The morphological marking that distinguishes conditionals that are called “counterfactual” from those that are not, can also be found in other modal constructions, such as in the expression of wishes and oughts. We propose to call it “X-marking”. In this article, we lay out desiderata for a successful theory of X-marking and make some initial informal observations. Much remains to be done.

This book is the first English version of Prolegomena zu einer kritischen Grammatik, published by Julius Springer, Vienna, 1935, as Volume 10 of the Vienna Circle's series Schriften zur wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung. The prefatory remarks of both editor and author acknowledge the influence ofWittgenstein in a general way. However, in aim and approach, the work differs from Wittgenstein's Philosophische Grammatik. This is indeed based on material going back to 1932, some of which Schachter must have known. On the other hand, (...) the present Prolegomena not only explains the general, philosophical principles to be followed, but in the light of these proceeds to cover the entire range of conventional grammar, showing where that is uncritical. Whether Wittgenstein in his turn knew of Schachter's work has never been explored. Schachter's object is universal grammar. As is natural, the examples in the original are largely drawn from German grammar, with occasional minor excursions into other languages. For English readers, what matters are the general problems of grammar: there is no point in tying these to the linguistic peculiarities of German, let alone a local variety of it. One who can grasp German at that level might as well read the original. The translation is therefore twofold: the text as a whole has been rendered into English, and the entire apparatus of examples has been replaced, as far as this can be done, by illustrations from English grammar, chosen so as to bring out the same kinds of problem as in the original. (shrink)

We argue that a formal semantics for music can be developed, although it will be based on very different principles from linguistic semantics and will yield less precise inferences. Our framework has the following tenets: Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition. In both cases, the semantic content derived from an auditory percept can be identified with the set of inferences it licenses on its causal sources, analyzed in appropriately abstract ways. What is special about music semantics is (...) that it aggregates inferences based on normal auditory cognition with further inferences drawn on the basis of the behavior of voices in tonal pitch space. This makes it possible to define an inferential semantics but also a truth-conditional semantics for music. In particular, a voice undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e. Aspects of musical syntax might be derivable on semantic grounds from an event mereology, which also explains some cases in which tree structures are inadequate for music. Intentions and emotions may be attributed at several levels, and we speculate on possible explanations of the special relation between music and emotions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prolegomena to a Comparative Reading of The Major Life of St. Francis and The Life of MilarepaMassimo A. RondolinoDifferent religious traditions in different cultures have recorded and transmitted the lives of individuals recognized as “perfected.” The particular doctrinal framework within which each of such figures is identified as “perfected” is certainly specific to the religious tradition that tells their life stories. Similarly, the social processes by which these (...) religious life writings are written, received, and circulated are appropriate to the historical and geographical contexts of their composition. Yet, narrative parallels can be detected across traditions, and the question arises whether these apparent similarities in the creation of such religious life stories across cultures, space, and time reflect actually similar doctrinal and political agendas. Could there be an underlying hagiographic process common to all these literary traditions, regardless of their compositional contexts? In other words, is the writing of spiritual lives a phenomenon that is contextual to a specific religious tradition, or is it rather a particular human response to given social and historical circumstances?I want to offer here a preliminary assessment of a study in comparative hagiology. To this end, I focus on two specific narrative traditions that pertain to two distinct religious, historical, and geographical contexts: the hagiographic writings on the medieval Christian St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and the namthars on the Tibetan Buddhist Milarepa (Mi la ras pa; ca. 1052–1135). In particular, here I make some considerations on a comparative reading of the “standard versions” of their life stories: The Major Life of St. Francis (Legenda Maior Sancti Francisci) by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221–1274), and The Life of Milarepa (Mi la ras pa’i rnam thar) by Tsangnyön Heruka, the “madman” of Tsang (gTsang smyon Heruka; 1452–1507).1The composition and reception of religious life writings is famously characteristic of early and medieval Christianity, with its complex and extensively studied production of hagiographic texts. Similarly, the compilation and distribution of life narratives in a religious context also plays a crucial role in the historical and cultural development of Tibetan Buddhism, with its extensive production of namthars (rnam thar, literally “great liberation” and, therefore, “stories of great liberation”). Within these large narrative traditions, St. Francis of Assisi and Milarepa eminently stand [End Page 163] out, both within and outside their respective cultural contexts, as two among the most renowned spiritual figures in Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, respectively.2 Furthermore, both figures and their related narrative traditions have been the object of scholarly studies for nearly a century.3Indeed, the spirituality embodied by St. Francis and Milarepa has been already the focus of attempted comparisons that have essentially and consistently focused on a direct assimilation of their respective extreme asceticism and teachings of poverty and renunciation, by drawing extensively on the literary accounts of their lives.4 Yet, it is important to note that the lives of these two exceptional individuals are also almost exclusively known through the dominating perspective of a single author’s works. In fact, although one of the best-known texts on St. Francis is the anonymous Little Flowers of St. Francis (Fioretti di San Francesco, late fourteenth century), the saint’s life and deeds are primarily known through their rendering by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, general minister of the Franciscan order. Similarly, the acts and teachings of Milarepa as they are familiar to Tibetan (and Western) audiences result primarily from the work of the wandering yogin Tsangnyön Heruka.Reflecting on the apparent parallelisms between the lives and teachings of St. Francis and Milarepa, though, I wonder whether such similarities may not extend beyond the spirituality that the saint and the repa embody. In particular, I am curious as to whether the analogies between the two figures that have been already outlined by several scholars may not actually arise from similarities in the sources’ underlying compositional dynamics and, in particular, in the authors’ approaches to the interpretation and retelling of these individuals’ lives as embodiments of a particular form of spirituality. In fact, if religious life writings are a form of communication that can be found in communities that belong to different traditions, times... (shrink)

The paper takes as its point of departure a more modern, pragmatics-based concept of “genre” at the base of which is the a notion of a social activity in a specific configuration or actional purpose, with use of language embedded in and determined by these pragmatic, language-external vectors. Such a concept lends itself more easily to a conceptualization of a complex social action like mobbing as a unitary, coordinated activity, with all component actions steered by a joined overarching goal. Testing (...) the notion of “genre” on such a complex borderline case will at the same time bring out both defining structural properties of mobbing actions and the theoretical issues incumbent on the notion of “genre”, especially how far the concept can be stretched to cover complex, multimedial social actions. (shrink)

A new methodology for developing theories of action has recently emerged which provides means for formally evaluating the correctness of such theories. Yet, for a theory of action to qualify as a solution to the frame problem, not only does it need to produce correct inferences, but moreover, it needs to derive these inferences from a concise representation of the domain at hand. The new methodology however offers no means for assessing conciseness. Such a formal account of conciseness is developed (...) in this paper. Combined with the existing criterion for correctness, our account of conciseness offers a framework where proposed solutions to the frame problem can be formally evaluated. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks answers to several foundational questions whose resolution is a necessary prerequisite to the development of a computational theory of metaphor processing. Working within a naturalistic framework, I address three main issues. Does metaphor fall within the domain of semantic theory or pragmatic theory? Is the concept of metaphor embedded in a 'folk' understanding of language and thought, and, if so, will the notion of metaphor-processing figure in any mature scientific psychology? Does the distinction between the metaphorical and (...) the literal inherently involve claims about truth and reference, and, if so, how can this distinction be addressed by a psychology that presupposes methodological solipsism? ;I defend the traditional, Aristotelean view which seeks to analyze both metaphors and similes in terms of underlying statements of comparison. This view implies that metaphors have semantic content, that they can, like literal claims, but true or false. I argue that Donald Davidson's analysis of meaning can, contrary to Davidson's own position, support this Aristotelean comparativist thesis. ;I then conclude that a semantic theory of metaphor must quantify over extra-psychological facts about the world. This raises the problems mentioned above concerning the psychological status of metaphor in a very pressing way. I reject both of the standard responses to these problems, eliminativism and sentential realism, and argue that explanations involving an extra-psychologically individuated type--such as metaphor--can constrain explanations involving a solipsistically individuated type. This offers some hope that an extensional theory of metaphor may be psychologically relevant. ;In Chapter Five I develop such an extensional theory. Through philosophical interpretation of work by some psychologists--principally A. Tversky and A. Ortony--I arrive at a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the metaphoricity of an utterance. This definition constitutes the principal positive accomplishment of the dissertation. ;Chapter Six reviews some unsolved foundational problems for future attention, sets my project in the context of other philosophical work on metaphor, and then looks forward to a computational theory of metaphor processing. (shrink)

We present in this article a new logical system inspired from linear logic. This system is designed in order to express causality and dynamism. The cut elimination theorem holds for this logic. Examples of applications are given.

We present in this article a new logical system inspired from linear logic. This system is designed in order to express causality and dynamism. The cut elimination theorem holds for this logic. Examples of applications are given.

_This essay outlines the author’s professional trajectory, a good portion of which is a journey through what historian Richard M. Morse called “the strange career of Latin American Studies.” The author’s intellectual interests span several fields but center most often at the intersections of philosophy, women’s and gender studies, and Spanish and Latin American letters. Further channeling Morse, what one’s occupation is called, is far less important than doing one’s work with _cha cha chá.

That AI will have a major impact on society is no longer in question. Current debate turns instead on how far this impact will be positive or negative, for whom, in which ways, in which places, and on what timescale. In order to frame these questions in a more substantive way, in this prolegomena we introduce what we consider the four core opportunities for society offered by the use of AI, four associated risks which could emerge from its overuse (...) or misuse, and the opportunity costs associated with its under use. We then offer a high-level view of the emerging advantages for organisations of taking an ethical approach to developing and deploying AI. Finally, we introduce a set of five principles which should guide the development and deployment of AI technologies. The development of laws, policies and best practices for seizing the opportunities and minimizing the risks posed by AI technologies would benefit from building on ethical frameworks such as the one offered here. (shrink)

T. H. Green was a leading member of the British Idealist movement, which adopted the continental philosophy of Hegel and Kant while rejecting utilitarianism. As well as being a prominent philosopher, Green was an influential educational reformer and an active member of the Liberal party. Green's writings can be placed into three categories: religion, philosophy and politics. This work was the most complete statement of Green's philosophy, although it remained unfinished at his death. Edited by A. C. Bradley, a former (...) student and brother of Green's fellow Idealist F. H. Bradley, the book, which contains four parts, was published posthumously in 1883. Like other Idealists, Green criticised empiricism for creating an unnecessary dualism between thought and the real. (shrink)

It is only two years since Immanuel Kant published his monumental Critique of Pure Reason.As part of entering into the spirit of this ‘untimely review’, I shall pretend that only the first edition of the Critique exists. This has a bearing on some claims that I shall make about differences between the content of the Prolegomena and that of the Critique. Despite its formidable difficulty, that book has already generated intense interest in the philosophical community. Those who are still (...) struggling to come to terms with its dense and subtle argumentation, or who may not even have started to read it yet but who know from the furore that it has created that it needs to be high on their ‘to read’ list, might easily despair at the prospect of having now to contend with another volume on the same broad range of subjects by the same author. This prospect is not, however, as daunting as it seems. In fact, it should afford some solace, at least if we are to believe claims that Kant makes on beh. (shrink)

"There is no attempt here to lay down as inviolable or to legislate certain ways of looking at things or ways of proceeding for philosophers of religion, only proposals for how to deal with a range of basic issues-proposals that I hope will ignite much fruitful discussion and which, in any case, I shall take as a basis for my own ongoing work in the field."-from the Preface Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, (...) J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of religious and irreligious belief, the varieties of religious skepticism, and the nature of religion itself. From the author's searching analysis of faith emerges a novel understanding of propositional faith as requiring the absence of belief. Schellenberg asks what the aims of the field should be, setting out a series of principles for carrying out some of the most important of these aims. His account of justification considers not only belief but also other responses to religious claims and distinguishes the justification of responses, propositions, and persons. Throughout Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg is laying the groundwork for an elaboration of his own vision while at the same time suggesting how philosophers might rethink assumptions guiding most of today's work in analytic philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Providing an original and systematic treatment of foundational issues in philosophy of religion, J. L. Schellenberg's new book addresses the structure of..

This article outlines a new paradigm of inquiry, An alternative to the classical or newtonian paradigm. Essentially, The author presents kant's version of the classical paradigm, And asks what he would have said if he had confronted contemporary, Rather than classical, Physics. Kant distinguished two levels of judgment, Determinate and reflective, Each differently grounded. This distinction must now be overcome: all judgment becomes formative judgment, Unfolding orders of division out of the order of undivided wholeness. He then applies formative judgment (...) to some traditional, Philosophical questions, Such as how we ought to live. (shrink)

This article investigates the structures of an identifiably Buddhist philosophy of religion, understood as the philosophical exposition and exploration of Buddhist religiosity. I thus theorize what forms a philosophy of religion structured according to Buddhist principles and paradigms might take, address various theoretical and methodological considerations, and survey a range of candidate schemas, which latter are arranged under textual, sectarian, and doctrinal rubrics. Overall, this project is undertaken on the understanding that the study of Buddhism, among other global traditions, need (...) not and should not replicate conceptual structures imposed upon it from without, and that philosophy of religion is enriched by attention to the resolutely plural philosophies of religions worldwide. (shrink)

Moral phenomenology is (roughly) the study of those features of occurrent mental states with moral significance which are accessible through direct introspection, whether or not such states possess phenomenal character – a what-it-is-likeness. In this paper, as the title indicates, we introduce and make prefatory remarks about moral phenomenology and its significance for ethics. After providing a brief taxonomy of types of moral experience, we proceed to consider questions about the commonality within and distinctiveness of such experiences, with an eye (...) on some of the main philosophical issues in ethics and how moral phenomenology might be brought to bear on them. In discussing such matters, we consider some of the doubts about moral phenomenology and its value to ethics that are brought up by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Michael Gill in their contributions to this issue. (shrink)

Euclidean diagrammatic reasoning refers to the diagrammatic inferential practice that originated in the geometrical proofs of Euclid’s Elements. A seminal philosophical analysis of this practice by Manders (‘The Euclidean diagram’, 2008) has revealed that a systematic method of reasoning underlies the use of diagrams in Euclid’s proofs, leading in turn to a logical analysis aiming to capture this method formally via proof systems. The central premise of this paper is that our understanding of Euclidean diagrammatic reasoning can be fruitfully advanced (...) by confronting these logical and philosophical analyses with the field of cognitive science. Surprisingly, central aspects of the philosophical and logical analyses resonate in very natural ways with research topics in mathematical cognition, spatial cognition and the psychology of reasoning. The paper develops these connections, concentrating on four issues: (1) the cognitive origins of Euclidean diagrammatic reasoning, (2) the cognitive representations of spatial relations in Euclidean diagrams, (3) the nature of the cognitive processes and cognitive representations involved in Euclidean diagrammatic reasoning seen as a form of visuospatial relational reasoning and (4) the complexity of Euclidean diagrammatic reasoning for the human cognitive system. For each of these issues, our analysis generates concrete experiment proposals, opening thereby the way for further empirical investigations. The paper is thus a prolegomenon to a research program on Euclidean diagrammatic reasoning at the crossroads of logic, philosophy and cognitive science. (shrink)

In the twentieth century, philosophy came to be dominated by the English-speaking world, first Britain and then the United States. Accompanying this development was an unprecedented professionalization and specialization of the discipline, the consequences of which are surveyed and evaluated in this article. The most general result has been a decline in philosophy's normative mission, which roughly corresponds to the increasing pursuit of philosophy in isolation from public life and especially other forms of inquiry, including ultimately its own history. This (...) is how the author explains the increasing tendency, over the past quarter-century, for philosophy to embrace the role of "underlaborer" for the special sciences. Indicative of this attitude is the long-term popularity of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that fields reach maturity when they forget their past and focus on highly specialized problems. In conclusion, the author recalls the history of philosophy that, following Kuhn's advice, has caused us to forget, namely, the fate of Neo-Kantianism in the early twentieth century. Key Words: analytic philosophy • normative • positivism • pragmatism • professionalism • underlaborer. (shrink)

In this article, ideas from St. Thomas Aquinas's neo-Aristotelian philosophy pertaining to the nature of human existence are used to arrive at a metapsychological orientation to child psychology. Four primary characteristics were identified as being fundamental to a Thomistic perspective on child development: anthropological holism, vitalistic integrative development, inherent sociality, and tactile interpersonal relatedness. These characteristics served as guiding themes for the articulation of a succinct, coherent narrative describing the nature of a Thomistic child psychology. Developmental insights from the works (...) of several psychologists were used to assist in the creation of this narrative. Associated characteristics of a Thomistic perspective on child psychology and some remarks concerning the future development of such an approach are provided at the conclusion of this analysis. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This essay is a reply to Matthew Feldman's identification and advocacy (in SBT/A 16) of a methodological "partition" in Beckett studies. It argues that the 'critical tribunal' set up by his article may be contested on the grounds that: the advocated paradigm for research makes a contentious journey from science to literature; it dogmatically imposes restrictions on the range of literary critical interventions deemed to be of value; it employs a 'black box' approach to its own argument.

My aim in this article is threefold: First, I wish to challenge the view put forward by A. Flew and H. L. A. Hart which has won widespread recognition, namely, that the concept of punishment entails a legal or quasi-legal system of punishment. In my view all that is necessary for a case of punishment to occur is that a person inflicts deliberately and not primarily for the sake of any beneficial consequences which may flow from his action, anything likely (...) to cause discomfort to a victim who is capable of experiencing it, provided that the person inflicting the discomfort would claim, if asked to give a reason for his action, that he is inflicting it because of something for which he holds the victim accountable. If I am right it follows that punishment is not necessarily retributive, and that utilitarian ‘punishment’ like reformative and compensatory ‘punishment’ is not true punishment, since the discomfort inflicted in these cases is merely ancillary to another end. Secondly, I hope to show that Hart does not succeed in discrediting the retributive theory, and that his treatment of punishment, though functional in aim, perpetuates the confusion between the meaning of punishment and its justification. Thirdly, I shall contend that retribution is not a proper aim of a legal system, whatever place it may actually have or ought to have in our moral code. Looking to the future, I shall venture to predict that the legal institution of punishment will sooner or later give way to a system designed to reduce crime and to rehabilitate offenders. Such a system will be adjusted to the needs of the community and of individual offenders, and will not involve the infliction of discomfort as an end. Hence, it would be wrong to call it a system of punishment. (shrink)

New opportunities for discourse about God have arisen, along with new challenges to the mainstream Catholic theology of God. In order to take advantage of these opportunities, a truly contemporary Catholic theology of God must critically appropriate three ‘events’ which have affected its approach to the subject matter: Heidegger's periodizing critique of ontotheology; the ‘contemporary’ viewed as the arena of contention between modern and postmodern claims; the presence of the Kingdom of God and the revelation of the nature of God (...) in the person and work of Jesus Christ, which alter our understandings of time and being. The present essay sketches a program for an authentically Catholic response to the issues raised by these occurrences, emphasizing the Catholic commitment to incarnation and sacramentality and the necessary effort to retrieve redemptive images of God from modernity, despite the present tendency of some postmodern theologians and philosophers to dismiss aspects of the past as unusable. (shrink)

Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics introduces body politics from both Eastern and Western perspectives. Hwa Yol Jung explores Giambattista Vico's anti-Cartesiansim and covers the carnal landscapes of Martin Heidegger, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Marshall McLuhan, and transversal geophilosophy.

A structuralist “reconstruction sketch” of an idealized theory is provided. This theory, QM, has some essential features of quantum mechanics. QM is a theory about abstract “result-observation events”, formal characterizations of interactions among physical systems and their results. QM is a stochastic theory and in the stochastic apparatus some features of “real life” quantum mechanics are recognizable. The result-observation events themselves exhibit neither essentially quantum mechanical features nor essentially physical features. At the level of the basic theory element QM is (...) more like a specialization of probability theory than a physical theory. It is only at the level of specialization of the basic theory element that essentially physical and quantum mechanical features may be introduced. The account provides a “reconstruction sketch” rather than a reconstruction largely in that no account is given of physically interesting specializations. It also falls short of a full reconstruction in that the mathematical apparatus is restricted to finite structures. (shrink)

For as long as philosophers ignore mind-wandering, they will disregard from one-third to one-half of conscious thoughts. Regrettably, mind-wandering is only seldom addressed in phenomenology. The fundamental ambition of this paper is to offer the first systematic phenomenological investigation of mind-wandering that relies on the classical principles of Husserlian phenomenology. The paper begins with a critique of the dominant conceptions of mind-wandering in contemporary psychology and philosophy. Against such a background, the paper develops a new, phenomenologically-grounded conception of mind-wandering. The (...) paper further focuses on the central resources in Husserlian phenomenology, which can be fruitfully employed in the future interdisciplinary research on mind-wandering. Phenomenological reflections on background consciousness, on pre-predicative experience, on passivity and on self-awareness lie at the center of this analysis. The paper concludes with some reflections on the relation between mind-wandering and daydreaming and on the function of mind-wandering in conscious life. (shrink)

As a step towards comprehensive computer models of communication, and effective human machine dialogue, some of the relationships between communication and affect are explored. An outline theory is presented of the architecture that makes various kinds of affective states possible, or even inevitable, in intelligent agents, along with some of the implications of this theory for various communicative processes. The model implies that human beings typically have many different, hierarchically organized, dispositions capable of interacting with new information to produce affective (...) states, distract attention, interrupt ongoing actions, and so on. High "insistence" of motives is defined in relation to a tendency to penetrate an attention filter mechanism, which seems to account for the partial loss of control involved in emotions. One conclusion is that emulating human communicative abilities will not be achieved easily. Another is that it will be even more difficult to design and build computing systems that reliably achieve interesting communicative goals. (shrink)