Propositional dynamic logic is complete but not compact. As a consequence, strong completeness requires an infinitary proof system. In this paper, we present a short proof for strong completeness of $$\mathsf{PDL}$$ relative to an infinitary proof system containing the rule from [α; β n ]φ for all $$n \in {\mathbb{N}}$$, conclude $$[\alpha;\beta^*] \varphi$$. The proof uses a universal canonical model, and it is generalized to other modal logics with infinitary proof rules, such as epistemic knowledge with common knowledge. Also, we (...) show that the universal canonical model of $$\mathsf{PDL}$$ lacks the property of modal harmony, the analogue of the Truth lemma for modal operators. (shrink)

Computational Functionalism is a subfield of philosophy of mind most relevant to the subject of cognitive science as well as to artificial intelligence (AI). The analysis of this paper focuses on Hilary Putnam’s and Gualtiero Piccinini’s standpoints regarding the molecular understanding of computation. Finally, Putnam’s argument of the functionalism in notion of the mental states is based on the positive definition of those states by their functions, while Piccinini, and on the other hand suggest that an understanding of the mechanism (...) of computation will go a long way to explaining cognition. This research also points out shortcomings of functionalism in their theories especially in regards to connectivity with physicality of AI structures. Therefore, the paper identifies the following gaps: The first gap holds that although both theorists have important insights, the two approaches put forward by the respective theorists are flawed and a better proposal is required, then a new proposal is suggested In identifying these gaps, the paper seeks to contribute to the literature by arguing for the need to develop a composite of the two theorists. The results show that the big ideas are important in present-day AI debate and analysis, which helps to explain the mind as computation. (shrink)

This introduction to the Journal of Business Research special issue on anti-consumption briefly defines and highlights the importance of anticonsumption research, provides an overview of the latest studies in the area, and suggests an agenda for future research on anti-consumption.

How are causal judgements such as 'The ice on the road caused the traffic accident' connected with counterfactual judgements such as 'If there had not been any ice on the road, the traffic accident would not have happened'? This volume throws new light on this question by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches to causation and counterfactuals. Traditionally, philosophers have primarily been interested in connections between causal and counterfactual claims on the level of meaning or truth-conditions. More (...) recently, however, they have also increasingly turned their attention to psychological connections between causal and counterfactual understanding or reasoning. At the same time, there has been a surge in interest in empirical work on causal and counterfactual cognition amongst developmental, cognitive, and social psychologists--much of it inspired by work in philosophy. In this volume, twelve original contributions from leading philosophers and psychologists explore in detail what bearing empirical findings might have on philosophical concerns about counterfactuals and causation, and how, in turn, work in philosophy might help clarify the issues at stake in empirical work on the cognitive underpinnings of, and relationships between, causal and counterfactual thought. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

The article addresses the treatment given to the notion of subject in Slavoj Žižek and Robert Kurz. Without aiming at a synthesis between the two radically opposed positions, they are played against one another in order to reveal the unidimensional stances and false steps in the field of the constitution of the struggle for a concrete negation of capitalist society.

Since the advent of computers, humans have pursued automata with superior information-processing capabilities. In the endeavor to create new entities that converge toward intellectual functions, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) that emulate AI surpassing ourselves has become a reality. With the intelligence explosion triggered by AI and the consequent emergence of superintelligence, the improvement of simulation capabilities accelerates. As this surpasses humans’ discriminative perceptual abilities between reality and unreality, a paradox arises wherein, from a modern scientific standpoint, science (...) becomes unscientific. It is thought that as our controllability over the reality we perceive is ultimately enhanced by superintelligence, even whether we ourselves exist, what happiness is, what ethics are, and whether concepts themselves ever existed become matters of uncertainty. -/- Note: In the creation of this paper, we have undertaken all writing ourselves and have not used generative AI for text generation except for translation purposes. (shrink)

Este trabajo examina la educación pública chilena desde la perspectiva de la ontología social. En primer lugar, se exponen brevemente elementos de la teoría de la realidad social para dar sentido a la tesis que se defiende: la educación pública es institución para instituciones. En la segunda parte se muestra de qué forma la educación pública es una instancia preparatoria para navegar en la realidad social. Y lo es porque enseña a posponer deseos personales en aras del servicio, tal como (...) acontece en la Educación pública chilena: constituye la esencia de la racionalidad institucional. En la última parte del ensayo se examina una experiencia histórico-paradigmática de dicha educación, la del Instituto Nacional. La formación en dicho liceo de numerosos presidentes, ministros de Estado, además de profesionales, científicos y humanistas, confirma que la educación pública es institución para instituciones. (shrink)

The essay investigates the question of the transition from a physiological view of anthropology to one ‘from a pragmatic point of view’ in the work of Immanuel Kant. The concepts this thinking hinges on are those of ‘prudence’ and ‘character’, which are crucial for the break that Kant’s anthropological thought represents with that of earlier and later philosophy.

The philosophy of science of Patrick Suppes is centered on two important notions that are part of the title of his recent book (Suppes 2002): Representation and Invariance. Representation is important because when we embrace a theory we implicitly choose a way to represent the phenomenon we are studying. Invariance is important because, since invariants are the only things that are constant in a theory, in a way they give the “objective” meaning of that theory. Every scientific theory gives a (...) representation of a class of structures and studies the invariant properties holding in that class of structures. In Suppes’ view, the best way to define this class of structures is via axiomatization. This is because a class of structures is given by a definition, and this same definition establishes which are the properties that a single structure must possess in order to belong to the class. These properties correspond to the axioms of a logical theory. In Suppes’ view, the best way to characterize a scientific structure is by giving a representation theorem for its models and singling out the invariants in the structure. Thus, we can say that the philosophy of science of Patrick Suppes consists in the application of the axiomatic method to scientific disciplines. What I want to argue in this paper is that this application of the axiomatic method is also at the basis of a new approach that is being increasingly applied to the study of computer science and information systems, namely the approach of formal ontologies. The main task of an ontology is that of making explicit the conceptual structure underlying a certain domain. By “making explicit the conceptual structure” we mean singling out the most basic entities populating the domain and writing axioms expressing the main properties of these primitives and the relations holding among them. So, in both cases, the axiomatization is the main tool used to characterize the object of inquiry, being this object scientific theories (in Suppes’ approach), or information systems (for formal ontologies). In the following section I will present the view of Patrick Suppes on the philosophy of science and the axiomatic method, in section 3 I will survey the theoretical issues underlying the work that is being done in formal ontologies and in section 4 I will draw a comparison of these two approaches and explore similarities and differences between them. (shrink)

This essay aims at an analysis of Stumpf’s doctrine of categories. In Erkenntnislehre Stumpf argues that all categories empirically stem from outer and inner perception. Although Stumpf champions an empiricist explanation of the matter, he firmly rejects associationism. In his conception of the origin of categories, including substance, Stumpf builds on the assumption that human perception behaves dynamically. Sensory experience consists indeed essentially of perceptual wholes. The analysis of Stumpf’s theses is of great importance for our thorough understanding of his (...) philosophy. His theory regarding this crucial philosophical topic diverges considerably from Brentano’s. (shrink)

This essay explores the inherent blankness of life, describing it as devoid of fixed meaning, purpose, or morality. It discusses how humans struggle with this blankness, often attempting to avoid or fill it through various activities and pursuits. The essay distinguishes between natural biological activities and those driven by fear and anxiety, emphasizing how societal conditioning contributes to the latter. It delves into the role of rationality in avoiding blankness, the discomfort of silence, and the vibrancy that this blankness holds. (...) Ultimately, it advocates for embracing this blankness as a source of freedom, vitality, and profound insight into the nature of existence. (shrink)

En tant que branche du droit, c'est un droit de l'organisation de l'économie dont le coeur est aujourd'hui le droit de la concurrence avec des développements considérables mais incertains dans les sociétés libérales ou en voie de libéralisation. C'est aussi une discipline, voire un sous-système du droit comparable à l'equity, en tout cas un "ressourcement" du droit, en réponse aux "pressions" de l'économie politique.

A longish (12 page) discussion of Richard Sorabji's excellent book, with a further discussion of what it means for a theory of emotions to be a cognitive theory.

The precautionary principle (PP) aims to anticipate and minimize potentially serious or irreversible risks under conditions of scientific uncertainty. Thus it preserves the potential for future developments. It has been incorporated into many international treaties and pieces of national legislation for environmental protection and sustainable development. In this article, we outline an interpretation of the PP as a framework of orientation for a sustainable information society. Since the risks induced by future information and communication technologies (ICT) are social risks for (...) the most part, we propose to extend the PP from mainly environmental to social subjects of protection. From an ethical point of view, the PP and sustainability share the principle of intergenerational justice, which can be used as an argument to preserve free space for the decisions of future generations. Applied to technical innovation and to ICT issues in particular, the extended PP can serve as a framework of orientation to avoid socio-economically irreversible developments. We conclude that the PP is a useful approach for: (i) policy makers to reconcile information society and sustainability policies and (ii) ICT companies to formulate sustainability strategies. (shrink)

I should like to offer my greatest thanks to Paul Griffiths for providing the opportunity for this exchange, and to commentators Gillian Brown, Steven Fuller, Stefan Linquist, and Erika Milam for their generous and thought-provoking comments. I shall do my best in this space to respond to some of their concerns.

There is growing interest in the use of technology to enhance the tracking and quality of clinical information available for patients in disaster settings. This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters (WIISARD).

While every health care system stakeholder would seem to be concerned with obtaining the greatest value from a given technology, there is often a disconnect in the perception of value between a technology’s promoters and those responsible for the ultimate decision as to whether or not to pay for it. Adopting an empirical ethics approach, this paper examines how five Canadian medical device manufacturers, via their websites, frame the corporate “value proposition” of their innovation and seek to respond to what (...) they consider the key expectations of their customers. Our analysis shows that the manufacturers’ framing strategies combine claims that relate to valuable socio-technical goals and features such as prevention, efficiency, sense of security, real-time feedback, ease of use and flexibility, all elements that likely resonate with a large spectrum of health care system stakeholders. The websites do not describe, however, how the innovations may impact health care delivery and tend to obfuscate the decisional trade-offs these innovations represent from a health care system perspective. Such framing strategies, we argue, tend to bolster physicians’ and patients’ expectations and provide a large set of stakeholders with powerful rhetorical tools that may influence the health policy arena. Because these strategies are difficult to counter given the paucity of evidence and its limited use in policymaking, establishing sound collective health care priorities will require solid critiques of how certain kinds of medical devices may provide a better (i.e., more valuable) response to health care needs when compared to others. (shrink)

Dramatic advances in 3D Web technologies have recently led to widespread development of virtual world Web browsers and 3D content. A natural question is whether 3D thumbnails can be used to find one’s way about such 3D content the way that text and 2D thumbnail images are used to navigate 2D Web content. We have conducted an empirical experiment that shows interactive 3D thumbnails, which we call worldlets, improve travelers’ landmark knowledge and expedite wayfinding in virtual environments.

The main objective of our project is to construct a fully functional voice-based home automation system that uses the Internet of Things and Natural Language Processing. The home automation system is user-friendly to smartphones and laptops. A set of relays is used to connect the Node MCU to homes under controlled appliances. The user sends a command through the speech to the mobile devices, which interprets the message and sends the appropriate command to the specific appliance. The voice command given (...) by the user is interpreted by the mobile device using Natural Language Processing. The system utilizes a node microcontroller unit (Node MCU) as a Wi-Fi-based gateway to connect to the Google Assistant. It determines operation must be completed by which the appliance to fulfill the user’s request. The user increased mobile capabilities we will be using a smart phone in this project. A smartphone application as nearly all of the data transferred can be processed by cloud. The user increased mobile capabilities we will be using a smart phone in this project. The IoT -based system for home automation can easily and efficiently control appliances. The Node MCU is interfaced with the appliances and programmed in a manner that they respond to mobile inputs. (shrink)

Can music express the world-view of a certain composer, or of a certain historical era – and how? In 19th Century, the wide-ranging philosophical implications of this question raised an intriguing quarrel between the formalists’ scepticism as to this point and their various opponents. Starting from the case study of the German psychologist and philosopher of music Georg Anschütz, it is argued that allowing for a systematic link of music and the world-views easily turns into the far more demanding claim (...) that music is the best and perhaps the only way to express them properly. In turn, this attitude sits well with the tendency to think of music hearing as a disembodied process, hinting at the deep dimension of synesthesia rather than to that of music as a cultural phenomenon, in Erich Hornbostel’s sense. (shrink)

Розкрито сутність поняття «рейтинг». Доведено значущість рейтингової оцінки для суб’єктів фінансового ринку, зокрема для страхових компаній, потенційних страхувальників, інвесторів та кредиторів.

This essay challenges the notion of avoiding uncomfortable thoughts and emotions in mental health. It argues that accepting these experiences, as supported by therapies like Exposure and Response Prevention for Pure OCD, promotes greater wellbeing. By cultivating a compassionate relationship with inner experiences, individuals can foster resilience amidst challenges.

Review of *How Literature Changes the Way We Think*, by Michael Mack (Continuum, 2012).

l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives. It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment. 2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th century, but to understand his solution, we need to understand his problem. He thought the necessity of Divine foreknowledge removed contingency from human acts, thus making it impossible for sinners to do otherwise than sin. 3. Erasmus objected (on behalf of Free Will) that this violates Ought-Implies-Can which he (...) supported with Hare-style ordinary language arguments. 4. Luther a) pointed out the antinomy and b) resolved it by undermining the prescriptivist arguments for Ought-Implies-Can. 5. We can reinforce Luther's argument with an example due to David Lewis. 6. Whatever its merits as a moral principle, Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical truth and should not be included in deontic logics. Most deontic logics, and maybe the discipline itself, should therefore be abandoned. 7. Could it be that Ought-Conversationally-Implies-Can? Yes - in some contexts. But a) even if these contexts are central to the evolution of Ought, the implication is not built into the semantics of the word; b) nor is the parallel implication built into the semantics of orders; and c) in some cases Ought conversationally implies Can, only because Ought-Implies-Can is a background moral belief. d) Points a) and b) suggest a criticism of prescriptivism - that Oughts do not entail imperatives but that the relation is one of conversational implicature. 8. If Ought-Implies-Can is treated as a moral principle, Erasmus' argument for Free Will can be revived (given his Christian assumptions). But it does not 'prove' Pelagianism as Luther supposed. A semi-Pelagian alternative is available. (shrink)

Possible worlds models of belief have difficulties accounting for unawareness, the inability to entertain (and hence believe) certain propositions. Accommodating unawareness is important for adequately modelling epistemic states, and representing the informational content to which agents have in principle access given their explicit beliefs. In this paper, I develop a model of explicit belief, awareness, and informational content, along with an sound and complete axiomatisation. I furthermore defend the model against the seminal impossibility result of Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini, according (...) to which three intuitive conditions preclude non-trivial unawareness on any possible worlds model of belief. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that there has never been any ground for the controversy between the doctrine of free will and determinism, that it is based upon a misapprehension, that the two assertions are entirely consistent, that one of them strictly implies the other, that they have been opposed only because of our natural want of the analytical imagination. In so saying I do not tamper with the meaning of either phrase. That would be unpardonable. I mean free (...) will in the natural and usual sense, in the fullest, the most absolute sense in which for the purposes of the personal and moral life the term is ever employed. I mean it as implying responsibility, merit and demerit, guilt and desert. I mean it as implying, after an act has been performed, that one " could have done otherwise " than one did. I mean it as conveying these things also, not in any subtly modified sense but in exactly the sense in which we conceive them in life and in law and in ethics. These two doctrines have been opposed because we have not realised that free will can be analysed without being destroyed, and that determinism is merely a feature of the analysis of it. And if we are tempted to take refuge in the thought of an "ultimate ", an "innermost" liberty that eludes the analysis, then we have implied a deterministic basis and constitution for this liberty as well. For such a basis and constitution lie in the idea of liberty. -/- The thesis is not, like that of Green or Bradley, that the contending opinions are reconciled if we adopt a certain metaphysic of the ego, as that it is timeless, and identifies itself with a desire by a " timeless act". This is to say that the two are irreconcilable, as they are popularly supposed to be, except by a theory that delivers us from the conflict by taking us out of time. Our view on the contrary is that from the natural and temporal point of view itself there never was any need of a reconciliation but only of a comprehension of the meaning of terms. (The metaphysical nature of the self and its identity through time is a problem for all who confront memory, anticipation, etc.; it has no peculiar difficulties arising from the present problem.) -/- I am not maintaining that determinism is true; only that it is true insofar as we have free will. That we are free in willing is, broadly speaking, a fact of experience. That broad fact is more assured than any philosophical analysis. It is therefore surer than the deterministic analysis of it, entirely adequate as that in the end appears to be. But it is not here affirmed that there are no small exceptions, no slight undetermined swervings, no ingredient of absolute chance. All that is here said is that such absence of determination, if and so far as it exists, is no gain to freedom, but sheer loss of it; no advantage to the moral life, but blank subtraction from it. -- When I speak below of "the indeterminist" I mean the libertarian indeterminist, that is, him who believes in free will and holds that it involves indetermination. (shrink)

Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. For one thing, (...) there are questions about how deliberation can succeed in being practical in its issue. What do we need to assume—both about agents and about the processes of reasoning they engage in—to make sense of the fact that deliberative reflection can directly give rise to action? Can we do justice to this dimension of practical reason while preserving the idea that practical deliberation is genuinely a form of reasoning? For another, there are large issues concerning the content of the standards that are brought to bear in practical reasoning. Which norms for the assessment of action are binding on us as deliberating agents? Do these norms provide resources for critical reflection about our ends, or are they exclusively instrumental? Under what conditions do moral norms yield valid standards for reasoning about action? The first set of issues is addressed in sections §§1–3 of the present article, while sections §§4–6 cover the second set of issues. (shrink)

We propose that Saussure’s signifiers must be processed in the left brain hemisphere (in right handed people) and the signified may be processed in the right. This proposition has consequences for understanding human cognitive phenomena and their pathologies, and can also be related to the passive and active process of thinking, as described by Karl Jaspers. Saussure studied signifiers and their relationships. He left the signified to be studied by psychologists, but there is no consensus about it. According to some (...) linguists, the signified, or the meaning, is the specific activity or succession of bodily states related to each signifier. Learning is the process of linking a signifier (a represented object) to a signified or meaning (a specific activity). However, human beings can represent signifiers autonomously because words and drawings are easily produced with small movements and have syntactic, referential and logical rules of combination. If they are processed in the left hemisphere, the meaning (the signified) is only found when the right hemisphere is reached. The right hemisphere can also work independently, as for instance, when we imagine a story which has to find the words in the left hemisphere. The complex relationship between the hemispheres through the corpus callosum is decisive for telling stories and having self-consciousness. (shrink)

This reply to an ongoing debate between conspiracy theory researchers from different disciplines exposes the conceptual confusions that underlie some of the disagreements in conspiracy theory research. Reconciling these conceptual confusions is important because conspiracy theories are a multidisciplinary topic and a profound understanding of them requires integrative insights from different fields. Specifically, we distinguish research focussing on conspiracy *theories* (and theorizing) from research of conspiracy *belief* (and mindset, theorists) and explain how particularism with regards to conspiracy theories does not (...) mean we cannot define a problematic subclass of conspiracy beliefs, while avoiding the problems of generalism. We hope this reply helps conspiracy theory researchers recognize the differences between studying conspiracy theories and conspiracy beliefs and appreciate the possibilities for fruitful, integrative, and interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

In moving into the Roman world, the first Christians encountered a secular culture whose social, political and cultural characteristics bore a striking resemblance to the contemporary period. Yet these Christians did not feel constrained to present only those aspects of their message that would be acceptable. For most of its history, the presentation of a Christian message in the “public square” has entailed both theological and philosophical perspectives. Today, Catholics seem “self-limited” by an unspoken demand that they argue solely from (...) philosophical and scientific positions in public debates. This approach often fails to present a distinctively Christian viewpoint. As early as 1946, Henri de Lubac pointed out that this side-lining of the Christian view was not solely the result of secularist agitation. Since the sixteenth century, the generally accepted notion that human reality is composed of two separate dimensions – natural and a supernatural – has given the impression that one can speak of a discrete natural order which is unaffected by grace. While this approach still has its defenders, many Catholic intellectuals have pointed to its shortcomings, both theologically and philosophically. When Catholics confine themselves to naturalistic arguments, they deceive no one. Secularists – who argue from their own perspective of “belief ” – are able to accuse their Catholic opponents of having a hidden agenda, and of lacking the courage of their convictions by concealing what really motivates them. Any movement away from this situation is likely to be met with derision. Nevertheless, while neither Christians nor Secularists should impose their political views on others, Catholics should feel free to mount the full range of their arguments in public and should reject the notion that they are bound by rules of engagement set by their intellectual opponents. (shrink)

This collection of original essays aims to reinvigorate the debate surrounding philosophical realism in relation to philosophy of science, pragmatism, epistemology, and theory of perception. Questions concerning realism are as current and as ancient as philosophy itself; this volume explores relations between different positions designated as ‘realism’ by examining specific cases in point, drawn from a broad range of systematic problems and historical views, from ancient Greek philosophy through the present. The first section examines the context of the project; contributions (...) systematically engage the historical background of philosophical realism, re-examining key works of Aristotle, Descartes, Quine, and others. The following two sections epitomize the central tension within current debates: scientific realism and pragmatism. These contributions address contemporary questions of scientific realism and the reality of the objects of science, and consider whether, how or the extent to which realism and pragmatism are compatible. With an editorial introduction by Kenneth R. Westphal, these fourteen original essays provide wide-ranging, salient insights into the status of realism today. (shrink)

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to moral reasons for (...) deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

A reply to Patrick Stokes' “Between Generalism and Particularism About Conspiracy Theory".

In Beyond Neutrality, George Sher criticises the idea that state neutrality between competing conceptions of the good helps protect society from oppression. While he is correct that some governments are non-neutral without being oppressive, I argue that those governments may be neutral at the core of their foundations. The possibility of non-neutrality leading to oppression is further explored; some conceptions of the good would favour oppression while others would not. While it is possible that a non-neutral state may avoid oppression, (...) it is argued that the risks are so great that it is better to bet on government being neutral, thereby minimizing the possibility of oppression. (shrink)

A reply to Patrick Stokes' 'Reluctance and Suspicion'—itself a reply to an early piece by myself replying to Stokes—in which I clarify what it is I intend when talking about how we should investigate conspiracy theories.

The humanities and the social sciences have been hostile to future visions in the postwar period. The most famous victim of their hostility was the enterprise of classical philosophy of history, condemned to illegitimacy precisely because of its fundamental engagement with the future. Contrary to this attitude, in this essay I argue that there is no history (neither in the sense of the course of human affairs nor in the sense of historical writing) without having a future vision in the (...) first place. History, its very possibility, begins in the future, in the postulation of a future where further change can take place. Our notions of history, change, and the future are interdependent, they come as one package, meaning that the abandonment of one entails the abandonment of the other two. As to the current situation, although lately it became a commonplace to diagnose our age as presentist, Western societies are deeply engaged in a vision of the future revolving around artificial intelligence and the prospect of technological singularity. This technological vision is best characterized as the prospect of unprecedented change, substantially differing from Enlightenment and nineteenth-century developmental visions of future. If our notions of history, change, and the future are necessarily interdependent, and if we have a characteristically new future vision, it follows that our historical sensibility is already transformed and is accommodated to the prospect of unprecedented change. The ultimate aim of this essay is to outline this transformed historical sensibility of our technological age. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that ‘Weak Modal Rationalism’, which is the view that ideal primary positive conceivability entails primary metaphysical possibility, is self-defeating. To this end, we outline two reductio arguments against ‘Weak Modal Rationalism’. The first reductio shows that, from supposing that ‘Weak Modal Rationalism’ is true, it follows that conceivability both is and is not conclusive evidence for possibility. The second reductio shows that, from supposing that ‘Weak Modal Rationalism’ is true, it follows that it is possible (...) that ‘Weak Modal Rationalism’ is necessarily false, and hence that ‘Weak Modal Rationalism’ is false. We then argue that adopting a weaker position according to which conceivability is merely prima facie evidence for possibility provides limited protection from our criticism of conceivability arguments. (shrink)

A number of controversial topics related to bioethics and biotechnology 17 papers that deal with various aspects of release and development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), stem cells and cloning, privacy and bio-banking.