leeuwenhoekových dopisech objevují tři strategie,, které Shapin a (...) Schaffer přisoudili Robertu Boylovi. Studie potvrzuje, že závěry britských autorů platí i pro jiné vědce. (shrink)

While the claim that certain functional states are sufficient for conscious experience has received substantial critical attention, the claim that functional states are necessary is rarely addressed. Yet the latter claim is perhaps now more common than the former. I aim to revive and revise a neglected argument against the necessity claim, by Michael Antony. The argument involves manipulating a conscious subject's brain so as to cancel a disposition which is supposedly crucial to the realization of an experience that (...) the subject is having at the time. The key step in the argument is to show that, contrary to what the functional necessity claim implies, the experience can survive such a manipulation. I defend that key step in a new way, by arguing that since the manipulation cannot influence the subject's thoughts, emotions, or behavior, there is no reason to suppose that it alters his conscious experience. (shrink)

The central focus of this article is to provide a new “Love Argument” for the necessary truth of the Latin “model” of the doctrine of the Trinity—termed “Latin Trinitarianism”—from an a priori standpoint. This new argument, called the Agápēic Argument, will be formulated in light of the metaphysical notions of a “trope,” introduced by D. C. Williams, and “multiple location,” posited by Antony Eagle, and the ethical concept of agápē, proposed by Alexander Pruss. Doing this will provide a specific (...) argument that provides strong grounds for affirming the necessary truth of the Trinity, without, however, being subject to the primary objections that have been often raised against the existing versions of the argument. (shrink)

The debate over whether ‘fair-play’ can serve as a justification for legal punishment has recently resumed with an exchange between Richard Dagger and Antony Duff. According to the fair-play theorist, criminals deserve punishment for breaking the law because in so doing the criminal upsets a fair distribution of benefits and burdens, and punishment rectifies this unfairness. Critics frequently level two charges against this idea. The first is that it often gives the wrong explanation of what makes crime deserving of (...) punishment, since the wrongfulness of murder is not primarily about unfairness. The second is that it implies that all crimes deserve the same degree of punishment, because all crimes create the same degree of unfairness. These objections are viewed as revealing fatal flaws in the theory. Although Dagger attempts to meet these objections by drawing on political theory, Duff responds that this still draws upon the wrong kind of resources for meeting these objections. This paper argues that these two objections rest on a crucial mistake that has been overlooked by both the defenders and critics of fair-play. This mistake results from failing to distinguish between what justifies punishment as a response to crime (which requires a common element to all crime) and what justifies attaching particular penalties to crimes (which requires making distinctions in the severity of crime). The arguments presented will give reasons to consider fair-play as a viable justification for legal punishment. (shrink)

There has been much recent debate over the meaning of the claim that God is good and loving. Although the participants in this debate strongly disagree over the correct analysis of the claim, there is nonetheless agreement across all parties that there is a single correct analysis. This paper aims to overthrow this consensus, by showing that sentences such as ‘There is a good and loving God’ are often used to express a variety of beliefs with quite different logico-grammatical characteristics. (...) Belief in a good and loving God might range from being an evidentially grounded and empirically falsifiable ontological hypothesis, all the way to being a belief which is both ungrounded and unfalsifiable, and more akin to an attitude than to an hypothesis. The logical variety exhibited by the belief in a good and loving God often gives rise, in turn, to people holding that belief in a way that is indeterminate, mixed, or fluid between those different varieties. That is, someone’s belief in a good and loving God may hover indeterminately between more than one logical variety of the belief; or it may mix together some of the logical characteristics of different varieties of the belief; or it may change from having one logical character to another and perhaps back again. These properties are often masked by the fact that the belief is always expressed by the same sentence regardless of any indeterminacy, mixedness, or fluidity. Though these properties are rarely discussed by analytic philosophers of religion, logico-grammatical variety, indeterminacy, mixedness, and fluidity are pervasive in religious beliefs and utterances, and account for much of those beliefs and utterances' real-life complexity. This paper will make a start at an examination of these important properties by using the belief in a good and loving God as a representative case study. (shrink)