Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

According to a tradition reaching back to Plato, questions about the nature of knowledge are to be answered by offering an analysis in terms of truth, belief, justification, and other factors presumed to be in some sense more basic than knowledge itself. In light of the apparent failure of this approach, knowledge first philosophy instead takes knowledge as the starting point in epistemology and related areas of the philosophies of language and mind. Knowledge cannot be analyzed in the traditional sense, (...) but this does not make it mysterious or unimportant. On the contrary, we are freed to use our grasp of what knowledge is to elucidate the nature of belief, justification, evidence, the speech act of assertion, and the demands on action and practical reasoning, and to treat knowledge as a purely mental state in its own right. Knowledge First? offers the first overview and critical evaluation of knowledge first philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

In this article, we present a definition of a hyperintensionality appropriate to relevant logics. We then show that relevant logics are hyperintensional in this sense, drawing consequences for other non-classical logics, including HYPE and some substructural logics. We further prove results concerning extensionality in relevant logics. We close by discussing related concepts for classifying formula contexts and potential applications of these results.

One of the many claims about the value of local food is that local food exchanges generate trust between producers and consumers. To what degree is this actually the case and how does such trust develop? Drawing on interview and fieldwork data in one local food system in the Northeastern U.S., I show how local food participants build trust and reciprocity with one another in order to mitigate the challenges imposed by the conventional system. This trust and reciprocity builds primarily (...) through three mechanisms: reliable, positive relationships; demonstrations of good will toward one another; and a shared understanding of the value of locally-oriented food. Through these mechanisms, local food operators are able to build a healthy, stable local food system, able to better resist the pressures of the conventional system in which it must continually operate. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has proposed that one has entitlements to accept certain propositions that play a foundational role within one’s body of belief. Such an entitlement is a kind of warrant that does not require the possessor to have acquired evidence speaking in favor of the proposition in question. The proposal allows Wright to concede much of the force of the most powerful arguments for scepticism, while avoiding the truly sceptical conclusion that one lacks warrant for most of one’s beliefs. Here (...) I will argue that Wright has underestimated a problem for his proposal, the alchemy problem, which is that it seems to make room for the easy conversion of mere entitlement to accept a proposition into justification to believe it. I question the adequacy of Wright’s own response to this worry, and instead explore the idea that epistemic alchemy, properly understood, is not epistemically objectionable. (shrink)

As local food activities expand and grow, an important question to answer is how various participants contribute to a local food system’s overall vitality and strength. This paper does so by focusing on the relationships between locally-oriented farm and retail actors and assessing what the configuration of these relationships tells us about the workings of the broader local food system. Such an analysis reveals two things. Empirically, it shows the important role food retailers play in the overall vibrancy of local (...) food exchanges: food retailers form crucial links holding the broader system together and significantly expanding consumer access to local foods. Further, different retailer types have distinct impacts on network configurations, each serving particular roles in the development and maintenance of local food systems. Methodologically, this paper shows the value of applying social network analysis techniques to the study of local food systems: such an approach yields insights that may not be as readily assessable from other strategies. In this paper, I overview common network analysis techniques and apply them to a case study of local food activities in New England, suggesting how such an approach might be applied to local food systems in other places. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has proposed that we should give a ‘knowledge first’ twist to David Lewis’s account of content, maintaining that for P to be the content of one’s belief is for P to be the content that would be attributed by an idealized interpreter working under certain constraints, and that the fundamental constraint on interpretation is a principle of knowledge maximization. According to this principle, an interpretation is correct to the extent that it maximizes the number of knowledgeable judgments the (...) subject comes out as making. Here I will argue against knowledge maximization and two fallback positions suggested by Williamson’s discussion. Williamson intends the principle of knowledge maximization to form the basis of an argument against a certain sort of skepticism about judgment. In the final section I argue that the kind of general response to judgment skepticism envisaged by Williamson is neither desirable nor necessary. (shrink)

Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works characterises and explores one democratically problematic kind of propaganda, ‘undermining propaganda’, which involves ‘[a] contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet is of a kind that tends to erode those very ideals’. Stanley’s model for how undermining propaganda functions is Rae Langton and Caroline West’s treatment of moves in pornographic language games. However, Stanley doesn’t consider whether his theory of propaganda might in turn illuminate the harmful nature of (...) pornography, in light of the familiar contention that some pornography acts as a kind of misogynistic propaganda. Drawing on Catharine MacKinnon’s writings on pornography, this paper will explore one way of developing the claim that pornography sometimes functions as undermining propaganda, in something close to Stanley’s sense. Moreover, I will suggest that the discussion points to a new response to the so-called authority problem for Rae Langton’s silencing argument against the protected status of pornography.El libro de Jason Stanley How Propaganda Works caracteriza y explora un tipo de propaganda democráticamente problemático, la ‘propaganda debilitadora’, que envuelve ‘[una] contribución al discurso público que se presenta como si incorporase determinados ideales, pero que es de un tipo que tiende a erosionar esos mismos ideales’. El modelo de Stanley para el funcionamiento de la propaganda debilitadora es el del tratamiento de los movimientos en los juegos de lenguaje pornográficos debido a Rae Langton y Caroline West. Sin embargo, Stanley no reflexiona acerca de si su teoría sobre la propaganda podría, a su vez, iluminar la dañina naturaleza de la pornografía, a la luz de la conocida tesis de que hay pornografía que actúa como una forma de propaganda misógina. A partir de los trabajos de Catharine MacKinnon sobre pornografía, este artículo pretende explorar una forma de desarrollar la tesis de que la pornografía funciona en ocasiones como propaganda debilitadora, en un sentido próximo al de Stanley. Además, sugeriré que la discusión apunta a una nueva respuesta al llamado problema de la autoridad en relación con el argumento del silenciamiento debido a Rae Langton en contra de un estatuto de protección para la pornografía. (shrink)

In the Shadow of Bezalel: Aramaic, Biblical, and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Bezalel Porten. Edited by AleJandro F. Botta. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 60. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. l + 429, illus. €228.

Epistemic injustice has become one of the most widely discussed topics in social epistemology, and has revived interest in issues in the intersections between epistemology and ethics and political philosophy. Much of the impetus for this recent explosion of interest has been the influential work of Miranda Fricker; however, Fricker’s framework and terminology for discussing the phenomena and the kinds of examples she’s interested in has not always been cleanly separated from the phenomena themselves. This chapter examines what’s distinctive of (...) Fricker’s treatment of the phenomena she labels epistemic injustice, focusing on the two varieties that her discussion highlights, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Once the distinctive elements of Fricker’s treatment are clearer, we will be better placed to assess which of them are plausible and which implausible, and to consider alternative theoretical frameworks for thinking about the phenomena, such as that developed by Kristie Dotson. (shrink)

Early commentators on David Lewis's account of counterfactuals noted that certain examples suggest that some counterfactuals with true antecedents and true consequents are false. Lewis's account has the consequence that all such counterfactuals are true, leaving us to choose between explaining away our intuitions about the examples in question or offering an alternative to Lewis's account. Here I argue that a simple modification of the familiar Lewisian truth conditions yields the intuitively correct verdicts about these examples, and so we can (...) take our intuitions about these examples at face value without any major departure from Lewis's approach to counterfactuals. (shrink)

An important question for proponents of non-contractive approaches to paradox is why contraction fails. Zardini offers an answer, namely that paradoxical sentences exhibit a kind of instability. I elaborate this idea using revision theory, and I argue that while instability does motivate failures of contraction, it equally motivates failure of many principles that non-contractive theorists want to maintain.

The ability to reason and think in a logical manner forms the basis of learning for most mathematics, computer science, philosophy and logic students. Based on the author's teaching notes at the University of Maryland and aimed at a broad audience, this text covers the fundamental topics in classical logic in an extremely clear, thorough and accurate style that is accessible to all the above. Covering propositional logic, first-order logic, and second-order logic, as well as proof theory, computability theory, and (...) model theory, the text also contains numerous carefully graded exercises and is ideal for a first or refresher course. (shrink)

This essay dates portions of the “Burden of Egypt” prophecy in Isaiah 19 to the Neo-Assyrian period, based on its borrowing of motifs from Assyrian royal inscriptions. These include the unique motif of the establishment of a monument on the border with Egypt and Assyrian attempts to dominate Egypt by controlling its trade. The essay also demonstrates the dependence of parts of Isaiah 19 on material in Exodus 1–15, integrating specific phrases from these Exodus chapters with motifs known to us (...) from Assyrian royal inscriptions. This integration could only have taken place during the Assyrian period, and this has obvious implications for the dating of the Exodus text. The essay understands the prophecy as a re-envisioning of the Assyrian campaign of 734, part of which was directed at Egypt. In this re-envisioned campaign, YHWH Himself is directing the Assyrian attack on Egypt. The essay focusses on 19:19–25, which describe how the Egyptians suffer as a result of the Assyrian attack. In their despair, they acknowledge the sovereignty of YHWH. This recognition is based on the Assyrian model of recognizing the Assyrian king as universal sovereign, and the monument described in v. 22 is based on the monument established by the Assyrians on the Egyptian border. The behavior of the Egyptians in vv. 20–22 provokes the unique theological statements of vv. 23–25, in which Egypt and Assyria join Israel in the triad blessed by YHWH. This passage demonstrates Isaiah’s use of a sort of “replacement theology” in which the universal sovereignty of YHWH is imagined and described based on Assyrian claims of universal dominion. (shrink)

Anderson and Belnap presented indexed Fitch-style natural deduction systems for the relevant logics R, E, and T. This work was extended by Brady to cover a range of relevant logics. In this paper I present indexed tree natural deduction systems for the Anderson–Belnap–Brady systems and show how to translate proofs in one format into proofs in the other, which establishes the adequacy of the tree systems.

Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising (...) modification of the communication argument. (shrink)

In the aftermath of World War II, the government of the United States provided considerable funding for military projects that promised to provide a technological edge during the nascent Cold War. The most famous example is likely the V-2 rocket-testing program that began in the late 1940s. The 67 rockets launched from White Sands developed a knowledge base that was critically important to the launch of the first U.S. satellite in 1958 and to the subsequent manned space program. Less well (...) known are the large-scale information technology projects, undertaken in the 1950s and early 1960s, that provided a significant catalyst for research into digital computing, information processing, and the. (shrink)

Presence suggests that adapting the experiences of leading innovators may address a nightmare scenario of environmental destruction, a growing divide between the rich and poor, and escalating violence around the world. Innovation occurs by transforming sensing to identify limitations in existing solution sets, transforming perception to envision an entire whole, and transforming action to realize the future seeking to emerge from the whole. This U sequence follows the rite-of-passage phases of separation, liminality, and reincorporation documented by Victor Turner. By ending (...) in spontaneous communitas and avoiding a normative model, the U does not discuss how to mobilize resources and develop systems of social control. This omission, as well as depending on the constructive power of human ritual without recognition of its destructive potential, significantly limits the U’s analytic validity. Despite these limitations, Presence is an encouraging set of stories of attempts within the industrial context to mitigate the nightmare scenario and work toward a sustainable future. (shrink)

Gilbert Meilaender argues that universities should eschew efforts to improve students’ moral character. I show that Meilaender’s arguments fail to offer any cogent reason for shunning university-based moral education. I then look to Thomas Aquinas in order to explain the connection between moral virtue and the practices common in university life. Using Aquinas as a guide, I argue that exemplary intellectual practice requires virtues that are subsidiary habits of the cardinal moral virtues themselves. The implication of this argument is as (...) follows: students require scrupulous moral training if they are to engage in exemplary intellectual practice. (shrink)

Richard Feldman and Ram Neta have recently noted that philosophers give relatively little attention to specifying the conditions under which S has something as evidence at a time. This issue is significant to evidentialists. Evidentialism states that which doxastic attitude S is epistemically justified in taking toward a proposition at a time depends upon what is supported by the total evidence S has at that time. What we regard as being necessary and sufficient for S’s having something as evidence partly (...) determines evidentialism’s implications in all cases. Evidentialists need to offer a plausible account that, when conjoined with evidentialism, yields plausible results about epistemic justification in all cases. Here’s what I do in this paper. After considering and rejecting two attempts to identify when S has something as evidence, I present and explain Richard Feldman’s recent account. I argue that evidentialists ought to reject Feldman’s account, too. (shrink)

We identify the locally finite graphs that are quantifier-eliminable and their first order theories in the signature of distance predicates. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

We present an extension of the basic revision theory of circular definitions with a unary operator, □. We present a Fitch-style proof system that is sound and complete with respect to the extended semantics. The logic of the box gives rise to a simple modal logic, and we relate provability in the extended proof system to this modal logic via a completeness theorem, using interpretations over circular definitions, analogous to Solovay’s completeness theorem forGLusing arithmetical interpretations. We adapt our proof to (...) a special class of circular definitions as well as to the first-order case. (shrink)

Is art a form of communication? If so, what does art express or represent? How should we interpret the meaning of works created by more than one artist? Is art an adaptation, via natural selection? In what ways is art similar to—and different from—language? Art as Communication: Aesthetics, Evolution, and Signaling employs information theory, the theory of evolution, and the newly developed sender-receiver model of communication to reason about art, aesthetic behavior, and its communicative nature. Shawn Simpson considers whether (...) art, from a biological point of view, is the province of only humans or whether animals might reasonably be said to create art. Examining the work of evolutionary biologists, art theorists, linguists, and philosophers—including Charles Darwin, Stephen Davies, H. Paul Grice, and others—he addresses how well different theories of communication explain meaning and expression in art and argues that art is much more continuous with other forms of communication than previously thought. (shrink)

In Saving Truth from Paradox, Hartry Field presents and defends a theory of truth with a new conditional. In this paper, I present two criticisms of this theory, one concerning its assessments of validity and one concerning its treatment of truth-preservation claims. One way of adjusting the theory adequately responds to the truth-preservation criticism, at the cost of making the validity criticism worse. I show that in a restricted setting, Field has a way to respond to the validity criticism. I (...) close with some general considerations on the use of revision-theoretic methods in theories of truth. (shrink)

This article responds to critical views of John Rhym, Martin Rossouw, Ludo de Roo, and Annie Sandrussi on my 2017 book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience. The article also takes up positive footholds from the analyses of Chiara Quaranta and Jason Wirth. The main topics addressed include Martin Heidegger’s ontic-ontological distinction; the notion of film-as-philosophy; being-in-the-world read as being-in-the-film-world; and questions surrounding the facticity and identity of the film viewer.

In light of the failure of attempts to analyse knowledge as a species of justified belief, a number of epistemologists have suggested that we should instead understand justification in terms of knowledge. This paper focuses on accounts of justification as a kind of ‘would-be’ knowledge. According to such accounts a belief is justified just in case any failure to know is due to uncooperative external circumstances. I argue against two recent accounts of this sort due to Alexander Bird and Martin (...) Smith. A further aim is to defend a more traditional conception, according to which justification is a matter of sufficiently high evidential likelihood. In particular, I suggest that this conception of justification offers a plausible account of lottery cases: cases in which one believes a true proposition – for example that one's lottery ticket will lose – on the basis of probabilistic evidence.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Justification logics provide frameworks for studying the fine structure of evidence and justification. Traditionally, these logics do not impose any closure requirements on justification. In this paper, we argue that for some applications they should subject justification to closure under some variety of logical consequence. Specifically, we argue, building on ideas from Beall, that the non-classical logic FDE offers a particularly attractive notion of consequence for this purpose and define a justification logic where justification is closed under FDE consequence. We (...) show the resulting logic to be sound and complete. Lastly, we discuss how the closure of justification under FDE ontrasts closure under related non-classical logics and how our approach contrasts with some alternatives. (shrink)

In the last few years, many countries have introduced laws combating the phenomenon colloquially known as ‘revenge porn’. While new laws criminalising this practice represent a positive step forwards, the legislative response has been piecemeal and typically focuses only on the practices of vengeful ex-partners. Drawing on Liz Kelly’s pioneering work, we suggest that ‘revenge porn’ should be understood as just one form of a range of gendered, sexualised forms of abuse which have common characteristics, forming what we are conceptualising (...) as the ‘continuum of image-based sexual abuse’. Further, we argue that image-based sexual abuse is on a continuum with other forms of sexual violence. We suggest that this twin approach may enable a more comprehensive legislative and policy response that, in turn, will better reflect the harms to victim-survivors and lead to more appropriate and effective educative and preventative strategies. (shrink)

Growth in CSR-washing claims in recent decades has been dramatic in numerous academic and activist contexts. The discourse, however, has been fragmented, and still lacks an integrated framework of the conditions necessary for successful CSR-washing. Theorizing successful CSR-washing as the joint occurrence of five conditions, this paper undertakes a literature review of the empirical evidence for and against each condition. The literature review finds that many of the conditions are either highly contingent, rendering CSR-washing as a complex and fragile outcome. (...) This finding runs counter to the dominant perception in the general public, among activists, and among a vocal contingent of academics that successful CSR-washing is rampant. (shrink)

Functionalist accounts of blame have been rising in popularity. Proponents of the approach claim that, by defining blame in terms of its function or functions, their account has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide range of attitudes and activities as blame; but their opponents question the extensional and explanatory adequacy of such accounts. This paper contributes to this burgeoning literature by presenting new challenges to the existing functionalist accounts. The fundamental problem, I shall argue, lies in the (...) fact that they all focus on using functions to define blame as a type of practice, but this strategy fails to pick out a unique moral-psychological type and does not offer a complete set of extension-determining criteria for the concept of blame. This amounts to a serious theoretical disadvantage. I consider various responses to the challenges throughout the paper, concluding that the best reply available to the functionalist theorist involves using functions to directly define blame tokens. (shrink)

How different were the claims of Assyrian royal inscriptions from actual Neo-Assyrian practice? This essay explores this question by examining two unusual claims made by Sargon II in relation to his rule of Samaria. The first claim, which appears both in the Khorsabad annals and in a Nimrud prism, should be translated “I again settled Samaria, more than previously.” Based on the historical reconstruction derived from archaeological data, I argue that this phrase refers to the movement of exiles into areas (...) in the western part of the province of Samaria. These areas in the western part of the province, around the sites of Aphek, Hadid, and Gezer, experienced significant population increases in the Assyrian period. The second passage, in Sargon’s Great Display Inscription from Khorsabad, refers to Sargon’s treatment of non-deported Samaritans. It should be translated “I trained the remnant in their crafts.” The historical reality behind this claim is the shift in agricultural techniques and activities in Samaria as a result of the Assyrian conquest. The Assyrian domination of Samaria required the production of grain surpluses, which needed to be made available in the Aphek-Gezer region in the western part of the province of Samaria. In each of the claims from the royal inscriptions examined in this essay, we see that the royal inscriptions credit the king with activities performed by the provincial governor. They change the description of the activity to make it “fit for royalty.”. (shrink)

En los territorios pluriétnicos y plurilingüísticos del imperio español, la traducción de las lenguas indígenas al español en contextos legales y burocráticos era común, pero son escasos los estudios del proceso de la traducción y su valor retórico. El Paraguay colonial es un interesante ejemplo, dado el extenso bilingüismo entre muchos españoles criollos y el monolingüismo entre la gran mayoría de los pueblos guaraníes. En este artículo reviso tres tipos de traducción en la región: traducción sin traducción, traducciones sospechosas y (...) una traducción resumida. Cada ejemplo refleja los variados modos de traducción, la política de la traducción, y las formas en que las traducciones pueden complementar un análisis cultural de los guaraníes. Incluyo aquí una traducción original de una carta guaraní del año 1761 del pueblo Nuestra Señora de Fe y un análisis de su traducción resumida. (shrink)