Decision theory has at its core a set of mathematical theorems that connect rational preferences to functions with certain structural properties. The components of these theorems, as well as their bearing on questions surrounding rationality, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Philosophy’s current interest in decision theory represents a convergence of two very different lines of thought, one concerned with the question of how one ought to act, and the other concerned with the question of what action consists (...) in and what it reveals about the actor’s mental states. As a result, the theory has come to have two different uses in philosophy, which we might call the normative use and the interpretive use. It also has a related use that is largely within the domain of psychology, the descriptive use. This essay examines the historical development of decision theory and its uses; the relationship between the norm of decision theory and the notion of rationality; and the interdependence of the uses of decision theory. (shrink)

There are currently two robust traditions in philosophy dealing with doxastic attitudes: the tradition that is concerned primarily with all-or-nothing belief, and the tradition that is concerned primarily with degree of belief or credence. This paper concerns the relationship between belief and credence for a rational agent, and is directed at those who may have hoped that the notion of belief can either be reduced to credence or eliminated altogether when characterizing the norms governing ideally rational agents. It presents a (...) puzzle which lends support to two theses. First, that there is no formal reduction of a rational agent’s beliefs to her credences, because belief and credence are each responsive to different features of a body of evidence. Second, that if our traditional understanding of our practices of holding each other responsible is correct, then belief has a distinctive role to play, even for ideally rational agents, that cannot be played by credence. The question of which avenues remain for the credence-only theorist is considered. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of what it is to have faith in a proposition p, in both religious and mundane contexts. It is argued that faith in p doesn’t require adopting a degree of belief that isn’t supported by one’s evidence but rather it requires terminating one’s search for further evidence and acting on the supposition that p. It is then shown, by responding to a formal result due to I.J. Good, that doing so can be rational in a (...) number of circumstances. If expected utility theory is the correct account of practical rationality, then having faith can be both epistemically and practically rational if the costs associated with gathering further evidence or postponing the decision are high. If a more permissive framework is adopted, then having faith can be rational even when there are no costs associated with gathering further evidence. (shrink)

In the peer disagreement debate, three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one’s own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one’s opinion on important matters. I show that contrary to initial appearances, we can accept all three of these claims. Disagreement significantly shifts the balance of the evidence; but with respect to certain kinds of claims, one should nonetheless retain one’s beliefs. (...) And one should retain them even though these beliefs would not be supported by the new total evidence if one didn’t already hold them. (shrink)

The ‘rollback argument,’ pioneered by Peter van Inwagen, purports to show that indeterminism in any form is incompatible with free will. The argument has two major premises: the first claims that certain facts about chances obtain in a certain kind of hypothetical situation, and the second that these facts entail that some actual act is not free. Since the publication of the rollback argument, the second claim has been vehemently debated, but everyone seems to have taken the first claim for (...) granted. Nevertheless, the first claim is totally unjustified. Even if we accept the second claim, therefore, the argument gives us no reason to think that free will and indeterminism are incompatible. Furthermore, seeing where the rollback argument goes wrong illuminates how a certain kind of incompatibilist, the ‘chance-incompatibilist,’ ought to think about free will and chance, and points to a possibility for free will that has remained largely unexplored. (shrink)

One phenomenon arising in epistemic life is allegiance to, and break from, a tradition. This phenomenon has three central features. First, individuals who adhere to a tradition seem to respond dogmatically to evidence against their tradition. Second, individuals from different traditions appear to see the same evidence differently. And third, conversion from one tradition to another appears to be different in kind from ordinary belief shift. This paper uses recent work on the nature and rationality of faith to show that (...) these features can all emerge from individuals acting rationally—in particular, from individuals rationally having faith in the core assumptions of their traditions. One upshot is that we don't need to employ the idea of incommensurability to explain these features. (shrink)

Faith is a central attitude in Christian religious practice. The problem of faith and reason is the problem of reconciling religious faith with the standards for our belief-forming practices in general (‘ordinary epistemic standards’). In order to see whether and when faith can be reconciled with ordinary epistemic standards, we first need to know what faith is. This chapter examines and catalogues views of propositional faith: faith that p. It is concerned with the epistemology of such faith: what cognitive attitudes (...) does such faith require, what epistemic norms govern these attitudes, and whether Christian faith can ever adhere to them. (shrink)

Many view cancellation as a method for holding influential personalities accountable for bad behavior, while others think cancelling amounts to censorship and bullying. I hold that neither of these accounts are worth pursuing, especially if the aim is social progress. In this paper, I offer a situated account of cancellation and cancel culture, locating the phenomenon in our exclusionary history while examining the social dynamics of belief. When we situate cancel culture, we can see how problematic instances of cancelling are (...) embedded in ignorance. While combatting ignorance appears to call for a remedy rooted in feminist standpoint epistemology, there are risks in adopting naive practices of deference. Applying criticisms of epistemic injustice and adopting Táíwò’s elite capture framework, I explain how well-intentioned cancelling can work against social movements. Since epistemic trust mechanisms discourage self-reflection and belief revision, the relevant tactics for enacting social change—coalition politics and education—seem out of reach. I conclude by sketching cancel culture as a diagnostic tool: cancellation can be used appropriately in marginalized communities, but when it comes to combatting ignorance among privileged folks, we should view cancel culture as a method for determining where our social institutions are failing us. (shrink)

In “Can it be rational to have faith?”, it was argued that to have faith in some proposition consists, roughly speaking, in stopping one’s search for evidence and committing to act on that proposition without further evidence. That paper also outlined when and why stopping the search for evidence and acting is rationally required. Because the framework of that paper was that of formal decision theory, it primarily considered the relationship between faith and degrees of belief, rather than between faith (...) and belief full stop. This paper explores the relationship between rational faith and justified belief, by considering four prominent proposals about the relationship between belief and degrees of belief, and by examining what follows about faith and belief according to each of these proposals. It is argued that we cannot reach consensus concerning the relationship between faith and belief at present because of the more general epistemological lack of consensus over how belief relates to rationality: in particular, over how belief relates to the degrees of belief it is rational to have given one’s evidence. (shrink)

The good of those who are worse off matters more to the overall good than the good of those who are better off does. But being worse off than one’s fellows is not itself bad; nor is inequality itself bad; nor do differences in well-being matter more when well-being is lower in an absolute sense. Instead, the good of the relatively worse-off weighs more heavily in the overall good than the good of the relatively better-off does, in virtue of the (...) fact that the former are relatively worse off. This paper articulates and defends the view just described. (shrink)

A two part presentation beginning with a short fictive and imaginal setting on the grounds of a glass house by a lake where an artist conducts psycho-dramas with his audience that explore the interface between the observer and the observed, interiority and exteriority and patiency and agency. Followed by a second part exploring a proto-dialectical logic that deals with the fundamentals of cerebral thought's claim to rationally order and process the "world," phenomenal, scientific or otherwise.

Some early phase clinical studies of candidate HIV cure and remission interventions appear to have adverse medical risk–benefit ratios for participants. Why, then, do people participate? And is it ethically permissible to allow them to participate? Recent work in decision theory sheds light on both of these questions, by casting doubt on the idea that rational individuals prefer choices that maximise expected utility, and therefore by casting doubt on the idea that researchers have an ethical obligation not to enrol participants (...) in studies with high risk–benefit ratios. This work supports the view that researchers should instead defer to the considered preferences of the participants themselves. This essay briefly explains this recent work, and then explores its application to these two questions in more detail. (shrink)

I have claimed that risk-weighted expected utility maximizers are rational, and that their preferences cannot be captured by expected utility theory. Richard Pettigrew and Rachael Briggs have recently challenged these claims. Both authors argue that only EU-maximizers are rational. In addition, Pettigrew argues that the preferences of REU-maximizers can indeed be captured by EU theory, and Briggs argues that REU-maximizers lose a valuable tool for simplifying their decision problems. I hold that their arguments do not succeed and that my original (...) claims still stand. However, their arguments do highlight some costs of REU theory. (shrink)

The orthodox theory of instrumental rationality, expected utility (EU) theory, severely restricts the way in which risk-considerations can figure into a rational individual's preferences. It is argued here that this is because EU theory neglects an important component of instrumental rationality. This paper presents a more general theory of decision-making, risk-weighted expected utility (REU) theory, of which expected utility maximization is a special case. According to REU theory, the weight that each outcome gets in decision-making is not the subjective probability (...) of that outcome; rather, the weight each outcome gets depends on both its subjective probability and its position in the gamble. Furthermore, the individual's utility function, her subjective probability function, and a function that measures her attitude towards risk can be separately derived from her preferences via a Representation Theorem. This theorem illuminates the role that each of these entities plays in preferences, and shows how REU theory explicates the components of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

Does postulating skeptical theism undermine the claim that evil strongly confirms atheism over theism? According to Perrine and Wykstra, it does undermine the claim, because evil is no more likely on atheism than on skeptical theism. According to Draper, it does not undermine the claim, because evil is much more likely on atheism than on theism in general. I show that the probability facts alone do not resolve their disagreement, which ultimately rests on which updating procedure – conditionalizing or updating (...) on a conditional – fits both the evidence and how we ought to take that evidence into account. (shrink)

Many accounts of faith hold that faith is deference to an authority about what to believe or what to do. I show that this kind of faith fits into a more general account of faith, the risky-commitment account. I further argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority even when the authority’s pronouncement goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities.

Johannes Müller von Königsberg (1436-1476), better known as Regiomontanus, is widely considered as the most influential astronomer and mathematician of 15th-century Europe. He was active as an astrologer and deemed astrology to be the queen of mathematical sciences. Despite this, Regiomontanus's astrological activity has yet to be fully explored. A brief examination of Regiomontanus's manuscripts shows that his astrological interests were accompanied by interests in the arts and in methods of prognostication. This article studies an unconventional astrological-chiromantical text, whose relevance (...) is threefold: a) it sheds new light on Regiomontanus's astrological interests; b) it enriches our knowledge of Regiomontanus's efforts to learn and understand Greek-Regiomontanus transcribed it into his own manuscript during his sojourn in Italy from 1460-1467; and c) it is the sole extant text in the Greek tradition that provides a system for prognostication from the study of a person's hand, the parts of which are considered as being under the domain of planets. The article provides an English translation of Regiomontanus's transcription, alongside a brief commentary, and studies the intellectual and historical context of that production through manuscript analysis. (shrink)

A natural view in distributive ethics is that everyone's interests matter, but the interests of the relatively worse off matter more than the interests of the relatively better off. I provide a new argument for this view. The argument takes as its starting point the proposal, due to Harsanyi and Rawls, that facts about distributive ethics are discerned from individual preferences in the "original position." I draw on recent work in decision theory, along with an intuitive principle about risk-taking, to (...) derive the view. (shrink)

There are notorious differences between the Jesuit theology of Gracián’s Humanism and the Pascalian theology of grace of the Colombian thinker Nicolás Gómez Dávila. In addition, Gómez Dávila criticizes Spanish Baroque when he compares it with other literatures. However, the virtuous hero of Gracián and the philosophical way of life of the Colombian thinker are connected. Both philosophies develop a mundane ethic that solves a puzzle: how the human spirit can access transcendence through the dark labyrinths of earthly difficulties.

Causal selection is the cognitive process through which one or more elements in a complex causal structure are singled out as actual causes of a certain effect. In this paper, we report on an experiment in which we investigated the role of moral and temporal factors in causal selection. Our results are as follows. First, when presented with a temporal chain in which two human agents perform the same action one after the other, subjects tend to judge the later agent (...) to be the actual cause. Second, the impact of temporal location on causal selection is almost canceled out if the later agent did not violate a norm while the former did. We argue that this is due to the impact that judgments of norm violation have on causal selection—even if the violated norm has nothing to do with the obtaining effect. Third, moral judgments about the effect influence causal selection even in the case in which agents could not have foreseen the effect and did not intend to bring it about. We discuss our findings in connection to recent theories of the role of moral judgment in causal reasoning, on the one hand, and to probabilistic models of temporal location, on the other. (shrink)

The history of humankind is full of examples that indicate a constant desire to make human beings more moral. Nowadays, technological breakthroughs might have a significant impact on our moral character and abilities. This is the case of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The aim of this paper is to consider the ethical aspects of the use of VR in enhancing empathy. First, we will offer an introduction to VR, explaining its fundamental features, devices and concepts. Then, we will approach the (...) characterization of VR as an “empathy machine,” showing why this medium has aroused so much interest and why, nevertheless, we do not believe it is the ideal way to enhance empathy. As an alternative, we will consider fostering empathy-related abilities through virtual embodiment in avatars. In the conclusion, however, we will, we will examine some of the serious concerns related to the ethical relevance of empathy and will defend the philosophical case for a reason-guided empathy, also suggesting specific guidelines for possible future developments of empathy enhancement projects through VR embodied experiences. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between personality traits and coping styles among college students in private higher educational institution. Hence, employing correlational design to assess the relationship between coping styles and personality of 150 college students. The statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.54 indicates a moderate positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between coping style and (...) personality traits among fourth-year college students in a private state university. (shrink)

Written in broad strokes, this paper attempts to draw form Krishnamurti’s life and teachings, a hermeneutics of the human soul’s quest-journey towards transcendent wholeness. It begins with an attempt to frame K’s “process” (the name given to the painful ordeals in his youth that many believe were the catalyst responsible for his metamorphosis) through a variety of disciplines and cultural perspectives, some of which underscore the impasse of scientific objectivity and the limits of phenomenalist categories in general. It then explores (...) the procedures and conceits of present technologies of self-transformation via pseudomeditative body work and suggests that this subject can only be confirmed by an experience so intimately and subversively (to its own object) subjective that it risks undermining its own legitimacy in the face of our body-phobic Cartesian cultural ethos that holds sacrosanct the mind-body split. -/- It then explores the deeper origins and history of this problem from the pre-Socratics to the misconceptions of modern mathematics about the proper place of metaphor and paradox and underscores how present day false consciousness fails to discriminate between a “noumenal” world and its conditioned “phenomenal” counterfeit copy. It ends with a brief meditation on K’s process. (shrink)

The debate about the foundations of mathematical sciences traces back to Greek antiquity, with Euclid and the foundations of geometry. Through the flux of history, the debate has appeared in several shapes, places, and cultural contexts. Remarkably, it is a locus where logic, philosophy, and mathematics meet. In mathematical astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus’s axiomatic approach toward a heliocentric theory of the universe has prompted questions about foundations among historians who have studied Copernican axioms in their terminological and logical aspects but never (...) examined them as a question of mathematical practice. Copernicus provides seven unproved assumptions in the introduction of the brief treatise entitled Nicolaus Copernicus’s draft on the models of celestial motions established by himself, better known as Commentariolus (ca. 1515), published circa 30 years before the final composition of his heliocentric theory (On the revolutions of the heavenly spheres, 1543). The assumptions deal with the renowned Copernican hypothesis of considering the Earth in motion and the Sun, not affected by motion, near the center of the universe. Although Copernicus decides to omit the proofs for the sake of brevity, the deductions in the Commentariolus are supposed to be drawn from the initial seven assumptions. Questions on the nature (are they postulates or axioms?) and the logic (is there an internal rigor?) of those assumptions have yet to be fully explored. By examining Copernicus’s seven assumptions as a question of mathematical practice, it is possible to hold historical, philosophical, and logical aspects of Copernican axiomatics together and understand them as part of Copernicus’s intuition and creativity. (shrink)

The history of the science of the stars (astronomy and astrology) in fourteenth-century Byzantium is significantly intertwined with the implications of theological and philosophical controversies. A less-explored astronomical text authored by the fourteenth-century Byzantine scholar Theorodos Meliteniotes (ca. 1320–1393 CE) provides new historical factors toward a historiography of the differences between scientific and theological discourses, their development in the transition to early modern times, and the different historical developments of science in the worlds of the Eastern and Western Churches.

Erick J. Ramirez, Miles Elliott and Per‑Erik Milam (2021) have recently claimed that using Virtual Reality (VR) as an educational nudge to promote empathy is unethical. These authors argue that the influence exerted on the participant through virtual simulation is based on the deception of making them believe that they are someone else when this is impossible. This makes the use of VR for empathy enhancement a manipulative strategy in itself. In this article, we show that Ramirez et al.’s ethical (...) rejection of empathy enhancement through VR is based on confusion. First, we show that this misunderstanding stems from the conception of empathy-enhancing simulations solely as failed attempts at “being someone else,” along with ignoring the crucial difference between the psychological perspective-taking processes of imagine-other and imagine-self. Then, having overcome that misconception, we argue that the ethical misgivings about the use of VR to promote empathy should disappear and that these projects have greater potential for behavioural change than purely sympathy-focused interventions. (shrink)

Anne Phillips argues that definitions of the human are a trap for the political claims to equality contained in humanitarianism or human rights discourse. However, defining the human also hides the ontological and political problem addressed by the Philosophical Anthropology. There is an ethical and political stake in the philosophical anthropology of the last century when it insists on the indefinability of the human. With this, it criticizes the politics implicit in the definition of the human. And also, it questions (...) the metaphysical positions that the act of defining implies. -/- //// La lógica de inclusión/exclusión presente en toda definición de lo humano no solo es una trampa para las reivindicaciones políticas de la igualdad contenidas en el humanitarismo o el discurso de los derechos humanos, como ha argumentado Anne Phillips, sino que también oblitera la problemática ontológica contenida en la pregunta fundamental de toda antropología filosófica y su correspondiente dimensión práctica. Las tesis de la indefinibilidad del ser humano y la problematicidad ontológica constitutiva de lo humano —desarrolladas por la antropología filosófica crítica del último siglo— cuestionan toda política de la definición de lo humano y las posturas metafísicas que tales políticas implican. Por ello, el artículo también pone en cuestión la imagen negativa del aporte de la antropología filosófica a la ética y la filosofía social. -/- . (shrink)

This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.

Originating in the field of biology, the concept of the hybrid has proved to be influential and effective in historical studies, too. Until now, however, the idea of hybrid knowledge has not been fully explored in the historiography of pre-modern science. This article examines the history of pre-Copernican astronomy and focuses on three case studies—Alexandria in the second century CE; Baghdad in the ninth century; and Constantinople in the fourteenth century—in which hybridization played a crucial role in the development of (...) astronomical knowledge and in philosophical controversies about the status of astronomy and astrology in scholarly and/or institutional settings. By establishing a comparative framework, this analysis of hybrid knowledge highlights different facets of hybridization and shows how processes of hybridization shaped scientific controversies. (shrink)

Perception of time is susceptible to distortions; among other factors, it has been suggested that the perceived duration of a stimulus is affected by the observer’s expectations. It has been hypothesized that the duration of an oddball stimulus is overestimated because it is unexpected, whereas repeated stimuli have a shorter perceived duration because they are expected. However, recent findings suggest instead that fulfilled expectations about a stimulus elicit an increase in perceived duration, and that the oddball effect occurs because the (...) oddball is a target stimulus, not because it is unexpected. Therefore, it has been suggested that top-down attention is sometimes sufficient to explain this effect, and sometimes only necessary, with an additional contribution from saliency. However, how the expectedness of a target stimulus and its salient features affect its perceived duration is still an open question. In the present study, participants’ expectations about and the saliency of target stimuli were orthogonally manipulated with stimuli presented on a short (Experiment 1) or long (Experiment 2) temporal scale. Four repetitive standard stimuli preceded each target stimulus in a task in which participants judged whether the target was longer or shorter in duration than the standards. Engagement of top-down attention to target stimuli increased their perceived duration to the same extent irrespective of their expectedness. A small but significant additional contribution to this effect from the saliency of target stimuli was dependent on the temporal scale of stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, saliency only significantly increased perceived duration in the case of expected target stimuli. In contrast, in Experiment 2, saliency exerted a significant effect on the overestimation elicited by unexpected target stimuli, but the contribution of this variable was eliminated in the case of expected target stimuli. These findings point to top-down attention as the primary cognitive mechanism underlying the perceptual extraction and processing of task-relevant information, which may be strongly correlated with perceived duration. Furthermore, the scalar properties of timing were observed, favoring the pacemaker-accumulator model of timing as the underlying timing mechanism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: A report on the pioneering of a new pedagogy designed to challenge students to use and improve their memory, increase their awareness of logical fallacies and tacitly embedded contradiction(s) and sensitize them to the deeply symbolic nature of thought in all its expressions (math, logos, music, picture and motor skills), as created, by the author, from in situ research at a senior level (ESL) course in Storytelling at one of East Asia’s premiere second languages university, and from teaching children (...) in several university summer programs. -/- As a Visiting Professor of Foreign Languages, I recently had a glorious opportunity to innovate curriculum and teaching techniques in an East Asian university classroom. Under the auspices of teaching senior level thematic courses in English as a Foreign Language, or more specifically, “storytelling,” I was blessed with the opportunity to innovate both on the level of curriculum and pedagogy. -/- But let me backtrack to set up my story from the start. All of this began in a children’s ESL class at a private language institute where I was given some newly formed intermediate level English classes for middle school students on a new campus that had yet to form a library. While waiting for my standard textbooks to arrive I began innovating with one of my own childrens’ stories titled The Tale of the Purple People Eater (a three page mythic story written in the late 90s. Please see appendix). In working with this story, because I envisioned presenting it orally (from memory) at first as a way to introduce students to memory arts exercises, I was compelled to read it over many times, which, to my surprise revealed a troubling feature: it was riddled with contradictions in every paragraph. At any rate, with the middle school aged students I only touched on this feature very briefly and focused more on language acquisition exercises. The tale nevertheless impressed upon me this bizarre aspect of language where a story can appear naturally cogent on the surface, but can also come apart at the seems if taken “literally.” Hence, later while teaching Storytelling in university with a rather dry textbook, I was invited to supplement the class with exercises of my own. Here I was curious to try work shopping the ‘Tale of The Purple People Eater’ with young adults. This involved three stages: 1) Memory work — or engaging with the unpublished story orally; 2) Exploring the contradictory nature of language and thought; 3) Probing the “deeply-symbolic” nature of meaning. -/- Of course, all of these levels have a long history of precedence in our civilization. Memory arts — though defunct now — had been highly developed in the ancient world, not least among bards who performed oral recitations from memory of the entire Illiad and Odyssey. Dialectics — now transmuted into the debate for show and prizes — had a deeper epistemological mission to discover truth and achieve enlightenment (i.e. Socrates, Boethius and St-Augustine). And if it could not be done via contradictory-prone rationality, it would do it by re-attaching or re-membering broken meanings via the sym-bol (“throwing together”), as per our lineage of platonic poets who created a world compelling enough to make us ask where Jesus went during his (underworld journey) three days in the crypt? Or, and, on what terrain did Dante travel? -/- Lets look at all three: Memory work can be very simple: it amounts to an oral recitation of the story in class followed by a homework assignment wherein the students are asked to reproduce the story (in writing) from memory. They can then compare ‘notes’ in class and by working in groups attempt to produce one version per group of the story in question. In this way we invite them to engage with ‘live’ stories as did our oral-history ancestors. Likewise, by writing it down (“for the first time”) they are re-living the act of our first bardic writer(s) who wove together a collection of competing versions of a popular legend to produce a standard. Very primal work! If Plato thought that writing meant the end of memory in his time, imagine what smart phones are doing to memory now. Contradictions too are easy to work with. It suffices to project a written version of the teacher’s story on the classroom screen — no note taking! — and let students have ample time to read it over and over, at first to check with their own memorized version, and later to seek out logical contradictions in the prose. Any way to ‘repair’ the story? Does it lose credibility because of contradictions? Can it be real without being true? Can it be true without being real? Do reality (L. res = matter) and truth (Gk. a-leithea = un-forgetting) etymologically speaking, share the same domain? -/- Further, if below the surface-meaning the story falls apart, its apparent mythical meaning immediately is called into question. This is a good time to ask the students to propose a (deeper) interpretation. On the surface, the obvious meaning of the Tale of the Purple People Eater, a world in which a purple ogre predatorily feasted on the purple race of the United Peoples of Benetton (a multi-racial nation representing every “skin colour of the rainbow”), revolves around racism, and indeed everyone save for one, thought the story was about racism. -/- I, the author, had the challenge of discovering the deeper meaning of my own story. Because it was written inspirationally one morning, the way we might record the memory of a dream from the night before in a journal, I also was ignorant of the story’s meaning. As luck would have it, a few days before I was to give my class feedback on their interpretations, a meditation on the color “purple” led to the book “The Color Purple” which I first heard of from a friend who, in my reply to a question about the book she was reading (in 1985), summarized it succinctly in one sentence about a black woman’s sexual awakening and liberation. I quickly got the book from the university library as well as the film which I viewed several times before my next class. -/- To my utter amazement, after reading the Tale of the Purple People Eater in light of the Color Purple and adjusting the meaning of color in the tale from the color of people’s complexion to the “color of people’s souls” (to commensurate with the film) as depicted in their clothing and other accoutrements (e.g. automobiles) as reflective of the “health of their souls” (white for revolt, purple for majesty, etc…) where the enslaved Celie is surrounded by drab lifeless colors in the beginning of the film in contrast to the liberated woman she has become in the end of the story symbolized by the extraordinary intensity of the purple shawl that bedecks her like an African queen, the tale can be considered, in part, as a kind of back story of the inner evolution of the book’s and film’s protagonist. -/- Many other cross-polenised metaphors come to the fore: Hippocrates in the tale is the mail man in the film; St-Yves anti-ageing gel is a metaphor for remaining in “childhood (sexual) slavery”; the Ex-Thrax vaccine is the spiritual laxative in the form of letters from Africa (from Ex-Lax and Thrace, a “wild place”) that eases Celie out of her yoke; the egg-shaped conference table with the pointy end in the tale is the kitchen table in the last meeting where Celie threatens her husband with the pointy end of the knife in the film… -/- Of course, the students could not be expected to decode the meaning of a story of this nature whose collective unconscious connotations the author himself had to go to great lengths to excavate almost like a detective of the subconscious. What was important here was the shared engagement between mind and narrative and how it acted as a vehicle for 1) re-membering, 2) becoming aware that all language is a metaphorical cover and 3) that the deep symbol and fused metaphor are divided not by external time and space but by external reality (in the Latin sense, res) and internal truth (in the Greek sense, aleithea). Myth then, in its highest meaning is a hybrid form (of these two) of narrative. Hence both parts real and true. (shrink)

The concept of sovereignty is a recurring and controversial theme in international law, and it has a long history in western philosophy. The traditionally favored concept of sovereignty proves problematic in the context of international law. International law’s own claims to sovereignty, which are premised on traditional concept of sovereignty, undermine individual nations’ claims to sovereignty. These problems are attributable to deep-seated flaws in the traditional concept of sovereignty. A viable alternative concept of sovereignty can be derived from key concepts (...) in Friedrich Nietzsche’s views on human reason and epistemology. The essay begins by considering the problem of sovereignty from the ancient philosophical perspective inherent in the fundamental assumptions and ideas of Plato’s political philosophy and epistemology. It then considers the contemporary problem of sovereignty in the context of international law by examining Louis Henkin’s formulation of and approach to it in his essay That S-Word: Sovereignty, and Globalization, and Human Rights, Etc. Finally, the essay articulates Nietzsche’s views on intellectual conscience, discusses their merits and advantages when used in dealing the problem of sovereignty in the context of international law, and proposes a solution to this problem that draws on the philosophies of Nietzsche, Novalis, Kant and Plato. The essay illustrates the relevance and advantages of this solution by examining the issue of states’ reservations to international treaties and conventions. (shrink)

Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution (...) to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the process of creating new prisoner’s dilemma strategies is both easy to teach and easy for students to grasp. We illustrate with two interesting examples taken from actual use of Oyun in the classroom. (shrink)

At the time of writing, social media is rife with misinformation and disinformation, having very real effects on our political processes and on the vaccination efforts of the COVID pandemic. As the effort to pass new laws and regulations on social media companies gains momentum, concerns remain about how to balance free speech rights and even who, if anyone, should be the one to regulate social media. Drawing on Dewey’s conception of the public, I argue for the regulation of social (...) media companies by the state as part of the effort to curb misinformation and disinformation. (shrink)

…A reconstructed imaginal account of Alexander’s (the Great) historical letter to Aristotle pursuant to his (in-) famous meeting with the gymnosophist Dandimus on the paradoxes of Zeno ( presaging those of Nagarjuna ) as a means of presenting a synthesis of the stasis and dynamism implicit in the potential of a phenomenally real world beyond a rigid designation of a chain-of-being taxonomy where animal dignity resides side by side with predator-prey relations and a mind-laden ( theory ) of evolution.

A reflection on the merits of an a priori poeto-epistemology in relation to tacitly held assumptions about the a fortiori validity of computational logic to transcend the limits of contradiction and infinite regression and establish a valid ontology.

This submission constitutes six (core) pages in literary prose expounding the philosophy of Parmenides of Elea outside the reductionist framework based in formal logic that has become de rigeur in philosophy departments of the English language world — at least prior to Dr. Papa-Grimaldi’s research. To this end, my paper, in chronological order, by way of introduction simulates Plato’s Parmenides; in the main body reconstructs Taran’s argument in “Much Ado About ‘Nothing,’” in Apeiron, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, June 2002, pp. (...) 87-104; and in the final section which will be presented at the conference, breaks away into an original hermeneutics in dialogical format featuring Socrates as a guest dramatis personae charged with the task of reconstructing in a new key, on behalf of the author, Parmenides’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the foundationary principles of education in the context of fragmentary consciousness and disembodied practice as inspired by the dialogues on these themes of J. Krishnamurti and David Bohm and supported by recent scientific evidence from a variety of fields.

"Memory and Mimesis" commence par une réflexion sur la relation entre l'esprit et la mémoire invoqué par un scénario quotidien de la vie d'un père jouant avec sa fille âgée d'un an dans un bistrot et extrapole, a partir de cette relation, une parallèle relation entre psychologie de l'enfant et de l'évolution humaine en termes du «développement» des formes peu profondes de la mémoire au détriment d'une mémoire plus profonde et primale incorporée dans un esprit non- épiphenominal. -/- -/- L'étude (...) procède alors a le démonter par une exégèse de l'histoire de la création dans le livre de la Genèse avec une attention particulière à l'histoire de la tentation du serpent et le péché originel d'Eve comme une preuve — quand l'histoire est prise ( pas trop ) au sérieux — d’un support biblique pour l'évolution de concert avec des découverts dans la biologie évolutive. (shrink)

A report on the pioneering of a new pedagogy designed to challenge students to use and improve their memory, increase their awareness of logical fallacies and tacitly embedded contradiction(s) and sensitize them to the deeply symbolic nature of thought in all its expressions (math, logos, music, picture and motor skills), as created, by the author, from in situ research at a senior level (ESL) course in Storytelling at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea’s premier university for foreign languages and (...) translation.in. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a criticism to a method for metaontology, namely, the idea that a discourse’s or theory’s ontological commitments can be read off its sentences’ truth- conditions. Firstly, I will put forward this idea’s basis and, secondly, I will present the way Quine subscribed to it. However, I distinguish between two readings of Quine’s famous ontological criterion, and I center the focus on the one currently dubbed “ontological minimalism”, a kind of modern Ockhamism applied to the mentioned (...) metaontological view. I show that this view has a certain application via Quinean thesis of reference inscrutability but that it is not possible to press that application any further and, in particular, not for the ambitious metaontological task some authors try to employ. The conclusion may sound promising: having shown the impossibility of a semantic ontological criterion, intentionalist or subjectivist ones should be explored. (shrink)

Thomas Bonk has dedicated a book to analyzing the thesis of underdetermination of scientific theories, with a chapter exclusively devoted to the analysis of the relation between this idea and the indeterminacy of meaning. Both theses caused a revolution in the philosophic world in the sixties, generating a cascade of articles and doctoral theses. Agitation seems to have cooled down, but the point is still debated and it may be experiencing a renewed resurgence.

How should a group with different opinions (but the same values) make decisions? In a Bayesian setting, the natural question is how to aggregate credences: how to use a single credence function to naturally represent a collection of different credence functions. An extension of the standard Dutch-book arguments that apply to individual decision-makers recommends that group credences should be updated by conditionalization. This imposes a constraint on what aggregation rules can be like. Taking conditionalization as a basic constraint, we gather (...) lessons from the established work on credence aggregation, and extend this work with two new impossibility results. We then explore contrasting features of two kinds of rules that satisfy the constraints we articulate: one kind uses fixed prior credences, and the other uses geometric averaging, as opposed to arithmetic averaging. We also prove a new characterisation result for geometric averaging. Finally we consider applications to neighboring philosophical issues, including the epistemology of disagreement. (shrink)

La actual crisis sanitaria nos invita a repensar el actual modelo de salud, así como sus implicaciones antropológicas, sociales y económicas. A partir de una breve historia del concepto de salud, en este artı́culo tratamos de evidenciar los cambios que ese mismo concepto ha implicado a nivel de relación médico-paciente y a nivel de relaciones sociales. Un nuevo paradigma de salud, más ajustado a los nuevos fenómenos globales que están aconteciendo, implica también una critica a los enfoques individualistas, reduccionistas, tecnocráticos (...) y economicistas que se encontraban en la raı́z del “antiguo” modelo de salud. Por último, proponemos el modelo One Health como una posible respuesta a los problemas teóricos del “antiguo paradigma” de salud, fuertemente enfatizados por la crisis sanitaria actual. (shrink)

In this chapter we use methods of corpus linguistics to investigate the ways in which mathematicians describe their work as explanatory in their research papers. We analyse use of the words explain/explanation (and various related words and expressions) in a large corpus of texts containing research papers in mathematics and in physical sciences, comparing this with their use in corpora of general, day-to-day English. We find that although mathematicians do use this family of words, such use is considerably less prevalent (...) in mathematics papers than in physics papers or in general English. Furthermore, we find that the proportion with which mathematicians use expressions related to ‘explaining why’ and ‘explaining how’ is significantly different to the equivalent proportion in physics and in general English. We discuss possible accounts for these differences. (shrink)

This article approaches the reflections of Paul Ricoeur regarding testimony to befound in his work Memory, History,Forgetting. Through reading of this work, we pos-tulate the idea that to consider others as readers or spectators of our actions forms animportant part of the construction of human subjectivity. The thesis that subjectivityarises as a discourse towards the other is proposed here, inasmuch as human experi-ences are transmitted narratively in the form of testimony, which stands as an examplefor the understanding of the experiences (...) of the past. (shrink)

The philosophical foundation of human rights has become more explicit, given that the presumption of peace in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights demands further development, both in its definition and in the conditions or requirements for its fulfillment. Based on the discussion of the human right to peace, we propose to reinterpret the Arendtine expression “The right to have rights” as the philosophical formula that calls for the ascension of peace to a legal enunciation; this is (...) based on the critique of Human Rights, the valuation of human singularity, and on believing in the merging of actions and discourses that characterize Hannah Arendt’s politics.Keywords: peace, human rights, stateless persons, philosophical foundation, the human right to peace. (shrink)

Nonviolent movements mainly characterized by not taking part in and resist-ing violent practices developed no multiple levels have had a significant contribution inputting an end to wars and oppressive systems. However, it is worth asking whether theyhave, consequently, contributed to the construction of peace. This article, centered onGandhi, reflects upon the general contribution of nonviolence for historical changes ar-ticulated through Paul Ricoeur’s critique and interpretation of the influence of these move-ments in the intricate relationship between politics and violence. -/- .