Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models similar to those used in Chomsky's program in linguistics. This approach is thought to provide a fruitful perspective from which to investigate moral competence from computational, ontogenetic, behavioral, physiological and phylogenetic perspectives. In this article, (...) I outline a framework for UMG and describe some of the evidence that supports it. I also propose a novel computational analysis of moral intuitions and argue that future research on this topic should draw more directly on legal theory. (shrink)

This guest column examines the historical fate of Russia in its catastrophic confrontation with Ukraine and the West. The piece considers the negative self-definitions of Russia that have arisen in the aftermath of the communist utopia and its virtual transformation into an anti-world — a society whose purpose is to undermine and destroy. Emerging Russian cults of war, death, and apocalypticism are stressed, as are the paradoxes and inversions by which Russia, in attempting to become stronger, becomes weaker and indeed (...) suicidal. (shrink)

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate 'moral grammar' that causes them to analyse human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyse human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for (...) jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgement. (shrink)

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

My primary aims in this paper are to explain what exploitation is, when it’s wrong, and what makes it wrong. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints such as those against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. (...) Its deepest wrongness, I argue, lies in our moral obligation not to extract excessive benefits from people who cannot, or cannot reasonably, refuse our offers. (shrink)

The aim of the dissertation is to formulate a research program in moral cognition modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar and organized around three classic problems in moral epistemology: What constitutes moral knowledge? How is moral knowledge acquired? How is moral knowledge put to use? Drawing on the work of Rawls and Chomsky, a framework for investigating -- is proposed. The framework is defended against a range of philosophical objections and contrasted with the approach of developmentalists like Piaget and Kohlberg. (...) ;One chapter consists of an interpretation of the analogy Rawls draws in A Theory of Justice between moral theory and generative linguistics. A second chapter clarifies the empirical significance of Rawls' linguistic analogy by formulating a solution to the problem of descriptive adequacy with respect to a class of commonsense moral intuitions, including those discussed in the trolley problem literature originating in the work of Foot and Thomson. Three remaining chapters defend Rawls' linguistic analogy against some of its critics. In response to Hare's objection that Rawls' conception of moral theory is too empirical and insufficiently normative, it is argued that Hare fails to acknowledge both the centrality of the problem of empirical adequacy in the history of moral philosophy and the complexity of Rawls' approach to the problem of normative adequacy. In response to Nagel's claim that the analogy between moral theory and linguistics is false because whatever native speakers agree on is English, but whatever ordinary men agree in condemning is not necessarily wrong, it is argued that the criticism ignores both Rawls' use of the competence-performance distinction and the theory-dependence of the corresponding distinction in linguistics. In response to Dworkin's claim that Rawls' conception of moral theory is incompatible with naturalism and presupposes constructivism, it is argued that Dworkin's distinction between naturalism and constructivism represents a false antithesis; neither is an accurate interpretation of the model of moral theory Rawls describes in A Theory of Justice. The thesis concludes by situating Rawls' linguistic analogy within the context of broader debates in metaethics, democratic theory, natural law theory, and the theory of moral development. (shrink)

Introduction. The article discusses the main approaches to the concept “right radicalism” in modern Russian and foreign political science. In addition, the author shows how actors in political processes use ideology in the framework of political struggle as exemplified by the ideological discourse of the far-right British National Party. The aim of the study is to trace the specifics of constructing the nationalist discourse of the rightwing political forces in modern Europe (using the example of the British National Party) and (...) formulate the author’s definition of the term “right-wing radicalism”. Methods. The author uses comparative and historical-retrospective methods to comprehensively consider the phenomenon of the right-wing radicalism, as well as discourse analysis of a political party’s text, which contributes to a better understanding of the features constructing the discourse of these actors in political processes. Scientific novelty of the study. The work provides comprehensive analysis of the concept “right radicalism” in the context of political processes of modern Europe, the author suggests his own definition of the phenomenon considered. Results. From the vast scientific heritage devoted to issues of the right-wing radicalism, ideology, and functioning of right-wing political parties, the author choses several approaches presented in both domestic and foreign political science, which makes it possible to disclose essential ideas of the “right-wing radicalism”. In addition, as a result of the discourse analysis of the British National Party program document, the author identifies the main points that are key to the nationalist discourse of the modern European right-wing radical party. Conclusions. As a result of the study, we can conclude that the concept “right radicalism” is one of the most debatable in modern political science and the relevance of its study is not in doubt. The analysis of the program document of one of the oldest extreme right-wing parties in Europe shows that ideological discourse is formed from various components and, using various methods, the researcher can analyze its structure in detail, understanding how political forces form this discourse within the framework of the political struggle. (shrink)

The absence of a clear influence of the responses modified by new connections created by LTP on the development of these connections casts doubt on an essential role of LTP in learning and memory formation without any association with reinforcement. The evidence for the involvement of the monoaminergic systems in synaptic potentiation in the cerebral cortex during learning is adduced, and their role in reinforcement system function is discussed.

When is it immoral to take advantage of another person for one's own benefit? For some, such as Ruth Sample, John Roemer, and Will Kymlicka, the answer at least partly depends on whether what one takes advantage of is the fact that this person is, or has been, the victim of injustice. I argue, however, that whether person A wrongly exploits person B is wholly unrelated to whether A takes advantage of the fact that B is, or was, the victim (...) of injustice. I also develop a positive account regarding which personal attributes one should not exploit for personal gain. (shrink)

Georges Gurvitch, from the 1920s to the end of his life, was solving the problem of combining unity and plurality in the justification of society. He believed that individualism and collectivism represented social processes in a limited way because they were based on the preconception that the binding power of law derives respectively from a private or corporate actor's will. Gurvitch contrasted individual law with the social one, which was intended to overcome the opposition between individualism and collectivism. Social law (...) bases on legal sociology's assumption that social interactions as such are already legal relations. This conclusion allows Gurvitch to consider any social interaction as a source of law and to assert legal pluralism as a way of constructing society. The integrity of the latter is a condition for the mutual correlation of the multiplicity of legal regulations generated by internal social interactions into the unified structure of social law. In a holistic approach to comprehending social interactions, Gurvitch, in his Russian-language works in the migr period, uses the philosophical-legal interpretation of sobornost to describe society's integrity. In French- and English-language works from the 1930s, Gurvitch uses the term "totality," which he learned from Marcel Mauss, to describe social integrity. This article compares sobornost and totality as variants of denoting social integrity in Gurvitch's social law doctrine. The researcher determines that Gurvitch, using the concepts of sobornost and totality, interpreted society's development differently, 1) as anti-hierarchical sobornost equality, and 2) as a hierarchical inordination of totalities. Having analyzed the peculiarities of the interpretation of sobornost and totality in Gurvitch's works, the author concludes that these concepts should be considered multilingual equivalents in denoting communal unity as sources of law, which reflect changes in the interpretation of society in Gurvitch's social law doctrine. (shrink)

In the paper we consider complexity of intuitionistic propositional logic and its natural fragments such as implicative fragment, finite-variable fragments, and some others. Most facts we mention here are known and obtained by logicians from different countries and in different time since 1920s; we present these results together to see the whole picture.

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum sentences, and (...) formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed. (shrink)

I argue against the view that there is intrinsic value in making one's own decisions about the direction and shape of one's life.

_Russian Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century: An Anthology_ presents a variety of contemporary philosophic problems found in the works of prominent Russian thinkers, ranging from social and political matters and pressing cultural issues to insights into modern science and mounting global challenges.

We propose and investigate a uniform modal logic framework for reasoning about topology and relative distance in metric and more general distance spaces, thus enabling the comparison and combination of logics from distinct research traditions such as Tarski’s for topological closure and interior, conditional logics, and logics of comparative similarity. This framework is obtained by decomposing the underlying modal-like operators into first-order quantifier patterns. We then show that quite a powerful and natural fragment of the resulting first-order logic can be (...) captured by one binary operator comparing distances between sets and one unary operator distinguishing between realised and limit distances . Due to its greater expressive power, this logic turns out to behave quite differently from both and conditional logics. We provide finite axiomatisations and ExpTime-completeness proofs for the logics of various classes of distance spaces, in particular metric spaces. But we also show that the logic of the real line is not recursively enumerable. This result is proved by an encoding of Diophantine equations. (shrink)

Mikhail L. Gasparov. Intertextual analysis today. The paper provides a discussion about recent results and perspectives of intertextual analysis — the method that has been a contemporary with Tartu-Moscow school. The connections between the classical philological methods and intertextual analysis are described, together with specifying the concept of intertext and emphasizing the need for the correctness of a researcher, because such an analysis always carries a danger of overinterpretation. Several examples are used to illustrate how the imagination of a (...) researcher can create arbitrary allusions that are not based on the original text and are usually misleading. As a result, the text under study will not become more clear, vice versa, it turns to be less understandable. (shrink)

Mikhail L. Gasparov. Intertextual analysis today. The paper provides a discussion about recent results and perspectives of intertextual analysis — the method that has been a contemporary with Tartu-Moscow school. The connections between the classical philological methods and intertextual analysis are described, together with specifying the concept of intertext and emphasizing the need for the correctness of a researcher, because such an analysis always carries a danger of overinterpretation. Several examples are used to illustrate how the imagination of a (...) researcher can create arbitrary allusions that are not based on the original text and are usually misleading. As a result, the text under study will not become more clear, vice versa, it turns to be less understandable. (shrink)

Mikhail L. Gasparov. Intertextual analysis today. The paper provides a discussion about recent results and perspectives of intertextual analysis — the method that has been a contemporary with Tartu-Moscow school. The connections between the classical philological methods and intertextual analysis are described, together with specifying the concept of intertext and emphasizing the need for the correctness of a researcher, because such an analysis always carries a danger of overinterpretation. Several examples are used to illustrate how the imagination of a (...) researcher can create arbitrary allusions that are not based on the original text and are usually misleading. As a result, the text under study will not become more clear, vice versa, it turns to be less understandable. (shrink)

The opposition between transcendentalism and naturalism plays a key role in discussions about consciousness at the confluence of phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Associated with it is a whole range of research programs. However, the opposition between transcendentalism and naturalism in these programs is, as a rule, operational and not thematic in nature and presupposes that 1) Transcendentalism and naturalism as traditions are initially alien to each other; 2) The domain of their opposition is ontology. The article attempts to problematize these (...) premises based on one historical circumstance. Turning to the texts of Kant, the founder of transcendental philosophy, I intend to show that transcendentalism, which was first substantiated in them, is a version of naturalistic ontology, that is, a peculiarly interpreted naturalism that identifies nature with its natural scientific model and excludes constituting subjectivity from ontology. It is built not on the naturalization of phenomenology, but on the transcendentalization of natural science. Reinterpreting the experimental method in the spirit of the Copernican turn, Kant substantiates the apodictic nature and lack of alternative to the ontology of nature by turning nature into a correlate of consciousness and strictly limiting the principles of mathematical natural science to the boundaries of the phenomenal world. As a result, the true theme of philosophy—the thing in itself and transcendental subjectivity itself—is taken beyond the boundaries of ontology. The thematization of the naturalistic origins of transcendentalism and the removal of transcendental consciousness beyond the boundaries of ontology, carried out within its framework, thus reveals the problematic nature of these premises. The article also demonstrates that, despite significant differences in the understanding of transcendental philosophy and ontology between Kant and Husserl, the identified motives—the naturalistic nature of the ontological foundation and the meta-ontological character of transcendental subjectivity—remain of fundamental importance for the founder of phenomenology. This allows us to conclude that ontology is not the original domain of confrontation between transcendentalism and naturalism and to substantiate the compatibilist thesis according to which transcendentalism is compatible with ontological naturalism. (shrink)

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum (...) disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

In this guest column, Epstein offers “a new sign” that, he argues, resolves difficulties that have arisen in many theories and practices, including linguistics, semiotics, literary theory, poetics, aesthetics, ecology, ecophilology, eco-ethics, metaphysics, theology, psychology, and phenomenology. The new sign, a pair of quotation marks around a blank space, signfies the absence of any sign. Most generally, “ ” relates to the blank space that surrounds and underlies a text; by locating “ ” within the text, the margins are brought (...) inside and can become the focus of attention. Not only the margins but also the material background of a text (the page or screen) can be brought forward and focused on through the transparency of the sign “ ”, in which case “ ” becomes a sign of itself. Consubstantial with its medium, therefore, this sign is both relative and universal: “ ” is the same everywhere, on every surface, in every language, and also in the arts. Epstein analyzes works by Rauschenberg, Malevich, Ilya Kabakov, and Vasilisk Gdenov in the visual arts, as well as music by John Cage, to demonstrate the usefulness of his new sign for aesthetics and art criticism. Each discipline, he argues, has its own nonspeakable conditions and assumptions that it needs to bring inside disciplinary frontiers. At the frontier of language, “ ” is both inside and outside, and therefore can express the nonspeakable condition of speakability. In concluding, Epstein suggests that the task of the avant-garde in theory today is to develop a “negative semiotics”: a semiotics of nonsigns, modeled on negative (apophatic) theology. (shrink)

Adequality, or παρισóτης (parisotēs) in the original Greek of Diophantus 1 , is a crucial step in Fermat’s method of finding maxima, minima, tangents, and solving other problems that a modern mathematician would solve using infinitesimal calculus. The method is presented in a series of short articles in Fermat’s collected works (1891, pp. 133–172). The first article, Methodus ad Disquirendam Maximam et Minimam 2 , opens with a summary of an algorithm for finding the maximum or minimum value of an (...) algebraic expression in a variable A. For convenience, we will write such an expression in modern functional notation as f (a). 3 The algorithm can be broken up into six steps in the following way:Introduce an auxiliary .. (shrink)

The KCTD family includes tetramerization (T1) domain containing proteins with diverse biological effects. We identified a novel member of the KCTD family, BTBD10. A comprehensive analysis of protein‐protein interactions (PPIs) allowed us to put forth a number of testable hypotheses concerning the biological functions for individual KCTD proteins. In particular, we predict that KCTD20 participates in the AKT‐mTOR‐p70 S6k signaling cascade, KCTD5 plays a role in cytokinesis in a NEK6 and ch‐TOG‐dependent manner, KCTD10 regulates the RhoA/RhoB pathway. Developmental regulator KCTD15 (...) represses AP‐2α and contributes to energy homeostasis by suppressing early adipogenesis. TNFAIP1‐like KCTD proteins may participate in post‐replication DNA repair through PCNA ubiquitination. KCTD12 may suppress the proliferation of gastrointestinal cells through interference with GABAb signaling. KCTD9 deserves experimental attention as the only eukaryotic protein with a DNA‐like pentapeptide repeat domain. The value of manual curation of PPIs and analysis of existing high‐throughput data should not be underestimated. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this comment on Joshua Greene's essay, The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul, I argue that a notable weakness of Greene's approach to moral psychology is its neglect of computational theory. A central problem moral cognition must solve is to recognize (i.e., compute representations of) the deontic status of human acts and omissions. How do people actually do this? What is the theory which explains their practice?

Many pigmented heterokonts are able to synthesize elements of their cell walls (the frustules) of dense biogenic silica. These include diatom algae, which occupy a significant place in the biosphere. The siliceous frustules of diatoms have species‐specific patterns of surface structures between 10 and a few hundred nanometers. The present review considers possible mechanisms of uptake of silicic acid from the aquatic environment, its transport across the plasmalemma, and intracellular transport and deposition of silica inside the specialized Silica Deposition Vesicle (...) (SDV) where elements of the new frustule are formed. It is proposed that a complex of silicic acid with positively charged proteins silaffins and polypropylamines remains a homogeneous solution during the intracellular transport to SDV, where biogenic silica precipitates. The high density of the deposited biogenic silica may be due to removal of water from the SDV by aquaporins followed by syneresis—a process during which pore water is expelled from the network of the contracting gel. The pattern of aquaporins in the silicalemma, the membrane embracing the SDV, can determine the pattern of species‐specific siliceous nanostructures. BioEssays 30:328–337, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Inspired by the views by the American educationalist Henry Giroux on the role teachers and educationalists should be playing in the time of postmodernism and by Abraham Maslow's concept of biological idioscyncrasy, the author discusses how the concepts of the dialogues created by the representatives of Norwegian Dialogue Pedagogy, Hans Skjervheim, Jon Hellesnes, and Lars Løvlie, can be applied in the area of higher education. The aim of pedagogy in the time of postmodernism is to provide learners with knowledge and (...) skills that will allow them to earn a living, maintain democracy and fight social, racial or gender injustice. This can be achieved only if educationalists provide for educating thinking and emancipated individuals and accordingly consider the issues of identities, ethics, differences, language, transformative intellectuals, and biological idiosyncrasy. The main pedagogical function of the dialogue concepts is to encourage Bildung by enlightening learners to seen and unseen power and authority relations. The dialogue can have a form of a discussion in class, at meetings, in talk between a teacher and a learner, and parents and a child, where everyone should be allowed to speak his or her mind. The dialogue in instructional situations is also understood as a dialogue in a broad sense, including texts in the text-books. Depending on the type of problem that is discussed, a dialogue can take many different forms, all of which can and should be used in supervising graduate and post-graduate students, as the use of the concepts will promote emancipation and self-determination. When it comes to the issues of ethics, transformative intellectuals and biological idiosyncrasy, the use of the concepts should be an approach of choice. However, the author argues that the dialogue concepts do not meet the requirement for the language that Giroux suggests that pedagogy in the time of postmodernism should use, and are based on assumptions that partly conflict with the postmodern understanding of the truth. The author proposes that a new type of a dialogue, the dialogue that allows existence of several narratives at the same time, should be developed. (shrink)

Our perestroika began with the development of a new political thinking, resurrecting the Renaissance spirit of true Leninism. What we must now do is decisively repudiate the Stalinist legacy in all areas of social consciousness, including literature, esthetics, philosophy, Aand social science.

The main result of the present paper is that the variable-free fragment of logic K*, the logic with a single K-style modality and its “reflexive and transitive closure,” is EXPTIMEcomplete. It is then shown that this immediately gives EXPTIME-completeness of variable-free fragments of a number of known EXPTIME-complete logics. Our proof contains a general idea of how to construct a polynomial-time reduction of a propositional logic to its n-variable—and even, in the cases of K*, PDL, CTL, ATL, and some others, (...) variable-free—fragments. Complexity of countermodels for such fragments is considered. (shrink)

The attempt to understand and discuss Mamardashvili's philosophy as metaphysics with its foundamental focus on Being of consciousness.

One can well understand the guarded attitude adopted toward a concept of culture that forces many structures and layers of experience beyond its boundaries, where they then become identified as lack of culture, chaos, etc. Such a restrictive, normative use of the word ‘culture’ is in principle explainable: after all, the intelligentsia does not simply speak; it speaks possessing a speech apparatus that is representative of the intelligentsia in relation to other strata of society that do not possess analogous speech (...) capabilities or in some cases even the inclination to self-expression. In some sense, culture and the discourse of culture are molded by a specific intellectual environment and serve that environment as a means to universalize its position. (shrink)

We study modal companions of \(K4^+\), the strictly positive fragment of _K_4. We partially find the boundary between all normal extensions of _K_4 and modal companions of \(K4^+\) among them. We also show that there is no greatest modal companion of \(K4^+\).

We study modal companions of $$K4^+$$, the strictly positive fragment of K4. We partially find the boundary between all normal extensions of K4 and modal companions of $$K4^+$$ among them. We also show that there is no greatest modal companion of $$K4^+$$.