I developed an activity in the classroom: to draw the image of the place. I communicate the results to interpret how the students subjectivate the place and perfect the teaching practice. Reflections move between subjectivity, place and violence, from a phenomenological contribution in dialogue with the historical-cultural approach, supported in the drawings, dialogue with students and intuition of the shareable singularity. I conclude: a) the image of the place is violence in the murderous-victim dyad; b) the mortal dyad serves as (...) mapper of the island; c) there is a fracture in relations with the place, which requires educational practices focused on subjectivity and corporal commitment to face this "crushing" of the subjective senses. (shrink)

In Transamazônica Paraense places do not exist in the geographical representations that shows the road, a regional and territorial domination project. The goal is to consider the emergency between -places to the road made of migrants from different geohitories that “ whether vicinam” and the implications of this context to the world of readings of/ on transamazônica geographicity. The experienced research focus is on the Vicinal of Adam, between Pacajá and New Repartimento (PA). Settlement Rio Cururuí. Methodologically, we start from (...) action-research, audiovisual recording of interviews with residents in their places, life histories and documentary survey interpreted the existential phenomenological contribution and concluded: a) the geographical debate, the educational plan, tends to declare the absence of They are living on the edge Transamazônica or “strip”; b) the sense of place is not strictly localizable or remarkable is not stable, constituting limit-spaces-s; c) Another language emerges from the between-place with the creative potential of communicative actions to clarify anding at multiple scales. (shrink)

The Transamazon (Br-230) Highway in the state of Pará has had its image frozen for decades: themuddy road, the cars stopped or tractors tearing down a forest, empty of people, opening the amazonianspace to a project of an authoritarian modernization. Reproduced by and reproductive of the teachingsof geography – including for children and teenagers who live on the edge of the road, in settlements andcommunities on the sideroads (vicinais) – in textbooks and discourses that frame regional scale (astotalizing and explanatory) (...) instead of scales emplaced in situ. The result of such dinamics is not restricted to a gap between what one experiences as a phenomenon and what one learns as a concept,it goes towards the reproducibility of an “unexistance of the creative potential” of the people living onthe sideroads, places of the construction of a geography, as well as mapping, that, from there, push usto rethink the unwavering foundations of such frosen images , of the generalistic maps and theirstandardizing projections, scales and simbology. To do so, we have, along with students and teachersof 2 schools on the sideroads of the municipality of Pacajá (PA), in the period of the beggining of 2016to 2019, done several geocartographic exercises: mind maps developped with students about the past,present and the future of the vicinal (sideroad). That is, an attempt to provoque the body into the mapand the map into the body in a context of a limit situation of existance, given the precarious schoolconditions as well as the diferent challenges lived by students and teachers. Such corporal engagementas an attempt to think the sideroads as a location in construction and, from there, a situated opening tothe world, is what gives meaning to geocartography. It is possible to conclude that: a) facing thesedimentary representations paralysing and overview of the Transamazon in the state of Pará , thephenomenological exercise of reactivation of geocartogrphying provoques the emergence of asubjective significance that does not separate the emotional and symbolic perspectives on creatingmaps; b) the corporal engagement and the situated perspective of students and teachers, not only hasthe value of a totalyzing exemple, but that of an opening to what is new as they bring up a simbologythat reveals the need to build a dialogical bridge between what is lived on the sideroads and the worldthat classifies it as “unexisting”. (shrink)

Aristotle and the classical rhetoricians conceived of metaphor as a figure of speech in which one thing is given a name or an attribute of another thing on the basis of some resemblance that exists between the two things. Wallace Stevens conceived of metaphor not as the production of pre-existing resemblances observed in nature but the “creation of resemblance by the imagination” (NA: 72). Resemblance, and not identity, according to Stevens, is the fundamental relation between the two terms of (...) metaphor. This is akin to contemporary accounts of metaphor in terms of the phenomenological or experiential seeing of one thing as another thing (Yoos 1971; Davidson 1979; Camp 2006a,b; Semino 2008; Ritchie 2013). Seeing one thing as another thing on the basis of resemblance or similarity implies that the one thing is not the other. I do two main things in this paper: one, I appraise the theoretical value of Wallace Stevens’ conception of metaphor as the creation of resemblance by the imagination; and two, I pose a challenge to the view that takes resemblance as fundamental to metaphor, arguing that in the cases I present, thinking of the relation as identity and not resemblance, concurs with our ontological commitments to the things compared in the metaphor. In the final analysis, I suggest that Stevens conception of metaphor as metamorphosis can meet the challenge: rather than thinking of the ‘is’ (identity) of metaphor as an ‘as’ (resemblance), for Stevens, the ‘as’ (resemblance) of metaphor metamorphosize into an ‘is’ (identity). (shrink)

According to strong composition as identity, the logical principles of one–one and plural identity can and should be extended to the relation between a whole and its parts. Otherwise, composition would not be legitimately regarded as an identity relation. In particular, several defenders of strong CAI have attempted to extend Leibniz’s Law to composition. However, much less attention has been paid to another, not less important feature of standard identity: a standard identity statement is true iff its terms are coreferential. (...) We contend that, if coreferentiality is dropped, indiscernibility is no help in making composition a genuine identity relation. To this aim, we analyse as a case study Cotnoir’s theory of general identity, in which indiscernibility is obtained thanks to a revisionary semantics and true identity statements are allowed to connect non-coreferential terms. We extend Cotnoir’s strategy for indiscernibility to the relation of comaternity, and we show that, neither in the case of composition nor in that of comaternity, indiscernibility contibutes to show that they are genuine identity relations. Finally, we compare Cotnoir’s approach with other versions of strong CAI endorsed by Wallace, Bøhn, and Hovda, and canvass the extent to which they violate coreferentiality. The comparative analysis shows that, in order to preserve coreferentiality, strong CAI is forced to adopt a non-standard semantic treatment of the singular/plural distinction. (shrink)

This paper presents a recent formalization of a Henkin-style completeness proof for the propositional modal logic S5 using the Lean theorem prover. The proof formalized is close to that of Hughes and Cresswell, but the system, based on a different choice of axioms, is better described as a Mendelson system augmented with axiom schemes for K, T, S4, and B, and the necessitation rule as a rule of inference. The language has the false and implication as the only primitive (...) logical connectives and necessity as the only primitive modal operator. The full source code is available online and has been typechecked with Lean 3.4.2. (shrink)

A collection of essays, mostly original, on the actual and possible positions on free will available to Buddhist philosophers, by Christopher Gowans, Rick Repetti, Jay Garfield, Owen Flanagan, Charles Goodman, Galen Strawson, Susan Blackmore, Martin T. Adam, Christian Coseru, Marie Friquegnon, Mark Siderits, Ben Abelson, B. Alan Wallace, Peter Harvey, Emily McRae, and Karin Meyers, and a Foreword by Daniel Cozort.

This study forms a part of a larger investigation of the influence of the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus on modern poetry. T. S. Eliot, to mention the best known of the many poets inspired by Heraclitus, selected two Heraclitus fragments (B 2 and B 60) as epigraphs for his “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot explained that he was drawn to the fragments because of their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘extraordinary poetic suggestiveness’. Similarly, in ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’, (...) Wallace Stevens spoke of ‘the flecked river which kept flowing and never the same way twice’ and elsewhere noted the ‘inherently poetic quality’ of many Heraclitean sayings. To gain some sense of the nature and magnitude of Heraclitus’ legacy for modern poetry we must first explore his vision of ‘a fiery cosmos being kindled in measures and extinguished in measures’ and a river into which one cannot step twice. -/- . (shrink)

Using a theoretical framework derived from my ongoing engagement with what I have called a ‘Gynocentric matrix’ of Indic sensibility, along with James Hillman’s polytheistic psychology and Wallace Stevens’ notion of a Supreme Fiction, this paper offers a reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s (b. 1967) short stories beyond postcolonial criticism. Stemming from a depth consciousness where life, living and death, joy, indifference and sorrow, generation, de/re-generation, and transformation are intricately intertwined, Lahiri’s fictional multiverse, opposed to universe, is peopled by a (...) new generation of characters who speak to the soul of the reader, while in the process, she sculpts a reality that does not tolerate any homogenizing impulse in the name of an abstract unity. (shrink)

Using a ‘reformulation of Bell’s theorem’, Waegell and McQueen (2020) argue that any empirically adequate theory that is local and does not involve retro-causation or fine-tuning must be a many-worlds theory. They go on to analyze several prominent many-worlds interpretations and conclude that non-separable many-worlds theories whose ontology is given by the wavefunction involve superluminal causation, while separable many-worlds theories (e.g. Waegell, 2021; Deutsch and Hayden 2000) do not. I put forward three claims. (A) I challenge their argument for relying (...) on a non-trivial, unquestioned assumption about elements of reality which allows Healey’s approach (Healey, 2017b) to evade their claim. In an attempt to respond to (A), Waegell and McQueen may restrict their claim to theories which satisfy such an assumption, however, I also argue that (B) their argument fails to prove even the so weakened claim, as exemplified by theories that are both non-separable and local. Finally, (C) by arguing for the locality of the decoherence-based Everettian approach (Wallace, 2012) I refute Waegell and McQueen’s claim that wavefunction-based ontologies, and more generally non-separable ontologies, involve superluminal causation. I close with some doubtful remarks about separable Everettian interpretations as compared to non-separable ones. (shrink)

This dossier emerges as an attempt to understand our current plight in which we necessarily failed. Some figures were transformed in escapist lines that brought confrontation within our reach in face of these "blockaded access future", where the body – the personal and the aggregate, in different communal places – screams at the top of lungs or remains silent in a fierce pursuit of life, cutting off these pandemic geographies of feverish horizons. It is in this abysmal situation that geographical (...) representations are reestablished, coupled with experienced landscapes, lost territories, and all those original space-time projects. (shrink)

This paper examines three meta-ontological deflationary approaches – frameworks, verbal disputes, and metalinguistic negotiation – and applies them to ontological debates in philosophy of mind. An intriguing consequence of this application is that it reveals a deep, systematic problem for mental deflationism – specifically, a problem of cognitive collapse. This is surprising; cognitive collapse problems are usually reserved for serious ontological views such as eliminative materialism and mental fictionalism, not deflationism. This paper investigates why deflationism about the mental is particularly (...) problematic, and provides an explanation as to why mental fictionalism is in principle better equipped to address collapsing problems than deflationism is. (shrink)

Some claim that Composition as Identity (CI) entails Mereological Essentialism (ME). If this is right, then we have an effective modus tollens against CI: ME is clearly false, so CI is, too. Rather than deny the conditional, I will argue that a CI theorist should embrace ME. I endorse a theory of modal parts such that ordinary objects are spatially, temporally, and modally extended. Accepting modal parts is certainly beneficial to CI theorists, but it also provides elegant solutions to the (...) traditional puzzles of constitution, making it a competitive move in its own right. (shrink)

Many of us think that ordinary objects – such as tables and chairs – exist. We also think that ordinary objects have parts: my chair has a seat and some legs as parts, for example. But once we are committed to the (seemingly innocuous) thesis that ordinary objects are composed of parts, we then open ourselves up to a whole host of philosophical problems, most of which center on what exactly the composition relation is. Composition as Identity (CI) is the (...) view that the composition relation is the identity relation. While such a view has some advantages, there are many arguments against it. In this essay, I will briefly canvass three different varieties of Composition as Identity, and suggest why one of them should be preferred over the others. Then I will outline several versions of the most common objection against CI. I will suggest how a CI theorist can respond to these charges by maintaining that some of the arguments are invalid. (In part 2, I show how a CI theorist can maintain that the remaining arguments, while valid, are unsound). (shrink)

There is an uneasy tension between our ordinary talk about beliefs and desires and the ontological facts supported by neuroscience. Arguments for eliminative materialism can be fairly persuasive, yet error theory about folk psychological discourse may be unacceptable. One solution is to accept mental fictionalism: the view that we are (or should be) fictionalists about mentality. My aim in this paper is to explore mental fictionalism as a viable theoretical option, and to show that it has advantages over other fictionalist (...) views in the literature, as well as advantages over other theories of mind. However, mental fictionalism faces particular objections that do not plague other fictionalist accounts, nor other theories of the mind. These objections may provide some explanation as to why mental fictionalism has not (until recently) gained much traction in the literature. I end with some suggestions on how the mental fictionalist can address these objections, hopefully paving the way for further development of mental fictionalism as a live philosophical position in philosophy of mind. -/- . (shrink)

This article discusses the process of universalization of education in Brazil the count from a specific spatiality - the places on the edge of the Transmazonica highway. There being no need toquestion the scope and effectiveness of expanding access to basic education, given its wide acceptance in the country - we start from the principle of geographical connectivity/connection to problematize such educational universalization. We aim to reflect on the scope of basic education, its conditions and ability to potentiate or not (...) the diversity of the territory. Methodologically grounded in a dialogue between phenomenology and existentialism, we conduct a literature review taking as starting point the preliminary empirical research data. We conclude that the universalization of education is configured as extermination argument that effective the urbanocentric vision and one connectedness between places and territory, produces disconnection of the places themselves, removing their ability to communicative action that jeopardizes not only education the local, but regional and national. (shrink)

In the essay I intend to revalue the descriptive principle in the contemporaryAmazonian geography, as presented to us by the geographer from Pará EidorfeMoreira (1960). Laterally, I call the attention of Amazonian geographers to thesensitivity of his work, which is not present in the bibliography of the training coursesin Geography in Pará. The methodological strategy is descriptive-interpretative with aphenomenological tone. I conclude: the refusal of the description is installed by aprejudiced effect of our current formation in relation to the procedures (...) consideredtraditional; the production of knowledge, eager for explanation/analysis, can produceethical violence; the abstraction - which flirts with abstractionism - imposed by thehasty generalization of certain ideas about the Amazon, from geographical studies,installs an artificial cut between the symbolic and the emotional in the act of makinggeography in our region. (shrink)

The essay approaches the relationship between education, didactic content and transamazonic geography. Objective to question the sharing of the sensitive present in the current format of geocartographic contents in the textbooks, as well as to express, in an embryonic state, the possibility of another sharing, centered in the emerging geography of the places on the verge of the Transamazonica Paraense, especially students and teachers in vicinal , Valuing localized expressions as paths of educational geocartography. Methodologically, the text is part of (...) the action-research movement inspired by the existential phenomenological atmosphere. I conclude as a suggestion of deepening that: the transamazonic between-places, materialized in the vicinities, is ignored as a space for the creative existence of other regional narratives; Generalizing geographical fictions must be confronted with other fictions, in view of the differentiation and creation of new positions and interpretability criteria of the Amazônia; The corporal engagement and the experiences in the field require description, interpretation and understanding, already begun, but not yet affirmed in terms of the production of dialogical content with what already circulates via didactic books; It is central to focus the subjectivity and corporeality of individuals / collectives as creative powers of the space culture, not just recipients of that culture. (shrink)

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

Religions today, actively participate in the daily life of most people on the planet, producing different relationships and conflicts too, from a reference to the transcendent existence, so the construction of their space of action - their territories - cut out ways different society, especially in big cities, where the clash of different world views imply different ways of living and feeling the city and others in this city. We propose here the discussion about territory and identity of the Church (...) of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, more popularly known as Mormons, in Belem, from the phenomenological method, highlighting the experience of church members as central to relational and hierarchical production that territory, so that it becomes a source of affirmation geo-symbolic group in the city and the world. Clarifying the designation of territorial identity and explaining their sacred ways of acting and conceiving the world contributed to deepen the debate in key categories to suit the social sciences in general: space and culture, and also debating and rethinking of the specific concepts geography in their culture perspective. (shrink)

Mathematically, gauge theories are extraordinarily rich --- so rich, in fact, that it can become all too easy to lose track of the connections between results, and become lost in a mass of beautiful theorems and properties: indeterminism, constraints, Noether identities, local and global symmetries, and so on. -/- One purpose of this short article is to provide some sort of a guide through the mathematics, to the conceptual core of what is actually going on. Its focus is on the (...) Lagrangian, variational-problem description of classical mechanics, from which the link between gauge symmetry and the apparent violation of determinism is easy to understand; only towards the end will the Hamiltonian description be considered. -/- The other purpose is to warn against adopting too unified a perspective on gauge theories. It will be argued that the meaning of the gauge freedom in a theory like general relativity is (at least from the Lagrangian viewpoint) significantly different from its meaning in theories like electromagnetism. The Hamiltonian framework blurs this distinction, and orthodox methods of quantization obliterate it; this may, in fact, be genuine progress, but it is dangerous to be guided by mathematics into conflating two conceptually distinct notions without appreciating the physical consequences. (shrink)

The essay approaches the gendered relations of sexual difference and their unsuspected effectsat the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Pará, BelémCampus. Writteninthe first person, it exposes the teacher/researcher's experiences andsharedsituations,glimpsing embodied maps that shout out the violence not confronted at the level of theinstitution. In dialogue with feminist and queer theorists, I seek to expose sexist cardinalpoints and propose an alternative centered on the politicization of prostituted ­ and destitute ­bodies. The conclusion exposes the mutilating framework of (...) a standardizing map that projectslimited futures for students/teachers/technicians who experience reduced diversity. However,it is also an invitation to reimagine ­ through a process of rebellion ­ another collectivecartography, a cartography of. (shrink)

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

According to Charles Travis our language is occasion-sensitive. The truth- conditions of all our sentences, and their correctness-conditions more generally, vary depending on the occasions on which they are used. This is part of a broader view of language as unshadowed. This paper develops objections Travis has made from this viewpoint against Michael Dummett’s anti-realism. It aims to show that the arguments are suggestive but inconclusive. For all it shows unshadowed anti-realism is a possibility.

O artigo tem foco central na relação entre conhecimento científico e realidade do lugar, bem como as repercussões geopolítica desta relação, haja vista que o debate sobre o impacto das representações geográficas sobre os espaços, pode auxiliar no esclarecimento de como são pensadas as estratégias de desenvolvimento para os mesmos. Objetivo problematizar o saber geográfico que informa o ambiente e a vida humana à beira da Transamazônica. Parto de uma metodologia de base fenomenológica para dar visibilidade à fragilidade do diálogo (...) entre a vida nos lugares e o conhecimento científico e reproduzido no plano educativo sobre tais lugares, a saber: os grupos de pequenos produtores que vivem entre Pacajá e Anapu, no estado do Pará. Realizo pesquisa de campo (ainda em curso), desde 2012, na modalidade observação participante, registros imagéticos, entrevistas e pesquisa bibliográfica sobre o tipo de saber científico e educativo acerca do espaço de pesquisa. Concluo que há uma distância profunda entre o saber e o viver, em função de uma não prioridade da escala do lugar no conhecimento padrão do território, bem como uma despersonalização dos indivíduos e grupos que vivem à beira da Transamazônica, somado à manutenção de uma imagética ambiental que não condiz com a realidade, ensinada nos livros didáticos que, inevitavelmente, decretam a inexistência dos que deles se servem, as crianças e professores que se educam nestes lugares, passam a ser pano de fundo para a estrada, objeto centralmente valorizado no saber geográfico e na geopolítica do espaço transamazônico paraense. (shrink)

GEOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS IN PANDEMIC TIMES -/- Held amid the impacts and mobilizations caused by the spatialization of the phenomenon of COVID-19, the book of an essayistic nature tries to make the moment feel, opening up issues geographically engaged by different geographers and from different philosophical perspectives. An invitation to experience longings, desires, defeats, hopes and mobilizations together in a pandemic world.

The relations between territory, religion and geopolitics seem to assume a central role in the contemporary world. I try to contribute to debate here, from a survey in Belém of Pará on the territory and the identity of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. Instrumentalized by semi-structured interviews, field observation, research of official documents of religion trought an existential phenomenological interpretation, I conclude that: there is a geopolitical war in evidence nowadays; territorial Mormons follow a metropolitan (...) spatial pattern; the identity of Mormon remount its geohistory in fruitful and tense negotiation with new cultural groups in seeking territorial expansion; the expansion of the territory demands a insurmountable relationship between domain and ownership, to sustain the tense unity of the group. (shrink)

This text is part of an on going research. It deals with the relationship between the production and experience of the places on the edge of the Trans-Amazon Highway (BR 230), which cuts the North and a Northeast portion in the East-West direction. Considering its programmatic sense of occupation of the territory, as opposed to the explanation already accepted, which expresses the road as an engineering system, therefore, means to flow, is that I propose to think the road as an (...) everyday living space, emphasizing the educational dimension to understand the existence of places. My purpose is to analyze the spatial imagination underlying the external understanding to the Trans-Amazon, in the educational plan, regarding the unique geographicity produced by local groups living near the road. Methodologically, I seek a dialogue between a phenomenological design and the existentialism, developing field of research procedures, literature review that supports the concepts of spatial imaginations, place and field education, critical reading of official documents in the MEC sites imagery record in dialogue with the representation of those that live on the edge of “Strip”. As an indication of preliminary findings point out: 1. The denial of places as a geopolitical strategy which is materialized in the educational process and planning politics; 2. The inescapable geographicity of groups that self recognize and are related contradictorily to the Trans-Amazon Highway; 3. The Countryside Education as opening or denial of the place, both for those who live it, and for those who do not live it, which can be ignorance widespread factor in terms of knowledge of the Amazon spatiality or coping and creation of a new geographic and cartographic knowledge about the places cut by “Strip”. (shrink)

International trade enables countries to expand their markets, access more products, improve resource allocation, and boost economic growth by leveraging comparative advantage and specialization. The aim of this article is to analyze the primary factors that influence Malawi’s international trade flows. The study is relevant because it examines Malawi’s trade patterns with its main partners, which include surrounding nations and traditional trade allies. The novelty is that, through the analysis, the research offers valuable insights into the primary factors that influence (...) Malawi’s international commerce. Panel data is gathered from various sources, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, covering the period from 2000 to 2023 for 11 countries that are trading partners with Malawi. We employ the Bayesian Mindsponge gravity methodology. The results show that the economic size (characterized by the gross domestic product) of the origin and destination countries, bilateral agreements, and the population size of the destination country have a beneficial impact on Malawi’s exports. In conclusion, Malawi’s export performance is significantly enhanced by the economic size of both Malawi and its trading partners, the existence of bilateral agreements, and the population size of the destination countries, underscoring the importance of strategic economic partnerships and targeted trade policies in boosting Malawi’s international trade. We recommend Malawi authorities focus on strengthening bilateral agreements and targeting trade relationships with larger and more populous economies to boost international trade. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire (...) to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider recent attempts to metaphysically explain agentive modality in terms of conditionals. We suggest that the best recent accounts face counterexamples, and more worryingly, they take some agentive modality for granted. In particular, the ability to perform basic actions features as a primitive in these theories. While it is perfectly acceptable for a semantics of agentive modal claims to take some modality for granted in getting the extension of action claims correct, a metaphysical explanation of agentive (...) modality cannot, at least not in the way that conditional approaches to agentive modality do. We argue that this problem was present even in the classical conditional analysis. By a pessimistic induction, we suggest that, probably, no conditional approach to agentive modality will succeed. (shrink)

Slingshot arguments aim to show that an allegedly non-extensional sentential connective—such as “necessarily ” or “the statement that Φ corresponds to the fact that ”—is, to the contrary, an extensional sentential connective. Stephen Neale : 761-825, 1995, 2001) argues that a reformulation of Gödel’s slingshot puts pressure on us to adopt a particular view of definite descriptions. I formulate a revised version of the slingshot argument—one that relies on Kaplan’s notion of “dthat.” I aim to show that if Neale’s version (...) of the slingshot argument is successful, then there is another slingshot available, parallel in structure to Neale’s, but independent of definite descriptions. So either there is a version of the slingshot that succeeds independent of any particular theory of descriptions or else Neale’s slingshot was never threatening to begin with. (shrink)

When people must either save a greater number of people from a smaller harm or a smaller number from a greater harm, do their choices reflect a reasonable moral outlook? We pursue this question with the help of an experiment. In our experiment, two-fifths of subjects employ a similarity heuristic. When alternatives appear dissimilar in terms of the number saved but similar in terms of the magnitude of harm prevented, this heuristic mandates saving the greater number. In our experiment, this (...) leads to choices that are inconsistent with all standard theories of justice. We argue that this demonstrates the untrustworthiness of distributive judgments in cases that elicit similarity-based choice. (shrink)

Using as a starting point recent and apparently incompatible conclusions by Saunders and Knox, I revisit the question of the correct spacetime setting for Newtonian physics. I argue that understood correctly, these two versions of Newtonian physics make the same claims both about the background geometry required to define the theory, and about the inertial structure of the theory. In doing so I illustrate and explore in detail the view—espoused by Knox, and also by Brown —that inertial structure is defined (...) by the dynamics governing subsystems of a larger system. This clarifies some interesting features of Newtonian physics, notably the distinction between using the theory to model subsystems of a larger whole and using it to model complete universes, and the scale-relativity of spacetime structure. _1_ Introduction _2_ Newtonian Mechanics and Galilean Spacetime _3_ Vector Relationism and Maxwellian Spacetime _4_ Recovering the Galilei Group: Dynamics of Subsystems _5_ Knox on Inertial Structure _6_ Connections on Maxwellian Spacetime _7_ Knox on Newtonian Gravity _8_ Vector Relationism and Newton–Cartan Theory _9_ Inertial Structure in Newton–Cartan Gravity _10_ Reconciling Knox and Saunders _11_ Conclusions. (shrink)

Many of us think that ordinary objects – such as tables and chairs – exist. We also think that ordinary objects have parts: my chair has a seat and some legs as parts, for example. But once we are committed to the (seemingly innocuous) thesis that ordinary objects are composed of parts, we then open ourselves up to a whole host of philosophical problems, most of which center on what exactly this composition relation is. Composition as Identity (CI) is the (...) view that the composition relation is the identity relation. While such a view has some advantages, there are many arguments against it. In this essay, I discuss several versions of the most common objection against CI, and show how the CI theorist can maintain that these arguments – contrary their initial intuitive appeal – are nonetheless unsound. (shrink)

In this paper we show that being blameworthy for not blaming and being blameworthy for victim blaming are structurally similar. Each involve the two traditional contours of moral responsibility: a knowledge condition and a control condition. But interestingly, in these cases knowledge and control are importantly interrelated. Being in a relationship with another person affords us varying degrees of knowledge about them. This knowledge in turn affords agents in relationships varying degrees of influence over one another. Cases where an agent (...) is especially blameworthy for failing to blame a friend, a close colleague, or a spouse highlight this. The interdependence of these two conditions in interpersonal relationships sheds (partial) light on why victim blaming is morally wrong. We argue that victim blamers suffer from a kind of moral myopia by only focusing on what the victim could do, in virtue of their being in a relationship of some sort with their abuser, to avoid abuse. We focus specifically on cases where such moral myopia is fueled by misogynistic and hierarchical gender schema and scripts. (shrink)

Fear is a preventer, sometimes robustly so. When fear robustly prevents, it changes or diminishes what an agent is able to do. Various popular conceptions of fear focus on its negative role: fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we should, as in certain cases of akrasia. But by the same token, fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we shouldn’t, as in certain other cases of inverse akrasia. We end with a plea on behalf of fear, both in light (...) of its preventing role and its broader connection to other ways we express concern, in particular, to hope. (shrink)

A common compatibilist view says that we are free and morally responsible in virtue of the ability to respond aptly to reasons. Many hold a version of this view despite disagreement about whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise. The canonical version of this view is reductive. It reduces the pertinent ability to a set of modal properties that are more obviously compatible with determinism, like dispositions. I argue that this and any reductive view of abilities faces a (...) significant challenge: it cannot adequately explain the freedom-grounding element of this ability. The problem has the form of a dilemma. This leaves reasons-responsive compatibilists with two options: abandon theories of free will grounded in abilities or abandon reductive theories of abilities. (shrink)

A common strategy unites much that philosophers have written about the virtues. The strategy can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who suggested that human beings have a characteristic function or activity, and that the virtues are traits of character which enable humans to perform this kind of activity excellently or well. The defining feature of this approach is that it treats the virtues as functional concepts, to be both identified and justified by reference to some independent goal or (...) end which they enable people to attain. Some recent philosophers seem to have hoped that by following this perfectionist strategy, we might attain a more convincing account of our moral practices than rule-based theories of ethics have been able to provide. (shrink)

Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the discourse occurs on social media. Several explanatory mechanisms for such conflict have been explored in recent psychological and social-science literatures. The present work sought to examine a potentially novel explanatory mechanism defined in philosophical literature: Moral Grandstanding. According to philosophical accounts, Moral Grandstanding is the use of moral talk to seek social (...) status. For the present work, we conducted six studies, using two undergraduate samples (Study 1, N = 361; Study 2, N = 356); a sample matched to U.S. norms for age, gender, race, income, Census region (Study 3, N = 1,063); a YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Study 4, N = 2,000); and a brief, one-month longitudinal study of Mechanical Turk workers in the U.S. (Study 5, Baseline N = 499, follow-up n = 296), and a large, one-week YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Baseline N = 2,519, follow-up n = 1,776). Across studies, we found initial support for the validity of Moral Grandstanding as a construct. Specifically, moral grandstanding motivation was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life. (shrink)

(Part of a symposium on an OUP collection of Paul Russell's papers on free will and moral responsibility). Paul Russell’s The Limits of Free Will is more than the sum of its parts. Among other things, Limits offers readers a comprehensive look at Russell’s attack on the problematically idealized assumptions of the contemporary free will debate. This idealization, he argues, distorts the reality of our human predicament. Herein I pose a dilemma for Russell’s position, critical compatibilism. The dilemma illuminates the (...) tension between Russell’s critical and compatibilist commitments. The problem is not obviously insurmountable, and as a compatibilist who is sympathetic to the view, my aim is to spark further discussion. (shrink)

Universal Energetic Field Theory -/- Additional Argumentation No1: Newton's Third Law relation with the Universal Energetic Field -/- The atom nucleus Quarks energy, and their three generations energy or energy gain, are too submit to the (Albert Einstein) “Law Of The Conservation Of Energy”. Thus, throughout the Quarks 3 generations energetic states and generations transformations, the Newton's Third Law impose the addition of the Universal Energetic Field theory. Martin B.J. Thibault December 2020 .

A lump theorist claims that ordinary objects are spread out across possible worlds, much like many of us think that tables are spread out across space. We are not wholly located in any one particular world, the lump theorist claims, just as we are not wholly spatially located where one’s hand is. We are modally spread out, a trans-world mereological sum of world-bound parts. We are lump sums of modal parts. And so are all other ordinary objects. In this paper, (...) I explore lump theory and investigate five arguments against it. These arguments may be the primary reasons why lump theory has not been widely accepted––or extensively explored––until now. I maintain that these arguments can be answered, and moreover, that accepting lump theory has distinct advantages, making it a competitive view in its own right. (shrink)

This paper explores the notion of the self as one of the main obstacles in advancing neuroscience. Some folks argue for strict naturalism in order to study the brain objectively. However, in this process of naturalization, we run the risk of losing key components that make up our experience as human beings, namely emotions, ideas, and values. Therefore, I argue for moderate naturalism in an attempt to reconcile with the self. I reference Immanuel Kant’s moral law theory in order to (...) discuss the ethical implications of following a moderate naturalist view of the self in advancing neuroscience. (shrink)

Some philosophers assume that our ordinary parts-whole concepts are intuitive and univocal. Moreover, some assume that mereology—the formal theory of parts-whole relations—adequately captures these intuitive and univocal notions. Lewis, for example, maintains that mereology is “perfectly understood, unproblematic, and certain.” Following his lead, many assume that expressions such as ‘is part of’ are univocal, topic-neutral, and that compositional monism is true. This paper explores the rejection of –. I argue that our ordinary parts-whole expressions are polysemous; they have multiple distinct, (...) but related, interpretations or meanings. I canvass several criteria by which to test for polysemy, and apply these criteria to some of our parts-whole terminology. I also examine some philosophical examples involving abstracta and abstract parts, which give us additional reasons to think that our parts-whole expressions are polysemous and topic-specific. Yet if so, then compositional pluralism is true. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

The article fits into the debate regarding space, time and nature in dialogue with the world lived by subjects that build up themselves or are built as mythological heroes, source of speech and spacial concrete practices. It's a poorly explored field in Geography that recently approaches to the cultural dynamic debate, to the symbolic field and also to their spacialization processes. The aim is to discuss the possibility of understanding in the present time about the space organization processes related to (...) the society's previous moments, in a space/time dialectics which articulate the present and past times in a complex and non linear way. Methodologically, starting from a literature review about the theme, the present study was linked to the field and documental research about migration to the vicinal ways of Transamazônica Highway (BR-230 Highway), the creation of the "Centro Espírita União do Vegetal", a religion that arises in the Amazon and set up its headquarters in Brasília and the construction of Brasilia as a modern metropolis without a past. The conclusion points at the possibility of space/time nexuses linking the Myth of Nature to the Creation of Heroes, constantly appropriated and with new meanings, in order to support speeches and new actions dialectically throughout the Brazilian contemporaneous space. (shrink)

The discipline of applied ethics already has a certain familiarity in the Anglo-Saxon world, above all through the work of Peter Singer. Applied ethics uses the tools of moral philosophy to resolve practical problems of the sort which arise, for example, in the running of hospitals. In the University at Buffalo (New York) there was organized on April 24-25 1998 the world's first conference on a new, sister discipline, the discipline of applied ontology. Applied ontologists seek to apply ontological tools (...) to solving practical problems of the sort which arise in various extra-philosophical domains, including law and government administration. (shrink)

Janette Dinishak’s work has helped shed critical light on the scientifically questionable and ethically troubling tendency in psychology and philosophy of mind to theorize autistic people as deficient empathizers. In a recently published reply on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Dinishak (2024) brings her important perspective on this topic to bear on our paper “AAC Technology, Autism, and the Empathic Turn” (2022). Dinishak is largely sympathetic to our view while also raising a number of rich and thoughtful philosophical (...) questions. Since each of these questions is capable of jumpstarting a lengthy exchange, we focus our response on those questions that, we hope, are particularly fruitful for advancing further conversation. With this aim in mind, we also engage with some of Dinishak’s own insights from her 2016 chapter “Empathy, Like-mindedness, and Autism.” … [please read below the rest of the article]. (shrink)

Translation in Greek of "A Geneticist's Roadmap to Sanity" (2019) by G.B. Côté. Μεταφράστηκε και στα Γαλλικά από τους Gilbert B. Côté και Roger Lapalme και προστέθηκε η βιβλιογραφία στις 28 του Απρίλη 2020: Pour comprendre le monde et revenir à la raison. La théorie du tout d'un généticien. Η ώθηση για τη συγγραφή ήταν η ανήθικη προεδρία του Donald J. Trump. Σε αυτό το κείμενο, θέλω να εξερευνήσω τα θεμέλια της ύπαρξής μας. Θα θίξω σύντομα την ενσυνείδηση, την ελεύθερη (...) βούληση, τη θρησκεία, την ηθική, τα βάσανα της ζωής , το πρόβλημα της δυαδικότητας του νου και του σώματος, την αχρονικότητα, τα πολλαπλά σύμπαντα και το ανθρώπινο πεπρωμένο. Για να διευκολύνω αυτήν την παρουσίαση, θα πρέπει πρώτα να δείξω ότι ο μαθηματικός πλατωνισμός είναι μια λογική αναγκαιότητα για την ύπαρξη οποιουδήποτε σύμπαντος, και θα εισαγάγω τους αφηρημένους, κβαντικούς και υλικούς τρόπους ύπαρξης (στη φιλοσοφία) που αντιστοιχούν στην πληροφόρηση, την ενέργεια και τη μάζα (στη φυσική). Το κείμενο αυτό αποτελεί μια σύνοψη της προσωπικής μου θεωρίας των πάντων. (shrink)