Hans Mayer, one of the most eminent literary critics and public intellectuals in post-war Germany, visited Israel four times between 1968 and 1995. This article aims to reconstruct the key elements of Mayer’s ambivalent perception of Israeli society and culture as it is documented in his travelogue Reisen nach Jerusalem from 1997 and several further texts. However, Mayer’s view on Israel can only be understood adequately by also considering his situation as a non-religious Jew and Shoah survivor in Germany.

This paper discusses the few passages in ancient literature in which the tyrant Nicagoras of Zeleia is mentioned, and others which have been regarded as referring to his rule by modern scholars. It is argued that he did not belong to the group of former patients who, dressed as gods, accompanied the physician Menecrates of Syracuse, that there is no need to assume that he was overthrown after the battle of the Granicus, and that he may have been the first (...) tyrant or at least one of the first who claimed divine honors for himself. In addition, Alexander’s policy towards tyrants in Asia Minor is analyzed and it is shown that it was more pragmatic than is often assumed. (shrink)

Contrary to the prevailing opinion the servum in Calpurnius Flaccus’ fourth declamation (ed. Håkanson 4,12) is to be kept very well, whereas the emendations sacrum and tectum are unnecessary and not very convincing.

In this article, the – in a double sense – problematic passages in the epithalamium for Stella and Violentilla and in thematically linked epigrams of Martial (especially in the epigram 6.21 whose subject likewise is their wedding, but also in the epigrams 5.11 and 5.12) are analyzed. These are the passages that, firstly, are difficult to interpret and, secondly, seem to cast a bad light on Stella and Violentilla in the form of explosive details and tactlessness. The guiding question in (...) this article will be whether and to what extent Martial’s and especially Statius’ portrayal of the wedding couple is not only idealizing but also ambivalent. (shrink)

We present the first comprehensive theory of fairness that conceives of fairness as having two dimensions: a comparative and an absolute one. The comparative dimension of fairness has traditionally been the main interest of Broomean fairness theories. It has been analysed as satisfying competing individual claims in proportion to their respective strengths. And yet, many key contributors to Broomean fairness agree that ‘absolute’ fairness is important as well. We make this concern precise by introducing the Fairness formula and the absolute (...) priority rule and analyse their implications for comparative fairness. (shrink)

Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the (...) insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money. (shrink)

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)

Many people think that if you're uncertain about which moral theory is correct, you ought to maximize the expected choice-worthiness of your actions. This idea presupposes that the strengths of our moral reasons are comparable across theories – for instance, that our reasons to create new people, according to total utilitarianism, can be stronger than our reasons to benefit an existing person, according to a person-affecting view. But how can we make sense of such comparisons? In this article, I introduce (...) a constructivist account of intertheoretic comparisons. On this account, such comparisons don't hold independently of facts about morally uncertain agents. They're simply the result of an ideal deliberation in terms of certain epistemic norms about what you ought to do in light of your uncertainty. If I'm right, this account is metaphysically more parsimonious than some existing proposals, and yet has plausible and strong implications. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to Bolzano’s theory of grounding (Abfolge) in his Wissenschaftslehre. Bolzanian grounding is an explanatory consequence relation that is frequently considered an ancestor of the notion of metaphysical grounding. The paper focuses on two principles that concern grounding in the realm of conceptual sciences and relate to traditionally widespread ideas on explanations: the principles, namely, that grounding orders conceptual truths from simple to more complex ones (Simplicity), and that it comes along with a certain theoretical economy among (...) them (Economy). Being spelled out on the basis of Bolzano’s notion of deducibility (Ableitbarkeit), these principles are revealing for the question to what extent grounding can be considered a formal relation. (shrink)

In their paper Nothing but the Truth Andreas Pietz and Umberto Rivieccio present Exactly True Logic, an interesting variation upon the four-valued logic for first-degree entailment FDE that was given by Belnap and Dunn in the 1970s. Pietz & Rivieccio provide this logic with a Hilbert-style axiomatisation and write that finding a nice sequent calculus for the logic will presumably not be easy. But a sequent calculus can be given and in this paper we will show that a calculus for (...) the Belnap-Dunn logic we have defined earlier can in fact be reused for the purpose of characterising ETL, provided a small alteration is made—initial assignments of signs to the sentences of a sequent to be proved must be different from those used for characterising FDE. While Pietz & Rivieccio define ETL on the language of classical propositional logic we also study its consequence relation on an extension of this language that is functionally complete for the underlying four truth values. On this extension the calculus gets a multiple-tree character—two proof trees may be needed to establish one proof. (shrink)

By using the notions of exact truth and exact falsity, one can give 16 distinct definitions of classical consequence. This paper studies the class of relations that results from these definitions in settings that are paracomplete, paraconsistent or both and that are governed by the Strong Kleene schema. Besides familiar logics such as Strong Kleene logic, the Logic of Paradox and First Degree Entailment, the resulting class of all Strong Kleene generalizations of classical logic also contains a host of unfamiliar (...) logics. We first study the members of our class semantically, after which we present a uniform sequent calculus that is sound and complete with respect to all of them. Two further sequent calculi and \ calculus) will be considered, which serve the same purpose and which are obtained by applying general methods to construct sequent calculi for many-valued logics. Rules and proofs in the SK calculus are much simpler and shorter than those of the \ and the \ calculus, which is one of the reasons to prefer the SK calculus over the latter two. Besides favourably comparing the SK calculus to both the \ and the \ calculus, we also hint at its philosophical significance. (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)

The standard argument for longtermism assumes that we should care as much about far future people as about our contemporaries. I challenge this assumption. I first consider existing interpretations of ‘temporal discounting’, and argue that such discounting seems either unwarranted or insufficient to block the argument. I then offer two alternative reasons to care less about far future people: caring as much about them as about our contemporaries would make our lives less authentic and less meaningful. If I’m right, this (...) undermines at least the strongest versions of longtermism. Plausibly, we should do much more for the far future than we’re currently doing. Still, we often ought to act for contemporaries’ sakes, even if longtermist actions would expectably do more good. (shrink)

Research on the base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach and the associated business case for deprived participants in informal markets now appears frequently in a range of business ethics and management-related journals. The present analysis of how supply chain management (SCM) and sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) concepts are habitually used in base-of-the-pyramid research serves to strengthen the theoretical foundation of BoP research by addressing the related business case. Based on a content analysis of BoP papers published in English-speaking peer-reviewed journals between 2000 (...) and 2014 from the Web of Science database, this literature review comprehends existing research in the context of established SCM and SSCM frameworks, using both frequency and contingency analyses. The frequency analysis indicates that supply chain management and sustainable supply chain management [(S)SCM] constructs regularly discussed in the BoP literature include supplier integration, strategic purchasing, decommoditization, long-term relationship and enhanced communication among supply chain actors. The identified contingencies reflect linkages between BoP research and (S)SCM constructs. The highest number of links was found between the SCM constructs of strategic purchasing and long-term relationship and the SSCM constructs of supplier integration and communication and coordination with suppliers. These can be regarded as the most crucial (S)SCM constructs in the BoP business environment. This analysis facilitates the development of future research propositions at this intersection, including the use of tools from (S)SCM theories to evaluate BoP propositions and projects. Granted the limited range of BoP-related papers analyzed, the findings provide a coherent understanding of (S)SCM practices crucial to the functioning of BoP markets and why they matter, so contributing to the related ethical rationale. These findings will be of use to researchers and practitioners alike for the formulation of business development strategies and their subsequent implementation in informal market economies. (shrink)

In order to explain that sentences containing empty definite descriptions are nevertheless true or false, Russell famously analyzes sentences of the form ‘The F is G’ as ‘There is exactly one F and it is G’. Against this it has been objected that Russell’s analysis provides the wrong truth-conditions when it comes to non-doxastic attitude ascriptions. For example, according to Heim, Kripke, and Elbourne (HKE), there are circumstances in which (1) is true and (2) is false. Hans wants the ghost (...) in his attic to be quiet tonight.Hans wants there to be exactly one ghost in his attic and for it to be quiet tonight. After all, the argument goes, unlike (2), (1) can be true without Hans wanting there to be exactly one ghost in his attic. Kaplan and Neale famously reply that the HKE objection presupposes that non-doxastic attitudes are closed under entailment, which they are not. For Rostworowski, on the other hand, the problematic principle used by the HKE objection is a substitutivity principle for non-doxastic attitude ascriptions. This is further supported by the fact that, as Elbourne points out, Russell’s analysis already leads to a problem similar to the HKE objection together with substitutivity alone. By questioning substitutivity for non-doxastic attitude ascriptions, Rostworowski tries to block both the HKE objection and Elbourne’s variant of the HKE objection. In this paper, I will argue that Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions leads to a variant of the HKE objection even in the context of doxastic attitude ascriptions. Since, as we will see, doxastic attitude ascriptions do not seem to suffer from the substitutivity problems discussed by Rostworowski in the context of non-doxastic attitude ascriptions, this will further exacerbate the problem for Russell’s analysis. I will then discuss the possibility to reject substitutivity for doxastic attitude ascriptions using a contextualist analysis of attitude ascriptions. However, we will see that, independent of whether we accept substitutivity for doxastic attitude ascriptions, a complete solution of the doxastic problem has to reject Russell’s analysis of the truth-conditions of sentences of the form ‘The F is G’. Concluding, I will show that, unlike Russell’s analysis, the Frege–Strawson analysis of definite descriptions, according to which a sentence of the form ‘The F is G’ presupposes that there is exactly one F, rather than asserting it, provides an explanation of the HKE objection, Elbourne’s variant of the HKE objection, and the doxastic problem presented in this paper. This will speak not only in favor of a Fregean analysis of definite descriptions, but also of a Fregean conception of propositions. (shrink)

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

This article develops an objection to Kant’s proof of freedom from the Critique of Practical Reason. In his proof — the fact of reason argument — Kant deduces the reality of freedom, understood as the ability to act independently of all inclinations, from our consciousness of the unconditional validity of morality. He calls this consciousness the "fact of reason". After a systematic reconstruction of the argument, I develop an objection that relies on three points: (i) the cultural embeddedness of human (...) beings ("fact of culture"), (ii) an "external" perspective on human deliberative processes, and (iii) an alternative interpretation of the unconditional validity of morality that appears in practical deliberation. Contrary to Kant’s claims, I argue that the reality of freedom cannot be deductively derived from the fact of reason. I then discuss two objections to my argument. The first objection claims that my considerations regarding the "external" perspective misunderstand Kant's methodology. The second objection states that, based on my considerations, the fact of reason ultimately turns out to be an illusion. I discuss both objections and refute them. My ultimate conclusion is that Kant's fact of reason argument is not convincing. (shrink)

There are several important criticisms against the unificationist model of scientific explanation: Unification is a broad and heterogeneous notion and it is hard to see how a model of explanation based exclusively on unification can make a distinction between genuine explanatory unification from cases of ordering or classification. Unification alone cannot solve the asymmetry and irrelevance problems. Unification and explanation pull in different directions and should be decoupled, because for good scientific explanation extra ad explanandum information is often required. I (...) am presenting a possible solution to those problems, by focusing on an often overlooked but important element of how theoretic unification is achieved—the conceptual frameworks of theories. The core conceptual assumptions behind theories are decisive for discriminating between explanatory and non-explanatory unification. The conceptual framework is also flexible enough to balance the tension between informativeness and maximum systematization in constructing explanatory inferences. A short case study of orthogenetic and Darwinian explanations in paleontology is presented as an illustration of how my addition to the unificationist model is applicable to a historical debate between rival explanations. (shrink)

Users of sociotechnical systems often have no way to independently verify whether the system output which they use to make decisions is correct; they are epistemically dependent on the system. We argue that this leads to problems when the system is wrong, namely to bad decisions and violations of the norm of practical reasoning. To prevent this from occurring we suggest the implementation of defeaters: information that a system is unreliable in a specific case (undercutting defeat) or independent information that (...) the output is wrong (rebutting defeat). Practically, we suggest to design defeaters based on the different ways in which a system might produce erroneous outputs, and analyse this suggestion with a case study of the risk classification algorithm used by the Dutch tax agency. (shrink)

The globalization movement in recent decades has meant rapid growth in trade, financial transactions, and cross-country ownership of economic assets. In this article, we examine how the globalization of national business systems has influenced the framing of corporate social responsibility (CSR). This is done using text analysis of CEO letters appearing in the annual reports of 15 major corporations in Sweden during a period of transformational change. The results show that the discourse about CSR in the annual reports has changed (...) from a national and communitarian view of social responsibility (cf. a negotiated view of CSR) toward an international and individualistic view of social responsibility (cf. a self-regulating view of CSR). The article contributes theoretically (1) by adding a national–global dimension to previous conceptualizations of CSR and (2) by showing that the rise of CSR discourse and activities in the last 10 years does not have to imply an increased commitment and interest in corporate responsibility per se, only that there are increased societal expectations that corporations should develop the capability to act more independently as moral agents. (shrink)

Most accounts of our knowledge of the successor axiom claim that this is based on the procedure of adding one. While they usually don’t claim to provide an account of how children actually acquire this knowledge, one may well think that this is how they get that knowledge. I argue that when we look at children’s responses in interviews, the time when they learn the successor axiom and the intermediate learning stages they find themselves in, that there is an empirically (...) viable alternative. I argue that they could also learn it on the basis of a method that has to do with the structure of the numeral system. Specifically, that they (1) use the syntactic structure of the numeral system and (2) attend to the leftmost digits, the one with the highest place-value. Children can learn that this is a reliable method of forming larger numbers by combining two elements. First, a grasp of the syntactic structure of the numeral system. That way they know that the leftmost digit receives the highest value. Second, an interpretation of numerals as designating cardinal values, so that they also realise that increasing or adding digits on the lefthand side of a numeral produces a larger number. There are thus two, currently equally well-supported, ways in which children might learn that there are infinitely many natural numbers. (shrink)

Reichenbach's Philosophy of Space and Time (1928) avoids most of the logical positivist pitfalls it is generally held to exemplify, notably both conventionalism and verificationism. To see why, we must appreciate that Reichenbach's interest lies in how mathematical structures can be used to describe reality, not in how words like 'distance' acquire meaning. Examination of his proposed "coordinative definition" of congruence shows that Reichenbach advocates a reductionist analysis of the relations figuring in physical geometry (contrary to common readings that attribute (...) to him a holistic conventionalism), while embracing a thoroughly holistic understanding of empirical confirmation (contrary to rival operationalist readings). (shrink)

Is it appropriate to blame people unequally if the only difference between them was a matter of luck? Suppose Alice would drive recklessly if she could, Belen drove recklessly but didn’t harm anyone, and Cleo drove recklessly and killed a child. Luck-advocates emphasize that in real life we do blame such agents very unequally. Luck-skeptics counter that people aren’t responsible for factors beyond their control, or beyond their quality of will. I’ll defend a somewhat reconciliatory view. I’ll concede to the (...) skeptics that these agents are equally culpable. Nonetheless, I’ll suggest with the luck-advocates that it’s fitting to blame them unequally. That’s because their culpability is unequally significant for us: Cleo’s culpability concerns us more than Belen’s, and Belen’s more than Alice’s—just like the fault of a close aggressor concerns us more than that of an aggressor far off in place and time. And it’s fitting for us to respond with more blame to faults that concern us more. Indeed, blaming people simply in proportion to their culpability manifests a form of fetishism, or problematic mere-matter-of-principle concern. So while many skeptical tenets may hold, in substance the luck-advocates are right. (shrink)

In this article, we explore to what extent parents should be ‘educators’ of their children. In the course of this exploration, we offer some examples of these practices and ways of speaking and thinking, indicate some of the problems and limitations they import into our understanding of the parent–child relationship, and make some tentative suggestions towards an alternative way of thinking about this relationship.

Using a variant of Schiffer’s puzzle regarding de re belief, I recently presented a new argument against the so-called Naive Russellian theory, consisting of the following theses: ( \(NR_{1}\) ) The propositions we say and believe are Russellian propositions, i.e., structured propositions consisting of the objects, properties, and relations our thoughts and speech acts are about; ( \(NR_{2}\) ) Names (and other singular terms) are directly referential terms, i.e., the propositional content of a name is just its referent; ( \(NR_{3}\) (...) ) A sentence of the form ‘_A_ believes/disbelieves that _S_’ is true in a context _c_ if and only if the referent of _A_ in _c_ believes/disbelieves the proposition expressed by _S_ in _c_. In this paper, I will argue that my variant of Schiffer’s puzzle is not only a problem for the Naive Russellian theory, but for every theory of belief ascriptions entailing ( \(NR_{3}\) ). Such theories are also called _relational analyses of belief ascriptions_. Here the main alternative to a Neo-Russellian theory, consisting of ( \(NR_{1}\) ) and ( \(NR_{2}\) ), is a Fregean theory, according to which the propositions we say and believe are Fregean propositions, i.e., structured propositions consisting of ways the objects, properties, and relations our thoughts and speech acts are about are presented to the speaker or agent. I will argue that such variants of the relational analysis are committed to principles very similar to the principles used by my Schiffer puzzle. Concluding, I will discuss Fregean and Neo-Russellian alternatives to the relational analysis, and I will argue that, although there are Neo-Russellian alternatives to the relational analysis which provide a solution to my variant of Schiffer’s puzzle, there seem to be no such Fregean alternatives. (shrink)

Can concepts be acquired by testing hypotheses about these concepts? Fodor famously argued that this is not possible. Testing the correct hypothesis would require already possessing the concept. I argue that this does not generally hold for mathematical concepts. I discuss specific, empirically motivated, hypotheses for number concepts that can be tested without needing to possess the relevant number concepts. I also argue that one can test hypotheses about the identity conditions of other mathematical concepts, and then fix the application (...) conditions based on those hypotheses—under the assumption that the neo‐logicist view on abstraction principles is correct. (shrink)

This essay develops a new interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s ontological argument in the Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence. At the beginning, Immanuel Kant’s famous criticism of the ontological proof of God’s existence in the Critique of Pure Reason is presented. Then I offer an in-depth analysis of Mendelssohn’s original ontological argument in the Morning Hours. It is shown that with Mendelssohn’s new proof of God, Kant’s objections are answered. Finally, it is explained why Mendelssohn does not succeed in completely (...) refuting Kant’s objections. (shrink)

With the widespread use of artificial intelligence, it becomes crucial to provide information about these systems and how they are used. Governments aim to disclose their use of algorithms to establish legitimacy and the EU AI Act mandates forms of transparency for all high-risk and limited-risk systems. Yet, what should the standards for transparency be? What information is needed to show to a wide public that a certain system can be used legitimately and responsibly? I argue that process-based approaches fail (...) to satisfy, as knowledge about the development process is insufficient to predict the properties of the resulting system. Current outcome-based approaches [Mitchell et al., 2019; Loi et al., 2021] are also criticized for a lack of attention to the broader socio-technical system and failure to account for empirical results that show that people care about more than just the outcomes of a process [as reported by Meyerson et al. (Procedural justice and relational theory: Empirical, philosophical, and legal perspectives, Taylor & Francis, 2021)]. Instead, I propose value-based transparency, on which the information we need to provide is what values have been considered in the design and how successful these have been realized in the final system. This can handle the objections to other frameworks, matches with current best practices on the design of responsible AI and provides the public with information on the crucial aspects of a system’s design. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a Gentzen calculus for (a functionally complete variant of) Belnap's logic in which establishing the provability of a sequent in general requires \emph{two} proof trees, one establishing that whenever all premises are true some conclusion is true and one that guarantees the falsity of at least one premise if all conclusions are false. The calculus can also be put to use in proving that one statement \emph{necessarily approximates} another, where necessary approximation is a natural dual (...) of entailment. The calculus, and its tableau variant, not only capture the classical connectives, but also the `information' connectives of four-valued Belnap logics. This answers a question by Avron. (shrink)

In their recent paper Bi-facial truth: a case for generalized truth values Zaitsev and Shramko [7] distinguish between an ontological and an epistemic interpretation of classical truth values. By taking the Cartesian product of the two disjoint sets of values thus obtained, they arrive at four generalized truth values and consider two “semi-classical negations” on them. The resulting semantics is used to define three novel logics which are closely related to Belnap’s well-known four valued logic. A syntactic characterization of these (...) logics is left for further work. In this paper, based on our previous work on a functionally complete extension of Belnap’s logic, we present a sound and complete tableau calculus for these logics. It crucially exploits the Cartesian nature of the four values, which is reflected in the fact that each proof consists of two tableaux. The bi-facial notion of truth of Z&S is thus augmented with a bi-facial notion of proof. We also provide translations between the logics for semi-classical negation and classical logic and show that an argument is valid in a logic for semi-classical negation just in case its translation is valid in classical logic. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to widen the scope of the current debate on peer disagreement by applying it to a kind of case it has hitherto remained silent about – namely, to cases of disagreement in which one of the disagreeing parties bases her opinion on a private religious experience to which the other party has no access. In order to do this, I will introduce a modified version of the notion of peerhood – a version that, in (...) contrast to the one employed in the current debate, can be fruitfully applied to the troublesome kind of case in question. I will then employ this new notion in order to specify the degree of conciliation rationally required from the disagreeing parties in the kind of case in question. (shrink)

Mathematical cognition has become an interesting case study for wider theories of cognition. Menary :1–20, 2015) argues that arithmetical cognition not only shows that internalist theories of cognition are wrong, but that it also shows that the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition is right. I examine this argument in more detail, to see if arithmetical cognition can support such conclusions. Specifically, I look at how the use of numerals extends our arithmetical abilities from quantity-related innate systems to systems that can deal (...) with exact numbers of arbitrary size. I then argue that the system underlying our grasp of small numbers is an unhelpful case study for Menary; it doesn’t support an argument for externalism over internalism. The system for large numbers, on the other hand, clearly displays important interactions between public numeral systems and our cognitive processes. I argue that the large number system supports an argument against internalist theories of arithmetical cognition, but that one cannot conclude that the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition is correct. In other words, the large number case doesn’t decide between the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition and the Hypothesis of EMbedded Cognition. (shrink)

So-called Neo-Russellians, such as Salmon, Braun, Crimmins, and Perry, hold that the semantic content of ‘ n is F ’ in a context c is the singular proposition ⟨ o, P ⟩, where o is the referent of the name n in c, and P is the property expressed by the predicate F in c. This is also known as the Neo-Russellian theory. Using truth ascriptions with names designating propositions, such as ‘Goldbach's conjecture’, in this paper, I will argue that, (...) together with highly plausible principles regarding a priori knowledge, the Neo-Russellian theory leads to unacceptable consequences. I will call this ‘the Goldbach puzzle’. Since the solution to the Goldbach puzzle cannot be to reject the discussed principles regarding a priori knowledge, the puzzle will undermine the Neo-Russellian theory. (shrink)

What are the fittingness conditions of gratitude? One assumption seems unquestioned in the literature: that whenever it’s fitting for you to be grateful to me, that’s because I’ve benefitted or tried to benefit you. In this paper, I argue that that’s false. You may sometimes fittingly be grateful precisely because I refrained from benefitting you. Or you may be grateful because I omitted to instrumentalise you, or treated you justly – where this isn’t reducible to benefits. Morality isn’t all about (...) benefits, so gratitude isn’t either. Instead, gratitude is the proper response to being shown more positive moral regard than you’re owed – where such regard might consist in beneficence, or respect, or in whatever kind of positive moral attitude. (shrink)

Linsky and Zalta try to explain how we can refer to mathematical objects by saying that this happens through definite descriptions which may appeal to mathematical theories. I present two issues for their account. First, there is a problem of finding appropriate pre-conditions to reference, which are currently difficult to satisfy. Second, there is a problem of ensuring the stability of the resulting reference. Slight changes in the properties ascribed to a mathematical object can result in a shift of reference (...) and this leads to various problems, e.g., it makes inferring knowledge much harder than it is. (shrink)

In this essay, I develop a moderate hierarchical position about the moral status of animals that is based on two factors: on the level of mental development of a being who is affected and on the significance of the interests that are affected. I argue that this view accommodates two different sets of moral intuitions. On one hand, it explains why, in general, humans have the special moral standing that is typically attributed to us. On the other hand, it also (...) allows us to accommodate much of our intuition about how animals ought to be treated. In addition, this view is supported also by plausible general theoretical considerations. Subsequently, I explore some implications of this view for some real-life examples of our interactions with animals, especially, for the practice of raising them for food using industrial methods. I argue that this practice is morally wrong and that the correct approach is to adopt a (nearly) plant-based lifestyle. (shrink)

This article discusses the influence that Schopenhauer’s thought had on Mihai Eminescu’s work with reference to the idea of “pessimism.” It also considers Schopenhauer’s influence on Romanian philosophy and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. We shall examine Eminescu’s alleged “Schopenhauerian pessimism,” considering firstly “pessimism” as a part of Eminescu’s “myth.” Secondly, we shall cover the critical reception of Eminescu’s “Schopenhauerian pessimism,” discussing the existing literary and philosophical scholarship. Finding that there are issues for debate regarding Schopenhauer’s alleged (...) influence upon Eminescu, we argue that Eminescu’s “Schopenhauerian pessimism” may be a “legend.” The article examines the connection between Eminescu and one of Schopenhauer’s most influential followers, Eduard von Hartmann. (shrink)

Recent developments regarding the pharmacology of psychoactive substances are significant for treating depressions or opioid addictions. Current theories, hypotheses, and models of drug effects assume a cause–effect narrative, which is based on a stimulus/response mechanism. These narratives prioritize effects rather than conscious experiences. In this sense, drug experiences are quickly subsumed into common categories and codes of biological determinism. If subjective experiences are in the focus of the research, it quickly becomes a link to mystical, spiritual, or transcendental narratives. These (...) classifications lead to epistemological doublets (Gadamer). In this article, psychedelic experiences of drug users are analyzed in the frame of the pharmaco-analysis by Deleuze/Guattari. These framed psychedelic experiences are interpreted by means of a non-philosophical approach through philo-fictions (Laruelle), i.e., contradictory assumptions and hyperspeculations. In this respect, the aim of this article is to bring philo-fictions in relation to psychedelic experiences and to discuss them with models of information science, quantum mechanics, new materialism, and the philosophy of immanence. The result will be an open synthesis, with the assumption of further reflections on the agency, immanence, and the wholeness of matter. (shrink)