Anarchism is by far the least broadly understood ideology and the least studied academically. Though highly influential, both historically and in terms of recent social movements, anarchism is regularly dismissed. Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach is a welcome addition to this growing field, which is widely debated but poorly understood. Occupying a distinctive position in the study of anarchist ideology, this volume, authored by a handpicked group of established and rising scholars, investigates how anarchists often seek to sharpen their message and (...) struggle to determine what ideas and actions are central to their identity. Moving beyond defining anarchism as simply an ideology or political theory, this book examines the meanings of its key concepts, which have been divided into three categories: Core, Adjacent, and Peripheral concepts. Each chapter focuses on one important concept, shows how anarchists have understood the concept, and highlights its relationships to other concepts. Although anarchism is often thought of as a political topic, the interdisciplinary nature of Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach makes it of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, liberal arts, and the humanities. (shrink)

William Faulkner (1897-1962), one of the United States’ most renowned authors, was born on Sept. 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. He initially focused on poetry, culminating in his first publication: The Marble Faun (1924). Subsequently, he transitioned to prose, producing novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which are considered his most significant works. Like most of his oeuvre, these novels are set in (...) a fictional Southern region that Faulkner termed ‘Yoknapatawpha county.’ Nearly all works set in this fictional county are characterized by themes of race, incest, the American Civil War, and the decline of the antebellum South. Faulkner frequently employs diverse perspectives and techniques that directly represent the consciousness of his characters. Recognition for his literary achievements came relatively late in his career. The primary catalyst for this recognition was the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to him in 1949, when he had arguably passed the zenith of his writing career. Faulkner’s extensive oeuvre, which spans from 1924 to 1962, also encompasses lesser-known works, such as Sanctuary (1931) and Intruder in the Dust (1948). In addition to novels, Faulkner authored numerous short stories that are considered among the finest in American literature. These include the story translated here, “Barn Burningr” originally published in 1939, in the June issue of Harper’s magazine. Faulkner died July 6 in Byhalia, Mississippi, of a heart attack. -/- In Dutch: William Faulkner (1897-1962) …, een van de beroemdste schrijvers uit de Verenigde Staten, werd geboren op 25 september 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. Hij begon aanvankelijk met het schrijven van poëzie, wat resulteerde in zijn eerste publicatie: The Marble Faun (1924). Kort daarna liet hij poëzie voor wat het was en stortte hij zich op het proza. Dit leidde tot romans als The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) en Absalom, Absalom! (1936) die als zijn belangrijkste werken worden beschouwd. Net als het merendeel van zijn oeuvre spelen deze romans zich af in een fictioneel Zuiden dat door Faulkner ‘Yoknapatawpha county’ genoemd werd. Vrijwel alle werken die zich in deze fictieve streek afspelen, worden gekenmerkt door thema’s als ras, incest, de Amerikaanse burgeroorlog en de teloorgang van het oude Zuiden. Faulkner maakt vaak gebruik van verschillende perspectieven en technieken die direct het bewustzijn van zijn personages representeren. Pas relatief laat in zijn carrière kreeg hij erkenning voor zijn literaire verdiensten. De belangrijkste stimulans hiervoor was de Nobelprijs voor de literatuur die hem werd toegekend in 1949, toen hij als schrijver eigenlijk al over zijn toppunt heen was. Faulkners omvangrijke oeuvre, dat ontstond in de periode van 1924 tot 1962, omvat ook minder bekende werken, zoals Sanctuary (1931) en Intruder in the Dust (1948). Naast romans schreef Faulkner echter ook nog een groot aantal korte verhalen die tot de absolute top van het Amerikaanse verhaal gerekend worden. Daartoe behoort ook het hier vertaalde verhaal ‘In vlammen op’ (‘Barn Burning’), dat oorspronkelijk werd gepubliceerd in 1939, in het juninummer van het tijdschrift Harper’s. Faulkner stierf op 6 juli in Byhalia, Mississippi, aan een hartaanval. -/- . (shrink)

In 1966 Gene Roddenberry, then a relatively unknown TV writer, created what was to become a cultural sensation. From cell phones and tablets, to MRI machines and medical jet injectors, Star Trek has undoubtedly anticipated much of the technology that we take for granted today. Moreover, the disagreements, fights and jokes between Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Dr Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy (DeForest Kelley) and Mr Spock (Leonard Nimoy) were expertly crafted for dramatic impact. But I’m not writing this (...) to confess to you my obsessive infatuation with the Star Trek universe. Instead I want to discuss how the beliefs and practices of Vulcans like Spock are similar to those of the Stoic school of philosophy. (shrink)

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

Iffication, Preiffication, Qualiffication, Reiffication, and Deiffication. -/- Roughly, iffication is the speech-act in which—by appending a suitable if-clause—the speaker qualifies a previous statement. The clause following if is called the qualiffication. In many cases, the intention is to retract part of the previous statement—called the preiffication. I can retract part of “I will buy three” by appending “if I have money”. This initial study focuses on logical relations among propositional contents of speech-acts—not their full conversational implicatures, which will be treated (...) elsewhere. The modified statement—called the iffication—is never stronger than the preiffication. A degenerate iffication is one logically equivalent to its preiffication. There are limiting cases of degenerate iffications. In one, the qualiffication is tautological, as “I will buy three if three is three”. In another, the negation of the qualiffication implies the preiffication, as “I will buy three if I will not buy three”. Reiffication is iffication of an iffication. “I will buy three if I have money” is reifficated by appending “if there are three left”. Deiffication is the speech-act in which—by appending a suitable and-clause—the effect of an iffication is cancelled so that the result implies the preiffication. “I will buy three if I have money” is deifficated by appending “and I have money”. All further examples come from standard (one-sorted, tenseless, non-modal) first-order arithmetic. All theorems are about first-order arithmetic propositions. An easy theorem, hinted above, is that an iffication is degenerate if and only if the negation of the qualiffication implies the preiffication. The iffication of a conjunction using one of the conjuncts as qualiffication need not imply the other conjunct: “Two is an even square if two is square” does not imply “Two is even”. END OF PRINTED ABSTRACT. -/- Some find that the last statement provides a surprise in logic. https://www.academia.edu/s/a5a4386b75?source=link Acknowledgements: Robert Barnes, William Frank, Amanda Hicks, David Hitchcock, Leonard Jacuzzo, Edward Keenan, Mary Mulhern, Frango Nabrasa, and Roberto Torretti. (shrink)

Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

According to an orthodox view, the capacity for conscious experience (sentience) is relevant to the distribution of moral status and value. However, physicalism about consciousness might threaten the normative relevance of sentience. According to the indeterminacy argument, sentience is metaphysically indeterminate while indeterminacy of sentience is incompatible with its normative relevance. According to the introspective argument (by François Kammerer), the unreliability of our conscious introspection undercuts the justification for belief in the normative relevance of consciousness. I defend the normative relevance (...) of sentience against these objections. First, I demonstrate that physicalists only have to concede a limited amount of indeterminacy of sentience. This moderate indeterminacy is in harmony with the role of sentience in determining moral status. Second, I argue that physicalism gives us no reason to expect that introspection is unreliable with respect to the normative relevance of consciousness. (shrink)

Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.

Which animals have conscious experiences? Many different, diverse and unrelated behaviors and cognitive capacities have been proposed as tests of the presence of consciousness in an animal. It is unclear which of these tests, if any, are valid. To remedy this problem, I develop a list consisting of eight desiderata which can be used to assess putative tests of animal consciousness. These desiderata are based either on detailed analogies between consciousness-linked human behavior and non-human behavior, on theories of consciousness or (...) on methods from human consciousness science. If a test or set of tests satisfies more of these desiderata, passing it provides stronger evidence of consciousness. Moreover, one can design future tests of animal consciousness with the intention of satisfying these desiderata to ensure their evidential strength. (shrink)

This article argues, against contemporary experimentalist criticism, that conceptual analysis has epistemic value, with a structure that encourages the development of interesting hypotheses which are of the right form to be valuable in diverse areas of philosophy. The article shows, by analysis of the Gettier programme, that conceptual analysis shares the proofs and refutations form Lakatos identified in mathematics. Upon discovery of a counterexample, this structure aids the search for a replacement hypothesis. The search is guided by heuristics. The heuristics (...) of conceptual analysis are similar to those in other interesting areas of scholarship, and so hypotheses generated by it are of the right form to be applicable to diverse areas. The article shows that the explanationist criterion in epistemology was developed and applied in this way. The epistemic value of conceptual analysis is oblique because it contributes not towards the main purpose of conceptual analysis but towards the reliable development of epistemically valuable hypotheses in philosophy and scholarship. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus, this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

Traditionally, intuitions about cases have been taken as strong evidence for a philosophical position. I argue that intuitions about concept deployment have epistemic value while intuitions about matters of fact have none. I argue this by use of the explanationist criterion which contends that S is justified in believing only those propositions which are part of the best explanation of S’s making the judgements she makes. This criterion accords with scientific practice. Bealer suggests, as a defence of intuition, that naturalists (...) rely on intuition in their arguments against intuition and thus that their arguments are self-undermining. But beliefs based on intuitions about the application of concepts, like ‘justification’ and ‘theory,’ are epistemically justified by the explanationist criterion. It is only intuitions about matters of fact which are rejected. Thus, epistemically-respectable intuitions about concepts are used to undermine intuitions about metaphysics. There is nothing self-undermining about this. (shrink)

Implementationalism maintains that conventional, silicon-based artificial systems are not conscious because they fail to satisfy certain substantive constraints on computational implementation. In this article, we argue that several recently proposed substantive constraints are implausible, or at least are not well-supported, insofar as they conflate intuitions about computational implementation generally and consciousness specifically. We argue instead that the mechanistic account of computation can explain several of the intuitions driving implementationalism and noncomputationalism in a manner which is consistent with artificial consciousness. Our (...) argument provides indirect support for computationalism about consciousness and the view that conventional artificial systems can be conscious. (shrink)

Sensorimotor enactivism is the view that the content and the sensory modality of perceptual experience are determined by implicit knowledge of lawful regularities between bodily movements and patterns of sensory stimulation. A proponent of the explanatory argument for sensorimotor enactivism holds that this view is able to provide an intelligible explanation for why certain material realizers give rise to certain perceptual experiences, while rival accounts cannot close this “explanatory gap”. However, I argue that the notion of the “material realizer” of (...) perceptual experience is ambiguous. On a narrow construal, the explanatory gap cannot be bridged, not even by enactivism. On a wide construal, enactivism gets a grip on the explanatory gap, but to the same extent do established theories of consciousness. Thus, on both horns of the dilemma, the explanatory power of enactivism is not superior to more traditional theories of conscious experience. (shrink)

I develop the anticipatory argument for the view that it is nomologically possible that some non-biological creatures are phenomenally conscious, including conventional, silicon-based AI systems. This argument rests on the general idea that we should make our beliefs conform to the outcomes of an ideal scientific process and that such an ideal scientific process would attribute consciousness to some possible AI systems. This kind of ideal scientific process is an ideal application of the iterative natural kind (INK) strategy, according to (...) which one should investigate consciousness by treating it as a natural kind which iteratively explains observable patterns and correlations between potentially consciousness-relevant features. The relevant AI systems are psychological duplicates. These are hypothetical non-biological creatures which share the coarse-grained functional organization of humans. I argue that an ideal application of the INK strategy would attribute consciousness to psychological duplicates because this gives rise to a simpler and more unifying explanatory account of biological and non-biological cognition. If my argument is sound, then creatures made from the same material as conventional AI systems can be conscious, thus removing one of the main uncertainties for assessing AI consciousness and suggesting that AI consciousness may be a serious near-term concern. (shrink)

Recent work has explored the extent to which intercollegiate athletics even belong at the university or meet the university’s mission. Just as play seems evident in athletics, it is also present in music, art, and theater. While these programs are popular targets when discussing possible cuts, few question their legitimacy at the university. In this article I argue that the justification for retaining the extracurricular status of intercollegiate sports should be based on their being especially playful. Indeed, on the basis (...) of this argument, I suggest that universities offer even greater and wider access to sport through club and intramural sports. However, while athletics might appear to be more playful, I hold that there is substantially more play present in university music, art, and theater programs than there is in intercollegiate sports. (shrink)

Roughly, empirical AI alignment research (AIA) is an area of AI research which investigates empirically how to design AI systems in line with human goals. This paper examines the role of non-epistemic values in AIA. It argues that: (1) Sciences differ in the degree to which values influence them. (2) AIA is strongly value-laden. (3) This influence of values is managed inappropriately and thus threatens AIA’s epistemic integrity and ethical beneficence. (4) AIA should strive to achieve value transparency, critical scrutiny (...) from inside and outside the discipline – involving the public –, and to empower actors without strong commercial interests. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention in the Critique of the Power of (...) Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On this account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary (...) text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism. (shrink)

Scientific method interests the linguist not only as it interests every scientific worker, but also in a special way, because the scientist, as part of his method, utters certain very peculiar speech-forms. The linguist naturally divides scientific activity into two phases: the scientist performs “handling” actions and utters speech. The speech-forms which the scientist utters are peculiar both in their form and in their effect upon hearers.

Jus post Bellum is, like Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello, a part of just war theory. Jus post Bellum is distinguished from the other parts of just war theory by being primarily concerned with the principles necessary for securing a just and lasting peace after the end of a war. Traditionally, jus post bellum has focused primarily on three goals: [1] compensating those who have been the victims of unjust aggression, while respecting the rights of the aggressors, [2] (...) punishing and rehabilitating those guilty of war crimes and other violations of the principles of Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello and [3] developing measures that will prevent future war and violence (Orend 2000 and May 2012). In this chapter, I outline an account of political forgiveness and explain the role that political forgiveness can have in promoting the goals of jus post bellum. My conception of political forgiveness requires some unpacking. Let me begin with individual forgiveness, which I understand along familiar Butlerian lines as the renunciation of resentment (Butler, Sermon IX in McNaughton 2017: 75-83), though with a bit of a twist. More exactly, ● An individual, I, forgives J for doing F if and only if I renounces all her own warrant for resenting J for doing F. Resentment is a judgment-sensitive attitude, and, therefore, it tends to track judgments concerning its warrant (Scanlon 1998: 20 and Smith 2015). In cases of perfect forgiveness, I’s renunciation causes her to cease feeling resentment toward J for doing F, though, of course, less perfect cases are possible. I reject the idea that there is a sharp discontinuity between individual and political forgiveness, a position argued for by, e.g., Peter Digeser (1998 and 2001). By contrast, I understand political forgiveness as the renunciation of resentment by the relevant political body in question. With greater precision, ● A sovereign political body, P, forgives J for doing F if and only if P renounces all warrant that its citizens have for resenting, as part of their public lives, J for doing F. A little more explanation is in order. Sovereign political bodies, such as national governments, claim degrees of control over the lives of their citizens, in both their public and their private aspects, though the claims with respect to the former tend to be considerably more expansive than the claims with respect to the latter. I assume here that, at least in the case of legitimate governments, these claims of control are often valid. Such governments may reasonably renounce certain grounds for motivating action in the public sphere. For example, governments may renounce all warrant that its citizens have, as part of their public lives, for hating members of marginalized groups. In practice, this means that, while citizens might continue to act in their private lives out of hatred for members of these groups, their appeal to this hatred is seen by the state as irrelevant to matters of law and public policy as well as being wholly out-of-place in public discourse. Political forgiveness toward J for doing F, as I understand it, involves an analogous rejection of resentment, on the part of citizens in their public lives, toward J for doing F. I turn now to the matter of how political forgiveness supports securing a just and lasting peace between former belligerents. With respect to the first goal of jus post bellum, political forgiveness helps to balance compensation for victims and respect for the rights of defeated aggressors by countering the all-too-human tendency to overvalue harms done to oneself and to members of one’s group. As regards the second goal, political forgiveness plays a similar role but also provides a model for rehabilitation by exemplifying among the victorious the behavior to be emulated by the vanquished. Finally, political forgiveness promotes the third goal of jus post bellum by providing a space for nations to meet as moral equals rather than allowing one nation to have the moral high ground over the other. None of this, of course, means that political forgiveness should be unearned or that it should be confused with condonation (Kolnai 1973 and Pettigrove 2004). However, the question of what is required to put oneself in a position to be forgiven as part of jus post bellum is a matter that goes beyond the scope of this chapter. (shrink)

This précis summarizes the main topics, arguments and conclusions of the book. Many interesting arguments and critiques have, of course, been omitted in order to make this summary appropriately brief.

L'Entente sur les tiers pays sûrs ratifiée par le Canada et les États-Unis en 2002 a transformé la conception de la souveraineté territoriale canadienne, tel qu'en témoigne le traitement accordé aux demandeur-euse-s d'asile ces dernières années. Arguant à l'effet que l'État canadien adopte une conception de la souveraineté territoriale étanche qui permet l'exercice d'un droit de sélection depuis la mise en place de l'ETPS, cet article propose de repenser un devoir politique d'accueil. La première partie de cet article examine la (...) dynamique d'externalisation de la migration à laquelle participe le Canada. La seconde partie propose une analyse du cadre normatif développé par l'ETPS justifié par un droit de « choisir » les réfugié-e-s. La troisième partie propose une critique du modèle d'exclusion à l'oeuvre derrière l'ETPS et propose à cette fin de penser la responsabilité canadienne en tant que devoir politique à l'égard des populations qui demandent l'asile. (shrink)

William S. Lewis examines the contribution to philosophy of science made by Lefebvre, in the context of his membership of the French Communist Party.

Recently, a number of cases have been proposed which seem to show that – contrary to widely held opinion – a subject can inferentially come to know some proposition p from an inference which relies on a false belief q which is essential. The standard response to these cases is to insist that there is really an additional true belief in the vicinity, making the false belief inessential. I present a new kind of case suggesting that a subject can inferentially (...) come to know a proposition from an essential false belief where no truth in the vicinity seems to be present. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 241-243, June 2012.

One recently proposed solution to the Liar paradox is the contextual theory of truth. Tyler Burge (1979) argues that truth is an indexical notion and that the extension of the truth predicate shifts during Liar reasoning. A Liar sentence might be true in one context and false in another. To many, contextualism seems to capture our pre-theoretic intuitions about the semantic paradoxes; this is especially due to its reliance on the so-called Revenge phenomenon. I, however, show that Super-Liar sentences (where (...) a Super-Liar sentence is a sentence which says of itself that it is not true in any context) generate a significant problem for Burge’s contextual theory of truth. (shrink)

The paper, Some Indigenous Solutions to African Environmental Problems: An Appraisal, is written to examine the relevance of African Environmental Philosophies to addressing African environmental problems. African environmental problems include: water pollution, air pollution, land pollution, climate change, flood and many more. Researchers have shown that these problems are caused by phenomena like coal mining, nuclear waste, deforestation, overfishing, wars, etc. It is a known fact that attempts have been made over the years to resolve these problems, with pockets of (...) successes, yet more needs to be done. Nigeria’s Niger Delta Development Commission, Kenya’s Bio-safty Act 2009, The National Environment Policy of Ghana, Oil Pipeline Act 2004, Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Act 2004 are a good example of such attempts with pockets of successes and challenges. This work uses the methods of rational speculation and critical analysis to examine aboriginal approaches to resolving African environmental challenges as recorded in Mark Omorovie Ikeke’s Philosophical Consciences, Caroline N. Mbonu’s Ecospiritualism, Thaddeus Metz’s Model Relationalism, and Chimakonam Jonathan Okeke’s Ohanifism. This work charged African environmental policymakers, Lecturers, and Students with the responsibility to understand and apply the theoretical foundation for sustainable living as recorded in the above philosophies. This is the time when Africans must use indigenous African methods and principles to proffer solutions to African environmental problems. (shrink)

Philosophy has been a public endeavor since its origins in ancient Greece, India, and China. However, recent years have seen the development of a new type of public philosophy conducted by both academics and non- professionals. The new public philosophy manifests itself in a range of modalities, from the publication of magazines and books for the general public to a variety of initiatives that exploit the power and flexibility of social networks and new media. In this paper we examine the (...) phenomenon of public philosophy in its several facets, and investigate whether and in what sense it is itself a mix of philosophical practice and teaching. We conclude with a number of suggestions to academic colleagues on why and how to foster further growth of public philosophy for the benefit of society at large and of the discipline itself. (shrink)

Recent debates between proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis (the standard model in evolutionary biology) and those of a possible extended synthesis are a good example of the fascinating tangle among empirical, theoretical, and conceptual or philosophical matters that is the practice of evolutionary biology. In this essay, we briefly discuss two case studies from this debate, highlighting the relevance of philosophical thinking to evolutionary biologists in the hope of spurring further constructive cross-pollination between the two fields.

Ned Markosian has recently defended a new theory of composition, which he calls regionalism : some material objects xx compose something if and only if there is a material object located at the fusion of the locations of xx. Markosian argues that regionalism follows from what he calls the subregion theory of parthood. Korman and Carmichael agree. We provide countermodels to show that regionalism does not follow from, even together with fourteen potentially implicit background principles. We then show that regionalism (...) does follow from five of those background principles together with and two additional principles connecting parthood and location, which we call and. While the additional principles are not uncontroversial, our conjecture is that many will find them attractive. We conclude by mentioning that fills a previously unnoticed gap in the formal theory of location presented in Parsons. (shrink)

The paper Ethical Issues in Arms Technology is written to highlight and explain some ethical issues in arms production. These issues include the act of innovation; issues with weapons of mass destruction, the issue of privacy; humanizing arms technology, artificial intelligence – military killer robots, etc. The paper advocated for a critical evaluation of the structural and potential nature of arms before they are mass-produced. We need to ask and address all possible moral questions at research level rather than wait (...) for the technologies to be developed and sent to the market place. The research employed the methods of rational speculation, critical analysis, evaluation, and prescription to call for ethical assessment of all arms before they are made available to the markets. This paper advocate for a stop on the production of any arms technology that will destroy the relationship between man and his environment. Scientists and arms researchers should give ethics a stool the heart of their research and production. Before production, every arms technology template must be ethically worthy before consideration is made to mass-produce them. With this new development, we shall eradicate the production of non-human value-adding arms from our world. Humanity does not need everything. We should accept and produce only what we need. (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

In celebration of Newton da Costa’s place in the history of paraconsistency, this paper considers the use and abuse of deliberate self-contradiction. Beginning with Parmenides, developed by Plato, and continued by Cicero, an ancient philosophical tradition used deliberately paraconsistent discourses to reveal the truth. In modern times, decisionism has used deliberate self-contradiction against Judeo-Christian revelation. • DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n1p1.

We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable—controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control mechanisms (...) that select when a production is required and how it should be carried out. To operate on production mechanisms, control mechanisms need to procure information through measurement processes and evaluate possible actions. They are making decisions. In all organisms, these decisions are made by multiple different control mechanisms that are organized not hierarchically but heterarchically. In many cases, they employ internal models of features of the environment with which the organism must deal. Cognition, in the form of decision-making, is thus fundamental to living systems which must control their production mechanisms. (shrink)

A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...) of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent’s mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol’s content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information. (shrink)

Catalan translation, introductory study and notes on W. K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief”. Published in Clifford, W.K. “L’ètica de la creença”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 129–150. // Catalan translation, introductory study and notes on William James’s “The Will to Believe”. Published in James, William. “La voluntat de creure”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 151–172. [Introductory study published in Oya, Alberto. “Introducció. El debat entre W. K. Clifford i (...) class='Hi'>William James”. Quaderns de Filosofia, vol. III, n. 2 (2016), pp. 123–127]. (shrink)

I critically examine the claim that modal collapse arguments against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) are in general fallacious. In a recent paper, Christopher Tomaszewski alleges that modal collapse arguments against DDS are invalid, owing to illicit substitutions of nonrigid singular terms into intensional contexts. I show that this is not, in general, the case. I show, further, that where existing modal collapse arguments are vulnerable to this charge the arguments can be repaired without any apparent dialectical impropriety. (...) I conclude that the genuine debate over modal collapse and divine simplicity and modal collapse is substantially a controversy over the metaphysics of divine action, and that this constitutes a fruitful direction in which to take future discussions of the subject. (shrink)

It is now well-known that Newton–Cartan theory is the correct geometrical setting for modelling the quantum Hall effect. In addition, in recent years edge modes for the Newton–Cartan quantum Hall effect have been derived. However, the existence of these edge modes has, as of yet, been derived using only orthodox methodologies involving the breaking of gauge-invariance; it would be preferable to derive the existence of such edge modes in a gauge-invariant manner. In this article, we employ recent work by Donnelly (...) and Freidel in order to accomplish exactly this task. Our results agree with known physics, but afford greater conceptual insight into the existence of these edge modes: in particular, they connect them to subtle aspects of Newton–Cartan geometry and pave the way for further applications of Newton–Cartan theory in condensed matter physics. (shrink)

This article investigates the claim that some truths are fundamentally or really true — and that other truths are not. Such a distinction can help us reconcile radically minimal metaphysical views with the verities of common sense. I develop an understanding of the distinction whereby Fundamentality is not itself a metaphysical distinction, but rather a device that must be presupposed to express metaphysical distinctions. Drawing on recent work by Rayo on anti-Quinean theories of ontological commitments, I formulate a rigourous theory (...) of the notion. In the final sections, I show how this package dovetails with ' interpretationist' theories of meaning to give sober content to thought that some things — perhaps sets, or gerrymandered mereological sums — can be 'postulated into existence'. (shrink)

Suppose that an altruistic agent who is uncertain between evidential and causal decision theory finds herself in a situation where these theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act in accordance with EDT. First, we claim that the appropriate response to normative uncertainty is to hedge one's bets. That is, if the stakes are much higher on one theory than another, and the credences you assign to each of (...) these theories are not very different, then it is appropriate to choose the option that performs best on the high-stakes theory. Second, we show that, given the assumption of altruism, the existence of correlated decision makers will increase the stakes for EDT but leave the stakes for CDT unaffected. Together these two claims imply that whenever there are sufficiently many correlated agents, the appropriate response is to act in accordance with EDT. (shrink)

This paper proposes a semantics for free choice permission that explains both the non-classical behavior of modals and disjunction in sentences used to grant permission, and their classical behavior under negation. It also explains why permissions can expire when new information comes in and why free choice arises even when modals scope under disjunction. On the proposed approach, deontic modals update preference orderings, and connectives operate on these updates rather than propositions. The success of this approach stems from its capacity (...) to capture the difference between expressing the preferences that give rise to permissions and conveying propositions about those preferences. (shrink)