Talk about evil resonates in ways that are culturally inherited. Historical and religious dimensions of “evil” often seem to be front and center. Nevertheless, we argue that it would be too quick to dismiss the study of evil within secular ethics. We defend an outlook that is inspired by ancient ethics—also called virtue ethics—which accepts the so-called Guise of the Good account of motivation. For an agent to be motivated to perform an action, something about the action must look good (...) to her. We argue that evil actions do not constitute exceptions to the Guise of the Good. To preserve this framework, we entertain a privative account of evil, according to which evil is the absence of the good, and yet appears in a positive light to the agent who performs an evil action. We reject the view that evil is quantitatively extreme badness. An account of evil should permit that some instances of evil are from a third person perspective not extremely bad. On this picture, evil is agent-relative; something can be evil relative to one person without being evil relative to another person. Accordingly, several qualities—rather than only one distinctive quality—can make an action evil. (shrink)

With the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), global researchers were confronted with major challenges. The German National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON) was launched in fall 2020 to effectively leverage resources and bundle research activities in the fight against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We analyzed the setup phase of NAPKON as an example for multicenter studies in Germany, highlighting challenges and optimization potential in connecting 59 university and nonuniversity study sites. We examined the ethics application (...) process of 121 ethics submissions considering durations, annotations, and outcomes. Study site activation and recruitment processes were investigated and related to the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections. For all initial ethics applications, the median time to a positive ethics vote was less than two weeks and 30 of these study sites (65%) joined NAPKON within less than three weeks each. Electronic instead of postal ethics submission (9.5 days (Q1: 5.75, Q3: 17) vs. 14 days (Q1: 11, Q3: 26), p value = 0.01) and adoption of the primary ethics vote significantly accelerated the ethics application process. Each study center enrolled a median of 37 patients during the 14-month observation period, with large differences depending on the health sector. We found a positive correlation between recruitment performance and COVID-19 incidence as well as hospitalization incidence. Our analysis highlighted the challenges and opportunities of the federated system in Germany. Digital ethics application tools, adoption of a primary ethics vote and standardized formal requirements lead to harmonized and thus faster study initiation processes during a pandemic. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of (...) language, logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us. (shrink)

What is first philosophy today? In Unity and Aspect, the questioning begins with a new (old) approach to metaphysics: being is implied; it is implied in everything that is; it is an implication. BUt then, the history of philosophy must be rethought completely - for being implies unity, and time, and the other of time, namely, aspect. THe effect on the self and on self-understanding is radical: we can no longer be thought as human beings; rather, reaching back to the (...) ancient Greek name for us (phos), Haas seeks to rearticulate us as illuminating, as illuminating ourselves and others, and as implicated in our illuminations. UNity and Aspect then provokes us to problematize words and deeds, thoughts and things - and this means reconsidering our assumptions about history and survival, meaning and universality, sensibility and intimacy, knowledge and intentionality, action and improvisation, language and truth. ANd if Haas suspends the privilege enjoyed by our traditional philosophical concepts, this has implications for fields as diverse as ontology and phenomenology, ethics and aesthetics, education and linguistics, law and politics. (shrink)

Khandro Rinpoche: A Needle Compassionately Sticking Out of a Cushion -- Dagmola Sakya: From the Palace to the Blood Bank -- Tenzin Palmo (Diane Perry): Sandpaper for the Ego -- Sangye Khandro (Nanci Gay Gustafson): Enlightenment Is a Full-time Job -- Pema Chödrön (Deirdre Blomfield-Brown): Relaxing into Groundlessness -- Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel: A Wonder Woman Hermit -- Chagdud Khadro (Jane Dedman): Like Iron Filings Drawn to a Magnet -- Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Patricia Zenn): Surfing to Realization -- Thubten Chodron (Cherry Greene): (...) A Rebel in Robes -- Roshi Joan Halifax: Fearless, Fierce, and Fragile -- Tsultrim Allione (Joan Rousmanière Ewing): The Enlightened Feminist -- Khandro Tsering Chödron: The Queen of Dakinis. (shrink)

Casey, in Supernatural, alludes to one of the oldest and most resilient arguments against the existence of God, the problem of evil. This problem arises from an apparent conflict between the existence of evil and the attributes that Western theists attribute to God. Casey's challenge to the existence of God is called the logical problem of evil by philosophers. Casey's problem of evil focused on an apparent logical inconsistency between believing in a God that is all‐powerful, all‐knowing, and all‐good, while (...) at the same time believing that evil exists. The soul‐making defense doesn't appear to be enough to solve the problem for Dean. While it seems true that an all‐powerful, all‐good, all‐knowing God would have the power to create a universe with soul‐growth, containing significantly less evil and suffering than the universe of Supernatural, that's just not Dean's world. (shrink)

This paper analyses a hitherto unknown technique of using logic diagrams to create argument maps in eristic dialectics. The method was invented in the 1810s and -20s by Arthur Schopenhauer, who is considered the originator of modern eristic. This technique of Schopenhauer could be interesting for several branches of research in the field of argumentation: Firstly, for the field of argument mapping, since here a hitherto unknown diagrammatic technique is shown in order to visualise possible situations of arguments in a (...) dialogical controversy. Secondly, the art of controversy or eristic, since the diagrams do not analyse the truth of judgements and the validity of inferences, but the persuasiveness of arguments in a dialogue. (shrink)

Our concept of politics – especially democracy – presupposes a principle of friendship, but our principle of friendship comes out of an understanding of the friend. However, from the Greeks to Derrida, such relations have been dominated by a philosophy of presence and/or absence, limiting our very idea of politics and friendship. A radical break with this tradition is only possible through an other way of speaking to, thinking about, acting toward, and being a friend, and the politics thereof. The (...) Aristotelian saying, “O friends, [there is] no friend,” provides a clue – for “being” is not there, not present in the Greek, nor absent therefrom, but just implied. Then the being of the friend, and of politics (and of being), is an implication. So, if we hope to be friends, and to be political, we must think and act and speak by implication: O friends no friend, and O democrats no democracy. (shrink)

Eristic has been studied more and more intensively in recent years in philosophy, law, communication theory, logic, proof theory, and A.I. Nevertheless, the modern origins of eristic, which almost all current researchers see in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, are considered to be a theory of the illegitimate use of logical and rhetorical devices. Thus, eristic seems to violate the norms of discourse ethics. In this paper, I argue that this interpretation of eristic is based on prejudices that contradict the original (...) intention of modern eristic. Eristic is not an art of being right or winning an argument, but an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to gain argumentative acceptance. For this reason, eristic must be seen as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Especially in the age of alternative facts and post-factual politics, this makes eristic a valuable discipline. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of Seneca's 58th letter to Lucilius and Porphyry's Isagoge, which were the origin of the tree diagrams that became popular in philosophy and logic from the early Middle Ages onwards. These diagrams visualise the extent to which a concept can be understood as a category, genus, species or individual and what the method of dihairesis (division) means. The paper explores the dissimilarities between Seneca's and Porphyry's tree structures, scrutinising them through the perspective of modern graph (...) theory. Although traditional trees can be interpreted in a modern way, their terms and definitions defy modern standardisation. These distinctions are not only useful for differentiating between Seneca's and Porphyry's trees, but also for comprehending the evolution of this philosophical tradition. Thus the paper highlights the continued significance of these tree diagrams in analysing concepts and categories in philosophy and structuring objects and information in modern fields such as artificial intelligence, computer science, bioinformatics, graph theory, and many more. (shrink)

Reism or concretism are the labels for a position in ontology and semantics that is represented by various philosophers. As Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Jan Woleński have shown, there are two dimensions with which the abstract expression of reism can be made concrete: The ontological dimension of reism says that only things exist; the semantic dimension of reism says that all concepts must be reduced to concrete terms in order to be meaningful. In this paper we argue for the following two (...) theses: (1) Arthur Schopenhauer has advocated a reistic philosophy of language which says that all concepts must ultimately be based on concrete intuition in order to be meaningful. (2) In his semantics, Schopenhauer developed a theory of logic diagrams that can be interpreted by modern means in order to concretize the abstract position of reism. Thus we are not only enhancing Jan Woleński’s list of well-known reists, but we are also adding a diagrammatic dimension to concretism, represented by Schopenhauer. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents. The standard possible-world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience. A familiar attempt to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal agents that (...) are incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that “anything goes”. But I prove that it is impossible to develop an impossible-world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. Effectively, I show that attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents, or extremely non-ideal agents. (shrink)

Beziehungen sind nicht gegeben, sie werden gemeinsam gemacht. Der Band untersucht Relationalitäten als prozessuale Aushandlungen zwischen Künsten und Wissenschaften, zwischen gebautem Raum und sozialem Körper, zwischen theoretischem und poetisch-künstlerischem Schreiben und Sprechen, zwischen Form, Material und Handlung. Plädiert wird für eine Wissenspolitik der Künste, die von einer radikalen Verstricktheit theoretischer, ästhetischer, medialer und gesellschaftlicher Praktiken und Techniken ausgeht. Mit Beiträgen von / with contributions by Bini Adamczak, Emily Apter, Alice Chauchat, Beatriz Colomina, Gradinger / Schubot, Annika Haas, Maximilian (...) class='Hi'>Haas, Orit Halpern, Tom Holert, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho, Maurício Liesen, Hanna Magauer, Michaela Ott, Sibylle Peters, Dennis Pohl, Possible Bodies (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting), Ghassan Salhab, Mirjam Schaub, Melanie Sehgal, Nora Sternfeld, Kathrin Thiele, Jeremy Wade, Brigitte Weingart. (shrink)

This book examines the history of the major paradigms of political science and proposes a new model for political theory. The book champions a neobehavioral political science including multimethodological innovations, cross-testing of paradigms, and tenets of a new political science that can rise to become a truly theoretical science.

The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt collects thirty original chapters on the diverse oeuvre of one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Carl Schmitt was a German theorist whose anti-liberalism continues to inspire scholars and practitioners on both the Left and the Right. Despite Schmitt's rabid anti-semitism and partisan legal practice in Nazi Germany, the appeal of his trenchant critiques of, among other things, aestheticism, representative democracy, and international law as well as of his theoretical justifications of (...) dictatorship and rule by exception is undiminished. Uniquely located at the intersection of law, the social sciences, and the humanities, this volume brings together sophisticated yet accessible interpretations of Schmitt's sprawling thought and complicated biography. The contributors hail from diverse disciplines, including art, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and history. In addition to opening up exciting new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt provides the intellectual foundations for an improved understanding of the political, legal, and cultural thought of this most infamous of German theorists. A substantial introduction places the trinity of Schmitt's thought in a broad context. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm has counterintuitive implications in cases involving overdetermination and preemption. A popular strategy for dealing with these problems appeals to plural harm—several events being jointly harmful. Björn Petersson criticizes this strategy on the grounds that it conflicts with a strong intuition that helps to motivate the counterfactual comparative account, namely, that harming someone essentially involves making a difference for the worse for her. In this paper, I argue that Petersson’s argument is unconvincing.

Logic diagrams have been increasingly studied and applied for a few decades, not only in logic, but also in many other fields of science. The history of logic diagrams is an important subject, as many current systems and applications of logic diagrams are based on historical predecessors. While traditional histories of logic diagrams cite pioneers such as Leibniz, Euler, Venn, and Peirce, it is not widely known that Kant and the early Kantians in Germany and England played a crucial role (...) in popularising Euler(-type) diagrams. In this paper, the role of the Kantians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be analysed in more detail. It shows that diagrams (or intuition in general) were a highly contentious topic that depend on the philosophical attitude and went beyond logic to touch on issues of physics, metaphysics, linguistics and, above all, mathematics. (shrink)

Plotinus (204-70) is the founder of Neoplatonism and its most significant thinker. He shaped late antique philosophy and significantly influenced the entire metaphysical tradition of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and German Idealism. In this volume, Jens Halfwassen presents Plotinus' life and work, as well as the most important aspects of his historical influence. Issues of key importance for the Neoplatonists-such as the interaction between Being and Thought, the ascent of the soul, and the interpretation of Plato's theory of principles-are (...) explained in detail in the course of outlining the Neoplatonic metaphysical system. The introduction outlines Halfwassen's significant contribution to the study of Plotinus, paying particular attention to the differences between the current German and Anglophone approaches to the Platonic tradition. (shrink)

The paper gives an overview of Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of rationality. For Schopenhauer, rationality is a human faculty based on language, which, in addition to language, is primarily concerned with knowledge or philosophy of science and practical action. For Schopenhauer, language is the umbrella term under which he subsumes logic and eristics. This paper will first introduce Schopenhauer's logic and clarify its connection to the philosophy of language. This is followed by eristic dialectics, which reflects on how one can protect (...) oneself from people who argue irrationally in a goal-oriented way. Schopenhauer's philosophy of mathematics belongs to the field of philosophy of science. Unlike many other authors of his time, Schopenhauer does not advocate a rationalist but a representationalist approach, which, however, includes a theory of rationality. Therefore, Schopenhauer's representationalist approach will finally be discussed, emphasizing its relationship to his theory of rationality. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a reading of Plotinus Enneads VI.1-3 [41-43] On the genera of being which regards this treatise as a coherent whole in which Aristotle's Categories is explored in a way that turns it into a decisive contribution to Plotinus' Platonic ontology. In addition, I claim that Porphyry's Isagoge and commentaries on the Categories start by adopting Plotinus' point of view, including his notion of genus, and proceed by explaining its consequences for a more detailed reading of (...) the Categories. After Plotinus' integration of the Categories into the Platonic frame of thought Porphyry saw the possibilities of exploiting the Peripatetic tradition both as a means to support the Platonic interpretation of the Categories and as a source for solutions to traditional questions. His allegiance to a division of being into ten, and his emphasis on semantics rather than ontology can be explained from this orientation. In the light of our investigation the alleged disagreement between Plotinus and Porphyry on the Categories changes its appearance completely. There are differences, but these can be best explained as confirmation and extension of Plotinus' perspective on the Categories and its role in Platonism. (shrink)

Being can no longer be thought, for Plato, in accordance with Parmenides’ either/or; rather, it is both/and, both present in and absent from things, which is how they can come-to-presence and go-out-into-absence. But as the Parmenides demonstrates, Greek grammar hints at a fundamental ontological truth: the expression, “one one,” ἓν ἕν, shows that being can be implied, neither present nor absent—for being is an implication. But then participating must be rethought in terms of implying: being is implied in everything that (...) is and is one, which is how it is present in beings and absent therefrom. But this understanding of participation—as Aristotle insists—is contradictory. Luckily, there is another way: implication qua belonging—being no longer participates-in, but belongs-to things, which is how it is one with them, distinct but inseparable. But this too, betrays implication, fails to grasp being’s way of being, and the meaning of being qua implied, and so cannot illuminate how being and beings are and are one—for as the suspension of presence and/or absence, implying is irreducible to participating or belonging. Rather, if being is implied, it is because implication is suspension, which is why it is so suspenseful. (shrink)

The article deals with the following: Three brain imaging studies on athletes are evaluated. What do these neuroscientific studies tell us about the brain and mind of the athlete? Empirical investigations will need a neuro-theory of mind if they are to make the leap from neural activity to the mental. The article looks at such a theory, Gerald Edelman's?Neural Darwinism?. What are the implications of such a theory for sport science and philosophy of sport? The article appreciates some of the (...) neurosciences applications, but questions the hope of giving a complete theory of mind. (shrink)

Advanced AI systems are rapidly making their way into medical research and practice, and, arguably, it is only a matter of time before they will surpass human practitioners in terms of accuracy, reliability, and knowledge. If this is true, practitioners will have a prima facie epistemic and professional obligation to align their medical verdicts with those of advanced AI systems. However, in light of their complexity, these AI systems will often function as black boxes: the details of their contents, calculations, (...) and procedures cannot be meaningfully understood by human practitioners. When AI systems reach this level of complexity, we can also speak of black-box medicine. In this paper, we want to argue that black-box medicine conflicts with core ideals of patient-centered medicine. In particular, we claim, black-box medicine is not conducive for supporting informed decision-making based on shared information, shared deliberation, and shared mind between practitioner and patient. (shrink)

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and computer vision, the field can increasingly avail itself of new ways of analyzing and understanding multimodal communication. As a result, there is a general hope that multimodal research may be at the “precipice of greatness” due (...) to technological advances in computer science and resulting extended empirical coverage. However, for this to come about there must be sufficient guidance on key (theoretical) needs of innovation in the field of multimodal communication. Absent such guidance, the research focus of computer scientists might increasingly diverge from crucial issues in multimodal communication. With this paper, we want to further promote interaction between these fields, which may enormously benefit both communities. The multimodal research community (represented here by a consortium of researchers from the Visual Communication [ViCom] Priority Programme) can engage in the innovation by clearly stating which technological tools are needed to make progress in the field of multimodal communication. In this article, we try to facilitate the establishment of a much needed common ground on feasible expectations (e.g., in terms of terminology and measures to be able to train machine learning algorithms) and to critically reflect possibly idle hopes for technical advances, informed by recent successes and challenges in computer science, social signal processing, and related domains. (shrink)

To translate is one thing; to say how we do it, is another. The practice is familiar enough, and there are familiar theories of it. But when we try to look more closely, theory tends to obscure rather than explain, and the familiar practice—an ancient practice, without which Western civilisation is unthinkable—appears to be just baffling, its very possibility a mystery.

This work is a systematic investigation of a range of solutions offered today for the philosophical problem of mental causation. The premises constituting the problem are analyzed before a survey is developed of the most popular theories on mental causation. It is demonstrated in detail why most of these canonical solutions must be considered deficient. In a third part, the 'new compatibilist's' approach to mental causation is explored, which is characterized by assertion of a non-identity-but-non-distinctness principle. The last part aims (...) to offer an alternative solution to the problem. On the basis of a certain set of counterfactual conditionals, which are jointly taken to provide a definition of 'causal proportionality' that improves the existing definitions, it is shown that a specific, and hitherto widely neglected, version of causal overdeterminationism must be considered the most successful solution to the problem of mental causation. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldts Rechtsphilosophie ist bei weitem nicht so bekannt wie seine Sprachphilosophie oder gar seine Rolle als Bildungsreformer. Der Autor untersucht zu diesem Zweck Humboldts "Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen".

This book marks the inauguration of the Historia Logicae book series, which seeks to publish high-quality monographs, dissertations, textbooks, proceedings, and anthologies on the history of logic in either German or English. Serving as the inaugural volume in this series, the book explores the contemporary interpretation of logic across many centuries and cultures. The first section of the volume comprises a compilation of papers dedicated to ancient and medieval logic, examining prominent thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Porphyry, Proclus, Boethius, (...) Buridan, and Kilwardby. The second section shifts focus towards early-modern and contemporary logics, including the works of Caramuel, Kant, Drobisch, Husserl, and Jaskowski. Topics of discussion encompass the relationship between mathematics and logic, natural deduction, intuitionism, graph theory, categorical judgments, theories of truth, modal logic, opposition relations, logic diagrams, definitions of formal logic, many-sorted logic, model theory, and paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

Nowadays, the forms assumed by knowledge indicate an unhinging of traditional structures conceived on the model of discipline. Consequently, what was once strictly disciplinary becomes interdisciplinary, what was homogeneous becomes heterogeneous and what was hierarchical becomes heterarchical. When we look for a matrix of interdisciplinarity, that is to say, a primary basis or an essential dimension of all the complex phenomena we are surrounded by, we see the need to break with the disciplinary self-restraint in which, often completely inadvertently, many (...) of us lock ourselves up, remaining anchored to our own competences, ignoring what goes beyond our own sphere of reference. However, interdisciplinarity is still a vague concept and a much demanding practice. It presupposes the continuous search for convergent theoretical perspectives and methodologies, and the definition of common spaces and languages, as well as a true dialogical and open mind of several scholars. From ethics to science, from communication to medicine, from climate change to human evolution the volume Controversies and Interdisciplinarity offers a series of original insights beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model. (shrink)

The aim of the current study was to investigate important pathways of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis concerning the role of peer relations. First, we examined (1) the mediating role of peer problems in the association between the motor performance in daily activities and internalizing problems as a main pathway of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis. Furthermore, we explored the role of (2) children’s popularity as a mediator and (3) best friendship quality as a moderator path of the effect of motor performance (...) on both peer problems and internalizing problems. The non-clinical sample of the present study consisted of 189 children (48.6% females) aged nine to eleven years (Mage = 9.69, SDage = 0.46). Parents reported on their child’s motor performance in daily activities by completing the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire. In addition, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire was used to assess peer problems as well as internalizing problems. The Self Description Questionnaire provided a measure of children’s self-reported popularity. Finally, the Friendship Quality Questionnaire was used to investigate children’s best friendship quality. Results of a structural equation model suggest that peer problems fully mediated the association between the motor performance in daily activities and both popularity and internalizing problems. However, no evidence for the mediating effect of popularity in the association between peer problems and internalizing problems was found. Further, best friendship quality had small but non-significant positive moderating effect on the relation between peer problems and internalizing problems. The mediating role of peer problems highlights the importance of peer relations in the motor performance of daily activities. Possible reasons for the lack of some of the expected mediating and moderating effects as well as practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Why, then, has Anglo-American jurisprudence remained staunchly indifferent to history? How has it been able to maintain its confident assumption that the analytical and the historical can be neatly...

The traditional Lewis–Stalnaker semantics treats all counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent as trivially or vacuously true. Many have regarded this as a serious defect of the semantics. For intuitively, it seems, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents—counterpossibles—can be non-trivially true and non-trivially false. Whereas the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then the mathematical community at the time would have been surprised" seems true, "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would (...) have been thrilled" seems false. Many have proposed to extend the Lewis–Stalnaker semantics with impossible worlds to make room for a non-trivial or non-vacuous treatment of counterpossibles. Roughly, on the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics, we evaluate a counterfactual of the form "If A had been true, then C would have been true" by going to closest world—whether possible or impossible—in which A is true and check whether C is also true in that world. If the answer is "yes", the counterfactual is true; otherwise it is false. Since there are impossible worlds in which the mathematically impossible happens, there are impossible worlds in which Hobbes manages to square the circle. And intuitively, in the closest such impossible worlds, sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan are not thrilled—they remain sick and unmoved by the mathematical developments in Europe. If so, the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would have been thrilled" comes out false, as desired. In this paper, I will critically investigate the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics for counterpossibles. I will argue that the standard version of the extended semantics, in which impossible worlds correspond to maximal, logically inconsistent entities, fails to give the correct semantic verdicts for many counterpossibles. In light of the negative arguments, I will then outline a new version of the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics that can avoid these problems. (shrink)

Jens Timmermann provides a detailed philosophical, developmental and historical analysis of Immanuel Kant's 1797 essay 'On a Supposed Right to Lie from Love of Humanity', in which Kant argues that it is criminally wrong to lie to protect a friend from being murdered.