Phenomenal Difference' grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the (...) basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.

Wilson and Kass talked about their book, The ethics of human cloning, which is about the ethical debate over human cloning.

Mobile health (mHealth) apps for self-monitoring increasingly gain relevance for public health. As a mobile technology, they promote individual participation in health monitoring with the aim of disease prevention and the mitigation of health risks. In this paper, I argue that users of mHealth apps must engage in value trade-offs concerning their fundamental dimensions of well-being when using mobile health apps for the self-monitoring of health parameters. I particularly focus on trade-offs regarding the user’s self-determination as well as their capacity (...) to form personal attachments. Depending on the user’s level of advantage or disadvantage, value trade-offs can pose a threat to the users’ sufficient fulfillment of the dimensions of well-being. As such, value trade-offs can entrench existing structural injustices and prevent disadvantaged users to benefit from this technology. I argue that value trade-offs are, to some, a type of injustice that can drive disadvantaged users away from a sufficiency threshold of well-being, risk users to fall below the threshold, or have an accumulative effect on different dimensions of the user’s well-being. (shrink)

An epistemic formalization of arithmetic is constructed in which certain non-trivial metatheoretical inferences about the system itself can be made. These inferences involve the notion of provability in principle, and cannot be made in any consistent extensions of Stewart Shapiro's system of epistemic arithmetic. The system constructed in the paper can be given a modal-structural interpretation.

Christopher Hom has recently argued that the best-overall account of the meaning of pejorative terms is a semantic account according to which pejoratives make a distinctive truth-conditional contribution, and in particular express complex, negative socially constructed properties. In addition, Hom supplements the semantic account with a pragmatic strategy to deal with the derogatory content of occurrences of pejorative terms in negations, conditionals, attitude reports, and so on, according to which those occurrences give rise to conversational implicatures to the effect that (...) the pejorative terms are non-empty, which explains the offensiveness of those occurrences. In this paper, I aim to defend this semantic strategy from several recent objections, and I will also present a novel objection, which in my view shows that we should understand the semantic account as a version of inferentialism, rather than radical externalism. (shrink)

Recently two developments have had a major impact on the field of ancient DNA (aDNA). First, new advances in DNA sequencing, in combination with improved capture/enrichment methods, have resulted in the recovery of orders of magnitude more DNA sequence data from ancient animals. Second, there has been an increase in the range of tissue types employed in aDNA. Hair in particular has proven to be very successful as a source of DNA because of its low levels of contamination and high (...) level of ancient endogenous DNA. These developments have resulted in significant advances in our understanding of recently extinct animals: namely their evolutionary relationships, physiology, and even behaviour. Hair has been used to recover the first complete ancient nuclear genome, that of the extinct woolly mammoth, which then facilitated the expression and functional analysis of haemoglobins. Finally, we speculate on the consequences of these developments for the possibility of recreating extinct animals. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that defenders of Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities do not need to construct a metaphysically possible scenario in which an agent is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. Rather, there is a weaker (but equally legitimate) sense in which Frankfurt-style counterexamples can succeed. All that's needed is the claim that the ability to do otherwise is no part of what grounds moral responsibility, when the agent is indeed morally responsible.

Proof-theoretic reflection principles have been discussed in proof theory ever since Gödel’s discovery of the incompleteness theorems. But these reflection principles have not received much attention in the philosophical community. The present chapter aims to survey some of the principal meta-mathematical results on the iteration of proof-theoretic reflection principles and investigate these results from a logico-philosophical perspective; we will concentrate on the epistemological significance of these technical results and on the epistemic notions involved in the proofs. In particular, we will (...) focus on the notions of commitment to and acceptance of a theory. Special attention is given to the connection between proof-theoretic reflection and axiomatic truth theories. After distinguishing between different types of proof-theoretic reflection principles, we review some proof-theoretic results concerning extensions of formal theories by (iterated) reflection principles. As basis theories, we concentrate on standard arithmetical and elementary axiomatic truth theories. We then go on to explore the epistemological significance of these results. In this investigation, we aim to show that the epistemic notion of acceptance of (or commitment to) a theory plays a crucial role in the philosophical argumentation for reflection principles and their iteration. (shrink)

Inspired by Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects, we explore some ways in which the generic structure of the natural numbers can be presented. Following a suggestion of Saul Kripke’s, we discuss how basic facts and questions about this generic structure can be expressed in the framework of Carnapian quantified modal logic.

Are sexual orientations freely chosen? The idea that someone’s sexual orientation is not a choice is very influential in the mainstream LGBT political movement. But do we have good reasons to believe it is not a choice? Going against the orthodoxy, William Wilkerson has recently argued that sexual orientation is partly constituted by our interpretations of our own sexual desires, and we choose these interpretations, so sexual orientation is partly constituted by choice. In this paper I aim to examine the (...) question of whether our interpretations of our own sexual desires are constitutive of our sexual orientations. I will argue that whereas Wilkerson’s argument for the claim that sexual orientations are in part constituted by our chosen interpretations of our sexual desires is not sound, there are good reasons for endorsing a weaker claim, namely, that there are different but equally apt descriptions of the same sexual desires, depending on which concepts we have. (shrink)

The Structure of the ' Scienza Nuova ' One of the main reasons for the failure of Vico's Scienza Nuova to establish itself as a widely read philosophical ...

This paper outlines a framework for the abstract investigation of the concept of canonicity of names and of naming systems. Degrees of canonicity of names and of naming systems are distinguished. The structure of the degrees is investigated, and a notion of relative canonicity is defined. The notions of canonicity are formally expressed within a Carnapian system of second-order modal logic.

§1. Introduction. This paper deals with aspects of my doctoral dissertation which contributed to the early development of model theory. What was of use to later workers was less the results of my thesis, than the method by which I proved the completeness of first-order logic—a result established by Kurt Gödel in his doctoral thesis 18 years before.The ideas that fed my discovery of this proof were mostly those I found in the teachings and writings of Alonzo Church. This may (...) seem curious, as his work in logic, and his teaching, gave great emphasis to the constructive character of mathematical logic, while the model theory to which I contributed is filled with theorems about very large classes of mathematical structures, whose proofs often by-pass constructive methods.Another curious thing about my discovery of a new proof of Gödel's completeness theorem, is that it arrived in the midst of my efforts to prove an entirely different result. Such “accidental” discoveries arise in many parts of scientific work. Perhaps there are regularities in the conditions under which such “accidents” occur which would interest some historians, so I shall try to describe in some detail the accident which befell me.A mathematical discovery is an idea, or a complex of ideas, which have been found and set forth under certain circumstances. The process of discovery consists in selecting certain input ideas and somehow combining and transforming them to produce the new output ideas. The process that produces a particular discovery may thus be represented by a diagram such as one sees in many parts of science; a “black box” with lines coming in from the left to represent the input ideas, and lines going out to the right representing the output. To describe that discovery one must explain what occurs inside the box, i.e., how the outputs were obtained from the inputs. (shrink)

Given any finite graph, which transitive graphs approximate it most closely and how fast can we find them? The answer to this question depends on the concept of “closest approximation” involved. In [8,9] a qualitative concept of best approximation is formulated. Roughly, a qualitatively best transitive approximation of a graph is a transitive graph which cannot be “improved” without also going against the original graph. A quantitative concept of best approximation goes back at least to [10]. A quantitatively best transitive (...) approximation is a transitive graph that makes the minimal number of mistakes against the original graph. In other words, the sum of the edges that are removed from and are added to the original graph is minimal. (shrink)

In this article the idea of random variables over the set theoretic universe is investigated. We explore what it can mean for a random set to have a specific probability of belonging to an antecedently given class of sets, or, in other words, to have a specific probability of having a given set-theoretic property.

Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.

Parte de la dificultad presentada a la hora de establecer la relación entre filosofia y filología en la teoría hermenéutica viquiana surge del hecho de que Vico vaciló entre dos formas de entender esa relación, las cuales dieron lugar a dos diferentes concepciones de la relación entre hermenéutica y metafísica: entre una hermenéutica metafísica (predominante en SNP) y una metafísica hermenéutica (predominante en SNS). La primera, conforme al deseo viquiano de elaborar un "arte diagnóstica", hace dependiente a la interpretación de (...) la metafísica y hoy es inviable. La segunda comporta una relación mucho más compleja entre interpretación y metafísica y ofrece un método de investigación hermenéutica de considerable relevancia para la filosofía actual. (shrink)

Recensión crítica de tres obras recientes que tocan ciertos problemas políticos, morales y científicos de gran importancia en relación con Vico.Critical review of three recent books , which touch some political, moral and scientific points of great consequence with regard to Vico.

Professor Pompa's study of Vico has done a great deal to stimulate and inform the growing interest in the English-speaking world in this remarkable figure. It remains the only work devoted almost exclusively to an interpretation of the New Science and offers a comprehensive guide to the main theoretical problems to which the text gives rise. For this second edition Professor Pompa has responded to the reactions of reviewers and critics and added a new chapter which analyses Vico's conception of (...) the principles which govern the development of law. (shrink)

I use the word Moralist, somewhat after the French fashion, in the sense of a commentator on the human scene. I apologize for Contemporary, but there was another Camus, way back in the seventeenth century, who is being resuscitated now and who, according to the new Encyclopaedia of Literature , “wrote besides theological works some fifty novels which make him a pioneer of religious edification through popular fiction.” Our Camus is very much of our century and is still a comparatively (...) young man. And he is contemporary not only in the accidental sense that he happens to be alive and writing in our generation. He has suffered in his own flesh with our generation. He is both of us and with us. Born to a working-class French Colonial family in 1913 he knew none of the douceurs de la vie which held the memory in the first World War; while in the second he took an active part in the French Resistance movement and after the liberation edited the periodical Combat . His novels- L'Étranger and La Peste -are not so much works of imaginative creation as fictional records of the events of our time. His plays- Le Malentendu , Caligula , L'État de siège , Les justes -are studies or allegories of moral and political collapse in its various and varying moods. Like Actuelles , a collection of his current writing from 1944 to 1948, both novels and plays are testimonies of the anxieties through which our generation has passed. (shrink)