We agree with Clarke and Beck that the approximate number system represents rational numbers, and we demonstrate our support by highlighting the case of the empty set – the non-symbolic manifestation of zero. It is particularly interesting because of its perceptual and semantic uniqueness, and its exploration reveals fundamental new insights about how numerical information is represented.

This paper demonstrates the central role of the Socratic elenchus in the Sophist. In the first part, I defend the position that the Stranger describes the Socratic elenchus in the sixth division of the Sophist. In the second part, I show that the Socratic elenchus is actually used when the Stranger scrutinizes the accounts of being put forward by his predecessors. In the final part, I explain the function of the Socratic elenchus in the argument of the dialogue. By contrast (...) with standard scholarly interpretations, this way of reading the text provides all the puzzles about being (241c4–251a4) with a definite function in the dialogue. It also reveals that Plato’s methodology includes a plurality of method and is more continuous than what is often believed. (shrink)

Changing the appraisal of stress to foster adaptive coping for students is explored by proposing an alternative lens theory of viewing the stress response from the perspective of Greek philosophy of Stoicism. The connection of Lazarus’s challenge appraisal to resilience and Stoicism is a novel perspective brought about by re-examining the foundations of current practices and has the potential to elicit new research, theories, and resources to help students learn to cope with stress differently. The concepts of stress, Stoicism, and (...) resilience are all inextricably linked, however Stoicism is at the root of these ideas. This proposal to view stress through the lens of Stoicism is an opportunity to alter the way students think and respond to challenges by using an ancient philosophy to have a positive outlook on the stresses of modern university life. (shrink)

Self-compassion is considered to be a healthy and adaptive attitude towards oneself, occurring both as a feature, as well as a state. Self-compassionate attitude towards oneself is composed of: a) kindness and understanding given to oneself b) mindfulness of one’s own experiences and c) a sense of community of experiences with humanity. Compassion towards oneself is structurally and functionally distinct from the self-commiseration and self-pity that lead to worse adaptation. Research shows that self-compassion is associated with better regulation of negative (...) emotions. Neff in her theoretical assumption states that due to more effective emotion regulation, people with a higher level of selfcompassion can generally cope better with reality. Therefore a question arises as to what the relationship is between a compassionate attitude towards oneself and social functioning of people. This article is a review of research that has been conducted so far regarding relations between self-compassion and the various dimensions of social functioning. (shrink)

This article delves into Captain Samuel Alfred Warner’s dogged campaign to sell two inventions – his submersible mine and “long range” missile – to the British government in the 1840s and 1850s. Departing from a historiography that dismisses Warner as a fraudster, it clarifies how he managed to generate widespread interest in his weapons technologies for nearly twenty years. I therefore analyze three key elements of his self-promotion: his personal branding, his pitch, and his simultaneous embrace and rejection of publicity. (...) Neither elite nor highly educated, Warner ran up against a culture of “polite science” that distinguished disinterested practitioners from profit-minded schemers. To establish his credentials, he emphasized his practical maritime experience and represented himself as a martyr willing to bear the scorn of a disbelieving establishment. In pitching his devices, Warner capitalized on alarmism over border security and the integrity of the empire; he declared that they could hobble France’s modernizing navy and quickly end colonial conflicts. When skeptics began to fret over the proliferation of his destructive weapons, Warner flipped the script and lauded the threat of mutual annihilation as a deterrent to needless warfare. The issue of publicity, however, would ultimately be Warner’s professional undoing. Despite successful demonstrations, his clashes with official investigators and his refusal to disclose his chemical secrets led critics to dispute the originality of his discoveries. An examination of Warner’s self-promotional strategies, his fraught interactions with the British state, and the ambivalent public reaction to his contraptions provides insight into how scientific authority was acquired and lost in this period. (shrink)

The Limits of Cognition and the Shape of Being Based on the Thought of Karl Jaspers The article points out the elements of Karl Jaspers’ epistemological conception that cross out the possibility of a comprehensive account of being. The key issue here is the limits of cognition, which take the form of object cognition. The theme of limits points to the inadequacies of human thinking in the context of quantifiable and absolutist representations of reality. The impossibility of adequately grasping the (...) totality of reality will be illustrated here by means of the criticism Jaspers levelled at absolutising metaphysics. In connection with the description of the structure of cognition proposed by Jaspers, the article points out the conceptual proximity of the issue of worldview and metaphysics in the light of the thought of the cited author. (shrink)

-- 2. Mattʻeos Jughayetsʻi, Aṛakʻel Syunetsʻi -- 3. Grigor Tatʻevatsʻi --.

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more (...) virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith, and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy. (shrink)

This paper deals with the political philosophy of Václav Havel, mainly its relation to ethics and what Michel Foucault called governmentality. Besides using his analytical framework, Foucault’s politics are engaged with to highlight similar trajectories of two intellectuals dealing with related dilemmas of ethics and politics. As a dissident of communist Czechoslovakia Havel, developed a profound critique of modernity, but also discovered technologies of the self, exclusive to dissidents, which empowered them in their moral struggle against the regime. The Velvet (...) Revolution in 1989 ascended Havel to the presidency of the republic, a position from which he quickly embraced and disseminated neoliberal governmentality. The final section deals with Havel’s use of human rights in the later years of his presidency, being a justification for military interventions and comparing them to Foucault’s conceptualisation of rights. Human rights discourse is the culmination of Havel’s lifelong quest for the ethical foundation of politics and it is the source of most difficulties and potentialities associated with this project. (shrink)

I argue that, although Aristotle himself does not say it in so many words, the Phaedrus has a deep influence on the three books of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I also show that this influence is not only negative, as some scholars believe, but that Aristotle draws and expands on some of the results and propositions of the Phaedrus. After demonstrating how influential the Phaedrus is for the Rhetoric, I return in my conclusion to the difference between the two works.

Let equation image be the semigroup of all mappings on the natural numbers equation image, and let U and V be subsets of equation image. We write U≼V if there exists a countable subset C of equation image such that U is contained in the subsemigroup generated by V and C. We give several results about the structure of the preorder ≼. In particular, we show that a certain statement about this preorder is equivalent to the Continuum Hypothesis.The preorder ≼ (...) is analogous to one introduced by Bergman and Shelah on subgroups of the symmetric group on equation image. The results in this paper suggest that the preorder on subsemigroups of equation image is much more complicated than that on subgroups of the symmetric group. (shrink)

The challenge of this work is to connect physics with the concept of intelligence. By intelligence we understand a capability to move from disorder to order without external resources, i.e., in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The objective is to find such a mathematical object described by ODE that possesses such a capability. The proposed approach is based upon modification of the Madelung version of the Schrodinger equation by replacing the force following from quantum potential with non-conservative forces (...) that link to the concept of information. A mathematical formalism suggests that a hypothetical intelligent particle, besides the capability to move against the second law of thermodynamics, acquires such properties like self-image, self-awareness, self-supervision, etc. that are typical for Livings. However since this particle being a quantum-classical hybrid acquires non-Newtonian and non-quantum properties, it does not belong to the physics matter as we know it: the modern physics should be complemented with the concept of the information force that represents a bridge to intelligent particle. As a follow-up of the proposed concept, the following question is addressed: can artificial intelligence system composed only of physical components compete with a human? The answer is proven to be negative if the AI system is based only on simulations, and positive if digital devices are included. It has been demonstrated that there exists such a quantum neural net that performs simulations combined with digital punctuations. The universality of this quantum-classical hybrid is in capability to violate the second law of thermodynamics by moving from disorder to order without external resources. This advanced capability is illustrated by examples. In conclusion, a mathematical machinery of the perception that is the fundamental part of a cognition process as well as intelligence is introduced and discussed. (shrink)

Despite intensive exegetical work, Plato’s description of dialectic in the Sophist still raises many questions. Through a close reading of this passage that contextualizes it in the general organisation of the Sophist, this paper provides answers to these questions. After presenting the difficult text, I contend that the “vowel-kinds” are necessary conditions for the blending of kinds. Then, I interpret the “cause of divisions” mentioned by the Stranger as the kinds responsible of the dichotomous division in the first half of (...) the dialogue. In the next part, I show that 235d5-e2 does not describe a procedure of “meta-divison” as some commentators have it, but that it describes the method of division itself. Finally, I connect the difficulty and the obscurity of the passage to the fact that dialectic is the supreme science and I explain why dialectic is the science of free men. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Hill [AJP, 2018] argues that Rachels’s famous bare-difference argument for the moral irrelevance between killing and letting die fails. In this paper, I argue that certain features in Hill’s cases might lead our intuitions astray. I propose new cases and suggest that they support the conclusion that, in itself, intentional killing is morally equivalent to intentional letting-die.

ABSTRACT Hill [AJP, 2018] argues that Rachels’s famous bare-difference argument for the moral irrelevance between killing and letting die fails. In this paper, I argue that certain features in Hill’s cases might lead our intuitions astray. I propose new cases and suggest that they support the conclusion that, in itself, intentional killing is morally equivalent to intentional letting-die.

The article deals with a topic of the role of science in current society and focuses on the role of political economy. There has been a critical feedback to the fact that the social sciences subordinate themselves to the interests of power instead of looking for the models of healthy society. These models should correspond with the changes in the society and should not allow to be tied with unchanging paradigms and various ‘-isms‘. Political economy should deal with the topic (...) of human freedom and increasing social inequalities, which threaten the society. It is important to work with sustainable relationship of social-economical and natural environment and with the relationship of culture and nature.) It is a new way of understanding what production means and how the society should cope with it. It is not just about classic waste but also about negative externalities. The human cannot be reduced to ‘human resources‘ or ‘homo economicus‘. The emphasis is laid on humanity and taking human as an indivisible individual. The article emphasizes the importance of full responsibility preference over limited responsibility and preference of the individual and community over an economical corporation. The society cannot be reduced or administrated as an economical or accounting unit. Good governance includes taking care of reproduction, justice and safety. It is all about sufficiency, dignity and trust among people. The most important is the fight for human freedom and independent life, which is the meaning of itself. People who are free and can persist in such fight, which is held by a spirit of unity, are important but also more and more rare. Political economy should look for the possibilities how to follow up the Jewish-Christian tradition without the God. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify the use of contrast cases—which are pairs of cases in which the feature under examination is varied and all else is held fixed—in ethical methodology. In another paper, I argue that we must reject a separability principle which is thought to allow one to use contrast cases to infer truths about intrinsic value. Here I offer a different criticism that has a positive upshot about what we are licensed to infer from contrast (...) cases. This provides clarification about the epistemic use of contrast cases in value theory and insight into what we can glean from contrast cases. (shrink)

Cet article est consacré au problème du rapport entre l’entrelacement des genres (συμπλοκὴ τῶν εἰδῶν) et le logos dans le Sophiste. Après avoir brièvement présenté le problème, je discute, dans la première partie, différentes solutions proposées par les commentateurs. Je cherche à montrer qu’aucune de ces solutions n’est pleinement satisfaisante. Dans la deuxième partie, je propose une nouvelle solution au problème de la συμπλοκὴ τῶν εἰδῶν fondée sur une distinction entre deux types de logos, le logos dialectique et le logos (...) doxique. Dans la troisième partie, je cherche à justifier textuellement cette solution en recourant à la fois au texte du Sophiste lui-même et à la dernière partie du Théétète. Dans ma conclusion, je suggère que la distinction entre logos dialectique et logos doxique correspond à une différence qui traverse toute l’œuvre de Platon, à savoir la différence entre connaissance et opinion. / This paper deals with the problem of the συμπλοκὴ τῶν εἰδῶν in the Sophist. In the first part, after a brief presentation of this problem, I discuss different solutions which have been proposed in the recent literature. I try to show that none of them is entirely satisfying. In the second part, I propose and explain a new solution based on a distinction between two types of logos : dialectical logos and doxastic logos. In the third part, I try to justify this solution on the basis of some passages of the Sophist and of the final part of the Theaetetus. To conclude, I suggest that the distinction between dialectical logos and doxasticlogos matches the difference between knowledge and belief made by Plato in his dialogues. (shrink)

Trust is a temporary attachment between humans that pervades our daily lives. Recent research has shown that the affiliative hormone oxytocin rises with a social signal of interpersonal trust and is associated with trustworthy behavior (the reciprocation of trust). This commentary reports these results and relates them to the target article's findings for variations in affiliative-related behaviors.

The διακριτικὴ τέχνη (the art of separating or discriminating), from which the sixth definition of theSophiststarts (226b1–231b9), is puzzling.Prima faciethe art of separating does not fit the initial division of art between ποιητικὴ τέχνη (production) and κτητικὴ τέχνη (acquisition) at 219a8–c9. Therefore, scholars generally agree that, although mutually exclusive, ποιητική and κτητική are not exhaustive and leave room for a third species of art, διακριτικὴ τέχνη, on a par with ποιητική and κτητική. However, I argue that textual evidence suggests otherwise.

Following Moore, value invariabilists deny that the intrinsic value of something can be affected by features extrinsic to it. The primary focuses of this paper are (i) to examine the invariabilistic thesis and expand upon how we ought to understand it, in light of contemporary axiological distinctions, and (ii) to argue that distinguishing between different kinds of invariabilism provides resources to undermine a prominent argument against variabilism. First, I use two contemporary axiological distinctions to clarify what kind of value the (...) invariabilism debate concerns (final value). Then I show how the distinction between personal value and value simpliciter reveals different variabilistic theses, depending on what type of final value one thinks may be affected by extrinsic features. Using this insight, I challenge an argument for final value simpliciter invariabilism. Variabilists offer the example of the vicious being pleased as a counterexample to the claim that pleasure’s final value is invariant to contextual changes. The argument that I examine purports to show that this case actually supports invariabilism about pleasure’s final value simpliciter, because the best explanation for why the vicious being pleased is a fitting object of indignation is that the vicious person’s pleasure is finally valuable simpliciter. I argue that this argument fails because the vicious person’s pleasure being finally personally good for them better explains why an attitude of indignation is fitting. I address two objections and conclude with remarks about how my results might inform future research on value invariabilism. (shrink)

Peterson et al. (2023) write that there’s “a rich philosophical debate on the nature of authenticity in dementia” involving the relationship of identity and autonomy. I explore this with Jaworska’s...

L’histoire de la dénomination des chaires de « psychologie », ou impliquant cette discipline, au Collège de France apparaît comme un révélateur particulier de l’évolution de celle-ci dans le champ des sciences humaines et sociales.

The bare‐difference methodology is considered to be a powerful tool in ethical reasoning. The underlying idea is that we can identify the intrinsic evaluative significance of some feature by constructing contrast cases or bare‐difference cases, i.e., two cases that hold everything constant but for the feature of interest. While this popular methodology has been challenged by prominent philosophers such as Kagan, Thomson, and Kamm, it is intuitively appealing because, as Perrett identifies, the methodology appears to share the same logical structure (...) as a fruitful scientific procedure. In this paper, I argue that examining this ‘scientific analogy’ is crucial to understanding both the limitations and the prospects for ethical bare‐difference reasoning. I expand upon Perrett's discussion of the scientific analogy and examine another relevant similarity. I then highlight two relevant dissimilarities between ethical bare‐difference reasoning and its scientific analogue. Though these differences threaten to undermine the analogy, I show how the analogy might be mended to better bring the ethical methodology in line with its scientific counterpart and avoid challenges to ethical bare‐difference methodology raised by philosophers in the literature. (shrink)