Many philosophers of science believe that empirical psychology can contribute little to the philosophical investigation of explanations. They take this to be shown by the fact that certain explanations fail to elicit any relevant psychological events (e.g., familiarity, insight, intelligibility, etc.). We report results from a study suggesting that, at least among those with extensive science training, a capacity to render an event intelligible is considered a requirement for explanation. We also investigate for whom explanations must be capable of rendering (...) events intelligible and whether or not accuracy is also viewed as a requirement. (shrink)

Ölümcül Hastalık Umutsuzluk adlı eserinde umutsuzluğu, ben’in bir hastalığı ve kendine yönelen bir ilişkinin sonucu olarak ele alan Danimarkalı filozof Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, bu hastalığın kişide üç farklı şekilde görülebileceğini öne sürmüştür: “(a) bir ben’i olduğunun farkında olmayan umutsuz kişi, (b) kendisi olmak isteyen umutsuz kişi ve (c) kendisi olmak istemeyen umutsuz kişi.” Kierkegaard’a göre kendi ben’ininden kurtulmak isteyen kişi, “olmak istediği ben” hâline gelemediği için olduğu ben’ine katlanamamakta ve bu nedenle umutsuzluk yaşamaktadır. Bu çalışma kapsamında Kierkegaard’ın benlik ve umutsuzluk (...) ilişkisi üzerine yaptığı bu tespitin, sosyal psikoloji alanının önde gelen araştırmacılarından biri olan Edward Tory Higgins’ın Benlik Uyuşmazlıkları Kuramı üzerinden okunabileceği öngörülmektedir. Higgins, geliştirdiği kuramda çoklu bir benlik ayrımına gitmekte ve benliği gerçek benlik, ideal benlik ve olması gereken benlik olmak üzere üç alana ayırmaktadır. Bu ayrıma göre gerçek benlik, kişinin sahip olduğunu düşündüğü özelliklerin; ideal benlik, kişinin kendisi olmak için idealde sahip olmayı arzu ettiği özelliklerin; olması gereken benlik ise kişinin taşımak zorunda olduğunu düşündüğü özelliklerin bir bütününü temsil etmektedir. Söz konusu özellikler, kişinin kendi kişisel bakış açısına dayalı olabileceği gibi başkalarının bakış açısından da kaynaklanabilmektedir. Higgins’a göre ikili benlik durumları arasındaki uyuşmazlık (örneğin gerçek benlik-ideal benlik ya da gerçek benlik-olması gereken benlik) kişide, kendi beklentilerini ya da başkalarının beklentilerini karşılamada yetersiz kaldığı yönünde negatif duyuşlar yaratmaktadır. Bu duyuşlar arasında depresyonun bir parçası olan umutsuzluk da yer almaktadır. Şimdiki çalışma Kierkegaard’ın tasvir ettiği “olmak istediği ben hâline gelemediği için olduğu ben’ine katlanamayıp umutsuzluğa yakalanan” kişinin içinde bulunduğu durumu, Higgins’ın öne sürdüğü “gerçek benlik-ideal benlik uyuşmazlığının depresyonla (dolayısıyla umutsuzlukla) ilişkili olabileceği” argümanıyla ilişkili bir biçimde ele almayı ve bu yolla benlik ve umutsuzluk ilişkisini felsefe ve psikoloji disiplinlerinin kesişiminde incelemeyi amaçlamaktadır. (shrink)

According to regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000), when people make decisions with strategies that sustain their regulatory focus orientation, they “feel right” about what they are doing, and this “feeling-right” experience then transfers to subsequent choices, decisions, and evaluations. The present research was designed to link the concept of regulatory fit to functional accounts of counterfactual thinking. In the present study, participants generated counterfactuals about their anagram performance, after which persistence on a second set of anagrams was measured. Under (...) promotion framing (i.e., find 90% or more of all the possible words) upward counterfactual thinking in general elicited larger increases in persistence than did downward counterfactual thinking in general, but under prevention framing (i.e., avoid failing to find 90% or more of all the possible words) upward evaluation (comparing reality to a better reality) elicited larger increases in persistence than did upward reflection (focusing on a better reality), whereas downward reflection (focusing on a worse reality) elicited larger increases in persistence than did downward evaluation (comparing reality to a worse reality). In all, the present findings suggest that the generation of counterfactuals enhances the likelihood that individuals will engage in courses of action that fit with their regulatory focus orientation. (shrink)

_La Peste_, originally published in 1947 by the Nobel Prize-winning writer Albert Camus, chronicles the progression of deadly bubonic plague as it spreads through the quarantined Algerian city of Oran. While most discussions of fictional examples within aesthetics are either historical or hypothetical, Camus offers an example of "pestilence fiction." Camus chose fiction to convey facts--about plagues in the past, his own bout with tuberculosis at age seventeen, living under quarantine away from home for several years, and forced separation from (...) his wife who remained in Algiers while he was abroad in Nazi-occupied France. His own lived experiences undergird an imaginative account of shared human realities with which we can identify: vulnerability to the disease, isolation, fear, and finally humanitarianism. _The Plague_ teaches us to neither covet nor expect what we so casually took for granted. This collection of original essays on philosophical themes in _The Plague_ is of special relevance during and in the aftermath of Covid-19 but also provides reflections that will be of lasting value to those interested in this classic work of literature. The novel explores questions of enduring importance. Do we collectively meet the threshold of ethical behavior posed by Camus who wrote, "What's true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves"? Or does the absurd undermine the compassionate? Do "heroes" dutifully fight a plague with "common decency," or does human nature resign itself to the normalization of uncontrollable suffering and death? There are myriad ways to approach the novel and this volume encourages readers to ponder human dilemmas in fictional Oran informed by our current pandemic. Series editor forward by Richard Eldridge. List of Contributors includes Steven G. Kellman, Jane E. Schultz, Andrew Edgar, Kathleen Higgins, Edward B. Weiser, Cynthia A. Freeland, and Margaret E. Gray; see "Introduction" by Peg Brand Weiser below. (shrink)

Edited proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on consciousness held at the University of Cambridge in January 1978. Includes a foreword by Freeman Dyson. Chapter authors: G. Vesey, R.L. Gregory, H.C. Longuet-Higgins, N.K. Humphrey, H.B. Barlow, D.M. MacKay, B.D. Josephson, M. Roth, V.S. Ramachandran, S. Padfield, and (editorial summary only) E. Noakes. A scanned pdf is available from this web site (philpapers.org), while alternative versions more suitable for copying text are available from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245189. -/- Page numbering convention for the pdf (...) version viewed in a pdf viewer is as follows: 'go to page n' accesses the pair of scanned pages 2n and 2n+1. Applicable licence: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. (shrink)

Is any unified theory of brain function possible? Following a line of thought dat- ing back to the early cybernetics (see, e.g., Cordeschi, 2002), Clark (in press) has proposed the action-oriented Hierarchical Predictive Coding (HPC) as the account to be pursued in the effort of gain- ing the “Grand Unified Theory of the Mind”—or “painting the big picture,” as Edelman (2012) put it. Such line of thought is indeed appealing, but to be effectively pursued it should be confronted with experimental (...) findings and explana- tory capabilities (Edelman, 2012). The point we are making in this note is that a brain with predictive capa- bilities is certainly necessary to endow the agent situated in the environment with forethought or foresight, a crucial issue to outline the unified account advocated by Clark. But the capacity for fore- thought is deeply entangled with the capacity for emotions and when emotions are brought into the game, cogni- tive functions become part of a large-scale functional brain network. However, for such complex networks a consistent view of hierarchical organization in large-scale functional networks has yet to emerge (Bressler and Menon, 2010), whilst heterarchical organization is likely to play a strategic role (Berntson et al., 2012). This raises the necessity of a multilevel approach that embraces causal relations across levels of explanation in either direc- tion (bottom–up or top–down), endorsing mutual calibration of constructs across levels (Berntson et al., 2012). Which, in turn, calls for a revised perspective on Marr’s levels of analysis framework (Marr, 1982). In the following we highlight some drawbacks of Clark’s proposal in address- ing the above issues. (shrink)

The paper presents a cognitive, educational and philosophical strategy, sometimes called reconstructionism (as it denotes e orts to reconstruct knowledge and science), proposed by a number of Muslim authors as a proper reaction to modern science. The pre‐modern background for this reaction is highlighted. Two examples are given: the Islamic science idea by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and the Islamization of knowledge project by Ismail Raji al‐Faruqi. Their critique of Euro‐Atlantic science is based on its perceived e ects on society and (...) morality (secularization, imperialism and colonialism, cruelty towards labora‐ tory animals, etc.) as well as on tawhid, the Islamic idea of unity. Their main postulates are to stop calling modern science objective and universal because this is a purely Western product; to produce an alternative indigenous science; to make science conform with Islamic doctrine and ethics; to reintroduce holism and sapiential aspects of knowledge into science. Critical voices, both Muslim and non‐Muslim, are quoted. All in all, reconstructionism is evaluated as a movement understandable to some extent but ine cient and idiosyncratic, unable to start objective and interesting research programmes on its own. (shrink)

Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education presents what the late Lawrence Kohlberg regarded as the definitive statement of his educational theory. Addressing the sociology and social psychology of schooling, the authors propose that school culture become the center of moral education and research. They discuss how schools can develop as just and cohesive communities by involving students in democracy, and they focus on the moral decisions teachers and students face as they democratically resolve problems. As the authors put it: "...we (...) propose an educational renewal of our democratic society.... We have attempted to establish schools that do more than just teach about democratic citizenship, that are themselves democratic societies.". (shrink)

‘I know his name.’ ‘I know something about him.’ ‘I know him.’ Consider how these uses of ‘know’ differ. The first two instances of know, seem to point to knowledge about something. Yet in the latter claim, the subject of the assertion is not a singular fact, but another person. I call these knowledge claims interpersonal knowledge. In the following paper, I provide an account for these interpersonal knowledge claims which employs the Conversational Contextualist view of language by synthesizing Allan (...) Gibbard’s Norm-Expressivist account for ‘good’ with an account of knowledge based in social epistemology. Under my theory ‘knowing someone claims’ amount to endorsements of our beliefs; as such, there is no truth-apt interpersonal knowledge. What is occurring is a self-assessment of our relationship to another person, based on our non-cognitive attitude towards the fact that we should know them. Therefore interpersonal knowledge claims are self-affirmations that assert we are doing what we believe we should, in an attempt to embody our perceived relationship with another person. -/- . (shrink)

This paper argues that the relevant unit of analysis for assessing the justice of an immigration policy is the socially-situated individual (as opposed to the individual simpliciter or the nation-state, for example). This methodological principle is demonstrated indirectly by showing how some liberal, cosmopolitan defenses of "open borders" and the alleged right of immigration fail by their own standards, owing to the implicit adoption of an inappropriate unit of analysis.

Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author finds most salient but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several thousand obituaries. Geography, gender, (...) and elite status all turn out to be associated with the virtues and values associated with the deceased. (shrink)

While many bibliometric techniques have been employed to represent the structure of academic research communities over the years, much of this work has been conducted on scientific fields as opposed to those in the humanities. Here we use graphing techniques to present two networks that allow us to explore the structure of a subset of the philosophy community by mapping the citations between philosophical texts on the topic of ontology (the study of what exists). We find a citation gap between (...) philosophers studying material and abstract objects, and between analytic and continental ontologists, but other predictions were not confirmed by this method. We conclude by considering several additional methods for further exploring both the structure of philosophy and other disciplines in the humanities. (shrink)

This paper argues that participating exclusively or predominantly in heterosexual romantic or sexual relationships is prima facie morally impermissible. It holds that this conclusion follows from three premises: (1) gender norms are on-balance harmful; (2) conforming to harmful social norms is prima facie morally impermissible; and (3) participating exclusively or predominantly in heterosexual romantic or sexual relationships is a way of conforming to gender norms.

A large portion of normative philosophical thought on immigration seeks to address the question “What policies for admitting and excluding foreigners may states justly adopt?” This question places normative philosophical discussions of immigration within the boundaries of political philosophy, whose concern is the moral assessment of social institutions. Several recent contributions to normative philosophical thought on immigration propose to answer this question, but adopt methods of reasoning about possible answers that might be taken to suggest that normative philosophical inquiry about (...) immigration belongs to the field of ethics, whose concern is the moral assessment of individual action and character. This paper focuses particularly on recent work by Christopher Heath Wellman and Kieran Oberman, both of whom attempt to derive conclusions about the justice of aspects of states’ immigrant admissions policies from answers to the question “Is it morally permissible for person P to migrate internationally?” I argue in this paper that such individualist ethical approaches to normative philosophical reasoning about states’ immigration policies obscure factors consideration of which is indispensable for assessing their justice, producing misguided policy recommendations. These factors include the global structural causes of international migration, and the role wealthy receiving countries of the global North play in shaping these causes – factors that are better appreciated by political philosophy than by ethics, given the respective objects of concern of each. (shrink)

Invoking three desiderata (empirical adequacy, conceptual precision, and sensitivity to social positioning), this paper argues that poverty is best understood as the deprivation of certain human capabilities. It defends this way of conceiving of poverty against standard alternatives: lack of income, lack of resources, inequality, and social exclusion.

The turn of the nineteenth century marked a rich and exciting explosion of philosophical energy and talent. The enormity of the revolution set off in philosophy by Immanuel Kant was comparable, in Kant's own estimation, with the Copernican Revolution that ended the Middle Ages. The movement he set in motion, the fast-moving and often cantankerous dialectic of "German Idealism," inspired some of the most creative philosophers in modern times: including G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer as well as those (...) who reacted against Kant--Marx and Kierkegaard, for example. This volume traces the emergence of German Idealism from Kant and his predecessors through the first half of the nineteenth century, ending with the irrationalism of Kierkegaard. It provides a broad, scholarly introduction to this period for students of philosophy and related disciplines, as well as some original interpretations of these authors. Also included is a glossary of technical terms as well as a chronological table of philosophical, scientific and other important cultural events. (shrink)

Progress in philosophy is difficult to achieve because our methods are evidentially and rhetorically weak. In the last two decades, experimental philosophers have begun to employ the methods of the social sciences to address philosophical questions. However, the adequacy of these methods has been called into question by repeated failures of replication. Experimental philosophers need to incorporate more robust methods to achieve a multi-modal perspective. In this chapter, we describe and showcase cutting-edge methods for data-mining and visualization. Big data is (...) a useful investigatory tool for moral psychology, and it fits well with the Ramsification method the first author advances in a series of recent papers. The guiding insight of these papers is that we can infer the meaning and structure of concepts from patterns of assertions and inferential associations in natural language. (shrink)

Whatever its ultimate philosophical merits, it is often thought that the growing block theory presents an intuitive picture of reality that accords well with our pre-reflective or folk view of time, and of the past, present, and future. This is partly motivated by the idea that we find it intuitive that, in some sense, the future is open and the past closed, and that the growing block theory is particularly well suited to accommodate this being so. In this paper, we (...) empirically investigate three claims. First, that people's intuitive or pre-reflective sense that the future is open is at least partly captured by there being truth-gaps for future contingents: what we call alethic openness. Second, that people, perhaps tacitly, believe that the fact that the future is alethically open is a reason to endorse the growing block theory; and third, that part of what explains why people tend to naively represent our world as a growing block is that they represent the future as alethically open. We found evidence in support of the first two claims. We consider the implications of these findings for several debates in the philosophy of time. (shrink)

Digital humanities research has developed haphazardly, with substantive contributions in some disciplines and only superficial uses in others. It has made almost no inroads in philosophy; for example, of the nearly two million articles, chapters, and books housed at philpapers.org, only sixteen pop up when one searches for ‘digital humanities’. In order to make progress in this field, we demonstrate that a hypothesis-driven method, applied by experts in data-collection, -aggregation, -analysis, and -visualization, yields philosophical fruits. “Call no one happy until (...) they are dead.” “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” These ancient norms still inform how we speak of the dead. From their beginnings in the nineteenth century, modern obituaries have been both practical and honorary. They are written with two aims: to pay respect to the deceased and to inspire the living to follow in their footsteps. The obituary of William Custis of Virginia exemplifies these aims, say that “it is due to his memory publicly to record his virtues,” and that “There is in the life a noble, independent and honest man, something so worthy of imitation, something that so strongly commends itself to the approbation of the virtuous mind, that his name should not be left to oblivion” (Daily National Intelligencer, 18 November 1838). Likewise, philosophers have emphasized that we can determine what counts as a virtue for a given type of person in a given community by analyzing what people say about the dead (Zagzebski, L. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 135). By adhering to norms of praise, admiration, and respect, obituaries reveal what counts as a virtue, value, or constituent of wellbeing (VVC) for a particular type of person in a particular community. -/- One way to explore this insight would be to close-read a small number of obituaries of people from intersecting demographics, crossing dimensions such as gender, age, race, class, educational attainment, veteran status, religion, and location. Another, which we demonstrate in this chapter, is to harness digital humanities resources to distance-read a much larger number of obituaries, extracting both demographic meta-data and first-order content expressive of VVC. We then analyze and visualize this information to establish the structures of VVC associated with different types of people in different communities, arguing that data-science measures such as eigenvector centrality can be used to identify cardinal virtues. We also explain the rudiments of our text- and meta-data mining, our method of aggregating and comparing texts, and our visualization techniques. In so doing, we pave the way for researchers in philosophy and related fields to generate similar analyses and visualizations. (shrink)

Present-bias is the preference, all else being equal, for positive events to be located in the present rather than the non-present, and for negative events to be located in the non-present rather than the present. Very little attention has been given to present-bias in the contemporary literature on time biases. This may be because it is often assumed that present-bias is not a distinctive psychological kind; that what explains people’s being present-biased is just what explains them displaying various other time-biases. (...) According to this view, there is no need to investigate present-bias independently of investigating these other biases, since present-bias is really just a manifestation of these other biases. We call this the manifestation thesis. We take up the question of whether the manifestation thesis is true, and argue that it is not. Thus, by failing to investigate present-bias in its own right we are failing fully to understand the spectrum of ways in which people display time biases. In turn, we suggest, this may have implications for the ways we evaluate whether present-bias is rationally permissible. (shrink)

In this article, we propose the Fair Priority Model for COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and emphasize three fundamental values we believe should be considered when distributing a COVID-19 vaccine among countries: Benefiting people and limiting harm, prioritizing the disadvantaged, and equal moral concern for all individuals. The Priority Model addresses these values by focusing on mitigating three types of harms caused by COVID-19: death and permanent organ damage, indirect health consequences, such as health care system strain and stress, as well as (...) economic destruction. It proposes proceeding in three phases: the first addresses premature death, the second long-term health issues and economic harms, and the third aims to contain viral transmission fully and restore pre-pandemic activity. -/- To those who may deem an ethical framework irrelevant because of the belief that many countries will pursue "vaccine nationalism," we argue such a framework still has broad relevance. Reasonable national partiality would permit countries to focus on vaccine distribution within their borders up until the rate of transmission is below 1, at which point there would not be sufficient vaccine-preventable harm to justify retaining a vaccine. When a government reaches the limit of national partiality, it should release vaccines for other countries. -/- We also argue against two other recent proposals. Distributing a vaccine proportional to a country's population mistakenly assumes that equality requires treating differently situated countries identically. Prioritizing countries according to the number of front-line health care workers, the proportion of the population over 65, and the number of people with comorbidities within each country may exacerbate disadvantage and end up giving the vaccine in large part to wealthy nations. (shrink)

There is wide support in logic, philosophy, and psychology for the hypothesis that the probability of the indicative conditional of natural language, P(if A then B), is the conditional probability of B given A, P(B|A). We identify a conditional which is such that P(if A then B)=P(B|A) with de Finetti's conditional event, B|A. An objection to making this identification in the past was that it appeared unclear how to form compounds and iterations of conditional events. In this paper, we illustrate (...) how to overcome this objection with a probabilistic analysis, based on coherence, of these compounds and iterations. We interpret the compounds and iterations as conditional random quantities which, given some logical dependencies, may reduce to conditional events. We show how the inference to B|A from A and B can be extended to compounds and iterations of both conditional events and biconditional events. Moreover, we determine the respective uncertainty propagation rules. Finally, we make some comments on extending our analysis to counterfactuals. (shrink)

Science communication via testimony requires a certain level of trust. But in the context of ideologically-entangled scientific issues, trust is in short supply—particularly when the issues are politically ‘entangled’. In such cases, cultural values are better predictors than scientific literacy for whether agents trust the publicly-directed claims of the scientific community. In this paper, we argue that a common way of thinking about scientific literacy—as knowledge of particular scientific facts or concepts—ought to give way to a second-order understanding of science (...) as a process as a more important notion for the public’s trust of science. (shrink)

The scientific community, we hold, often provides society with knowledge—that the HIV virus causes AIDS, that anthropogenic climate change is underway, that the MMR vaccine is safe. Some deny that we have this knowledge, however, and work to undermine it in others. It has been common to refer to such agents as “denialists”. At first glance, then, denialism appears to be a form of skepticism. But while we know that various denialist strategies for suppressing belief are generally effective, little is (...) known about which strategies are most effective. We see this as an important first step toward their remediation. This paper leverages the approximate comparison to various forms of philosophical skepticism to design an experimental test of the efficacy of four broad strategies of denial at suppressing belief in specific scientific claims. Our results suggest that assertive strategies are more effective at suppressing belief than questioning strategies. (shrink)

Predication is an indisputable part of our linguistic behavior. By contrast, the metaphysics of predication has been a matter of dispute ever since antiquity. According to Plato—or at least Platonism, the view that goes by Plato’s name in contemporary philosophy—the truths expressed by predications such as “Socrates is wise” are true because there is a subject of predication (e.g., Socrates), there is an abstract property or universal (e.g., wisdom), and the subject exemplifies the property.1 This view is supposed to be (...) general, applying to all predications, whether the subject of predication is a person, a planet, or a property.2 Despite the controversy surrounding the metaphysics of predication, many theistic philosophers—including the majority of contemporary analytic theists—regard Platonism as extremely attractive. At the same time, however, such philosophers are also commonly attracted to a form of traditional theism that has at its core the thesis that God is an absolutely independent.. (shrink)

Conceptualism is the view that at least some perceptual representation is conceptual. This paper considers a prominent recent argument against Conceptualism due to Ned Block. Block’s argument appeals to patterns of color representation in infants, alleging that infants exhibit categorical perception of color while failing to deploy concepts of color categories. Accordingly, the perceptual representation of color categories in infancy must be non-conceptual. This argument is distinctive insofar as it threatens not only the view that all perception is conceptual, but (...) also views that restrict the Conceptualist thesis to perceptual categorization. However, I contend that it fails at two stages. Block’s arguments for the perceptual representation of color categories in infancy, and against color concept deployment in infancy, are unpersuasive. Thus, Block has not vanquished Conceptualism. I draw out implications for debates about the perception-cognition border and for the question of whether explicit categorization occurs in perception. (shrink)

We model scientific theories as Bayesian networks. Nodes carry credences and function as abstract representations of propositions within the structure. Directed links carry conditional probabilities and represent connections between those propositions. Updating is Bayesian across the network as a whole. The impact of evidence at one point within a scientific theory can have a very different impact on the network than does evidence of the same strength at a different point. A Bayesian model allows us to envisage and analyze the (...) differential impact of evidence and credence change at different points within a single network and across different theoretical structures. (shrink)

A pecuária brasileira tem destaque acentuado quanto a sua participação no produto interno Bruto nacional (PIB), entretanto, dentro da cadeia produtiva das proteínas de origem animal, a ovinocultura ainda se apresenta como uma atividade com pouca expressividade e tecnificação frente a outras espécies animais domésticas, desta forma seu fomento e próspero desenvolvimento é dependente de inúmeros fatores, sendo que destes o correto manejo reprodutivo de espécies , a escolha de raças autóctones ou do exterior com boa adaptabilidade para serem criadas (...) em regiões de clima tropical e subtropical encontrados no Brasil e a correta seleção quanto a características reprodutivas de matrizes e principalmente de jovens carneiros cujos quais se deseja utilizar como reprodutores em rebanhos que buscam a constante evolução produtiva se faz muito importante. Tal cenário traz à tona a importância da realização de estudos referentes a suplementação de elementos como vitaminas e microminerais, que embora não sejam os maiores constituintes das dietas ofertadas aos animais de interesse zootécnico, exercem grande influência não só no crescimento e desenvolvimento do tecido muscular como também podem estar positivamente correlacionados quanto aos aspectos reprodutivos . O presente trabalho objetivou a avaliação da qualidade seminal e morfometria testicular de carneiros púberes submetidos a suplementação injetável de minerais e vitaminas, sendo utilizados 30 reprodutores divididos em três grupos de dez animais cada, com delineamento dos grupos inteiramente casualizado. Ao primeiro grupo foi administrada suplementação vitamínica e mineral (Grupo VM), no segundo grupo houve apenas suplementação vitamínica (Grupo VIT) e no terceiro grupo a suplementação mineral (Grupo MIN). No presente trabalho buscou-se avaliar os efeitos da aplicação de complexo vitamínico e mineral sobre a qualidade do sêmen ovino, medidas morfométricas testiculares e alteração nas concentrações dos hormônios cortisol e testosterona. Palavras chave: elementos-traço, hormônios, nutracêutico, ovinos, sêmen -/- Brazilian livestock has a strong emphasis in terms of its participation in the Gross National Product (GDP), however, within the production chain of animal proteins, sheep farming still presents itself as an activity with little expressiveness and technology compared to other domestic animal species. in this way its promotion and development depends on the correct methods, which are the reproductive of sheep species, the choice of indigenous or foreign breeds with good adaptability to be created in tropical and subtropical regions found in Brazil and the correct selection of selected animals and selection of products that are very important for the demand for products of constant breeding. This scenario leads to the development of important studies for the supplementation of such vitamins and trace minerals, which, although not the largest components of diets, exert a great influence not only on the growth of muscle tissues but can also be positively correlated with their reproductive aspects. The present evaluation of seminal quality and testicular morphometric of pubertal animals includes an injectable supplement of vitamins and minerals, using 30 sires distributed in three groups of animals each, with a completely random design of the products. The first supplementary group was given the mineral supplement (VM Group) in the second group only vitamin supplementation (VM Group) and the mineral supplementation group (MIN Group). Key words: nutraceutical, semen, sheep, testosterone, trace elements. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God is an absolutely simple being lacking any distinct metaphysical parts, properties, or constituents. Although this doctrine was once an essential part of traditional philosophical theology, it is now widely rejected as incoherent. In this paper, I develop an interpretation of the doctrine designed to resolve contemporary concerns about its coherence, as well as to show precisely what is required to make sense of divine simplicity.

In 2035 global egg demand will have risen 50% from 1985. Because we are not able to tell in the egg whether it will become a male or female chick, billons of one day-old male chicks will be killed. International research initiatives are underway in this area, and governments encourage the development of an alternative with the goal of eliminating the culling of day-old male chicks. The Netherlands holds an exceptional position in the European egg trade, but is also the (...) only country in the European Union where the downside of the egg sector, the practice of killing day-old male chicks, is a recurrent subject of societal debate. ‘Preventing the killing of young animals’ and ‘in ovo sex determination’ are the two alternative approaches available to solve this problem. It is clear that both approaches solve the problem of killing day-old male chicks, either by keeping them alive or by preventing them from living, but they also raise a lot of new animal welfare-related dilemmas. A thorough analysis was undertaken of these dilemmas and the results are presented in this article. The analysis resulted in an ethical framework based on the two main approaches in bioethics: a consequentialist approach and a deontological approach. This ethical framework was used to develop an online survey administered to ascertain Dutch public opinion about these alternative approaches. The results show that neither alternative will be fully accepted, or accepted by more than half of Dutch society. However, the survey does provide an insight into the motives that are important for people’s choice: food safety and a good treatment of animals. Irrespective of the approach chosen, these values should be safeguarded and communicated clearly. (shrink)

Two systems of belief change based on paraconsistent logics are introduced in this article by means of AGM-like postulates. The first one, AGMp, is defined over any paraconsistent logic which extends classical logic such that the law of excluded middle holds w.r.t. the paraconsistent negation. The second one, AGMo , is specifically designed for paraconsistent logics known as Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs), which have a formal consistency operator that allows to recover all the classical inferences. Besides the three usual (...) operations over belief sets, namely expansion, contraction and revision (which is obtained from contraction by the Levi identity), the underlying paraconsistent logic allows us to define additional operations involving (non-explosive) contradictions. Thus, it is defined external revision (which is obtained from contraction by the reverse Levi identity), consolidation and semi-revision, all of them over belief sets. It is worth noting that the latter operations, introduced by S. Hansson, involve the temporary acceptance of contradictory beliefs, and so they were originally defined only for belief bases. Unlike to previous proposals in the literature, only defined for specific paraconsistent logics, the present approach can be applied to a general class of paraconsistent logics which are supraclassical, thus preserving the spirit of AGM. Moreover, representation theorems w.r.t. constructions based on selection functions are obtained for all the operations. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s concepts shed light on the phenomenon of schizophrenia in at least three different ways: with a view to empathy, scientific explanation, or philosophical clarification. I consider two different “positive” wittgensteinian accounts―Campbell’s idea that delusions involve a mechanism of which different framework propositions are parts, Sass’ proposal that the schizophrenic patient can be described as a solipsist, and a Rhodes’ and Gipp’s account, where epistemic aspects of schizophrenia are explained as failures in the ordinary background of certainties. I argue that (...) none of them amounts to empathic-phenomenological understanding, but they provide examples of how philosophical concepts can contribute to scientific explanation, and to philosophical clarification respectively. (shrink)

Epistemic justifications for democracy have been offered in terms of two different aspects of decision-making: voting and deliberation, or ‘votes’ and ‘talk.’ The Condorcet Jury Theorem is appealed to as a justification in terms votes, and the Hong-Page “Diversity Trumps Ability” result is appealed to as a justification in terms of deliberation. Both of these, however, are most plausibly construed as models of direct democracy, with full and direct participation across the population. In this paper, we explore how these results (...) hold up if we vary the model so as to reflect the more familiar democratic structure of a representative hierarchy. We first recount extant analytic work that shows that representation inevitably weakens the voting results of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, but we question the ability of that result to shine light on real representative systems. We then show that, when we move from votes to talk, as modeled in Hong-Page, representation holds its own and even has a slight edge. (shrink)

Benjamin Libet's empirical challenge to free will has received a great deal of attention and criticism. A standard line of response has emerged that many take to be decisive against Libet's challenge. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that this standard response fails to put the challenge to rest. It fails, in particular, to address a recent follow-up experiment that raises a similar worry about free will (Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). In the second part, (...) however, I will argue that we can altogether avoid Libet-style challenges if we adopt a traditional compatibilist account of free will. In the final section, I will briefly explain why there is good and independent reason to think about free will in this way. (shrink)

COVID-19 often manifests with different outcomes in different patients, highlighting the complexity of the host-pathogen interactions involved in manifestations of the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. In this paper, we propose a set of postulates and a framework for systematically understanding complex molecular host-pathogen interaction networks. Specifically, we first propose four host-pathogen interaction (HPI) postulates as the basis for understanding molecular and cellular host-pathogen interactions and their relations to disease outcomes. These four postulates cover the evolutionary dispositions involved (...) in HPIs, the dynamic nature of HPI outcomes, roles that HPI components may occupy leading to such outcomes, and HPI checkpoints that are critical for specific disease outcomes. Based on these postulates, an HPI Postulate and Ontology (HPIPO) framework is proposed to apply interoperable ontologies to systematically model and represent various granular details and knowledge within the scope of the HPI postulates, in a way that will support AI-ready data standardization, sharing, integration, and analysis. As a demonstration, the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework were applied to study COVID-19 with the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), leading to a novel approach to rational design of drug/vaccine cocktails aimed at interrupting processes occurring at critical host-coronavirus interaction checkpoints. Furthermore, the host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) relevant to COVID-19 were predicted and evaluated based on prior knowledge of curated PPIs and domain-domain interactions, and how such studies can be further explored with the HPI postulates and the HPIPO framework is discussed. (shrink)

The present paper has two, interrelated objectives. The first is to analyze the different senses in which arguments are characterized as persuasive in the extant writings of Sextus Empiricus. The second is to examine the Pyrrhonist’s therapeutic use of arguments in the discussion with his Dogmatic rivals – more precisely, to determine the sense and basis of Sextus’ distinction between therapeutic arguments that appear weighty and therapeutic arguments that appear weak in their persuasiveness.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to discuss some challenging issues concerning Sextus’ works and outlook, and to offer an overview of the influence exerted by Sextan Pyrrhonism on both early modern and contemporary philosophy.

While environmental philosophers have been striving to extend ethics to deal with future generations and nonhuman life forms, very little work has been undertaken to address what is perhaps a more profound deficiency in received ethical doctrines, that they have very little impact on how people live. I explore Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on narratives and traditions and defend a radicalization of his arguments as a direction for making environmental ethics efficacious.

The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as on diseases, in particular on diseases of kidney (...) and skin. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the moral dimensions of gender affirmation. I argue that the moral value of gender affirmation is rooted in what Iris Murdoch called loving attention. Loving attention is central to the moral value of gender affirmation because such affirmation is otherwise too fragile or insincere to have such value. Moral reasons to engage in acts that gender affirm derive from the commitment to give and express loving attention to trans people as a way of challenging their (...) marginalization. In the latter part of the paper, I will discuss how my arguments bear on recent arguments by Robin Dembroff and Daniel Wodak (2018) on the use of gender-neutral language. They argue that we have a duty not to use gender-specific pronouns for anyone. Their conclusion turns, in part, on a rejection of gender affirmation as a moral duty. The value of gender affirmation, rooted in our moral perception of trans people, should make us skeptical of this conclusion, in favor of a more nuanced and pluralistic approach to the ethics of gendering. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS) .

Shedding light on the political power and oppressive potential of language, theories of illocutionary silencing and discursive injustice show how gender, class and race can shape the pragmatics of speech, limiting in some circumstances the speaker’s ability to do things with her words. This article takes a close look at discursive injustice in trials for gender-based violence in connection with the phenomenon of misogyny. It argues that in the courtroom the testimony of the complainant is sometimes silenced by a sexist (...) ideology used in service of misogynistic ends. In particular, it argues that sexist social meanings can sometimes be enacted by the judge and accommodated by prosecutors, figuring as a component of the score in the language game of the trial and thus 1) determining what counts as sexual violence and 2) preventing complainants from making the moves they intend to make. (shrink)

De uma perspectiva comportamentalista radical, o eu é um repertório verbal complexo, que, como tal, tem uma gênese social. O reconhecimento da origem social do “eu” abre caminho para uma análise política, incluindo uma discussão do pa- pel das relações de poder na constituição do eu. Entretanto, uma concepção radicalmente social do “eu”, como a proposta pelo comportamentalismo, suscita um problema político: se o eu é integralmente produto do ambiente social, de onde viria uma eventual “vontade” de romper com esse (...) sistema? Parece que para reconhecer a possibilidade de ação política transformadora seria preciso preservar uma noção descontextualizada de “eu”. Considerando essa dificuldade, o objetivo deste artigo é propor uma interpretação política da constituição do “eu” no âmbito do comportamentalismo radical, mantendo no horizonte a possibilidade de uma ação política transformadora. Para tanto, destacamos como “eus” oprimidos são tornados submissos, mas também como de certas contingências podem emergir “eus” subversivos, que se opõem a um sistema social opressivo. Esse “eu” subversivo é caracterizado por um repertório de autoconhecimento mais amplo, que inclui a discriminação do papel das relações de poder e do controle promovido por instituições. Concluímos, com isso, que um “eu” socialmente constituído pode ser politicamente ativo. (shrink)

This study investigated the effectiveness of utilizing induced magnetism on the seed germination of radish (Raphanussativus) in terms of growth rate, growth speed, shoot growth, and overall development. This study utilized two groups that consisted of an experimental group where induced magnetism was present one control group where there was an absence of induced magnetism in the seed germination of Radish (Raphanus sativus). Moreover, this study aimed to determine the significant difference between the two in terms growth rate, growth speed, (...) shoot growth, and overall development. Both groups had the same amount of radish (Raphanus sativus) seeds planted in a rectangular wooden container with the same amount of measurement and soil content. This study used an experimental research design by utilizing the functions of an Electromagnetic Induction Device (EID) comprised of a 12v motor battery, light bulb, coiled wire, and switch. The EID was turned on for 10 minutes every day where the electric volts generated by the 12v motor battery were transported through the coiled wire and distributed to the metallic iron screen surrounding the area of the experimental group. The data gathered during the 12-day observation of the growth of radish (Raphanus sativus) were tabulated, analyzed, and evaluated using mean tests, standard deviation, and T-test. Based on the result and analyses of the gathered data, it was found that the experimental group, the one with the presence of induced magnetism, surpassed the control group in terms of growth speed, shoot growth, and overall seed development. However, it was also revealed that in terms of growth rate, there is no significant difference between the control group and experimental group. Therefore, the utilization of Induced Magnetism on the seed germination of radish (Raphanus sativus) is effective in terms of growth speed, shoot growth, and overall development. (shrink)

Resumo: A crise na União Europeia e os programas de austeridade subsequentes fizeram emergir uma miríade de movimentos sociais, diversos na sua natureza e nos seus propósitos. O que se pretende aferir neste artigo é a relação e a conexão existentes entre o Estado, o poder económico, a sociedade civil e os movimentos sociais neste contexto específico de crise. Procuraremos, nesta breve abordagem, explanar alguns elementos de originalidade intrínsecos aos movimentos sociais hodiernos, patentes na sua forma de participação e organização, (...) assim como aplicar estas questões teóricas relevantes ao contexto português. A parte empírica, dada a escassez de estudos de caso existentes, será apoiada no último inquérito do European Social Survey, de 2012. Analisando um conjunto de perguntas aí explícitas, podemos compreender, de forma indirecta, algumas das dinâmicas que caracterizam estes movimentos. Abstract: The crisis in the European Union and the subsequent austerity programs have unleashed a myriad of social movements, diverse in its nature and purpose. The purpose of this paper is to assess the relationship and connection between the State, economic power, civil society and social movements in this specific context of crisis. We will try, in this brief approach, to explain some elements of originality intrinsic to modern social movements, evident in their form of participation and organization, as well as to apply these theoretical questions relevant to the Portuguese context. The empirical part, given the paucity of existing case studies, will be supported in the last survey of the European Social Survey of 2012. By analyzing a set of questions explicit there, we can, indirectly, understand some of the dynamics that characterize these movements. (shrink)

O presente trabalho visa apresentar a solução dada por Santo Agostinho ao problema do mal, aliado à aparente contraditoriedade entre a presciência de Deus e a liberdade humana. Para isto, será útil como bibliografia principal do filósofo sua obra De libero arbitrio, um livro em forma de diálogo onde o pensador esclarece suas posições acerca do livre-arbítrio e da presciência divina.

International human rights law is profoundly oxymoronic. Certain well-known international treaties claim a universal character for human rights, but international tribunals often interpret and enforce these either narrowly or, if widely, they rely upon sovereign states to enforce the rights against themselves. International lawyers and diplomats have usually tried to resolve the apparent contradiction by pressing for more general rules in the form of treaties, legal doctrines, and institutional procedures. Despite such efforts, aliens remain who are neither legal nor illegal (...) and who thereby slip through a discourse that claims universality. I ask, why does international legal discourse claim a universality of human rights enforceable by impartial, politically neutral tribunals when it also recognises that a state may refuse to recognise some groups as “persons”? I turn to the works of Bernhard Waldenfels for an explanation. To that end, I briefly outline two examples of state-centered human rights treaties. I then reconstruct Waldenfels’ explanation as to how a territorial sense of space needs an alien exterior to the space. The territorial structure assumes time is frozen as of the date of the foundation of the structure. The body of the alien is taken as a biological body. The personality, motives, and actions of the alien are the consequence of the imagination of people inside the territorial boundary. The dominant international legal discourse reinforces and institutionalises such a territorial sense of space and frozen time because the territorial state is considered the primary legal subject of international law. I also retrieve, however, an experiential but concealed sense of space and time. To retrieve this sense of space and time requires that lawyers see the world through the twilight of legality heretofore ignored as pre-legal. (shrink)