There seems to exist a general consensus on how to conceptualize cooperation in the field of international relations (IR). We argue that this impression is deceptive. In practice, scholars working on the causes of international cooperation have come to implicitly employ various understandings of what cooperation is. Yet, an explicit debate about the discipline's conceptual foundations never materialized, and whatever discussion occurred did so only latently and without much dialog across theoretical traditions. In this paper, we develop an updated conceptual (...) framework by exploring the nature of these differing understandings and situating them within broader theoretical conversations about the role of cooperation in IR. Drawing on an array of studies in IR and philosophy, our framework distinguishes between three distinct types of cooperative state interactions – cooperation through tacit policy coordination (‘minimal’ cooperation), cooperation through explicit policy coordination (‘thin’ cooperation), and cooperation based on joint action (‘thick’ cooperation). The framework contributes to better theorization about cooperation in two main ways: it allows scholars across theoretical traditions to identify important sources of disagreement and previously unnoticed theoretical common ground; and the conceptual disaggregation it provides grants scholars crucial theoretical leverage by enabling type-specific causal theorization. (shrink)

Political methodologists have long sought to develop standards that can guide political scientists in the process of concept formation. Yet, the methodology literature has struggled to provide satisfactory solutions to the fundamental problem of conceptualization: for any given concept, there are a large number of attributes one could postulate as its defining characteristics, and it is unclear how to adjudicate between different possible definitions. We leverage the fact that the theory within which a concept appears places important restrictions on concept (...) formation: conceptualizations entail ontological claims that need to be consistent with those of the theories in which they appear. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The transition from modern to postmodern society leads to changing expectations about the purpose and responsibility of leadership. Habermas’s social theory provides a useful analytical tool for understanding current societal transition processes and exploring their implications for the responsibility of business vis-à-vis society. We argue that integrative responsible leadership, in particular, can contribute to the reconciliation of business with societal goals. Integrative responsible leadership understood in a Habermasian way is not only a strategic endeavor but also a communicative endeavor. An (...) essential part of integrative responsible leadership in light of the current societal transformation processes is the facilitation of discourses about a shared base of norms and values. This is exemplified alongside current societal developments like the European migration crisis or the emerging nationalist and fundamentalist movements in some countries. We specify how and when leadership should resort to communicative action and discuss the implications for leadership. (shrink)

The paper continues my earlier Chat with OpenAI’s ChatGPT with a Focused LLM Experiment (FLEX). The idea is to conduct Large Language Model (LLM) based explorations of certain areas or concepts. The approach is based on crafting initial guiding prompts and then follow up with user prompts based on the LLMs’ responses. The goals include improving understanding of LLM capabilities and their limitations culminating in optimized prompts. The specific subjects explored as research subject matter include a) diagonalization techniques as practiced (...) by Cantor, Turing, Gödel, and the advances, such as the Forcing techniques introduced by Paul Cohen and later investigators, b) Knowledge Hierarchies & Mapping Exercises, c) Discussions of IJ Good’s Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine, AGI, and Super- intelligence. Results suggest variability between major models like ChatGPT-4, Llama-3, Cohere, Sonnet and Opus. Results also point to strong dependence on users’ preexisting knowledge and skill bases. The paper should be viewed as ’raw data’ rather than a polished authoritative reference. (shrink)

According to a prominent thought, in one’s practical reasoning one should rely only on what one knows. Yet for many choices, the relevant information is uncertain. This has led Schiffer to the following objection: oftentimes, we are fully rational in reasoning from uncertain premises which we do not know. For example, we may decide to take an umbrella based on a 0.4 credence that it will rain. There are various ways proponents of a knowledge norm for practical reasoning can respond. (...) One option is to say that the right way of dealing with uncertain information requires knowledge of probabilities. Another option is to say that credences can be knowledge because they really are beliefs with an unusual kind of content that consists of a set of probability spaces. Mixed accounts are possible as well. On neither of the accounts in the literature, however, can reasoning from uncertain premises be taken as reasoning based on a graded attitude, a credence, toward an ordinary proposition. To make room for this possibility, I argue that reliance comes in degrees. The knowledge norm is only plausible when taken to be concerned with full reliance.Partial reliance, on the other hand, goes hand in hand with credence. (shrink)

People prefer linguistic stimuli with an inward (e.g. BODIKA) over those with an outward articulation dynamic (e.g. KODIBA), a phenomenon known as the articulatory in-out effect. Despite its robustness across languages and contexts, the phenomenon is still poorly understood. To learn more about the effect’s boundary conditions, mental representation, and origin, we crossed the in-out effect with evaluative conditioning research. In five experiments (N = 713, three experiments pre-registered), we systematically paired words containing inward versus outward dynamics with pictures of (...) negative versus positive valence. Although this evaluative conditioning procedure reversed the preference for inward over outward words, this was the case only for words with the same consonant sequences as the conditioned words. For words with inward/outward dynamics but different consonant sequences than the conditioned ones, a regular in-out effect emerged. Also, no preference reversal at all emerged for the conditioned consonant sequences when the contingency between single consonants at specific positions and positive/negative valence was zero. Implications of these findings for the in-out effect and evaluative conditioning are discussed. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of Hume’s views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American Crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended to (...) the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This article explores a specific case of premodern social thought, the Middle Persian Zoroastrian system of estates, MP pēšagān, sg. pēšag, which originated in Sasanian Iran, and its link to the social position of priests in the empire. It is argued that Zoroastrian religious experts tried to impose a totalizing system of social organization and heuristic possibility in a situation characterized by competition for resources in a tributary society. Against a widely held belief, it will be shown that this system (...) was only loosely based on an Avestan predecessor—an observation that should caution against broader attempts to project Middle Persian concepts onto the Avesta and vice versa. The findings also contribute to our understanding of the relationship between the Sasanians and the Zoroastrian tradition. (shrink)

Today, using a sophisticated publicity, corporations aim to generate an image of respect to the environment in consumer’s minds. These images do not necessarily match with reality. It is called “Greenwashing” when a company amplifies selectively information with an environmental positive connotation aiming to produce a distorted image with a “green” bias. This article pretends to analyze these phenomena and to evaluate their existence, importance and influence on consumer’s decisions through the design of a methodology and piloting it with a (...) population of students. The results point out that the images transmitted by the publicity of five selected corporations contrasts with examples of poor management, and this manipulation affects the perception of the surveyed students. Students of environmental sciences present a slightly higher resistance against Greenwashing because of their formation, but the majority incorporates the official discourse based on corporate public relationship. (shrink)

People prefer prototypical stimuli over atypical stimuli. The dominant explanation for this prototype preference effect is that prototypical stimuli are processed more fluently. However, a more recent account proposes that prototypes are more strongly associated with their category’s valence, leading to a reversed prototype preference effect for negative categories. One critical but untested assumption of this category-valence account is that no prototype preference should emerge for entirely neutral categories. We tested this prediction by conditioning categories of dot patterns positively, negatively, (...) or neutrally. In line with previous findings on the category-valence account, prototype preference reversed for negatively conditioned categories. However, prototype preference was similarly strong for positive and neutral categories. These findings imply that prototype preferences do not only reflect a transfer of category valence to exemplars. Instead, the results suggest that prototype preference is a multi-process phenomenon arising from the activated category valence and a fluency-based process. We discuss further implications for theories on fluency and prototype preference. (shrink)

Frege's philosophy of language includes detailed views on judgments. His formal logic - the Begriffsschrift - documents some of these views in the introduction and treatment of the judgment stroke. In current logic such an expression is either entirely ignored or, appearing as turnstile, plays an fundamentally different role. In this paper I put forward four claims: (i) Considering Frege's Begriffsschrift, it is methodologically palpable why the judgment stroke was omitted in nearly all logical systems developed after Frege. (ii) The (...) Frege-style inclusion of the judgment stroke in a formal language represents a partial implementation of results from speech act theory. (iii) A more comprehensive implementation, not limited to the judgment stroke, helps to satisfy justified expectations about formal languages and logical calculi. (iv) Such an implementation has not yet been achieved in the current logical mainstream. (shrink)

Translator's introduction -- Fundamental questions of geometry -- The decidability requirement -- The origin of the concept of number -- Implicit definition and the proper grounding of mathematics -- Rigid bodies in geometry -- Prelude to geometry : the essential ideas -- Physical and mathematical geometry -- Natural geometry -- The concept of the differential -- Reflections on the proper grounding of mathematics I -- Concepts and proofs in mathematics -- Dimension and space in mathematics -- Reflections on the proper (...) grounding of mathematics II -- The axiomatic method in modern mathematics. (shrink)

This article provides a re-evaluation of David Hume's intensive reading of the classics at an important moment of his literary and intellectual career. It sets out to reconstruct the extent and depth of this reading as well as the uses – scholarly, philosophical and polemical – to which Hume put the information he had gathered in the course of it. The article contends that Hume read the classics against the grain to collect data on a wide range of cultural information (...) which he could utilise for a number of literary and philosophical projects he was engaged in during the early 1750s. This reading soon came to pervade almost all aspects of Hume's literary activities of that period and resulted in what is here described as a fragmentary history of classical antiquity. As a result Hume's reading of the classics emerges from this article as both more extensive and more significant than has so far been acknowledged. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is Heidegger’s understanding of world and world-formation [Weltbildung] in his lecture The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GA 29/30) and his references to the idealistic philosophy of Schelling, the ancient thought of Aristotle and Heraclitus. I will put forward the following thesis: World is prevailing [Walten] and, as this prevailing, it is the being of beings as such as a whole in the projection of world that lets it prevail. In this paper, I will clarify how (...) the world prevails, how Dasein forms the world, and the significance of physis, logos and as-structure [als-Struktur] in this context. I will also show that Heidegger’s concept of world-formation can be thought together with his concepts of being-in-the-world and worldhood. Finally, I will discuss some of the difficulties in Heidegger’s understanding of the world and propose some solutions. (shrink)

According to a suggestion by Williamson, outright belief comes in degrees: one has a high/low degree of belief iff one is willing to rely on the content of one’s belief in high/low-stakes practical reasoning. This paper develops an epistemic norm for degrees of outright belief so construed. Starting from the assumption that outright belief aims at knowledge, it is argued that degrees of belief aim at various levels of strong knowledge, that is, knowledge which satisfies particularly high epistemic standards. This (...) account is contrasted with and shown to be superior to an alternative proposal according to which higher degrees of outright belief aim at higher-order knowledge. In an “Appendix”, it is indicated that the logic of degrees of outright belief is closely linked to ranking theory. (shrink)

In a recent essay Jürgen Ludwig Scherb strives for a benevolent reconsideration of Heidegger's famous phrase 'the nothing noths' (,das Nichts nichtet'). In 1932 Rudolf Carnap attacked this expression for being meaningless and a pseudo-sentence. Using Stanislaw Lesniewski's ontology. Scherb reconstructs 'the nothing noths' in the tradition of Desmond Paul Henry. My text tries to show that attempts to rehabilitate Heidegger's dictum by just providing such a reconstruction must fail. Indeed, all that Scherb's and Henry's results illustrate is the trivial (...) fact that for every concatenation of signs there is a reconstruction that renders it syntactically well formed and provable. If Scherb wants his reconstruction to stand out among all the other possible reconstructions, it will be necessary for him to scrutinize more than the three words 'the nothing noths'. To facilitate an adequate critique, my text includes an informal introduction to the talk about reconstructions and offers further reconstructions which provide material for illustration and comparison. (shrink)

Recently, Yalcin (Epistemic modals. Mind, 116 , 983–1026, 2007) put forward a novel account of epistemic modals. It is based on the observation that sentences of the form ‘ & Might ’ do not embed under ‘suppose’ and ‘if’. Yalcin concludes that such sentences must be contradictory and develops a notion of informational consequence which validates this idea. I will show that informational consequence is inadequate as an account of the logic of epistemic modals: it cannot deal with reasoning from (...) uncertain premises. Finally, I offer an alternative way of explaining the relevant linguistic data. (shrink)

Excerpt from Raum und Zeit in der Gegenwartigen Physik: Zur Einfuhrung in das Verstandnis der Relativitats-und Gravitationstheorie Die in dieser Schrift behandelte physikalische Theorie hat seit dem Erscheinen der zweiten Auflage eine wahr haft glanzende Bestatigung durch astronomische Beobach tungen gefunden (vergl. S. Sie hat dadurch die all gemeine Aufmerksamkeit in hohem Mae auf sich gelenkt und den Ruhm ihres Schopfers Einstein in noch hellerem Glanze erstrahlen lassen. So wird die grundlegende Be deutung der Relativitatstheorie fur unsere gesamte Natur auffassung (...) immer mehr von allen Seiten anerkannt, und es ist kein Zweifel, da sie binnen kurzem als Allgemeingut menschlich-wissenschaftlicher Weltanschauung gelten wird. Freilich, die Zahl derer, die diese erstaunliche Schopfung genialer Geisteskraft bewundern, ist weit schneller ge wachsen als die Zahl derer, die sie wirklich restlos ver stehen, und so hat sich das Bedurfnis nach aufklarenden Darstellungen der Grundlagen der Theorie nicht vermindert, sondern ist im Gegenteil im Steigen begriffen. Das zeigt sich auch darin, da die zweite Ausgabe dieser Schrift trotz hoherer Auflageziffer noch schneller erschopft war als die erste. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

What is Understanding? This is the first of a series of Chats with OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Chat). The main goal is to obtain Chat’s response to a series of questions about the concept of ’understand- ing’. The approach is a conversational approach where the author (labeled as user) asks (prompts) Chat, obtains a response, and then uses the response to formulate followup questions. David Deutsch’s assertion of the primality of the process / capability of understanding is used as the starting point. (...) Understanding is posited as a major step in the Big Picture description of emergence in the Universe. Understanding follows the emergence of Brains and Minds, culminating in Power Over the Universe. My evaluation suggests that Chat does indeed offer utility, but also has limitations manifested by overly general responses that do not focus tightly on the questions asked. Chat does yield some gems that could be easily missed. The approach used here includes creating Metaprompts, wherein Chat is asked to create more efficient prompts based on initial promptsThis approach appears to hold significant promise, and will likely be of benefit to those exploring various facets of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs) and designers of Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). Other findings include the need for creating new metrics and ways of discussing intelligence, and various adjacent areas and subprocesses associated with intelligence. Discussions of future directions is also included. (shrink)

Problems in normative ethics paradigmatically concern what it is obligatory or permissible for an individual to do. Yet sometimes, each of us ought to do something individually in virtue of what we ought to do together. Unfortunately, traversing these two different levels at which a moral obligation can arise – individual and collective – is fraught with difficulties that easily lure us into conclusions muddying our understanding of collective obligations. This paper seeks to clearly lay out a systematic problem central (...) to the relation between collective and individual duties in view of alleviating some such confusion and facilitating more concerted attempts at resolving it: Collective duties require individuals to act in order for the collective duty to be fulfilled. Yet typically, a collective duty does not entail any one set of individual duties that would prescribe such contributory actions: The work we need to do in order to fulfil a duty can be allocated differently to the individuals collectively bearing it. Much like in matters of distributive justice, then, deriving individual duties from a collective one requires us to employ a distributive scheme, which raises separate normative concerns that have rarely taken centre stage in the debate so far. (shrink)

In the early Analytic Philosophy, the concept of a pseudosentence was used as a polemical device. To try and formalize a sentence without success was a means to ›debunk‹ it as a pseudosentence. The classical example is Heidegger’s dictum of the nothing which noths. But, according to Carnap, not only did Carnap not understand what Heidegger said, but also Heidegger himself must have misunderstood his own utterances! Does Carnap's diagnosis remain intact if one admits the possibility of a misunderstanding and (...) misconstrual on Carnap’s side, too? Should not Carnap's concept of formalization be substituted by that of logico-hermeneutical reconstruction in order to obviate any such infelicities? In everyday communication, we very rarely ever feel the need to undertake a significant effort to understand each other. This attitude is at odds with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s view that misunderstandings are ubiquitous and that one has to actively invest into the establishment of correct understandings. Therefore, one should ask: Are there good reasons to reject the view that we misunderstand ourselves all the time? Or: Is there any worth in the view that misunderstandings are prevalent? The answers developed in this paper are generalized so that they apply to philosophical contexts and a maxim of escalating formalization is formulated. The debate about peer disagreement is adduced as an illustration of philosophical practices that evade the maxim and thus stagnate cognitively. (shrink)

Many of us view the world of science as a firm bastion of knowledge, with each new discovery and further illumination adding to an unshakable foundation of natural truths. Weak Knowledge aims to rattle our faith, not in core certainties of scientific findings but in their strength as accessible resources. The authors show how, throughout history, many bodies of research have become precarious due to a host of factors. These factors have included cultural or social disinterest, feeble empirical evidence or (...) theoretical justifications, and a lack of practical applications in a given field's findings. This book brings together cases from a range of historical periods and disciplines, ranging from personal medicine to climatology, to illuminate the specific forms, functions, and dynamics of so-called "weak" bodies of knowledge. (shrink)

In his book Meinungsverschiedenheiten (engl.: Disagreement) Marc Andree Weber defends a probability based conception of epistemic peerhood. Starting from this conception he proves the equal weight thesis, which prescribes that one should allocate the same weight to the beliefs of epistemic peers as to one's own beliefs. – In the present article I provide a much shorter proof. For that purpose I first formalize Weber's definition and thesis and I close the argumentative gap between the two of them by making (...) relatively few additions. Toward the end, I will document the differences between Weber's proof and my proof and indicate the relevance of a second proof. No judgmental assessment will be sought. (shrink)

This paper is a review of Rudolf Carnap's changing attitudes towards the conceptualisation of pseudo-problems. For that purpose his early works are divided into four phases each of which display subtle dierences with respect to the role pseudo-problems play in Carnap's epistemology and philosophical methodology. Based on a number of short texts by Carnap, an attempt is made to give provisional denitions of 'pseudo-problem' and related expressions.

Does an affirmation of theistic evolution make the task of theodicy impossible? In this article, I will review a number of ancient and contemporary responses to the problem of evil as it concerns animal suffering and suggest a possible way forward which employs the ancient Jewish insight that evil—as resistance to God's will that results in suffering and alienation from God's purposes—precedes the arrival of human beings and already has a firm foothold in the nonhuman animal world long before humans (...) are ever tempted to go astray. This theological intuition is conferred renewed relevance in light of the empirical reality of evolutionary gradualism and continuity and in view of the recent findings of cognitive ethology. Consequently, I suggest that taking biological evolution seriously entails understanding “moral evil” as a prehuman phenomenon that emerges gradually through the actions and intentions of “free creatures” which—as evolutionary history unfolded—increasingly possessed greater levels of freedom and degrees of moral culpability. (shrink)

This study investigates Hobbe’s theory of natural rights. Hobbes conceived a natural right of every man to every thing that is necessary for his survival. This prima facie curious theory was consecutively attacked with conceptually illuminating arguments from the two main representatives of the next generation of natural lawyers, Pufendorf and Cumberland. Their objections and possible defences of Hobbe’s theory are reconstructed. Especially Pufendorf’s arguments help to understand Hobbe’s position in ascribing him a special concept of rights, namely non-obligatory rights. (...) This concept in turn was fully developed in Pufendorf’s extremely influential distinction of perfect and imperfect duties. (shrink)

This study analyses central concepts and arguments of Hume’s critique of the social contract theory, mainly presented in the Essay “Of the Original Contract” published in 1748. Hume’s work is interpreted here in broader perspective as an anti-voluntaristic argument in political philosophy that helped to form and cause the transition from natural law to utilitarianism in later British enlightenment. Therefore on the one hand the critical notions of consent and political obligation and on the other hand Hume’s carefully considered arguments (...) will be referred to their historical background in modern natural law theory proposed by Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke and others from the seventeenth century onwards. The strong influence of Hume’s critique on the next generation of enlightened philosophers will become as understandable as the historical acuteness of his reflections. (shrink)

To reach a deeper understanding of Kant's theory of legal punishment it's illuminating to examine the conceptions of early Kantian scholars. We look at writings of various authors from Gottlieb Hufeland to Johann Gottlieb Fichte that appeared after 1785 and before Kant published for the first time his own mature thoughts on criminal justice 1797 in the “Metaphysik der Sitten”. The investigated conceptions of the Early Kantians tend to support a rather conservative reading of Kant's theory as closely related to (...) the enlightened natural law tradition. (shrink)

To reach a deeper understanding of Kant’s theory of legal punishment it’s illuminating to examine the conceptions of early Kantian scholars. We look at writings of various authors from Gottlieb Hufeland to Johann Gottlieb Fichte that appeared after 1785 and before Kant published for the first time his own mature thoughts on criminal justice 1797 in the “Metaphysik der Sitten”. The investigated conceptions of the Early Kantians tend to support a rather conservative reading of Kant’s theory as closely related to (...) the enlightened natural law tradition. (shrink)

This study analyses the development of the relation between natural rights theories and the moral valuation of capital punishment in the European enlightenment up to Beccaria. The theories of Grotius, Hobbes and Cumberland are three eminent theoretical options in early modern natural law theory. In different ways they all approved capital punishment: Grotius proposed that the criminal forfeited his right to life through his criminal deed qua implicit consent or reciprocity. Hobbes saw the individual right to life of the citizen (...) as finally not binding for the state. And in Cumberland’s sight the right to live was only conditional on its maximizing effect on the collective welfare as he understood it. It was not until Beccaria published his famous book on crime and punishment that an enlightened natural law author rejected the legitimacy of the death penalty. Beccaria’s arguments concerning capital punishment are investigated in this study in the light of the foregoing debate based on natural rights. (shrink)

Fassio and Gao (2021) object to a knowledge-based decision theory on the ground that it cannot deal with unsuccessful inquiry. One way for inquiry to fail is not to know what one should know. If one’s inquiry fails in this way, is a subsequent choice in any way wrong when based on one’s limited actual knowledge? This paper discusses two strategies for dealing with this problem. On a first strategy, there is nothing wrong with such a choice (but something went (...) wrong prior to one’s choice). On a second strategy, there is something wrong with one’s choice and a knowledge-based decision theory should require that one’s decisions be based on the knowledge one should have, not merely on the knowledge one actually has. (shrink)

This is not the first Very Short Introduction to Hume. An earlier introduction to Hume by the eminent twentieth-century philosopher A. J. Ayer was included in the series in 2000 and is now replaced by James Harris’s volume.1 The choice of Harris by the editors at Oxford University Press was an obvious one, since he published a full-scale intellectual biography of Hume in 2015.2 The shorter book is not, however, merely a shortened version of the larger work. Rather, it was (...) written as a free-standing volume with the aim of presenting “a brief but comprehensive introduction to [Hume’s] thought”. That said, the volume contains some of the arguments developed at greater length in Harris’s intellectual... (shrink)

Recently the Principia Cybernetica Project undertook a computer‐based collaborative effort to develop a unified system of philosophy. The philosophy and its implementation are explicitly based on evolutionary principles of variation and natural selection (VNS) and a fundamental type of emergence called MetaSystem Transition (MST) which increases the overall freedom and adaptivity of systems. MST, conceived and articulated by Turchin (1977), occurs when a control subsystem is replicated and integrated into a whole through a higher level VNS generated control subsystem. Turchin (...) also articulated the concept of “the will to immortality” which led to Heylighen's (1991) formulation of cybernetic immortality (CI) contingent on immortal meme systems, metarational consciousness, and limitless knowledge. A possible direction of future evolution is the emergence of further levels of organization realized in "superbeing/metabeings.” The precise configuration of these “beings” is still open; an aspect or totality of which may be viewed as "cybernetic immortality.” In this paper, I review aspects of memes and MST as the basis for cybernetic immortality, discuss the potential for further MetaSystem Transitions in humans and human culture (trans‐sapiens and trans‐culture) , generalized CI constructs and interactions between cybernetically immortal constructs. Finally, some reflections are offered concerning the role of CI constructs in future evolution and the evolution of the future. (shrink)

As we read these lines we are inevitably reminded of the old adage ab love principium, . Horace here conforms to the ancient precept, as many other poets, at least since Pindar, had done before him. But in his works as a whole, and in the first collection of Odes as a whole, he begins not with Jupiter but with his patron Maecenas.3 Perhaps, therefore, Horace's own practice may help to justify the division of this Horatian article into two separate (...) but interdependent parts of which the first takes Maecenas as its starting-point while the second is concerned with Jupiter and with Augustus, his vicegerent on earth. (shrink)

We ask what type of neutralization techniques corporations apply to allegations of human rights abuses. We proceed by undertaking a Qualitative Content Analysis of 162 responses by ten extractives-sector firms over a period of 14 years. The firms were responding to accusations of human rights impacts documented by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. We use Garrett et al.’s :507–520, 1989) framework of neutralization techniques consisting of denial, justification, concession and excuse to examine the responses. During our QCA, we (...) observed emerging themes around self-promotion and evasive tactics. We contribute to existing literature by proposing ‘evasion’ as a novel neutralization technique, particularly in circumstances of corporate responses to accusations of wrongdoing. We argue that evasion occurs when firms refuse to engage in the debate brought forward in an accusation. In addition, we enrich our understanding of neutralization techniques by proposing subneutralization techniques in our analysis to diverge from that of other studies. We conclude by discussing the implications of the predominance of corporate narcissism and evasive neutralization techniques to the business and human rights movement and other international corporate responsibility standards. (shrink)

Quine challenged traditional views of the a priori by appealing to two key premises: that any statement may be held true “come what may” and that no statement is immune to revision in light of new experience. Chalmers has recently developed a seemingly compelling response to each of these claims. The critique is particularly threatening because it seems to rest on the Bayesian premise that upon acquiring evidence E, a rational agent will update her credence in any statement S to (...) equal her prior conditional credence in S given E. We argue that Chalmers’s criticisms misfire. When properly understood, Quine’s two theses are largely consistent with Bayesianism. (shrink)