This book, a history of a religious category of ancient philosophy, is the first synthesis on the notion of daimōn in the Platonic tradition. It focuses on the relationship between demonology and, respectively, cosmology, the philosophical hermeneutics of religion and theories of the soul. Histoire d’une catégorie religieuse de la philosophie ancienne, ce livre représente la première synthèse sur la notion de daimōn dans la tradition platonicienne. Il étudie les relations de la démonologie avec la cosmologie, l’herméneutique philosophique de la (...) religion et les théories de l’âme. (shrink)

According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.

Digital inequality and digital justice are pressing issues in today's world. This work examines the socio-philosophical aspects of these problems and proposes measures to achieve digital justice. The authors draw attention to the fact that digital inequality can manifest itself in various forms, such as access to information, technology and resources, as well as opportunities to participate in the digital economy. This can lead to increased social inequalities and limited opportunities for the development of individuals and society as a whole. (...) To achieve digital justice, the authors propose a number of measures, such as improving access to digital technologies and resources, ensuring equal opportunities to participate in the digital economy, and protecting consumer rights and data privacy. They also draw attention to the need to promote digital literacy and education so that people can make effective use of digital technologies and resources. The authors also examine digital inequality and digital justice in the context of monopoly and free speech. They point out that some companies that declare their social responsibility may use their monopolistic position in the market to limit freedom of speech and access to information. In this context, the authors suggest strengthening the role of the state in regulating the digital economy and protecting consumer rights. In conclusion, the research is a valuable contribution to the field of research on digital inequality and digital justice. It emphasizes the need to take into account the socio-philosophical dimensions of these issues and suggests measures to achieve digital justice. It also draws attention to the importance of cultural and historical sensitivity in the development of digital policies and resources. (shrink)

This book provides an original and challenging perspective of religions as abstract complex adaptive systems, using an interdisciplinary approach to try to understand what religions are and how they function, two fundamental issues which, despite an intense struggle from several fields, have not yet been resolved. What is the source of religious belief? How do religions work and what are they made of? Why is religion so important for us that it has survived centuries of scientific progress and secularization? Why (...) are people religious even outside religion? The book addresses these questions using an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to untangle the Gordian knot of defining religion. In short, they can be considered entropy-reducing technologies. What differentiates them from other meaning-producing systems is their configuration which employs specific building blocks as tools for mitigating entropy, which are also subsystems and combine in various ways to build a unique configuration: rituals, myths, taboos, supernatural agents, authority, identity, superstitions, moral obligations, afterlife beliefs and the sacred. As a reaction to perturbances or pressure, systems can collapse. Inspired by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it is, in this book, referred to as fragility—the negative reaction of systems to random events, and four parameters can be used to evaluate it in religious systems: monotonicity (the inability to learn from past mistakes), coupling (linking with other systems: such as political or economic), centralization and stress starvation. Several case studies are provided in order to test the theoretical claims made in this book, based on the author's field research in Romania, Japan, North Korea and Mongolia, and offering details that could be of interest to casual readers, students and researchers of religion. (shrink)

In the wake of the considerable cultural changes and social shifts that the United States and all advanced industrial democracies have experienced since the late 1960s and early 1970s, social discourse around the disempowered has changed in demonstrable ways. In From Property to Family: American Dog Rescue and the Discourse of Compassion, Andrei Markovits and Katherine Crosby describe a “discourse of compassion” that actually alters the way we treat persons and ideas once scorned by the social mainstream. This “culture (...) turn” has also affected our treatment of animals inaugurating an accompanying “animal turn”. In the case of dogs, this shift has increasingly transformed the discursive category of the animal from human companion to human family member. One of the new institutions created by this attitudinal and behavioral change towards dogs has been the breed specific canine rescue organization, examples of which have arisen all over the United States beginning in the early 1980s and massively proliferating in the 1990s and subsequent years. While the growing scholarship on the changed dimension of the human-animal relationship attests to its social, political, moral and intellectual salience to our contemporary world, the work presented in Markovits and Crosby’s book constitutes the first academic research on the particularly important institution of breed specific dog rescue. (shrink)

The article investigates the possibility of formation of creative competencies of students within the framework of scientific personnel training. It is noted that the available training courses within the framework of general training of scientific personnel allow to prepare a specialist who is able to use existing knowledge, but such a specialist is not trained in creativity. For the formation of creative competences it is necessary to take a training course of the general theory of systems, the purpose of which (...) is to create a universal methodology of reliable representation of models of objects, based on the similarity (isomorphism) of the forms and laws of the universe. A detailed argumentation of the connection between creativity and holistic representation of being, the empirical manifestation of which is isomorphism, is given. The mechanism of knowledge translation within the framework of the mechanism of multisystem integration of human being, the mechanism of knowledge borrowing by human being from sensually comprehended forms of reality is investigated. It is stated that in order to meet the set tasks of cognition, a version of the general theory of systems, extended by the metaphysical component, is required. Further, starting from the metaphysical description of the foundations of the phenomenon of isomorphism observed in the practice of cognition, it is possible to form complete collections of patterns - typical forms, templates of objects and their relations. At present, the work on such a version of the general theory of systems is being finalized. The article concludes with a discussion of the problematics of teaching general systems theory. It emphasizes two components: the issue of positioning the training course "General Theory of Systems" in relation to other courses, as well as taking into account the specifics of the subject area of students in different specialties (directions). (shrink)

This volume explores how understanding relates to conscious experience. In doing so, it builds bridges between different philosophical disciplines and provides a metaphysically robust characterization of understanding, both in and beyond science. The past two decades have witnessed growing interest from epistemologists, philosophers of science, philosophers of mind, and ethicists in the nature and value of intellectual understanding. This volume features original essays from leading scholars of understanding and the phenomenal experiences that underlie it. The chapters are divided into three (...) thematic sections. Part 1 provides theoretical characterizations of understanding, including Henk de Regt’s defense of a contextual theory of scientific understanding and a debate whether scientific inference and explanatory power are necessary or central features of understanding. Part 2 explores how conscious experience and understanding are related. The chapters articulate a phenomenal theory of understanding and address themes that are connected to understanding, including awareness, transformative experiences, and exemplification. Finally, Part 3 is devoted to domain-specific inquiries about understanding, such as logical proofs, particle physics, cognitive enhancement, and moral understanding. (shrink)

Iritări cotidiene -- Actualităţi, inactualităţi -- Mici exerciţii de memorie -- Despre patosul real al interogaţiei religioase -- Neliniști (politice) -- Bazarul naţional -- Privitor ca la teatru -- Unele perplexităţi.

This paper examines the ability of countries in Central and Eastern Europe to ensure appropriate protection of research participants in the field of increasingly globalizing biomedical research. By applying an analytical framework for identifying gaps in policies and programs for human subjects protection to four countries of CEE—Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, substantial gaps in the scope and content of relevant policies and major impediments to program performance have been revealed. In these countries, public policies on the protection of research (...) participants lack consistency and reliable mechanisms for their implementation. Impediments to program performance most often relate to inadequacies in the national research ethics systems with regard to organizational structure, budgetary support, supervision, and training. The level of research ethics capacity varies from country to country and depends on socio-economic and political factors of post-communist transition. The breadth and depth of the problems identified suggest that the current level of protection for research participants in CEE might be inadequate to the challenges posed by the globalization of biomedical research. In CEE countries, there is a need for strengthening research ethics capacity through modification of relevant policies and improvement of program management. The differences among the countries call for further research on identifying the best approaches for filling the gaps in the policies and programs aimed at ensuring effective protection of research participants. (shrink)

The article analyzes the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence. The article considers the subjectivity of artificial intelligence, determines its necessity for solving intellectual problems depending on the possibility of representing the real world as a deterministic system. Methodological limitations of artificial intelligence, which is based on the use of big data technologies, are stated. These limitations cause the impossibility of forming a holistic representation of the objects of cognition and the world as a whole. As a tool for deterministic (...) description of the universe it is proposed to use empirical-metaphysical general theory of systems, which is an extension of existing general theories of systems due to ontological justification of the phenomenon of isomorphism and definition of a limited set of laws, rules, patterns and primitives of forms and relations of objects in the universe. The distinction of natural (human) and artificial intelligence is considered, including the realization of multisystem integration of intelligence in physical, biological, social and spiritual systems. A philosophically grounded approach to ensuring the evolutionary properties of artificial intelligence is formulated, based on the inclusion of non-equilibrium mechanisms through which stability is realized. (shrink)

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

Viebahn (2018) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular polysemy. I put this conclusion at work in the (...) context of the debate over the alleged referential-attributive ambiguity of the definite article. In reply to various criticisms, defenders of the ambiguity view argue that this is a case of polysemy. But opponents object that the dual use of the definite article fails tests for ambiguity. The debate seems to have come to stalemate, unless the relevance of the tests is determined for cases of alleged polysemy. I conclude that the balance of considerations incline towards rejecting the ambiguity thesis. (shrink)