Surveys Western literature and thought to reveal the evolution of the ideals of sincerity and authenticity.

Building on recent work, I present sequent systems for the non-classical logics LP, K3, and FDE with two main virtues. First, derivations closely resemble those in standard Gentzen-style systems. Second, the systems can be obtained by reformulating a classical system using nonstandard sequent structure and simply removing certain structural rules (relatives of exchange and contraction). I clarify two senses in which these logics count as “substructural.”.

Respublica literaria, eller de lärdes republik, är ett begrepp som framför allt förknippas med de nya former för vetenskaplig kommunikation och lärda nätverk som introducerades vid slutet av 1600-talet och som sedan kom att spela en betydelsefull roll i 1700-talets intellektuella värld. Denna tänkta gemenskap av lärda är central för vår förståelse av den tidigmoderna epokens idé-, kultur- och vetenskapshistoria. Lärdomsrepubliken var ett ideal för de lärdas verksamhet, ett slags kunskapsproducerandets utopi, där den ideala kommunikationen präglades av jämlikhet, rationalitet och (...) filosofisk frihet, ofta i tydlig och uttalad kontrast mot en mer krass verklighet där de lärdas gemenskap tvärtom byggdes på en grundval av politiska, ideologiska, ekonomiska och religiösa intressen. I Lärda samtal behandlas vitt skilda aspekter av begreppet respublica literaria, dess kommunikation och dess materialitet: det handlar om den lärda republikens statsskick, de lärdas institutioner och praktiker, seder och bruk, uppfostran genom samtal, kvinnors och barns plats i republiken, och mycket mer. Boken är en festskrift till Erland Sellberg, professor i idéhistoria vid Stockholms universitet. (shrink)

En affirmant que "tout philosophe a deux philosophies : la sienne et celle de Spinoza", Bergson exprime avant tout que le philosophe se doit de rompre avec une pensée dogmatique qui n'a plus lieu d'être et que Spinoza incarne tout particulièrement. Le spinozisme manifeste la pente de l'intelligence lorsqu'elle suit sa logique propre sans être rectifiée par le recours à l'expérience. Or, c'est cette démarche systématique que la philosophie doit désormais abandonner. Bergson est néanmoins hanté par la pensée de Spinoza (...) et le rapport qu'il entretient avec lui, en particulier dans ses cours au Collège de France, met en évidence un lien bien plus complexe et subtil qu'un simple rapport d'opposition. Contre la tendance à la clôture et à la systématicité, Bergson va alors privilégier chez Spinoza la tendance à l'ouverture et au mysticisme. En mettant en lumière cet aspect, cet ouvrage montre la sympathie intellectuelle qui réunit ces penseurs autour des notions de joie et de liberté. C'est pourquoi la figure du Christ va constituer un modèle non seulement éthique mais ontologique. Le terme de mysticisme, chez ces deux auteurs, ne désigne ni le refus de l'expérience ni celui des sciences positives mais renvoie à un rationalisme élargi jusqu'à l'amour du réel."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

L’objectif, éminemment politique, de cet ouvrage est de proposer pour 2012 une alternative aux programmes court-termistes et consensuels qui pourraient être développés par les candidats lors de la campagne officielle pour les élections présidentielles. Il vise à offrir une perspective de long terme de ce à quoi la société pourrait ressembler d’ici trente à cinquante ans si nous prenons un véritable virage écologique et humain et si nous opérons un changement concret de paradigme. Si, ces dernières années, un grand nombre (...) d’ouvrages et de films ont dénoncé les pires crises que traverse l’humanité, si d’autres se sont évertués à mettre en lumière des alternatives, force est de constater que très peu se sont attelés à la tâche d’offrir une vision articulée, écologique et positive de l’avenir. Loin des “yaka-fokon” et des déclarations d’intention pleines de bonne volonté, cet ouvrage met en lumière des solutions qui ont fait leur preuve, à petite comme à grande échelle, dans la plupart des domaines de la société. Pour chaque thématique, une personnalité “experte”, ayant développé une vision du sujet - voire souvent conduit ou observé une expérimentation -, propose en quelques pages des voies de transition concrètes, ainsi que les moyens à disposition de tous, qu’ils soient citoyens, élus ou entrepreneurs, pour les mettre en action. Chacune de ces propositions s’appuie sur un “cas pratique” : un exemple concluant mené à l’échelle d’un territoire européen (canton, département, région...). Au-delà d’une simple compilation, ces propositions sont mises en relation comme un véritable projet de société. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth seek to undermine debates about the nature of truth by arguing that the truth predicate is merely a device that allows us to express a certain kind of generality. I argue that a parallel approach is available in the case of logical consequence. Just as deflationism about truth offers an alternative to accounts of truth's nature in terms of correspondence or justification, deflationism about consequence promises an alternative to model-theoretic or proof-theoretic accounts of consequence's nature. I then (...) argue, against considerations put forward by Field and Beall, that Curry's paradox no more rules out deflationism about consequence than the liar paradox rules out deflationism about truth. (shrink)

The revisionary approach to semantic paradox is commonly thought to have a somewhat uncomfortable corollary, viz. that, on pain of triviality, we cannot affirm that all valid arguments preserve truth (Beall2007, Beall2009, Field2008, Field2009). We show that the standard arguments for this conclusion all break down once (i) the structural rule of contraction is restricted and (ii) how the premises can be aggregated---so that they can be said to jointly entail a given conclusion---is appropriately understood. In addition, we briefly rehearse (...) some reasons for restricting structural contraction. (shrink)

Experiencing a stimulus in one sensory modality is often associated with an experience in another sensory modality. For instance, seeing a lemon might produce a sensation of sourness. This might indicate some kind of cross-modal correspondence between vision and gustation. The aim of the current study was to provide explore whether such cross-modal correspondences influence cross-modal integration during perceptual learning. To that end, we conducted 2 experiments. Using a speeded classification task, Experiment 1 established a cross-modal correspondence between visual lightness (...) and the frequency of an auditory tone. Using a short-term priming procedure, Experiment 2 showed that manipulation of such cross-modal correspondences led to the creation of a crossmodal unit regardless of the nature of the correspondence (i.e., congruent, Experiment 2a or incongruent, Experiment 2b). However, a comparison of priming-effects sizes suggested that cross-modal correspondences modulate cross-modal integration during learning and thus leading to new learned units that have different stability over time. We discuss the implications of our results for the relation between cross-modal correspondence and perceptual learning in the context of a Bayesian explanation of cross-modal correspondences. (shrink)

According to commitment accounts of assertion, asserting is committing oneself to something’s being the case, where such commitment is understood in terms of norms governing a social practice. I elaborate and compare two version of such accounts, liability accounts (associated with C.S. Peirce) and dialectical norm accounts (associated with Robert Brandom), concluding that the latter are more defensible. I argue that both versions of commitment account possess a potential advantage over rival normative accounts of assertion in that they needn’t presuppose (...) any notion of an assertion’s correctness. Additionally, I show how dialectical norm accounts can explain relations between assertion and truth. After setting forth objections that have been raised against commitment accounts, I argue that responses are available on behalf of dialectical norm accounts. Finally, I propose that a liberalized dialectical norm account can illuminate phenomena sometimes seen as supporting truth relativism. (shrink)

The lexicon of religion has been widely used in the context of the social and cultural transformations associated with the ‘digital revolution’, whether in metaphoric or in realistic terms. The study of digital magic/magic in digital times, the other side of the coin of the Sacred 2.0, is still in its infancy. Yet, references to magic are made frequently in reflections about the rapid development of the digitalisation of society and culture, and they deserve more in-depth study. This paper tackles (...) the issue of magic in and of new technologies, including artificial intelligence devices. After a broad outline of the presence of magic in the digital ecosystem, this paper will focus on the lexical surface and semantic references to ‘magical thinking’, explore the underlying reasons for such references and unveil the regimes of existence for magic. Finally, the paper questions the role of language in the construction of a ‘digital magic’ and the transformations of the semantic category of magic as seen through the prism of a cultural revolution, that of the digitalisation of societies. (shrink)

This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. "Remarkable and exceptionally readable... There is wit, wisdom and an immense erudition on every page."—Jonathan Steinberg, Times Literary Supplement "Gossman's book, a product of many years of active contemplation, is a tour de force. It (...) is at once an intellectual history, a cultural history of Basel and Europe, and an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century historiography. Written with a grace and elegance that many aspire to, few seldom achieve, this is model scholarship."—John R. Hinde, American Historical Review. (shrink)

A decade in the making, the _Handbook i_s the definitive contemporary exposition of interpersonal psychoanalysis. It provides an authoritative overview of development, psychopathology, and treatment as conceptualized from the interpersonal viewpoint.

ABSTRACT:‘Race’ has long searched for a stable, suitable idea, with no consensus on a master meaning in sight. What I call deflationary pluralism about the existence of race recognizes that various meanings may be true as far as they go but avoids murky disputes over whether there are races in some sense. Once we have rejected the notion that racial essences yield innate cognitive differences, there is little point to arguing over the race idea. In its place, I propose the (...) idea of socioancestry, which jettisons racial thinking yet recognizes the social dynamics of color. For example, Black Americans, many of whom have traceable non-African ancestry, constitute an Africa-identified, socioancestrally black subgroup. ‘Race’ talk is not needed to sustain legitimate color-conscious approaches to social identity and social justice. Long-standing fixation on the race idea has obscured the simple truth that visible continental ancestry is the root of the social reality of color consciousness. (shrink)

Can we ever experimentally disentangle phenomenal consciousness from the cognitive accessibility inherent to conscious reports? In this commentary, we suggest that (1) Block's notion of phenomenal consciousness remains intractably entangled with the need to obtain subjective reports about it; and (2) many experimental paradigms suggest that the intuitive notion of a rich but non-reportable phenomenal world is, to a large extent illusory – in a sense that requires clarification.

Rejecting structural contraction has been proposed as a strategy for escaping semantic paradoxes. The challenge for its advocates has been to make intuitive sense of how contraction might fail. I offer a way of doing so, based on a “naive” interpretation of the relation between structure and logical vocabulary in a sequent proof system. The naive interpretation of structure motivates the most common way of blaming Curry-style paradoxes on illicit contraction. By contrast, the naive interpretation will not as easily motivate (...) one recent noncontractive approach to the Liar paradox. (shrink)

El método de la “libre investigación científica del derecho” propuesto por François Gény ha marcado toda una generación de juristas. Tratado con detenimiento a lo largo de su extensa y compleja obra, la libre investigación científica se presenta como un método completo destinado a orientar al jurista en la creación, interpretación y aplicación del derecho positivo. Por desventura, el clima ambiente en el que nació su obra y en el que tuvo que desenvolverse con posterioridad, dominado por la escuela de (...) la exégesis, no ha sabido extraer de la obra de Gény más que elementos dispares no haciendo justicia a su método. En la actualidad, el redescubrimiento de su método de la libre investigación científica permitirá combatir el anquilosamiento dogmático, evitar los excesos formalistas, y aportar elementos de interés para la investigación iusfilosófica de nuestro tiempo. El método de la “libre investigación científica del derecho” propuesto por François Gény ha marcado toda una generación de juristas. Tratado con detenimiento a lo largo de su extensa y compleja obra, la libre investigación científica se presenta como un método completo destinado a orientar al jurista en la creación, interpretación y aplicación del derecho positivo. Por desventura, el clima ambiente en el que nació su obra y en el que tuvo que desenvolverse con posterioridad, dominado por la escuela de la exégesis, no ha sabido extraer de la obra de Gény más que elementos dispares no haciendo justicia a su método. En la actualidad, el redescubrimiento de su método de la libre investigación científica permitirá combatir el anquilosamiento dogmático, evitar los excesos formalistas, y aportar elementos de interés para la investigación iusfilosófica de nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

Stephenson (2022) has argued that Kant’s thesis that all transcendental truths are transcendentally a priori knowable leads to omniscience of all transcendental truths. His arguments depend on luminosity principles and closure principles for transcendental knowability. We will argue that one pair of a luminosity and a closure principle should not be used, because the closure principle is too strong, while the other pair of a luminosity and a closure principle should not be used, because the luminosity principle is too strong. (...) Stephenson’s argument also depends on a factivity principle for transcendental knowability, which we will argue to be false. (shrink)

1. Die erste Hälfte des Kommentars, mit Ausnahme der Kapitel über die Weltseele.

Based on specific documentary evidence, historian Lionel Jensen reveals how 16th- and 17th-century Western missionaries used translations of the ancient RU ...

This book, collecting his most important papers in the form in which they were originally published, can be seen as a companion to that one.

This paper compares two ways of holding that logic is special among the sciences in that it has no restricted class of entities as its subject matter, but instead concerns all entities alike. One way is Williamson’s explanation of how inquiry into logical consequence and logical truth only superficially concerns the linguistic or conceptual entities that bear these properties. Williamson draws on ideas familiar from deflationism about truth, and his account has been called “deflationary.” I argue that the analogy is (...) misleading. While there’s a broad sense in which Williamson offers a deflationary account of logical inquiry, his view differs from deflationism about truth in being best understood as a form of instrumentalism. By contrast, I elaborate a deflationism about logical properties modeled on deflationism about truth. I defend this expressive device deflationism as an explanation of our use of logical predicates. (shrink)

'What is real?' has been one of the key questions of philosophy since its beginning in antiquity. But it is not just a question that philosophers ask. This Very Short Introduction discusses what reality is by looking at a variety of arguments, theories, and thought-experiments from philosophy, physics, and cognitive science.

A number of well-developed theories shed light on the question, under what circumstances our beliefs enjoy epistemic justification. Yet, comparatively little is known about epistemic defeat--when new information causes the loss of epistemic justification. This book proposes and defends a detailed account of epistemic defeaters. The main kinds of defeaters are analyzed in detail and integrated into a general framework that aims to explain how beliefs lose justification. It is argued that defeaters introduce incompatibilities into a noetic system and thereby (...) prompt a structured re-evaluation process that makes a justified reinstatement of the defeated belief impossible. The account is then applied to the topic of disagreement, where it is used in an argument for conciliationism, as well as a new explanation for higher-order defeat. Throughout the book, the notion of defeat is the center of attention, while a number of new issues are discussed at the intersections of defeat and justification. Specifically, new problems are raised for broadly internalist accounts of defeat, a fully descriptive reliabilist account of defeat is provided, and the case for normative defeat is revisited. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is poised to eliminate millions of jobs, from finance to truck driving. But artisanal products are valued precisely because of their human origins, and thus have some inherent “immunity” from AI job loss. At the same time, artisanal labor, combined with technology, could potentially help to democratize the economy, allowing independent, small-scale businesses to flourish. Could AI, robotics and related automation technologies enhance the economic viability and environmental sustainability of these beloved crafting professions, perhaps even expanding their niche (...) to replace some job loss in other sectors? In this paper, we compare the problems created by the current mass production economy and potential solutions from an artisanal economy. In doing so, the paper details the possibilities of utilizing AI to support hybrid forms of human–machine production at the microscale; localized and sustainable value chains at the mesoscale; and networks of these localized and sustainable producers at the macroscale. In short, a wide range of automation technologies are potentially available for facilitating and empowering an artisanal economy. Ultimately, it is our hope that this paper will facilitate a discussion on a future vision for more “generative” economic forms in which labor value, ecological value and social value can circulate without extraction or alienation. (shrink)

The Natural Philosophy of Jan Bayer The main focus of this study is a reconstruction of the natural philosophy of the early modern Prešov's scholar Jan (Johannes) Bayer (1630–1674), with special regard to its Mosaic profile. After a critical reading of the research done on Bayer up to this point, the author concludes that Bayer’s natural-philosophical work, as such, has not yet been satisfactorily analyzed, nor has its connection to its supposedly two most important sources, Francis Bacon and Jan Amos (...) Comenius, been sufficiently explored. The study therefore concentrates on a critical analysis of Bayer’s interpretation of creation and his natural history, which are then both situated in the philosophical context of their time. The author then notes that although Bayer’s project of erecting an original and on the (especially Aristotelian) tradition independent Mosaic natural philosophy ended in failure, the thinker’s work can be assessed as a valuable attempt to synthesize Baconian and Comenian motifs while at the same time reflecting broader intellectual contexts of the period. (shrink)

Innocence is a notion that can prove controversial. Claims of innocence typically support not imposing burdens on the innocent when their conduct is relevantly unobjectionable. This paper examines innocence in the context of violent conflict between states or groups. Many thinkers about the morality of such violence want to establish a principle that would protect innocent civilians. Yet the common view in just war theory does not affirm the moral innocence of civilians. Similarly, the common view that soldiers have an (...) equal right to kill does not affirm their equal moral culpability. (shrink)

This paper contrasts two versions of a pragmatist critique of deflationism about truth. According to the critique, understanding the practice of factual discourse requires understanding a role played in that practice by speakers’ use of the concept of truth. Huw Price takes this role to lie in the expression of attitudes of approval and disapproval toward other speakers’ assertions. Proceeding from Robert Brandom’s analysis of assertion, I defend an alternative account of truth’s role in terms of the acknowledgement and disacknowledgement (...) of communicative authority. I explain why this account fails to yield Price’s key anti-deflationary conclusion, namely that engaging in factual discourse requires holding that false assertion are ipso facto normatively incorrect. (shrink)

Development of the shapes of living organisms and their parts is a field of science in which there are no generally accepted theoretical principles. What form these principles are likely to take, when they emerge, is a subject in which there is a wide gulf of disagreement between physical scientists and experimental biologists. This book contains both an extensive philosophical commentary on this dichotomy in views and an exposition of the type of theory most favoured by physical scientists. In this (...) theory living form is a manifestation of the dynamics of chemical change and physical transport or other physics of spatial communication. The reaction-diffusion theory, as initiated by Turing in 1952 and since elaborated by Prigogine and by Gierer and Meinhardt among others, is discussed in detail at a level that requires a good knowledge of a first course in calculus, but no more than that. The great growth of molecular biology has tended to overshadow the increase in our understanding of the nature of these kinetic processes. This book seeks to reawaken interest in dynamics in the hope that a better balance between the importance of things and the importance of actions may emerge in the biology of the 21st century. (shrink)

This paper aims to call into question the customary division of logically revisionary responses to the truth-theoretic paradoxes into those that are “substructural” and those that are “ structural.” I proceed by examining, as a case study, Beall’s recent proposal based on the paraconsistent logic LP. Beall formulates his response to paradox in terms of a consequence relation that obeys all standard structural rules, though at the price of the language’s lacking a detaching conditional. I argue that the same response (...) to paradox can be given using a consequence relation that preserves detachment rules for a conditional, though at the price of restricting structural rules. The question “Is paradox being blocked by invoking a substructural consequence relation?” is thus ill-posed. The lesson of this example, I conclude, is that there is no useful explication of the idea of a substructural approach to paradox. (shrink)