The present narrative review seeks to unravel where we are now, and where we need to go to delineate the active ingredients in psychotherapy delivered by conversational agents (e.g., chatbots). While psychotherapy delivered by conversational agents has shown promising effectiveness for depression, anxiety, and psychological distress across several randomized controlled trials, little emphasis has been placed on the therapeutic processes in these interventions. The theoretical framework of this narrative review is grounded in prominent perspectives on the active ingredients in psychotherapy. (...) Based on search terms derived from various theoretical perspectives, we conducted a systematic literature search of four scientific databases and identified 17 studies. Across the selected studies, three themes emerged: relationship variables, emotional venting, and cognitive factors. While methodological issues compromise the epistemic value of this evidence base, core questions also remain to be answered. Such questions include, but are not limited to, whether humans can form affectionate bonds to inanimate beings and whether these kind of mental health treatments should be understood as psychotherapy or something else. Researchers should therefore be cautious when applying theories of psychotherapy in the realm of conversational agents. We conclude the paper by introducing recommendations for future research, which we hope will help instigate methodologically sound studies in this field. (shrink)

Pedagogy is a pillar of human culture and society. Telling each other information and showing each other how to do things comes naturally to us. A strong case has been made that declarative knowledge is the norm of assertion, which is our primary way of telling others information. This article presents an analogous case for the hypothesis that procedural knowledge is the norm of instructional demonstration, which is a primary way of showing others how to do things. Knowledge (...) is the norm of telling and showing. It is the prime pedagogical principle. (shrink)

Many philosophers subscribe to the view that philosophy is a priori and in the business of discovering necessary truths from the armchair. This paper sets out to empirically test this picture. If this were the case, we would expect to see this reflected in philosophical practice. In particular, we would expect philosophers to advance mostly deductive, rather than inductive, arguments. The paper shows that the percentage of philosophy articles advancing deductive arguments is higher than those advancing inductive arguments, which is (...) what we would expect from the vantage point of the armchair philosophy picture. The results also show, however, that the percentages of articles advancing deductive arguments and those advancing inductive arguments are converging over time and that the difference between inductive and deductive ratios is declining over time. This trend suggests that deductive arguments are gradually losing their status as the dominant form of argumentation in philosophy. (shrink)

Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like “I dreamed that…”. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like NARRATION, BACKGROUND, and EXPLANATION) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that-clause (or a sequence of independently embedded (...) clauses). I show how we can analyze actual, complex dream report stories using a formal discourse semantics framework. I then explore how to extend this discourse framework to visual dream reporting, like in movies and comics, where it’s not immediately clear that we even have any intensional operators or embeddings to begin with. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the prospects for an epistemic norm which relates knowledge-how to showing in a way that parallels the knowledge norm of assertion. In the first part of the paper I show that this epistemic norm can be motivated by conversational evidence, and that it fits in with a plausible picture of the function of knowledge. In the second part of the paper I present a dilemma for this norm. If we understand showing in a (...) broad sense as a general kind of skill teaching, then the norm faces counterexamples of teachers who know how to teach, but not to do. On the other hand, it we understand showing more narrowly as involving only teaching by doing the relevant activity, then the data which initially supported the norm can be explained away by more general connections between knowledge-how and intentional action. (shrink)

Dorit Bar-On aims to account for the distinctive security of avowals by appealing to expression. She officially commits herself only to a negative characterization of expression, contending that expressive behavior is not epistemically based in self-judgments. I argue that her account of avowals, if it relies exclusively on this negative account of expression, can't achieve the explanatory depth she claims for it. Bar-On does explore the possibility that expression is a kind of perception-enabling showing. If she endorsed this positive (...) account, her argument would re-gain an explanatory advantage over its rivals. But extending this account to linguistic expressive behavior would bring Bar-On very close to constitutive accounts of first-person authority. (shrink)

I can be aware of myself, and thereby come to know things about myself, in a variety of different ways. But is there some special way in which I—and only I—can learn about myself? Can I become aware of myself by introspecting? Do I somehow show up in my own conscious experiences? David Hume and most contemporary philosophers say no. They deny that the self shows up in experience. However, in this paper I appeal to research on schizophrenia—on thought insertion, (...) in particular—to argue that Hume and his follows are wrong: The self does, in fact, show up in experience. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are increasingly arguing for the importance of doing scientifically- and socially-engaged work, suggesting that we need to reduce barriers to extra-disciplinary engagement and broaden our impact. Yet, we currently lack empirical data to inform these discussions, leaving a number of important questions unanswered. How common is it for philosophers of science to engage other communities, and in what ways are they engaging? What barriers are most prevalent when it comes to broadly disseminating one’s work or collaborating with (...) others? To what extent do philosophers of science actually value an engaged approach? Our project addresses this gap in our collective knowledge by providing empirical data regarding the state of philosophy of science today. We report the results of a survey of 299 philosophers of science about their attitudes towards and experiences with engaging those outside the discipline. Our data suggest that a significant majority of philosophers of science think it is important for non-philosophers to read and make use of their work; most are engaging with communities outside the discipline; and many think philosophy of science, as a discipline, has an obligation to ensure it has a broader impact. Interestingly, however, many of these same philosophers believe engaged work is generally undervalued in the discipline. We think these findings call for cautious optimism on the part of those who value engaged work—while there seems to be more interest in engaging other communities than many assume, significant barriers still remain. (shrink)

This essay constitutes an attempt to probe the very idea of a saying/showing distinction of the kind that Wittgenstein advances in the Tractatus—to say what such a distinction consists in, to say what philosophical work it has to do, and to say how we might be justified in drawing such a distinction. Towards the end of the essay the discussion is related to Wittgenstein’s later work. It is argued that we can profitably see this work in such a way (...) that a saying/showing distinction arises there too. In particular, in the final sub-section of the essay, it is suggested that we can see in Wittgenstein’s later work an inducement to say what we are shown. (shrink)

Coping with everyday life limits the extent of one’s scepticism. It is practically impossible to doubt the existence of the things with which one is immediately engaged and interacting. To doubt that, say, a door exists, is to step back from merely using the door (opening it) and to reflect on it in a detached, theoretical way. It is impossible to simultaneously act and live immersed in situation S while doubting that one is in S. Sceptical doubts—such as ‘Is this (...) really a door?’, ‘Am I really walking?’ — require a reflective withdrawal in thought from the situation at hand. Maintaining sceptical doubt while coping with everyday life requires a split consciousness, a bad faith, with one part of consciousness doubting the existing of things that the other part takes forgranted. For this reason, a sustained lived sceptical doubt is sometimes thought to be impossible. -/- In this article, I examine Wittgenstein's response to scepticism in "On Certainty". I argue that one of his responses is "the response based on action", which is (as other Wittgenstein interpreters have noted) a characteristically pragmatist response. I then evaluate the quality of this pragmatist response to scepticism, noting that actions just as much as representations are susceptible to mis-interpretation. It is argued that despite the insights contained in it, Wittgenstein's contextualism about meaning is inadequate to rescue the Wittgensteinian response to scepticism. (shrink)

Some philosophers take Perky's experiments to show that perceiving can be mistaken for visualizing and so that the two sometimes match in phenomenology. On Segal’s alternative interpretation Perky’s subjects did not consciously perceive the stimuli at all. I argue that even setting this alternative aside, Perky's results do not prove what the philosophers think. She showed her subjects, not the objects they were asked to visualise, but pictures of them. What they mistook for visualizing was not perceptual consciousness of stimuli, (...) but pictorial consciousness. Once clear about the nature of the latter, we can see that Perky's results reveal nothing very surprising. (shrink)

The small improvement argument has been said to establish that the standard weak preference or value relation can be incomplete. We first show that the argument is one of three possible ‘small amendment arguments’, each of which would yield the same conclusion. Generalizing the analysis thus, we subsequently present a strong and a weak version of small amendment arguments and derive the exact rationality conditions under which they reveal incompleteness. The results show that the arguments (in any of their variants) (...) need not reveal a problem for the possibility of rational choice. In fact, it can be argued that they only reveal such a problem if the underlying relation is complete rather than incomplete. (shrink)

Suppose we grant that evolutionary forces have had a profound effect on the contours of our normative judgments and intuitions. Can we conclude anything from this about the correct metaethical theory? I argue that, for the most part, we cannot. Focusing my attention on Sharon Street’s justly famous argument that the evolutionary origins of our normative judgments and intuitions cause insuperable epistemological difficulties for a metaethical view she calls "normative realism," I argue that there are two largely independent lines of (...) argument in Street’s work which need to be teased apart. The first of these involves a genuine appeal to evolutionary considerations, but it can fairly easily be met by her opponents. The second line of argument is more troubling; it raises a significant problem, one of the most difficult in all of philosophy, namely how to justify our reliance on our most basic cognitive faculties without relying on those same faculties in a question-begging manner. However, evolutionary considerations add little to this old problem, and rejecting normative realism is not a way to solve it. (shrink)

Three professors reflect on the experience of creating a learning community of 22 students by linking courses in Literature and Ethics. The project demonstrates practical strategies for incorporating feminist scholarship and pedagogy into the core curriculum and for integrating core courses from diverse disciplines.

On September 11, 2001, many of us experienced life as what it is not: we lived an extreme instance of the spectacle, of the sublime outside the realm of ethics. Starting with a few compelling questions that the media representations of the attack on the New York World Trade Center inevitably raise, this paper explores a series of similarities, continuums, and extrapolations of the aesthetic in different types of discourse from Friedrich Schiller to Guy Debord. My assessment of the individual‘s (...) dissolution in the ritual (former dissident and present Czech President Václav Havel‘s phrase) rejects the bleak Marxist theories of manipulation, without overlooking, at the same time, the potential dangers of unfreedom that the process of surrendering to the spectacle implies. Living life as show time may ultimately, and oxymoronically, prove to be the only option toward an infinitude of choices. (shrink)

Hegel's most interesting and controversial claims about nonconceptual knowledge arise in contexts of value. This paper examines the relation between nonconceptual and conceptual knowledge in Hegel's Phenomenology, specifically in connection with early Greek aesthetics. I take up Hegel's claim that the ancient Greeks expressed in their myths, religious narratives, sculpture, and artistic materials certain high powered philosophical truths which they shouldn't express in words. I raise a paradox about his claims and show how his claims about ineffable knowledge clash with (...) his general propositional criterion of knowledge, namely, that for something to count as knowledge it must be expressible in words. However I argue that Hegel's thoughts about the matter were coherent and I solve the paradox. (shrink)

A defendant's absence need not be a bar to continuation of his trial for fraud. The.

Jason Stanley's Know How aims to offer an attractive intellectualist analysis of knowledge how that is compositionally predicted by the best available treatments of sentences like 'Emile knows how to make his dad smile.' This paper explores one significant way in which Stanley's compositional treatment fails to generate his preferred account, and advocates a minimal solution.

Background -/- Previous literature suggests that those with reading disability (RD) have more pronounced deficits during semantic processing in reading as compared to listening comprehension. This discrepancy has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies showing abnormal activity in RD during semantic processing in the visual but not in the auditory modality. Whether effective connectivity between brain regions in RD could also show this pattern of discrepancy has not been investigated. Methodology/Principal Findings -/- Children (8- to 14-year-olds) were given a (...) semantic task in the visual and auditory modality that required an association judgment as to whether two sequentially presented words were associated. Effective connectivity was investigated using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Bayesian Model Selection (BMS) was used separately for each modality to find a winning family of DCM models separately for typically developing (TD) and RD children. BMS yielded the same winning family with modulatory effects on bottom-up connections from the input regions to middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus(IFG) with inconclusive evidence regarding top-down modulations. Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) was thus conducted across models in this winning family and compared across groups. The bottom-up effect from the fusiform gyrus (FG) to MTG rather than the top-down effect from IFG to MTG was stronger in TD compared to RD for the visual modality. The stronger bottom-up influence in TD was only evident for related word pairs but not for unrelated pairs. No group differences were noted in the auditory modality. Conclusions/Significance -/- This study revealed a modality-specific deficit for children with RD in bottom-up effective connectivity from orthographic to semantic processing regions. There were no group differences in connectivity from frontal regions, suggesting that the core deficit in RD is not in top-down modulation. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence has given us synthetic media that are increasingly easy to create and increasingly hard to distinguish from photographs and videos. Whereas an existing literature has been concerned with how these new media might make a difference for would-be knowers—the viewers of photographs and videos—I advance a thesis about how they will make a difference for would-be communicators—those who embed photos and videos in their speech acts. I claim that the presence of these media in our information environment (...) reduces our ability to show one another things, even as it may increase our resources for telling. And I argue that this has consequences beyond the disruption of knowledge acquisition; showing is a way that we preserve relational equality through superficial asymmetries in political communication, and thereby express respect for our audiences. If synthetic media reduce our options for showing, they then interfere in the way that we manage our relationships in the context of collective political action. (shrink)

Although the free-will reply to divine hiddenness is often associated with Kant, the argument typically presented in the literature is not the strongest Kantian response. Kant’s central claim is not that knowledge of God would preclude the possibility of transgression, but rather that it would preclude one’s viewing adherence to the moral law as a genuine sacrifice of self-interest. After explaining why the Kantian reply to hiddenness is superior to standard formulations, I argue that, despite Kant’s general skepticism about theodicy, (...) his insights pertaining to hiddenness also provide the foundation for a new theodicy that merits serious attention. (shrink)

I begin by proposing a notion of mathematical understanding; then I take a brief look at four approaches to the task of teaching infinity to mathematical novices—four approaches, that is, to “popular” philosophy and mathematics—and assess whether they provide such an understanding. But I don’t mean this to be a recommendation for or against any author. Rather, I want to submit the idea that mathematical understanding is an important dimension of popularizing efforts, all of which can be valuable, to be (...) sure, along other dimensions. (shrink)

It is important to note that certain mental health disorders are classified as rare conditions, and they have their own ‘cultural concepts of distress’ as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM 5). Cultural concepts of distress are a recent attempt to understand psychological distress influenced by culture, separate from biomedical diagnoses that require equal attention and support for individuals and their families, both physically and emotionally. [1].

Ours arrived under mysterious circumstances in Wuhan, China sometime in the last quarter of 2019. In the memorable words of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the Covid-19 virus then “got on a plane” and became a super-spreading global pandemic in a matter of months. The human toll is devastating — over 80 million infected and over 1.7 million deaths as I write this. Over a century ago and during World War I no less, the world witnessed the devastating “Spanish flu” (...) pandemic, which according to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention infected 500 million people and killed over 50 million, with an estimated 20 million in Asia alone, although precise numbers are hard to come by. Pandemics are named pandemics because their human toll is on a global scale and devastating. (shrink)

Whether we perceive high-level properties is presently a source of controversy. A promising test case for whether we do is aesthetic perception. Aesthetic properties are distinct from low-level properties, like shape and colour. Moreover, some of them, e.g. being serene and being handsome, are properties we appear to perceive. Aesthetic perception also shares a similarity with gestalt effects, e.g. seeing-as, in that aesthetic properties, like gestalt phenomena, appear to ‘emerge’ from low-level properties. Gestalts effects, of course, are widely observed, which (...) raises the question: do gestalt effects make it plausible that we perceive high-level aesthetic properties? Contra Stokes, this paper argues that they don’t. This is interesting in its own right, but it also points to a more general lesson, namely we should resist the temptation to appeal to gestalt effects to argue for high-level perception. (shrink)

This essay extends my side of a discussion begun earlier with Duncan Pritchard, the recent author of Epistemic Luck. Pritchard’s work contributes significantly to improving the “diagnostic appeal” of a neo-Moorean philosophical response to radical scepticism. While agreeing with Pritchard in many respects, the paper questions the need for his concession to the sceptic that the neo-Moorean is capable at best of recovering “‘brute’ externalist knowledge”. The paper discusses and directly responds to a dilemma that Pritchard poses for virtue epistemologies (...) (VE). It also takes issue with Pritchard’s “merely safety-based” alternative. Ultimately, however, the criticisms made here of Pritchard’s dilemma and its underlying contrast of “anti-luck” and “virtue” epistemologies are intended to help realize his own aspirations for a better diagnosis of radical scepticism to inform a still better neo-Moorean response. (shrink)

Chapter 3 of an e-book 'Handbook for Logotherapists' 2024 (Niiles-Mäki Anne). Institute for Purpose-centered Philosophy Finland.

Spite is typically considered a vicious emotion that causes us to engage in petty, vindictive, and sometimes self-destructive behavior. Even though it has this bad reputation, I will argue that spite is a reactive attitude. Spite is emotional defiance of another’s command: to spite you, I will do something exactly because you told me not to. Our liability to feelings of spite presupposes that we recognize others as having practical authority, which is why it qualifies as a reactive attitude. I (...) conclude by offering conditions under which spite can be justified and unjustified. (shrink)

What Ivan Illich regarded in his Medical Nemesis as the ‘expropriation of health’ takes place on the surfaces and in the spaces of the screens all around us, including our cell phones but also the patient monitors and (increasingly) the iPads that intervene between nurse and patient. To explore what Illich called the ‘age of the show’, this essay uses film examples, like Creed and the controversial documentary Vaxxed, and the television series Nurse Jackie. Rocky’s cancer in his last film (...) (submitting to chemo to ‘fight’ cancer) highlights what Illich along with Petr Skrabanek called the ‘expropriation of death’. In contrast to what Illich denotes as ‘Umsonstigkeit’ – i.e., a free gift, given undeservedly, i.e., gratuitously – medical science tends to be tempted by what Illich terms scientistic ‘black magic’, taking over (expropriating) the life and the death of the patient in increasingly technological ways, a point underscored in the concluding section on the commercial prospects of xenotransplants using factory farm or mass-produced (and already for some time) human-pig mosaics or chimeras. (shrink)

With millions of animals brought into existence and raised for food every year, their negative impact upon the environment and the staggering growth in the number of chronic diseases caused by meat and dairy diets make a global move toward ethical veganism imperative. Typi-cally, utilitarians and deontologists have led this discussion. The purpose of this paper is to pro-pose a virtuous approach to ethical veganism. Virtue ethics can be used to construct a defense of ethical veganism by relying on the (...) virtues of compassion and fairness. Exercising these values in our relations with animals involves acknowledging their moral value, thus seeing that they are not our property or our food. It is important to emphasize that this argument applies only to well-developed societies that need not rely upon animals as sources of food, clothing, and various by-products. (shrink)

This paper casts the television series BoJack Horseman as a challenge to the genre that Stanley Cavell calls “the comedy of remarriage.” First, it is argued that the last season of the series explicitly suggests but finally contradicts the narrative pattern of the comedy of remarriage. Then, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is traced back to some structural features of the medium of television and its relationship to time. Finally, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is related (...) to the capacity of the medium of television to enable self-defeating fictions which challenge fiction as a cultural institution. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that the new emerging discipline cognitive science of religion has a bearing on how to think about the epistemic status of religious beliefs. Both defenders and opponents of the rationality of religious belief have used cognitive theories of religion to argue for their point. This paper will look at the defender-side of the debate. I will discuss an often used argument in favor of the trustworthiness of religious beliefs, stating that cognitive science of religion shows that (...) religious beliefs are natural and natural beliefs ought to be trusted in the absence of counterevidence. This argument received its most influential defense from Justin Barrett in a number of papers, some in collaboration with Kelly James Clark. I will discuss their version of the argument and argue that it fails because the natural beliefs discovered by cognitive scientists of religion are not the religious beliefs of the major world religions. A survey of the evidence from cognitive science of religion will show that cognitive science does show that other beliefs come natural and that these can thus be deemed trustworthy in the absence of counterevidence. These beliefs are teleological beliefs, afterlife beliefs and animistic theistic beliefs. (shrink)

I have argued that emergentism is a non-computational theory of mind, because this theory says that mind or consciousness emerges from material objects, but it will not be reduced to that matter. That is to say that the higher level of quality emerge from a lower level of existence. It emerges therefrom, and does not belong to that level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existence with its social laws of behaviour. Thus, emergentism is an anti-reductionists' theory of (...) the mind and has established the hardness of the problem of consciousness. The physicalistic theory of mind in all its hues faces the question as to how we can account for the qualitative content of our consciousness. It cannot ultimately tell us how the subjective content of our consciousness. (shrink)

This article is a study of the interpretive resources developed by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. Interpretive resources – also called ‘hermeneutical resources’ – are concepts, narratives, conceptual frameworks, etc. that enable subjects to make sense of themselves and their world. Much recent scholarship has explored how a community's interpretive resources influence social interactions or character traits in the community. In Limbaugh's transcripts, we found a pattern of what we call ‘concept doubling’, wherein terms are characterised in a way (...) suggesting that liberals and conservatives express different concepts by their utterances of the same word form. We propose that this promotes an interpretive resource that encourages in those who use it what we call ‘false double consciousness’. We contrast the effects of false double consciousness with those of double consciousness, and we consider the interpretive resources available within false double consciousness. (shrink)

Students often invoke quantum mechanics in class or papers to make philosophical points. This tendency has been encouraged by pop culture influences like the film What the Bleep do We Know? There is little merit to most of these putative implications. However, it is difficult for philosophy teachers unfamiliar with quantum mechanics to handle these supposed implications in a clear and careful way. This paper is a philosophy of science version of MythBusters. We offer a brief primer on the nature (...) of quantum mechanics, enumerate nine of the most common implications associated with quantum mechanics, and finally clarify each implication with the facts. Our goal is to explain what quantum mechanics doesn’t show. (shrink)

According to [Bayesian] models” in cognitive neuroscience, says a recent textbook, “the human mind behaves like a capable data scientist”. Do they? That is to say, do such model show we are rational? I argue that Bayesian models of cognition, perhaps surprisingly, do not and indeed cannot, show that we are Bayesian-rational. The key reason is that such models appeal to approximations, a fact that carries significant implications. After outlining the argument, I critique two responses, seen in recent cognitive neuroscience. (...) One says that the mind can be seen as approximately Bayes-rational, while the other reconceives norms of rationality. (shrink)

I show the sort of solution currently commonly imagined as fitting the hard problem of consciousness is impossible to reach. The category mistake implicit in the problem can be dealt with, but the reformulated version will still never reach complete predictive ability and intuitiveness. Applications of this proof of impossibility and attempts by others to solve the hard problem are discussed. An overarching phenomenological-cognitive framework is proposed, partially to show the possibilities which are still open for those interested in discovering (...) ‘consciousness-processes’. (shrink)

In an era where digital screens are as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, Toward an Anthropology of Screens by Mauro Carbone and Graziano Lingua offers a seminal exploration into screens’ crucial functions and profound impact on human culture. This scholarly work dissects the screen’s evolution, anthropological significance and philosophical implications, offering an enlightening narrative on our mediated reality.

Review of Johan de Jong, The Movement of Showing: Indirect Method, Critique, and Responsibility in Derrida, Hegel, and Heidegger (New York: SUNY, 2020).

Rollback arguments focus on long sequences of actions with identical initial conditions in order to explicate the luck problem that indeterminism poses for libertarian free will theories (i.e. the problem that indeterministic actions appear arbitrary in a free-will undermining way). In this paper, I propose a rollback argument for probability incompatibilism, i.e. for the thesis that free will is incompatible with all world-states being governed by objective probabilities. Other than the most prominently discussed rollback arguments, this argument explicitly focusses on (...) the ability to act otherwise. It argues that the negligible probability of the relative frequencies in overall rollback patterns being relevantly different indicates that even the ability to act otherwise with regard to individual actions is not free-will enabling. My proposed argument provides probability incompatibilists with a tool to argue against a classical event-causal response to the luck problem, while it can still motivate an agent-causal response to it. (shrink)

This article addresses the Conings case – a Belgian soldier, currently wanted for threatening Belgium’s top virologist Marc Van Ranst and the illegal possession of weapons in a terrorist context. It moreover argues for a more situated analysis of Belgium’s far-right extremism by looking at its complex political climate.

Saul Kripke proposed a skeptical challenge that Romina Padró defended and popularized by the name of the Adoption Problem. The challenge is that, given a certain definition of adoption, there are some logical principles that cannot be adopted—paradigmatic cases being Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens. Kripke has used the Adoption Problem to argue that there is an important sense in which logic is not revisable. In this essay, I defend two independent claims. First, that the Adoption Problem does not entail (...) that logic is never revisable in the sense that Kripke addresses. Second, that, to assess whether an agent can revise their logic in the sense that Kripke addresses, it is best to consider a different definition of adoption, according to which Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens are sometimes adoptable. (shrink)

The shelves of film and philosophy books should have made it considerably easier to teach with films in introductory philosophy classes, and certainly many philosophers have found them useful. However, shortcomings of many of these pop culture volumes (which I discuss in the next section) make these works rarely useful in the classroom. I propose instead a new model for how to teach film in a philosophy class. The model develops the virtues inherent in cinephilia and connects those virtues to (...) the good life. (shrink)

Współczesny świat, zdominowany przez elektroniczne środki przekazu, to już zupełnie inne pojmowanie komunikacji językowej, zarówno tej w formie pisanej, jak i mówionej. Dominują w nim skrótowe i kompaktowe wypowiedzi; język z jednej strony traci na znaczeniu, z drugiej zaś - chłonie nowinki z innych systemów językowych, z którymi wchodzi w interakcje na różnych płaszczyznach. Niewątpliwe ogromną rolę odgrywają w tym procesie różnice kulturowe i związane z tym nie tylko kwestie mentalności, stereotypy, lecz także odmienne pojmowanie zjawisk dnia codziennego, w tym (...) również sposób definiowania poczucia humoru. Ciekawą rzeczą jest więc próba wskazania na podobieństwa oraz różnice między tzw. „typowo niemieckim” poczuciem humoru a niemieckim programem komediowym Was guckst du?, produkowanym i prowadzonym przez obcokrajowca. Kaya Yanar, autor i gospodarz tego programu, jest niewątpliwie najlepszym przykładem na to, że wymienione wcześniej „typowo niemieckie” poczucie humoru odbiega w znacznym stopniu od rodzaju żartu, proponowanego właśnie przez Yanara. Was guckst du? daje możliwość zanalizowania języka audycji komediowej, odwołującej się głównie do kultury świata arabskiego i wszelkich zjawisk z nią związanych, kwestii opanowania i posługiwania się językiem niemieckim właśnie przez obcokrajowców z tego kręgu kulturowego. W przełożeniu na leksykę i jej użycie w praktyce oznacza to wykorzystanie w programie zjawiska wieloznaczności, wynikających z braku znajomości języka, jako źródła sytuacji komediowych, które w połączeniu z niezwykle barwną osobą prowadzącego, odpowiednim obrazem, charakterem postaci oraz motywami muzycznymi, jest punktem wyjścia do całościowej analizy tegoż programu. (shrink)

In order to link fine-tuning in physics with spiritual influx, I propose that the highest degree in physics is where ‘ends’ are received in physics. By ends, I refer to what it is that determines the means or causes in physics, and what it is that manages or influences to basis parameters (masses and charge values) of the quantum fields. This is fine-tuning, in the sense that it occurs not just for the whole universe (in the Big Bang, for example), (...) but locally. That is, this fine-tuning is different at each time, and in point in space. Thus this influx can be specific to living organisms, and can occur at all the needed scales and levels in psychology and biology, namely every day and every micros-second of our lives. (shrink)

Review: J. E. Wolff. The metaphysics of quantity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 240 pp, $72.00 HB.