MV-algebras stand for the many-valued Łukasiewicz logic the same as Boolean algebras for the classical logic. States on MV-algebras were first mentioned [20] in probability theory and later also introduced in effort to capture a notion of `an average truth-value of proposition' [15] in Łukasiewicz many-valued logic. In the presented paper, an integral representation theorem for finitely-additive states on semisimple MV-algebra will be proven. Further, we shall prove extension theorems concerning states defined on sub-MV-algebras and normal partitions of unity generalizing (...) in this way the well-known Horn-Tarski theorem for Boolean algebras. (shrink)

In this paper I want to do the following things. First I want to show that in the part of the Theaetetus where the relationship between knowledge and perception is examined, the concept of knowledge that is in question is very clearly characterized. We are left in no doubt as to what is to count as knowing. Secondly I want to unravel in some detail the case that Socrates puts on Protagoras’ behalf where he draws on what Protagoras actually wrote (...) (151 E-152C); as opposed to what he may have taught secretly to his pupils (152C-160D). Thirdly I wish to argue that if we let the dialogue speak for itself, it is manifest that this case put up on Protagoras’ behalf at 151 E-152C is not overthrown; it is not even shaken. (shrink)

In this paper I want to do the following things. First I want to show that in the part of the Theaetetus where the relationship between knowledge and perception is examined, the concept of knowledge that is in question is very clearly characterized. We are left in no doubt as to what is to count as knowing. Secondly I want to unravel in some detail the case that Socrates puts on Protagoras’ behalf where he draws on what Protagoras actually wrote (...) ; as opposed to what he may have taught secretly to his pupils. Thirdly I wish to argue that if we let the dialogue speak for itself, it is manifest that this case put up on Protagoras’ behalf at 151 E-152C is not overthrown; it is not even shaken.In that part of the dialogue where the question is under examination whether or not knowledge and perception are the same, Socrates uses an idealized concept of knowledge. That is, he restricts the use of the word by setting down what he will consider to be the essential characteristics of knowledge, the sufficient and necessary conditions of its being instantiated. An excellent piece of philosophical procedure. (shrink)

It is not quite as easy to see that there is in fact no formula of this modal language having the same truth conditions (in terms of S5 Kripke semantics) as (1). This was rst conjectured by Allen Hazen2 and later proved by Harold Hodes3. We present a simple direct proof of this result and discuss some consequences for the logical analysis of ordinary modal discourse.

Because anticipated and retrospective regret play important roles in practical deliberation and motivation, better understanding them can illuminate the contours of human agency. However, the possibility of self-ignorance and the fact that we change over time can make regret—especially anticipatory regret—not only a poor predictor of where the agent will be in the future but also an unreliable indicator of where the agent stands. Granting these, this paper examines the way in which prospective and, particularly, retrospective regret can nevertheless yield (...) important insight into the sorts of creatures we are, both generally and individually. The experience of retrospective regret can show a person she values something in a way she did not know or that she is (or was) a different person than she had thought, insights which can factor into forward-looking, or prospective, deliberation. Such instances of revelatory regret reveal something to the agent about herself as agent. I examine two cases of agential self-ignorance. In the first, the experience of regret reveals what the agent values, not only to others but even to the agent himself. In the second, the agent anticipates experiencing regret for an action but does not experience the regret, suggesting that the agent did not value the rejected alternative in the way she thought. Anticipatory regret is forward-looking and can play an important role in practical deliberation. But insofar as anticipatory regret flows from one’s imperfect judgment and prospection about oneself, retrospective regret can be an important corrective in helping the agent understand her own standpoint. (shrink)

It can be said that Rousseau is one of the most acute thinkers of the corruption of civilisation. In fact, the Second Discourse and the Essay on the Origins of Languages could be read as elaborate analyses of advancing social and cultural decline inasmuch as mankind is continually moving away from the original state of natural innocence. But Rousseau’s idea of corruption is not straightforward. I try to show that in the Essay, Rousseau emphasizes the natural causes for corruption. I (...) argue that an opposition between necessity and contingency, which more accurately represents the two modes operating in Rousseau’s doctrine, should replace the standard nature/culture divide. The contingency of natural catastrophes is found to be ultimately responsible for the corruption in the social realm, which is therefore largely driven by natural causes. (shrink)

Descartes and Architecture -/- The article analyses the architectural metaphor in Descartes' Discourse on Method and The Seventh replies. The idea of Descartes' project, introduced to the reader as a construction of a building and planning of a city, is much more indebted to its architectural imagery than, or so its critics say, is "sound" for a philosophical theory. Architecture is an analogon of philosophy in Descartes' texts. By producing a figure of philosopher-architect, Descartes tries to legitimate his philosophical theory (...) using architectural discourse. Descartes always uses the examples of architecture and urban planning when he intends to introduce his great project of a new beginning in philosophy. This new beginning is manifest in two levels: first, as a denial of traditional metaphysics of the Schools in the Discourse, and second, as a denial of one’s own beliefs in the Meditations using methodical doubt. In the conclusion, the article emphasises through Derrida's analysis of metaphor that, given the metaphysical nature of any metaphor, Descartes’ metaphor also cannot appear as a mere rhetorical figure. (shrink)

"Language and its Public Features: Reorganizing the Trivium in Locke's Essay and Port-Royal Logic" The new theory of language in the 17th century coincides with the end the traditional order of disciplines in the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric), which in the mediaeval times provided a comprehensive view of the problems of discourse. The article focuses on some key passages in Port-Royal Logic and Locke's Essay that provide us with a typical early modern scheme of linguistic representation, characterised by heavily (...) emphasized dualism of ideas and words. Since ideas are also the meanings of words and are ontologically essentially private, one can raise the question, where in this analysis of language is it even possible to locate its public features. The article tries to show that private language is not only possible for Locke and the Port-Royalists, but that it is even a necessary and primary character of language. Language becomes a public medium of communication only on the junctures of private meanings constituted by the “common use” of words. The article then focuses on almost complete marginalisation in the two works of the theory of public speech. Rhetoric, in the 17th century often reduced to mere eloquence, has no place in philosophy, and the duties of making speeches persuasive are taken over by reason alone. To show how the domains of jurisdiction of the trivial disciplines had been transformed in the linguistic theories proposed by the Port-Royal Logic and Locke, one can construct a hypothetical early modern trivium in the light of the following order: idea – word – figure, or, logic – grammar – rhetoric. Rhetoric is found to have kept its structural place only to be singled out as dangerous. (shrink)

"Dieu fainéant? God and Bodies in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz" Conservation, concurrence with secondary causes, and occasionalism are the three attitudes that God can have towards the created universe in early modern philosophy. The aim of this article is to show how and in what forms these three originally mediaeval theories had survived the seventeenth century in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. I argue that although it cannot always be unequivocally determined which of the three doctrines each of the thinkers is (...) indebted to, Descartes should nevertheless be interpreted as a concurrentist, Malebranche as an occasionalist, and Leibniz can be read as a mere conservationist. The conservation of substances in existence being nothing but a continual creation, we claim (against the famous thesis of Alexandre Koyré) that Leibniz’s God can be called neither Dieu fainéant nor God of the Sabbath day. (shrink)

The article describes a rarely mentioned and discussed method of explication first found in Chapter six of Descartes’s posthumously published _The World_ (_Le Monde_), where he uses a fictitious cosmological narrative to develop an account of our material universe and its laws. The assumption of such an approach is that the thing’s structure (nature) can be revealed by its genesis (its producibility), even if the latter is fictitious, or rather, precisely _because_ it is fictitious. This method of “genetic epistemology” turns (...) out to be surprisingly influential: it is found, for example, in Rousseau’s reflections on the state of nature, but also in commentaries on Descartes’s philosophy – e.g. in Martial Gueroult’s principle of “the order of reasons”. (shrink)

The present book is intended to help students overcome difficulties by presenting Jaspers' thoughts in comparatively clear and straightforward fashion. While it denies that philosophy is "practical" in any cheap and obvious sense, it follows Jaspers in attempting to avoid the otiose and emphasize the relevance of philosophy to matters of ultimate concern. Those who wish a more theoretical and systematic presentation may well call to mind that, as Heidegger's followers express it, Jaspers, like Kierkegaard- and to some extent Sartre- (...) quite deliberately spurned the "ontological" in favor of the "ontic.". (shrink)

Although the idiom “genesis and structure” is usually associated with the rise of structuralism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two notions are arguably among the most persistent methods in the history of modern philosophy. This article outlines the emergence of “genetic epistemology” in the seventeenth century, when the seemingly antithetical character of the conceptual pair was reworked into a productive epistemological theory, especially in Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who increasingly used diachronic (genetic) narratives to explain the (...) synchronic (structural) features in their theories. Against Cassirer, I argue that it was Descartes rather than Hobbes who first presented structural issues genetically. In Descartes’ natural philosophy, his frequent claims that showing how a thing is produced reveals its true nature foreshadow precisely what Hobbes and Isaac Barrow later describe as causal definitions of geometric figures, in which the process of ideal generation by motion is what constitutes the very essence of a figure. I link this method to the historicizing discourse on origins in the Enlightenment and conclude by suggesting that there is a trace of Platonic idealism in genetic epistemology. (shrink)

The article deals with a seldom exposed but ubiquitous method in the 18th century philosophy, named conjectural history by Dugald Stewart. Its characteristic feature is a peculiar combination of historically verified facts and speculations, which in some authors are even openly fictitious. The hypotheses about prehistory (always set forth in the form of temporal historical narrative) are meant to aid a certain classic philosophical topos of the 18th century: the quest for origins. The article first surveys and compares common points (...) as well as peculiarities of various “treatises on the origins” in the Scottish and French Enlightenment. In the second half it focuses on an implicit but clearly identifiable conjectural history in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, and on the application of conjectural history in the domain of the intellect and knowledge in the Encylopédie. It seems that the genealogy of knowledge in d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse most manifestly confirms the initial designation of conjectural history: that it is in fact another name for philosophy. If this holds true, than it might prove useful to search for its first seeds in Descartes’ Discourse on method, a work which places itself on the cross-section of history and fable. (shrink)

In the field of contemporary continental ontology, Speculative realist thinkers are now grappling with the genealogy of their ideas in the history of modern philosophy. The Speculative Realism movement prompted a debate, criticizing the predominant postmodernist orientation in philosophy, which located its origins in Kantian "correlationism" which supposedly ended the period of early modern naive realist metaphysics by showing that the mind and the outside world can only ever be understood as correlates. The debate over a new kind of realism (...) has attracted many supporters and critics. In order to refocus its specific interpretation of modern philosophy in general and of the Kantian gesture in particular, this volume brings together major authors working on contemporary ontology and historians of ideas. It underlines and illustrates the fact that contemporary continental philosophy is rediscovering its past in original ways by productively re-interpreting some of the key concepts of modern philosophy. The perspectives and accounts of the key concepts of the history of philosophy are different in the views of individual contributors, and sometimes radically so, yet the discussion between contemporary realists and their critics shows that the real battleground of new ideas lies not in developing the philosophical motifs of the end of the 20th century, but rather in rethinking the milestones of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Članek obravnava Leibnizev načrt filozofskega jezika, t. i. »univerzalno karakteristiko«. Najprej izpostavimo dejstvo, da Leibnizev načrt temelji na določenem semiotičnem vidiku matematike, ki v kontekstu novoveške ideje matematizacije vseh znanosti predstavlja novost. Kakorkoli ima Leibnizev drzen načrt resne pomanjkljivosti, ki so nedvomno botrovale temu, da ni nikoli zares začel z njeno izvedbo, pa Leibniz črpa optimizem iz strogo platonistične zasnove svoje epistemologije, v kateri je karakteristika utemeljena. Karakteristika je v sami teoretski zasnovi mogoča le pod pogojem, da se zaveže klasičnemu (...) realizmu in se odpove tisti metodi filozofije zavesti, ki sta jo ustoličila Descartes in Locke. Iz tega, kaj karakteristika obljublja, in iz njene zavezanosti platonizmu pa je videti, da se karakteristika kot jezik narave v ključnih potezah zgleduje po neki tradiciji mišljenja jezika, ki ima svoj začetek v Platonovem Kratilu in ima v Leibnizevem času še vedno svoje zagovornike. (shrink)

This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency (...) while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions. (shrink)

The article tackles the relationship between genius and analogy in Descartes’s early writings and the programmatic writings of the Encyclopédie. For Descartes, ingenious analogies between phenomena that are not obviously related belong more properly to poetic truth discourse, whereas philosophy must be content with the more easily observable and methodical mechanistic comparisons. In the encyclopedic ordering of Diderot and d’Alembert, on the other hand, ingenious analogies are not specific to any particular field of knowledge, since genius consists precisely in connecting (...) even the most remote branches of the whole tree of knowledge. I argue that the theoretical core of both approaches can be traced back to Aristotle’s theory of metaphor insofar as it relies on the analogy of genera rather than species. (shrink)

Against recent criticisms of idealism coming from the camp of the so-called New Realists, this volume shows that there is (and always has been) more to idealism than mind-centered ontology. The chapters by a group of both leading and up-and-coming scholars show that idealism can be approached from a plethora of angles, both contemporary and historically inspired, and that this broader view is precisely what may save its reputation in the 21st century.

In his newly updated version of The Anatomy of a Constitutional Law Case, Alan F. Westin provides a documentary portrait of historically important constitutional law case, 'Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, ' from its rise in a bargaining dispute in the steel industry during 1952 to the aftermath of its decision by the United States Supreme Court. Westin has added to his classic book additional materials and personal commentaries collected since the work was first published. The new information (...) covers what went on within the Truman administration, what went on within the Supreme Court when analyzing and resolving issues that come before it. Westin includes selections from transcripts, briefs and other official proceedings, adds notes describing each phase of the constitutional process, and a section of commentary and questions relating this case to others. (shrink)

What does social justice require in contemporary societies? What are the requirements of social democracy? Who and where are the individuals and groups that can carry forward agendas for progressive social transformation? What are we to make of the so-called new social movements of the last thirty years? Is identity politics compatible with egalitarianism? Can cultural misrecognition and economic maldistribution be fought simultaneously? What of the heritage of Western Marxism is alive and dead? And how is current critical social theory (...) to approach these and other questions? Much of the most productive work done in recent social theory has revolved around such issues, in particular, around those concerning the relationship between the politics of recognition and the politics of distribution. After the intense theoretical focus over the last fifteen years or so on the issues of recognition politics—multiculturalism, multi-nationalism, identity politics, group-differentiated rights, the accommodation of difference, and so on—some social theorists have worried that attention has been diverted from important issues of distributive equality—systematic impoverishment, increasing material inequality, ‘structural’ unemployment, the growth of oligarchic power, global economic segmentation, and so on. While some critics seem to have adopted a blunt ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ line of criticism,1 others have attempted to develop an overarching, integrative theoretical framework adequate to the diverse issues concerning both economic and cultural justice. For example, Axel Honneth proposes that a suitably developed and normatively robust theory of intersubjective recognition can adequately integrate an analysis of apparently diverse contemporary struggles: those for a just division of labor and hence, a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as those for a culture free of identity-deforming disrespect and denigration. (shrink)

Since Mueller’s 1958 article calling Hegelian dialectics a “legend,” it has been fashionable to deny that Hegel used thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectics. But in truth, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has 28 dialectics hidden on four outline levels, and The Philosophy of History has 10 more on three outline levels. In Phenomenology’s macrodialectic, Hegel’s nonsupernatural Spirit–all reality, everything in the universe, including man and artificial objects–advances from unconscious + union (thesis) to conscious + separation (antithesis) to a synthesis of conscious (from the antithesis) (...) + union (from the thesis). Previous interpretations of Phenomenology have missed this dialectic: they have assumed that Spirit’s journey begins with consciousness, whereas the journey actually begins in the primordial state of nature, before man arrives and provides Spirit with its Mind (the collective mind of man). Mind then misperceives itself as a multitude of separate alien “objects”–things other than itself. The macrodialectic and all other dialectics are based on Christianity’s Johannine separation-and-return mythology; all Hegelian dialectics separate from a concept in the thesis, going to that something’s opposite (antithesis), and then return to the thesis concept. Thus, in Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectic (God = master, man = slave), man advances from potential + freedom to actual + bondage (religiosity) to actual + freedom (atheism). Only Marx and Tillich understood Hegelian dialectics. Marx’s basic dialectic (one of four) saw history separating from and returning to Communism, going from communal ownership + poverty (primitive communism, or gens) to private ownership + wealth (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) to communal ownership + wealth (final communism). Tillich’s basic dialectic (one of many) separates from and returns to God, advancing from Yes to God + Yes to supernaturalism (theism) to No to God + No to supernaturalism (atheism) to Yes to God + No to supernaturalism (humanism: humanity is the nonsupernatural “God above the God of theism”). (shrink)

A key philosophical feature of Peter Jackson’s film interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is its use of fantasy to inspire a “recovery” of the actual or, in other words, a reawakening to the beauty of nature and the many possible ways of living in healthier ecological relation to the world. Though none of these ways is perfectly achieved, this pluralistic view is demonstrated in the various lifeways of Hobbits, Elves, Men, and Ents. All of the positive (...) relationships embodied in the films—to trees, mountains, horses, and vegetable gardens—involve loving care and attention, receiving nourishment and livelihood without instrumentalization, or reducing nature to mere resource. The films also vividly display a variety of ugly and destructive ways of using the land to accrue power and wealth. These noxious ways, specifically because they actively destroy the lands that they use, always need more. They will thus eventually annihilate the beautiful ways of being if they are not actively resisted. Some of those who would rather be tending their own trees, gardens, or horses or even wandering in the wild forests must therefore turn their attention to struggle and resistance instead. This is a struggle full of grief, and at times even verging on despair, but it is marked by the refusal to give up hope. Indeed, what Jackson and Tolkien have to say about hope is as important in responding to the ecological crisis as anything they have to say about nature, inasmuch as they help to remind us that even in our own times, “there is still hope.”. (shrink)

Whiskey Lao -- Fair warning -- Randomness at large -- We the addicted -- The best possible world -- The importance of being doomed -- Moral responsibility -- The upper limit to the value of possible worlds.

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

Are we witnessing progress or regress in the recent increasing popularity and electoral success of populist politicians and parties in consolidated democratic nations? ... Is the innovative use of popular referendum in Great Britain to settle fundamental constitutional questions a progressive or regressive innovation? ... Similarly, is the increasing use of constituent assemblies to change constitutions across the world evidence of progress in democratic constitutionalism, or, a worryingly regressive change back toward unmediated popular majoritarianism? ... This paper reflects on some (...) of the perils and promise of framing such questions with the conceptual couplet of progress and regress. It considers four compelling critiques of the use of ‘progress’ and its cognates in sociopolitical theory, as well as arguing that such concepts are nevertheless ineliminable for our normative theories. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can avoid the most serious problems by employing only conceptions of political progress and regress that are piecemeal, pragmatic, and processual. (shrink)

Autobiography and Teacher Development in China investigates the roles of autobiography in teacher education, as several scholars in China recontextualize Western conceptions of teacher development, combining them with uniquely Chinese cultural conceptions to articulate a reconceptualization of teacher development that holds worldwide significance. Framed by the work of Zhang Hua and William F. Pinar, these theoretical and practical essays point to an internationally inflected reconceptualization of teachers' professional development, pre-service and in-service. This volume addresses multiple movements of teacher education reform (...) worldwide, focused on crafting a nationally distinctive course not only internationally, but also culturally, historically, and locally. (shrink)

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