Zum Kant-Jahr: Manfed Kühns meisterhafte Biographie so preist der Verlag C. H. Beck im Buchumschlag seine 2004 in fünfter Auflage erschienene Übersetzung von Manfred Kuehns Kant. A Biography. Cambridge University Press 2001 an. Nun, 2018, habe ich eben diese Jubiläumsausgabe zu Weihnachten, dem Fest der Geburt des Immanuel, geschenkt bekommen. Kant wurde am 22. April 1724 in Königsberg geboren und starb dort am 12. Februar 1804. 2018 kann kaum oder gar nicht als Kant-Jahr gelten. Doch ein katholischer Kalender verbindet (...) mit dem 25. Dezember den Namen Immanuel, Gott (ist) mit uns. Kant hat also Namenstag. (shrink)

In an important study, Lawrence Sklar has defended a doctrine of methodological conservatism (very roughly, the principle that a proposition derives some sort of epistemic warrant from being believed). I argue that Sklar's careful formulation of methodological conservatism remains too strong, and that a yet weaker version of the doctrine cannot be successfully defended. I also criticize Sklar's argument that the rejection of methodological conservatism would result in total skepticism. Finally, I turn to a closely related issue, and try to (...) show why different people with the same evidence should be justified in believing the same things. (shrink)

Even though it is not very often admitted, partial functions do play a significant role in many practical applications of deduction systems. Kleene has already given a semantic account of partial functions using a three-valued logic decades ago, but there has not been a satisfactory mechanization. Recent years have seen a thorough investigation of the framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. However, strong Kleene logic, where quantification is restricted and therefore not truthfunctional, does not fit the framework directly. We solve this (...) problem by applying recent methods from sorted logics. This paper presents a tableau calculus that combines the proper treatment of partial functions with the efficiency of sorted calculi. (shrink)

I explore and develop the idea that (NA) knowledge is non-accidentally true belief. The applicable notion of non-accidentality differs from that of ‘epistemic luck’ discussed by Pritchard. Safety theories may be seen as a refinement of, or substitute for, NA but they are subject to a fundamental difficulty. At the same time, NA needs to be adjusted in order to cope with two counterexamples. The Light Switch Case turns on the ‘directionof-fit’ between a belief and the facts, while the Meson (...) Case concerns knowledge of nomological necessities. A proposed revision to NA is: (ENA) S knows that P when S’s belief that P is non-accidentally true because (i) it is based on good evidence, and (ii) in and of themselves, beliefs based on good evidence tend to be true. ‘knowledge-as-credit’ accounts have been offered as an alternative way of sharpening NA. I argue that such accounts face serious objections that don’t apply to ENA. Finally, I take up Lackey’s worry that the credit-based approach mishandles knowledge via testimony. ENA faces no difficulty on that score, which counts in its favor. (shrink)

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of (...) natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

Co jest większe, bycie czy nic? Anzelm dowodzi istnienia Boga przy pomocy nihil. Bóg jako to, od czego nic większego nie może zostać pomyślane przez skończony umysł. Właściwe dla Anzelma logiczne – i być może mistyczne – użycie słowa „nic” domaga się porównania z negatywną ontologią Heideggera i jej recepcją w ramach tzw. Szkoły z Kioto założonej przez Nishidę. Czyż jednak pustka buddyzmu zen nie odsyła nas do – niewypowiedzianej – boskiej obecności?

A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches (...) take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher’s methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge. (shrink)

Michael WiIliams maintains that skepticism about the extemal worId is vitiated by a commitment to foundationalism and epistemological realism. (The latter is, approximately, the view that there is such a thing as knowledge of the extemal world in general, which the skeptic can take as a target). I argue that skepticism is not encumbered in the ways Williams supposes. What matters, first of all, is that we can’t perceive the difference between being in an ordinary environment and being in the (...) sort of situation the skeptic describes (e.g. having one’s brain manipulated by deceitful experimenters). This point can be upheld without embracing any substantial foundationalist tenet, such as the existence of basic beliefs, the availabiIity of something “given,” or the epistemic priority of experience. As to “epistemological realism,” I find that Williams has offered no principled way to distinguish between ordinary chaIIenges to knowledge and skeptical challenges which, supposedly, have no cIaim on our concem. (shrink)

A prominent response is that Cartesian skepticism is too Cartesian. It arises from outmoded views in epistemology and the philosophy of mind that we now properly reject. We can and should move on to other things. §2 takes up three broadly Cartesian themes: the epistemic priority of experience, under-determination, and the representative theory of perception. I challenge some common assumptions about these, and their connection to skepticism. §3 shows how skeptical arguments that emphasize causal considerations can avoid some suspect Cartesian (...) commitments. §4 explores the related idea that perceptual knowledge is what I call instrumental knowledge. Drawing on that connection, §5 examines a skeptical argument based on minimal assumptions, and explains why a Moorean response to it is unsatisfactory. The problem of skepticism is still with us, and it requires a substantive solution. (shrink)

Important conceptual and metaphysical issues arise when we try to understand the mental lives of “split-brain” subjects. How many distinct streams of consciousness do they have? According to Elizabeth Schechter’s partial unity model, the answer is one. A related question is whether co-consciouness, in general, is transitive. That is, if α and β are co-conscious experiences, and β and γ are co-conscious experiences, must α and γ be co-conscious? According to Schechter, the answer is no. The partial unity model faces (...) some serious objections. Its underpinnings are suspect, and ways of working out the model fall into trouble of various sorts: incoherence, emptiness, or unacceptable indeterminacy about the identity of (token) conscious states. One apparent lesson is that a subject can host two distinct conscious experiences of the same sort. Another is that the co-consciousness relation is transitive after all. (shrink)

Crispin Wright tried to refute classical 'Cartesian' skepticism contending that its core argument is extendible to a reductio ad absurdum (_Mind<D>, 100, 87-116, 1991). We show both that Wright is mistaken and that his mistakes are philosophically illuminating. Wright's 'best version' of skepticism turns on a concept of warranted belief. By his definition, many of our well-founded beliefs about the external world and mathematics would not be warranted. Wright's position worsens if we take 'warranted belief' to be implicitly defined by (...) the general principles governing it. Those principles are inconsistent, as shown by a variant of Godel's argument. Thus the inconsistency Wright found has nothing to do with the special premises of Cartesian skepticism, but is embedded in his own conceptual apparatus. Lastly, we show how a Cartesian skeptic could avoid Wright's critique by reconstructing a skeptical argument that does not use the claims Wright ultimately finds objectionable. (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)

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)

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.

In this paper, the political pamphlet “Der Hessische Landbote” by the eminent German author, Georg Büchner (1813–1837), will be positioned within the context of its political and historical background, analyzed as to its argumentative and stylistic structure, and critically evaluated. It will be argued that propaganda texts such as this should be evaluated by taking into account both rhetorical perspectives and standards of rational discussion. As far as argumentative structure is concerned, a modified version of the Toulmin scheme will be (...) used for the description of three passages of the “Landbote”. As far as stylistic techniques are concerned, Büchner’s strategic use of some figures of speech, especially parallelism, metaphor and metonymy will be examined. As to the critical evaluation, the recently developed concept of “strategic maneuvering” within Pragma-Dialectics, the typology of argumentative dialogues established by D. Walton, and sets of critical questions will be used to assess the status of the arguments within the “Landbote” as potentially fallacious ones. (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)

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)

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.

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

Considering questions at the intersection of time and fiction deepens our understanding of fiction, introduces new questions for philosophy of time, and brings analytic philosophy in discussion with narratology. Philosophers debate whether fictional time can be tensed, whether fictional time can branch, repeat, pause, rewind, or skip and whether fictional time travel is possible. Much of the way we answer these questions will depend on our overall commitment to the nature of fiction. It’s also unclear what, if anything, we can (...) learn about the metaphysics of time from fiction. This chapter will introduce readers to discussions that are shaping the debates in this domain. (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)

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’.

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)

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)

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)

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. -/- .

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)

Dieser Text beinhaltet nichts Neues. Nur hinlänglich Bekanntes, Erinnerungen an Gelesenes und Reflektiertes, vor allem zur Philosophie der Kunst mit ihrer zentrale Frage, was Kunst ist. Und eng damit verknüpft die Frage, was ein Kunstwerk ist und was einen Künstler und eine Künstlerin auszeichnet. In diesem Essay wird es aber nicht um die Kunst im Allgemeinen gehen, sondern um die abstrakte Kunst und die abstrakte Malerei im Besonderen. Was zeichnet sie aus und was ist ihr Wesen? Ist es die Freiheit?

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)

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)

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)

With the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant once again forcing countries into lockdown, this essay seeks to outline a Foucauldian critique of various legal measures taken by the Danish government to cope with COVID-19 during the first year and a half of the pandemic. The essay takes a critical look at the extra-legal measures employed by the Danish government, as the Danish politicians attempted to halt the spread of the, now almost forgotten, Cluster 5 COVID-19 variant. This situation will (...) serve as a critical point from where to start using Foucault’s writings on life and biopolitics in order to expose various legally problematic governmental decisions that became visible during the handling of COVID-19 in general and the Cluster 5 mutation in particular. Reframing the pandemic within Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, this essay concludes that the state of exception has led to an increase in biopolitical logic, where some lives have come to matter more than others. As a critical counterpoint to this logic, the conclusion suggests that the notion of biocommunism could provide a suitable reconfiguration of communism. A reconfiguration that could mitigate some of the issues related to biopolitics is uncovered earlier in the essay. (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)

Presence as ordinarily understood requires spatio-temporal proximity. If however Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is understood in this way it would take a miracle to secure multiple location and an additional miracle to cover it up so that the presence of Christ where the Eucharist was celebrated made no empirical difference. And, while multiple location is logically possible, such metaphysical miracles—miracles of distinction without difference, which have no empirical import—are problematic. I propose an account of Eucharist according to which Christ (...) is indeed really and objectively present in the religiously required sense, without benefit of metaphysical miracles. According to the proposed account, which draws upon Searle’s discussion of “social ontology” in The Construction of Social Reality and The Making of the Social World, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is an institutional fact. I argue that such an account satisfies the requirements for a real presence doctrine. (shrink)

This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a specific focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an (...) interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism fluctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth. (shrink)

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)

Neoclassical economists use expected utility theory to explain, predict, and prescribe choices under risk, that is, choices where the decision-maker knows---or at least deems suitable to act as if she knew---the relevant probabilities. Expected utility theory has been subject to both empirical and conceptual criticism. This chapter reviews expected utility theory and the main criticism it has faced. It ends with a brief discussion of subjective expected utility theory, which is the theory neoclassical economists use to explain, predict, and prescribe (...) choices under uncertainty, that is, choices where the decision-maker cannot act on the basis of objective probabilities but must instead consult her own subjective probabilities. (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)

Samuel Thomas (von) Soemmerring (1755–1830) war ein umfassend gebildeter und vielseitig interessierter Aufklärer, der sich vor allem als (Neuro-)Anatom anhaltende Berühmtheit ver- diente. Unrühmliche Bedeutung erlangten seine Untersuchung „zur körperlichen Verschiedenheit des Mohren vom Europäer“ und sein Versuch, die menschliche Seele im Liquor cerebrospinalis zu verorten. Weitgehend in Vergessenheit geraten sind seine Ver- dienste um die Gesundheit der Frauen und auch mancher Kna- ben, die ehedem in ein Korsett gezwungen wurden. Kants Kritik an Soemmerrings Organ der Seele (1796) nahm moderne (...) neuro- biologische Konzepte der Neurotransmission vorweg und inspi- rierte Soemmerring zum Bau eines einfachen Nervensystems, dem elektrolytischen Telegrafenapparat. (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)

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

The doctrine that Christ is really present in the Eucharist appears to entail that Christ's body is not only multiply located but present in different ways at different locations. Moreover, the doctrine poses an even more difficult meta-question: what makes a theological explanation of the Eucharist a ‘real presence’ account? Aquinas's defence of transubstantiation, perhaps the paradigmatic account, invokes Aristotelian metaphysics and the machinery of Scholastic philosophy. My aim is not to produce a ‘rational reconstruction’ of his analysis but rather (...) to suggest a metaphysically innocent alternative that will ‘save the phenomena’ of religious belief and practice.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.The real presenceVolume 49, Issue 1H. E. BABER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000121Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. The real presenceVolume 49, Issue 1H. E. BABER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000121Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. The real presenceVolume 49, Issue 1H. E. BABER DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000121Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (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)