Universal health coverage (UHC) is at the center of current efforts to strengthen health systems and improve the level and distribution of health and health services. This document is the final report of the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage. The report addresses the key issues of fairness and equity that arise on the path to UHC. As such, the report is relevant for every actor that affects that path and governments in particular, as they are in (...) charge of overseeing and guiding the progress toward UHC. (shrink)

This paper is about a problem that can arise when we try to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” from groups comprised of individuals who exhibit a certain kind of epistemic humility in the way they respond to testimonial evidence. I begin by setting out the problem and then make some initial steps toward solving it. The solution I develop is tentative and may not apply in all circumstances, but it promises to alleviate what seems to me to be a (...) problem of both theoretical interest and practical importance. (shrink)

The modern Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics describes an emergent multiverse. The goal of this paper is to provide a perspicuous characterisation of how the multiverse emerges making use of a recent account of (weak) ontological emergence. This will be cashed out with a case study that identifies decoherence as the mechanism for emergence. The greater metaphysical clarity enables the rebuttal of critiques due to Baker (2007) and Dawid and Th\'ebault (2015) that cast the emergent multiverse ontology as incoherent; responses (...) are also offered to challenges to the Everettian approach from Maudlin (2010) and Monton (2013). (shrink)

Language is the main resource for meaningful action, including the very formation of selves and psychosocial identities, shaped by practical norms, beliefs, and values. Thus, language education constitutes one of the most powerful means for both social reproduction and social production and ideological maintenance and utopian innovation. In this paper, we attempt to emphasise the invaluable psychosocial, political, economic, and cultural function of language education in order to propose a critical view of the current transition from the monolingual to a (...) multilingual paradigm. We maintain that multilingual approaches tend to serve the neoliberal framework and reproduce its systemic inequalities. Therefore, we argue in favour of emancipatory multilingual practices that could embody a translingual pedagogy capable of promoting the development of capabilities, the recognition of otherness, and the cultivation of diversity. Rooted in critical theory, namely in Foucault’s notion of subjectification and Freire’s view of conscientisation, an emancipatory translingual pedagogy would enable and empower every learner to synthesise a contextually creative field of new semantic and pragmatic relationships. Critical language education would enhance the ethos of biophilia that fosters what we term the poetics of communality and selfhood, that is to say, the proactive commitment to expanding symbolic and existential novelty. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to review Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" in English Translation. It compares and contrasts the translations by Thomas Common, Walter Kaufmann, Josefine Nauckhoff, and R. Kevin Hill. First, I argue in favor of translating the work's title "Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft" as "The Gay Science" or perhaps more precisely as "The Gay Knowledge". Nietzsche who is likely the greatest stylist in the German language wrote with philological precision and succinctness. This exactitude and awareness of the (...) shaping influence of linguistic means on the contents expressed therefore needs to be reflected throughout in any kind of rendition of Nietzsche's artful texts and the evaluation and assessment thereof. (shrink)

Impossible worlds are representations of impossible things and impossible happenings. They earn their keep in a semantic or metaphysical theory if they do the right theoretical work for us. As it happens, a worlds-based account provides the best philosophical story about semantic content, knowledge and belief states, cognitive significance and cognitive information, and informative deductive reasoning. A worlds-based story may also provide the best semantics for counterfactuals. But to function well, all these accounts need use of impossible (...) and as well as possible worlds. So what are impossible worlds? Graham Priest claims that any of the usual stories about possible worlds can be told about impossible worlds, too. But far from it. I'll argue that impossible worlds cannot be genuine worlds, of the kind proposed by Lewis, McDaniel or Yagisawa. Nor can they be ersatz worlds on the model proposed by Melia or Sider. Constructing impossible worlds, it turns out, requires novel metaphysical resources. (shrink)

I propose an account of possible worlds. According to the account, possible worlds are pluralities of sentences in an extremely large language. This account avoids a problem, relating to the total number of possible worlds, that other accounts face. And it has several additional benefits.

There are at least three dimensions to rights. We may have and lack freedom to 1) be, 2) do, and 3) have. These dimensions reformulate Locke’s categories, and are further complicated by placing them within the context of domains such as natural or civil rights. Here the question of the origins of rights is not addressed, but issues concerning how we may contextualize them are discussed. Within the framework developed, this paper makes use of Actor-Network Theory and Enlightenment values to (...) examine the multidimensionality and appropriateness of animal rights and human rights for posthumans. The core position here is that rights may be universal and constant, but they can only be accessed within a matrix of relative cultural dimensions. This will be true for posthumans, and their rights will be relative to human rights and dependent on human and posthuman responsibilities. (shrink)

David Lewis holds that a single possible world can provide more than one way things could be. But what are possible worlds good for if they come apart from ways things could be? We can make sense of this if we go in for a metaphysical understanding of what the world is. The world does not include everything that is the case—only the genuine facts. Understood this way, Lewis's “cheap haecceitism” amounts to a kind of metaphysical anti-haecceitism: it says (...) there aren't any genuine facts about individuals over and above their qualitative roles. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents. The standard possible-world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience. A familiar attempt to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal (...) agents that are incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that “anything goes”. But I prove that it is impossible to develop an impossible-world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. Effectively, I show that attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents, or extremely non-ideal agents. (shrink)

This paper explores the essence of the World and the essence of Life/Consciousness. Then derives from they the highest principles of value judgment and a series of ethics, providing a theoretical basis for guiding our future actions. The essence of the World consists of three aspects: 1. Existence, 2. Not nothingness, 3.Difference/Change. The essence of Life/Consciousness includes four aspects: 1.Has the distinction of "self" and "non-self".2. Has the change of the "new self" and the "old self".3. Pursues to maintain "self".4. (...) Pursue turning "non-self" into "self". Life and consciousness are completely identical. The pursuit of "Difference/Change" is the principle of the World. Beauty and art originate from the essence of the World and Life/Consciousness. The highest principle of value judgment for Life/Consciousness actions is that they should contribute to the growth of "Difference/Change". Ethics are inherent in Life /Consciousness. Low-level Life/Consciousness species have inherent rights. In the end, I argue that all of Life/Consciousness is a whole, which is also the consciousness or will of the World. Through the cognition of Life/Consciousness, the World achieves self-cognition and finally self-expansion. (shrink)

Truthmaker says that things, broadly construed, are the ontological grounds of truth and, therefore, that things make truths true. Recently, there have been a number of arguments purporting to show that if one embraces Truthmaker, then one ought to embrace Truthmaker Maximalism—the view that all non-analytic propositions have truthmakers. But then if one embraces Truthmaker, one ought to think that negative existentials have truthmakers. I argue that this is false. I begin by arguing that recent attempts by Ross Cameron and (...) Jonathan Schaffer to provide negative existentials with truthmakers fail. I then argue that the conditional—if one embraces Truthmaker, the one ought to embrace Truthmaker Maximalism—is false by considering worlds where very little, if anything at all, exists. The conclusion is that thinking that negative existentials do not have truthmakers, and therefore rejecting Truthmaker Maximalism, need not worry Truthmaker embracers. (shrink)

I want to model a finite, fallible cognitive agent who imagines that p in the sense of mentally representing a scenario—a configuration of objects and properties—correctly described by p. I propose to capture imagination, so understood, via variably strict world quantifiers, in a modal framework including both possible and so-called impossible worlds. The latter secure lack of classical logical closure for the relevant mental states, while the variability of strictness captures how the agent imports information from actuality in the (...) imagined non-actual scenarios. Imagination turns out to be highly hyperintensional, but not logically anarchic. Section 1 sets the stage and impossible worlds are quickly introduced in Sect. 2. Section 3 proposes to model imagination via variably strict world quantifiers. Section 4 introduces the formal semantics. Section 5 argues that imagination has a minimal mereological structure validating some logical inferences. Section 6 deals with how imagination under-determines the represented contents. Section 7 proposes additional constraints on the semantics, validating further inferences. Section 8 describes some welcome invalidities. Section 9 examines the effects of importing false beliefs into the imagined scenarios. Finally, Sect. 10 hints at possible developments of the theory in the direction of two-dimensional semantics. (shrink)

Accounts of propositions as sets of possible worlds have been criticized for conflating distinct impossible propositions. In response to this problem, some have proposed to introduce impossible worlds to represent distinct impossibilities, endorsing the thesis that impossible worlds must be of the same kind; this has been called the parity thesis. I show that this thesis faces problems, and propose a hybrid account which rejects it: possible worlds are taken as concrete Lewisian worlds, and impossibilities (...) are represented as set-theoretic constructions out of them. This hybrid account (1) distinguishes many intuitively distinct impossible propositions; (2) identifies impossible propositions with extensional constructions; (3) avoids resorting to primitive modality, at least so far as Lewisian modal realism does. (shrink)

The “shrinking” of the globe in the last few centuries has made explicit that the world is a tense unity of many: the many worlds are forced to contend with one another. Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced. We exist by partaking in “the socio-historical world.” More recently, Jean-luc Nancy has conceived of the world in terms of sense. What is striking in both is that the world emerges (...) out of a nothing, created ex nihilo—the phrase stripped of its theistic connotations. While for Nishida the world is ultimately implaced in the “place of absolute nothing,” Nancy speaks of the nothing that is the basis of the world’s self-creation. I will explore a possible convergence between these and any light it may shed upon our contemporary situation of globalization and its implications for praxis. I look to a sense of the nothing as a chōratic spatiality, an opening that provides space for co-being and serves as the source of creativity. In face of globalization, the project for meaning through mondialisation (in Nancy) and within a multi-cultural world (in Nishida) would imply the appropriation of such an originary spatiality. (shrink)

‘Adams worlds’ are possible worlds that contain no creature whose life is not worth living or whose life is overall worse than in any other possible world in which it would have existed. Creating an Adams world involves no wrongdoing or unkindness towards creatures on the part of the creator. I argue that the notion of an Adams world is of little value in theodicy. Theists are not only committed to thinking that this world was created without wrongdoing (...) or unkindness but also must rule out the possibility that the world might have been better had God not existed. Nor is there much reason, independent of the availability of a satisfactory theodicy, for believing that the actual world is an Adams world. The need for a theodicy constructed along Leibnizian lines, incorporating the claim that this world is the best possible, is thus reinforced. (shrink)

The main objective of the paper is to give initial answers to three important questions. Why did Leibniz visit Spinoza? Why did his preparation for this meeting include a modification of the ontological proof of God? What is the philosophical result of the meeting and what do possible worlds have to do with it? In order to provide answers, three closely related manuscripts by Leibniz from November 1676 have been compared and the slow conceptual change of his philosophical apparatus (...) has been analyzed. The last of these manuscripts was presented and read in front of Spinoza. Around that time Leibniz abandoned the idea of plurality of worlds (cf. Tschirnhaus) and instead proposed the idea of possible worlds, thus introducing possibility into the (onto/theo)logical structure itself in order to avoid the “precipice” of Spinoza’s necessity. What is interesting, however, is how exactly this conceptual change occurred at the end of 1676 and what its philosophical and methodological implications are. (shrink)

Humanity faces two basic problems of learning: learning about the universe, and learning how to become civilized. We have solved the first problem, but not the second, and that puts us in a situation of great danger. Almost all our global problems have arisen as a result. It has become a matter of extreme urgency to solve the second problem. The key to that is to learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second one. This (...) was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, but in implementing it, the Enlightenment blundered. Their mistakes are still built into academia today. In order to create a civilized world, it is essential we cure academia of the structural blunders inherited from the Enlightenment. We need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academia more broadly so that the basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge. (shrink)

2020 is the year of the first pandemic lived through the Internet. More than half of the world population is now online and because of self-isolation, our moral and social lives unfold almost exclusively online. Two pressing questions arise in this context: how much can we rely on the Internet, as a set of technologies, and how much should we trust online platforms and applications? In order to answer these two questions, I develop an argument based on two fundamental assumptions: (...) the development stage of today’s Internet is a contingent and not a necessary one and technologies are never neutral. My argument is that today’s pandemic produced an acceleration of the change which started almost 30 years ago, one of online migration, datafication and algorithmization of day to day life, a change in which digital technologies take on the classic role of institutions, both formal and informal. My thesis is a descriptive one, although it has some normative implications: this take over is not just a translation, but a modification or mutation which demands a creative collective answer, although users don’t have direct power over it. When they play the role of institutions, these technologies are surrogates or simulacra. I offer the paradigmatic case of online education, an experiment we were forced into because of the pandemic, in order to show that the institutional matrix of education cannot be reproduced online, due to the limitations of the medium and of the applications, especially those concerning physical presence. In the end I will critically address the question of the role played by Artificial Intelligence in the pandemic, and then I will show that the open source ethics was more useful in approaching scientifically and technologically the problems generated by the epidemic. (shrink)

Allen s has proposed a new approach to possible worlds, designed explicitly to overcome Cantorian difficulties for possible worlds construed as maximal consistent set of propositions. I emphasize some of the distinctive features of Hazenworlds, some of their weaknesses, and some further Cantorian problems for worlds against which they seem powerless.

Possible world semantics has been gradually fine-grained over the years. First, simple extensional semantics was fine-grained by relativizing it to worlds considered as counterfactual, thus generating standard possible-world semantics, which was later further fine-grained by relativizing it to worlds considered as actual, thus generating two-dimensional semantics. However, worlds considered as actual were only considered with respect to the empirical facts obtaining in such worlds. This paper shows that no less of an important role is played by (...) another feature of actual worlds, namely, the criteria of identity that obtain in such worlds. (shrink)

This paper explores what an experiment of consciousness might necessitate. So far, the experimental part of science is considered to be best studied under laboratory conditions in which variables are isolated and controlled in order to study certain aspects of a phenomenon. This paper will argue that certain aspects of consciousness can only be revealed under real-world conditions, for reasons having to do with fundamental ways in which meaning is generated in consciousness. Meaning will be argued to necessitate genuine preconditions (...) in order to appear, thus laboratory conditions being inadequate to study certain aspects of consciousness. We will explore telepathic experiences that I had in relations with girls and highlight the real-world conditions that were needed for such experiences to take place, and then based on such considerations, an analysis of meaning will be undertaken. (shrink)

Third World and transnational feminisms have emerged in opposition to white second-wave feminists’ single-pronged analyses of gender oppression that elided Third World women’s multiple and complex oppressions in their various social locations. Consequently, these feminisms share two “Third World feminist” mandates: First, feminist analyses of Third World women’s oppression and resistance should be historically situated; and second, Third World women’s agency and voices should be respected. Despite these shared mandates, they have diverged in their proper domains of investigation, with transnational (...) feminism concentrating on the transnational level and Third World feminism focusing on local and national contexts. Further, their respective positions regarding nation-states and nationalism have been antithetical, as leading transnational feminists have categorically rejected nation-states and nationalism as detrimental to feminism. In recent decades, transnational feminism has become the dominant feminist position on Third World women, overshadowing Third World feminism, and the dismissal of nation-states and nationalism as irrelevant to feminism has become fashionable. Against this current trend, this article argues for the relevance of nation-states and nationalism for transnational feminism and the urgency of reclaiming Third World feminism. (shrink)

World semantics for relevant logics include so-called non-normal or impossible worlds providing model-theoretic counterexamples to such irrelevant entailments as (A ∧ ¬A) → B, A → (B∨¬B), or A → (B → B). Some well-known views interpret non-normal worlds as information states. If so, they can plausibly model our ability of conceiving or representing logical impossibilities. The phenomenon is explored by combining a formal setting with philosophical discussion. I take Priest’s basic relevant logic N4 and extend it, on (...) the syntactic side, with a representation operator, (R), and on the semantic side, with particularly anarchic non-normal worlds. This combination easily invalidates unwelcome “logical omniscience” in- ferences of standard epistemic logic, such as belief-consistency and closure under entailment. Some open questions are then raised on the best strategies to regiment (R) in order to express more vertebrate kinds of conceivability. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel experimental task is developed for testing the highly influential, but experimentally underexplored, possible worlds account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). In Experiment 1, this new task is used to test both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For indicative conditionals, five competing truth tables are compared, including the previously untested, multi-dimensional possible worlds semantics of Bradley (2012). In Experiment 2, these results are replicated and it is shown that they cannot be accounted for by (...) an alternative hypothesis proposed by our reviewers. In Experiment 3, individual variation in truth assignments of indicative conditionals is investigated via Bayesian mixture models that classify participants as following one of several competing models. As a novelty of this study, it is found that a possible worlds semantics of Lewis and Stalnaker is capable of accounting for participants’ aggregate truth value assignments in this task. Applied to indicative conditionals, we show across three experiments, that the theory both captures participants’ truth values at the aggregate level (Experiments 1 and 2) and that it makes up the largest subgroup in the analysis of individual variation in our experimental paradigm (Experiment 3). (shrink)

In his metaphysical summa of 1986, The Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis famously defends a doctrine he calls ‘modal realism’, the idea that to account for the fact that some things are possible and some things are necessary we must postulate an infinity possible worlds, concrete entities like our own universe, but cut off from us in space and time. Possible worlds are required to account for the facts of modality without assuming that modality is primitive – (...) that there are irreducibly modal facts. We argue that on one reading, Lewis’s theory licenses us to assume maverick possible worlds which spread through logical space gobbling up all the rest. Because they exclude alternatives, these worlds result in contradictions, since different spread worlds are incompatible with one another. Plainly Lewis’s theory must be amended to exclude these excluders. But, we maintain, this cannot be done without bringing in modal primitives. And once we admit modal primitives, bang goes the rationale for Lewis’s modal realism. (shrink)

What does it mean for the laws of logic to fail? My task in this paper is to answer this question. I use the resources that Routley/Sylvan developed with his collaborators for the semantics of relevant logics to explain a world where the laws of logic fail. I claim that the non-normal worlds that Routley/Sylvan introduced are exactly such worlds. To disambiguate different kinds of impossible worlds, I call such worlds logically impossible worlds. At a (...) logically impossible world, the laws of logic fail. In this paper, I provide a definition of logically impossible worlds. I then show that there is nothing strange about admitting such worlds. (shrink)

In ‘from times to worlds and back again: a transcendentist theory of persistence’ (henceforth TTP) Alessandro Giordani outlines five competitor views regarding the manner in which objects occupy regions along a dimension. These are: (1) classical uni-location (2) bare uni-location (3) multi-location (4) counterpart presence and (5) transcendent presence. Each view comes in both a temporal and modal version and Giordani argues that one ought to prefer transcendentism (i.e. 5) along both dimensions. According to temporal transcendentism, necessarily, no object (...) is exactly located at any region along the temporal dimension. Instead, any object, O, is derivatively present at some region, R, along the temporal dimension in virtue of bearing certain relations to something (according to TTP an event) that occupies R along that dimension. According to modal transcendentism, no object is exactly located at any region along the modal dimension. Instead, any object, O, is derivatively present at some region, R, along the modal dimension in virtue of bearing certain relations to something (according to TTP an event) that occupies R along that dimension. I argue that such a view is under motivated, and, at any rate, may not in fact offer a distinct view. (shrink)

Influential interpretations of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art focus on the view that great art is massive and communal—typically structures like temples and cathedrals. This approach, however, faces two interpretive problems. First, what are we to do with artworks in the essay that clearly are not monumental or communal, such as van Gogh’s Shoes? Second, how should we understand our experience of works such as the Greek temple, which once were but are no longer central in this way? (...) Heidegger himself says that great art of the past becomes either a relic of the past or a mere object of aesthetic experience, but his description of his own experience with a Greek temple seems to contradict this. To understand Heidegger’s views on art—including his explicit claims about the limited vitality of great art of the past and his unintentional case for the continued power of great art of the past—it is crucial to distinguish, first, between Heidegger’s notions of world and worldhood, and, second, between two senses of what makes art great—world disclosure and world gathering. Doing so allows us to make better sense both of the essay as a whole and the potential continued vitality of great art of the past. (shrink)

The common view has it that there are two families of approaches towards the logical structure of impossible worlds – Australasian and North American. According to the first, impossible worlds are closed under the relation of logical consequence of one of the non-classical logics. The North American approach is more liberal, allowing for impossible worlds where no logic holds. After pointing out the questionable consequences of each view, I propose a third one. While this new perspective allows (...) for worlds where no logical consequence holds, it also imposes some constraints on what worlds are built upon. This renders the proposed view not as restrictive as the Australasian approach and not as liberal as the North American approach. Due to its intermediary nature, I have named this perspective ‘the Pacific’ approach. (shrink)

eSports practice designates a unique set of activities tethered to competitive, virtual environments, or worlds. This correlation between eSports practitioner and virtual world, we argue, is inadequately accounted for solely in terms of something physical or intellectual. Instead, we favor a perspective on eSports practice to be analyzed as a perceptual and embodied phenomenon. In this article, we present the phenomenological approach and focus on the embodied sensations of eSports practitioners as they cope with and perceive within their virtual (...) worlds. By approaching eSports phenomenologically, we uncover ways in which its unique forms of virtual involvement overlap with as well as differentiate themselves from traditional structures of embodiment. (shrink)

One response to the problem of logical omniscience in standard possible worlds models of belief is to extend the space of worlds so as to include impossible worlds. It is natural to think that essentially the same strategy can be applied to probabilistic models of partial belief, for which parallel problems also arise. In this paper, I note a difficulty with the inclusion of impossible worlds into probabilistic models. Under weak assumptions about the space of (...) class='Hi'>worlds, most of the propositions which can be constructed from possible and impossible worlds are in an important sense inexpressible; leaving the probabilistic model committed to saying that agents in general have at least as many attitudes towards inexpressible propositions as they do towards expressible propositions. If it is reasonable to think that our attitudes are generally expressible, then a model with such commitments looks problematic. (shrink)

We address an argument by Floridi (Synthese 168(1):151–178, 2009; 2011a), to the effect that digital and analogue are not features of reality, only of modes of presentation of reality. One can therefore have an informational ontology, like Floridi’s Informational Structural Realism, without commitment to a supposedly digital or analogue world. After introducing the topic in Sect. 1, in Sect. 2 we explain what the proposition expressed by the title of our paper means. In Sect. 3, we describe Floridi’s argument. In (...) the following three sections, we raise three difficulties for it, (i) an objection from intuitions: Floridi’s view is not supported by the intuitions embedded in the scientific views he exploits (Sect. 4); (ii) an objection from mereology: the view is incompatible with the world’s having parts (Sect. 5); (iii) an objection from counting: the view entails that the question of how many things there are doesn’t make sense (Sect. 6). In Sect. 7, we outline two possible ways out for Floridi’s position. Such ways out involve tampering with the logical properties of identity, and this may be bothersome enough. Thus, Floridi’s modus ponens will be our (and most ontologists’) modus tollens. (shrink)

I modify and generalize Carnap’s notion of frameworks as a way of unpacking Goodman’s metaphor of “making worlds with symbols”. My frameworks provide, metaphorically, a way of making worlds out of symbols in as much as all our framework-bound access to the world is through frameworks that always stand to be improved in accuracy, precision, and usually both. Such improvement is characterized in pragmatist terms.

This contribution considers the world-historical significance of climate change. Climate change unmasks the stability of the living and acting in the world of human and nonhuman existence and confronts it with its living and acting on Earth, shifts the attention from World to Earth, and raises the question about the place of human and nonhuman existence on Earth. To answer this question, this chapter moves beyond humanist and post-humanist positions and argues for earth and world interest in times of climate (...) change. First, an ontological concept of World is rehabilitated, which enables to distinguish between the Holocene World and the Anthropocene World. As climate change also confronts with Earth as exterior milieu beyond the interior milieu of the Anthropocene World, the chapter subsequently criticizes the self-interest of philosophers of the twentieth century and argues for world interest in times of climate change. It is argued that world interest should not lead to world production, whether it is found in a productive act by the Earth or by humanity, as world production is accompanied by Earth alienation. A gestalt-based understanding of the givenness of Earth as noncausal ontic-ontological ground of the givenness of World is developed. The conceptualization of World and Earth in this chapter helps to differentiate between the often ambiguous uses of these concepts in environmental philosophy and contributes to contemporary debates in philosophy of climate change. (shrink)

In this paper I will draw attention to an important route to external world skepticism, which I will call confidence skepticism. I will argue that we can defang confidence skepticism (though not a meeker ‘argument from might’ which has got some attention in the 20th century literature on external world skepticism) by adopting a partially psychologistic answer to the problem of priors. And I will argue that certain recent work in the epistemology of mathematics and logic provides independent support for (...) such psychologism. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding (...) to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

Theorists who advocate worldly (metaphysical or ontological) indeterminacy—the idea that the world itself is indeterminate in one or more respects—should address how we understand the signifying nature and function of language in light of worldly indeterminacy. I first attend to Sengzhao and Jizang, two leading thinkers in Chinese Sanlun Buddhism, to reconstruct a Chinese Madhyamaka notion of ontic indeterminacy. Then, I draw on the thinkers’ views to propose a provisional (non-definitive) understanding of the nature and use of language. Under this (...) understanding, an expression signifying a thing is provisional in that the expression connotes no determinate feature of the thing. (shrink)

In a recent article, P. Roger Turner and Justin Capes argue that no one is, or ever was, even partly morally responsible for certain world-indexed truths. Here we present our reasons for thinking that their argument is unsound: It depends on the premise that possible worlds are maximally consistent states of affairs, which is, under plausible assumptions concerning states of affairs, demonstrably false. Our argument to show this is based on Bertrand Russell’s original ‘paradox of propositions’. We should then (...) opt for a different approach to explain world-indexed truths whose upshot is that we may be morally responsible for some of them. The result to the effect that there are no maximally consistent states of affairs is independently interesting though, since this notion motivates an account of the nature of possible worlds in the metaphysics of modality. We also register in this article, independently of our response to Turner and Capes, and in the spirit of Russell’s aforementioned paradox and many other versions thereof, a proof of the claim that there is no set of all true propositions one can render false. (shrink)

It is argued that the many-worlds interpretation is by far the best interpretation of quantum mechanics. The key points of this view are viewing the wave functions of worlds in three dimensions and understanding probability through self-locating uncertainty.

Among the most remarkable developments in metaphysics since the 1950’s is the explosion of philosophical interest in possible worlds. This paper proposes an explanation of what possible worlds are, and argues that this proposal, the interpreted models conception, should be attractive to anyone who thinks that modal facts are primitive, and so not to be explained in terms of some non-modal notion of “possible world.” I articulate three constraints on any acceptable primitivist explanation of the nature of possible (...) worlds, and show that the interpreted models conception meets the three constraints. (shrink)

A critical reflection on John Woods's new monograph, Truth in Fiction – Rethinking its Logic. I focus in particular on Woods’s world-inheritance thesis (what others have variously called ‘background,’ ‘the principle of minimal departure,’ and ‘the reality assumption,’ and which replaces Woods’s earlier ‘fill-conditions’) and its interplay with auctorial say-so, arguing that world-inheritance actually constrains auctorial say-so in ways Woods has not anticipated.

This chapter provides an introduction to possible worlds semantics in both logic and the philosophy of language, including a discussion of some of the advantages and challenges for possible worlds semantics.

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with true components does not extend to these further principles, however, so it is not clear that rejecting the latter should be (...) a consequence of rejecting the former. Instead I consider how one might defuse putative counterexamples to the truth of true-true counterfactuals. (shrink)

The present article analyzes the world order in the past, present and future as well as the main factors, foundations and ideas underlying the maintaining and change of the international and global order. The first two sections investigate the evolution of the world order starting from the ancient times up to the late twentieth century. The third section analyzes the origin and decline of the world order based on the American hegemony. The authors reveal the contradictions of the current unipolar (...) world and explain in what way globalization has become more profitable for the developing countries but not for the developed ones. In the paper also explains the strengthening belief that the US leading status will inevitably weaken. In this connection we discuss the alternatives of the American strategy and the possibility of the renaissance of the American leadership. The last section presents a factor analysis which allows stating that the world is shifting toward a new balance of power and is likely to become the world without a leader. The new world order will consist of a number of large blocks, coalitions and countries acting within a framework of rules and mutual responsibility. However, the transition to a new world order will take certain time (about two decades). This period, which we denote as the epoch of new coalitions, will involve a reconfiguration of the World System and bring an increasing turbulence and conflict intensity. (shrink)

You and I can differ in what we say, or believe, even though the things we say, or believe, are logically equivalent. Discussing what is said, or believed, requires notions of content which are finer-grained than sets of (metaphysically or logically) possible worlds. In this paper, I develop the approach to fine-grained content in terms of a space of possible and impossible worlds. I give a method for constructing ersatz worlds based on theory of substantial facts. I (...) show how this theory overcomes an objection to actualist constructions of ersatz worlds and argue that it naturally gives rise to useful notions of fine-grained content. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the universe, and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe; and learning how to create a good, civilized, enlightened, wise world. We have solved the first great problem of learning – we did that when we created modern science and technology in the 17th century. But we have not yet solved the second one. That combination of solving the first problem, failing to solve the second one, (...) is very, very, dangerous. Almost all our current global problems have arisen as a result. Modern science and technology immensely increase our powers to act (for some of us), but not our power to act wisely. Modern science and technology lead to modern industry, modern agriculture, travel, medicine, hygiene and armaments, and these in turn lead to much that is of benefit, but also to all our current global problems: population growth, habitat destruction, loss of wild life, mass extinction of species, lethal modern war, the menace of nuclear weapons, pollution of earth, sea and air, antibiotic resistance, degradation of democracy facilitated by the internet and, most serious of all, the climate crisis. Now that we have modern science and technology, wisdom has become, not a private luxury, but a public necessity. But how is it to be achieved? Here is the solution. We can learn from the solution to the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one. That was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, but in implementing it, the philosophes of the Enlightenment blundered. They got the progress-achieving methods of science wrong; they failed to generalize them properly; and they applied them, not to social life but to creating social science. Their mistakes are still built into academia today. In order to learn how to create a civilized, enlightened world, the key thing we need to do is to cure academia of the structural blunders we have inherited from the Enlightenment. We need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academia more broadly so that the basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge – wisdom being the capacity, active endeavour and desire to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others, wisdom thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. The outcome of the revolution we need would be universities radically transformed, so that they become rationally and actively devoted to helping people solve problems of living, including global problems, thus making progress to as good, civilized, enlightened a world as possible. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of language, (...) logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us. (shrink)

Until recently, an almost perfect parallelism seemed to hold between theories of identity through time and across possible worlds,as every account in the temporal case(endurantism,perdurantism, exdurantism) was mirrored by a twin account in the modal case (trans-world identity, identity-via-parts, identity-via-counterparts). Nevertheless, in the recent literature, this parallelism has been broken because of the implementation in the debate of the relation of location. In particular, endurantism has been subject to a more in-depth analysis, and different versions of it, corresponding to (...) different ways an entity can be located in time, emerged. In this article, we provide a precise map of the conceptions at stake, complete the debate by introducing a version of endurantism not yet considered in the debate — we call transcendentism — and show that it allows us to provide an effective interpretation of the relation of trans-world identity and an intuitive solution in the temporal case. (shrink)