Like David Silver before them, Erik Baldwin and Michael Thune argue that the facts of religious pluralism present an insurmountable challenge to the rationality of basic exclusive religious belief as construed by Reformed Epistemology. I will show that their argument is unsuccessful. First, their claim that the facts of religious pluralism make it necessary for the religious exclusivist to support her exclusive beliefs with significant reasons is one that the reformed epistemologist has the resources to reject. Secondly, they fail to (...) demonstrate that it is impossible for basic religious beliefs to return to their properly basic state after defeaters against them have been defeated. Finally, I consider whether there is perhaps a similar but better argument in the neighbourhood and conclude in the negative. Reformed Epistemology's defence of exclusivism thus remains undefeated. (shrink)

One thing about technical artefacts that needs to be explained is how their physical make-up, or structure, enables them to fulfil the behaviour associated with their function, or, more colloquially, how they work. In this paper I develop an account of such explanations based on the familiar notion of mechanistic explanation. To accomplish this, I outline two explanatory strategies that provide two different types of insight into an artefact’s functioning, and show how human action inevitably plays a role in artefact (...) explanation. I then use my own account to criticize other recent work on mechanistic explanation and conclude with some general implications for the philosophy of explanation.Keywords: Artefact; Technical function; Explanation; Levels of explanation; Mechanisms. (shrink)

An intuitive and widely accepted view is that (a) beliefs aim at truth, (b) many citizens have stable and meaningful political beliefs, and (c) citizens choose to support political candidates or parties on the basis of their political beliefs. We argue that all three claims are false. First, we argue that political beliefs often differ from ordinary world-modelling beliefs because they do not aim at truth. Second, we draw on empirical evidence from political science and psychology to argue that most (...) people lack stable and meaningful political beliefs. Third, we claim that the true psychological basis for voting behavior is not an individual’s political beliefs but rather group identity. Along the way, we reflect on what this means for normative democratic theory. (shrink)

Technical artifacts have the capacity to fulfill their function in virtue of their physicochemical make-up. An explanation that purports to explicate this relation between artifact function and structure can be called a technological explanation. It might be argued, and Peter Kroes has in fact done so, that there issomething peculiar about technological explanations in that they are intrinsically normative in some sense. Since the notion of artifact function is a normative one an explanation of an artifact’s function must inherit this (...) normativity.In this paper I will resist this conclusion by outlining and defending a ‘buck-passing account’ of the normativity of technological explanations. I will first argue that it is important to distinguish properly between a theory of function ascriptions and an explanation of how a function is realized. The task of the former is to spell out the conditions under which one is justified in ascribing a function to an artifact; the latter should show how the physicochemical make-up of an artifact enables it to fulfill its function. Second, I wish to maintain that a good theory of function ascriptions should account for the normativity of these ascriptions. Provided such a function theory can be formulated — as I think it can — a technological explanation may pass the normativity buck to it. Third, to flesh out these abstract claims, I show how a particular function theory — to wit, the ICE theory by Pieter Vermaas and Wybo Houkes — can be dovetailed smoothly with my own thoughts on technological explanation. (shrink)

The longevity of Aristotelian natural science consists not so much in the fact that Aristotle’s solutions to puzzles were accepted by generations of philosophers, but by the fact that the presuppositions that made these puzzles look puzzling were. In what follows I consider some Neoplatonic responses to two puzzles that Aristotle poses in De Caelo Book 2, Chapter 12. Both Proclus and Simplicius rejected Aristotle’s solutions to the puzzles he posed. In one case, but not in the other, they also (...) reassessed the relative importance of the presuppositions that created the puzzle. (shrink)

Gegen die verbreitete Vorstellung, dass Negativität im Interesse von mehr Selbstverwirklichung, Produktivität und Positivität überwunden oder be-grenzt werden muss, eröffnet dieser Band eine andere Perspektive. Er geht den verschiedenen Formen des Negativen in Kunst, Recht und Politik nach, um zu zeigen, dass es nicht allein eine Negativität gibt, die dem Gelingen im Weg steht oder zu dessen sicher beherrschtem Mittel wird. Die Beiträge des Bandes erweisen Negativität vielmehr als eine Kraft der Befreiung, die ein Gelingen anderer Art ermöglicht.

Die biomedizinische Forschung hat ein Kommunikationsproblem. Um die Ergebnisse ihrer Arbeit darzustellen, greifen einzelne Forschergruppen auf unterschiedliche und oft inkompatible Terminologien zurück. Für den Fortschritt der modernen Biomedizin ist die Integration dieser Ergebnisse jedoch unabdingbar.

Die vorliegende Publikation dient als Grundlage für die interdisziplinäre Entwicklung einer Zertifizierung von Künstlicher Intelligenz. Angesichts der rasanten Entwicklung von Künstlicher Intelligenz mit disruptiven und nachhaltigen Folgen für Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Alltagsleben verdeutlicht sie, dass sich die hieraus ergebenden Herausforderungen nur im interdisziplinären Dialog von Informatik, Rechtswissenschaften, Philosophie und Ethik bewältigen lassen. Als Ergebnis dieses interdisziplinären Austauschs definiert sie zudem sechs KI-spezifische Handlungsfelder für den vertrauensvollen Einsatz von Künstlicher Intelligenz: Sie umfassen Fairness, Transparenz, Autonomie und Kontrolle, Datenschutz sowie Sicherheit und (...) Verlässlichkeit und adressieren dabei ethische und rechtliche Anforderungen. Letztere werden mit dem Ziel der Operationalisierbarkeit weiter konkretisiert. (shrink)

Was ist Natur oder was könnte sie sein? Diese und weitere Fragen sind grundlegend für Naturdenken und -handeln. Das Lehr- und Studienbuch bietet eine historisch-systematische und zugleich praxisbezogene Einführung in die Naturphilosophie mit ihren wichtigsten Begriffen. Es nimmt den pluralen Charakter der Wahrnehmung von Natur in den philosophischen Blick und ist auch zum Selbststudium bestens geeignet.

At the heart of Mizrahi’s project lies a sociological narrative concerning the recent history of philosophers’ negative attitudes towards scientism. Critics (e.g. de Ridder (2019), Wilson (2019) and Bryant (2020)), have detected various empirical inadequacies in Mizrahi’s methodology for discussing these attitudes. Bryant (2020) points out one of the main pertinent methodological deficiencies here, namely that the mere appearance of the word ‘scientism’ in a text does not suffice in determining whether the author feels threatened by it. Not all (...) philosophers use the term in ‘inherently negative’ (29) or pejorative ways. In this paper, I not only corroborate Bryant’s critical claim, but argue that Mizrahi’s response to this part of Bryant’s objection is inadequate. (shrink)

The insightful commentaries to our contribution "Education as the Social Cultivation of Intellectual Virtue" (in 'Social Virtue Epistemology', (eds.) M. Alfano, C. Klein & J. de Ridder, Routledge 2022) offered by Alessandra Tanesini and Lani Watson highlight some important aspects of the work that philosophers, education theorists, and educators should carry out to strengthen the theoretical and practical advantages of the educational approach we have proposed. This commentary briefly addresses a few points that could set the grounds for future (...) investigations on intellectual virtue-based approaches to education and their social dimensions. (shrink)

Response to Steven Bland’s ‘Interactionism, Debiasing, and the Division of Epistemic Labour’ (in Social Virtue Epistemology, (eds.) M. Alfano, C. Klein & J. de Ridder). Biased cognition is an obvious source of epistemic vice, but there is some controversy about whether cognitive biases generate reliabilist or responsibilist epistemic vices. Bland’s argument, in a nutshell, is that since the development of cognitive biases is due to the interplay of internal psychological processes and external (i.e., environmental) conditions, it cannot be expected (...) that a solution to the problem tackles only one of these dimensions. We argue that the complex architecture on which Bland’s coordinated approach is grounded appears to lose some stability once we analyze more closely its pillars. We shall concentrate our attention on the notion of reliabilist and responsibilist epistemic virtues that the approach should foster as well as on the educational implications of Bland’s view. (shrink)

An operational approach to quantum mechanics has been developed in the past decades in our group in Brussels. A similar approach is taken in this work, making use of the extra operational depth offered by this approach, to show that the construction of spacetime is specific to each observer. What is usually referred to as the block universe then emerges by noting that parts of the past and future are also contained in the present, but without the limitations that a (...) four-dimensional block universe usually implies, of a reality in which change would be impossible. In our operational approach, reality remains dynamic, with free choice playing a central role in its conceptualization. We also show that, when operationally analyzed, the theory implies that objects move not only in space, but also and especially in time, and more generally in spacetime, with their rest mass being a measure of their kinetic time energy. We therefore claim that Einstein’s relativity revolution has not been fully realized, since most physicists are not ready to accept these consequences of the theory although the formula’s showing them, when operationally analyzed, are in every relativity textbook. In particular, when relativistic motion is revisited as a genuine four-dimensional motion, it becomes possible to reinterpret the parameter c associated with the coordinate speed of light, which becomes the magnitude of the four-velocity of all material entities. We observe that this four-dimensional motion in Minkowski space can also be better understood if placed in the broader perspective of quantum mechanics, provided that non-locality is interpreted as non-spatiality, thus indicating the existence of an underlying non-spatial reality, the nature of which could be conceptual, consistent with the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics. This hypothesis is reinforced by noting that when observers, or experiencers, as they will be referred to in this article, are described by acknowledging their cognitive nature of entities moving in a semantic space, Minkowski metric emerges in a natural way. (shrink)

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed (...) asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

How should we account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims? Many philosophers favour an invariantist account on which such contextual variability is due entirely to pragmatic factors, leaving no interesting context-sensitivity in the semantic meaning of ‘know that.’ I reject this invariantist division of labor by arguing that pragmatic invariantists have no principled account of embedded occurrences of ‘S knows/doesn’t know that p’: Occurrences embedded within larger linguistic constructions such as conditional sentences, attitude verbs, expressions of probability, comparatives, and (...) many others, I argue, give rise to a threefold problem of embedded implicatures. (shrink)

Surveys the ideals of friendship in ancient Greco-Roman philosophy. The notion of the best friendship inevitably reflects the various conceptions of a good life.

This has been available under Teaching Materials, but items in that category are not easily located, so I have added it here. This short dialogue can be used to introduce students to the core claims of Stoic moral philosophy and to position Stoic moral philosophy in relation to its ancient alternatives: Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Peripatetic thought. The dialogue form is meant to make this fun and easy. -/- This little dialogue may also be of interest to readers who have encountered (...) various popular books on "How to Stoic". Such readers should know that Stoicism is a school of _philosophy_. The Stoics themselves would not recommend that you try to Stoic Yourself unless and until you were convinced of the _truth_ of the central claims of the school -- a truth that the ancient Stoics sought to establish by _arguments_. To treat Stoicism simply as self-help, without due regard to whether its central claims can be shown to be true, would be to treat those ancient philosophers with contempt. (shrink)

This third and final volume concludes Hermias' commentary on Plato's Phaedrus. Here, Plato delivers a celebrated critique of writing, and its relationship to orality. Hermias follows him, and adds a general account of good writing. In addition, this volume offers the first English translation of the brief Introduction to Hermogenes' On Styles, which manuscripts attribute-probably mistakenly-to Hermias' teacher Syrianus. Baltzly and Share discuss the Introduction's authorship and its relation to the genuine commentaries of Syrianus on the rhetorical treatises of Hermogenes. (...) They illuminate the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in the Neoplatonic schools, and provide a novel explanation of Neoplatonic commentaries as performances of Platonic literacy in ancient elite education. This translation offers novel evidence of interest for students of ancient philosophy, rhetorical education, and literature more broadly. It is accompanied by explanatory notes, an introduction, and scholarly apparatus, including indices, glossaries, and bibliography. (shrink)

The Platonic dialogues contain passages that seem to point in quite opposite directions on the question of the moral equality of women with men. Rep. V defends the view that sexual difference need not be relevant to a person’s capacity for philosophy and thus for virtue. Tim. 42a-c, however, makes incarnation in a female body a punishment for failure to master the challenges of embodiment. This paper examines the different ways in which two subsequent Platonists, Proclus (d. 485 CE) and (...) Theodore of Asine (d. c. 360 CE), dealt with this tension. (shrink)

‘Know-that’, like so many natural language expressions, exhibits patterns of use that provide evidence for its context-sensitivity. A popular family of views – call it prag- matic invariantism – attempts to explain the shifty patterns by appeal to a pragmatic thesis: while the semantic meaning of ‘know-that’ is stable across all contexts of use, sentences of the form ‘S knows [doesn’t know] that p’ can be used to communicate a pragmatic content that depends on the context of use. In this (...) paper, the author argues that pragmatic invariantism makes inaccurate predictions for a wide range of well- known use data and is committed to attributing systematic pragmatic error to ordinary speakers. But pragmatic error is unprecedented, and it is doubtful that speakers are systematically wrong about what they intend to communicate. (shrink)

Mit Beiträgen von Gerhard Vollmer, Dirk Koppelberg, Stephen Stich, W. v. O. Quine, Ansgar Beckermann, Dirk Hartmann und Rainer Lange, Mircea Flonta, Geert Keil, Peter Simons, Andreas Kemmerling, Lynne R. Baker, Holm Tetens und Peter Janich.

Plato’s Phaedrus is a dialogue of journeys, a tale of transitions. It begins with Socrates’ question, ‘Where to and from whence, my dear Phaedrus?’ and concludes with the Socrates’ decision, ‘Let’s go’ (sc. back into the city from whence they’ve come). In the speech that forms its centre-piece Socrates narrates another famous journey—the descent of the soul into the body and its reascent to the realm of Forms through erotic madness. It is not too implausible to suppose that Plato himself (...) saw fit to relate his powerful images of the human soul’s fall and re-ascent by dramatic means that highlight the movement from one place to another. This explains how Hermias of Alexandria -- author of the longest sustained work on the Phaedrus to survive from antiquity related the physical journey to the Ilissus to the soul's descent and ascent. This seemingly implausible allegorising gains a certain kind of sense when we consider that the Neoplatonic commentary tradition formed part of a philosophic way of life with an ethical telos. (shrink)

Lengthy review of the 2020 Brill Companion to Hellenistic Astronomy with special reference to Neoplatonism.

Plato's Tim. 90b1-c6 describes a pathway to the soul's salvation via the study of the heavens. This paper poses three questions about this theme in Platonism: 1. The epistemological question: How is the paradigmatic function of the visible heavenly bodies to be reconciled with various Platonic misgivings about the faculty of perception? 2. The metaphysical question: How can »assimilation« to the motions of bodies in the realm of Becoming provide for the salvation of souls when souls are »higher«- a mid-point (...) between Being and Becoming? 3. The psychological question: What can it mean for an incorporeal soul to utilise the motions of a body for an ethical and cognitive paradigm? And provides an account of how Proclus and some of his fellow Neoplatonists answered these questions. (shrink)

In this paper we look at two kinds of relations that give rise to reasons for action of a distinctive sort: friendship and erotic love. We argue that what is common to these different relations of affection is that the people in them exhibit dispositions toward mutual direction by one another and interpretation of one another (in a sense that we describe in detail below). This mutual responsiveness is, in part, a matter of responding to reasons that arise from the (...) relation of love or friendship. These reasons are frequently distinct from – and may be opposed to – normative reasons arising from prudence or even morality. Yet reasons of love are normative: they too may obligate us. They may make demands on us that conflict with our present desires and require considerable sacrifice. (shrink)

Definida como beleza lógica e forma do paradoxo, a ironia romântica de Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) assimila a antiga ironia socrática e a reinterpreta, inserindo-a como elemento central de sua teorização crítico-literária. O presente artigo analisa a ironia romântica, buscando situar sua alteração e abrangência no final do século XVIII, quando o conceito passa a significar metacrítica, reflexão filosófica, ruptura ficcional, distância estética e forma de exposição da arte literária. Defined as logical beauty and form of paradox, Friedrich Schlegel's (1772-1829) romantic (...) irony incorporates ancient Socratic irony and reinterprets it, inserting it as a nuclear element of his theorization on literary criticism. The current paper analyses the concept of romantic irony seeking to situate its alterations at the end of 18th century, when it changed its meaning for metacritics, philosophical reflexion, fictional rupture, aesthetical distance and form of art exposition. (shrink)

CAVALCANTI NETO, Lamartine de Hollanda. Contributions of Thomistic Psychology to the study of the plasticity of the ethos. 2012. 571s. Thesis (Doctorate in Bioethics) – Centro Universitário São Camilo, São Paulo,2012. If Ethics is not a static science, it is because ethos — its basic object of study — is a mutable reality. For this reason, ethical themes, chiefly those of Bioethics, are directly related to the study of the plasticity of the ethos. Nevertheless, such investigation requires that the researcher (...) distance himself from concrete ethical questions, to apply himself to the theoretical examination of what enables the existence and development of such questions — that is, the aforementioned plasticity. However, bibliographical literature on this subject has revealed a scarcity of works focused specifically on the theme. This scarcity seems to indicate that the subject is still in a process of methodological definition. Therefore, we propose as a research question, to investigate at the theoretical level, if Thomistic Psychology can be considered a valid study tool for the plasticity of ethos. For this aim, we adopt a documental and bibliographical research methodology adapted to the aforesaid question, based on the presupposition that such validity can be gauged to the extent that Thomistic Psychology offers objective contributions to the study of the plasticity of the ethos. Backed by extensive literature, we present an overview of Thomistic Psychology, as well as of ethos and its plasticity. With the data obtained, we establish a discussion with a view to identifying these contributions. Based on the results, we close with a reply, while still open, to our research question, hoping to afford, in this way, a kind of platform on which new studies can be developed with greater facility. (shrink)

In the present volume Proclus comments on the creation of the body of the universe in Plato's Timaeus.

It is widely supposed that Epicurus' identification of aponia (painlessness) and the absence of anxiety (ataraxia) yields as a consequence the claim that the most pleasant life is one that requires little in the way of resources or power. This paper argues that the remarks in Cicero which attempt to reconstruct Epicurus' reasons for thinking that aponia and ataraxia are the limit of pleasure are best interpreted if we suppose that the inference runs the other direction. Epicurus supposed that it (...) was a pre-theoretical constraint on any account of human happiness that it should be natural. Moreover, its naturalness means its in-principle availability to most humans. (shrink)

Debate about cognitive science explanations has been formulated in terms of identifying the proper level(s) of explanation. Views range from reductionist, favoring only neuroscience explanations, to mechanist, favoring the integration of multiple levels, to pluralist, favoring the preservation of even the most general, high-level explanations, such as those provided by embodied or dynamical approaches. In this paper, we challenge this framing. We suggest that these are not different levels of explanation at all but, rather, different styles of explanation that capture (...) different, cross-cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. Which pattern is explanatory depends on both the cognitive phenomenon under investigation and the research interests occasioning the explanation. This reframing changes how we should answer the basic questions of which cognitive science approaches explain and how these explanations relate to one another. On this view, we should expect different approaches to offer independent explanations in terms of their different focal patterns and the value of those explanations to partly derive from the broad patterns they feature. (shrink)

The commentary on Plato's Republic by Proclus (d. 485 CE), which takes the form of a series of essays, is the only sustained treatment of the dialogue to survive from antiquity. This three-volume edition presents the first complete English translation of Proclus' text, together with a general introduction that argues for the unity of Proclus' Commentary and orients the reader to the use which the Neoplatonists made of Plato's Republic in their educational program. Each volume is completed by a Greek (...) word index and an English-Greek glossary that will help non-specialists to track the occurrence of key terms throughout the translated text. The second volume of the edition presents Proclus' essays on the tripartite soul and the virtues, female philosopher rulers, and the metaphysics and epistemology of the central books of the Republic. The longest of the essays in Volume II interprets the nature and significance of the 'marriage number' whose miscalculation leads to the degeneration of the ideal city-state. (shrink)

Later versions of Platonic ethics fit the frame of eudaimonism and specify a telos based on Theaetetus 176B and Timaeus 90A-D: 'likeness to god in so far as possible'. This paper examines the development of this idea from the middle Platonist Alcinous to the Neoplatonist Proclus. It examines the way in which Proclus makes this specification of human happiness a bit less "other worldy".

In previous chapters, it has become clear that Proclus’ metaphysics is often relevant to human life. In this chapter, that relation is elaborated on in detail, starting from the notion of a ‘textual community’. In the first section, the author presents the Neoplatonic goal of human life, assimilation to the divine. In the second section, he elaborates the scale of virtues through which, according to Proclus, one may reach that assimilation. The third section is devoted to establishing the interesting hypothesis (...) that the philosophical curriculum was in fact considered a mystagogy, aimed at internalizing semantic associations and thereby acquiring the different virtues. In the last section the author turns to Proclus’ political philosophy, and specifically the analogical relation between the philosopher-ruler and the demiurge. (shrink)

In Plato’s dialogues we often find Socrates talking at length about poetry. Sometimes he proposes censorship of certain works because what they say is false or harmful. Other times we find him interpreting the poets or rejecting potential interpretations of them. This raises the question of whether there is any consistent account to be given of Socrates’ practice as a literary critic. One might think that Plato himself in the Ion answers the question that I have raised. Rhapsody, at least (...) in the Ion , is portrayed as the activity of interpreting and evaluating the works of the poets. At first glance at least, Plato seems to conclude that this activity cannot meet the standards of a τέχνη. Rhapsodes are divine madmen. Thus, there cannot be a systematic Platonic account of literary criticism because this activity is inherently irrational and, subsequently, not something that one could engage in in a systematic way, guided by a theory of any sort. In the first part of the paper I argue that the Ion does not simply consign the Interpretation of poetry to the irrational and, as a result, does not pose an obstacle to the possibility of a Platonic literary criticism. In the second part of the paper I turn to the task of finding an account of the purpose of reading poetry and strategies for fulfilling this purpose that make systematic sense of Socrates’ multifarious remarks about poetry. (shrink)

It is an axiom of late neoplatonic metaphysics that all things are in all, but in each in an appropriate manner (ὀικείως, ET 103). These manners or modes of being are indicated by adverbial forms such as παραδειματικῶς or εἰκονικῶς. Thus, for example, the Forms are in the World Soul in the mode of images, while the objects in the sensible realm below Soul are in it in the manner of paradigms (in Tim. II 150.27). Among the many modes of (...) being distinguished by Proclus we find existence ὁλικῶς and μερικῶς – in the manner of a whole and in the manner of a part. This paper investigates the nature and significance of these mereological modes of being. (shrink)

The idea that there is a coherent and morally relevant concept of sexual perversions has been increasingly called into question. In what follows, I will be concerned with two recent attacks on the notion of sexual perversion: those of Graham Priest and Igor Primoratz. Priest’s paper is the deeper of the two. Primoratz goes methodically through various accounts of sexual perversion and finds difficulties in them. This is no small task, of course, but unlike Priest he does not attempt to (...) provide any diagnosis of why any attempt to analyse the concept of sexual perversion must fail. Priest argues that sexual perversion is an “inapplicable concept”: the presuppositions that would allow us to make sense of the notion have been rightly rejected. Without the theoretical backdrop of an Aristotelian moral teleology, we cannot provide a satisfactory account of sexual perversion, for only such a teleological world-view allows us to give some sense to the idea that a sexual practice might be morally wrong because it is unnatural. Priest surveys accounts of perversion that don’t appeal to any idea of unnaturalness and rejects them—rightly I believe. But, Priest argues, Aristotle’s own moral teleology is part and parcel of his wider views about purpose in nature. This natural teleology has been shown to be explanatorily superfluous. Though some sciences still talk of functions, this can be understood in terms of contributions to evolutionary survival. Though there is considerable disagreement about the details of the right account of function, all versions of this scientifically respectable teleology are morally neutral: it would not follow from the fact that homosexual intercourse does nothing to propagate the agents’ genetic material to future generations that it is therefore morally wrong. Here too I think Priest is right. He also considers what he calls “Aristotelian revivalism” in Roger Scruton’s account of sexual perversion. I think Priest sells Aristotelianism short. I have no interest in defending Scruton’s own understanding of the Aristotelian moral framework nor his particular account of sexual perversion. I shall, however, argue that Aristotelian moral philosophy provides a more useful framework for thinking about these issues than Priest implies, and attempt to defend an account of sexual perversion within the context of this framework. (shrink)

We argue that lack of direct and conscious control is not, in principle, a reason to be afraid of machines in general and robots in particular: in order to articulate the ethical and political risks of increasing automation one must, therefore, tackle the difficult task of precisely delineating the theoretical and practical limits of sustainable delegation to robots.

The author puts forward and defends a new argument for indirect realism called the argument from pain. The argument is akin to a well-known traditional argument to the same end, the argument from hallucination. Like the latter, it contains one premise stating an analogy between veridical perceptions and certain other states and one premise stating that those states are states of acquaintance with sense-data. The crucial difference is that the states that are said to be analogous to veridical perceptions are (...) pain-states instead of hallucinations. This difference makes the argument from pain immune to the standard objections against the argument from hallucination. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Frege’s argument against the relativity of truth contained in his posthumous writing Logic from 1897. Two points are made. The first is that the argument is a performative version of the common objection that truth relativism is incoherent: it is designed to show that the assertion of the relativity of truth involves a performative incoherence, because the absoluteness of truth is a success condition for making assertions. From a modern point of view, (...) the central premise of the argument, that the successful making of assertions depends on the absoluteness of truth, is highly doubtful. The second point is that this premise can be made plausible within the framework of Frege’s conception of truth and assertion: it can be derived from his thesis that, in order to put something forward as true, we do not need the word ‘true’, but only the assertoric force. (shrink)

In his book, "Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge" (2011), John McDowell advocates that the warrant provided by perception is infallible. For such, it is necessary to understand the role reason plays in the constitution of genuine perceptual states. Based on reason, we situate these states in the logical space of reasoning. So, we not only make the perceptual state into an episode of knowledge, but we also acquire knowledge of how we arrived to that knowledge. McDowell argues that this (...) condition for knowledge - the possession of the capacity to situate a perceptual state in the logical space of reasoning - does not commit him to intellectualism. In this paper, I defend that McDowell's internalism is not entirely exempt from intellectualism, and that internalism is more reasonable not only without intellectualism, but also without reflexivity. (shrink)

Na era das tecnologias digitais, entender vieses algorítmicos por meio das teorias da verdade ajuda a fazer perguntas cujas respostas facilitam a filtragem da informação de forma mais eficaz. O ganho é a compreensão aprofundada da realidade.

Translation and commentary on the only surviving sustained work on Plato's Phaedrus from antiquity.

The paper offers a running commentary on ps-Archytas’ On Intellect and Sense Perception (composed ca. 80 BCE), with the aim to provide a clear description of Hellenistic/post-Hellenistic Pythagorean epistemology. Through an analysis of the process of knowledge and of the faculties that this involves, ps-Archytas presents an original epistemological theory which, although grounded in Aristotelian and Platonic theories, results in a peculiar Pythagorean criteriology that accounts for the acquisition and production of knowledge, as well as for the specific competences of (...) each cognitive faculty. (shrink)

In his commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Alexander of Aphrodisias quotes from Aristotle's now-lost work On the Ideas -- his account of the arguments offered by Plato for the theory of Forms and his criticisms of those arguments. This paper considers one of these arguments, the Argument from Relatives (ta pros ti). It considers how Plato argued for Forms or Ideas such as the Large Itself, the Just Itself and so on and whether Plato supposed that there were Forms corresponding to (...) sortal terms like Man. (shrink)

Covers Essays 1 to 6 in Proclus' Commentary and includes a general introduction to the work as a whole.

Proclus' commentary on Plato's dialogue Timaeus is arguably the most important commentary on a text of Plato, offering unparalleled insights into eight centuries of Platonic interpretation. It has had an enormous influence on subsequent Plato scholarship. This edition offers the first new English translation of the work for nearly two centuries, building on significant recent advances in scholarship on Neoplatonic commentators. It provides an invaluable record of early interpretations of Plato's dialogue, while also presenting Proclus' own views on the meaning (...) and significance of Platonic philosophy. The present volume, the fifth in the edition, presents Proclus' commentary on the Timaeus, dealing with Proclus' account of static and flowing time; we see Proclus situating Plato's account of the motions of the stars and planets in relation to the astronomical theories of his day. The volume includes a substantial introduction, as well as notes that will shed new light on the text. (shrink)

Vehicle externalism maintains that the vehicles of our mental representations can be located outside of the head, that is, they need not be instantiated by neurons located inside the brain of the cogniser. But some disagree, insisting that ‘non-derived’, or ‘original’, content is the mark of the cognitive and that only biologically instantiated representational vehicles can have non-derived content, while the contents of all extra-neural representational vehicles are derived and thus lie outside the scope of the cognitive. In this paper (...) we develop one aspect of Menary’s vehicle externalist theory of cognitive integration—the process of enculturation—to respond to this longstanding objection. We offer examples of how expert mathematicians introduce new symbols to represent new mathematical possibilities that are not yet understood, and we argue that these new symbols have genuine non-derived content, that is, content that is not dependent on an act of interpretation by a cognitive agent and that does not derive from conventional associations, as many linguistic representations do. (shrink)

During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality,” this (...) roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations using examples from their own research. The conversation then progresses to how these researchers have employed contemporary theories, conceptual vocabularies, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres to then conclude with some ethico-political notes about collaborations between scholars and (digital) activists. (shrink)