The paper deals with the question of the attribution to Epicurus of the classification of pleasures into 'kinetic' and 'static'. This classification, usually regarded as authentic, confronts us with a number of problems and contradictions. Besides, it is only mentioned in a few sources that are not the most reliable. Following Gosling and Taylor, I believe that the authenticity of the classification may be called in question. The analysis of the ancient evidence concerning Epicurus' concept of pleasure is made according (...) to the following principle: first, I consider the sources that do not mention the distinction between 'kinetic' and 'static' pleasures, and only then do I compare them with the other group of texts which comprises reports by Cicero, Diogenes Laertius and Athenaeus. From the former group of texts there emerges a concept of pleasure as a single and not twofold notion, while such terms as 'motion' and 'state' describe not two different phenomena but only two characteristics of the same phenomenon. On the other hand, the reports comprising the latter group appear to derive from one and the same doxographical tradition, and to be connected with the classification of ethical docrines put forward by the Middle Academy and known as the divisio Carneadea. In conclusion, I argue that the idea of Epicurus' classification of pleasures is based on a misinterpretation of Epicurus' concept in Academic doxography, which tended to contrapose it to doctrines of other schools, above all to the Cyrenaics' views. (shrink)

Avicenna says that intellectual cognition involves the emanation of an intelligible form by the ‘agent intellect’ upon the human mind. This paper argues that in order to understand why he says this, we need to think of intellectual cognition as a special case of a much more general phenomenon. More specifically, Avicenna's introduction of an agent intellect will be shown to be a natural consequence of certain assumptions about the temporality, the completion, and the teleology of the causal processes by (...) which things acquire forms. (shrink)

Philosophy is traditionally understood as the search for universal truths, and philosophers are supposed to transmit those truths beyond the limits of their own culture. But, today, we have become skeptical about the ability of an individual philosopher to engage in "universal thinking," so philosophy seems to capitulate in the face of cultural relativism. In Introduction to Antiphilosophy, Boris Groys argues that modern "antiphilosophy" does not pursue the universality of thought as its goal but proposes in its place the (...) universality of life, material forces, social practices, passions, and experiences --angst, vitality, ecstasy, the gift, revolution, laughter or "profane illumination" --and he analyzes this shift from thought to life and action in the work of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Derrida, from Nietzsche to Benjamin. Ranging across the history of modern thought, Introduction to Antiphilosophy endeavors to liberate philosophy from the stereotypes that hinder its development. --Publisher. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's «Phenomenology of Perception» suggests perception to be the primary level of the giveness of the world. Perception appears as always an incomplete synthesis of the plural, bringing together bodily and material aspects. Such the simplest interpretation of perception as rendering a contact within the dyad «body-world» is a preliminary axiom for explaining the rest of the process of noematic sense formation. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical intuitions clearly presuppose more, and perception is also thought of as the final (...) point where sense is already given by some way. Thus, in Phenomenology, the second interpretation of perception presumes it to be sense-giving accompanied by the tacit cogito. Merleau-Ponty suggests that these interpretations are compatible with each other, but the transition between them seems really problematic. In the research author shos that the limit of the initial synthesis of perception - some sense of the perceived (exemplyfing meanings as «this horse», «the green density that rushed towards me») - is unattainable from within perception itself and by its means. Perception is itself mediated by other faculties, such as memory, reflection, and imagination. Argumentation for this thesis is carried out in several ways; the relations in the perception/imagination pair show us the most characteristic case, where Merleau-Ponty, judging by later works, himself comes close to recognizing the limitations of the hypothesis of «the world of perception», to the need for a phenomenological development of the topic of faculties. Based on the application of the phenomenological method and the analysis of the conceptual constructions of Merleau-Ponty, we can conclude the following: «the world of perception» does not exist, but the phenomenology of faculties is demanded. (shrink)

If definitive evidence concerning treatment effectiveness becomes available from an ongoing randomized clinical trial, then the trial could be stopped early, with the public release of results benefiting current and future patients. However, stopping an ongoing trial based on accruing outcome data requires methodological rigor to preserve validity of the trial conclusions. This has led to the use of formal interim monitoring procedures, which include inefficacy monitoring that will stop a trial early when the experimental treatment appears not to be (...) working. For participants, inefficacy monitoring is especially important as it ensures that they are not being treated worse than if they had not enrolled on the trial. We discuss the importance of reporting with trial results the formal interim inefficacy monitoring guidelines that were utilized, and, if none were used, the reasons for their absence. A survey of two leading medical journals suggests that this is not current practice. (shrink)

Together with language, music is perhaps the most distinctive behavioral trait of the human species. Different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in our species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the self-domestication view of human evolution, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to domestication in other mammals, triggered by (...) the reduction in reactive aggression responses to environmental changes. We specifically argue that self-domestication can account for some of the cognitive changes, and particularly for the behaviors conducive to the complexification of music through a cultural mechanism. We hypothesize four stages in the evolution of music under self-domestication forces: (1) collective protomusic; (2) private, timbre-oriented music; (3) small-group, pitch-oriented music; and (4) collective, tonally organized music. This line of development encompasses the worldwide diversity of music types and genres and parallels what has been hypothesized for languages. Overall, music diversity might have emerged in a gradual fashion under the effects of the enhanced cultural niche construction as shaped by the progressive decrease in reactive (i.e., impulsive, triggered by fear or anger) aggression and the increase in proactive (i.e., premeditated, goal-directed) aggression. (shrink)

Descartes’ metaphysics lays the foundation for the special sciences, and the notion of consciousness (conscientia) belongs to metaphysics rather than to psychology. I argue that as a metaphysical notion, ‘consciousness’ refers to an epistemic version of moral conscience. As a consequence, the activity on which science is based turns out to be conscientious thought. The consciousness that makes science possible is a double awareness: the awareness of what one is thinking, of what one should be doing, and of the possibility (...) of a gap between the two. (shrink)

This is an attempt to describe and explain so-called timbre-based music as a special system of musicking, communication, and psychological and social usage, which along with its corresponding beliefs constitutes a viable alternative to “frequency-based” music. Unfortunately, the current scientific research into music has been skewed almost entirely in favor of the frequency-based music prevalent in the West. Subsequently, whenever samples of timbre-based music attract the attention of Western researchers, these are usually interpreted as “defective” implementations of frequency-based music. The (...) presence of discrete pitch is often regarded as the structural criterion that distinguishes music from non-music. We would like to present evidence to the contrary—in support of the existence of indigenous music systems based on the discretization and patterning of aspects of timbre, rather than pitch. This evidence comes mainly from extensive ethnographic research systematically conducted in eastern European and Asian parts of Russia from the 1890s. It involved the efforts of thousands of specialists and was coordinated by dozens of research institutions, and it has included not just ethnomusicology but linguistics, philology, organology, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and religious and social studies. Much of the data has not been translated into Western languages. Timbre-based tonal organization (TO) differs from that based on frequency in its personal orientation: musicking here occurs primarily for oneself and/or for close relatives/friends. Collective music-making is rare and exceptional. The foundation of timbre-based music seems to have vocal roots and rests on “personal song”—a system of personal identification through individualized patterns of rhythm, timbre, and pitch contour, utilized like a “human voice”—whose sound enables the recognition of a particular individual. The instrumental counterpart of the personalized singing tradition is the jaw harp tradition. The jaw harp is the principal musical instrument for at least 21 ethnicities in Russia, who occupy over half the territory of the country. The evolution of its TO forms the backbone for the development of timbre-based music art. Here, we provide the acoustic, socio-cultural, geographic, and chronological overview of timbre-based music. (shrink)

I propose a general alethic theory of epistemic risk according to which the riskiness of an agent’s credence function encodes her relative sensitivity to different types of graded error. After motivating and mathematically developing this approach, I show that the epistemic risk function is a scaled reflection of expected inaccuracy. This duality between risk and information enables us to explore the relationship between attitudes to epistemic risk, the choice of scoring rules in epistemic utility theory, and the selection of priors (...) in Bayesian epistemology more generally. (shrink)

Wenn Tugenden Praxisformen sind, dann kann man einiges über Praxisformen lernen, indem man nachsieht, was Tugenden sind. Ich werde dies im Folgenden partiell und indirekt tun, indem ich die sprachliche Form untersuche, in der Aristoteles die ethischen Tugenden beschreibt. Er tut dies im Wesentlichen dadurch, dass er den derart Tugendhaften in der dritten Person Singular beschreibt. Dann werde ich kurz auf die Grenzen von Aristoteles’ Verfahren zu sprechen kommen, indem ich auf eine den Tugenden und anderen Praxisformen inhärente Pluralität hinweise. (...) Eine vergleichbare Untersuchung der sprachlichen Form in der Nikomachischen Ethik ist mir nicht bekannt; die Hinweise auf die Pluralität der Tugend dagegen beanspruchen keine besondere Originalität. (shrink)

The leading art theorist takes on art in the age of the Internet In the early twentieth century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. The notion of works of art as sacred objects was decried and subsequently they would be understood merely as things. This meant an attack on realism, as well as on the traditional preservative mission of the museum. Acclaimed art theorist Boris Groys argues this led to the development (...) of “direct realism”: an art that would not produce objects, but practices (from performance art to relational aesthetics) that would not survive. But for more than a century now, every advance in this direction has been quickly followed by new means of preserving art’s distinction. In this major new work, Groys charts the paradoxes produced by this tension, and explores art in the age of the thingless medium, the Internet. Groys claims that if the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura, digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present. (shrink)

In this handbook, I put into practice my philosophical views on children's mathematics. The handbook contains brief instructions and examples of mathematical activities. In the INSTRUCTIONS section, instructions are given on how, and in part why that way, to help preschool children in their mathematical development. In the ACTIVITIES section, there are examples of activities through which the child develops her mathematical abilities.

В книге прослежены разнообразные виды обманов, вплоть до парадоксально положительных, уточняется понимание терминов. Для специалистов и широкого круга читателей.

This paper presents a new line of inquiry into when and how music as a semiotic system was born. Ten principal expressive aspects of music retain specific structural patterns to signify a certain affective state, which distinguishes the tonal organization of music from the phonetic and prosodic organization of natural languages. Therefore, the question of music’s origin can be answered by establishing the point in human history, at which expressive aspects might have been abstracted from the instinct-driven primate calls and (...) used to express human psycho-emotional states. Etic analysis of acoustic parameters is the prime means of cross-comparison of the typical patterns of expression of the same basic emotions in human music versus animal vocal communication. A new method of such analysis is proposed here. Formation of such expressive aspects as meter, tempo, melodic intervals, and articulation can be explained by the influence of bipedal locomotion, breathing cycle, and heartbeat, long before Homo sapiens. However, two aspects, rhythm and melodic contour, most crucial for music as we know it, lack proxies in the Paleolithic lifestyle. The available ethnographic and developmental data leads one to believe that rhythmic and directional patterns of melody became involved in conveying emotion-related information as a result of frequent switching from one call-type to another within the limited repertory of calls adopted for ongoing caretaking of human youngsters and domestic animals. The efficacy of rhythm and pitch contour in affective communication must have been discovered spontaneously in new important cultural activities. The most likely scenario for music to have become fully semiotically functional is the formation of cross-specific communication between humans and domesticated animals during the Neolithic demographic explosion. The model of such communication can be found in the surviving tradition of Scandinavian pastoral music. This article discusses the most likely ways in which such music evolved. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a general theory of algorithmic fairness. Drawing on Johnson King and Babic’s work on moral encroachment, on Gary Becker’s work on labor market discrimination, and on Strawson’s idea of resentment and indignation as responses to violations of the demand for goodwill toward oneself and others, we locate attitudes to fairness in an agent’s utility function. In particular, we first argue that fairness is a matter of a decision-maker’s relative concern for the plight of people from (...) different groups, rather than of the outcomes produced for different groups. We then show how an agent’s preferences, including in particular their attitudes to error, give rise to their decision thresholds. Tying these points together, we argue that the agent’s relative degrees of concern for different groups manifest in a difference in decision thresholds applied to these groups. (shrink)

This book examines Aristotle's four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), offering a systematic discussion of the relation between form and matter, causation, taxonomy, and teleology. The overall aim is to show that the four causes form a system, so that the form of a natural thing relates to its matter as the final cause of a natural process relates to its efficient cause. Aristotle's Four Causes reaches two novel and distinctive conclusions. The first is that the formal cause or (...) essence of a natural thing is not a property of this thing but a generic natural thing. The second is that the final cause of a process is not its purpose but the course that processes of its kind typically take. (shrink)

Boris Kment takes a new approach to the study of modality that emphasises the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. He argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in counterfactual reasoning, which allows us to investigate explanatory connections. Contrary to accepted views, explanation is more fundamental than modality.

We further investigate a divisibility relation on the set of BN ultrafilters on the set of natural numbers. We single out prime ultrafilters (divisible only by 1 and themselves) and establish a hierarchy in which a position of every ultrafilter depends on the set of prime ultrafilters it is divisible by. We also construct ultrafilters with many immediate successors in this hierarchy and find positions of products of ultrafilters.

In this paper, I make a contribution to a naturalistically-minded theory of truthmakers by proposing a solution to the nasty problem of truthmakers for negative truths. After formulating the difficulty, I consider and reject a number of solutions to the problem, including Armstrong's states of affairs of totality, incompatibility accounts, and JC Beall 's polarity view. I then defend the position that absences of truthmakers are real and are responsible for making negative truths true. According to the positive account of (...) absences I offer, absences of contingent states of affairs are causally relevant mind-independent features of the physical world, located within space and time, and capable of being discovered by scientific inquiry. Recognition of the reality of absences strengthens truthmaker theory as a naturalistic metaphysics, as truth and falsity of each and every contingent proposition finds an ontological grounding in some region of the physical universe. (shrink)

Considering liberty as a social notion implies the adoption of both an innovative method and style. With this aim in mind, Axel Honneth provides a fresh outlook on notions typically found with Hegel, Marx, Dewey, or Habermas. At last, inspired by psychoanalysis, he pioneers fruitful and unprecedented social therapeutics.

Earthly civilization has now entered a phase of development which requires urgent need of imagination to discern its eventual evolution.Demographic problems occupy a considerable place in global development. Numerous authors interested in the future of the planet have referred to the important factor of population increase. Nevertheless their attitudes toward demographic problems, the manner in which they conceive their own roles, their forecasts are all diverse and reflect a wide range of ideas from serene optimism to nihilistic pessimism.

Thought experiments by ancient philosophers are often open to debate: in what sense did their reasoning really concern thought experimentation? For instance, in Plato's Republic, Glaucon uses the myth of Gyges to demonstrate why people who practice justice do so unwillingly. A challenge, posed to Socrates and provided through some sort of thought experiment by imagining the effects of using the ring of invisibility, was intended to answer the question of human nature and our basis for the inclination towards justice (...) or injustice. This collection expands the current, but rare, topic of whether it is possible to articulate a discussion about thought experiments and their arguments from the historical perspective of philosophy and science. It may sometimes seem that, in a loose sense, any philosophical reflection can already be interpreted as some form of thought experiment. Although the functions of it are very diverse and complex, and often closely linked to other cognitive tools, such as visualization, imagination or idealization, the contributions in this book provide new insights into how the concept of a thought experiment coincides with more modern perceptions. The purpose of the book is to show how philosophers, already in antiquity, began to use thought experiments and argumentation to convey theories in an accessible manner and how philosophical hypotheses, often being subjective and impossible to prove through empirical evidence, helped to promote scientific knowledge and discoveries. Different authors develop several lines of argumentation, claiming that philosophical thinking can be understood by comparing it to scientific experimenting, or vice versa: if empirical evidence is usually necessary for science, thought experiments may be used to develop a hypothesis or to prepare for experimentation. The analysis of historical examples of thought experiments might also contribute to a better understanding of philosophical endeavour in antiquity as a whole. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

Many philosophers have argued that statistical evidence regarding group char- acteristics (particularly stereotypical ones) can create normative conflicts between the requirements of epistemic rationality and our moral obligations to each other. In a recent paper, Johnson-King and Babic argue that such conflicts can usually be avoided: what ordinary morality requires, they argue, epistemic rationality permits. In this paper, we show that as data gets large, Johnson-King and Babic’s approach becomes less plausible. More constructively, we build on their project and develop (...) a generalized model of reasoning about stereotypes under which one can indeed avoid normative conflicts, even in a big data world, when data contain some noise. In doing so, we also articulate a general approach to rational belief updating for noisy data. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the historical context and systematic importance of Kant's hypothetical use of reason. It does so by investigating the role of hypotheses in Kant's philosophy of science. We first situate Kant’s account of hypotheses in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy of science, focusing on the works of Wolff, Meier, and Crusius. We contrast different conceptions of hypotheses of these authors and elucidate the different theories of probability informing them. We then adopt a more systematic perspective to discuss (...) Kant's idea that scientific hypotheses must articulate real possibilities. We argue that Kant's views on the intelligibility of scientific hypotheses constitute a valuable perspective on scientific understanding and the constraints it imposes on scientific rationality. (shrink)

We construct and study structures imitating the field of complex numbers with exponentiation. We give a natural, albeit non first-order, axiomatisation for the corresponding class of structures and prove that the class has a unique model in every uncountable cardinality. This gives grounds to conjecture that the unique model of cardinality continuum is isomorphic to the field of complex numbers with exponentiation.

We continue the research of an extension of the divisibility relation to the Stone‐Čech compactification. First we prove that ultrafilters we call prime actually possess the algebraic property of primality. Several questions concerning the connection between divisibilities in and nonstandard extensions of are answered, providing a few more equivalent conditions for divisibility in. Results on uncountable chains in are proved and used in a construction of a well‐ordered chain of maximal cardinality. Probably the most interesting result is the existence of (...) a chain of type in. Finally, we consider ultrafilters without divisors in and among them find the greatest class. (shrink)

While there are satisfactory answers to the question “How should we teach children mathematics?”, there are no satisfactory answers to the question “What mathematics should we teach children?”. This paper provides an answer to the last question for preschool children (early childhood), although the answer is also applicable to older children. This answer, together with an appropriate methodology on how to teach mathematics, gives a clear conception of the place of mathematics in the children’s world and our role in helping (...) children develop their mathematical abilities. Briefly, children’s mathematics consists of the world of children’s internal activities that they eventually purposefully organize in order to understand and control the outside world and organize their overall activities in it. We need to support a child in mathematical activities that she does spontaneously and in which she shows interest, and we need to teach her mathematics that she is interested in developing through these activities. In doing so, we must be fully aware that the child’s mathematics is part of the child’s world of internal activities and is not outside of it. We help the child develop mathematical abilities by developing them in the context of her world and not outside of it. From the point of view of this conception, the standards established today are limiting and too focused on numbers and geometric figures: these topics are too prominent and elaborated, and other mathematical contents are subordinated to them. Adhering to the standards, we drastically limit the mathematics of the child’s world, hamper the correct mathematical development of a child, and we can turn her away from mathematics. (shrink)

Approximate coherentism suggests that imperfectly rational agents should hold approximately coherent credences. This norm is intended as a generalization of ordinary coherence. I argue that it may be unable to play this role by considering its application under learning experiences. While it is unclear how imperfect agents should revise their beliefs, I suggest a plausible route is through Bayesian updating. However, Bayesian updating can take an incoherent agent from relatively more coherent credences to relatively less coherent credences, depending on the (...) data observed. Thus, comparative rationality judgments among incoherent agents are unduly sensitive to luck. (shrink)