This article is based on the Lasallian virtues while at the same time borrowing insights from five Biblical personalities namely Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, son of Jacob, and Moses respectively. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to examine these personalities in relation to the twelve Lasallian virtues as well as their attitudinal disposition in responding to their call of faith. Specific objectives are in tandem with these virtues, that is, piety, prudence, patience, self-control, silence, gentleness, gravity, humility, wisdom, zeal, (...) vigilance, and generosity. A descriptive research design and qualitative research methods were adopted. The aforementioned five Biblical personalities were selected using purposive sampling technique. Pertinent data were collected from the Holy Bible through desk research. Inferential citations and selected Biblical texts were the point of focus. Content analysis-exegesis was employed in qualitative data analysis. The analysis was guided by the theory of underdogs, misfit and the art of battling giants. It was revealed that the studied personalities faced their figurative Goliaths. Adam faced the serpent, Noah faced the unbelieving people before the deluge, while Abraham, Joseph, and Moses had to confront the Egyptian Pharaoh. Obedience was the Lasallian virtue that featured in all of these personalities from Adam to Moses. Other dominant virtues included piety, wisdom, prudence, patience, humility, zeal, self-control, and generosity. The study recommended that we embrace the Lasallian virtues. Irrespective of the Goliaths that we may face in our lives, it is recommended that we put our trust in God and have faith in Him similarly to how the studied Biblical personalities approached challenges during their times. (shrink)

Today, music is ubiquitous, highly valued in all known cultures, playing many roles in human daily life. The ethnographic study of the music of extant human foragers makes this quite apparent. Moreover, music is ancient. Sophisticated bird-bone and ivory flutes dated from 40 kya reveal an even earlier musical-technological tradition. So is music likely to be an entrenched feature of human social life during the long passage to behavioral modernity—say, by 150 kya—or earlier? In this article I sketch an evolutionary (...) model that focuses on hominin vocal musicality and communication in the Pleistocene, tracking between series of phenotypes and changes in ecological, social, cognitive, and informational contexts. The model links musicality and protomusic to a bigger picture of hominin socio-cognitive evolution, making some connections clearer, motivating further theorizing and the search for new evidence. (shrink)

O'Donnell, J. R. Anton Charles Pegis on the occasion of his retirement.--Conlan, W. J. The definition of faith according to a question of MS. Assisi 138: study and edition of text.--Spade, P. V. Five logical tracts by Richard Lavenham.--Maurer, A. Henry of Harclay's disputed question on the plurality of forms.--Brown, V. Giovanni Argiropulo on the agent intellect: an edition of Ms. Magliabecchi V 42.--Synan, E. A. The Exortacio against Peter Abelard's Dialogus inter philosophum, Iudaeum et Christianum.--Fitzgerald, W. Nugae Hyginianae.--Sheehan, M. (...) M. Marriage and family in English conciliar and synodal legislation.--Shook, L. K. Riddles relating to the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium.--Boyle, L. E. The De regno and the two powers.--Colledge, E. A Middle English Christological poem.--Gough, M. R. E. Three forgotten martyrs of Anazarbus in Cilicia.--Häring, N. Chartres and Paris revisited.--Hayes, W. Greek recentiores, (Ps.) Basil, Adversus eunomium, IV-V.--Owens, J. The physical world of Parmenides. (shrink)

This book presents a two-pronged analysis of Africa’s predicament by looking at the duality of ethics and identity. Its subject is the influence of history in the making of modern African identity, nationalism, peace-building and questions of ethics and justice.

Community Engagement (CE) has been presented by bio-ethicists and scientists as a straightforward and unequivocal good which can minimize the risks of exploitation and ensure a fair distribution of research benefits in developing countries. By means of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Kenya between 2007 and 2009 we explored how CE is understood and enacted in paediatric vaccine trials conducted by the Kenyan Medical Research Institute and the US Centers for Disease Control (KEMRI/CDC). In this paper we focus on the role (...) of paid volunteers who act as an interface between villagers KEMRI/CDC. Village Reporters’ (VRs) position of being both with the community and with KEMRI/CDC is advantageous for the conduct of trials. However it is also problematic in terms of exercising trust, balancing allegiances and representing community views. VRs role is shaped by ambiguities related to their employment status and their dual accountability to researchers and their villages. VRs are understandably careful to stress their commitment to self-less community service since it augments their respectability at community level and opens up opportunities for financial gain and self-development. Simultaneously VRs association with KEMRI/CDC and proximity to trial participants requires them to negotiate implicit and explicit expectations for material and medical assistance in a cultural setting in which much importance is placed on sharing and mutuality. To ensure continuity of productive interactions between VRs, and similar community intermediaries, and researchers, open discussion is needed about the problematic aspects of relational ethics, issues concerning undue influence, power relations and negotiating expectations. (shrink)

This collection of ten essays elucidates some of the more challenging aspects of Anscombe’s work and affirms her reputation as one of our most original ...

Excerpt from Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Allgemeinen Grammatik und Sprachphilosophie Uber den Begriff und die Aufgaben der Sprachphilosophie und allgemeinen Grammatik und ihr Verhältnis zur Psychologie. Erstes Kapitel. Begriff der Sprache und der Sprachphilosophie. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in (...) the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

This is a wide ranging and deeply learned examination of evolutionary developmental biology, and the foundations of life from the perspective of information theory. Hermeneutics was a method developed in the humanities to achieve understanding, in a given context, of texts, history, and artwork. In Readers of the Book of Life, the author shows that living beings are also hermeneutical interpreters of genetics texts saved in DNA; an interpretation based on the past experience of the cell (cell lineage, species), confronted (...) with and incorporating present environmental clues. This approach stresses the history, not only of the digital record saved in the DNA, but also of the flesh - the cellular organization which has a direct time-continuity with the very origins of life. This book is aimed at reconciling two opposite approaches to life. The first strictly sticking to a belief that all phenomena observed in the realm of the living can be explained from laws of physics. The opposite stressing the importance of features characteristic for a given level of description. To bring both views into a common understanding, the first part gives a comparison of the two problem solving strategies. The second part surveys the development of 20th century biology, bringing to light branches that never became part of the research mainstream. The third section of the book reviews a large body of recent evidence that can be interpreted in favor of the hermeneutic arguments. (shrink)

Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on meta-linguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension side and a precise conversational goal. The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, both when the quantifier occurs in unembedded and embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task (...) from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game-theoretic design, thereby including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context. Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles that describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient than a strategy based on literal descriptions. (shrink)

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, (...) suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures. (shrink)

When an agent intentionally changes something separate from herself—when, say, she opens a bottle—what is the relation between what the agent does and what the patient suffers? This paper defends the Aristotelian thesis that action is to passion as the road from Thebes to Athens is to the road from Athens to Thebes: they are two aspects of a single material reality. Philosophers of action tend to think otherwise. It is generally taken for granted that intentional transactions must be analyzed (...) in terms of a causal relation. Controversy surrounds the question what the causal relata are: event-causalists claim that both of the relata are events; agent-causalists claim that the first relatum is an agent, and they dispute among themselves whether the second is an event or a terminal state of the patient. But the entire controversy assumes the necessity of some causal analysis of transactions. This paper argues that, far from being necessary, no such analysis is even possible. (shrink)

We have previously established that [Formula: see text]-comprehension is equivalent to the statement that every dilator has a well-founded Bachmann–Howard fixed point, over [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we show that the base theory can be lowered to [Formula: see text]. We also show that the minimal Bachmann–Howard fixed point of a dilator [Formula: see text] can be represented by a notation system [Formula: see text], which is computable relative to [Formula: see text]. The statement that [Formula: see text] (...) is well founded for any dilator [Formula: see text] will still be equivalent to [Formula: see text]-comprehension. Thus, the latter is split into the computable transformation [Formula: see text] and a statement about the preservation of well-foundedness, over a system of computable mathematics. (shrink)

Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of _minimum necessary competence_: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of (...) the material record through that lens. We give examples to show that background theoretical commitments in cognitive science that inform those models lead to different minimum necessary competence results. This raises an important question: what principles should guide us in selecting a model from the cognitive sciences? We outline two complementary responses to this question. The first involves using _independent_ lines of evidence to converge on a particular capacity. This can then influence model choice. The second is a broader suggestion. Theoretical diversity is a good thing in science, but is only beneficial over a limited amount of time. According to recent modelling work, one way of limiting diversity is to introduce extreme priors. We argue that having a broad spectrum of views in the philosophy of cognitive science may actually help cognitive archaeologists address the problem of minimum necessary competence. (shrink)

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

In contrast to the theories of relativity, quantum mechanics is not yet based on a generally accepted conceptual foundation. It is proposed here that the missing principle may be identified through the observation that all knowledge in physics has to be expressed in propositions and that therefore the most elementary system represents the truth value of one proposition, i.e., it carries just one bit of information. Therefore an elementary system can only give a definite result in one specific measurement. The (...) irreducible randomness in other measurements is then a necessary consequence. For composite systems entanglement results if all possible information is exhausted in specifying joint properties of the constituents. (shrink)

In den Aufsätzen dieses Bandes präsentiert Anton Friedrich Koch Hegels theoretische Philosophie als diejenige Nichtstandard-Metaphysik, in der sich die Metaphysik, nicht aber die Philosophie vollendet. Jenseits von Hegels Evolutionstheorie des Absoluten gilt es von einem Standpunkt der Endlichkeit aus neu zu philosophieren.

History of the Mongolian Khėl Zokhiolyn Khu̇rėėlėn (Institute of Language and Literature) and well-known Mongolian linguists.

Scientific communication takes place at two registers: first, interactions with colleagues in close proximity—members of a network, school of thought or circle; second, depersonalised transactions among a potentially unlimited number of scholars can be involved (e.g., author and readers). The interference between the two registers in the process of peer review produces a drift toward conflict of interest. Three particular cases of peer review are differentiated: journal submissions, grant applications and applications for tenure. The current conflict of interest policies do (...) not cover all these areas. Furthermore, they have a number of flaws, which involves an excessive reliance on scholars’ personal integrity. Conflicts of interest could be managed more efficiently if several elements and rules of the judicial process were accepted in science. The analysis relies on both primary and secondary data with a particular focus on Canada. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 778-792, June 2022.

Empirical research on counterfactual thinking has found a closeness effect: people report higher negative affect if an actual outcome is close to a better counterfactual outcome. However, it remains unclear what actually is a ?close? miss. In three experiments that manipulate close counterfactuals, closeness effects were found only when closeness was unambiguously defined either with respect to a contrasted alternative, or with respect to a categorical boundary. In a real task people failed to report greater negative affect when encountering a (...) close numerical miss, while they predicted greater negative affect hypothetically. These results show that counterfactual closeness effects on affect depend on closeness being accessible and unambiguously defined. (shrink)

Michael Rathjen and the present author have shown that ‐bar induction is equivalent to (a suitable formalization of) the statement that every normal function has a derivative, provably in. In this note we show that the base theory can be weakened to. Our argument makes crucial use of a normal function f with and. We shall also exhibit a normal function g with and.

In the context of reverse mathematics, effective transfinite recursion refers to a principle that allows us to construct sequences of sets by recursion along arbitrary well orders, provided that each set is ‐definable relative to the previous stages of the recursion. It is known that this principle is provable in. In the present note, we argue that a common formulation of effective transfinite recursion is too restrictive. We then propose a more liberal formulation, which appears very natural and is still (...) provable in. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

We present a developmental perspective regarding the difference in perceptions toward privacy between young and old. Here, we introduce the notion of privacy conceptions, that is, the specific ideas that individuals have regarding what privacy actually is. The differences in privacy concerns often found between young and old are postulated as the result of the differences found in their privacy conceptions, which are subsequently linked to their developmental life stages. The data presented have been obtained through a questionnaire distributed among (...) adolescents, young adults, and adults and provide support for this developmental perspective. This study is one of the first to include adolescents when investigating the privacy concerns among young and old. The results show that the privacy conceptions held by adolescents indeed differ from those held by young adults and adults in keeping with the expectations as seen from a developmental perspective. In addition, the areas in which the differences in privacy conceptions are found also reflect the strongest relationship with concerns. As such, these findings present an alternative perspective to the commonly held notion that young people are less concerned about privacy. (shrink)

In this paper we are going to show that error coping strategies play an essential role in linguistic pragmatics. We study the effect of noisy speaker strategies within a framework of signalling games with feedback loop. We distinguish between cases in which errors occur in message selection and cases in which they occur in signal selection. The first type of errors affects the content of an utterance, and the second type its linguistic expression. The general communication model is inspired by (...) the Shannon–Weaver communication model. We test the model by a number of benchmark examples, including examples of relevance implicatures, quantity implicatures, and presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

Questions regarding the moral responsibility of Internet accessand service providers relating to information on the Internetcall for a reassessment of the ways in which we think aboutattributing blame, guilt, and duties of reparation andcompensation. They invite us to borrow something similar to theidea of strict liability from the legal sphere and to introduceit in morality and ethical theory. Taking such a category in thedistribution of responsibilities outside the domain of law andintroducing it into ethics, however, is a difficult thing. Doingso (...) seems to conflict with some broadly shared and deeply feltintuitions regarding the individuality of responsibility and therelationship between responsibility and guilt. These convictionscoincide with some basic ideas in Kantian moral theory and theascriptive theory based on these ideas. Nevertheless, theproblems to which the proposed liabilities / responsibilitiesrelate are so serious that they do not seem to leave room foraloofness. At least, they encourage us to reconsider the idea ofstrict liability carefully and to assess its merits. (shrink)

Peter Singer’s defense of the duty to aid the world’s poor by the pond analogy is self-defeating. It cannot be both true that you ought to save the drowning child from a pond at the expense of ruining your shoes and that you ought to aid the world’s poor if you thereby do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance. Taking the latter principle seriously would lead you to let the child in front of you drown whenever you could thereby (...) save more children in the developing world. Though Singer can defend the duty to aid the world’s poor starting from consequentialist principles requiring you to make things go best in the impartial sense, he cannot have it invoking the commonsense judgment about what you ought to do in the pond case. There is no sound path from commonsense morality to Singer’s principles of beneficence. (shrink)

The conclusion of practical reasoning is commonly said to rest upon a diverse pair of representations—a “major” and a “minor” premise—the first of which concerns the end and the second, the means. Modern and contemporary philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning tend to portray the minor premise as a “means-end belief”—a belief about, as Michael Smith puts it, “the ways in which one thing leads to another,” or, as John McDowell puts it, “what can be relied on to bring (...) about what.” On this point there is little difference between followers of Davidson and followers of Anscombe, or between those who invoke Hume’s legacy and those who invoke Aristotle’s. But Aristotle himself held a very different position. According to him, the minor premise concerns particulars, a sphere controlled by perception. The perception of particulars—that is, of the really-existing people and things confronted in the field of action—plays no essential role in the modern account of rational agency. Because it does not, the modern account fails to explain how one could act for a reason, or how practical reasoning could deliver any conclusion. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the specific ways in which Hegel's account of life and organisms advances upon Kant's account of natural purposes in the third Critique. First of all, I argue that it is essential for Hegel's account that it contains two levels. The first level is that of logical life, the discussion of which does not depend on any empirical knowledge of natural organisms. I provide my reconstruction of this logical account of life that answers to the objection (...) made by a number of Hegel scholars to the effect that Hegel does in fact rely on empirical knowledge at this place in the logic. The second level is that of natural organisms themselves. I argue that it is with the help of this separation of the logical and natural levels, as well as his doctrine of the impotence of nature, that Hegel, unlike Kant, (a) is able to claim that not everything in natural organisms is purposive, and (b) provide a philosophical, and not merely empirical, account of the distinction between plants and animals. In both of these respects, Hegel's position can be seen as a welcome advance over Kant. (shrink)

In this contribution, the author analyzes Vladimir Solov''ëv''s intention to study the idea of the Good as something relatively independent from religion and metaphysics. Some implications of Solov''ëv''s definition of moral philosophy in The Justification of the Good are investigated, and illustrated with his applied ethics of war in chapter 18 of this book. It appears that Solov''ëv''s moral philosophy and his account of war must be understood in connection with the central place of the cult of ancestors in his (...) ethics. The idea of the Good and the idea of God spring from a religious origin and appear in our efforts to conjure up and exorcize the spirits of our forefathers. The author explains this ethics by referring to Solov''ëv''s article China and Europe. There, Solov''ëv assumes that the Christian mind is treatened by the danger of a cultural order in which the cult of ancestors is most purely preserved. In the future war against China, however, Christian civilization must show itself superior to its enemy without betraying its loyalty to its own ancestors. The author concludes that in Solov''ëv''s ethics, the moral subject is divided between the confirmation of its own autonomy and its being haunted by the spirits of its forefathers, a haunt which results in relentless wars against others. (shrink)