The nature of blame is not to be identified solely with a judgment, or an overt act, or an angry emotion. Instead, blame should be identified with a sentiment: more specifically, a multi-track disposition that manifests itself in various different emotions, thoughts or actions in a range of different circumstances. This paper aims to argue for these two claims. I start by arguing that blame is not solely a judgment, overt act, or an angry emotion. Then I develop the view (...) that blame is a sentiment. In doing so, I also show how viewing blame as a sentiment avoids objections that justifies us in dismissing the previous accounts. In addition, I argue that it significantly affects other inquiries concerning blame. I end by answering a skeptical challenge that there cannot be an illuminating and unifying analysis of blame. (shrink)

This volume has 41 chapters written to honor the 100th birthday of Mario Bunge. It celebrates the work of this influential Argentine/Canadian physicist and philosopher. Contributions show the value of Bunge’s science-informed philosophy and his systematic approach to philosophical problems. The chapters explore the exceptionally wide spectrum of Bunge’s contributions to: metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of physics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of social science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, social and political (...) philosophy, medical philosophy, and education. The contributors include scholars from 16 countries. Bunge combines ontological realism with epistemological fallibilism. He believes that science provides the best and most warranted knowledge of the natural and social world, and that such knowledge is the only sound basis for moral decision making and social and political reform. Bunge argues for the unity of knowledge. In his eyes, science and philosophy constitute a fruitful and necessary partnership. Readers will discover the wisdom of this approach and will gain insight into the utility of cross-disciplinary scholarship. This anthology will appeal to researchers, students, and teachers in philosophy of science, social science, and liberal education programmes. 1. Introduction Section I. An Academic Vocation Section II. Philosophy Section III. Physics and Philosophy of Physics Section IV. Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind Section V. Sociology and Social Theory Section VI. Ethics and Political Philosophy Section VII. Biology and Philosophy of Biology Section VIII. Mathematics Section IX. Education Section X. Varia Section XI. Bibliography. (shrink)

This is a collective writing project that is part of the larger design of Infantologies, Infanticides and Infantilizations; a quartet that explores the philosophy of infants from thematic perspectives, that puts infants at the centre of our reflections, and that encourages a different academic style of thinking.

Proof-theoretic methods are developed for subsystems of Johansson’s logic obtained by extending the positive fragment of intuitionistic logic with weak negations. These methods are exploited to establish properties of the logical systems. In particular, cut-free complete sequent calculi are introduced and used to provide a proof of the fact that the systems satisfy the Craig interpolation property. Alternative versions of the calculi are later obtained by means of an appropriate loop-checking history mechanism. Termination of the new calculi is proved, (...) and used to conclude that the considered logical systems are PSPACE-complete. (shrink)

ONTOLOGY This book is a book about the world. I am concerned with ontology, not merely with language. Many ontological treatises concentrate largely on the ...

Two arguments are offered here for postulating individual essences of concrete individuals on top of their sortal essences. One is the explanatory gap argument, the other draws on the analogy with the individual essences of events presupposed in single causal explanations. These arguments support qualitative individual essences with explanatory goals as opposed to hybrid impure relational essences accounting for origin and numerical identity. It is highlighted why origin properties as parts of impure relational essences do not yield genuine de re (...) constructions. The distinction between the two types of individual essences is traced back to the ambiguity of the very notion of individuation. (shrink)

The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) literature tends to focus on bias as a problem that requires ex post solutions (e.g. fairness metrics), rather than addressing the underlying social and technical conditions that (re)produce it. In this article, we propose a complementary strategy that uses genealogy as a constructive, epistemic critique to explain algorithmic bias in terms of the conditions that enable it. We focus on XAI feature attributions (Shapley values) and counterfactual approaches as potential tools to gauge these conditions (...) and offer two main contributions. One is constructive: we develop a theoretical framework to classify these approaches according to their relevance for bias as evidence of social disparities. We draw on Pearl’s ladder of causation (Causality: models, reasoning, and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, Causality, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803161) to order these XAI approaches concerning their ability to answer fairness-relevant questions and identify fairness-relevant solutions. The other contribution is critical: we evaluate these approaches in terms of their assumptions about the role of protected characteristics in discriminatory outcomes. We achieve this by building on Kohler-Hausmann’s (Northwest Univ Law Rev 113(5):1163–1227, 2019) constructivist theory of discrimination. We derive three recommendations for XAI practitioners to develop and AI policymakers to regulate tools that address algorithmic bias in its conditions and hence mitigate its future occurrence. (shrink)

A complete, illustrated survey of Etienne-Jules Marey's work that investigates the far reaching effects of her inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

Contemporary or traditional? Blended or seeker? Pop or "classical"? Chorus or hymn? Combo or organ? Questions concerning music in worship abound these days. Is there a practical way to deal with these issues? In Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint, Calvin Johansson looks to God's Word for principles foundational to music ministry. Weaving together great scriptural truths, he establishes the need for a "directional balance" between pastoral contextualization and prophetic purity. In a time of facile musical accommodation of the (...) gospel to culture, Dr. Johansson suggests that a heightened concern for musical style and quality is in order—not for the sake of music, but for the sake of the gospel. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Suppose that, for every possible event and person who would exist whether or not the event were to occur, there is a well-being level that the person would occupy if the event were to occur, and a well-being level that the person would occupy if the event were not to occur. Do facts about such connections between events and well-being levels always suffice to determine whether an event would harm or benefit a person? Many seemingly attractive accounts of harm (...) and benefit entail an affirmative answer to this question, including the widely held Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). In this paper, however, we argue that all such accounts will be unsuccessful. (shrink)

This paper examines a little studied type of perspective shift that I call protagonist projection, following Holton :625–628, 1997). PP is a way of describing the mental state of a protagonist that conveys, to some extent, her perspective. Similarly to its better known cousin free indirect discourse, the shift in perspective is achieved without an overt operator. Unlike FID, PP is not based on a presumed speech-act of a protagonist. Rather, it gives a linguistic form to pre-verbal perceptual content, sensations, (...) feelings or implicit beliefs. I propose to analyse PP in a bi-contextual framework, extending Eckardt’s approach to FID. Under the resulting analysis, FID and PP are two instances of a more general category of perspective shift. (shrink)

The central idea behind this paper is that presuppositions of soft triggers arise from the way our attention structures the informational content of a sentence. Some aspects of the information conveyed are such that we pay attention to them by default, even in the absence of contextual information. On the other hand, contextual cues or conversational goals can divert attention to types of information that we would not pay attention to by default. Either way, whatever we do not pay attention (...) to, be it by default, or in context, is what ends up presupposed by soft triggers. This paper attempts to predict what information in the sentence is likely to end up being the main point (i.e. what we pay attention to) and what information is independent from this, and therefore likely presupposed. It is proposed that this can be calculated by making reference to event times. The notion of aboutness used to calculate independence is based on that of Demolombe and Fariñas del Cerro (In: Holdobler S (ed) Intellectics and computational logic: papers in honor of Wolfgang Bibel, 2000). (shrink)

In this paper I show that a novel ontic reading of explanation, intending to capture the de re essential features of individuals, can support the qualitative view of individual essences. It is argued further that the putative harmful consequences of the Leibniz Principle and its converse for the qualitative view can be avoided, provided that individual essences are not construed in the style of the naïve bundle theory with set-theoretical identity- conditions. Adopting either the more sophisticated two-tier BT or, alternatively, (...) the neo-Aristotelian position of taking essences as natures in the Aristotelian sense, can help to evade these main charges against the qualitative view. The functional parallels with the alternative haecceitistic view of individuation and individual essence will also be considered. (shrink)

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of presuppositions, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’. ‘Soft’ presuppositions are usually assumed to arise in a pragmatic way, while ‘hard’ presuppositions are thought to be genuine semantic presuppositions. This paper argues against such a distinction and proposes to derive the difference in cancellation from inherent differences in how presupposition triggers interact with the context: their focus sensitivity, anaphoricity, and (...) question–answer congruence properties. The paper also aims to derive the presuppositions of additive particles such as too, also, again, and of it-clefts. (shrink)

Famously, Galilei made the ontological claim that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Probably, if only implicitly, most contemporary natural scientists share his view. This paper, in contradistinction, argues that nature is only partly written in the language of mathematics; partly, it is written in the language of functions and partly in a very simple purely qualitative language, too. During the argumentation, three more specific but in themselves interesting theses are put forward: first (in Section (...) 3), there are more shapes than real numbers; second (in Section 4), the metrological notion ‘amount of substance’ can profitably be exchanged for ‘number of entities’; third (in Section 5), prototypical concepts will always be scientifically important. (shrink)

The relationship between philosophy and science has always been complementary. Today, while science moves increasingly fast and philosophy shows some problems in catching up with it, it is not always possible to ignore such relationships, especially in some disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience. However, the methodological procedures used to analyze these data are based on principles and assumptions that require a profound dialogue between philosophy and science. Following these ideas, this work aims to raise the (...) problems that a classical connectionist theory can cause and problematize them in a cognitive framework, considering both philosophy and cognitive sciences but also the disciplines that are near to them, such as AI, computer sciences, and linguistics. For this reason, we embarked on an analysis of both the computational and theoretical problems that connectionism currently has. The second aim of this work is to advocate for collaboration between neuroscience and philosophy of mind because the promotion of deeper multidisciplinarity seems necessary in order to solve connectionism’s problems. In fact, we believe that the problems that we detected can be solved by a thorough investigation at both a theoretical and an empirical level, and they do not represent an impasse but rather a starting point from which connectionism should learn and be updated while keeping its original and profoundly convincing core. (shrink)

In this paper, we give a new argument for the existence of moral luck. The argument is based on a manipulation case in which two agents both lack second-order control over their actions, but one of them has first-order control. Our argument is, we argue, in several respects stronger than standard arguments for moral luck. Five possible objections to the argument are considered, and its general significance for the debate on moral luck is briefly discussed.

Cancer research is experiencing ‘paradigm instability’, since there are two rival theories of carcinogenesis which confront themselves, namely the somatic mutation theory and the tissue organization field theory. Despite this theoretical uncertainty, a huge quantity of data is available thanks to the improvement of genome sequencing techniques. Some authors think that the development of new statistical tools will be able to overcome the lack of a shared theoretical perspective on cancer by amalgamating as many data as possible. We think instead (...) that a deeper understanding of cancer can be achieved by means of more theoretical work, rather than by merely accumulating more data. To support our thesis, we introduce the analytic view of theory development, which rests on the concept of plausibility, and make clear in what sense plausibility and probability are distinct concepts. Then, the concept of plausibility is used to point out the ineliminable role played by the epistemic subject in the development of statistical tools and in the process of theory assessment. We then move to address a central issue in cancer research, namely the relevance of computational tools developed by bioinformaticists to detect driver mutations in the debate between the two main rival theories of carcinogenesis. Finally, we briefly extend our considerations on the role that plausibility plays in evidence amalgamation from cancer research to the more general issue of the divergences between frequentists and Bayesians in the philosophy of medicine and statistics. We argue that taking into account plausibility-based considerations can lead to clarify some epistemological shortcomings that afflict both these perspectives. (shrink)

Research question and aimClinical Ethics Committees (CECs) aim to support healthcare professionals (HPs) and healthcare organizations to deal with the ethical issues of clinical practice. In 2020,...

Cases—be they real or fictional—are commonplace both in the medical ethics literature and in the public media. Cases take on a variety of forms: from streamlined to book length narratives. They also serve a variety of different purposes, from illustration, to decision making, and from debunking to heuristics. Drawing on the rhetorical analysis of « exemplum », I shall describe what cases are, and what their role is in the practice of clinical ethics. I identify two basic ways in which (...) cases can be brought to bear on ethical thinking and practice: a « tamed » and a « wild » way, and show how « wild cases » can serve a useful heuristic function despite their appeal to emotions and their unusual and striking character. In conclusion, I will argue that cases, both in their wild and their tamed form, are not only useful pedagogical tools, but can serve as a legitimate empirical basis for medical ethics. (shrink)

The chapter provides an analysis of the concept of the dignity of the person in Polish legal culture. It begins with a brief description of the historical background in which the legal status of human dignity has been framed. Then it turns to the analysis of the philosophical doctrines which have shaped the concept, in particular those which influenced Polish legal scholarship to the highest degree. The subsequent section attempts to clarify the meaning of the concept, specifying its features and (...) providing distinctions between dignity of the person and dignity of personage. Finally, the chapter presents the protection and respect of the dignity of the person in Polish legislation. (shrink)

Academic mobility is usually perceived and discussed as a positive phenomenon — as a prerequisite for building a competitive and successful economy and quality science. Academic mobility has now become essential to building a successful academic career in many research domains. On the policy level the negative impact of academic mobility on researchers’ lives and especially women’s is usually overlooked and marginalized. In my paper I focus on academic mobility in the context of academics’ relationships and family lives. I ask (...) two research questions: What is the impact of mobility on researchers’ relationships? How does mobility affect the lives of the partners of mobile researchers? The analysis is based on i) 16 in-depth interviews with academics from various fields of research about their experiences of long-term fellowships abroad in the early stages of their academic path and on ii) 16 in-depth joint interviews with Czech dualcareer academic couples. The analysis shows that academic mobility has a great and significant impact on the family and partnership lives of migrating researchers. For many, especially the partners of migrating researchers, mobility means they have to make many concessions in their private and family lives. I conclude that the impact of academic mobility on people’s partnership lives is highly gendered because couples’ work and family lives are closely intertwined. (shrink)

This book presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle's account of how shame instils virtue, and defends its philosophical import. Shame is shown to provide motivational continuity between the actions of the learners and the virtuous dispositions that they will eventually acquire.

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo (...) tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI. (shrink)

Death has long been a pre-occupation of philosophers, and this is especially so today. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death collects 21 newly commissioned essays that cover current philosophical thinking of death-related topics across the entire range of the discipline. These include metaphysical topics--such as the nature of death, the possibility of an afterlife, the nature of persons, and how our thinking about time affects what we think about death--as well as axiological topics, such as whether death is bad (...) for its victim, what makes it bad to die, what attitude it is fitting to take towards death, the possibility of posthumous harm, and the desirability of immortality. The contributors also explore the views of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato and Epicurus on topics related to the philosophy of death, and questions in normative ethics, such as what makes killing wrong when it is wrong, and whether it is wrong to kill fetuses, non-human animals, combatants in war, and convicted murderers. With chapters written by a wide range of experts in metaphysics, ethics, and conceptual analysis, and designed to give the reader a comprehensive view of recent developments in the philosophical study of death, this Handbook will appeal to a broad audience in philosophy, particularly in ethics and metaphysics. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure was mostly received as a depiction of the crisis of masculinity. And it is, but that particular theme is also placed within a larger context concerning questions of value, understanding, order, and control, questions asked not only on a thematic level but also through cutting, framing, and the use of camera views. Not accepting any simple dichotomy between form and meaning, Force Majeure places itself firmly in an avant- garde and modernist tradition. Thereby the film (...) is also related to this tradition’s ambition of investigating Western thought, knowledge and art anew, problematising given forms of rational thinking in order for something new to emerge. In the wake of World War II it was, for thinkers like Adorno, Foucault, Stockhausen, and Boulez, seen as unavoidable and urgent to deconstruct the conventions and norms that had made Auschwitz possible. It is still urgent. This article takes its starting point in the connections between avant-garde serialism in music, Foucault’s serialist methods of research and Deleuze’s theories of modernist film, in order to grasp how the aesthetics of Force Majeure continues to deconstruct. (shrink)

Animal minds are complex and diverse, making them difficult to study. This Element focuses on a question that has received much attention in the field of comparative cognition: 'Do animals reason about unobservable variables like force and mental states?' The Element shows how researchers design studies and gather evidence to address this question. Despite the many virtues of current methods, hypotheses in comparative cognition are often underdetermined by the empirical evidence. Given this, philosophers and scientists have recently called for additional (...) behavioral constraints on theorizing in the field. The Element endorses this proposal (known as 'signature testing'), while also arguing that studies on animal minds would benefit from drawing more heavily on neuroscience and biology. (shrink)

A natural landscape can look serene, a shade of colour cheerful and a piece of music might sound heartrending. Why do we ascribe affective qualities to objects that can't entertain psychological states? The capacity that objects, and especially artworks, have to express affective states is a bizarre phenomenon that needs to be clarified in numerous respects. Philosophers are still struggling with the phenomenon of expressiveness being a matter of imagination, perception, or mnemonic association, and usually do not agree on the (...) role that emotions and human bodily expressions play in it. Benenti questions the main theories that populate the aesthetics domain using the tools of philosophy of mind. This study deals with crucial debates concerning seeing-in, cognitive penetration, the relation between phenomenal character and representational content and between emotions and expressions. It aims at providing a viable account of the experience we have of expressive properties by casting light on its fundamentally perceptual nature. The outcome is an empirically informed and critical overview of a topic which has been rather neglected in the philosophy of mind. The book will be of interest to scholars of the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, the cognitive sciences, and psychology. (shrink)