The paper explores a metaphysics of information enriched by a computational view of Buddhism consistent with onto-ethics. To the extent that Floridi has explained the new philosophy of information as borrowing methods from computer science to approach philosophical problems computationally, I believe an applied philosophy of information can return the fruits of these results back to grounding issues in the practices of information technology. With this process we also foster a cross-fertilization between Eastern and Western philosophies, in the larger, intercultural (...) arena. (shrink)

Media philosopher Vilém Flusser proposed a revolutionary new way of thinking about photography.

La production d’images par ordinateur fait apparaître deux aspects d’une telle importance pour le futur imminent que tous les autres aspects de cette nouvelle technique seront ici éliminés. Ces deux aspects sont l’auto-programmation et l’imagination conceptuelle. Il s’agit là d’une révolution de la structure de la société et de la conscience, de l’émergence d’une existence nouvelle.

Immanuel Kant was one of the most significant philosophers of the modern age. Historical Dictionary of Kant and Kantianism, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on key terms of Kant's philosophy.

This paper is an attempt to develop the many-valued first-order fuzzy logic. The set of its truth, values is supposed to be either a finite chain or the interval 0, 1 of reals. These are special cases of a residuated lattice L, , , , , 1, 0. It has been previously proved that the fuzzy propositional logic based on the same sets of truth values is semantically complete. In this paper the syntax and semantics of the first-order fuzzy logic (...) is developed. Except for the basic connectives and quantifiers, its language may contain also additional n-ary connectives and quantifiers. Many propositions analogous to those in the classical logic are proved. The notion of the fuzzy theory in the first-order fuzzy logic is introduced and its canonical model is constructed. Finally, the extensions of Gödel's completeness theorems are proved which confirm that the first-order fuzzy logic is also semantically complete. (shrink)

The attempt of modern social science to follow the methods of the physical sciences in seeking verification of its theories by statistical techniques is a result of an outmoded view of the methods of the physicist. The decisive element in verifying a theory is not the amassing of large bodies of data but insightful judgment into a relatively few cases. Because the will is primary in scientific activity, scientific statements, particularly those of social science, have the same cognitive status as (...) religious and ethical beliefs. Continued disagreements are, therefore, inevitable in the social sciences. (shrink)

This investigation examined whether speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across semantic domains and whether listeners use these cues to derive word meaning from novel words. Speakers were asked to produce phrases in infant‐directed speech in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small). Acoustic analyses revealed that some acoustic features were correlated with overall valence of the meaning. However, each word meaning also displayed a unique acoustic signature, (...) and semantically related meanings elicited similar acoustic profiles. In two perceptual tests, listeners either attempted to identify the novel words with a matching meaning dimension (picture pair) or with mismatched meaning dimensions. Listeners inferred the meaning of the novel words significantly more often when prosody matched the word meaning choices than when prosody mismatched. These findings suggest that speech contains reliable prosodic markers to word meaning and that listeners use these prosodic cues to differentiate meanings. That prosody is semantic suggests a reconceptualization of traditional distinctions between linguistic and nonlinguistic properties of spoken language. (shrink)

Vilém Flusser was born in Prague. He emigrated to Brazil, where he taught philosophy and wrote a daily newspaper column in Sao Paulo, then later moved to France. He wrote several books in Portuguese and German. Writings, Into the Universe of Technical Images, and Does Writing Have a Future? have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, and the Shape of Things, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, and The Freedom of the Migrant have also been translated into English.

Under one of the last remaining single-party communist regimes, Vietnam’s in-progress transition is a hybrid between post-Soviet reforms and Chinese authoritarian compromise. This chapter provides a brief account of the historical events and cultural attributes that have shaped the current political and economic configuration of the country, a coverage of globalization and entrepreneurial endeavours in relation to trade liberalization, an analysis of growing consumerist tendencies and the solidification of a circle of economic elites, an overview of Vietnamese foreign trade, with (...) a focus on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China as significant partners, and a macroeconomic assessment of the country. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to the development of fuzzy logic in narrow sense with evaluated syntax and connectives interpreted in Łukasiewicz algebra. The main results concern model theory of fuzzy logic and generalization of the Craig-Robinson's theorem on joint consistency of fuzzy theories as well as Craig's interpolation theorem.

The paper deals with fuzzy Horn logic which is a fragment of predicate fuzzy logic with evaluated syntax. Formulas of FHL are of the form of simple implications between identities. We show that one can have Pavelka-style completeness of FHL w.r.t. semantics over the unit interval [0, 1] with left-continuous t-norm and a residuated implication, provided that only certain fuzzy sets of formulas are considered. The model classes of fuzzy structures of FHL are characterized by closure properties. We also give (...) comments on related topics proposed by N. Weaver. (shrink)

Gestures is a collection of essays that proposes a daring and ambitious new conception of human behavior. Defining gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation,” Flusser moves around the topic from different points of view, angles and distances: sometimes he zooms in on a modest, ordinary movement like taking a photograph, shaving, or smoking a pipe. Sometimes he pulls back to look at something as (...) vast and varied as human “making,” embracing everything from the fashioning of simple tools to mass manufacturing. Holding firmly to basic phenomenological principles – that consciousness is always consciousness of something, that we know others by reference to ourselves, he claims that we constantly “read” states of mind, i.e. thoughts, intentions, emotions, from gestures; still we lack a theory about how this happens. Gestures takes a first step. It offers alternatives to theories by now so veiled by habit and myth that we are hardly conscious of them, and so hardly realize that they are failing. These include the assumption that we can “know” something without being affected by it, the belief that science is value-free, and the common conviction that science and art are fundamentally different activities. (shrink)

In The Democratic Soul, Aaron L. Herold argues that liberal democracy's current crisis—of extreme polarization, rising populism, and disillusionment with political institutions—must be understood as the culmination of a deeper dissatisfaction with the liberal Enlightenment. Major elements of both the Left and the Right now reject the Enlightenment's emphasis on rights as theoretically unfounded and morally undesirable and have sought to recover a contrasting politics of obligation. But this has re-opened questions about the relationship between politics and religion long (...) thought settled. To address our situation, Herold examines the political thought of Spinoza and Tocqueville, two authors united in support of liberal democracy but with differing assessments of the Enlightenment. Through an original reading of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Herold uncovers the theological foundation of liberal democracy: a comprehensive moral teaching rehabilitating human self-interest, denigrating "devotion" as a relic of "superstition," and cultivating a pride in living, acting, and thinking for oneself. In his political vision, Spinoza articulates our highest hopes for liberalism, for he is confident such an outlook will produce both intellectual flourishing and a paradoxical recovery of community. But Spinoza's project contains tensions which continue to trouble democracy today. As Herold shows via a new interpretation of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the dissatisfactions now destabilizing democracy can be traced to the Enlightenment's failure to find a place for religious longings whose existence it largely denied. In particular, Tocqueville described a natural human desire for a kind of happiness found, at least partly, in self-sacrifice. Because modernity weakens religion precisely as it makes democracy stronger than liberalism, it permits this desire to find new and dangerous outlets. Tocqueville thus sought to design a "new political science" which could rectify this problem and which therefore remains indispensable today in recovering the moderation lacking in contemporary politics. (shrink)

Turing tersely mentioned a notion of ``cultural search'' while otherwise deeply engaged in the design and operations of one of the earliest computers. His idea situated the individual squarely within a collaborative intellectual environment, but did he mean to suggest this in the form of a general information system? In the same writing Turing forecast mechanizations of proofs and outlined genetical searches, much later implemented in cellular automata. The conjecture explores the networked data-information-knowledge continuum as the subject of Turing's notions (...) of search and intelligence, using analogous models from library systems theory. Floridi's philosophy of information is posed as a potential guide to applied information services design of the Turing type. The initial problem is to identify a minimal set of assumptions from Turing's essay beyond the general context of computing. This set will form a bridge to an analogous set of principles in library systems models by eliciting supporting evidence in the literature relating the two. Finally it will be shown how Floridi's philosophy of information more fully encompasses Turing's insight in view of the conjecture. (shrink)

Bynum (Putting information first: Luciano Floridi and the philosophy of information. NY: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) identifies Floridi’s focus in the philosophy of information (PI) on entities both as data structures and as information objects. One suggestion for examining the association between the former and the latter stems from Floridi’s Herbert A. Simon Lecture in Computing and Philosophy given at Carnegie Mellon University in 2001, open problems in the PI: the transduction or transception, and how we gain knowledge about the world as (...) a complex, living, information environment. This paper addresses PI across a model of interoperating levels: perception (P)—intuition (N)—computation (C)—information (I), as factored by cognitive continuity (1), temporality (2), and constitution (3). How might we begin to characterize our experience of an abstract information object across such a matrix? Chudnoff’s rationalist distinctions between perception and intuition serve as a first rung of the ladder. Turing’s brief references to the utility of intuition, in an allied, rationalist-Cartesian sense, provide the next step up to computation. Floridi provides the final link from computation to information. (shrink)

This book reflects on the significant and highly original scientific contributions of Hans Primas. A professor of chemistry at ETH Zurich from 1962 to 1995, Primas continued his research activities until his death in 2014. Over these 50 years and more, he worked on the foundations of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, contributed to a number of significant issues in theoretical chemistry, helped to clarify central topics in quantum theory and the philosophy of physics, suggested innovative ways of addressing interlevel relations (...) in the philosophy of science, and introduced cutting-edge approaches in the flourishing young field of scientific studies of consciousness. His work in these areas of research and its continuing impact is described by noted experts, colleagues, and collaborators of Primas. All authors contextualize their contributions to facilitate the mutual dialog between these fields. (shrink)

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelbände zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants veröffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verhältnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ansätzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Veröffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdrückliche Desiderate der Forschung erfüllen. Die Publikationen repräsentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

In Post-History, Vilém Flusser asks the essential question: Is there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? Written as a series of lectures to be delivered at universities in Brazil, Israel, and France, this first English translation of Post-History brings to an anglophone readership Flusser's first critique of apparatus as the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological model of present times.