Kuala Lumpur is a diverse city representing many different religions and nationalities. Recent government policy has actively promoted unity and cohesion throughout the city; and the country of Malaysia, with the implementation of a programme called 1Malaysia. In this book, the authors investigate the aims of this programme – predominantly to unify the Malaysian society – and how these objectives resonate in the daily spatial practices of the city’s residents. -/- This book argues that elements of urban infrastructure could work (...) as an essential mediator ‘beyond community’, allowing inclusive social structures to be built, despite cultural and religious tensions existing within the city. It builds on the premise of an empirical study which explores the ways in which different communities use the same spaces, supported through the implementation of a theoretical framework which looks at both Western and Islamic conceptualisations of the notion of community. Through the analysis of Kuala Lumpur, this book contributes towards the creation of more inclusive places in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious communities across the world. (shrink)

The organ donation and transplantation (ODT) system heavily relies on the willingness of individuals to donate their organs. While it is widely believed that public trust plays a crucial role in shaping donation rates, the empirical support for this assumption remains limited. In order to bridge this knowledge gap, this article takes a foundational approach by elucidating the concept of trust within the context of ODT. By examining the stakeholders involved, identifying influential factors, and mapping the intricate trust relationships among (...) trustors, trustees, and objects of trust, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of trust dynamics in ODT. We employ maps and graphs to illustrate the functioning of these trust relationships, enabling a visual representation of the complex interactions within the ODT system. Through this conceptual groundwork, we pave the way for future empirical research to investigate the link between trust and organ donation rates, informed by a clarified understanding of trust in ODT. This study can also provide valuable insights to inform interventions and policies aimed at enhancing organ donation rates. (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on the roles that coercion and persuasion should play in contemporary democratic political systems or societies. A number of the authors advocate new approaches to this question, offering various critiques of the dominant classical liberalism views of political justification, freedom, tolerance and the political subject. A major concern is with the conversational character of democracy. Given the problematic and ambiguous status of the many differences present in contemporary society, the authors seek to alert us to (...) the danger, that an emphasis on reasonable consensus will conceal exclusion in practice of some contending positions. The voices of vulnerable peoples can be unconsciously or even deliberately silenced by various institutional processes and operating procedures and a strong media influence can change the tenor of conversations and even lead to deception. To counter these factors, a number of the essays, in differing ways, urge the fostering of local community conversations or democratic agoras so that democratic debate and conversation might maintain the vitality necessary to a strong democratic system. (shrink)

The introspective devices framework proposed by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) offers an attractive conceptual tool for evaluating and developing accounts of introspection. However, the framework assumes that different views about the nature of introspection can be easily evaluated against a set of common criteria. In this paper, I set out to test this assumption by analysing two formal models of introspection using the introspective device framework. The question I aim to answer is not only whether models developed outside of (...) philosophy can be successfully evaluated against the set of conceptual criteria proposed by Kammerer and Frankish, but also whether this kind of evaluation can reveal some limitations inherent to the framework. (shrink)

Sixteen years ago, Prahalad and Hart introduced the possibility of both profitably serving the poor and alleviating poverty. This first iteration of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid approach focused on selling to the poor. In 2008, after ethical criticisms leveled at it, the field moved to BoP 2.0, instead emphasizing business co-venturing. Since 2015, we have witnessed some calls for a new iteration, with the focus broadening to a more sustainable development approach to poverty alleviation. In this paper, we seek (...) to answer the question: How has the BoP approach evolved over the past 16 years, and has it delivered on its early promise? We conducted a systematic review of 276 papers published in journals in this period, utilizing a rigorous correspondence analysis method to map key trends, and then further examined the 22 empirical studies conducted on the BoP approach. Our results suggest that the field has evolved, passing through a number of trends and coming full circle—with our analysis pointing to more recent BoP literature emphasizing similar themes to those espoused in the initial BoP iteration, rather than reflecting the principles espoused in either BoP 2.0 or BoP 3.0. Our analysis also points to a lack of clear evidence that the BoP concept has delivered on its promise either to businesses or to BoP participants. (shrink)

Several authors have investigated the question of whether canonical logic-based accounts of belief revision, and especially the theory of AGM revision operators, are compatible with the dynamics of Bayesian conditioning. Here we show that Leitgeb's stability rule for acceptance, which has been offered as a possible solution to the Lottery paradox, allows to bridge AGM revision and Bayesian update: using the stability rule, we prove that AGM revision operators emerge from Bayesian conditioning by an application of the principle of maximum (...) entropy. In situations of information loss, or whenever the agent relies on a qualitative description of her information state - such as a plausibility ranking over hypotheses, or a belief set - the dynamics of AGM belief revision are compatible with Bayesian conditioning; indeed, through the maximum entropy principle, conditioning naturally generated AGM revision operators. This mitigates an impossibility theorem of Lin and Kelly for tracking Bayesian conditioning with AGM revision, and suggests an approach to the compatibility problem that highlights the information loss incurred by acceptance rules in passing from probabilistic to qualitative representations of beliefs. (shrink)

Based on a small research project conducted in Kuala Lumpur (KL) in July - August 2017, the paper discusses places and practices of young heterosexual Malaysian Muslims dating in KL. In Malaysia, the law (Khalwat law) does not allow for two unrelated people (where at least one of them is Muslim) of opposite sexes to be within ‘suspicious proximity’ of one another in public. This law significantly influences behaviours and activities in urban spaces in KL. However, apart from the legal (...) framework, the faith of urban users seems to influence significantly the way they perceive space and how they behave in the city. The paper questions the analytical usefulness of the notion of public space (as the Western construct) in an attempt to formulate new intellectual coordinates to discuss urban space in a context of the Islamic, post-colonial, tropical, and global city. The ultimate aim of this paper is to start discussing how religious imagination and narratives could lead to formulating a new typology of urban spaces. (shrink)

"Working from newly available texts in Heidegger's Complete Works, Krzysztof Ziarek presents Heidegger at his most radical and demonstrates how the thinker's daring use of language is an integral part of his philosophical expression. Ziarek emphasizes the liberating potential of language as an event that discloses being and amplifies Heidegger's call for a transformative approach to poetry, power, and ultimately, philosophy."--Publisher's website.

Porter and Kramer :78–92, 2006; Harv Bus Rev 89, 62–77, 2011) introduced ‘shared value’ as a ‘new conception of capitalism,’ claiming it is a powerful driver of economic growth and reconciliation between business and society. The idea has generated strong interest in business and academia; however, its theoretical precepts have not been rigorously assessed. In this paper, we provide a systematic and thorough analysis of shared value, focusing on its ontological and epistemological properties. Our review highlights that ‘shared value’ has (...) spread into the language of multiple disciplines, but that its current conceptualization is vague, and it presents important discrepancies in the way it is defined and operationalized, such that it is more of a buzzword than a substantive concept. It also overlaps with many other concepts and lacks empirical grounding. We offer recommendations for defining and measuring the concept, take a step toward disentangling it from related concepts, and identify relevant theories and research methods that would facilitate extending the knowledge frontier on shared value. (shrink)

Pomiędzy filozofią a resztą kultury rośnie przepaść. Podczas gdy filozofowie są całkowicie przekonani o ważności swojej dziedziny i doniosłości tego, co się w niej robi – jej pytań, jej argumentacji, jej odpowiedzi, jej wynalazków pojęciowych, jej błyskotliwych idei, to niefilozofowie coraz powszechniej ważność tę kwestionują, w doniosłość powątpiewają, argumentacji nie cenią, błyskotliwości nie dostrzegają i w ogóle nie pojmują o co cały ambaras. Wszak filozofia drwa nie narąbie, wirusów z komputera nie usunie, cen w sklepach nie obniży, w rubryce „patenty (...) i wdrożenia” napisze „brak”. Zapytajmy więc: po co naszej kulturze filozofowanie? Nie filozofowie i nie instytuty filozoficznych badań i kształcenia filozoficznego, ale właśnie – filozofowanie. Żeby odpowiedzieć na takie pytanie, potrzeba nie tylko filozofii, ale także dobrych narzędzi z innych dziedzin nauki. Trzeba zapytać, jakiego rodzaju grą kulturową jest filozofowanie? Ilu z nas w nią gra? I co się wtedy dzieje? Czy filozofujemy na co dzień, czy tylko od święta? Niniejsza książka ani nie popularyzuje, ani nie przybliża tego, co robią filozofowie. Zamiast tego prowadzi Czytelników od rozmów w pociągach do teorii czerpanych z filozofii i socjologii wiedzy, od lektury nagłówków prasowych do teorii kultury, od obrazów epidemii i biografii Spinozy do studiów nad nauką. Stara się przy tym na pytania wyżej postawione jak najogólniej odpowiedzieć, a przepaść zasypać, pokazać przy tym, że filozofia od swego kulturowego otoczenia nie jest i nigdy nie była odizolowana. Przeciwnie, filozofowanie tak bardzo i w tak licznych miejscach w tkankę kultury wrosło, że bez niego tkanka ta porozrywałaby się na strzępy, że dla kultury współczesnej filozofowanie w najrozmaitszych przejawach jest czymś koniecznym, jest warunkiem trwania, życia i rozwoju. (shrink)

This book argues for the real possibility of an amelioration of an individual's life within the parameters of available resources, against all odds, or rather in spite of the odds, and against unfavorable economic and political conditions.

The proposal that probabilistic inference and unconscious hypothesis testing are central to information processing in the brain has been steadily gaining ground in cognitive neuroscience and associated fields. One popular version of this proposal is the new theoretical framework of predictive processing or prediction error minimization, which couples unconscious hypothesis testing with the idea of ‘active inference’ and claims to offer a unified account of perception and action. Here we will consider one outstanding issue that still looms large at the (...) core of the PEM framework: the lack of a clear criterion for distinguishing conscious states from unconscious ones. In order to fulfill the promise of becoming a unifying framework for describing and modeling cognition, PEM needs to be able to differentiate between conscious and unconscious mental states or processes. We will argue that one currently popular view, that the contents of conscious experience are determined by the ‘winning hypothesis’, falls short of fully accounting for conscious experience. It ignores the possibility that some states of a system can control that system’s behavior even though they are apparently not conscious. What follows from this is that the ‘winning hypothesis’ view does not provide a complete account of the difference between conscious and unconscious states in the probabilistic brain. We show how this problem for the received view can be resolved by augmenting PEM with Daniel Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness. This move is warranted by the similar roles that attention and internal competition play in both the PEM framework and the multiple drafts model. (shrink)

This article discusses places and practices of young heterosexual Malaysian Muslims dating in non-private urban spaces. It is based on research conducted in Kuala Lumpur (KL) in two consecutive summers 2016 and 2017. Malaysian law (Khalwat law) does not allow for two unrelated people (where at least one of them is Muslim) of opposite sexes to be within ‘suspicious proximity’ of one another in public. This law significantly influences behaviors and activities in urban spaces in KL. In addition to the (...) legal framework, the beliefs of Malaysian muslims significantly influence the way they perceive space and how they behave in the city. The article discusses the empirical theme, beginning with the participants’ narratives of their engagement with the dominant sexual and gender order in non-private spaces of KL. Utilizing questionnaires, interviews and observations, this paper draws upon a qualitative research project and questions the analytical usefulness of the notion of public space (as a Western construct) in the context of an Islamic, postcolonial, tropical, global city. (shrink)

This article examines the question: How do local organizations deal with competing temporal dynamics when building and implementing base/bottom of the pyramid initiatives? Time has been neglected in the BoP literature to date, yet, addressing poverty in a developing country requires a complex perspective of time. An analysis of 21 semi-structured interviews with locally based organizations implementing BoP initiatives in the Philippines revealed that the organizations had an ambitemporal perspective. In particular, we discover that they harmonize multiple temporal pacers by (...) making strategic decisions about the best mechanism of entrainment to utilize to move their community and any stakeholders to a long-term temporal horizon. We find that organizations manage this process by generating what we term a “third time” via a process of push-and-pull entrainment between the communities, the business, and the different temporal pacers. This article develops a conceptual framework for helping organizations to harmonize competing temporal dynamics to generate a bespoke “third time” for each community they work with. (shrink)

The Joint International Conference on Logic Programming, sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming, is a major forum for presentations of research, applications, and implementations in this important area of computer science. Logic programming is one of the most promising steps toward declarative programming and forms the theoretical basis of the programming language Prolog and its various extensions. Logic programming is also fundamental to work in artificial intelligence, where it has been used for nonmonotonic and commonsense reasoning, expert systems implementation, (...) deductive databases, and applications such as computer-aided manufacturing. Krzysztof R. Apt is project leader at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and part-time Professor in Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam. Topics covered: Theory Foundations. Programming Languages. Implementation. Programming Methodologies and Tools. Applications. Deductive Databases. Artificial Intelligence. Parallelism. (shrink)

In the paper it is shown that for the existence of the virtual particles - in Quine's sense of existence - is responsible a part H'(t) of the hamiltonian of the mutual interaction among real particles. The author tries to prove that the application of Quine's definition of existence to the justification of the existence of virtual particles, cannot be accepted by the physicists. For that reason they seek another justification for the existence of virtual particles - with the help (...) of the specific (strictly: false) interpretation of the Heisenberg time-energy uncertainity principle. (shrink)

Jaegwon Kim used the causal exclusion argument as a weapon against non-reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind. The aim of this paper is to inquire into the consequences of this argument in order to check whether they are devastating to the initial position. The main focus will be the question of whether type epiphenomenalism, the alleged consequence of the causal exclusion argument, really leads to eliminativism about the mental. In order to cast some doubt on this claim I use (...) David Lewis's distinction between sparse and abundant properties and draw a comparison between mental predicates and deflationary truth. The conclusion is that the causal exclusion argument doesn't lead to eliminativism as traditionally conceived and some of Kim's theses might in fact be approved by non-reductive physicalists. (shrink)

According to a prevailing view, conceptual engineering introduces a revolutionary philosophical methodology, challenging traditional conceptual analysis. However, in our paper, we argue that closer scrutiny reveals not only the falsity but also the inherent ambiguity of this narrative. We explore four interpretations of the "Anti-Novelty Claim", the claim that conceptual engineering is not a new way of doing philosophy. Discussing the Anti-Novelty Claim from the perspective of a text’s producer, the text’s consumers, and the exegetical potential of the text, we (...) examine each perspective’s metaphilosophical implications and demonstrate that taking each perspective requires different methods. Adopting these different methods, we argue that the different interpretations of the Anti-Novelty Claim range from nearly trivially true to unlikely but untested. Importantly, we emphasize that each interpretation offers unique philosophical insights, yet addressing them requires diverse types of evidence, preventing a singular, straightforward answer to whether conceptual engineering is new. (shrink)

The article presents the painter Stanisław Daczyński, a student of Jan Matejko, who having completed his art studies and leaving Krakow worked at a pottery school in Kolomyia in Pokuttia. There has been scarcely any research conducted about the life of Stanisław Daczyński. The present article is a continuation of the studies on this painter, previously published by the author, and aims to bring him back to the space of the history of Polish culture and bring closer the space in (...) which he functioned. The paper presents the outcome of the research conducted in the Jagiellonian Library and in several Polish archives, as well as information obtained from the author’s own collection. The study method used a historical and anthropological analysis of the source materials. The article reconstructs the social and cultural background of the Pokuttia, where the painter lived and worked. It also outlines his personal and professional life in Kolomyia, Vienna, Bochnia, Zakopane and Krakow. Moreover, it solves the dates of birth and death of the artist and his wife, Stefania Zajączkowska, and identifies the place of their burial. To illustrate the painter’s activity, the article is supplemented with iconography: his drawings and the photographs of him and the places he was associated with. They are meant to complement the presented profile of Stanisław Daczyński and the cultural context of the environment in which he lived and which he influenced. (shrink)

The article presents a problem of proper hedging strategy in expected utility model when forward contracts and options strategies are available. We consider a case of hedging when an investor formulates his own expectation on future price of underlying asset. In this paper we propose the way to measure effectiveness of hedging strategy, based on optimal forward hedge ratio. All results are derived assuming a constant absolute risk aversion utility function and a Black-Scholes framework.

According to political philosopher Frédéric Gros, traditional notions of war and peace are currently being replaced by ideas of intervention and security. But while we may be able to speak of an end to war, this does not imply an end to violence. On the contrary, Gros argues that what we are witnessing is a reconfiguration of our ideas of war, resulting in new forms of violence—terrorist attacks, armed groups jockeying for territory, the use of precision missiles, and the dangerous (...) belief that conflict can be undertaken without casualties. In _States of Violence_, Gros explains how war was once conducted to defend or increase the power of a city, an empire, or a state, but today conflict is directed at the very fragility of the individual and based upon a logic of unilateral destruction inflicted upon deprived civilian populations. While war was once rationalized as justified bloodshed, these new states of violence are instead centered on the spectacle of stark, publicized civilian suffering. By charting the history of the philosophy of conflict in Western discourse, Gros offers a stimulating and timely critique of contemporary notions of war and terror. (shrink)