The authors of the book have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to effectively use modern approaches to developing and implementation strategies of sustainable socio-economic development in order to increase efficiency and competitiveness of economic entities. Basic research focuses on economic diagnostics of socio-economic potential and financial results of economic entities, transition period in the economy of individual countries and ensuring their competitiveness, assessment of educational processes and knowledge management. The research results have been implemented in the different (...) models and strategies of supply and logistics management, development of non-profit organizations, competitiveness of tourism and transport, financing strategies for small and medium-sized enterprises, cross-border cooperation. The results of the study can be used in decision-making at the level the economic entities in different areas of activity and organizational-legal forms of ownership, ministries and departments that promote of development the economic entities on the basis of models and strategies for sustainable socio-economic development. The results can also be used by students and young scientists in modern concepts and mechanisms for management of sustainable socio-economic development of economic entities in the condition of global economic transformations and challenges. (shrink)

Abstract: The objective of this study was to examine empirically the determinants of job satisfaction levels among community development officer in Oyo State, Nigeria. Due to this, two research questions were formulated and answered. All community development officers across thirty-three local government areas of Oyo state formed the target population. However, fifteen local governments were chosen for the study from the existing number, also, simple random sampling technique which was stratified in nature and operation was used to select seven-hundred and (...) seventy one (771) respondents which cut across three strata (that is three senatorial districts). Structured questionnaire was used to elicit information from the respondents, while descriptive component of statistics was employed to analyse the data generated from the instrument. The empirical findings from demographic attributes of the respondents revealed that the majority of the community development officers participated in the study were female by gender, first degree or Higher National Diploma by qualifications, spent between 4-6 years in service as community development agent, Christian by religious affiliation, and inspector in terms of cadre. Based on the determinants levels of job satisfaction, it was discovered from majority point of view that the current placement in the job, future prospect of the career, availability and accessibility of on-the-job training, favourable working conditions, regular promotion, routine of the job, level of motivation, monthly remuneration among others were some of the determinants of job satisfaction levels among community development officers. The study recommended constant and regular initiation of programmes like on-the-job training, regular payment of wages and salaries, attractive social welfare packages to mention a few for the community development officers regardless of their gender and religious affiliation. (shrink)

Remittances are private financial transfers from migrant workers back to their countries of origin. These are typically intra-household transfers from members of a family who have emigrated to those who have remained behind. The scale of such transfers throughout the world is very large, reaching $338 billion U.S. in 20081—several times the size of overseas development assistance (ODA) and larger even than foreign direct investment (FDI). The data on migration and remittances is too poor to warrant very firm conclusions about (...) their effects—actual or potential—on poverty and development in poorer countries. We will however, present reasons that make it plausible to believe that remittances can contribute to poverty-reduction and promote development in poorer countries. Our main aim, however, is not to engage in detail with empirical debates about the effects of these transfers, but to establish moral grounds for favorable tax treatment on remittances on the assumption that they do have positive effects on receiving countries. (shrink)

Este trabajo despliega la pertenencia “específica” o “más propia” de ciertas maneras del ser (p.e. existencia, ser-a-la-mano) a ciertos entes, tema que Heidegger menciona, pero no profundiza. La exposición se articula en cuatro pasos. Primero, se aclara la confusa con-ceptualidad de las maneras del ser. Segundo, se indaga el vínculo entre las maneras del ser y los entes, considerando a ambos como fenómenos y mostrando en ello la imposibilidad de captar este vínculo y la consecuente pertenencia específica según un “subjetivismo” (...) u “objetivismo”. Tercero, se acredita la propuesta principal de esta investigación, a saber, el rasgo fenoménico, ni subjetivo ni objetivo, de la pertenencia específica de las maneras del ser a los entes y la posibilidad de su modificabilidad. Cuarto, se aborda el existir preteoré-tico del Dasein en cuanto el suelo analítico en que se explicita hermenéutico-fenomenológicamente la pertenencia específica y su modificabilidad. (shrink)

With a Call for Essays, the special issue Multimodality sought contributions that accept not only the material but also the body-bound dependence of media perception and understanding. To this end, contributions were included that shed light on both the structural and signifying potential of artistic works through multimodal analysis. Particular attention was paid to contributions that clarify how the structural features - the modes - of the arts, their perception, and their signifying potential in terms of content are interrelated and (...) how they are to be understood in communicative and thus socioculturally relevant terms. Thus, in addition to neuroscientific contributions, those from cultural anthropology, art history, image and art studies, and literary studies were included. -/- Articles -/- 8 Martina Sauer and Christiane Wagner - Introduction -/- 11 Giada Lombardi and Giuseppe Di Cesare - From Neuroscience to Art: The Role of ‘Vitality Forms’ in the Investigation of Multimodality -/- 25 Martina Sauer - Abstract - Affective – Multimodal: Interaction between Medium and Perception of Moving Images from the Viewpoint of Cassirer’s, Langer’s and Krois’ Embodiment Theories -/- 49 Göran Sonesson - The Secrets of Plastic Language Revealed: Multimodality, Polysemiosis, and Iconicity -/- 71 Natalia Igl - Making Sense of the Material: Multisensory Reader Involvement in Contemporary Multimodal Novels -/- 87 J. Philippe Thompson - Art is All: Proust’s Life Lessons Through Perception and Art -/- 107 Hans Dieter Huber - Philippe Parreno and the Exhibition as a Multimodal Aesthetic Experience -/- 135 Jörg U. Lensing - The Performing Human Being in a Media Interaction Space: Multi- and intermodal productions by the Düsseldorf Theater der Klänge (Theatre of Sounds) . (shrink)

In this reply, I respond to points raised in Christian Kanzian's „Kommentar zu Kathrin Koslickis Form, Matter, Substance” in connection with a book-symposium on _Form, Matter, Substance_ held at the University of Innsbruck in May 2019.

This Essay discusses whether U.S. law is ready for artificial intelligence (“AI”) which is headed down the road of blurring the line between human and machine minds. Perhaps the most high-profile and recent examples of AI are Large Language Models (“LLMs”) such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini that can generate written text, reason and analyze in a manner that seems to mimic human capabilities. U.S. law is based on English common law, which in turn incorporates Christian principles that assume (...) the dominance and uniqueness of humankind. U.S. law assumes human communication skills are accompanied by attributes such as consciousness and Free Will (“FW”) that, in turn, underpin critical legal concepts such as mens rea – i.e., intent. Philosophers and others generally agree that consciousness is necessary for FW. On the assumption that human beings possess consciousness that supports FW, the law thereafter deems human beings capable of acting with legal consequences, from entering into contracts to committing crimes. With a focus on LLMs, the Essay suggests that U.S. law may struggle to respond to AI because the technology disrupts the law’s assumptions regarding the uniqueness of human traits and abilities such as consciousness, FW, written communications and reasoning. (shrink)

The paper aims to show that by abstracting from a specific mythical historical- stylistic context and “ideation” of the notion of the Proto-Slavic deities Perun and Veles, especially in Croatian tradition, symbolic archetypes and abstract notions of form and primordial matter (materia prima) can be extracted from mythical content. We refer to mythical texts and contents according to the reconstructions and materials brought by Radoslav Katičić, and comparative analysis by Mislav Ježić. We distinguish form (1) as that in which identity (...) and possibility of a thing consists, (2) as the reasonableness of judgment and the form of existence, and (3) as the specific structure of a thing, which unites its parts and aspects as a whole and constitutes its internal necessity. These formative notions are relativized and nullified in Veles’ appearances, in which the archetypal notion of primordial matter is encoded. Examples of Platō’s dialogues historically confirm certain aspects of decoding myth as constitutive of philosophy. The above approach also opens a view of the roots of Croatian philosophical thought, which in its genesis can be traced back to Proto-Slavic mythical archetypes. With the implementation of Christianity, the questions of identity, reason and the structure of the whole are raised radically and sharply, as shown by the text of Trpimir’s grant (852). (shrink)

The book Porphyry's Heritage in Bosnia contains three parts: the first part is the introductory study Transformed logos; the second part is the study Bosnia Porphyriana – an outline of development of logic in Bosnia and Herzegovina; the third part is a bilingual (Greek-Bosnian) edition of the famous Porphyry's work Introduction (gr. Eisagoge; lat. Isagoge; arab. إيساغوجي. ). This part is followed by an extensive Commentary of Porphyry's text.

Following the spread of Platonic anthropology, Christianity has started, already since the 2nd century A.D., to be dominated by dualism – a trend undisturbed by somewhat more holistic Thomism, and further strengthened by Cartesianism, which distanced Christian theology and soul even further away from the body. During the 1960s, theologians have become aware of the far more positive and inclusive attitude that the Bible has towards the body. Yet, a century before, the Adventist movement was born in conditionalism such (...) as presented by Hobbes in Leviathan (XLIV). Man does not have a soul; he is a “living soul” – a body vivified by the “breath of life” (Gen 2:7). Without the body, there is no life, nor, consequentially, eternal hell. To this Adventists have also conjoined a philosophy of health reform in which the care of the body has a key role, and upon which depends man’s intellectual and spiritual wellbeing. On this foundation, they have built a rich healthcare and educational practice. This physicalist version of Christian anthropology is a unique worldview contribution to philosophy of the body and a subject worthy of academic attention. (shrink)

Though academic debate over gender-inclusive God-talk seems to have fizzled, the issue is a pressing one within many Christiandenominations today—both within and outside the Church—and for that reason deserves to be briefly revisited. Accordingly, althoughin this essay we approach the issue as professional philosophers, our focus is on the life of the Church—more specifically, those no doubt sizable segments of the Church for which a personal God and Satan exist and evangelism matters. Running an elimination argument, we contend that if (...) a certain sort of feminist concern about traditional God-talk is well-directed, the best response is to speak of not only God but also Satan in both masculine and feminine terms. And in closing, we address the possible worry that this response to the God-talk problem would not be Christian enough. (shrink)

There is much that Christian churches can learn from relevant secularapproaches and adapt to support integration and participation within ourcongregations for adults with impairments. One of these approaches isSocial Role Valorization developed by Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger. In thisapproach, one considers the relevance of image and competency of deval-ued individuals and how these two areas impact access to “the good thingsof life.” This article applies these principles to the inclusion of vulnerablecongregational members into the life of the Christian church, (...) asking thequestion, “What would be better?” as a prompt for those in leadership toreflect on their current practices with an eye toward maturity in their prac-tices as they intersect the lives of devalued people. (shrink)

Heralded as the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison was, besides one of the most influential architects of the U.S. Constitution, a man of letters, a politician, a scientist and a diplomat who left an enduring legacy for American philosophical thought. As a tireless advocate for the ratification of the Constitution, Madison advanced his most groundbreaking ideas in his jointly authoring The Federalist Papers with John Jay and Andrew Hamilton. Indeed, two of his most enduring ideas—the large republic thesis and (...) the argument for government separation-of-powers/checks-and-balances—are contained in there. In his life’s work, Madison fused together the three dominant philosophies in post-revolutionary, antebellum America: Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism and Christian Protestantism. (shrink)

Das Problem, wie der Völkermord an den Juden in der Nazizeit in der SBZ/ DDR behandelt wurde, war Gegenstand zahlreicher wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen von Philologen und Historiken. In den Jahren 1990-2000 wurden die Arbeiten von u.a. Mario Kessler, Michael Wolffsohn, Angelika Timm, Thomas Jung und Ulrike Offenberg veröffentlicht. Die dort formulierten Thesen bilden die Grundlage für diesen Artikel. Er schildert die Lage der jüdischen DDR-Bewohner, die sich nach Kriegsende für das Leben in Deutschland entschieden haben. Es wurde versucht, die Kluft zu (...) veranschaulichen, die zwischen der von der Regierung betriebenen Propaganda und dem ostdeutschen Alltag bestand. Die im Artikel dargestellten politischen und ideologischen Grundlagen des ostdeutschen Staates, wie auch die Realität, in welcher die jüdischen DDR-Bürger gelebt haben, bilden wichtige Kontexte für das Schaffen von Jurek Becker. Die angedeuteten Probleme, die die jüdische Bevölkerung zu bewältigen hatte, wie etwa die Unmöglichkeit der Identitätsfindung in der scheinbar homogenen, in Wirklichkeit jedoch deutlich geteilten ostdeutschen Gesellschaft, kommen hier zur Sprache. Da Becker selbst von diesem Problem betroffen war, inspirierte ihn dies bei der Arbeit an seinen Romanen, Erzählungen und anderen literarischen Texten, die oft autobiographische Züge aufweisen. Dies wurde am Beispiel von Bronsteins Kinder dargestellt. Die existenziellen Probleme der jüdischen Bevölkerung wurden hier in Verbindung mit der Kritik der ostdeutschen Gesellschaft geschildert. (shrink)

Perhaps owing to frictions between his Christological worldview and the dominant secularism of contemporary French thought as taken up in the U.S., and persistent worries about a seeming solipsism in his phenomenology, Michel Henry's innovative contributions to aesthetics have received unfortunately little attention in English. The present investigation addresses both issues simultaneously with a new interpretation of his recently-translated 1996 interview, “Art and Phenomenology.” Inspired by this special issue’s theme, “French Thought in Dialogue,” it emphasizes four levels of dialogue in (...) the interview, as follows: (1) the interview as such, with Brohm; (2) its titular dialogue between art and phenomenology; (3) what I term a “trans-religious” dialogue between Christianity’s Jesus and Nietzsche’s Dionysus; and (4) a related dialogue between painting (Henry’s favored genre) and dance that is “Dionysian” (in Nietzsche’s sense). It concludes with new phenomenological accounts of a literal and a figurative dance, namely the social Latin dance called bachata, and an improvised musical dialogue with the mockingbirds of my hometown. In sum, thanks to Henry’s engagement with various forms of dialogue, including with Brohm, the arts, paganism, and dance, one can find room in his transcendental subjectivity of Life for others, dancingly transcending even humanity. (shrink)

Increased participation in public affairs by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops during the highly contentious 2012 Presidential election has seemingly brought the traditions of Catholic social teaching and socialism into a high profile conflict. While it is clear that President Obama is not what most academics would consider a “socialist,” modern discourse still presents what I argue is a false dichotomy- one can be either endorse natural law (especially of the Catholic variety) or socialism, but not both. While my (...) goal in this article is to refute the alleged incompatibility, not to determine its historical roots, some speculation about its origin may be illuminating. Recent work on religious identity in the United States suggests that Americans largely identify Christianity with the right wing of the American culture war. Additional research is required to fully grasp where this perception comes from, but one can venture several guesses: the rise of the “Christian Right” in Republican Party politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the concept of “social justice” being lampooned by Right-wing talk show hosts, and decades of a Catholic Church that firmly opposed Cold War-era Soviet Communism. The contrast between left-wing and right-wing thought on social issues (same-sex marriage, abortion, etc.) is very well documented and widely discussed. Differences between leftists and natural lawyers on economic issues, however, are more often assumed than argued for. Perhaps this is a matter of “guilt by association,” with those arguing that leftist social policy is at odds with natural law simply assuming that the same must be the case with leftist economic policy as well. Thus, natural law, long tied to Christianity throughout its history, is gratuitously appropriated by right-wing political ideology. Against this claim of incompatibility, I argue that one can rationally hold both socialism and natural law to be true. In his landmark Natural Law and Natural Rights, John Finnis offers what is arguably the twentieth century’s most complete theory of natural law. I will argue that the conception of socialism laid out by G.A. Cohen in hisWhy Not Socialism? is compatible with Finnis’s account of the human goods, and that natural lawyers can therefore reasonably endorse Cohen’s prescription for socialism. (shrink)

The questions that have been looming at the thoughts of many African theologians for years have been: How can the Christian faith be made to be at home in Africa, in such a way that it harmo nizes with African beliefs and practices, thus becoming the religion of the African people? What is the relationship between African traditional religion and culture with the Christian faith? Does being a Christian mean that I should distance myself from m y (...) traditional religious and cultural heritages? It is from this background that Igwebuike theology emerges as an African theology , posting that effort towards evangelization must begin from the understanding of the African worldview and the incorporation of such in the processes of the communication and learning of the Christian faith. This work presented the theology of African typo logy ( u di, meaning type, kind or nature) within the context of Igwebuike theology , with a view to creating a balance in the midst of the conflicts between Christianity and African religion and culture by connecting the events of the New Testament to events and persons in African traditional religion and culture. This connection is such that the events, persons, realities, etc., in African traditional religion and culture find meaning and fulfillment in the New Testament Scriptures. The Igwebuike theology of u di has created an aperture for further dialogue of culture with faith. It provided a deeper meaning and wider capacity for the application of the concept , ‘typology’. It has contributed to the continuous search for better ways of making the Christian fai th feel at home in Africa, and also making it possible for the redemption of the African culture through its interaction with faith. For the purpose of this study, the Igwebuike theoretical framework , which emphasizes beginning from and valuing what is kno wn, and using what is already known as a stepping stone to get to the unknown , was adopted. (shrink)

Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to end the constitutional right to abortion in (...) Dobbs v Jackson is but one instance of this larger pattern. We analyze reproductive and obstetric violence and the structural trauma they produce through the lenses of i) historical continuity and ii) the global architectures of neoliberal settler capitalism in order to connect reproductive rights rollbacks in the U.S. with the expansion of reproductive violence across a world connected by colonial globalization. (shrink)

In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic principles, and construct a definition of causation that satisfies them. We define the concepts of counterfactual dependence and production, and put (...) forward principles such that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, whereas production is an insufficient but necessary condition. The resulting definition of causation is a suitable compromise between dependence and production. Every principle is introduced by means of a paradigmatic example of causation. We illustrate some of the benefits of our approach with two examples that have spelled trouble for other accounts. We make all of this formally precise using structural equations, which we extend with a timing over all events. (shrink)

Mourad Wahba’s Fundamentalism and Secularization was first published in Arabic in Egypt in 1995. By the 1990s, Islamist thought had become hegemonic in Egypt, and it is this cultural context that informs Wahba’s concern with philosophy of culture as applied to the question of fundamentalism and its antagonistic relationship to secularization. As Robert Beshara notes in his interview with Wahba, which serves as a foreword to this new translation, the book was ahead of its time insofar as it was published (...) before the spate of publications on fundamentalism in the aftermath of the events of September 11th 2001, and it clearly predicted the coming clash of fundamentalisms which would go on to shape the first decade of the third millennium, namely, the clash between right-wing Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. on the one hand, and expressions of Islamic fundamentalism on the other. Wahba also rejects the framing of the conflict as a conflict of civilizations. For Wahba, there is in fact strictly speaking only one human civilization and many cultures (x). Wahba defines civilization as ‘a tiered singularity, the course of which goes from mythical thinking to rational thinking’ (32). It seems here that Wahba, in attempting to undermine the thesis of the clash of civilizations, ends up reintroducing an evolutionist account of a singular human civilization, akin to those endorsed by Victorian British anthropologists of the nineteenth century. -/- The first chapter deals with fundamentalism both historically and conceptually. On the conceptual level, Wahba argues that we can understand fundamentalism as essentially driven by the human propensity for unity, which for Wahba is essentially a yearning for the Absolute (7). According to Wahba, this is how humans attempt to overcome their alienation from the world. However, the problem is that absolutes seem to multiply as a function of time, and we do not have context-independent criteria which would allow us to decide between competing claims for opposing absolutes. For Wahba, the solution is to simply give up on the search for absolutes and to endorse a kind of relativism. However, it is important to recognize that for Wahba relativism does not imply that ‘anything goes.’ Wahba thinks of relativism in negative terms, i.e. simply as the rejection of the thesis that knowledge claims can ever be of an absolute, context-independent nature. What is especially interesting is that Wahba presents himself as a proponent of the Enlightenment qua universal project. However, unlike many participants in the contemporary ‘culture wars’ of the U.S., he seems to think that commitment to the Enlightenment project with its attendant secularization entails a commitment to the rejection of absolutism in epistemology. The commitment to relativism as defined above is presented by him as a requirement of enlightened rationality and not as a product of its rejection. (shrink)

The counterfactual tradition to defining actual causation has come a long way since Lewis started it off. However there are still important open problems that need to be solved. One of them is the (in)transitivity of causation. Endorsing transitivity was a major source of trouble for the approach taken by Lewis, which is why currently most approaches reject it. But transitivity has never lost its appeal, and there is a large literature devoted to understanding why this is so. Starting from (...) a survey of this work, we will develop a formal analysis of transitivity and the problems it poses for causation. This analysis provides us with a sufficient condition for causation to be transitive, a sufficient condition for dependence to be necessary for causation, and several characterisations of the transitivity of dependence. Finally, we show how this analysis leads naturally to several conditions a definition of causation should satisfy, and use those to suggest a new definition of causation. (shrink)

The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that (...) it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI. (shrink)

Andreas & Günther have recently proposed a difference-making definition of actual causation. In this paper I show that there exist conclusive counterexamples to their definition, by which I mean examples that are unacceptable to everyone, including AG. Concretely, I show that their definition allows c to cause e even when c is not a causal ancestor of e. I then proceed to identify their non-standard definition of causal models as the source of the problem, and argue that there is no (...) viable strategy open to AG to fixing it. I conclude that their definition of causation is damaged beyond repair. (shrink)

We articulate a distinction between ontology, understood as involving existence questions, and metaphysics, understood as either providing for metaphysical profiles of entities or else as dealing with fundamentality and/or grounding and dependence questions. The distinction, we argue, allows a better understanding of the roles of metaontology and metametaphysics when it comes to discussing the relations between ontology and science on the one hand, and metaphysics and science on the other. We argue that while ontology, as understood in this paper, may (...) have reasonable perspectives for naturalization, given its relation to science, the same cannot be said for metaphysics, given that it is typically understood as an additional theoretical layer over science, not participating in the scientific investigation. That may result either in skepticism over metaphysics, or else on accepting that metaphysics is an autonomous branch of investigation, depending on one’s concern for metaphysics. (shrink)

Scientific realism is typically associated with metaphysics. One current incarnation of such an association concerns the requirement of a metaphysical characterization of the entities one is being a realist about. This is sometimes called “Chakravartty’s Challenge”, and codifies the claim that without a metaphysical characterization, one does not have a clear picture of the realistic commitments one is engaged with. The required connection between metaphysics and science naturally raises the question of whether such a demand is appropriately fulfilled, and how (...) metaphysics engages with science in order to produce what is called “scientific metaphysics”. Here, we map some of the options available in the literature, generating a conceptual spectrum according to how each view approximates science and metaphysics. This is done with the purpose of enlightening the current debate on the possibility of epistemic warrant that science could grant to such a metaphysics, and how different positions differently address the thorny issue concerning such a warrant. (shrink)

Nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (QM) works perfectly well for all practical purposes. Once one admits, however, that a successful scientific theory is supposed not only to make predictions but also to tell us a story about the world in which we live, a philosophical problem emerges: in the specific case of QM, it is not possible to associate with the theory a unique scientific image of the world; there are several images. The fact that the theory may be compatible with distinct (...) ontologies, and that those ontologies may themselves be associated with a plurality of metaphysical approaches, gives rise to the problem of metaphysical underdetermination. This paper concludes that the available metametaphysical criteria fail to deliver objectivity in theory choice, and it puts forward its own criterion based on a tension between two methods of metaphysical inquiry: one that is closely related to science and another that is not. (shrink)

Sumário: 1. El caso del método científico, Alberto Oliva; 2. Un capítulo de la prehistoria de las ciencias humanas: la defensa por Vico de la tópica, Jorge Alberto Molina; 3. La figura de lo cognoscible y los mundos, Pablo Vélez León; 4. Lebenswelt de Husserl y las neurociencias, Vanessa Fontana; 5. El uso estético del concepto de mundos posibles, Jairo Dias Carvalho; 6. Realismo normativo no naturalista y mundos morales imposibles, Alcino Eduardo Bonella; 7. En la lógica de pragmatismo, Hércules (...) de Araujo Feitosa, Luiz Henrique da Cruz Silvestrini; 8 La lógica, el tiempo y el lenguaje natural: un sistema formal para tiempos de portugués, Carlos Luciano Manholi. / Temas em filosofia contemporânea II / Jonas Rafael Becker Arenhart, Jaimir Conte, Cezar Augusto Mortari (orgs.) – Florianópolis : NEL/UFSC, 2016. 167 p. : tabs. - (Rumos da epistemologia ; v. 14); ISBN 978-85-87253-27-9 (papel); ISBN 978-85-87253-26-2 (e-book). (shrink)

We discuss some methodological aspects of the relation between physics and metaphysics by dealing specifically with the case of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Our main claim is that current attempts to productively integrate quantum mechanics and metaphysics are best seen as approaches of what should be called ‘the metaphysics of science’, which is developed by applying already existing metaphysical concepts to scientific theories. We argue that, in this perspective, metaphysics must be understood as an autonomous discipline. It results that this metaphysics (...) cannot hope to derive any kind of justification from science. Thus, one of the main motivations of such project, which is the obtaining of a scientifically respectable justification for the attribution of a single true metaphysical profile to the posits of a scientific theory, is doomed because of the emergence of metaphysical underdetermination from the outset. If metaphysics floats free from physics, which is a premise of such project of integration between these two areas, then it is always possible to attribute more than one metaphysical profile to dress physical entities. (shrink)

Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have entirely (...) disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind. (shrink)

Across various fields it is argued that the self in part consists of an autobiographical self-narrative and that the self-narrative has an impact on agential behavior. Similarly, within action theory, it is claimed that the intentional structure of coherent long-term action is divided into a hierarchy of distal, proximal, and motor intentions. However, the concrete mechanisms for how narratives and distal intentions are generated and impact action is rarely fleshed out concretely. We here demonstrate how narratives and distal intentions can (...) be generated within cognitive agents and how they can impact agential behavior over long time scales. We integrate narratives and distal intentions into the LIDA model,and demonstrate how they can guide agential action in a manner that is consistent with the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. This paper serves both as an addition to the LIDA cognitive architecture and an elucidation of how narratives and distal intention emerge and play their role in cognition and action. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the emerging theory of judgment aggregation as a framework for studying institutional design in social epistemology. When a group or collective organization is given an epistemic task, its performance may depend on its ‘aggregation procedure’, i.e. its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ individual beliefs or judgments into corresponding collective beliefs or judgments endorsed by the group as a whole. I argue that a group’s aggregation procedure plays an important role in determining whether the group (...) can meet two challenges: the ‘rationality challenge’ and the ‘knowledge challenge’. The rationality challenge arises when a group is required to endorse consistent beliefs or judgments; the knowledge challenge arises when the group’s beliefs or judgments are required to track certain truths. My discussion seeks to identify those properties of an aggregation procedure that affect a group’s success at meeting each of the two challenges. (shrink)

Quasi-Nelson logic (QNL) was recently introduced as a common generalisation of intuitionistic logic and Nelson's constructive logic with strong negation. Viewed as a substructural logic, QNL is the axiomatic extension of the Full Lambek Calculus with Exchange and Weakening by the Nelson axiom, and its algebraic counterpart is a variety of residuated lattices called quasi-Nelson algebras. Nelson's logic, in turn, may be obtained as the axiomatic extension of QNL by the double negation (or involutivity) axiom, and intuitionistic logic as the (...) extension of QNL by the contraction axiom. A recent series of papers by the author and collaborators initiated the study of fragments of QNL, which correspond to subreducts of quasi-Nelson algebras. In the present paper we focus on fragments that contain the connectives forming a residuated pair (the monoid conjunction and the so-called strong Nelson implication), these being the most interesting ones from a substructural logic perspective. We provide quasi-equational (whenever possible, equational) axiomatisations for the corresponding classes of algebras, obtain twist representations for them, study their congruence properties and take a look at a few notable subvarieties. Our results specialise to the involutive case, yielding characterisations of the corresponding fragments of Nelson's logic and their algebraic counterparts. (shrink)

Can we design a perfect democratic decision procedure? Condorcet famously observed that majority rule, our paradigmatic democratic procedure, has some desirable properties, but sometimes produces inconsistent outcomes. Revisiting Condorcet’s insights in light of recent work on the aggregation of judgments, I show that there is a conflict between three initially plausible requirements of democracy: “robustness to pluralism”, “basic majoritarianism”, and “collective rationality”. For all but the simplest collective decision problems, no decision procedure meets these three requirements at once; at most (...) two can be met together. This “democratic trilemma” raises the question of which requirement to give up. Since different answers correspond to different views about what matters most in a democracy, the trilemma suggests a map of the “logical space” in which different conceptions of democracy are located. It also sharpens our thinking about other impossibility problems of social choice and how to avoid them, by capturing a core structure many of these problems have in common. More broadly, it raises the idea of “cartography of logical space” in relation to contested political concepts. (shrink)

Islamic Law & it's purpose to give directions to human life.

This is an edited transcript of a conversation to be included in the collection "Conversations on Rational Choice". The conversation was conducted in Munich on 7 and 9 February 2016.

An Islamic point of view regarding "fate".

Longtermists claim that what we ought to do is mainly determined by how our actions might affect the very long-run future. A natural objection to longtermism is that these effects may be nearly impossible to predict — perhaps so close to impossible that, despite the astronomical importance of the far future, the expected value of our present actions is mainly determined by near-term considerations. This paper aims to precisify and evaluate one version of this epistemic objection to longtermism. To that (...) end, I develop two simple models for comparing ‘longtermist’ and ‘neartermist’ interventions, incorporating the idea that it is harder to make a predictable difference to the further future. These models yield mixed conclusions: if we simply aim to maximize expected value, and don’t mind premising our choices on minuscule probabilities of astronomical payoffs, the case for longtermism looks robust. But on some prima facie plausible empirical worldviews, the expectational superiority of longtermist interventions depends heavily on these ‘Pascalian’ probabilities. So the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism. (shrink)

The aim of this exploratory paper is to review an under-appreciated parallel between group agency and artificial intelligence. As both phenomena involve non-human goal-directed agents that can make a difference to the social world, they raise some similar moral and regulatory challenges, which require us to rethink some of our anthropocentric moral assumptions. Are humans always responsible for those entities’ actions, or could the entities bear responsibility themselves? Could the entities engage in normative reasoning? Could they even have rights and (...) a moral status? I will tentatively defend the (increasingly widely held) view that, under certain conditions, artificial intelligent systems, like corporate entities, might qualify as responsible moral agents and as holders of limited rights and legal personhood. I will further suggest that regulators should permit the use of autonomous artificial systems in high-stakes settings only if they are engineered to function as moral (not just intentional) agents and/or there is some liability-transfer arrangement in place. I will finally raise the possibility that if artificial systems ever became phenomenally conscious, there might be a case for extending a stronger moral status to them, but argue that, as of now, this remains very hypothetical. (shrink)

The place of scientific expertise in democracy has become increasingly disputed, raising question who ought to have a say in decision-making about science and technology, with what authority, and for what reasons. Public engagement has become a common refrain in technoscientific discussions to address tensions in the rightful roles of experts and the public in democratic decision-making. However, precisely what public engagement entails, who it involves, how it is performed, and to what extent it is desirable for democratic societies remain (...) contested matters. Nevertheless, strong commitments to greater public engagement in the governance of science and technology persist. This essay examines expert discussions about heritable human genome editing beginning from the 2015 International Summit on Human Genome Editing through the controversies surrounding of the first CRISPR-edited humans in late 2018 and the subsequent renewed calls for a moratorium on heritable human genome editing. I examine these discussions as example cases in which the right relations among experts, the public, and technoscientific decision-making are actively reconfigured. I argue that rather than expanding the range of included stakeholders, public engagement serves as an enabling handservant of technocracy that reinforces the position of scientific experts in decision-making as both epistemic and normative authorities. (shrink)

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent (...) and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality. (shrink)

It is often argued that higher-level special-science properties cannot be causally efficacious since the lower-level physical properties on which they supervene are doing all the causal work. This claim is usually derived from an exclusion principle stating that if a higher-level property F supervenes on a physical property F* that is causally sufficient for a property G, then F cannot cause G. We employ an account of causation as difference-making to show that the truth or falsity of this principle is (...) a contingent matter and derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which a version of it holds. We argue that one important instance of the principle, far from undermining non-reductive physicalism, actually supports the causal autonomy of certain higher-level properties. (shrink)

Suppose that the members of a group each hold a rational set of judgments on some interconnected questions, and imagine that the group itself has to form a collective, rational set of judgments on those questions. How should it go about dealing with this task? We argue that the question raised is subject to a difficulty that has recently been noticed in discussion of the doctrinal paradox in jurisprudence. And we show that there is a general impossibility theorem that that (...) difficulty illustrates. Our paper describes this impossibility result and provides an exploration of its significance. The result naturally invites comparison with Kenneth Arrow's famous theorem (Arrow, 1963 and 1984; Sen, 1970) and we elaborate that comparison in a companion paper (List and Pettit, 2002). The paper is in four sections. The first section documents the need for various groups to aggregate its members' judgments; the second presents the discursive paradox; the third gives an informal statement of the more general impossibility result; the formal proof is presented in an appendix. The fourth section, finally, discusses some escape routes from that impossibility. (shrink)

This paper argues that influential Mahāyāna ethicists, such as Śāntideva, who allow for moral rules to be proscribed under the expediency of a compassionate aim, seriously compromise the very notion of moral responsibility. The central thesis is that moral responsibility is intelligible only in relation to conceptions of freedom and human dignity that reflect a participation in, and sharing of, interpersonal relationships. The central thesis of the paper is that revisionary strategies, which seek to explain agency in event-causal terms, set (...) the stage for moral epiphenomenalism. On the view I defend here, an effective compatibilist solution to the problem of reconciling freedom of the will and determinism depends on expanding, rather than eliminating, the complex register of factors that underpin the experiential aspects of our moral life. (shrink)

This paper sketches a new and somewhat heterodox metaphysical theory of consciousness: the “many-worlds theory”. It drops the assumption that all conscious subjects’ experiences are features of one and the same world and instead associates different subjects with different “first-personally centred worlds”. We can think of these as distinct “first-personal realizers” of a shared “third-personal world”, where the latter is supervenient, in a sense to be explained. This is combined with a form of modal realism, according to which different subjects’ (...) first-personally centred worlds are all real, though only one of them is present for each subject. The theory offers a novel way of capturing the irreducibly subjective nature of conscious experience without lapsing into solipsism. The paper also looks at some scientific theories of consciousness, such as integrated information theory, through the proposed lens and reconsiders the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

Humean reductionism about laws of nature appears to leave a central aspect of scientific practice unmotivated: If the world’s fundamental structure is exhausted by the actual distribution of non-modal properties and the laws of nature are merely efficient summaries of this distribution, then why does science posit laws that cover a wide range of non-actual circumstances? In this paper, we develop a new version of the Humean best systems account of laws based on the idea that laws need to organize (...) information in a way that maximizes their cognitive usefulness for creature like us. We argue that this account motivates scientific practice because the laws’ applicability to non-actual circumstances falls right out of their cognitive usefulness. (shrink)

This paper generalises the classical Condorcet jury theorem from majority voting over two options to plurality voting over multiple options. The paper further discusses the debate between epistemic and procedural democracy and situates its formal results in that debate. The paper finally compares a number of different social choice procedures for many-option choices in terms of their epistemic merits. An appendix explores the implications of some of the present mathematical results for the question of how probable majority cycles (as in (...) Condorcet's paradox) are in large electorates. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...) what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? (4) Can the relationship between normative and non-normative domains be viewed as one involving levels? Although I use the terminology of “levels”, the proposed framework can also represent “scales”, “domains”, or “subject matters”, where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. (shrink)

Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...) individual-level descriptions do not always capture all explanatorily salient properties, and (ii) nonreductionistic explanations are mandated when social regularities are robust to changes in their individual-level realization. We characterize the dividing line between phenomena requiring nonreductionistic explanation and phenomena permitting individualistic explanation and give examples from the study of ethnic conflicts, social-network theory, and international-relations theory. (shrink)

How should you decide what to do when you’re uncertain about basic normative principles? A natural suggestion is to follow some "second-order:" norm: e.g., obey the most probable norm or maximize expected choiceworthiness. But what if you’re uncertain about second-order norms too—must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty appears doomed to a vicious regress. This paper aims to rescue second-order norms from the threat of regress. I first elaborate and defend the claim (...) some philosophers have made that the regress problem forces us to accept normative externalism, the view that at least one norm is incumbent on all agents regardless of their normative beliefs. But, I then argue, we need not accept externalism about first-order norms, thus closing off any question of how agents should respond to normative uncertainty. Rather, we can head off the threat of regress by ascribing external force to a single second-order norm: the enkratic principle. (shrink)

We offer a new argument for the claim that there can be non-degenerate objective chance (“true randomness”) in a deterministic world. Using a formal model of the relationship between different levels of description of a system, we show how objective chance at a higher level can coexist with its absence at a lower level. Unlike previous arguments for the level-specificity of chance, our argument shows, in a precise sense, that higher-level chance does not collapse into epistemic probability, despite higher-level properties (...) supervening on lower-level ones. We show that the distinction between objective chance and epistemic probability can be drawn, and operationalized, at every level of description. There is, therefore, not a single distinction between objective and epistemic probability, but a family of such distinctions. (shrink)