The task of this paper is to argue that expressivism [the thesis that moral judgements function to express desires, emotions, or pro/con attitudes] neither implies, nor is implied by, [motivational internalism].

Colin Radford must weary of defending his thesis that the emotional reactions we have towards fictional characters, events, and states of affairs are irrational.1 Yet, for all the discussion, the issue has not, to my mind, been properly settled—or at least not settled in the manner I should prefer—and so this paper attempts once more to debunk Radford’s defiance of common sense. For some, the question of whether our emotional responses to fiction are rational does not arise, for they are (...) inclined to doubt that we have them at all.2 Emotions, on this view, are fundamentally linked to belief states, as in the following thesis concerning the emotion of fear: 1) We fear for ourselves only if we believe ourselves to be in danger; we fear for others only if we believe they actually exist and are in danger. When we typically engage with fiction we do not ‘suspend our disbelief’, in the sense of coming to believe that the fiction is non-fiction. No matter how engrossed I become in a Dracula movie, I do not begin to believe that I am seeing actual vampires. 2) When we watch a horror movie, we do not believe ourselves, or anyone actual, to be in danger. And so these theorists, endorsing (1) and (2), are obliged to deny the intuitive (3): 3) We are sometimes frightened when watching a horror movie. These three propositions are a version of what is sometimes called ‘The Paradox of Fiction’. For my money, since the denial of (2) is foolish, and the denial of (3) deeply counterintuitive, it is (1)—being a substantive philosophical thesis—that is most likely the culprit. Radford agrees, yet maintains that there is some intimate connection between belief and emotion. For him, the dependence is not the existential one stated in (1), but a normative one: we do not rationally feel fear unless we believe ourselves (or someone actual) to be in danger.3 This revision of the connection allows the construction of a quite different inconsistent triad: 4) We are not rationally frightened unless we believe someone actual to be in danger.. (shrink)

The evolutionary neurological foundations of religious experience are detailed. Human beings have been burying and preparing their dead for the Hereafter for more than 100,000 years. These behaviors and beliefs are related to activation of the amygdala, hippocampus, and temporal lobe, which are responsible for religious, spiritual, and mystical trancelike states, dreaming, astral projection, near‐death and out‐of‐body experiences, and the hallucination of ghosts, demons, angels, and gods. Abraham, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus Christ, and others who have communed with angels or (...) gods display limbic system hyperactivity, whereas patients report religious hallucinations or out‐of‐body experiences when limbic structures are stimulated or excessively activated. It is postulated that limbic and temporal lobe structures account for the sexual and violent aspects of religious behavior and also serve as a “transmitter to God,” and that the evolution of these structures made spiritual experience possible. (shrink)

Discussions of responsibility typically focus on the person who is held responsible: what are the conditions or criteria of responsibility; what can be done to or demanded of a person who is responsible? This paper shifts focus onto those who hold, rather than those who are held, responsible: what do we owe to those whom we hold responsible? After distinguishing responsibility as answerability from responsibility as liability, it attends mainly to the former, and points out the ways in which it (...) is multiply relational: I am responsible for something to someone who has the standing to call me to account for it, under the norms of some particular practice. Responsibility as thus understood is also reciprocal: if you are to be answerable to me, I must treat you with a certain respect, attend seriously to your answer, and be ready to answer to you myself. The paper explores some of the implications of this point both for our moral dealings with each other, and for criminal law and the criminal trial. (shrink)

Mutual perceptions of ethical behaviour among managers in nine EU-countries were quantatively measured and related to perceptions concerning "ease of cooperation". A strong positive correlation obtains: the more ethical a country is perceived to be, the higher it is valued as an international business partner. Germany, however, is a typical exception to this rule: German managers are perceived as the most ethical, but are considered relatively difficult to cooperate with.

K.J. Devlin has extended Jensen's construction of a model ofZFC andCH without Souslin trees to a model without Kurepa trees either. We modify the construction again to obtain a model with these properties, but in addition, without Kurepa trees inccc-generic extensions. We use a partially defined ◊-sequence, given by a fine structure lemma. We also show that the usual collapse ofκ Mahlo toω 2 will give a model without Kurepa trees not only in the model itself, but also inccc-extensions.

It has been reported that, on average, most adults recall first memories formed around age 3.5. In general, most first memories are positive. However, whether these first memories tend to be visual or verbal and whether the period for childhood amnesia (CA) is greater for visual or verbal or for positive versus negative memories has not been determined. Because negative, stressful experiences disrupt memory and can injure memory centers such as the hippocampus and amygdala, and since adults who were traumatized (...) or abused during childhood (TA) reportedly suffer memory disturbances, it was hypothesized that those with a history of early trauma might suffer from a lengthier childhood amnesia and form their first recallable memories at a later age as compared to the general population (GP). Because the right hemisphere matures earlier than the language-dominant left hemisphere, and is dominant for visual and emotional memory, as well as the stress reponse, it was hypothesized that first recallable memories would be visual rather than verbal. Lastly, since stress can injure the brain and disrupt memory, it was hypothesized that the traumatized group would demonstrate memory and intellectual disturbances associated with right hemisphere injury as based on WAIS-R, Wechsler Memory Scale, and facial-memory testing. All hypotheses were supported. Positive and visual memories are formed before negative and verbal memories. TA CA offset, on average, is at age 6.1 versus 3.5 for GPs. TA PIQ (performance IQ), short-term visual memory, and facial memory were significantly reduced. (shrink)

It is often thought that Plato sets himself an important task in the Sophist – that of disentangling different uses, or senses, of the verb einai. Plato is thought to have confused different senses or uses of the verb in his philosophical youth; here he is supposed to correct his mistake, and to mark out a danger area for his successors.1 Plato is also often supposed, by commentators, to have set himself the task of disentangling a second confusion – a (...) confusion between the mē on and the mēdamōs on : on this view, the mē on is revealed as the negation of the on, whereas the mēdamōs on is the opposite of the on. (shrink)

The urgency of the research topic is that the attempt, through the prism of higher education in Ukraine, is to outline the factors and opportunities for forming a positive image of a modern teacher as the basis for the competitiveness of a higher educational institution. The purpose of the article is: rethinking the teacher’s image in conditions of growing demands and increasing competitiveness among higher education institutions. The objectives of the study are to summarize the data of the investigated problem (...) and to develop a model for the development of theoretical aspects of forming a teacher’s positive image in the context of the growth of the status of the university, and an analysis of the interdependence of the teacher’s image and his professional competence, practical skills, and the ability to associate theory with practice. The research methodology is general scientific and special-disciplinary methods of scientific research. In particular, the methods of theoretical generalization, analogy and abstraction are used to clarify the conditions, specifics and realities of the modern educational process, in particular – in higher educational institutions; deduction and induction, analysis and synthesis – to identify systemic problems of Ukrainian universities the needs satisfaction of educational services users; the synthesis of progressive ideas on designing ways to enhance the teacher’s positive image in the context of the growth of the status of higher education institutions. Also, special-disciplinary methods of scientific research are used: comparison, systematization and grouping – to generalize the model of development of theoretical aspects of creating of a positive image of the teacher in the context of the formation of the image of the university; analytical – in the analysis of the interdependence of the teacher's image and his professional competence, practical skills and ability to associate theory with practice, etc. The result of the study is a theoretical understanding of the teacher’s image in the context of the formation of the competitiveness of a higher educational institution. The result of the analysis is the constant, systematic improvement of their own professional competencies. And only under this condition, the teacher will be able to rely on the authority and respect among students and colleagues. It is noted that the current state of higher education dictates the necessity of finding new ways of solving problems of increasing the efficiency of not only training, preparation of a specialist in the labor market, but also the efficiency of the activity of a higher educational establishment in conditions of autonomy. Conclusion. The positive image of the teacher, and in general the educational institution, will increase the authority of the professions and specialties of higher education. And philosophy itself should assume responsibility for the formation of the future teacher, since since ancient times, philosophy has been, is and will be the reason for the comprehension of wisdom. The image of a modern teacher largely depends on his professional competence in practical skills and the ability to instruct students to study the theory in close relationship with practice. After all, knowledge becomes effective only in the applied aspect, in particular, when applying the principle of “theory-practice-theory". (shrink)

The paragraph in the first book of the Georgics, running from lines 118 to 159, which describes the loss of the golden age and man's subsequent history, has been very diversely interpreted. But one sentence, at 145f., has been especially controversial: labor omnia vicit improbus et duns urgens in rebus egestas.

I shall briefly evaluate the common claim that ethically acceptable population policies must let individuals to decide freely on the number of their children. I shall ask, first, what exactly is the relation between population policies that we find intuitively appealing, on the one hand, and population policies that maximize procreative freedom, on the other, and second, what is the relation between population policies that we tend to reject on moral grounds, on the one hand, and population policies that use (...) coercive methods such as laws or economic incentives and deterrents, on the other. I shall argue that when changing a population policy, it may be morally desirable to affect people's procreative decisions more rather than less, and that sometimes it may be morally desirable to prefer a population policy that does not maximize procreative freedom to a population policy that does maximize it. I shall also point out that indirect population policies that use incentives and deterrents are not necessarily incompatible with liberal principles. Finally, I try to show what is assumed by those who defend the view that coercive population policies are morally wrong in all circumstances. (shrink)

On June 5, 2024, the Australian Capital Territory passed a law to permit voluntary assisted dying (“VAD”). The Australian Capital Territory became the first Australian jurisdiction to permit nurse practitioners to assess eligibility for VAD. Given evidence of access barriers to VAD in Australia, including difficulty finding a doctor willing to assist, the Australian Capital Territory’s approach should prompt consideration of whether the role of nurses in VAD should be expanded in other Australian jurisdictions. Drawing on lessons from Canada, which (...) currently permits nurse practitioners to assess patient eligibility, we argue that the time has come for Australian jurisdictions to expand the role of nurses in VAD systems. This would be an important step in ensuring access to VAD for patients in practice. Attention, however, must also be paid to ensuring adequate remuneration of nurses (and doctors) if this goal of promoting access is to be achieved in practice. (shrink)

This chapter looks at ‘any’ as a quantifier. If noun phrases with ‘any’ are to be construed quantificationally, they must sometimes be represented by a universal quantifier, and sometimes by an existential. Earlier philosophers, notably Quine and Geach, hoped that the existentially representable cases might, when considerations of scope are taken into account, prove to be universal after all. Nevertheless, there are ineluctably ‘existential’ uses. In addition, if there are cases that must be represented existentially, then it is useless to (...) insist that all those cases that can be represented universally must be, even those for which a short-scope existential representation is available. However, the larger conclusion is that we should question the view that ‘any’ is essentially a quantifier in anything like the first-order logical understanding of that notion. (shrink)

The first chapter discusses the association of the English word ‘or’ in reasoning. “Or” is descended from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning second, a form which survives in such expressions as “every other day.” If logical theory had not introduced the vocabulary of disjunction, we could not formulate the question. The truth-functional character of ‘or’ and ‘and’, if they have such a character in their natural language habitat, is a character that is derived as a consequence of their playing a certain (...) role in discourse, one best described as punctuation, or in a specialized sense of the word adverbial. In many cases, the transformation of a sentence embedding an or-list to an equivalent or joined pair of sentences cannot plausibly be called disjunctive distribution. ‘Or’-words derive from additive rather than from subtractive ancestors. (shrink)

This chapter describes logic and the significance of punctuation to ‘or’ in a sentence. Axioms are primitive theorems. This is what is meant by ‘logic’, and in particular, a propositional logic is one that can be specified. Deontic logicians are by no means unanimous about their point of formal departure: whether it is the language of ‘ought’ and ‘may’ or the language of ‘obligation’ and ‘permissibility’. The punctuationist account takes ‘or’ as providing punctuation for lists and asks why we should (...) punctuate a list with ‘or’ in certain contexts when we want it to receive a conjunctive reading. ‘Or’ can be replaced by ‘else’ or ‘otherwise’, ‘or’ is a relative adverb as well. ‘Or’ can be regarded as a modifier of a whole sentence. (shrink)

This paper is an experiment in Leibnizian analysis. The reader will recall that Leibniz considered all true sentences to be analytically so. The difference, on his account, between necessary and contingent truths is that sentences reporting the former are finitely analytic; those reporting the latter require infinite analysis of which God alone is capable. On such a view at least two competing conceptions of entailment emerge. According to one, a sentence entails another when the set of atomic requirements for the (...) first is included in the corresponding set for the other; according to the other conception, every atomic requirement of the entailed sentence is underwritten by an atomic constituent of the entailing one. The former conception is classical on the twentieth century understanding of the term; the latter is the one we explore here. Now if we restrict ourselves to the formal language of the propositional calculus, every sentence has a finite analysis into its conjunctive normal form. Semantically, then, every sentence of that language can be represented as a simple hypergraph, H, on the powerset of a universe of states. Entailment of the sort we wish to study can be represented as a known relation, subsumption between hypergraphs. Since the lattice of hypergraphs thus ordered is a DeMorgan lattice, the logic of entailment thus understood is the familiar system, FDE of first-degree entailment. We observe that, extensionalized, the relation of subsumption is itself a DeMorgan Lattice ordered by higher-order subsumption. Thus the semantic idiom that hypergraph-theory affords reveals a hierarchy of lattices capable of representing entailments of every finite degree. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the conceptual orbitings of individuals corresponding to lists of noun phrases formed with ‘or’. We should resist the precept that a set-theoretic union must be contrived for every occurrence of ‘or’ in favour of some discourse-theoretical account that codifies the work that ‘or’ does in the punctuation of speech. A succession of sentences composed with ‘or’ is replaced by a succession of forms containing non-assertive occurrences of those sentences either composed with ‘and’ or as separate acts of (...) speech. The discussion of the behaviour of ‘or’ may be taken up in intensional environments where Quine left the subject of the opacity of certain verbs. The degree of particularity of the intentions is reflected in the particularity with which the dative pronoun will permit existential generalization. (shrink)

This chapter examimes relevance to misunderstandings about the meaning of aut and possible meanings of ‘or’. In spite of what has been said about the notion of form, there is no harm in applying the word ‘formal’ to the Stoics' work. By some standards, it is not informal, and by those standards, we may therefore call it formal where it is the contrast intended. Since the substitution account of validity would not rule out such disjunctions and a descriptive account would, (...) the descriptive account seems on that score to be the more likely candidate for the Stoic conception of validity. Boole also took exclusivity, even the same arity-free idea of exclusivity, to be centrally important to his representation, but the exclusivity was constructed out of a non-exclusive disjunctive use of ‘or’. (shrink)

This chapter talks about how philosophers define and use the word ‘or’ and how the word ‘or’ has undergone changes in modification. The notion of logical form does not apply straightforwardly to sentences of natural language. A sentence has no logical form independently of a specification of a formal language of representation. There is a sense in which the whole meaning of the inclusive “or” is only part of the meaning of the exclusive “or”. According to Boole's Rule, and-lists of (...) general terms represent unions in the subject place; or-lists of general terms represent unions in the predicate place. A unified semantic account of or, and a uniform semantics of natural language connectives more generally must depend upon an abandonment of both assumptions. (shrink)

I argue that the conjunctive distribution of permissibility over or, which is a puzzling feature of free-choice permission is just one instance of a more general class of conjunctive occurrences of the word, and that these conjunctive uses are more directly explicable by the consideration that or is a descendant of oper than by reference to the disjunctive occurrences which logicalist prejudices may tempt us to regard as semantically more fundamental. I offer an account of how the disjunctive uses of (...) or may have come about through an intermediate discourse-adverbial use of or, drawing a parallel with but, which, etymologically, is disjunctive rather than conjunctive and whose conjunctive uses seem to represent just such a discourse-adverbial application. (shrink)

This chapter examines puzzle about the word ‘or’ and some proposed solutions. The theorems of propositional logic are interpreted in such a way as to be provided with an analogous account. The contrast lies in the absence of any such compositional account of ‘or’ and the vocabulary of preference. The distributive puzzle has merely been displaced. We should have to justify the assumption that every list formed with ‘or’ is a disjunctive list. A grammaticological account of distribution over or-lists depends (...) upon our being able to understand the list-containing sentence as a sentence-embedding sentence. Readers have to add a parallel observation about ‘or’. Disjunctive occurrences of ‘or’ as a sentential connective are, if not quite rare, at least not among the commonest uses of ‘or’ in spoken or written English. (shrink)

This chapter describes the second myth. The second myth can be described as cheerful handmaiden to the first, and, perhaps because of its classical hearkening, has an undeniable charm. Some languages, though English is not one of them, have two different words for two different senses of “or.” The second myth—Latin not only possessed truth-functional vocabulary but also possessed a clearer meaning. The ultimate source of the myth remains a mystery. As with the English ‘or’ the puzzle is not to (...) understand how the conjunctive uses of aut are to be explained in the face of its disjunctive meaning, but how its disjunctive use arises out of a more primitive meaning that is adverbially conjunctive and more or less adversative. Latin, awaits its dissolution, and as we shall see, provides a useful clue. (shrink)

This chapter explains the final account of the origins of disjunction. In Russell's account, “or” corresponds to a state of hesitation. ‘In order to express a hesitation in words, we need “or” or some equivalent word’. His suggestion that ‘or’ represents a state of hesitation takes up in altered form a theme of earlier writers having to do with the character of disjunction in individual as contrasted with general propositions. Grice's genetic speculations about ‘or’ are, like Russell's, part of an (...) attempt to say more generally what the logical particles do in language and thus why they came into it. The final account of the origins of disjunction is, a realization of Wittgenstein's aim, and since it will show how the logical uses of ‘or’ have been sponsored by specific non-logical requirements of linguistic practice. (shrink)

Se analiza la Idea de Sujeto desde su relación con la Idea de Mundo, reconstruyendo esta relación a partir del concepto de «mundo de la vida», entendido como un «apriori» que comprende otros aprioris con cretos: corporeidad, intersubjetividad, historicidad y expresividad. A par tir de aquí, se hace una crítica de la fenomenología transcendental del último Husserl (Crisis), en cuanto pretendida «reflexión total», que, tras el análisis del mundo de la vida, conduce al concepto de un proto-yo transcendental absoluto. La (...) crítica muestra cómo la imposibilidad de tal reflexión hace patente, a su vez, la imposibilidad de una razón autosufi ciente. (shrink)