This chapter contains sections titled: Scientific Reasons Motivated by Morality? The Science of Religion Notes.

Provides an overview of the complex history of the secular tradition of science and its interactions with religions and spiritual traditions.

Atheists, conservative theists, and religious liberals often read the history of science in ways that support their own position. Atheists expect continual mutual support between science and nonbelief, conservatives emphasize theistic metaphysical foundations for science; and liberals find a historical development toward separate spheres for science and religion. The rise of science was more complicated than anticipated by any of these stories. Atheism and science have usually developed almost independently, with weak connections. Today, the naturalism of modern scientific descriptions (...) of the world is consonant with an atheistic position. But even now, significant tensions between science and atheism remain. (shrink)

Judgments of the rationality of beliefs must take the costs of acquiring and possessing beliefs into consideration. In that case, certain false beliefs, especially those that are associated with the benefits of a cohesive community, can be seen to be useful for an agent and perhaps instrumentally rational to hold. A distinction should be made between excusable misbeliefs, which a rational agent should tolerate, and misbeliefs that are defensible in their own right because they confer benefits on the agent. Likely (...) candidates for such misbeliefs are to be found in the realm of nationalism and religion, where the possession costs of true beliefs are high, and where collective beliefs in falsehoods may allow for a cohesive community. We discuss the paradoxes of reflective awareness involved in the idea of deliberately embracing falsehoods. More rigorous, fully reflective concepts of rationality would still disallow false beliefs, but such demanding versions of rationality would commit agents to pay large costs, thereby weakening the motivation for acquiring true beliefs. (shrink)

Certain enterprises at the fringes of science, such as intelligent design creationism, claim to identify phenomena that go beyond not just our present physics but any possible physical explanation. Asking what it would take for such a claim to succeed, we introduce a version of physicalism that formulates the proposition that all available data sets are best explained by combinations of “chance and necessity”—algorithmic rules and randomness. Physicalism would then be violated by the existence of oracles that produce certain kinds (...) of noncomputable functions. Examining how a candidate for such an oracle would be evaluated leads to questions that do not admit an easy resolution. Since we lack any plausible candidate for any such oracle, however, chance-and-necessity physicalism appears very likely to be correct. (shrink)

Gödel's Theorem is often used in arguments against machine intelligence, suggesting humans are not bound by the rules of any formal system. However, Gödelian arguments can be used to support AI, provided we extend our notion of computation to include devices incorporating random number generators. A complete description scheme can be given for integer functions, by which nonalgorithmic functions are shown to be partly random. Not being restricted to algorithms can be accounted for by the availability of an arbitrary random (...) function. Humans, then, might not be rule-bound, but Gödelian arguments also suggest how the relevant sort of nonalgorithmicity may be trivially made available to machines. (shrink)

While concern about public irrationality and antiscientific movements is not new, the increasing power of right-wing populist movements that promote distrust of expertise and of scientific institutions gives such concerns a new context. Experience with classic pseudosciences such as creationism, and the long-running efforts by defenders of science to oppose such pseudosciences, may also help us understand today’s post-truth populism. The politics of creationism and science education in the United States and in Turkey does not, however, suggest easy answers. Moreover, (...) there are important features of politics in liberal democracies that drive a populist backlash, which makes it counterproductive for defenders of science to call for deference to all forms of expertise claimed by professionals. There is a danger that the rhetoric of reason that is used to defend science will become part of a more general apologetics for an unsustainable status quo. (shrink)

In the past centuries, most Muslims have encountered modern science as a Western import. To avoid being overwhelmed by the military and commercial advantages enjoyed by technologically advanced nations, Middle Eastern Muslim societies had to begin adopting modern knowledge. As westernization started to shape social structures and institutions as well as technologies, conservative Muslim responses to modern science typically became conditioned by the demands of cultural defense. Many Muslim thinkers argued that upholding the religious character of Muslim civilization meant borrowing (...) technology but rejecting the perceived materialism pervading the conceptual frameworks of modern science. This defensive approach remains prominent in present Muslim thinking about science. Almost all religiously oriented Muslim thinkers take harmony between science and Islam for granted, but in practice, conservative Muslims often express deep reservations about the naturalistic perspectives dominating modern science. Especially in the popular literature, religiously motivated distortions of science are common. Darwinian evolution is a particular target of rejection. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that, owing to our humble evolutionary origins, some mysteries of the universe will forever remain beyond our ken. But what exactly does it mean to say that humans are ‘cognitively closed’ to some parts of the universe, or that some problems will forever remain ‘mysteries’? First, we distinguish between representational access and imaginative understanding, as well as between different modalities of cognitive limitation. Next, we look at tried-and-tested strategies for overcoming our innate cognitive limitations. In particular, (...) we consider how metaphors and analogies can extend the reach of the human mind, by allowing us to make sense of bizarre and counterintuitive things in terms of more familiar things. Finally, we argue that this collection of mind-extension devices is combinatorial and open-ended, and that therefore pronouncements about cognitive closure and about the limits of human inquiry are premature. (shrink)

What, if any, are the limits of human understanding? Epistemic pessimists, sobered by our humble evolutionary origins, have argued that some parts of the universe will forever remain beyond our ken. But what exactly does it mean to say that humans are ‘cognitively closed’ to some parts of the world, or that some problems will forever remain ‘mysteries’? In this paper we develop a richer conceptual toolbox for thinking about different forms and varieties of cognitive limitation, which are often conflated (...) by the so-called ‘new mysterians’. We distinguish between representational access and imaginative understanding, as well as between different modalities of cognitive limitation. Next, we look at tried-and-tested strategies for overcoming our innate cognitive limitations, drawing from the literature on distributed cognition and cognitive scaffolding’. This allows us to distinguish between the limits of bare brains vs. scaffolded brains. Most importantly, we argue that this panoply of mind-extension devices is combinatorial and open-ended. In the end, this allows us to turn the table on the mysterians: for every alleged ‘mystery’, they should demonstrate that no possible combination of mind extension devices will bring us any closer to a solution. (shrink)

This note is a generalization and improved interpretation of the main result of Karni and Schmeidler. A decision-maker is supposed to possess a preference relation on acts and another preference relation on state-prize lotteries, both of which are assumed to satisfy the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms. In addition, the two preference relations restricted to a state of nature are assumed to agree. We show that these axioms are necessary and sufficient for the existence of subjective expected utility over acts with state-dependent (...) utility functions and a subjective probability measure. This subjective probability measure is unique when conditioned on the set of states of nature in which not all the prizes are equally desirable. (shrink)

Free logics is a family of first-order logics which came about as a result of examining the existence assumptions of classical logic. What those assumptions are varies, but the central ones are that the domain of interpretation is not empty, every name denotes exactly one object in the domain and the quantifiers have existential import. Free logics usually reject the claim that names need to denote in, and of the systems considered in this paper, the positive free logic concedes that (...) some atomic formulas containing non-denoting names are true, while negative free logic rejects even the latter claim. Inclusive logics, which reject, are likewise considered. These logics have complex and varied axiomatizations and semantics, and the goal of this paper is to present an orderly examination of the various systems and their mutual relations. This is done by first offering a formalization, using sequent calculi which possess all the desired structural properties of a good proof system, including admissibility of contraction and cut, while streamlining free logics in a way no other approach has. We then present a simple and unified system of abstract semantics, which allows for a straightforward demonstration of the meta-theoretical properties, and offers insights into the relationship between different logics. The final part of this paper is dedicated to extending the system with modalities by using a labeled sequent calculus, and here we are again able to map out the different approaches and their mutual relations using the same framework. (shrink)

The Quantified argument calculus (Quarc) has received a lot of attention recently as an interesting system of quantified logic which eschews the use of variables and unrestricted quantification, but nonetheless achieves results similar to the Predicate calculus (PC) by employing quantifiers applied directly to predicates instead. Despite this noted similarity, the issue of the relationship between Quarc and PC has so far not been definitively resolved. We address this question in the present paper, and then expand upon that result. Utilizing (...) recent developments in structural proof theory, we develop a G3-style sequent calculus for Quarc and briefly demonstrate its structural properties. We put these properties to use immediately to construct direct proofs of the meta-theoretical properties of the system. We then incorporate an abstract (and, as we shall see, logical) predicate into the system in a way that preserves all the structural properties. This allows us to identify a system of Quarc which is deductively equivalent to PC, and also yields a constructive method of demonstrating the Craig interpolation theorem (which speaks in favor of the aforementioned predicate being logical). We further generalize this extension to develop a bivalent system of Quarc with defining clauses that still maintains all the desirable properties of a good proof system. (shrink)

In the presence of incomplete risk attitudes, choices between noncomparable risky prospects are random. A random choice model advanced by Karni, 2021) includes the hypothesis that choices among noncomparable risky prospects are prompted by signals drawn from personal distributions. This paper introduces a scheme designed to elicit subjects’ assessments of their personal likelihoods of choices among noncomparable risky prospects and describes experiments designed to test the aforementioned hypothesis.

The relative rate of success of parliamentary vs. governmental legislative initiative is quite different. The examination of one, resp. two full legislative term, for amendments, resp. bills introduced, shows thatparliamentary legislative initiative by far exceeds «regular» governmental initiative : in a ratio of 3 to 1 for bills, and of 4 to 1 for amendments. But the results are almost inverse : governmental initiative accounts for 76 % of the bills, and for 67 % of the amendments eventually voted. The (...) government succeeds in «pushing through» more than 90 % of its own initiatives, whereas parliamentary initiative hardly obtains an overall 10 % realization score. In an interrogative manner, the conclusion pointsto a few elements that may account for this situation. (shrink)

This paper introduces a logic game which can be used to demonstrate the working of Boolean connectives. The simplicity of the system turns out to lead to some interesting meta-theoretical properties, which themselves carry a philosophical import. After introducing the system, we demonstrate an interesting feature of it—that it, while being an accurate model of propositional logic Booleans, does not contain any tautologies nor contradictions. This result allows us to make explicit a limitation of application of propositional logic to those (...) sentences with relatively stable truth values. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is Timothy Williamson’s understanding of the logical form of thought experiments as involving counterfactual conditionals which are true when their antecedent is impossible. At the same time, he sees the ability to handle counterfactuals as grounded in our everyday capacities. The aim of this paper is to drive a wedge, on empirical grounds, between our ordinary capacities and the counterfactuals which require an impossible antecedent.

This paper extends the investigations into logical properties of the quantified argument calculus (Quarc) by suggesting a series of proper subsystems which, although retaining the entire vocabulary of Quarc, restrict quantification in such a way as to make the result decidable. The proof of decidability is via a procedure that prunes the infinite branches of a derivation tree in what is a syntactic counterpart of semantic filtration. We demonstrate an application of one of these systems by showing that Aristotle’s assertoric (...) syllogistic is embeddable within, thus also providing another method of showing its decidability. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s 1959 essay critiquing forced integration, “Reflections on Little Rock,” is widely debated, but less has been said about the positions she takes on education and childhood in this essay. Drawing on archival and historical materials, this article posits an answer to why notoriously obstinate Arendt accepted Ralph Ellison’s critique of her stance on parents of integrators: Ellison’s portayal of these parents aligned with Arendt’s requirement in “The Crisis in Education” that parents introduce children to the old world. It (...) then explicates the problem this acceptance poses for Arendt’s insistence on an apolitical childhood arbitrarily demarcated at age eighteen. It also finds that this position is further undermined by the biographies of the teenage integrators themselves. Finally, it proposes viewing politics as a process of “becoming”—an idea found in Arendt’s work. This would permit political participation for maturing teenagers, while protecting younger children from the harshness of politics. (shrink)

Resumo: Palavras-chave : Learning mathematics in school is being faced with a world of concepts that involves reading and understanding of the natural language and mathematical language. Often, the curriculum components, Portuguese language and the Mathematic don’t talk to each other. The resolution of the problems seems to be a critical point in mathematics education. This article seeks to bring these components together to identify strategies for an effective learning. Keywords : Mathematical language.Natural language. Problems. : Linguagem matemática. Linguagem natural. (...) Problemas. Aprender Matemática na escola é deparar-se com um mundo de conceitos que envolvem leitura e compreensão, tanto da linguagem natural como da linguagem matemática. Muitas vezes, os componentes curriculares, a Língua Portuguesa e a Matemática não dialogam. A resolução de problemas parece ser um dos pontos críticos na Matemática escolar. Este artigo aproxima esses componentes de forma a buscar estratégias para uma aprendizagem efetiva. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Negri and Pavlović (Studia Logica 1–35, 2020) have formulated a decidable sequent calculus for the logic of agency, specifically for a deliberative see-to-it-that modality, or dstit. In that paper the adequacy of the system is demonstrated by showing the derivability of the axiomatization of dstit from Belnap et al. (Facing the future: agents and choices in our indeterminist world. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001). And while the influence of the latter book on the study of logics (...) of agency cannot be overstated, we note that this is not the only axiomatization of that modality available. In fact, an earlier (and arguably purer) one was offered in Xu (J Philosophical Logic 27(5):505–552, 1998). In this article we fill this lacuna by proving that this alternative axiomatization is likewise readily derivable in the system of Negri and Pavlović (Studia Logica 1–35, 2020). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 123 become the origin of the norms of moral freedom and the formal origin of the laws os nature. The totality of the world may be interpreted in terms of the homo noumenon, or in terms of a totality of values, in terms of feeling or as the historical stream of experience. The interrelationship between the various aspects of reality is misconstrued by humanism when the modal (...) laws of the world are absolutized, and a single aspect is made the basic denominator of reality. The neo-Augustinian philosophy of Dooyeweerd recognizes the priority of faith and would unmask the alleged neutrality of theoretical reason as a dogma concealing the religious foundations of theoretical thought. The Archimedean point of Dooyeweerd's philosophy is not cogito ergo sum, nor vivo in [luxu continuo, etiam cogitans, but it is rather: Ego, in Christo regeneratus, etiam cogitans ex Christo vivo. The heart in its Biblical sense is the religious root and center of human existence, the center in which our temporal functions find their religious concentration and consummation of meaning. The Christian philosopher finds the ultimate origin of the world in God's sovereign and creative will, out of which originate all laws, and all things which are subject to law. The Christian philosopher finds the coherence of the modal diversity of the cosmos in a divine world order. The unity of the world is not a construction of philosophical thought, but is rather an enduring effect of God's sovereign power, so that each mode, each aspect of the cosmos is under divine law. Every aspect of the world is a sphere of law, sovereign under God in its own domain. God's laws constitute the universal valid determination and limitation of the individual things subject to them. Consequently, the Christian philosopher cannot hold to a theoretical conception of reality which is emancipated from the Biblical motive of creation, for all such conceptions are at least partially dominated by apostate religious motives. Nash does not attempt to refute Dooyeweerd's main thesis concerning the impossibility of a religiously neutral philosophy; however, his critical remarks do point out that more argumentation is needed in defense of that thesis, and that the introduction of a new terminology, shifts in the meaning of traditional terms, as well as vagueness and ambiguity, necessitate further elaboration on the part of Dooyeweerd and the members of his School. Nash's work successfully accomplishes a two-fold purpose: it calls attention to an important development within the Augustinian tradition of philosophy, and it raises issues which cannot be ignored by members of Dooyeweerd's own school as well as by philosophers who are self-critical of their own presuppositions. Nash's book deserves careful attention and it is to be hoped that it will direct the serious reader to a study of Dooyeweerd's own works and that it will stimulate others to take part in the critical study of a system of thought which "gives important and exciting direction to present and future thought and action and is, in the fullest sense of the word, a Christian Philosophy and a great one." DAWD H. FREEMAN University of Rhode Island Husserl et la pensde moderne--Husserl und das Denken der Neuzeit. Edited by H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959. Pp. x + 250.) This volume contains papers which were read at the Second International Colloquium on Phenomenology which was held at Krefeld in Germany, November 1-3, 1956, under the auspices of the Husserl Archives of Louvain and Cologne. Though the names which 124 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY appear in this volume are among the leading figures in European phenomenology, the content of the volume itself is somewhat disappointing. The editors note that the discussion of these papers was prolonged and lively but they regret that it was impossible to record and publish this part of the Colloquium. The reader of this volume can but share the regret of the editors in this case since many of the papers are but rough drafts, clearly meant to pose questions and lead into discussion and, of themselves, contain very little in the way of new or... (shrink)

Any deviation of speed in a traffic flow from a speed limit represents a potential risk of traffic accidents, so speed management appears as an imperative. However, an inadequately set speed limit often causes drivers’ noncompliance to it in the conditions of real traffic flow. By determining the value of exceeding the speed limit according to vehicle classes, it is possible to recommend a credible speeding value that can be considered credible up to a value above the speed limit. In (...) this paper, deterministic multistep mathematical models of speed deviation from the speed limit as a function of longitudinal gradient for the proposed vehicle classes were developed. A total of 11 measuring sections with different traffic flow types were analyzed. Based on a detailed analysis of speeding, models for the deviation of the 15th, 50th, and 85th percentiles were obtained, with the aim of adjusting the credible deviation to control measures. The results obtained in this study were compared with a survey of traffic flow speeding on two-lane roads conducted in Serbia. (shrink)

Most theorists on International Relations agree on recognizing natural resources, economic strength, technologica! development, political stability and military strength as the five bases of a state's power.This unanimity is in sharp contrast with the divergence in the operationalizations of the power of states. Most operationalizations use only one or two bases of a state's power and thus are very limited in scope.Therefore, the demand for an operationalization sticking as closely as possible to the unanimity among theorists, farces itself on the (...) researcher. The present study is an attempt to transform the theoretical unanimity into an operational measuring.Such an operationalization was obtained by granting all five power bases an equal share in the index, and by giving an equal weight to the sums of the arithmetical values for fifteen subindicators and thus for the five indicators. The nations'power index thus obtained was applied for 110 nation states as they existed in the beginning of the '70s. On this power scale, ratings diHer from 29,046 IWM for the USA to 276 IWM for Gambia, and even less for a number of the smaller states that could not be investigated. (shrink)

In this article, Zygmunt Bauman's deep-seated utopian sensibilities are dissected and discussed. It is shown how Bauman already early on in his career took a keen interest in the topic of utopia and how he throughout the years has continued to pursue the idea of utopia - its perversions and possibilities. The article suggests that Bauman is basically an ‘ambivalent utopian’ - that he, on the one hand, regards utopianism as an important and ineradicable constant in the human-being-in-the-world, something (...) creating the hopeful possibility for a better world and a brighter future, but also that he, on the other hand, is concerned with attempts to turn utopia into a ‘project’ or a ‘concrete reality’. Bauman's utopian ambivalence owes perhaps as much to the inherently two-sided nature of utopian ideas as to his own personal experiences throughout his life in the 20th century. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article is an introduction to the current thematic issue dedicated to the seminal lecture by Max Weber ‘Science as a vocation’, published in 1919. Its centenary is worth celebrating be...

In this paper, we sustain the thesis that there is a violent aspect in the religious attitude. However, it is also true – as paradoxical as it might sound – that religion has been the privileged field to limit all kinds of violence in human societies. Keywords: Religion. Violence. Sacrifice. Frazer. Girard. Eliade.

A growing interest for the emotion of disgust has recently arisen in international contexts across several fields of research. A general definition of disgust will be primarily assumed: by disgust I understand a total rejection that generates a motion of repulsion and removal of an object that is in the proximity of the subject, without constituting a real danger. In reference to the notion of taboo, I will first of all assume its ambivalence. The emotion of disgust, essentially natural and (...) cultural at the same time, as a typical trait of the process of human civilization that distinguishes humans from animals. At variance with other theories of disgust, I will argue that it is not possible to theoretically articulate the overcoming of disgust, but that it is possible to educate about this emotion through artistic experience. On this ground, an ethics of disgust will be outlined, which starts from the acknowledgement of one of our most bodily emotions. (shrink)