This paper investigates, from a philosophical perspective, whether high functioning autists are legally responsible for the crimes they may commit. We do this from the perspective of the Croatian legal system. According to Croatian Criminal Law, but also criminal laws adopted in many other countries, the legal responsibility of the person is undermined due to insanity when two conditions are satisfied. The first may be called the incapacity requirement. It states that a person, when committing the crime, suffers cognitive or (...) volitional incapacities or limited capacities that are relevant for exculpation. The second, we may call the mental disorder requirement, which states that these exculpatory incapacities are due to the presence of a mental disorder. In this paper we focus on the incapacity requirement. The review of the studies on executive functions deficits associated with high-functioning autism suggests that many autists should not be held categorically responsible for the crimes they may commit. Nonetheless, we argue that these impairments in executive functions generally do not provide an unqualified excuse. (shrink)

The supporters of the neurodiversity movement contend that autism is not a mental disorder, but rather a natural human variation. In a recent paper Jerome Wakefi eld, David Wasserman and Jordan Conrad (2020) argued against this view relying on Wakefi eld’s harmful dysfunction theory of mental disorder (the HD theory). Although I argue that the HD theory is problematic, I contend that arguments offered by Wakefi eld et al. (2020) against those of the neurodiversity movement are plausible, except in one (...) respect: their claim that high functioning autism in general is not a disorder is not well supported. I argue instead that the disorder status of high-functioning autistic persons should be judged on a case-by-case basis, depending on the harmfulness of the condition. In this regard, I maintain that the list of basic psychological capacities provided by George Graham (2010) provides an adequate conceptualization of harm. Moreover, I show how this framework may offer an appropriate tool for a case-by-case assessment of harm associated with high-functioning autism. (shrink)

Die Arbeit, die das ethische Denken von Levinas im Lichte seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger zu rekonstruieren und kritisch zu bewerten sucht, ist als Gegenüberstellung der beiden Denkansätze angelegt. Sie gliedert sich in drei Teile, die jeweils eine Grundfrage zum Thema haben (Sein, Zeit, das Gute) und zugleich die Entwicklung von Levinas' Denken nachzeichnen. Ausgehend von einem Heidegger entgegengesetzten Seinsverständnis gelangt Levinas zu seiner spezifischen Auffassung der Transzendenz, die schließlich zur Ethik jenseits des Seins führt. Levinas' Denken zeichnet sich somit durch (...) eine strukturelle Nähe zu Heidegger aus, wenngleich die Distanz zwischen beiden Ansätzen unüberbrückbar bleibt. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss Foucault’s formulation of the notions of biopolitics and biopower against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public reaction to it. For this purpose, we first identify his body of work relevant to the issue of biopolitics, since this issue – unlike the subject areas represented in Foucault’s earlier work – has not been the subject of a separate study. We narrow the focus to the period between 1974 and 1976, when he wrote five (...) crucial texts for understanding biopolitics. The final one – “Right of Death and Power over Life”, the only one with biopolitics as the sole subject – provides what could be understood as Foucault’s definitive interpretation of the genesis and position of biopolitics in modern technologies of power. In the second part of the paper, we analyze the conceptual structure of biopower and the position of discipline and biopolitics within this structure. We then turn to Foucault’s final determination of biopolitics as thanatopolitics to raise the question of whether this whole perspective is dystopian. We find that it is not, because this perspective depends on Foucault’s understanding of power relations, according to which resistance is primary and power is derived. Finally, we argue that his conceptualization of biopolitics cannot be used to justify any of today’s antibiopolitical tendencies. (shrink)

How should a machine intelligence perform unsupervised structure discovery over streams of sensory input? One approach to this problem is to cast it as an apperception task [1]. Here, the task is to construct an explicit interpretable theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions, designed to ensure that the constituents of the theory are connected in a relational structure. However, the original formulation of the apperception task had one fundamental limitation: it assumed (...) the raw sensory input had already been parsed using a set of discrete categories, so that all the system had to do was receive this already-digested symbolic input, and make sense of it. But what if we don't have access to pre-parsed input? What if our sensory sequence is raw unprocessed information? The central contribution of this paper is a neuro-symbolic framework for distilling interpretable theories out of streams of raw, unprocessed sensory experience. First, we extend the definition of the apperception task to include ambiguous (but still symbolic) input: sequences of sets of disjunctions. Next, we use a neural network to map raw sensory input to disjunctive input. Our binary neural network is encoded as a logic program, so the weights of the network and the rules of the theory can be solved jointly as a single SAT problem. This way, we are able to jointly learn how to perceive (mapping raw sensory information to concepts) and apperceive (combining concepts into declarative rules). (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the propensity toward identifying natural kinds with successful scientific categories in contemporary discussions of natural kinds within the philosophy of science. Success in this case is understood as the fulfillment of epistemic interests or goals in a given field of scientific research. The prevailing view is that, in order to have a theory of natural kinds that successfully captures current scientific practice, the relevant epistemic interests are the current interests of scientists working in a (...) particular field. In contrast, we concur with the Franklin-Hall (2015) that a wider range of possible interests needs to be taken into account, in order to avoid making natural kinds too dependent on the current stage of research. But unlike Franklin-Hall who suggests looking for an intersection between the interests and goals of current epistemic agents and our neighboring epistemic agents (the categorical bottleneck view), we advocate the view that all these different interests and goals need to be taken into account, and thus our view takes into account a much wider range of categories. (shrink)

U ovom članku daje se prikaz hrvatskih sljedbenika teorije relativnosti iz redova matematičara, fizičara, prirodoslovaca i tehničara. Istraživanje se odnosi na sveučilišna predavanja, seminare, znanstvene i popularne članke, prevedene znanstvene, stručne i popularne knjige i ostale publikacije u svezi s Einsteinovom teorijom relativnosti. Prikaz rezultata istraživanja iznosi se povijesnim redoslijedom s kratkim osvrtom na značenje i osnovne biografske podatke sljedbenikâ teorije relativnosti kod nas.Dieser Artikel gibt einen Űberblick der kroatischen Anhänger der Relativitätstheorie aus denReihen der Mathematiker, Physiker, Naturwissenschaftler und Techniker. (...) Die Untersuchungberichtet über Vorlesungen an Universitäten, wissenschaftliche und populäre Artikel, Übersetzungenwissenschaftlicher und populärerBücher sowie übrige Publikationen in VerbindungmitEinsteinsRelativitätstheorie. Die jeweiligen Veranstaltungenund Publikationen werdenin derReihenfolgeihresgeschichtlichen Erscheinens aufgeführt und sind versehen mit einem kurzenKommentarzu ihrerBedeutung sowie mit wesentlichen biografische Angabenzu den Anhängernder Relativitätstheorie hierzulande. (shrink)

In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.

Introduction -- Plato -- Aristotle -- The rise of modernity -- Immanuel Kant -- Romanticism and historicism -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- Philosophes and philosophers -- Analytic philosophy -- Conclusion.

The work of the Paduan Aristotelian philosopher Iacopo Zabarella (1533–1589) has attracted the attention of historians of philosophy mainly for his contributions to logic, scientific methodology and because of his possible influence on Galileo. At the same time, Zabarella's views on Aristotelian psychology have been little studied so far; even those historians of Renaissance philosophy who have discussed them, have based their analysis mainly on the psychological essays included in Zabarella's De rebus naturalibus , but have avoided Zabarella's commentary on (...) Aristotle's De anima . This has led to an inaccurate, but widespread, understanding of Zabarella's views. The intention of this article is to provide a systematic analysis of Zabarella's arguments about the (im)mortality of the soul in the context of Aristotelian psychology. Zabarella's view that the soul is mortal according to Aristotle is remarkable for his time, while his elaboration of this position is far more comprehensive than that of Pietro Pomponazzi, the other significant Renaissance thinker who shared the same view. (shrink)