Among the abilities people fear they will lose as they age, the most frequently reported is "staying sharp". The fear of being afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and other dementing disorders, which will clinically impact 10 to 12% of the population between the age of 65 and death, is the major concern. Despite the fear of losing their minds, most persons will not develop Alzheimer's disease. So why does the fear of losing mental acuity top the AARP list?One reason is that (...) older adults in general cannot distinguish the usual changes with aging from neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. We also live in a society that has been labeled, among other things... (shrink)

This dissertation identifies and responds to a problem for liberal relational egalitarians. There is a prima facie worry about the compatibility of liberalism and relational egalitarianism, concerning the requirements of equality in informal social life. Liberalism at least involves a commitment to leaving individuals substantial discretion to pursue their own conceptions of the good. Relational equality is best understood as a kind of deliberative practice about social institutions and practices. Patterns of otherwise innocuous social choices (e.g., where to live, whom (...) to befriend or marry) can create emergent, severe differentials in power, status, and influence, and when they do they can threaten relational equality. If relational equality required individuals to subordinate personal choices to egalitarian considerations, it would run into conflict with liberal commitments. In response, I defend the value of accepting an imperfect realization of relational equality. What I call fair relational equality demands that members of society treat some informal social norms and practices as part of the basic structure of society, in need of justification. Three practices are required to meet that demand. First, the relational-egalitarian society must develop institutional strategies to preempt or mitigate tendencies toward emergent inequality as they are identified. Second, members of society must engage in broad social deliberation about the norms and expectations of informal social interaction. Third, they must be willing to reform social practices where doing so does not impinge on important personal projects and values. (shrink)

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy (...) of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language. (shrink)

Introduction There are some exceptions, which we shall see below, but virtually all theories in psychology and cognitive science make use of the notion of representation. Arguably, folk psychology also traffics in representations, or is at least strongly suggestive of their existence. There are many different types of things discussed in the psychological and philosophical literature that are candidates for representation-hood. First, there are the propositional attitudes – beliefs, judgments, desires, hopes etc. (see Chapters 9 and 17 of this volume). (...) If the propositional attitudes are representations, they are person-level representations – the judgment that the sun is bright pertains to John, not a subpersonal part of John. By contrast, the representations of edges in V1 of the cerebral cortex that neuroscientists talk about and David Marr’s symbolic representations of “zero-crossings” in early vision (Marr 1982) are at the “sub-personal” level – they apply to parts or states of a person (e.g. neural parts or computational states of the visual system). Another important distinction is often made among perceptual, cognitive, and action-oriented representations (e.g. motor commands). Another contrast lies between “stored representations” (e.g. memories) and “active representations” (e.g. a current perceptual state). Related to this is the distinction between “dispositional representations” and “occurrent representations.” Beliefs that are not currently being entertained are dispositional, e.g. your belief that the United States is in North America - no doubt you had this belief two minutes ago, but you were not consciously accessing it until you read this sentence. Occurrent representations, by contrast, are active, conscious thoughts or perceptions. Which leads us to another important distinction: 1 between conscious and non-conscious mental representations, once a bizarre-sounding distinction that has become familiar since Freud (see Chapter 4 of this volume). I mention these distinctions at the outset to give you some idea of the range of phenomena we will be considering, and to set the stage for our central “problem of representation”: what is a mental representation, exactly, and how do we go about deciding whether there are any? We know there are public representations of various kinds: words, maps, and pictures, among others.. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the crucial relationship between Locke’s theory of individuation and his theory of kinds. Locke holds that two material objects—e.g., a mass of matter and an oak tree—can be in the same place at the same time, provided that they are ‘of different kinds’. According to Locke, kinds are nominal essences, that is, general abstract ideas based on objective similarities between particular individuals. I argue that Locke’s view on coinciding material objects is incompatible with his view (...) on kinds. In order for two material objects to be in the same place at the same time, they must differ with respect to at least one nominal essence. However, Locke thinks that it is impossible that x and y have the same real essence but differ with respect to any nominal essence; and coinciding material objects have the same real essence. Therefore, Locke cannot hold what he in fact holds, namely that distinct material objects can be in the same place at the same time. (shrink)

There are a class of moral virtues that have an intimate relationship with agential evaluation, following Gary Watson we can call these ‘second-order virtues,’ e.g., modesty, blind charity, being judgmental, etc. Julia Driver has argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues which require ignorance. Richard Y. Chappell and Helen Yetter-Chappell have argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues of salience. Aside from the disagreement about the distinguishing features of these virtues, there is an intrinsic interest in (...) the second-order virtues and vices. For these virtues and vices play an integral role in moral education and character formation. This paper seeks to deepen that discussion by examining a second-order vice, namely, the vice of being judgmental. I argue that being judgmental requires a salience structure which exhibits undue attention to the negative features of others (pace Jessie Munton). Modeling being judgmental as a vice of attention helps to unify the various characteristics of judgmental persons, namely, a tendency to excessive standing, excessive epitomization, and relational qualification. As an upshot, we receive another reason to adopt an attention model of the second-order virtues and vices. (shrink)

The dominant methodology in health policy for prioritizing and rationing health care resources is cost-effectiveness analysis, typically using quality adjusted life years (QALYs) or disability adjusted life years (DALYs) to measure health outcomes. The construction of these measures involves a number of moral or value choices, including: How should states of health and disability be evaluated, and whose preferences (e.g., the disabled or non-disabled) should be used? How should these evaluations reflect that prioritization will involve tradeoffs between health benefits for (...) different persons or groups? Do all QALYs count equally, no matter what age at which they are received? Should discount rates be applied to health benefits? I will show the nature of the moral issues at stake in answering these questions, and briefly argue how they should be answered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Montaignian MomentDan EngsterIn the Machiavellian Moment, J. G. A. Pocock argued that the development of modern republican theory was closely bound up with a paradigmatic shift in the early modern discourse of temporality and politics. 1 Whereas medieval thinkers tended to emphasize the supreme importance of eternal and universal principles in politics, the Italian civic humanists turned their attention to the stream of contingent temporal events ruled by (...) “fortune” and claimed human beings could create a stable political order within time through their own “virtue.” 2 The exemplar of this new paradigm was Machiavelli. In contrast to earlier humanist writers who still appealed to timeless values and static ideals in laying out their political theories, Machiavelli reframed his political discourse entirely in terms of contingency and fortune. “The Machiavellian moment,” Pocock wrote, “is a name for the moment in conceptualized time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability.” 3 The importance of the Machiavellian moment, according to Pocock, was that it “left an important paradigmatic legacy” to modern political thought. Mach-iavelli’s new understanding of temporality and politics has “continued to pose problems in historical self-awareness, which form part of the journey of Western thought from the medieval Christian to the modern historical mode,” and his political strategies for taming fortune laid the foundation for the development of modern republican theory. 4 [End Page 625]Victoria Kahn has recently suggested several correctives to Pocock’s thesis. 5 Most importantly, she has criticized him for emphasizing the republican dimensions of Machiavelli’s thought while discounting the amoral or “Machiavellian” aspects of it. “For if Machiavellism is a rhetoric for conceptualizing and responding to the realm of contingency,” she has written, “it includes not only republicanism but also tyranny; it involves the use of force and fraud not only to advance one’s self interest but also to serve the commonwealth.” 6 According to Kahn, the “paradigm” which Machiavelli defined was not strictly republican but rather a broadly “activist” ideology amenable to a number of different causes. 7 But in this broader sense, she has continued to endorse Pocock’s assertion that Machiavelli’s approach to the problem of fortune and contingency was widely influential, or “paradigmatic,” in framing early modern political debates.In this article I suggest that Machiavelli’s arguments represented only one important shift in the discourse of temporality and politics in early modern Europe. During the late sixteenth century a second shift occurred; the exemplar of this new paradigm was Michel de Montaigne. 8 In his Essays Montaigne argued that Machiavelli and the civic humanists had grossly underestimated the capriciousness and uncertainty of fortune. He then challenged the effectiveness of traditional humanist strategies for establishing order within time and proposed a new set of principles for taming fortune based upon the concept of “nature” and the values of moderation, restraint, and self-discipline. I argue that no less than Machiavelli, Montaigne left an important paradigmatic legacy to later writers. He was one of the first early modern writers to suggest that human beings ought not to focus so much on trying actively to manipulate fortune. Instead, he felt that the aim should be more on attempting to construct self-sufficient and self-regulating communities that would avoid her blows altogether. In this respect he may be seen as a central transitional figure between the activist humanism of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the more rationalistic state theories of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or more succinctly, between Machiavelli and Hobbes. The “Montaignian moment” outlined an alternative discourse of temporality and politics that provided a theoretical framework for the development and justification of the new language of the state. [End Page 626]Montaigne is not usually regarded as an important political thinker, let alone as a “paradigmatic” one. There have been two recent studies, however, that have attempted to situate his ideas in the history of early modern political thought. David Schaefer has argued that Montaigne was a proponent of republican ideas... (shrink)

Reductive, naturalistic psychosemantic theories do not have a good track record when it comes to accommodating the representation of kinds. In this paper, I will suggest a particular teleosemantic strategy to solve this problem, grounded in the neurocomputational details of the cerebral cortex. It is a strategy with some parallels to one that Ruth Millikan has suggested, but to which insufficient attention has been paid. This lack of attention is perhaps due to a lack of appreciation for the severity of (...) the problem, so I begin by explaining why the situation is indeed a dire one. One of the main tasks for a naturalistic psychosemantic theory is to describe how the extensions of mental representations are determined. (Such a theory may also attempt to account for other aspects of the “meaning” of mental representations, if there are any.) Some mental representations, e.g. the concept of water, denote kinds (I shall be assuming this is non-negotiable). How is this possible? Unfortunately, I haven’t the space to canvass all the theories out there and show that each one fails to accommodate the representation of kinds, but I will point out the major types of problems that arise for the kinds of theories that, judging by the literature, are considered viable contenders.1 In general, the theories either attempt and fail to account for the representation of kinds, or they fall back on something like an intention to refer to a kind – not exactly the most auspicious move for a reductive theory. There are a number of problems that prevent non-teleosemantic theories from explaining how it is possible to represent kinds. A concept of a kind K must.. (shrink)

What is the relationship between perception and mental imagery? I aim to eliminate an answer that I call perceptualism about mental imagery. Strong perceptualism, defended by Bence Nanay, predictive processing theorists, and several others, claims that imagery is a kind of perceptual state. Weak perceptualism, defended by M. G. F. Martin and Matthew Soteriou, claims that mental imagery is a representation of a perceptual state, a view sometimes called The Dependency Thesis. Strong perceptualism is to be rejected since it misclassifies (...) imagery disorders and abnormalities as perceptual disorders and abnormalities. Weak Perceptualism is to be rejected since it gets wrong the aim and accuracy conditions of a whole class of mental imagery–projected mental imagery–and relies on an impoverished concept of perceptual states, ignoring certain of their structural features. Whatever the relationship between perception and imagery, the perceptualist has it wrong. (shrink)

In this study I am going to present and discuss some of the central themes of Gustav Bergmann's theory of perception. I shall be concerned, however, only with "later Bergmann," that is, with the perceptual theory worked out in a series of essays in which Bergmann shifts from phenomenalism to a form of intentional realism. This label ("intentional realism") indicates the two dominant themes in Bergmann's later thought about perception: perceivings are analyzed as mental acts (thoughts) which are intentionally related (...) to real and mind-independent objects and states of affairs. In a timely essay, " Intentionality" (1955) Bergmann presented an impressive defense of mental acts, and although the framework of that essay was still phenomenalistic, the structural analysis of mental acts and their intentionality presented there has not been significantly altered by Bergmann in later writings. In two subsequent essays, "Acts" (1960) and "Realistic Postscript" (1963) his realistic turn was worked out in detail in the context of giving a satisfactory account of ordinary perceptual experience. These three essays will comprise the core texts of the study that follows. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

This is a forthcoming section for the book "Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy", edited by Graham Oppy, Gregory Dawes, Evan Fales, Joseph Koterski, Mashhad Al-Allaf, Robert Fastiggi, and David Shatz. I was asked to write a brief essay on whether naturalism or theism can successfully explain the distribution of suffering in our world. Wheras another section covers the possibility that suffering is evidence against theism, my essay is concerned only with the ability for either naturalism or theism to (...) explain suffering. I argue that, for naturalists, suffering is not to be explained by either philosophers of religion or theologians. Instead, naturalists believe that suffering should be explained by the cognitive and social sciences, perhaps in conjunction with political philosophy and philosophy of mind. Moreover, naturalists may take suffering to be an important reason for action. In a world without a transcendent, supernatural being to watch over us, we can only depend upon each other to ameliorate existing conditions, to the extent that they can be ameliorated. On the other hand, theistic explanations of the distibution of suffering slip very easily into problematic theologies when they try to offer explicit explanations for suffering. For example, the world's most vulnerable people are often those who suffer the most, whereas oppressors are often able to prosper. That is, theistic explanations of our world's suffering easily slip into, e.g., the just world fallacy, racist ideology (i.e., that God favors some race(s) of people over others), or patriarchal ideology. Instead of offering an explicit explanation, theists should instead be skeptical theists -- i.e., they should argue that an explanation for our world's suffering is beyond our ken. While skeptical theism avoids the aforementioned problematic implications, if skeptical theism is true, then our world's suffering cannot be fully explained. (shrink)

La question de fond traitée dans cet article est celle des rapports entre la science et la philosophie. Cette question est abordée par le biais d'une considération de la critique de la science élaborée par la phénoménologie. La philosophie de Merleau-Ponty sert d'exemple de la position phénoménologique. Le but de l'article est de démontrer l'insuffisance de la position de Merleau-Ponty — et, par extension, de la phénoménologie en général — en ce qui concerne son appréciation de la nature véritable du (...) projet scientifique. A cette fin, on essaie de saisir le sens véritable des développements récents dans la science en examinant quatre cas particuliers : la physique nucléaire, la psychologie, la biologie moléculaire, la cybernétique. Le résultat de cette analyse est de montrer que la lecture que faisait Merleau-Ponty des visées et des tendances de la science était erronée et que la position classique de la phénoménologie est indéfendable. Comme, cependant, l'auteur se trouve en accord avec la motivation profonde de Merleau-Ponty et de la phénoménologie en ce qui concerne l'irréductibilité du sujet ou de la conscience à l'objectivisme scientifique, il est alors amené à se demander ce que pourrait être une position phénoménologique satisfaisante vis-à-vis de la science. C'est ainsi que l'article se termine par une critique de toute position positiviste en philosophie et par une tentative d'indiquer ce que devrait être la véritable nature du discours philosophique, une fois que celui-ci est purifié de tout empirisme, c'est-à-dire de toute prétention à des connaissances positives.The basic question delt with in this article is that of the relation between science and philosophy. This question is approached through a consideration of the phenomenological critique of science. The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty is taken as an example of the phenomenological position. The aim of the article is to show the insufficiency of Merleau-Ponty's position — and, by implication, of phenomenology in general — as regards his estimation of the true nature of the scientific project. To this end an attempt is made to seize hold of the true meaning of recent developments in science by examining four special instances : nuclear physics, psychology, molecular biology, cybernetics. The result of this analysis is to show that Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of aims and tendencies of science was mistaken and that the position normally taken by phenomenology cannot be defended. As, however, the author is in agreement with the basic motivation of Merleau-Ponty and of phenomenology as regard the irreducibility of the subject or consciousness to scientific objectivism, he is thus led to ask what might be a satisfactory phenomenological position vis-a-is science. The article thus ends a critique of all positivist positions in philosophy and with an attempt to indicate what must be the true nature of philosophical discourse, once this has been purified of all empirical elements, i.e., of all claims to positive knowledge. (shrink)

I. Par opposition à l’individualisme purement métaphysique, au logicisme ontologique et au positivisme radical, il est soutenu que le droit peut être justifié, dans le domaine de l’expérience, comme valeur idéale et dont une part peut être rapportée à l’individu.II. Pour cela on cherche à montrer que si tout droit a d’abord été inclus, comme toute norme, dans la communauté, l’individu, quand il s’est trouvé libéré au sein de cette communauté, a pris à sa charge la constitution de toutes les (...) normes de la vie sociale et morale. Il y a été aidé par sa dépendance même vis-à-vis de la société qui lui a permis d’user et de la socialité et du langage pour se désindividualiser lui-même au sens empirique de ce mot, et projeter, au- dessus de soi, en même temps qu’une expression de soi une discipline pour soi, et pour autrui, consciente, voulue et tout de même objective et universalisable.L’individu, dans et par sa socialité, s’est donc fait lui-même source et critère des valeurs qu’il respecte et qui l’obligent. A ce titre il a bien affirmé et son individualité et son autonomie subjective. (shrink)

In this paper, I will introduce you to a new theory of mental representation, emphasizing two important features. First, the theory coheres very well with folk psychology; better, I believe, than its competitors (e.g. Cummins, 1996; Dretske, 1988; Fodor, 1987 and Millikan, 1989, with which it has the most in common), though I will do little by way of direct comparison in this paper. Second, it receives support from current neuroscience. While other theories may be consistent with current neuroscience, none (...) that I know of actually receives some degree of confirmation from it. There are many different kinds of representations. Some examples are maps, words, meter and gauge readings, diagrams, pictures, scale models, computer simulations, blueprints, charts, musical notation, smoke signals, semaphore, and computer data structures. Qua representations, they all possess intentionality, or aboutness: maps are about places, most words are about the entities they refer to, meters and gauges are about the quantities they measure, etc. However, it seems they have little in common beyond this aboutness (Millikan, 1984, p. 85). Therefore we should be open to the possibility that the aboutness of different representations is ultimately to be explained in different ways. It is becoming increasingly popular to understand the aboutness of a large class of these representations in terms of function.1 For example, a tire gauge represents one of the properties that it indicates or carries information about, namely air pressure. However, it also carries information about other quantities. If the pressure and volume of the tire are kept constant, the tire gauge will indicate the temperature of the air inside the tire, and if the temperature and pressure are kept constant, the gauge will indicate the tire volume. However, although the tire gauge indicates these things, it does not represent them. It only.. (shrink)

RésuméCette étude retrace l'évolution des recherches de von Wright en logique déontique depuis 1951 jusqu'à la fin des années 70. J'ai préféré, à une suite d'exposés isolés et indépendants à propos de chaque système, m'attacher à la mise en évidence des différences et des similitudes; je montre en quoi chaque étape est originale. Je reléve d'abord les traits saillants du système de 1951 et ceux de la construction de 1963, après avoir analysé les raisons du passage du premier à la (...) seconde. Ensuite, j'expose le profil essentiel de la généralisation métalogique de 1968. Enfin, je décris les tentatives de réduction de la logique déontique à des logiques plus familieres et j'examine à propos de positions très recentes ce qui va dans le sens de la reprise de l'ancien et ce qui marque des ruptures radicales avec tout ce qui précéde.SummaryThis study describes the evolution of von Wright's investigations about deontic logic from 1951 until the late 70. Rather than isolated expositions of a series of independent systems, I prefered to attach myself to differences and similitudes. I strived to show the originality of each conception. First, I call attention to the 1951 system principal features; I analyse the reasons which compelled von Wright to construct the 1963 logico‐philosophical system. Then I describe the essential profile of the 1968 metalogic generalisation. So, I come to the reductionnist tentations, concluding with the examination of very recent positions. In the conceptions of the late 70, we find a lot of things which repeat the past, but also extreme originality on many points. (shrink)

A central debate in contemporary philosophy of perception is between those who hold that perception is a detection relation of sensory awareness and those who hold that it is representational state akin to belief. Another key debate is between those who claim that we can perceive natural or artifactual kind properties, e.g. ‘being a tomato’, ‘being a doorknob’, etc. and those who hold we cannot. The current consensus is that these debates are entirely unrelated. I argue that this consensus is (...) wrong: the perception of natural or artifactal kinds favours representationalism. Naïve realists who wish to accommodate such perception should embrace a disunified metaphysics of perception, one that combines relational and representational events; call such a view ‘impure relationalism.’. (shrink)

Bu çalışma, Türkiye’deki Şer’i yönetişim aktörlerinden olan banka içi danışma komitelerinin Şer’i yönetişimdeki yeri ve önemini keşfetmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Bu minvalde nitel araştırma desenlerinden olan durum çalışması tercih edilmiş ve 5 danışma komitesi üyesi ve 2 danışma komitesi başkanıyla yarı yapılandırılmış mülakatlar gerçekleştirilmiştir. Mülakatlar neticesinde toplam 625 dakikalık ses kayıtları elde edilerek çözümlenmiş ve 85 sayfalık metin elde edilmiştir. Elde edilen metinler ve görüşme notları ATLAS.ti programı aracılığıyla analiz edilerek BİDK, Şer’i yönetişim ve Merkezi Danışma Kurulu olmak üzere 3 ana tema (...) ve bunlara bağlı 26 alt temaya ulaşılmıştır. İlgili temalar BİDK’nin Türkiye’deki Şer’i yönetişimdeki yeri ve önemini keşfetmek açısından zengin bir içerik sunmaktadır. Türkiye’deki Şer’i yönetişimi ele alan çalışmaların literatürde sınırlı olması ve bu çalışmanın hem saha çalışmasına hem de Türkiye’deki Şer’i yönetişimde yer alan, katılım bankacılığının tarihine eş bir ömre sahip BİDK’ları konu etmesi literatürde özgün bir yere sahip olacağına işaret etmektedir. Islamic finance has developed the Shariah governance mechanism to ensure compliance and control of IFIs with the principles of Islamic law. However, the levels of Shariah governance are different from each other due to the different legal affiliations of each country, the level of development of Islamic finance, and regime differences. International Islamic financial institutions such as Islamic Financial Services Board and The Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions have published standards to define the general lines of Shariah governance and have brought Shariah governance practices to a certain point, at least in principle. After the Shariah governance standards of IFSB and AAOIFI, studies on Shariah governance have increased rapidly. By 2010, while there were only 18 publications on Shariah governance in the two most well-known indexes, this number increased to 42 in 2015 and 159 in 2020. This academic interest shows that Shariah governance issues are followed closely. In this context, there have been some remarkable developments at the regulatory and supervisory level in terms of Shariah governance in Turkey, and the TKBB Advisory Board was established in 2018, bringing one step closer to international Shariah governance practices. (shrink)

Humans constantly produce strings of characters in symbolic languages, e.g., sentences in natural languages. We show that for any given moment in human history, the set of character strings that have been produced up to that moment, i.e., the sum total of human symbolic output up to that moment, is finite and so Turing computable. We then prove a much stronger result: a Turing machine can produce any particular set of symbolic output that we could possibly have produced. We then (...) discuss metaphysical and/or theological systems, e.g., Spinoza’s, Leibniz’s, or Aquinas’s. We argue that any particular metaphysical system could be the output of a Turing machine. We then briefly discuss (i) automated theorem proving, the attempt to generate and/or prove theorems using computers, and (ii) computational metaphysics, the attempt to apply methods from computer science such as automated theorem proving to metaphysics. We conclude by arguing that: (i) computational metaphysics can succeed, at least in theory; indeed, all human metaphysical reasoning could be automated; (ii) computational metaphysics – and indeed metaphysical systems in general – will have the same limitations as Turing machines; and (iii) a number of different methods – not currently used in computational metaphysics – could be used to advance metaphysical research. (shrink)

This paper is a response to replies by Dan López de Sa and Mark Jago to my ‘Truthmaking, Entailment, and the Conjuction Thesis’. In that paper, my main aim was to argue against the Entailment Principle by arguing against the Conjunction Thesis, which is entailed by the Entailment Principle. In the course of so doing, although not essential for my project in that paper, I defended the Disjunction Thesis. López de Sa has objected both to my defence of the Disjunction (...) Thesis and my case against the Conjunction Thesis. I shall show that his objections are unfounded and based on serious misunderstandings of my position, what the relevant debate is, and some fundamental notions of Truthmaker Theory. Jago argues that accepting the Disjunction Thesis and rejecting the Conjunction Thesis is hard to maintain. But I show that Jago has not shown that accepting the Disjunction Thesis while rejecting the Conjunction Thesis is impossible or even hard to maintain. Jago believes that, to accept the Disjunction Thesis while rejecting the Conjunction Thesis, one needs to reject his axiom (T3), which says that all the truthmakers for <P&P> are truthmakers for <P>. I argue that there are reasons to reject such a principle, and the version of it that says that what makes <P&P> true makes <P> true. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:134 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it —­Genesis 3:6 Abstract Aesthetics has emerged as an important battleground in the moral quest for a lower carbon society. Especially in the case of proposed wind farms (an environmentally benign technology in terms of low carbon emissions), (...) opponents frequently refer to the unsightly machines creating negative landscape impacts and ruining the view. This essay seeks to reflect on the particular ways in which visual aesthetics are framed and mobilized in this moral debate. Exploring the dividing lines between pictoral and more-­ than-­ representational approaches I ask if the moral dilemmas in our landscape decisions (e.g. individual rights to beauty or collective duties toward future generations) are obscured by physical or visual realms. The largely invisible nature of wind, electricity and climate change, set within the physical and tangible nature of landscapes and turbines, challenges us to experience the aesthetics of landscapes-­ with-­ machines through more creative and engaging means that are not limited to visibility, nor deaf to morality. SIN, DUTY, AND THE AESTHETICS OF NATURE As the first act of sin in the bible, Eve’s consumption of a visually aesthetic fruit led to humans being banned from the Garden of Eden. Looking at the above sentence more closely, we could even argue that “good for food” is not a positive condition (e.g. tasty, nourishing), but Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? ‘Looking’ Beyond the Visual Aesthetics of Wind Machines in a Post-­Productivist Landscape DAN VAN DER HORST Dan van der Horst / Justice in the Eye of the Beholder? 135 rather the absence of a negative (e.g. inedible), whilst “also desirable” may sound like the hunger for wisdom was only a secondary, additional attraction. The sentence thus draws attention to the key role of aesthetics in the making of a moral decision; would Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit if it was not “pleasing for the eye”? Aesthetic judgments may be informed by a range of factors, but as this bible quote illustrates, morality is key among them. Associations between right and wrong on the one side and beauty or ugliness on the other, are not exactly rare in written history, be they religious, literary or scholastic works. As a marked contribution to the latter, Immanuel Kant has paid particularly close attention to the links between aesthetics and morality, arguing amongst others that any universal agreement in judgments of the sublime must rest on an appeal to moral feelings.1 But universality is not the only logical link between aesthetic judgementandmorality.Peoplecanfeelasenseof‘duty’tofindcertainthings beautiful e.g. because that is the aesthetic judgment of the group they aspire to belong to.2 Whilst this sense of duty can refer to social conditioning and group belonging, it also has resonance for landscape aesthetics at a time of anthropogenic climate change (a universal threat) when we must “learn to love the low carbon landscape.”3 This presents a point of departure from the debate on the moral obligation of preserving aesthetically pleasing landscapes (as we tend to do through legal designations, e.g. national parks), an ethical logic which leads, to use the words of Holmes Rolston, “from beauty to duty.”4 Moreover a posi­ tive aesthetical appreciation of a landscape because it accommodates low carbon technologies, would potentially require an inverse ethical logic, i.e. from duty to beauty.5 Notwithstanding the clear conceptual links between moral and aesthetic judgment, in everyday life it may be far less clear what kind of moral issues may underpin particular expressions of aesthetic sensibility. This can be particularly problematic for the deployment of environmental technologies (i.e. technologies pursued to reduce pollution ) that have significant landscape footprints. That is where we can find universal moral claims demanding environmental action for the common good rubbing up against aesthetic landscape judgments in places where such developments are proposed. This produces an unsatisfactory situation in which the deployment of clean technologies ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 10 / ISSUE 1 / 2018 136 is delayed, tensions within local communities may increase... (shrink)

In many coevolutionary systems members of one party select members of a second party based on quality differences existing among members of the latter (e.g., predators and prey, pollinators and flowers, etc.). We examined the fate of characters that increase (amplifiers) or decrease (attenuators) the perceived amplitude of differences in the quality upon which choice of the selecting party is based. We found that the evolution of such characters depends on (i) the relationship between the cost of the character and (...) the relative benefit it gives to the high quality individuals (if an amplifier) or low quality individuals (if an attenuator), and (ii) the frequency, among members of the selected party, of the quality sought by the selecting party. (shrink)

This work of vast erudition, which according to the author is substantially the same as the original Swedish edition, attempts to show how the young Augustine integrated certain key concepts of ancient philosophy into Christian thought. Holte limits himself to the philosophical issues and so does not consider the young Augustine as theologian. Parts I and II develop the historical background of the concept telos in the ancient philosophers and in the early Fathers. Part III presents the central thesis: that (...) Augustine tried to link the contemplative life to the commandment of love which requires total abandonment to God of every form of human life. The Telos is to be found in the contemplative life, although Augustine never separates it from the active. Telos is to be realized in the study of Christian philosophy and scripture. Part IV treats of this realization as a sort of Christian gnosis which can be briefly characterized from the point of view of systematic theology as fides quaerens intellectum.--V. G. P., S.J. (shrink)

Throughout his active philosophical life, Nikolai Berdiaev was preoccupied with the philosophical and sociological questions stemming from the impact of technology on the life of modern man. He gave to his thoughts a condensed expression in a longish essay in the journal Put' for 1933 with the title "Man and Machine" [Chelovek i mashina]. But he had touched on the subject penetratingly already in his early work The Meaning of History [Smysl istorii], which was first published in Russian in 1923 (...) and in English translation in 1936, and he devoted a chapter to it in his last major work, the posthumously published The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar [Tsarstvo dukha i tsarstvo Kesaria], which came out in Russian in 1949 and in English translation in 1952. In the last year of his life, Berdiaev read a paper titled "L'homme dans la civilization technique" at a conference in Neuchâtel. The Russian original of the paper apparently has not been published. (shrink)