This interview with Jeremy Waldron covers three topics. Firstly, we dealt with the methodology debate, that is, the discussion about how to proceed in analyzing the nature of law. Does the question ‘What is law?’ require a descriptive analysis of the concept of law or, rather, a normative exercise in political philosophy? Secondly, we spoke about the role of law in response to historic injustice, especially in relation to the restitution of property rights. On this topic Waldron vindicates the ‘supersession-thesis’, (...) the idea that, due to changed circumstances and the passage of time, historic injustices become superseded. The third section of the interview is devoted to Waldron’s perspective on the citation of foreign law by national judges. (shrink)

The frequent occurrence of comorbidity has brought about an extensive theoretical debate in psychiatry. Why are the rates of psychiatric comorbidity so high and what are their implications for the ontological and epistemological status of comorbid psychiatric diseases? Current explanations focus either on classification choices or on causal ties between disorders. Based on empirical and philosophical arguments, we propose a conventionalist interpretation of psychiatric comorbidity instead. We argue that a conventionalist approach fits well with research and clinical practice and resolves (...) two problems for psychiatric diseases: experimenter’s regress and arbitrariness. (shrink)

In this book Professor Tjoa not only reconstructs Lewes’ theory of criticism and his social and political opinions but also evaluates his contributions to ...

Dans cet article, composé en hommage aux travaux de Peter Sharratt, l’auteur examine l’attitude de Pierre de La Ramée (Ramus) et d’Omer Talon à l’égard de l’Éthique à Nicomaque. En tant qu’humanistes, ces derniers s’occupent intensément des arts du discours. Tout en reconnaissant la nécessité d’un fondement éthique dans tout discours, ils se montrent violemment hostiles au traité aristotélicien. Le traité posthume de théologie composé par Ramus propose le Décalogue comme source exclusive de la morale chrétienne. Ramus et Talon refusent (...) de la sorte de s’engager dans la voie ouverte quelques décennies plus tôt par Ph. Melanchthon, qui avait intégré de manière originale la morale antique, notamment celle d’Aristote, dans la théologie protestante. Toutefois, vers la fin du xvie siècle, le philosophe hollandais Rodolphe Snellius, père adoptif du théologien Arminius, composera un traité de morale dans lequel il tente de concilier la morale aristotélicienne avec la méthode développée par Ramus et son équipe. (shrink)

This paper compares the ethical decisions and attitudes of business students and practitioners. Recent unpublished data from a national study of over 1600 students are contrasted with information reported previously. Students are found consistently to make less ethical choices than practitioners, and there is some indication that students are making less ethical choices in the 1980s than in the 1960s. In addition, both students and practitioners agree that buyers should beware, view the role of business more narrowly, and find fewer (...) incentives to behave ethically over time. Codes of ethics appear to be less influential than the individual''s strong personal value system and one''s superiors behaving ethically; support for codes is declining. The paper concludes with observations about the limitations and possibilities for survey research in this area drawing on other studies that used the same instrument utilized for this paper. Some implications for future research are suggested. (shrink)

Animal ethicists have recently debated the ethical questions raised by disenhancing animals to improve their welfare. Here, we focus on the particular case of breeding hens for commercial egg-laying systems to become blind, in order to benefit their welfare. Many people find breeding blind hens intuitively repellent, yet ‘welfare-only’ positions appear to be committed to endorsing this possibility if it produces welfare gains. We call this the ‘Blind Hens’ Challenge’. In this paper, we argue that there are both empirical and (...) theoretical reasons why even those adopting ‘welfare-only’ views should be concerned about breeding blind hens. But we also argue that alternative views, which (for example) claim that it is important to respect the telos or rights of an animal, do not offer a more convincing solution to questions raised by the possibility of disenhancing animals for their own benefit. (shrink)

When producing a description of a target referent in a visual context, speakers need to choose a set of properties that distinguish it from its distractors. Computational models of language production/generation usually model this as a search process and predict that the time taken will increase both with the number of distractors in a scene and with the number of properties required to distinguish the target. These predictions are reminiscent of classic findings in visual search; however, unlike models of reference (...) production, visual search models also predict that search can become very efficient under certain conditions, something that reference production models do not consider. This paper investigates the predictions of these models empirically. In two experiments, we show that the time taken to plan a referring expression—as reflected by speech onset latencies—is influenced by distractor set size and by the number of properties required, but this crucially depends on the discriminability of the properties under consideration. We discuss the implications for current models of reference production and recent work on the role of salience in visual search. (shrink)

Long ago, when Alexander the Great asked the mathematician Menaechmus for a crash course in geometry, he got the famous reply ``There is no royal road to mathematics.'' Where there was no shortcut for Alexander, there is no shortcut for us. Still, the fact that we have access to computers and mature programming languages means that there are avenues for us that were denied to the kings and emperors of yore. The purpose of this book is to teach logic and (...) mathematical reasoning in practice, and to connect logical reasoning with computer programming in Haskell. Haskell emerged in the 1990s as a standard for lazy functional programming, a programming style where arguments are evaluated only when the value is actually needed. Haskell is a marvelous demonstration tool for logic and maths because its functional character allows implementations to remain very close to the concepts that get implemented, while the laziness permits smooth handling of infinite data structures. This book does not assume the reader to have previous experience with either programming or construction of formal proofs, but acquaintance with mathematical notation, at the level of secondary school mathematics is presumed. Everything one needs to know about mathematical reasoning or programming is explained as we go along. After proper digestion of the material in this book, the reader will be able to write interesting programs, reason about their correctness, and document them in a clear fashion. The reader will also have learned how to set up mathematical proofs in a structured way, and how to read and digest mathematical proofs written by others. This is the updated, expanded, and corrected second edition of a much-acclaimed textbook. Praise for the first edition: 'Doets and van Eijck's ``The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming'' is an astonishingly extensive and accessible textbook on logic, maths, and Haskell.' Ralf Laemmel, Professor of Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should (...) choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

We axiomatize all quantifier properties which can be expressed by a universal condition on the class of algebras of sets.

We axiomatize all quantifier properties which can be expressed by a universal condition on the class of algebras of sets.

Leading Harvard philosophy professor William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), author of 17 books and in his day second only to John Dewey in the breadth of his thinking, is now largely forgotten, and his once-influential writings are out of print. This volume, which combines a rich selection of Hocking’s work with incisive essays by distinguished scholars, seeks to recover Hocking’s valuable contributions to philosophical thought.

ABSTRACT Temporal dynamists argue that we should believe that there exists temporal passage because there being passage is the best explanation for the presence of our temporal phenomenology. Presentists argue that presentism is the best version of temporal dynamism. Therefore, conditional on us accepting temporal dynamism, we should accept presentism. In this paper it is argued that if we understand temporal passage as the presentist does, such an argument can succeed only if dualism is true. Thus, we conclude, either presentists (...) should embrace dualism, or they should reject any argument for presentism that proceeds via any such argument for temporal passage that proceeds via considerations of what best explains our temporal phenomenology. (shrink)

Radical and autopoietic enactivists disagree concerning how to understand the concept of sense-making in enactivist discourse and the extent of its distribution within the organic domain. I situate this debate within a broader conflict of commitments to naturalism on the part of radical enactivists, and to phenomenology on the part of autopoietic enactivists. I argue that autopoietic enactivists are in part responsible for the obscurity of the notion of sense-making by attributing it univocally to sentient and non-sentient beings and following (...) Hans Jonas in maintaining a phenomenological dimension to life-mind continuity among all living beings, sentient or non-sentient. I propose following Merleau-Ponty instead, who offers a properly phenomenological notion of sense-making for which sentience is a necessary condition. Against radicalist efforts to replace sense-making with a deflationary, naturalist conception of intentionality, I discuss the role of the phenomenological notion of sense-making for understanding animal behavior and experience. (shrink)