Reflections on the life and works of Scotus -- The early works of Scotus -- Duns Scotus at Oxford -- A Scotistic approach to the ultimate why-question -- God's knowledge : a study in Scotistic methodology -- William of Alnwick on Scotus and divine concurrence -- Scotus on the origin of possibility -- Scotus's lectures on the Immaculate Conception -- Scotus's ethics -- Scotus's eschatology : some reflections -- Scotism -- An Oxford dialogue on language and metaphysics -- Ockham and (...) the textbooks -- Ockham's conception of matter. (shrink)

The book is an english translation with revisions and updates of the "Philosophische Grundbegriffe 1" and provides an introduction to six key concepts in philosophy - philosophy, language, knowledge, truth, being and good. At the same time, it aims to initiate its readers into the process of philosophical thinking. The book is addressed to students and laypeople, but also contains new ideas for specialists. It is written in a clear, accessible and engaging style, and its author 'shares, and manages to (...) convey, something of Plato's own commitment to philosophy'. (shrink)

This book deals with Johann Heinrich Lamberts epistemological foundation of scientific knowledge and with his linear diagrams of logical reasoning.

ZusammenfassungIm November 2015 ereignete sich an einer Schweizer Sekundarschule ein Vorfall, der in der Folge als sogenannter „Handschlag von Therwil“ Schlagzeilen machte. Mit diesem Topos ist jedoch nicht nur die Entscheidung zweier Schüler gemeint, ihrer Lehrerin unter Verweis auf religiöse Motive den Handschlag zu verweigern, sondern ebenso die medialen, schulischen, politischen und rechtlichen Konsequenzen, die sich an diese Episode anschlossen. Die folgende Einleitung zu dieser Thematik bietet, neben einer Schilderung des Vorfalls, eine Rahmensetzung, die sich mit dem religionswissenschaftlichen Stellenwert lokaler (...) Aushandlungsprozesse von Religion befasst. Es wird argumentiert, dass lokale Aushandlungen von Religion weder rein binnenreligiös noch in den sozialen und räumlichen Grenzen ihrer Lokalität vollzogen werden. Stattdessen sind sie in eine Vielzahl nicht-religiöser und translokaler Kontexte eingebunden. Daraus ergibt sich eine Reihe von Fragestellungen: Unter welchen Umständen werden lokale Religionsthematiken zum Verhandlungsgegenstand anderer, nicht-religiöser Gesellschaftsbereiche? Wie wirken diese Dynamiken auf lokale Aushandlungsprozesse zurück und welche Themen fungieren dabei als Kristallisationspunkte? Nicht zuletzt stellt sich zudem die Frage nach geeigneten Konzepten und Ansätzen, anhand derer die Aushandlungsprozesse von Religion in nicht religiösen Kontexten adäquat erfasst werden können. Die vorliegende Einleitung stellt verschiedene Beiträge vor, die sich in ihrer Analyse des Therwiler Handschlags auf unterschiedliche Weise diesen Fragen angenähert haben. (shrink)

Current suggestions for capacities that should be targeted for moral enhancement has centered on traits like empathy, fairness or aggression. The literature, however, lacks a proper model for understanding the interplay and complexity of moral capacities, which limits the practicability of proposed interventions. In this paper, I integrate some existing knowledge on the nature of human moral behavior and present a formal model of prosocial motivation. The model provides two important results regarding the most friction-free route to moral enhancement. First, (...) we should consider decreasing self-interested motivation rather than increasing prosociality directly. Second, this should be complemented with cognitive enhancement. These suggestions are tested against existing and emerging evidence on cognitive capacity, mindfulness meditation and the effects of psychedelic drugs and are found to have sufficient grounding for further theoretical and empirical exploration. Furthermore, moral effects of the latter two are hypothesized to result from a diminished sense of self with subsequent reductions in self-interest. (shrink)

We construct a normal extension of K4 with the finite model property whose minimal tense extension is not complete with respect to Kripke semantics.

PurposeThe aim of the research described was to identify reasons for differences between discourses on electronic voting in the UK and The Netherlands, from a qualitative point of view.Design/methodology/approachFrom both countries, eight e‐voting experts were interviewed on their expectations, risk estimations, cooperation and learning experiences. The design was based on the theory of strategic niche management. A qualitative analysis of the data was performed to refine the main variables and identify connections.FindingsThe results show that differences in these variables can partly (...) explain the variations in the embedding of e‐voting in the two countries, from a qualitative point of view. Key differences include the goals of introducing e‐voting, concerns in relation to verifiability and authenticity, the role of the Electoral Commissions and a focus on learning versus a focus on phased introduction.Research limitations/implicationsThe current study was limited to two countries. More empirical data can reveal other relevant subvariables, and contribute to a framework that can improve our understanding of the challenges of electronic voting.Originality/valueThis study shows the context‐dependent character of discussions on information security. It can be informative for actors involved in e‐voting in the UK and The Netherlands, and other countries using or considering electronic voting. (shrink)

In information security research, perceived security usually has a negative meaning, when it is used in contrast to actual security. From a phenomenological perspective, however, perceived security is all we have. This paper develops a phenomenological account of information security, in which a distinction is made between revealed and reveiled security instead. Linking these notions with the concepts of confidence and trust, the paper provides a phenomenological explanation of the electronic voting controversy in the Netherlands.

Conceiving new technologies as social experiments is a means to discuss responsible deployment of technologies that may have unknown and potentially harmful side-effects. Thus far, the uncertain outcomes addressed in the paradigm of new technologies as social experiments have been mostly safety-related, meaning that potential harm is caused by the design plus accidental events in the environment. In some domains, such as cyberspace, adversarial agents may be at least as important when it comes to undesirable effects of deployed technologies. In (...) such cases, conditions for responsible experimentation may need to be implemented differently, as attackers behave strategically rather than probabilistically. In this contribution, we outline how adversarial aspects are already taken into account in technology deployment in the field of cyber security, and what the paradigm of new technologies as social experiments can learn from this. In particular, we show the importance of adversarial roles in social experiments with new technologies. (shrink)

We propose a logic for reasoning about metric spaces with the induced topologies. It combines the 'qualitative' interior and closure operators with 'quantitative' operators 'somewhere in the sphere of radius r.' including or excluding the boundary. We supply the logic with both the intended metric space semantics and a natural relational semantics, and show that the latter (i) provides finite partial representations of (in general) infinite metric models and (ii) reduces the standard '∈-definitions' of closure and interior to simple constraints (...) on relations. These features of the relational semantics suggest a finite axiomatisation of the logic and provide means to prove its EXPTIME-completeness (even if the rational numerical parameters are coded in binary). An extension with metric variables satisfying linear rational (in)equalities is proved to be decidable as well. Our logic can be regarded as a 'well-behaved' common denominator of logical systems constructed in temporal, spatial, and similarity-based quantitative and qualitative representation and reasoning. Interpreted on the real line (with its Euclidean metric), it is a natural fragment of decidable temporal logics for specification and verification of real-time systems. On the real plane, it is closely related to quantitative and qualitative formalisms for spatial representation and reasoning, but this time the logic becomes undecidable. (shrink)

Few people, if any, still argue that science in all its aspects is a value-free endeavor. At the very least, values affect decisions about the choice of research problems to investigate and the uses to which the results of research are applied. But what about the actual doing of science? -/- As Science, Values, and Objectivity reveals, the connections and interactions between values and science are quite complex. The essays in this volume identify the crucial values that play a role (...) in science, distinguish some of the criteria that can be used for value identification, and elaborate the conditions for warranting certain values as necessary or central to the very activity of scientific research. -/- Recently, social constructivists have taken the presence of values within the scientific model to question the basis of objectivity. However, the contributors to <I>Science, Values, and Objectivity</I> recognize that such acknowledgment of the role of values does not negate the fact that objects exist in the world. Objects have the power to constrain our actions and thoughts, though the norms for these thoughts lie in the public, social world. -/- Values may be decried or defended, praised or blamed, but in a world that strives for a modicum of reason, values, too, must be reasoned. Critical assessment of the values that play a role in scientific research is as much a part of doing good science as interpreting data. (shrink)

In information security research, perceived security usually has a negative meaning, when it is used in contrast to actual security. From a phenomenological perspective, however, perceived security is all we have. This paper develops a phenomenological account of information security, in which a distinction is made between revealed and reveiled security instead. Linking these notions with the concepts of confidence and trust, the paper provides a phenomenological explanation of the electronic voting controversy in the Netherlands.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a much-discussed subject in the business world. The Internet has become one of the main tools for CSR information disclosure, allowing companies to publicise more information less expensively and faster than ever before. As a result, corporations are increasingly concerned with communicating ethically and responsibly to the diversity of stakeholders through the web. This paper addresses the main question as whether CSR information disclosure on corporate websites is influenced by country of origin and/or industry (...) sector. Analysing the websites of 127 corporations from emerging countries, such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and South Africa, it becomes evident that both country of origin and industry sector have a significant influence over CSR information disclosure on the web (CSRIDOW). Based on the data studied, country of origin has a stronger influence over CSRIDOW than industry sector. (shrink)

Two systems of belief change based on paraconsistent logics are introduced in this article by means of AGM-like postulates. The first one, AGMp, is defined over any paraconsistent logic which extends classical logic such that the law of excluded middle holds w.r.t. the paraconsistent negation. The second one, AGMo , is specifically designed for paraconsistent logics known as Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs), which have a formal consistency operator that allows to recover all the classical inferences. Besides the three usual (...) operations over belief sets, namely expansion, contraction and revision (which is obtained from contraction by the Levi identity), the underlying paraconsistent logic allows us to define additional operations involving (non-explosive) contradictions. Thus, it is defined external revision (which is obtained from contraction by the reverse Levi identity), consolidation and semi-revision, all of them over belief sets. It is worth noting that the latter operations, introduced by S. Hansson, involve the temporary acceptance of contradictory beliefs, and so they were originally defined only for belief bases. Unlike to previous proposals in the literature, only defined for specific paraconsistent logics, the present approach can be applied to a general class of paraconsistent logics which are supraclassical, thus preserving the spirit of AGM. Moreover, representation theorems w.r.t. constructions based on selection functions are obtained for all the operations. (shrink)

As forms of private self-regulation, multi-stakeholder initiatives have emerged as an important empirical phenomenon in global governance processes. At the same time, MSIs are also theoretically intriguing because of their inherent double nature. On the one hand, MSIs spell out CSR standards that define norms for corporate behavior. On the other hand, MSIs are also the result of corporate and stakeholder behavior. We combine the perspectives of institutional theory and club theory to conceptualize this double nature of MSIs. Based on (...) a stage model that looks at the interplay of actor and institutional dynamics, we generate insights into why actors join a voluntary MSI, how the various motivations and intentions of the actors influence the standard development, and how these as well as the MSI design are subsequently influenced by both external and internal dynamics. (shrink)

This book consists of eleven new essays that provide new insights into classical and contemporary issues surrounding free will and human agency. They investigate topics such as the nature of practical knowledge and its role in intentional action; mental content and explanations of action; recent arguments for libertarianism; the situationist challenge to free will; freedom and a theory of narrative configuration; the moral responsibility of the psychopath; and free will and the indeterminism of quantum mechanics. Also tackling some historical precursors (...) of contemporary debates, taken together these essays demonstrate the need for an approach that recognizes the multifaceted nature of free will. This book provides essential reading for anyone interested in the current scholarship on free will. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo consiste em analisar como Nietzsche, baseado na filosofia schopenhauriana, resolveu o problema do surgimento da tragédia grega através da elevação dos elementos Apolo e Dionísio a um estatuto ontológico, e como os gregos fizeram isso em seu tempo através da Música, além de revelar como, em Nietzsche, o pensamento de Sócrates surge como o “perverso algoz da arte”.O estudo foi realizado através de uma pesquisa bibliográfica com base nas seguintes obras do filósofo: A visão Dionisíaca de (...) Mundo e O nascimento da tragédia no espírito da Música. Na segunda parte, sugere-se como Nietzsche faz esse resgate do trágico em sua época e qual a recepção no século XIX de seu trabalho. (shrink)

This article offers a new reading of Heidegger's thesis of the animal in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Framing Heidegger's text through a brief analysis of Protagoras' genetic story of nature and of man's nature in Plato's eponymous dialogue, our reading brings out three key elements common to both texts: living nature as a normative rather than a physical order, the poverty of man's world in relation to the animal, and the attempted redemption of the latter through the acquisition of (...) Weltbildung. Staying with the way Heidegger brings out man's poverty in world in the text allows us (i) to undo once for all the oft-repeated charge of Heidegger's anthropocentric interpretation of the animal, (ii) to stage the hypothesis that philosophy and the life sciences of his day draw upon a common basic experience of the autonomy of life in relation to everything human, all-too-human, and (iii) to demonstrate the normativity and poverty of life. (shrink)

In this paper two systems of AGM-like Paraconsistent Belief Revision are overviewed, both defined over Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs) due to the possibility of defining a formal consistency operator within these logics. The AGM° system is strongly based on this operator and internalize the notion of formal consistency in the explicit constructions and postulates. Alternatively, the AGMp system uses the AGM-compliance of LFIs and thus assumes a wider notion of paraconsistency - not necessarily related to the notion of formal (...) consistency. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in (...) Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

The Gongsun Longzi is often considered the only extant work of the Classical Chinese “School of Names”, an early intellectual tradition mainly concerned with logic and the philosophy of language. The Gongsun Longzi is a heterogeneous collection of five chapters that include short treatises and largely fictive dialogues between an anonymous persuader and his opponent, which typically revolve around a paradoxical claim. Its value as a testimony to Early Chinese philosophy, however, is somewhat controversial due to the intricate textual history (...) of the text and our limited knowledge about its intellectual backgrounds. This volume gathers contributions by leading specialists in the fields of Classical Chinese philosophy, philology, logic, and linguistics. Besides an overview of the scholarly literature on the topic and a detailed account of the reception of the text throughout time, it presents fresh insights into philological and philosophical problems raised by the Gongsun Longzi and other closely-related texts equally attributed to the “School of Names”. (shrink)

The important yet contradictory role of innovation in society calls for a philosophy of innovation. Critically exploring innovation in relation to values, the economy and social change, Rafael Ziegler proposes a collaborative theory and practice of innovation that aims to liberate possibilities for our common futures. Following cues from the arts and drawing on the innovation literature across the social sciences, this book exposes pro-innovation bias and the gospel of disruptive change. Not only entrepreneurs but also civic networks and (...) tinkerers are discussed as sources of innovation, and social change as a balancing act of innovation, exnovation and restoration. The discussion of capabilitarian, communitarian, liberal, republican and socialist ideas of justice and innovation leads Ziegler to a transformative proposal: 'enough innovation' based on enough for all and with respect for all. This is a thought-provoking read for scholars working on sustainability-transformation, democratic, responsible and social innovation, and philosophy of economics. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce a new fragment of the first-order temporal language, called the monodic fragment, in which all formulas beginning with a temporal operator have at most one free variable. We show that the satisfiability problem for monodic formulas in various linear time structures can be reduced to the satisfiability problem for a certain fragment of classical first-order logic. This reduction is then used to single out a number of decidable fragments of first-order temporal logics and of two-sorted (...) first-order logics in which one sort is intended for temporal reasoning. Besides standard first-order time structures, we consider also those that have only finite first-order domains, and extend the results mentioned above to temporal logics of finite domains. We prove decidability in three different ways: using decidability of monadic second-order logic over the intended flows of time, by an explicit analysis of structures with natural numbers time, and by a composition method that builds a model from pieces in finitely many steps. (shrink)

A recent issue of Topics in Cognitive Science featured 11 thoughtful commentaries responding to our article “What happened to cognitive science?” (Núñez et al., 2019). Here, we identify several themes that arose in those commentaries and respond to each. Crucial to understanding our original article is the fundamental distinction between multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors: Cognitive science began (and has stayed) as multidisciplinary but has failed to move on to form a cohesive interdisciplinary field. We clarify and elaborate our original argument (...) and reiterate the importance of a data‐driven evaluation of the current status of the field, which exhibits a marked disciplinary imbalance, a lack of a coherent conceptual core, and a striking absence of a consistent curriculum in the institutions that grant degrees in this domain. Half a century after the creation of cognitive science, it may now be a good time to revisit goals and visions for how to best approach the ever‐fascinating scientific study of the mind(s). (shrink)

A Revisão de Crenças estuda como agentes racionais mudam suas crenças ao receberem novas informações. O sistema AGM, trabalho mais influente desta área apresentado por Alchourrón, Gärdenfos e Makinson, postula critérios de racionalidade para os diferentes tipos de mudança de crenças e oferece construções explícitas para tais - a equivalência entre os postulados e operações é chamado de teroema da representação. Trabalhos recentes mostram como o paradigma AGM pode ser compatível com diferentes lógicas não-clássicas, o que é chamado de AGM-compatibilidade (...) - este é o caso da família de lógicas paraconsistentes que analisamos, as Lógicas da Inconsistência Formal (LFIs, da sigla em inglês). A despeito da AGM-compatibilidade, ao se partir de uma nova lógica sua racionalidade subjacente deve ser entendida e sua linguagem deve ser efetivamente usada. Propomos assim novas construções que de fato capturam a intuição presente na LFIs - é o que chamamos de sistema AGMo. Com isso, possibilitamos a estas lógicas uma nova interpretação, na esteira da epistemologia formal. Em uma abordagem alternativa, ao se partir da AGM-compatibilidade os resultados AGM podem ser diretamente aplicados às LFIs - o que chamamos de sistema AGMp. Em ambas abordagens, provamos os respectivos teoremas da representação sempre que necessário. (shrink)

Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it. The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (...) provides a framework to cluster flow research, gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first “Individual” level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second “Contextual” level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third “Cultural” level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

A strange dialectical reversal characterizes the oppositions which psychoanalysis posits against philosophy and neuroscience: what psychoanalysis intervenes with as a unique and missing quality of these subjects, reveals itself upon enquiry as already having been a feature of said subjects. This article first discusses the failed intervention of psychoanalysis within the perceived totalities and absolutes of German idealism. Psychoanalysis, founded on an ontological division and internal inconsistency with a retroactive logic, finds this internal contradiction already reflected within the supposed totalities (...) of Schelling and Hegel. Schelling’s “blind act,” a decision with no prior foundation that grounds an abstract identity-in-itself, appears as the counterpart to what Badiou calls the strictly “analytic act.” Hegel’s Science of Logic, in which the inconclusive interpenetration of being and nothing presupposes its own conclusion in the transitions to essence, and in which an internal incompleteness and contradiction are retroactively constitutive of the concept, similarly nullifies the intervention of psychoanalysis. Finally, precisely such a reversal is presented in neuroscience, where the constitutive contradiction of contingently functional neuronal formations in the adaptive “multiple demand” model of executive functioning repeats the contingent and self-contradicting psychoanalytic subject as being its own deference within linguistic, discursive formations. (shrink)

Se presenta una propuesta de innovación educativa, dirigida al alumnado de Educación Secundaria, fundamentada en el uso de los itinerarios didácticos teatralizados como recurso didáctico con perspectiva de género. Para su confección se pretende una metodología que privilegia los contenidos procedimentales y que fomenta el pensamiento histórico y, por ende, el pensamiento crítico. Los contenidos seleccionados están relacionados con el siglo XVI y XVII y, más concretamente, con la persecución y procesamiento de mujeres por brujería y hechicería por parte del (...) Tribunal de la Inquisición. Para ello se toma como centro de estudio el proceso que se llevó a cabo en Córdoba contra Leonor Rodríguez, lo que llevará al alumnado a reflexionar y a preguntarse sobre los estereotipos de la mujer en la historia, así como en la actualidad, con la intención de formar a una ciudadanía crítica y comprometida. (shrink)

There is a common problem in artificial intelligence (AI) and information security. In AI, an expert system needs to be able to justify and explain a decision to the user. In information security, experts need to be able to explain to the public why a system is secure. In both cases, an important goal of explanation is to acquire or maintain the users’ trust. In this paper, I investigate the relation between explanation and trust in the context of computing science. (...) This analysis draws on literature study and concept analysis, using elements from system theory as well as actor-network theory. I apply the conceptual framework to both AI and information security, and show the benefit of the framework for both fields by means of examples. The main focus is on expert systems (AI) and electronic voting systems (security). Finally, I discuss consequences of the analysis for ethics in terms of (un)informed consent and dissent, and the associated division of responsibilities. (shrink)