This eighth volume of Collected Papers includes 75 papers comprising 973 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2010-2022 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 102 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 24 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abduallah Gamal, Firoz Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Akbar Rezaei, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, Azeddine Elhassouny, Durga Banerjee, Romualdas Bausys, Mircea Boșcoianu, Traian Alexandru Buda, Bui Cong Cuong, Emilia Calefariu, Ahmet Çevik, Chang Su Kim, Victor (...) Christianto, Dae Wan Kim, Daud Ahmad, Arindam Dey, Partha Pratim Dey, Mamouni Dhar, H. A. Elagamy, Ahmed K. Essa, Sudipta Gayen, Bibhas C. Giri, Daniela Gîfu, Noel Batista Hernández, Hojjatollah Farahani, Huda E. Khalid, Irfan Deli, Saeid Jafari, Tèmítópé Gbóláhàn Jaíyéolá, Sripati Jha, Sudan Jha, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, M. Karthika, Kawther F. Alhasan, Giruta Kazakeviciute-Januskeviciene, Qaisar Khan, Kishore Kumar P K, Prem Kumar Singh, Ranjan Kumar, Maikel Leyva-Vázquez, Mahmoud Ismail, Tahir Mahmood, Hafsa Masood Malik, Mohammad Abobala, Mai Mohamed, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Seema Mehra, Kalyan Mondal, Mohamed Talea, Mullai Murugappan, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Aslam Malik, Muhammad Khalid Mahmood, Nivetha Martin, Durga Nagarajan, Nguyen Van Dinh, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Lewis Nkenyereya, Jagan M. Obbineni, M. Parimala, S. K. Patro, Peide Liu, Pham Hong Phong, Surapati Pramanik, Gyanendra Prasad Joshi, Quek Shio Gai, R. Radha, A.A. Salama, S. Satham Hussain, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Selvaraj Ganesan, Shahbaz Ali, Shouzhen Zeng, Manjeet Singh, A. Stanis Arul Mary, Dragiša Stanujkić, Yusuf Șubaș, Rui-Pu Tan, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Zenonas Turskis, Vakkas Uluçay, Norberto Valcárcel Izquierdo, V. Venkateswara Rao, Volkan Duran, Ying Li, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Jian-qiang Wang, Lihshing Leigh Wang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

The landscape of cybersecurity is constantly evolving, with adversaries becoming increasingly sophisticated and persistent. This manuscript explores the utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) to address these evolving threats, focusing on the journey from threat detection to autonomous response. By examining AI-driven detection methodologies, advanced threat analytics, and the implementation of autonomous response systems, this paper provides insights into how organizations can leverage AI to strengthen their cybersecurity posture against modern threats. Key words: Ransomware, Anomaly Detection, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), Automated (...) Threat Response and Artificial Intelligence. (shrink)

The rapid adoption of cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations operate, offering unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. However, it also introduces a new set of vulnerabilities and security challenges. This manuscript explores the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity solutions to address these cloud vulnerabilities. By examining the current landscape, AI methodologies, and practical implementation strategies, we aim to provide a roadmap for enhancing cloud security through AI-powered solutions. -/- .

Technology has the power to break the limitations of traditional passive learning and innovate almost all aspects of everyday life with the power of connecting things of the world to the Internet, “Internet of Things (IoT).” IoT is no longer a phenomenon, but it has become a prevalent system in which people, processes, data, and things connect to the Internet and each other. This paper ‘Enhanced Campus Automation System and the emerging need of IoT integration: an automation perspective’ [eCAS-IoT] is (...) an outcome of case study undertaken at St. Aloysius’ College, Jabalpur, India, wherein the automation challenges are taken into consideration that has been integrated in the existing ERP and related tools such as RFID based attendance and monitoring system in real-time, digital library, API integration and implementation of Optical Network. In this paper we have tried to bring out ideas to achieve the campus automation challenges and awareness of greater need of technical expertise, promotion and training on the effective use of ICT and related devices to make teaching, learning and administration more impacting. (shrink)

Modelling ethics is critical to understanding and analysing social phenomena. However, prior literature either incorporates ethics into agent strategies or uses it for evaluation of agent behaviour. This work proposes a framework that models both, ethical decision making as well as evaluation using virtue ethics and utilitarianism. In an iteration, agents can use either the classical Continuous Prisoner's Dilemma or a new type of interaction called moral interaction, where agents donate or steal from other agents. We introduce moral interactions to (...) model ethical decision making. We also propose a novel agent type, called virtue agent, parametrised by the agent's level of ethics. Virtue agents' decisions are based on moral evaluations of past interactions. Our simulations show that unethical agents make short term gains but are less prosperous in the long run. We find that in societies with positivity bias, unethical agents have high incentive to become ethical. The opposite is true of societies with negativity bias. We also evaluate the ethicality of existing strategies and compare them to those of virtue agents. (shrink)

Modeling social interactions based on individual behavior has always been an area of interest, but prior literature generally presumes rational behavior. Thus, such models may miss out on capturing the effects of biases humans are susceptible to. This work presents a method to model egocentric bias, the real-life tendency to emphasize one's own opinion heavily when presented with multiple opinions. We use a symmetric distribution, centered at an agent's own opinion, as opposed to the Bounded Confidence (BC) model used in (...) prior work. We consider a game of iterated interactions where an agent cooperates based on its opinion about an opponent. Our model also includes the concept of domain-based self-doubt, which varies as the interaction succeeds or not. An increase in doubt makes an agent reduce its egocentricity in subsequent interactions, thus enabling the agent to learn reactively. The agent system is modeled with factions not having a single leader, to overcome some of the issues associated with leader-follower factions. We find that agents belonging to factions perform better than individual agents. We observe that an intermediate level of egocentricity helps the agent perform at its best, which concurs with conventional wisdom that neither overconfidence nor low self-esteem brings benefits. (shrink)

Virtue-based approaches have attracted significant recent interest in argumentation, including a recent anthology of Chinese translations of important articles in the field. In this article, adapted from the introduction to that anthology, we discuss the origins of virtue argumentation and some of the challenges it has faced, as well as attempt to provide an overview of recent work on the virtues and vices relevant to argumentation. In the final section we discuss the articles that were selected and motivate their selection.

We present a multi-agent system where agents can cooperate to solve a system of dependent tasks, with agents having the capability to explore a solution space, make inferences, as well as query for information under a limited budget. Re-exploration of the solution space takes place by an agent when an older solution expires and is thus able to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment. We investigate the effects of task dependencies, with highly-dependent graph G_40 (a well-known program graph that (...) contains 40 highly interlinked nodes, each representing a task) and less-dependent graphs G_18 (a program graph that contains 18 tasks with fewer links), increasing the speed of the agents and the complexity of the problem space and the query budgets available to agents. Specifically, we evaluate trade-offs between the agent's speed and query budget. During the experiments, we observed that increasing the speed of a single agent improves the system performance to a certain point only, and increasing the number of faster agents may not improve the system performance due to task dependencies. Favoring faster agents during budget allocation enhances the system performance, in line with the "Matthew effect." We also observe that allocating more budget to a faster agent gives better performance for a less-dependent system, but increasing the number of faster agents gives a better performance for a highly-dependent system. (shrink)

The modern computer environment has moved past the local data center with a single entry and exit point to a global network comprising many data centers and hundreds of entry and exit points, commonly referred as Cloud Computing, used by all possible devices with numerous entry and exit point for transactions, online processing, request and responses traveling across the network, making the ever complex networks even more complex, making traversing, monitoring and detecting threats over such an environment a big challenge (...) for Network forensic and investigation for cybercrimes. It has demanded in depth analysis using network tools and techniques to determine how best information can be extracted pertinent to an investigation. Data mining technique providing great aid in finding relevant clusters for predicting unusual activities, pattern matching and fraud detection in an environment, capable to deal with huge amount of data. The concept of network forensics in cloud computing requires a new mindset where some data will not be available, some data will be suspect, and some data will be court ready and can fit into the traditional network forensics model. From a network security viewpoint, all data traversing the cloud network backplane is visible and accessible by the cloud service provider. It is not possible to think now that one physical device will only have one operating system that needs to be taken down for investigation. Without the network forensics investigator, understanding the architecture of the cloud environment systems and possible compromises will be overlooked or missed. In this paper, we focus on the role of Network Forensic in a cloud environment, its mapping few of the available tools and contribution of Data Mining in making analysis, and also to bring out the challenges in this field. (shrink)

Midrash Genesis Rabbah takes aim at a variety of ideological adversaries, but the most subtle polemic is directed at sages who went beyond standard hermeneutical practices to embrace mystical approaches to Torah learning. This essay seeks to expose the use of satire and other literary forms of critique among passages treating cosmology and Torah study. Analytic tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu, especially as they pertain to exposing the use of the symbolic language intrinsic to the establishment of systems of social (...) authority, will be employed to delineate the ideological conflict among sages developing diverse approaches to ascending the religious hierarchy within early rabbinism. (shrink)

Both Philip and Andrew are philosophy students whose interests converge around the philosophy of technology broadly understood. Philip's interest is specifically aimed toward the ethics of Transhumanism and depictions of Transhumanism in works of fiction. On the other hand, Andrew finds himself more focused on religious behavior in the technological world. While the two perspectives might not seem that close, there is certain to be an overlap in Andrew and Philip's shared understanding of how technological phenomena play a crucial role (...) concerning religion and society. (shrink)

In this paper, we assess the impact of extended reality technologies as they relate to sexual forms of harassment. We begin with a brief history of the nature of sexual harassment itself. We then offer an account of extended reality technologies focusing specifically on psychological and hardware elements most likely to comprise what has been referred to as “the metaverse”. Although different forms of virtual spaces exist (i.e., private, semi-private, and public), we focus on public social metaverse spaces. We do (...) this to better explain how the concept of sexual harassment must be adjusted to such spaces and how approaches aimed at mitigating harassment must be sensitive to the type of metaverse spaces users utilize. We then offer a typology of sexual harassment for the metaverse focusing on three distinct forms of sexual harassment: (1) invariant (2) mixed variance or modified and (3) unique or metaverse specific. Although existing normative and legal frameworks may function well with respect to the first and, possibly, second forms of harassment, we argue such frameworks will not helpfully address metaverse-specific harassment. Ultimately, the changing nature of privately owned public spaces (POPS) which metaverses are likely to represent pose distinct ethical and regulatory challenges. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that indeterminacy and indeterminism make most ordinary counterfactuals false. I argue that a plausible way to avoid such counterfactual skepticism is to postulate the existence of primitive modal facts that serve as truth-makers for counterfactual claims. Moreover, I defend a new theory of ‘might’ counterfactuals, and develop assertability and knowledge criteria to suit such unobservable ‘counterfacts’.

This classic collection of essays, first published in 1968, represents H.L.A. Hart's landmark contribution to the philosophy of criminal responsibility and punishment. Unavailable for ten years, this new edition reproduces the original text, adding a new critical introduction by John Gardner, a leading contemporary criminal law theorist.

This book is a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Utrecht. It was prepared under the supervision of Prof. Dr. H. Schultink. I would like to express my gratitude to him for his criticisms of earlier versions which led to many improvements, in particular with respect to the exposition of the argument. To my co-referent Dirk van Dalen, reader in the Department of Philo sophy (,Centrale Interfaculteit') of the University of Utrecht, I am greatly indebted (...) for his valuable and fruitful suggestions about problems relevant to both linguistics and logic. Several ideas developed in this study owe their present concrete form to our many discussions. This thesis originates in syntactic research into the Aspects carried out in 1967 under the supervision of Albert Kraak, professor at the University of Nijmegen, who ever since gave much attention to my work in progress. I am very grateful to him for his careful and stimulating criticism as well as for the continuous support he gave me during these years. The present study closely relates to the work of my colleague Wim Klooster with regard to both its theoretical framework and its subject matter. Our joint work on the measurement of duration in Dutch is an integral part of the argument. I have greatly profited from the numerous discussions we have had. (shrink)

How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer’s original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we examined intuitions about artifact categorization among the Shuar, a hunter-horticulturalist society in the Amazon region of Ecuador. We (...) used a forced-choice method similar to previous studies, but unlike these studies, our scenarios involved artifacts that would be familiar to the Shuar. We also incorporated a community condition to examine the possible effect of community consensus on how artifacts are categorized. The same scenarios were presented to university student participants in the UK. Across populations and conditions, participants tended to categorize artifacts in terms of a creator’s intent as opposed to a differing current use. This lends support to the view that the design stance may be a universal feature of human cognition. However, we conclude with some thoughts on the limitations of the present method for studying artifact concepts. (shrink)

Signing Ceremony of MOU on Professional Legal Diploma, Government of Dubai 2020.

Jordan agreed to extensive liberalization undertakings under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (“GATS”) that would open some sectors that were previously closed or restricted to foreign suppliers and investors. It undertook horizontal commitments in cross-border movement of individuals and commercial presence covering all types of services.

According to the orthodox treatment of risk preferences in decision theory, they are to be explained in terms of the agent's desires about concrete outcomes. The orthodoxy has been criticised both for conflating two types of attitudes and for committing agents to attitudes that do not seem rationally required. To avoid these problems, it has been suggested that an agent's attitudes to risk should be captured by a risk function that is independent of her utility and probability functions. The main (...) problem with that approach is that it suggests that attitudes to risk are wholly distinct from people's (non-instrumental) desires. To overcome this problem, we develop a framework where an agent's utility function is defined over chance propositions (i.e., propositions describing objective probability distributions) as well as ordinary (non-chance) ones, and argue that one should explain different risk attitudes in terms of different forms of the utility function over such propositions. (shrink)

This book is a translation of W.V. Quine's Kant Lectures, given as a series at Stanford University in 1980. It provide a short and useful summary of Quine's philosophy. There are four lectures altogether: I. Prolegomena: Mind and its Place in Nature; II. Endolegomena: From Ostension to Quantification; III. Endolegomena loipa: The forked animal; and IV. Epilegomena: What's It all About? The Kant Lectures have been published to date only in Italian and German translation. The present book is filled out (...) with the translator's critical Introduction, "The esoteric Quine?" a bibliography based on Quine's sources, and an Index for the volume. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Offsetting is a very ineffective way to do good. Offsetting your lifetime emissions may increase aggregated life expectancy by at most seven years, while giving the amount it costs to offset your lifetime emissions to a malaria charity saves in expectation the life of at least one child. Is there any moral reason to offset rather than giving to some charity that does good so much more effectively? There might be such a reason if your offsetting compensated or somehow (...) benefitted the victims of your emission, since that could mean that you would satisfy the duty not to harm others by emitting and offsetting. But that is typically not true. If your emission harms some person and your offsetting benefits some person, then these are most likely different people. Hence, I conclude, we have a stronger reason to give to effective charities than we have to offset our emissions. (shrink)

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer an opportunity for computational social science research at scale. Building upon prior explorations of LLM agent design, our work introduces a simulated agent society where complex social relationships dynamically form and evolve over time. Agents are imbued with psychological drives and placed in a sandbox survival environment. We conduct an evaluation of the agent society through the lens of Thomas Hobbes's seminal Social Contract Theory (SCT). We (...) analyze whether, as the theory postulates, agents seek to escape a brutish "state of nature" by surrendering rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order and security. Our experiments unveil an alignment: Initially, agents engage in unrestrained conflict, mirroring Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. However, as the simulation progresses, social contracts emerge, leading to the authorization of an absolute sovereign and the establishment of a peaceful commonwealth founded on mutual cooperation. This congruence between our LLM agent society's evolutionary trajectory and Hobbes's theoretical account indicates LLMs' capability to model intricate social dynamics and potentially replicate forces that shape human societies. By enabling such insights into group behavior and emergent societal phenomena, LLM-driven multi-agent simulations, while unable to simulate all the nuances of human behavior, may hold potential for advancing our understanding of social structures, group dynamics, and complex human systems. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that we should use a lottery to decide who gets a good to which two persons have an equal claim but which only one person can get. Some philosophers think that we should save identified persons from harm even at the expense of saving a somewhat greater number of statistical persons from the same harm. I defend a principled way of justifying both judgements, namely, by appealing to the decreasing marginal moral value of survival chances. I identify (...) four desiderata that, I contend, any such justification should satisfy, and explain how my account meets these desiderata, unlike some previous accounts. (shrink)

The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi's and Rawls' that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent's behind the veil are averse to ambiguity. Allowing for aversion to ambiguity---which is both (...) the most commonly observed and a seemingly reasonable attitude to ambiguity---however supports a version of Egalitarianism, whose logical form is quite different from the theories defended by the aforementioned authors. Moreover, it turns out that the veil of ignorance argument neither supports standard Utilitarianism nor Prioritarianism unless we assume that rational people are insensitive to ambiguity. (shrink)

Women in the labor force are at a disadvantage not only because of continuing discrimination in hiring and promotion, but because of factors extrinsic to the labor market hence adjusting conditions within the labor market will not completely eliminate women's disadvantage. Because, unlike most men, most women do not have spouses to take on the major responsibility of running their homes and caring for their children, the costs of working outside the home, particularly in a professional or managerial capacity, are (...) greater for women than they are for men. Thus, even if ongoing discrimination in the labor market were eliminated, through affirmative action policies or other such remedies, women would still be as a disadvantage relative to men.For women, the costs and benefits of behaving like men are different than they are for their male counterparts. To the extent that the costs and benefits of various policies of action are not the same for women as they are for men, men and women are not equal, therefore, arguably, it is not fair to treat them equally. (shrink)

Those who are risk averse with respect to money, and thus turn down some gambles with positive monetary expectations, are nevertheless often willing to accept bundles involving multiple such gambles. Therefore, it might seem that such people should become more willing to accept a risky but favourable gamble if they put it in context with the collection of gambles that they predict they will be faced with in the future. However, it turns out that when a risk averse person adopts (...) the long-term perspective, she faces a decision-problem that can be analysed as a noncooperative game between different “time-slices” of herself, where it is in the interest of each time-slice (given its prediction about other slices) to turn down the gamble with which it is faced. Hence, even if a risk averse but rational person manages to take the long-term perspective, she will, in the absence of what Hardin called “mutual coercion”, end up in a situation analogous to the “tragedy of the commons”. (shrink)

Hồ Mạnh Tùng và Hồ Mạnh Toàn đều là các nhà nghiên cứu trẻ trong lĩnh vực khoa học xã hội ở độ tuổi dưới 30. Mặc dù mới tham gia nghiên cứu khoa học chưa lâu, nhưng 2 anh em nhà họ Hồ đã có thành tích khoa học ấn tượng.

This paper advances a theory of disease as domino dysfunction. It is often argued that diseases are biological dysfunctions. However, a theory of disease as biological dysfunction is complicated by some plausible cases of dysfunction, which seem clearly non-pathological. I argue that pathological conditions are not just dysfunctions but domino dysfunctions, and that domino dysfunctions can be distinguished on principled biological grounds from non-pathological dysfunctions. I then show how this theory can make sense of the problem cases; they are not (...) diseases because they are not domino dysfunctions. (shrink)

Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199(3–4):8701–8740, 2021) and Steel and Bartha (Risk Analysis 43(2):260–268, 2023) argue that we should understand the precautionary principle as the injunction to maximise lexical utilities. They show that the lexical utility model has important pragmatic advantages. Moreover, the model has the theoretical advantage of satisfying all axioms of expected utility theory except continuity. In this paper I raise a trilemma for any attempt at modelling the precautionary principle with lexical utilities: it permits choice cycles or leads (...) to paralysis or implies that the smallest value difference that is possible in a context has extreme axiological implications. (shrink)

We present an epistemological schema of natural sciences inspired by Peirce's pragmaticist view, stressing the role of the \emph{phenomenological map}, that connects reality and our ideas about it. The schema has a recognisable mathematical/logical structure which allows to explore some of its consequences. We show that seemingly independent principles as the requirement of reproducibility of experiments and the Principle of Sufficient Reason are both implied by the schema, as well as Popper's concept of falsifiability. We show that the schema has (...) some power in demarcating science by first comparing with an alternative schema advanced during the first part of the 20th century which has its roots in Hertz and has been developed by Einstein and Popper. Further, the identified differences allow us to focus in the construction of Special Relativity, showing that it uses an intuited concept of velocity that does not satisfy the requirements of reality in Peirce. While the main mathematical observation connected with this issue has been known for more than a century, it has not been investigated from an epistemological point of view. A probable reason could be that the socially dominating epistemology in physics does not encourage such line of work. We briefly discuss the relation of the abduction process presented in this work with discussions regarding ``abduction'' in the literature and its relation with ``analogy''. (shrink)

If I were asked to put forward an ethical principle which I considered to be especially certain, it would be that no one can be responsible, in the properly ethical sense, for the conduct of another. Responsibility belongs essentially to the individual. The implications of this principle are much more far-reaching than is evident at first, and reflection upon them may lead many to withdraw the assent which they might otherwise be very ready to accord to this view of responsibility. (...) But if the difficulties do appear to be insurmountable, and that, very certainly, does not seem to me to be the case, then the proper procedure will be, not to revert to the barbarous notion of collective or group responsibility, but to give up altogether the view that we are accountable in any distinctively moral sense. (shrink)

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).

Considerations of dynamic inconsistency have figured prominently in debates over the rationality of preferences that violate the separability conditions characteristic of expected utility theory. These debates have mostly focused on risk- and ambiguity averse preferences, but analogous considerations apply to preferences for fairness. We revisit these debates in the context of a specific hypothesis regarding the violations of separability by such preferences, namely that they are potentially both explained and rationalised by attitudes to the chances of goods that motivate a (...) preference for equality in the distribution of chances across people and possible events. Our main aim is to argue that, first, when these violations of static separability are motivated by such attitudes to chances, then they need not result in dynamically inconsistent behaviour. Second, and more generally, considerations of dynamic consistency do not, we argue, undermine the rationality of such attitudes towards the distribution of chances, despite the fact that such attitudes give rise to violations of the static separability assumptions of expected utility theory. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper argues that the influence of language on science, philosophy and other field is mediated by communicative practices. Where communications is more restrictive, established linguistic structures exercise a tighter control over innovations and scientifically motivated reforms of language. The viewpoint here centers on the thesis that argumentation is crucial in the understanding and evaluation of proposed reforms and that social practices which limit argumentation serve to erode scientific objectivity. Thus, a plea is made for a sociology of scientific belief (...) designed to understand and insure social‐institutional conditions of the possibility of knowledge and its growth. A chief argument draws on work of Axelrod concerning the evolution of cooperation. (shrink)

In this field questions arise which are certainly difficult; but as I listened last time to members of the group, I felt that the main difficulty perhaps lay in determining precisely what questions we are trying to answer. I have the conviction that if we could only say clearly what the questions are, the answers to them might not appear so elusive. So I have begun with a simple list of questions about discretion which in one form or another were, (...) as it seemed to me, expressed by the group last time. I may indeed have omitted something and inserted something useless: if so, no doubt I shall be informed of this later. The central questions then seem to me to be the following: 1. What is discretion, or what is the exercise of discretion? 2. Under what conditions and why do we in fact accept or tolerate discretion in a legal system? 3. Must we accept discretion or tolerate discretion, and if so, why? 4. What values does the use of discretion menace, and what values does it maintain or promote? 5. What can be done to maximize the beneficial operation of the use of discretion and to minimize any harm that it does? (shrink)

I argue, first, that the deprived individuals whose predicaments Nussbaum cites as examples of "adaptive preference" do not in fact prefer the conditions of their lives to what we should regard as more desirable alternatives, indeed that we believe they are badly off precisely because they are not living the lives they would prefer to live if they had other options and were aware of them. Secondly, I argue that even where individuals in deprived circumstances acquire tastes for conditions that (...) we regard as bad, they are typically better off having their acquired preferences satisfied. If they are badly off it is because they cannot get what we and they, would regard as more desirable alternatives. Preference utilitarianism explains why individuals in such circumstances are badly off whether they have adapted to their deprived circumstances or not. Even if they prefer the conditions of their lives to all other available alternatives, most would prefer alternatives that are not available to them which would, on the preferentist account, make them better off. And that, on the preferentist account, is the basis for a radical critique of unjust institutions that limit people's options and prevent them from getting what they want. (shrink)

Through Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics, the Philosophy of Organism, it will be argued that psychedelic experience is a vertical, lateral and temporal integration of sentience.

This paper examines the metaphysically modest view that attributionsof normative reasons can be made true in the absence of a responseindependent normative reality. The paper despairs in finding asatisfactory account of normative reasons in metaphysically modestterms.

I defend a weak version of the Pigou-Dalton principle for chances. The principle says that it is better to increase the survival chance of a person who is more likely to die rather than a person who is less likely to die, assuming that the two people do not differ in any other morally relevant respect. The principle justifies plausible moral judgements that standard ex post views, such as prioritarianism and rank-dependent egalitarianism, cannot accommodate. However, the principle can be justified (...) by the same reasoning that has recently been used to defend the core axiom of ex post prioritarianism and egalitarianism, namely, Pigou-Dalton for well-being. The arguably biggest challenge for proponents of Pigou-Dalton for chances is that it violates State Dominance for social prospects. However, I argue that we have independent reason for rejecting State Dominance for social prospects, since it prevents a social planner from properly respecting people's preferences. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium is tied into an interesting and hitherto unexplored web of ideas in Plato’s ethics and psychology. The poet’s analysis of erōs as ‘leading us to what “belongs” (the oikeion)’ (193d2) and as ‘restoring us in our “original nature” (archaia phusis)’ (193d4) is not a mere negative contribution that renders him a ‘target for Diotima’s fire’ (Dover). Rather, he unwittingly communicates central ethical and psychological ideas which we find developed in (...) key passages of Plato’s dialogues. What is interesting is that Diotima in a curious passage seems to dismiss his contribution of the oikeion as unrelated to our good (agathon) and irrelevant to the analysis of desire (205d10–206a1). I argue that this interpretation of Diotima’s response to Aristophanes, which would render her position an ethical anomaly in Plato’s dialogues, should be rejected. Instead, it is more plausible to read her response as proposing a revisionary conception of the oikeion, relying on the idea that our agathon is our true oikeion. In addition, I tentatively suggest that the theory of psychic pregnancy may be seen as presenting the agathon of wisdom of virtue produced in the ascent as an oikeion. Just as fascinating as Diotima’s stance on the oikeion is the question how her teachings relate to the concept of an archaia phusis of the soul. The idea that the soul’s self-perfection constitutes a return to a temporally prior condition of excellence, which in two places other than the Symposium (Republic X, Timaeus) is called the ‘archaia phusis’, is pervasive and centrally important to Plato’s psychology. I address the question whether Diotima’s ascent passage constitutes a psychological anomaly in portraying self-perfection as unrelated to the concept of the archaia phusis. I argue that an answer to this depends on the stance we take on the Symposium’s position regarding the immortality of the soul. While a reading that posits a rejection of immortality in the Symposium must indeed deny a role for the concept in Diotima’s speech, I show that a reading allowing for immortality as a theoretical commitment in the background has an interesting interpretative option: along with Timaeus 90d5, it may fruitfully interpret the ascent as an ordering of the soul ‘in accordance with its archaia phusis’. (shrink)

A moderately risk averse person may turn down a 50/50 gamble that either results in her winning $200 or losing $100. Such behaviour seems rational if, for instance, the pain of losing $100 is felt more strongly than the joy of winning $200. The aim of this paper is to examine an influential argument that some have interpreted as showing that such moderate risk aversion is irrational. After presenting an axiomatic argument that I take to be the strongest case for (...) the claim that moderate risk aversion is irrational, I show that it essentially depends on an assumption that those who think that risk aversion can be rational should be skeptical of. Hence, I conclude that risk aversion need not be irrational. (shrink)

Walter Reese-Schäfer, Karl-Otto Apel, Zur Einführung (with an Afterword by Jürgen Habermas), Junis Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1990, 176pp. DM 17.80 -/- The author, presently a freelance writer published in the newspaper “Die Zeit” and the magazine “Stern,” pro­vides in this small book a clear and concise introduction to sources, themes and conclusions in the philosophy of Karl-Otto Apel. Apel, Emeritus Pro­fessor at Frank­furt, and close colleague of Habermas, characterizes his viewpoint as a “transcen­dental pragmatism” in which a Kantian concern for (...) question regarding “the conditions for the possi­bility of some­thing,” (p.10) mixes with deontological discourse-ethics, semeiotic themes from Peirce, an ap­proach to fallibilism, the demand for “final justifica­tions” (Letzt­begründung) and German her­meneutics. In view of the “den­sity and concentration” of Apel’s texts, which often have a “deterrent effect” upon those not already at home with “the phil­osophical language game,” it is the announced aim of this book to provide a work of translation and clarification of Apel’s special­ized efforts --in effect an orientation to Apel’s work. The book divides into an Introduction, 8 chapters and a summary conclusion --with Habermas’ appreciation, “A Master Builder with Hermeneutic Feeling --The Way of Philosopher Karl-Otto Apel,” bringing up the rear. There is also a bibliography of primary and secondary sources and a short table outlining highlights of Apel’s career. The “Introduction” provides a good overview of the aims of the book and gets one started on central themes. (shrink)

Catastrophic risk raises questions that are not only of practical importance, but also of great philosophical interest, such as how to define catastrophe and what distinguishes catastrophic outcomes from non-catastrophic ones. Catastrophic risk also raises questions about how to rationally respond to such risks. How to rationally respond arguably partly depends on the severity of the uncertainty, for instance, whether quantitative probabilistic information is available, or whether only comparative likelihood information is available, or neither type of information. Finally, catastrophic risk (...) raises important ethical questions about what to do when catastrophe avoidance conflicts with equity promotion. (shrink)

The relationship between “Towards a Critique of Violence” (1921) and the work of Franz Kafka has been well established by several critical studies devoted to Walter Benjamin. However, it is striking that Benjamin himself, already well acquainted with the work of the Czech writer in 1921, never made any comment to Kafka’s work in this essay, and, more broadly, in any of the related texts that make up the project on the ‘Critique of Violence’. In this article, we analyze a (...) set of notions (Entstellung, Entsühnung, Zurechstellen) that allow us to establish a mediated relationship between this essay and the articles and letters that Benjamin devoted to Kafka in the 1930s. This relationship takes us back to the only piece in which Benjamin carries out an autonomous treatment of the “category of justice” (1916) in which he identifies -as it will happen eighteen years later, in the essay on Kafka (1934)- the locus of justice in the “non-violence”, thus untying the knot that binds in a perhaps indiscernible way in the Jewish tradition the notions of “messianism” and “violence”. (shrink)

The Precautionary Principle (PP) is an influential principle of risk management. It has been widely introduced into environmental legislation, and it plays an important role in most international environmental agreements. Yet, there is little consensus on precisely how to understand and formulate the principle. In this paper I prove some impossibility results for two plausible formulations of the PP as a decision-rule. These results illustrate the difficulty in making the PP consistent with the acceptance of any trade-offs between catastrophic risks (...) and more ordinary goods. (shrink)

This volume offers a collection of in-depth explorations of pragmatism as a framework for discussions in philosophy of science and metaphysics. Each chapter involves explicit reflection on what it means to be pragmatist, and how to use pragmatism as a guiding framework in addressing topics such as realism, unification, fundamentality, truth, laws, reduction, and more. -/- .

Dr Peter Sjöstedt-H reviews Dr Andrew R. Gallimore's book, Alien Information Theory. -/- This was published on PsyPressUK on 13 June 2019.