Some intriguing questions such as: What is reality for an agent? How does reality of a bacterium differ from a reality of a human brain? Do we need representation in order to understand reality? are still widely debated. Starting with the presentation of the computing nature as an info-computational framework, where information is defined as a structure, and computation as information processing, we address questions of evolution of increasingly complex living agents through interactions with the environment. In this context, the (...) concept of computation will be discussed and the sense in which computation is observer-relative. Using the results on morphological/ morphogenetic computation as information self-organization we argue that reality for an agent is a result of networked agent-based computation. Consciousness is a (computational) process of information integration that evolved in organisms with nervous system. We present an argument why pancomputationalism (computing nature) is a sound scientific strategy and why panpsychism is not. (shrink)

What is reality for an agent? What is minimal cognition? How does the morphology of a cognitive agent affect cognition? These are still open questions among scientists and philosophers. In this chapter we propose the idea of info-computational nature as a framework for answering those questions. Within the info-computational framework, information is defined as a structure, and computation as the dynamics of information. To an agent, nature therefore appears as an informational structure with computational dynamics. Both information and computation in (...) this context have broader meaning than in everyday use, and both are necessarily grounded in physical implementation. Evolution of increasingly complex living agents is understood as a process of morphological computation driven by agents’ interactions with the environment. It is a process much more complex than random variation; instead the mechanisms of change are morphological computational processes of self-organisation. Reality for an agent emerges as a result of interactions with the environment together with internal information processing. Following Maturana and Varela, we take cognition to be the process of living of an organism, and thus it appears on different levels of complexity, from cellular via organismic to social. The simpler the agent, the simpler its “reality” defined by the network of networks of info-computational processes, which constitute its cognition. The debated topic of consciousness takes its natural place in this framework, as a process of information integration that we suggest naturally evolved in organisms with a nervous system. Computing nature/pancomputationalism is sometimes confused with panpsychism or claimed to necessarily imply panpsychism, which we show is not the case. Even though we focus on natural systems in this chapter, the info-computational approach is general and can be used to model both biological and artifactual cognitive agents. (shrink)

Collective emotions are at the heart of any society and become evident in gatherings, crowds, or responses to widely salient events. However, they remain poorly understood and conceptualized in scientific terms. Here, we provide first steps towards a theory of collective emotions. We first review accounts of the social and cultural embeddedness of emotion that contribute to understanding collective emotions from three broad perspectives: face-to-face encounters, culture and shared knowledge, and identification with a social collective. In discussing their strengths and (...) shortcomings and highlighting areas of conceptual overlap, we translate these views into a number of bottom–up mechanisms that explain collective emotion elicitation on the levels of social cognition, expressive behavior, and social practices. (shrink)

Dieses historische Buch kann zahlreiche Tippfehler und fehlende Textpassagen aufweisen. Kaufer konnen in der Regel eine kostenlose eingescannte Kopie des originalen Buches vom Verleger herunterladen (ohne Tippfehler). Ohne Indizes. Nicht dargestellt. 1898 edition. Auszug:...so viel uber allen Zweifel erhoben zu haben, dass es sich hier um ein einheitliches, planvoll angelegtes, genau durchdachtes und folgerichtig durchgefuhrtes Ganzes, um eine Schopfung aus einem Gusse handelt, kurz ausgedruckt: unsere heutigen Umgangsformen enthalten eine vollstandige Organisation des Umgangs, ein ebenburtiges Seitenstuck zu der Organisation des (...) Verkehrs in Form des Rechts. Eine solche Behauptung lasst sich mit einigen allgemeinen Bemerkungen und einzelnen wenigen Beispielen nicht abthun, sie erfordert einen stringenten Beweis, und derselbe ist nur zu erbringen durch Aufbringung eines reichen Apparates. Auch bei dieser Aufgabe werde ich des Stofflichen eher zu viel als zu wenig bringen, getreu der Maxime, die ich bei diesem Werk unausgesetzt befolgt habe, meinen Abstractionen eine moglichst breite Unterlage an einem reichen Detail zu geben. Wem ich des Guten zu viel zu thun scheine, der moge sich erinnern, dass ich genothigt bin, die Sache erst aus dem Groben herauszuarbeiten--ware ich auf diesem Gebiete mein eigener Nachfolger, ich wurde mich kurzer fassen. 0. Wissenschaftliche Kritik der Umgangsformen--echte und unechte Anstandsregeln. Alle Umgangsformen haben den Zweck, den Umgang zu ermoglichen, zu sichern, zu fordern, angenehm und behaglich zu gestalten, --sie enthalten die durch die Sitte beschaffte und gehandhabte Disciplin des gesellschaftlichen Benehmens, wie sie den Vorstellungen der massgebenden Gesellschaftskreise dieses Volks und dieser Zeit entspricht. Es sind die massgebenden d. h. die relativ hoch oder hochst gestellten Kreise, welche die Formen des geselligen Verkehrs...". (shrink)

In his essay on Seneca, T.S. Eliot used theHercules Furens(=HF) as his example to illustrate ‘this curious freak of non-theatrical drama’. Even though Senecan scholarship has by and large moved away from his indictment, the sense that the attention seems to be directed away from the stage points to the play's unique dramaturgy. The surest indicator of this reverse orientation is the conspicuous absence of Hercules himself for much of the play. Hercules is (or wishes to be) permanently ‘elsewhere’. His (...) entrance is delayed for a long time; once home, he rushes offstage after a few lines to kill Lycus. He returns onstage only to be attacked by madness, and is drawn inside the palace again to kill his wife and sons. When his madness abates, he falls asleep onstage; on waking, he longs for a place beyond the known world (and underworld) and finally exits into exile. This article proposes a closer examination of the semiotics of space, especially the symbolic value of the offstage. Seneca is constantly drawing attention to the pull towards the stage perimeter and the unseen offstage, characterizing the cosmic nature of Hercules’ conflict with Juno and questioning the hero's place in the world as the son of an immortal father. (shrink)

We show that the morphosyntactic makeup of the SMC is crosslinguistically stable. We show that the semantics of the construction poses a severe compositionality problem. We solve the problem by giving the negation and the exclusive operator differential scope. For only, this means decomposing it into negation and an exclusive other than component.

As cause we often specify an event the occurrence of which first guaranteed that of the effect. This notion is explicated in a framework of branching worlds in Sections I to V. VI and VII point out its close relations to the concept of an agent's bringing about an event. The topic of the last two sections is the distinction between causes and necessary circumstances. For this purpose conditionals are used, interpreted with respect to branching worlds without a similarity relation (...) between them. (shrink)

In recent work, Louis deRosset (Philosophical Studies 149:73–97, 2010) has argued that priority theorists, who hold that truths about macroscopic objects can be metaphysically explained without reference to such things, cannot meet an independently motivated constraint upon good explanation. By clarifying the nature of the priority theorist’s project, I argue that deRosset’s argument fails to establish its conclusion.

Compassionate care: a moral dimension of nursingThis paper focuses on the concept of compassion and its meaning for nursing practice. Compassion is often considered to be an essential component of nursing care; however, it is difficult to identify what exactly comprises compassionate care. To begin with, there is a general discussion of the meaning of compassion and an examination of its common usage. An argument then is presented that compassion is more than just a natural response to suffering, rather that (...) it is a moral choice. The paper outlines the extent to which this concept has implications for nursing care, highlighting some of the obstacles that nurses need to overcome in order to maintain this essential moral value of the caring role. (shrink)

A normalization procedure is given for classical natural deduction with the standard rule of indirect proof applied to arbitrary formulas. For normal derivability and the subformula property, it is sufficient to permute down instances of indirect proof whenever they have been used for concluding a major premiss of an elimination rule. The result applies even to natural deduction for classical modal logic.

Recently Ekman gave a derivation in natural deduction such that it either contains a substantial redundant part or else is not normal. It is shown that this problem is caused by a non-normality inherent in the usual modus ponens rule.

The arguments for LF Pied-Piping given by Nishigauchi and others are represented. It is shown that Nishigauchi's semantics for pied-piped phrases gives the wrong meaning for interrogatives. We argue that none of the arguments for LF Pied-Piping is tenable and most of the arguments against the traditional approach (unbounded wh-movement at LF) do not stand up to scrutiny. However, some data turn out to be problematic for the traditional account. The alternative considered here involves pied-piping at an intermediate level between (...) S-structure and LF. It is called WH-structure and is followed by reconstruction at LF. This proposal will combine the essential insights of Nishigauchi's idea and have all its advantages over the traditional view, without running into the problems of his approach. (shrink)

Gentzens natural deduction. Thereby the appearance of the cuts in translation is explained.

Elementary geometry can be axiomatized constructively by taking as primitive the concepts of the apartness of a point from a line and the convergence of two lines, instead of incidence and parallelism as in the classical axiomatizations. I first give the axioms of a general plane geometry of apartness and convergence. Constructive projective geometry is obtained by adding the principle that any two distinct lines converge, and affine geometry by adding a parallel line construction, etc. Constructive axiomatization allows solutions to (...) geometric problems to be effected as computer programs. I present a formalization of the axiomatization in type theory. This formalization works directly as a computer implementation of geometry. (shrink)

Simone Weil's influence has been enormous and in this age of doubt and uncertainty there is something particularly appealing about this French Jewish writer, for Weil lived out her beliefs. From an early age she was attracted to Bolshevism, became an anarchist and helped Trotsky. She joined the International Red Brigade to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War. An agnostic, she experienced a profound religious conversion, yet never converted to the Christian faith to which she was so deeply attracted. (...) This clear lucid exposition of her life and work shows how Weil is truly a prophet for our age and an indispensable source of encouragement to all those at the frontiers of religion, both within and without. (shrink)

Leibniz holds that creatures require divine concurrence for all their actions, and that this concurrence is 'special,' that is, directed at the particular qualities of each action. This gives rise to two potential problems. The first is the problem of explaining why special concurrence does not make God a co-author of creaturely actions. Second, divine concurrence may seem incompatible with the central Leibnizian doctrine that substances must act spontaneously, or independently of other substances. Concurrence, in other words, may appear to (...) jeopardize creaturely substancehood. I argue that Leibniz can solve both of these problems by invoking final and formal causation. The creature is the sole author of its actions because it alone contributes the formal and final cause to these actions. Similarly, because it contributes the formal and final cause, the creature possesses what I call explanatory spontaneity. Leibniz, I contend, considers this type of spontaneity sufficient for substancehood. (shrink)

The typescripts from which both parts of Wittgenstein's Investigations were printed are now lost. Of the TS for Part I there exists a second copy, but not so of the TS for Part II. There is, however, a manuscript in Wittgenstein's hand which contains the whole of the printed Part II - and some additional material. A comparision of this MS with the printed text reveals some interesting discrepancies. They are noted in the paper. Moreover, a detailed comparision is made (...) in a Postscript between the printed Preface of the Investigations and another, obviously earlier, version of it. Both versions are dated "Cambridge, January 1945" - but the printed one was probably not prepared until two years later. (shrink)

Business students early on should be offered a course presenting and analyzing ethical dilemmas they will face as human beings both in the business world and in society. However, such a course should use literature, plays, and novels to illustrate ethical norms and values in the intertwined relationships of human activities. Better than business case studies, literature offers portraits of characters as leaders, employees, consultants, and other professionals, as ordinary human beings with conflicting desires, drives, and ambitions. Literary texts offer (...) excellent descriptions of the circumstances or the organizational settings in which people find themselves. I believe this is the best way to sensitize students without business experience when they are still open to such a formative learning process. At the same time, this pedagogical method linking ethics and literature may help to critically expose some of the weak or missing aspects of various management theories students encounter in their business curriculum and make them more observant and critical. (shrink)

After cataloguing various ‘improper’ sense of only, those which are taken with restricted scope (‘no more than [within a fixed domain]’) as opposed to the purely exclusive ‘proper’ sense, Ockham (1980:137) remarks that These are the senses, then, in which the exclusive expression can be taken improperly. And perhaps there are still other senses in which it can be taken improperly. But since they are not as widely used as the ones we have dealt with, I will leave them to (...) the specialists. Larry Horn: “A glorious picture indeed: monasteries crammed to the spires with specialists on only, laboring away on the fine points of the semantics of exclusive propositions. Those were the days!” (Horn 1996: 26-27). (shrink)

What do we convey with (2)? We somehow manage to say at least the following: going to the North End is (part of ) a way of finding good cheese and going to the North End is relatively easy. Furthermore, we are leaving it open whether there are other places (in Boston) to get good cheese, that is, with (2) we are not claiming that the North End is the only place to find good cheese.

An oversight in Guaspari and Solovay’s “Rosser sentences” [D. Guaspari, R.M. Solovay, Rosser sentences, Annals of Mathematical Logic 16 81–99] is pointed out and emended. It concerns the premisses of their proof that there are standard proof predicates all of whose Rosser sentences are provably equivalent. The result holds up, but the premisses mentioned in the paper have to be strengthened somewhat.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 224 Seiten: 19-44.

There is a rich literature about the temporal conjunctions before/after, but at the time I gave the talk that underlies this paper I was not aware of any analysis of the temporal comparatives früher/später ‘earlier/later’, which may be used to express similar states of affairs, but are constructed differently.2 Recently I got acquainted with the del Prete’s thesis about It. prima/dopo, which analyses prima as a comparative and dopo as a preposition.3 This is the only paper known to me that (...) goes into the same direction as the following proposal. Del Prete’s analysis is very different from mine and I must leave the discussion of his theory to another occasion. The semantics of before/after is notoriously controversial and the semantics of the related adjectives is therefore interesting in itself. A study of the adjectives gains additional interest from the fact that they are entirely differently constructed: they are degree adjectives and have a comparative, an equative and a positive variant. I will study each of them. (shrink)

Most proponents of restorative justice admit to the need to find a well defined place for the use of traditional trial and punishment alongside restorative justice processes. Concrete answers have, however, been wanting more often than not. John Braithwaite is arguably the one who has come the closest, and here I systematically reconstruct and critically discuss the rules or principles suggested by him for referring cases back and forth between restorative justice and traditional trial and punishment. I show that we (...) should be sceptical about at least some of the answers provided by Braithwaite, and, thus, that the necessary use of traditional punishment continues to pose a serious challenge to restorative justice, even at its current theoretical best. (shrink)

Our discussion is couched within a compositional implementation of the analysis of the Perfect developed by Iatridou et.al. (a version of Extended Now of McCoard 78, Dowty 72, 79). The basics.

Libertarians often rely on arguments that subordinate the principle of liberty to the value of its economic consequences. This invites the question of what a pure libertarian theory of justice—one that takes liberty as its overriding concern—would look like. Grotius's political theory provides a template for such a libertarianism, but it also entails uncomfortable commitments that can be avoided only by compromising the principle of liberty. According to Grotius, each person should be free to decide how to act as long (...) as her actions do not violate the equal liberty of others. According to this principle, however, people are free to enter any contract and alienate any rights, permitting even contracts of slavery or the alienation of rights of bodily integrity. Libertarians can escape this commitment to absolute freedom of contract only by adopting ad-hoc amendments to the principle of liberty. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.