The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped under QIG. I will also (...) argue that given some plausible assumptions about what it would take for a relation to back metaphysical explanation, many salient views about grounding allow us to give “easy” answers to these questions—easy in the sense that we can straightforwardly derive them from the respective conception of grounding without getting into the sorts of complexities that typically inform answers to QIG. The paper's main upshot is that we cannot expect to make much progress on QIG without first addressing the difficult issue of how exactly grounding is related to metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

Chapter 20 David Kovacs’ “Essence, Grounding, and Explanation” sets out four different ways in which essence might be taken to relate to the notion of grounding or metaphysical explanation, i.e., the type of connection that is often expressed by means of non-causal “in virtue of” or “because”-claims: (i) Unity: essence and grounding belong to a unified set of explanatory concepts; (ii) Supplementation: essence and grounding both contribute in their own way to a distinctive type of explanation; (iii) Independence: essence (...) is a sui generis notion with no straightforward conceptual links to grounding; and (iv) Irrelevance: essence is not an explanatory notion at all and therefore should not be viewed as connected to explanatory notions like grounding. As Kovacs brings out in the chapter, a wide variety of attitudes are represented in the literature even among philosophers who are sympathetic to the recent “hyperintensional” turn in metaphysics when it comes to the question of how the notions of essence and grounding interact with one another. (shrink)

In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which (...) there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper’s conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful. (shrink)

The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun ‘I’, so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very (...) mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made. (shrink)

This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...) conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn’t rely on the notion of a “determinative” or “explanatory” relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

Este capítulo se propone explorar cómo el replanteo de las causas finales en la ciencia natural suscitado por la Revolución Científica impactó en el desarrollo del materialismo y el ateísmo del Siglo de las luces. Con el surgimiento de la ciencia moderna en Europa, en el siglo XVII ocurrieron cambios sustantivos en la concepción de la causalidad. Ciertos estudios pioneros sobre el tema, sostenían que la nueva ciencia anulaba las causas finales y establecía que todos los fenómenos naturales debían explicarse (...) en términos de materia y movimiento (Burtt, 1952:98‒99; Schmitt, 1983:5). Más tarde, otros especialistas —con argumentos más sólidos y pruebas más convincentes— mostraron que la causalidad final no fue anulada por completo; siguió presente en muchos autores, aunque ya no como parte indispensable de la explicación científica, sino como un componente ontológico de la naturaleza (Osler, 1996 y 2001). Ahora bien, ¿qué sucedió con las causas finales en el siglo XVIII europeo, época de profundas turbulencias políticas y controversias filosóficas, en la cual el materialismo, el ateísmo y el deísmo fueron ganando terreno? Para hacer un recorte dentro de la vasta variedad de posiciones existentes en este escenario, comenzaremos por repasar la posición sobre las causas finales de Francis Bacon (1561‒1626), quien fue una figura muy influyente en la Ilustración. 2 Luego, analizaremos la recepción de esa posición por parte de algunos autores británicos (D. Stewart, S. Parker) y franceses en el siglo XVIII (D'Alembert, Naigeon, Diderot, Cabanis). (shrink)

On a widely shared assumption, our mental states supervene on our microphysical properties – that is, microphysical supervenience is true. When this thesis is combined with the apparent truism that human persons have proper parts, a grave difficulty arises: what prevents some of these proper parts from being themselves thinkers as well? How can I know that I am a human person and not a smaller thinker enclosed in a human person? Most solutions to this puzzle make radical, if not (...) absurd, claims. Recently, however, Michael Burke and Howard Robinson proposed conservative solutions that, according to them, do not have such undesired consequences. This paper argues that the conservative solutions tacitly assume at least one of the radical ones, and therefore they provide no alternative to the extreme solutions. (shrink)

Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory role. (...) Once we carefully spell out what playing these roles includes, however, we find that any notion of grounding that isn’t irreflexive fails to play these roles when they are interpreted narrowly, and is redundant for playing them when they are interpreted more broadly. The upshot is that no useful notion of grounding can allow a fact to ground itself. (shrink)

This paper develops the Diachronic Self-Making View, the view that we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our ‘I’-beliefs. A formulation and defence of DSV is followed by an overview of its treatment of familiar puzzle cases about personal identity. The rest of the paper focuses on a challenge to DSV, the Puzzle of Inconstant ‘I’-beliefs: the view appears to force on us inconsistent verdicts about personal identity in cases that we would naturally describe as changes in one’s de (...) se beliefs. To solve this problem, the paper defends the possibility of overlapping people, and addresses a number of objections to this idea. (shrink)

In a series of works, Jody Azzouni has defended deflationary nominalism, the view that certain sentences quantifying over mathematical objects are literally true, although such objects do not exist. One alleged attraction of this view is that it avoids various philosophical puzzles about mathematical objects. I argue that this thought is misguided. I first develop an ontologically neutral counterpart of Field’s reliability challenge and argue that deflationary nominalism offers no distinctive answer to it. I then show how this reasoning generalizes (...) to other philosophically problematic entities. The moral is that puzzle avoidance fails to motivate deflationary nominalism. (shrink)

Francis Bacon’s theory of matter is a controversial topic among historians. I agree with the viewpoint, which suggests that although Bacon changed his views on atomism repeatedly, he never rejected it completely (Partington, Urbach, Gemelli). I will substantiate this interpretation by paying more attention to the usually neglected allegorical works and by investigating why Bacon changed his mind on atomism in his Novum organum. I shall reconstruct Bacon’s various opinions in chronological order to establish his final evaluation of atomism and (...) his reasons for it. Given that Bacon never embraced a matter theory identical with Greek atomism, I shall here define atomism in the broadest sense, as a corpuscular matter theory that posits final and indivisible particles. Following this semantic delimitation, two successive Baconian opinions will be distinguished: the first took the atom to constitute an ontological and causative-operational principle; the second deprived the atom of this causative-operational ability, but did not touch its ontological priority. At the same time, I will investigate the question concerning the coexistence of atomism and pneumatism in Bacon’s theory, a point that has been discussed in the influential interpretations by Kargon and Rees. I shall argue that Bacon did not regard these two doctrines as incompatible. (shrink)

Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary (...) forces that were independent of the ontological truth. Second, I draw an analogy between the Problem of Reasonableness and the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that the revisionary ontologist can always find a positive epistemic status to characterize ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. Finally, I address the worry that the evolutionary component of my story also threatens to undermine the best arguments for revisionary ontologies. (shrink)

It is well-established that algorithms can be instruments of injustice. It is less frequently discussed, however, how current modes of AI deployment often make the very discovery of injustice difficult, if not impossible. In this article, we focus on the effects of algorithmic profiling on epistemic agency. We show how algorithmic profiling can give rise to epistemic injustice through the depletion of epistemic resources that are needed to interpret and evaluate certain experiences. By doing so, we not only demonstrate how (...) the philosophical conceptual framework of epistemic injustice can help pinpoint potential, systematic harms from algorithmic profiling, but we also identify a novel source of hermeneutical injustice that to date has received little attention in the relevant literature: epistemic fragmentation. Epistemic fragmentation is a structural characteristic of algorithmically-mediated environments that isolate individuals, making it more difficult to develop, uptake and apply new epistemic resources. This, in turn, can impede the identification and conceptualisation of emerging harms in these environments. We trace the occurrence of hermeneutical injustice back to the fragmentation of the epistemic experiences of individuals, who are left more vulnerable by the inability to share, compare, and learn from shared experiences. (shrink)

Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conceptual rigor on the debate by offering an opinionated taxonomy of views with a reasonable claim (...) to being “skeptical.” I argue that carving up logical space into pro- and anti-grounding views isn’t especially helpful; rather, we should recognize various degrees of ground-theoretic involvement depending on how inflationary our understanding of the theoretical term ‘ground’ is. (shrink)

Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot be captured in terms of supervenience, or as the slogan (...) goes: “Supervenience Is Nonexplanatory”. While SIN is widely endorsed, it is far from clear what it amounts to and why we should believe it. In this paper, I will distinguish various theses that could be meant by it, and will argue that none of them is both interesting and plausible: on some interpretations of ‘explanatory’, we have no reason to believe that supervenience is unexplanatory, while on other interpretations, supervenience is indeed unexplanatory, but widely accepted textbook cases of explanatory relations come out as unexplanatory, too. This result raises doubts as to whether there is any interesting sense in which SIN is true, and suggests that the contemporary consensus about supervenience is mistaken. (shrink)

Maimonides famously holds that, while it is perfectly possible to know (and say) that God exists, it is impossible to know (and say) what God is like because any positive attri- bution contradicts God’s essential oneness. Consequently, pure equivocity obtains between descriptions of the divine and descriptions of any other being. But this raises a puzzle: Knowledge of God seems vacuous if we lack all comprehension of God’s nature - so how can we have any comprehension of the divine without (...) being able to say what it is that we know? In this essay, I defend the substantiality of the concept of knowledge of God on Maimonides’ apophatic picture. Drawing on the concept of non-propositional knowledge, I argue that knowledge and comprehension can come apart, which lends support to Maimonides’ thesis that knowledge of God, though substantial and objective, cannot be expressed. (shrink)

When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial (...) ones; it gives a nice story about the evidential relevance of modal, mereological and set-theoretic facts to ontological dependence; and it makes sense of debates over the relation's formal properties. One important upshot of the deflationary account is that questions of ontological dependence are generally less deep and less interesting than usually thought. (shrink)

This article presents the first, systematic analysis of the ethical challenges posed by recommender systems through a literature review. The article identifies six areas of concern, and maps them onto a proposed taxonomy of different kinds of ethical impact. The analysis uncovers a gap in the literature: currently user-centred approaches do not consider the interests of a variety of other stakeholders—as opposed to just the receivers of a recommendation—in assessing the ethical impacts of a recommender system.

A survey of the connection between grounding and modality, in particular supervenience. The survey explores three possible connections between grounding and supervenience: (1) supervenience can be analyzed in terms of grounding, (2) grounded facts supervene on their grounds, and (3) grounding and supervenience overlap in their theoretical roles.

We want to show that Aristotle’s general conception of syllogism includes as its essential part the logical concept of necessity, which can be understood in a causal way. This logical conception of causality is more general then the conception of the causality in the Aristotelian theory of proof (“demonstrative syllogism”), which contains the causal account of knowledge and science outside formal logic. Aristotle’s syllogistic is described in a purely intensional way, without recourse to a set-theoretical formal semantics. It is shown (...) that the conclusion of a syllogism is justified by the accumulation of logical causes applied during the reasoning process. It is also indicated that logical principles as well as the logical concept of causality have a fundamental ontological role in Aristotle’s “first philosophy”. (shrink)

The Simple Question (SQ) asks: “What are the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions any x must satisfy in order for it to be true that x is a simple?” The main motivation for asking SQ stems from the hope that it could teach us important lessons for material-object ontology. It is universally accepted that a proper answer to it has to be finite, complete and devoid of mereological expressions. This paper argues that we should stop treating SQ as the central (...) question to be asked about simples; there are a plethora of questions about simples that may even be addressed without answering the original question. The paper closes with some tentative remarks on how this lesson could be extended to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question. (shrink)

The book discusses the development of reproductive medicine from the perspective of the parent-child relationship. -/- A könyv a reprodukciós medicina fejlődését vizsgálja a szülői felelősség szempontjából.

Aristotelian causal theories incorporate some philosophically important features of the concept of cause, including necessity and essential character. The proposed formalization is restricted to one-place predicates and a finite domain of attributes (without individuals). Semantics is based on a labeled tree structure, with truth defined by means of tree paths. A relatively simple causal prefixing mechanism is defined, by means of which causes of propositions and reasoning with causes are made explicit. The distinction of causal and factual explanation are elaborated, (...) and examples of cyclic and convergent causation are given. Soundness and completeness proofs are sketched. (shrink)

After introductory reminder of and comments on Gödel’s ontological proof, we discuss the collapse of modalities, which is provable in Gödel’s ontological system GO. We argue that Gödel’s texts confirm modal collapse as intended consequence of his ontological system. Further, we aim to show that modal collapse properly fits into Gödel’s philosophical views, especially into his ontology of separation and union of force and fact, as well as into his cosmological theory of the nonobjectivity of the lapse of time. As (...) a result, modal collapse should not be conceived in Gödel so much as a deficit, but rather as a kind of the rise of modalities to the “perfect” being. We further show that, in accordance with Gödel’s ontology, the concepts of modality and time should be derived in terms of the “fundamental philosophical concept” of cause. To give an example of how a formalization of such causative Gödelian ontology and ontological proof might look, we propose the transformation of GO into a kind of causally re-interpreted justification logic. (shrink)

U članku se promatraju osnovne karakteristike razvojne dinamike hrvatskoga logičkoga nazivlja od izlazka Pacelove Logike za gimnazije, prve sustavne logike na hrvatskome jeziku, 1868. godine, pa sve do Petrovićeve Logike, također za srednja učilišta, iz 1964., koja je još uviek u uporabi. Nazivlje je u tu svrhu razvrstano u nekoliko tipičih skupina. Općenito, uočava se porast zastupljenosti latinizama (i grecizama) na štetu hrvatskih naziva. U analizi nazivlja autor se ograničuje na knjige namienjene nastavi logike bilo na srednjim učilištima, bilo na (...) sveučilištu, i to na nazivlje tradicionalne logike. Mjestimice su pridodane i napomene o nazivlju moderne (matematičke) logike. (shrink)

U tekstu se obrađuju Stadlerovo i Bauerovo shvaćanje i zasnivanje formalne logike. Formalna je logika u oba slučaja postavljena u duhu novoskolastičke filozofije druge polovice 19. stoljeća. Subjektivna je strana mišljenja (samosviest, djelatba) spojena s njegovom objektivnom stranom (objektivna vriednost), a logička se načela temelje na ontologijskim. Stadler se i Bauer oddvajaju od onodobnoga formalizma i logicizma, kao i od psihologizma i voluntarizma. Pritom je Bauer izrazitije ušao u razpravljanje s drugačijim shvaćanjima (psihologizam i voluntarizam u Wundta).

Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a.

A first-order logic of belief with identity is proposed, primarily to give an account of possible de re contradictory beliefs, which sometimes occur as consequences of de dicto non-contradictory beliefs. A model has two separate, though interconnected domains: the domain of objects and the domain of appearances. The satisfaction of atomic formulas is defined by a particular S-accessibility relation between worlds. Identity is non-classical, and is conceived as an equivalence relation having the classical identity relation as a subset. A tableau (...) system with labels, signs, and suffixes is defined, extending the basic language $\mathscr{L}_{\mathbf{QB}}$ by quasiformulas (to express the denotations of predicates). The proposed logical system is paraconsistent since $\phi \wedge \neg\phi$ does not ``explode'' with arbitrary syntactic consequences. (shrink)

We show how some model-theoretical devices (local reasoning, modes of presentation, an additional accessibility relation) can be combined in first-order modal logic to formalize the consequence relation that includes de dicto and de re contradictory beliefs. Instead of special ``sense objects'', appearances of objects in an agent's belief are introduced and presented as ordered pairs consisting of an object and an individual constant. A non-classical identity relation is applied. A relation S on the set of possible worlds is introduced, which (...) models possible distortions in an agent's picture of a (real) world. The application of such models in deontic logic is illustrated by a characteristic example. (shrink)

The paper sets out from Göodel's question about primitive concepts, in connection with Gödel's proposal of the employment of phenomenological method. The author assumes that the answer that can be found in Kant is relevant as a starting point. In a modification of the approach by K. Reich, a reconstruction of Kant's "deduction'' of logical forms of judgment is presented, which serve Kant as the basis for his "metaphysical deduction of categories'' including substantiality and causality. It is proposed that different (...) aspects of Kant's "original unity of self-consciousness'' as applied and attached to concrete representations step by step yield different forms of concepts, judgments, and inferences. Categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive judgments are shown to be gradually strengthening the conditions of bringing our representations under the "objective unity of consciousness", and in this way gradually implementing logical laws. The corresponding concepts of substantiality, causality, and mutual influence appear to be grounded in the primitive forms of our thinking. (shrink)

This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions (...) and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

Pluralist mathematical realism, the view that there exists more than one mathematical universe, has become an influential position in the philosophy of mathematics. I argue that, if mathematical pluralism is true (and we have good reason to believe that it is), then mathematical realism cannot (easily) be justified by arguments from the indispensability of mathematics to science. This is because any justificatory chain of inferences from mathematical applications in science to the total body of mathematical theorems can cover at most (...) one mathematical universe. Indispensability arguments may thus lose their central role in the debate about mathematical ontology. (shrink)

Thought Experiments in Ethics, 2021 CONTENTS Preface i Chapter I The Story in Your Head: Tomoceuszkakatiti and Gyugyu 1 Chapter II How Thought Experiments Move Us: The Samaritan and His Neighbours 16 Chapter III What Makes a Thought Experiment? 34 Chapter IV Thought Experiments in Practical Philosophy and Bioethics 75 Chapter V The Experience Machine 93 Chapter VI The Last Man Argument 129 Chapter VII The Trolley Problem 158 Chapter VIII The Violinist Analogy 213 Conclusion 246 Notes 248.

Popular culture continues fuelling public imagination with things, human and non-human, that we might beco-me or confront. Besides robots, other significant tropes in popular fiction that generated images include non-human humans and cyborgs, wired into his-torically varying sociocultural realities. Robots and artificial intelligence are re-defining the natural order and its hierar-chical structure. This is not surprising, as natural order is always in flux, shaped by new scientific discoveries, especially the reading of the genetic code, that reveal and redefine relationships between (...) life forms. However, for the first time, a new, artificial, species is being introduced into the existing diagrams, and, for the first time, it appears to hybridise the anthro-pocentric natural world order. (shrink)

Gödel's ontological argument is related to Gödel's view that causality is the fundamental concept in philosophy. This explicit philosophical intention is developed in the form of an onto-theological Gödelian system based on justification logic. An essentially richer language, so extended, offers the possibility to express new philosophical content. In particular, theorems on the existence of a universal cause on a causal "slingshot" are formulated.

Christine Overall has argued that miracles, if they exist, would be an evil committed by God and therefore disprove the existence of God. However, her notion of a miracle as an intervention presupposes a view about the relation between God and creation that posits God as an ‘outsider.’ Such a view has not been held by all theists. It was not held by Thomas Aquinas. I show that Aquinas ’s conception is not susceptible to Overall’s criticisms. The upshot is that (...) theists should avoid any view of God as an ‘outsider,’ if they wish to avoid Overall’s criticisms. (shrink)

The paper shows that it is possible to obtain a "slingshot" result in Gödel's theory of positiveness in the presence of the theorem of the necessary existence of God. In the context of the reconstruction of Gödel's original "slingshot" argument on the suppositions of non-Fregean logic, this is a natural result. The "slingshot" result occurs in sufficiently strong non-Fregean theories accepting the necessary existence of some entities. However, this feature of a Gödelian theory may be considered not as a trivialisation, (...) but as an intended consequence of Gödel's ontotheological views. (shrink)

L’identité et la datation de Nicolas le Péripatéticien, l’auteur d’un sommaire de la philosophie d’Aristote, ont fait l’objet d’un article récent de Silvia Fazzo paru dans la Revue des Études Grecques. Contre la datation courante, fondée sur l’identification de Nicolas à l’historien de grand renom Nicolas Damascène , Fazzo a montré que Nicolas avait probablement vécu au cours de la période couvrant les IIIe au Ve siècles ap. J.-C., et plus problablement à l’époque de l’empereur Julien l’Apostat . Cette (...) hypothèse trouve un appui dans un nouveau fragment en traduction hébraïque découvert par Mauro Zonta, dans lequel Nicolas cherche à expliquer la Trinité de Dieu au moyen de la doctrine aristotélicienne des causes: Dieu est un, en tant que sa substance est une, mais Dieu est également trois, puisqu’il est à la fois causes motrice, formelle et finale du monde. Dans la mesure, évidemment réduite, où un fragment si court est susceptible de datation, l’époque de Julien paraît la plus probable. (shrink)

I argue that recent attempts to deflect Access Problems for realism about a priori domains such as mathematics, logic, morality, and modality using arguments from evolution result in two kinds of explanatory overkill: the Access Problem is eliminated for contentious domains, and realist belief becomes viciously immune to arguments from dispensability, and to non-rebutting counter-arguments more generally.

Logical reasoning is not only a component of religious faith (cf., for instance, the "Golden rule"), but, in addition, the religious faith itself can be conceived as a logical pragmatic function applied to sentences and their meanings. Pragmatic role of religious faith is shown on the examples of the analogy of seed and spoken word (e.g., Mt 13:3-23) and on the degrees of faith described in the episode about Nicodemus (John 3). Pragmatics adds (different grades of) perseverance to the correctness (...) of reasoning and to the truth-preservation of the consequence relation. Correspondingly, religious faith is described by formally defined model and satisfaction relation, which are applied to and examined on the text of John 3. (shrink)

The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with an alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. However, mathematicians do in fact disagree on fundamental questions, for example on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and some philosophers have argued that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue (...) that pluralist accounts of mathematics render fundamental mathematical disagreements compatible with mathematical realism in a way in which moral disagreements and moral realism are not. 11. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the historiographical categories rationalism and empiricism have been criticized for their limitations to explain the complex positions and the links held by the philosophers tradiotnally attached to them. This narrative was firstly conceived by Kantian German historians and began to become standard at the turn of the twentieh century. Nonetheless, nineteenth-century French historiography developed other narratives by which early modern philosophers were classified according to alternative criteria. In the first edition of Histoire comparée des systémes (...) de philosophie (1804), Joseph-Marie Degérando distinguishes three first-order early modern schools founded by Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz, respectively. Degérando introduces the empiricism and rationalism distinction as one among others, and not as the fundamental one. In addition, he separates empiricism from experimental philosophy. The last one, along with speculative philosophy, is said to conciliate senses and reason. As a result, this account offers philosophical groupings different from those constructed by the standard narrative. Furthermore, it draws on labels and classification criteria which were part of the early modern philosophical discourse. (shrink)

In this chapter we will argue, firstly, that Bacon’s engages in a pecu-liar form of mathematization of nature that develops a quali-quantitative methodology of measurement. Secondly, we will show that medicine is one of the disciplines where that dual way of measurement is practiced. In the first section of the chapter, we will expose the ontology involved in the Baconian proposal of measurement of nature. The second section will address the place that mixed mathematics occupies in Bacon’s scheme of scientific (...) branches and will suggest that a proper advancement of medicine can generate a new branch of mixed mathematics. The next section will reconstruct Bacon’s approach to measurement and expose its quali-quantitative import. In the last section, we will show some examples of medicine in which this quali-quantitative measurement is applied. (shrink)

Attention, for Iris Murdoch, is a central concept in more than one sense. On the one hand, it appears to be one of the keys, if not the key, to goodness, the task of the moral subject, and the pre-requisite for right action. On the other, attention can function as the hinge around which Murdoch’s general ethical worldview (including psychology and metaphysics) can be made to revolve, and through which it turns away from the mainstream contemporary philosophy of her time. (...) Overwhelmingly inspired by Simone Weil, Murdoch presents attention as a truth-seeing and truth-discovering attitude and activity, animated by Platonic eros. (shrink)

The paper aims to show that by abstracting from a specific mythical historical- stylistic context and “ideation” of the notion of the Proto-Slavic deities Perun and Veles, especially in Croatian tradition, symbolic archetypes and abstract notions of form and primordial matter (materia prima) can be extracted from mythical content. We refer to mythical texts and contents according to the reconstructions and materials brought by Radoslav Katičić, and comparative analysis by Mislav Ježić. We distinguish form (1) as that in which identity (...) and possibility of a thing consists, (2) as the reasonableness of judgment and the form of existence, and (3) as the specific structure of a thing, which unites its parts and aspects as a whole and constitutes its internal necessity. These formative notions are relativized and nullified in Veles’ appearances, in which the archetypal notion of primordial matter is encoded. Examples of Platō’s dialogues historically confirm certain aspects of decoding myth as constitutive of philosophy. The above approach also opens a view of the roots of Croatian philosophical thought, which in its genesis can be traced back to Proto-Slavic mythical archetypes. With the implementation of Christianity, the questions of identity, reason and the structure of the whole are raised radically and sharply, as shown by the text of Trpimir’s grant (852). (shrink)