Interrogation of metaphysics -- Difference of absolute particularity -- From science to speculation -- Being multiple-- Quality of quantity -- Measure of multiplicity -- Conceptual subjectivity -- Conceptual objectivity -- Idea of totality -- Metaphysics of multiplicity.

I propose that the successes and contributions of reinforcement learning urge us to see the mind in a new light, namely, to recognise that the mind is fundamentally evaluative in nature.

Stefan Collini challenges the common claim that universities need to show that they help to make money in order to justify getting more money.

Einleitung -- Charismatische Herrschaft -- Traditionale Herrschaft -- Traditionale und charismatische Herrschaft im vorrationalen Okzident: Antike -- Traditionale und charismatische Herrschaft im vorrationalen Okzident: Mittelalter -- Legale Herrschaft.

Ist Musik eine Anschauungs- und Denkform aus eigenem Recht? Wie steht es um die systematischen, historischen und ethnologischen Aspekte einer solchen Thematik? Verändert sich die Fragestellung dank kulturspezifischer Besonderheiten befragbarer Stoffe oder lassen sich auch Universalien im Sinne von Invarianten ausmachen, die nicht automatisch aus neuzeitlichen Vorprägungen des Begriffs «Musik» gewonnen sind, sondern die auf anthropologische Prägungen verweisen? Dieser Band vereinigt die aufgrund mehrerer Symposien entstandenen Beiträge zu diesen Fragen.

In this paper I propose a reading of Plotinus Enneads VI.1-3 [41-43] On the genera of being which regards this treatise as a coherent whole in which Aristotle's Categories is explored in a way that turns it into a decisive contribution to Plotinus' Platonic ontology. In addition, I claim that Porphyry's Isagoge and commentaries on the Categories start by adopting Plotinus' point of view, including his notion of genus, and proceed by explaining its consequences for a more detailed reading of (...) the Categories. After Plotinus' integration of the Categories into the Platonic frame of thought Porphyry saw the possibilities of exploiting the Peripatetic tradition both as a means to support the Platonic interpretation of the Categories and as a source for solutions to traditional questions. His allegiance to a division of being into ten, and his emphasis on semantics rather than ontology can be explained from this orientation. In the light of our investigation the alleged disagreement between Plotinus and Porphyry on the Categories changes its appearance completely. There are differences, but these can be best explained as confirmation and extension of Plotinus' perspective on the Categories and its role in Platonism. (shrink)

The aim of the current study was to investigate important pathways of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis concerning the role of peer relations. First, we examined (1) the mediating role of peer problems in the association between the motor performance in daily activities and internalizing problems as a main pathway of the Environmental Stress Hypothesis. Furthermore, we explored the role of (2) children’s popularity as a mediator and (3) best friendship quality as a moderator path of the effect of motor performance (...) on both peer problems and internalizing problems. The non-clinical sample of the present study consisted of 189 children (48.6% females) aged nine to eleven years (Mage = 9.69, SDage = 0.46). Parents reported on their child’s motor performance in daily activities by completing the Developmental Coordination Disorder Questionnaire. In addition, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire was used to assess peer problems as well as internalizing problems. The Self Description Questionnaire provided a measure of children’s self-reported popularity. Finally, the Friendship Quality Questionnaire was used to investigate children’s best friendship quality. Results of a structural equation model suggest that peer problems fully mediated the association between the motor performance in daily activities and both popularity and internalizing problems. However, no evidence for the mediating effect of popularity in the association between peer problems and internalizing problems was found. Further, best friendship quality had small but non-significant positive moderating effect on the relation between peer problems and internalizing problems. The mediating role of peer problems highlights the importance of peer relations in the motor performance of daily activities. Possible reasons for the lack of some of the expected mediating and moderating effects as well as practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

To translate is one thing; to say how we do it, is another. The practice is familiar enough, and there are familiar theories of it. But when we try to look more closely, theory tends to obscure rather than explain, and the familiar practice—an ancient practice, without which Western civilisation is unthinkable—appears to be just baffling, its very possibility a mystery.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted in society, creating numerous opportunities but at the same time posing ethical challenges. Many of these are familiar, such as issues of fairness, responsibility and privacy, but are presented in a new and challenging guise due to our limited ability to steer and predict the outputs of AI systems. This chapter first introduces these ethical challenges, stressing that overviews of values are a good starting point but frequently fail to suffice due to the context (...) sensitivity of ethical challenges. Frequently, additional (ethical) values emerge for specific applications, as e.g. challenges with fraud detection are very different from those around language technologies. Second, methods to tackle these challenges are discussed. Main ethical theories (virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology) are shown to provide a starting point, but often lack the details needed for actionable AI Ethics. Instead, mid-level philosophical theories coupled to design-approaches such as Design for Values, together with interdisciplinary working methods, offer the best way forwards. The chapter aims to show how these approaches can lead to an ethics of AI that is actionable and that can be proactively integrated in the design of AI systems. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to help people understand black box algorithms, particularly of their outputs. But what are these explanations and when is one explanation better than another? The manipulationist definition of explanation from the philosophy of science offers good answers to these questions, holding that an explanation consists of a generalization that shows what happens in counterfactual cases. Furthermore, when it comes to explanatory depth this account holds that a generalization that has more abstract variables, is broader in (...) scope and/or more accurate is better. By applying these definitions and contrasting them with alternative definitions in the XAI literature I hope to help clarify what a good explanation is for AI. (shrink)

The topic of this thesis is axiological uncertainty – the question of how you should evaluate your options if you are uncertain about which axiology is true. As an answer, I defend Expected Value Maximisation (EVM), the view that one option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected value across axiologies. More precisely, I explore the axiomatic foundations of this view. I employ results from state-dependent utility theory, extend them in various ways and interpret (...) them accordingly, and thus provide axiomatisations of EVM as a theory of axiological uncertainty. (shrink)

This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs (...) the sense of identity and of relation to an audience exhibited by social critics from John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to J.M. Keynes and F.R. Leavis. (shrink)

Examines widespread myths about transhumanism and explores the most pressing ethical issues in the debate over technologically assisted human enhancement.

This is the first full discussion of Philoponus' account of matter.

This volume collects Late Ancient, Byzantine and Medieval appropriations of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, addressing the logic of inquiry, concept formation, the question whether metaphysics is a science, and the theory of demonstration.

This study defends the legitimacy of the Enlightenment project by way of its different realizations in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Today, Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with a global claim is often considered synonymous with Western chauvinism. The assertion of a universally binding reason is all too obviously inconsistent with the much-cited recognition of cultural differences. In contrast, it is the conviction brought forward in this book that an adequately understood Enlightenment is an unconditional right (...) of every person taking an active interest in a self-determined way of life. Only the realization of this conception of Enlightenment can provide the required space for the reciprocal recognition of human differences to freely unfold. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the ways in which Alexander of Aphrodisias employs and develops so-called ‘common notions’ as reliable starting points of deductive arguments. He combines contemporary developments in the Stoic and Epicurean use of common notions with Aristotelian dialectic, and axioms. This more comprehensive concept of common notions can be extracted from Alexander’s commentary on Metaphysics A 1–2. Alexander puts Aristotle’s claim that ‘all human beings by nature desire to know’ in a larger deductive framework, and adds weight (...) to Aristotle’s use of the common understanding of the notion of ‘wisdom’. Finally I will indicate how these upgraded common notions are meant to play an important role in the general framework of metaphysics as a science. (shrink)

Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism and fascism and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan (...) for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in _A Brief History of the Masses_, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989. (shrink)

The notion of a migration system is often invoked but it is rarely clearly defined or conceptualized. De Haas recently provided a powerful critique of the current literature highlighting some important flaws that recur through it. In particular, migration systems tend to be identified as fully formed entities, and there is no theorization as to how they come into being and how they break down. The internal dynamics which drive such changes are not examined. Such critiques of migration systems (...) relate to wider critiques of the concept of systems in the broader social science literature, where they are often presented as black boxes in which human agency is largely excluded. The challenge is how to theorize system dynamics in which the actions of people at one time contribute to the emergence of systemic linkages at a later time. This article focuses on the genesis of migration systems and the notion of pioneer migration. It draws attention both to the role of particular individuals, the pioneers, and also the more general activity of pioneering which is undertaken by many migrants. By disentangling different aspects of agency, it is possible to develop hypotheses about how the emergence of migrations systems is related to the nature of the agency exercised by different pioneers or pioneering activities in different contexts. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 413-437 DOI 10.1558/jcr.v11i4.413 Authors Oliver Bakewell, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford Hein De Haas, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford Agnieszka Kubal, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 11 Journal Issue Volume 11, Number 4 / 2012. (shrink)

The attribution of mental states (MS) to other species typically follows ascala naturaepattern. However, “simple” mental states, including emotions, sensing, and feelings are attributed to a wider range of animals as compared to the so-called “higher” cognitive abilities. We propose that such attributions are based on the perceptual quality (i.e.imageability) of mental representations related toMSconcepts. We hypothesized that the attribution of highly imaginableMSis more dependent on the familiarity of participants with animals when compared to the attribution ofMSlow in imageability. In (...) addition, we also assessed how animal agreeableness, familiarity with animals, and the type of human-animal interaction related to the judged similarity of animals to humans. Sixty-one participants (19 females, 42 males) with a rural (n = 20) and urban (n = 41) background rated twenty-six wild and domestic animals for their perceived similarity with humans and ability to experience a set ofMS: (1) Highly imageableMS: joy, anger, and fear, and (2)MSlow in imageability: capacity to plan and deceive. Results show that more agreeable and familiar animals were considered more human-like. Primates, followed by carnivores, suines, ungulates, and rodents were rated more human-like than xenarthrans, birds, arthropods, and reptiles. HigherMSratings were given to more similar animals and more so if theMSattributed were high in imageability. Familiarity with animals was only relevant for the attribution of theMShigh in imageability. (shrink)

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability (...) mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation. (shrink)

How do we get out knowledge of the natural numbers? Various philosophical accounts exist, but there has been comparatively little attention to psychological data on how the learning process actually takes place. I work through the psychological literature on number acquisition with the aim of characterising the acquisition stages in formal terms. In doing so, I argue that we need a combination of current neologicist accounts and accounts such as that of Parsons. In particular, I argue that we learn the (...) initial segment of the natural numbers on the basis of the Fregean definitions, but do not learn the natural number structure as a whole on the basis of Hume's principle. Therefore, we need to account for some of the consistency of our number concepts with the Dedekind-Peano axioms in other terms. (shrink)

Sur la décomposition des ensembles de points en parties respectivement congruentes.