Le monde se révèle à l'homme, comme matière, temps et esprit. L'on sait à présent que considérés dans l'espace et le temps, la terre est d'une extrême petitesse et l'homme un être éphémère. Une conception du monde qui prendrait l'homme pour centre et partirait de lui ne donnerait donc aucune garantie de probabilité. Pourtant elle est assez générale, accoutumés comme nous sommes à juger d'après les perceptions grossières des sens, qui trop souvent nous induisent en erreur. Selon les physiciens, la (...) formule mathématique réunissant les coördonnées du temps et de l'espace, serait la plus conforme à la représentation du monde matériel. Nous avançons ici l'hypothèse que le monde matériel répond effectivement à cette conception, et qu'il est donc un monde plongé dans un repos éternel, dans lequel nous voyageons, pour ainsi dire, avec notre temps. Grâce à cette hypothèse, la causalité, le miracle, la prévoyance de l'avenir, s'expliquent plausiblement. Manifestement le troisième principe, l'esprit, est à la fois en interaction avec la matière et indépendante d'elle. Cette action réciproque suppose une parenté partielle entre l'esprit et la matière. C'est pourquoi nous proposons une seconde hypothèse: l'esprit est une "facies" de la matière qui reste en dehors de la rigidité du monde considéré comme espace et temps. On a toujours considéré ces éléments spirituels comme étant des êtres spirituels, mais leur aspect anthropomorphique nous empêche de croire à leur existence réelle. Si nous identifions la partie spirituelle du corps humain avec l'homme spirituel, le problème du libre arbitre s'explique avec clarté. Seul le procès spirituel du libre arbitre est vraiment libre, mais la volonté ne peut réaliser aucun changement dans la substance purement matérielle. La conception d'une àme se logeant dans le corps matériel comme dans une maison, et qui par ses actions détermine sa demeure future ne s'accorde pas avec l'hypothèse du monde matériel-et-temporel-en-repos. Suivant nos conceptions humaines, nous avons imaginé des êtres spirituels animés d'une volonté libre. Mais alors il faut supposer une unité spirituelle supérieure, qui considère et qui décide. Or, cette conception étant anthropomorphique il est admissible qu'elle soit la véritable figuration du monde. La solution de ce problème pourrait être trouvée par une troisième hypothèse" selon laquelle il existerait un monde supérieur, dans lequel le monde-du-temps-et-de-l'espace fusionne avec un temps supérieur, auquel le nom de "temps spirituel" serait approprié. Seul, ce monde supérieur plongé dans un repos éternel peut nous expliquer d'une façon convaincante l'univers. Un monde d'une essence et d'une invariabilité éternelles, dans lequel le temps, capable d'agir pas des voies infiniment variées, introduit des événements innombrables, les processus spirituels étant effectués par le temps spirituel, les événements matériels par ce que nous sommes habitués à appeler "le temps". (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to 'Joe' Karel Lambert. The contributors are all personally affected to Joe in some way or other, but they are definitely not the only ones. Whatever excuses there are - there are some -, the editors apologize to whomever they have neglected. But even so the collection displays how influential Karel Lambert has been, personally and through his teaching and his writings. The display is in alphabetical order - with one exception: Bas van Fraassen, (...) being about the earliest student of Karel Lambert, opens the collection with some reminiscences. Naturally, one of the focal points of this volume is Lambert's logical thinking and (or: freed of) ontological thinking. Free logic is intimately connected with description theory. Bas van Fraassen gives a survey of the development of the area, and Charles Daniels points to difficulties with definite descriptions in modal contexts and stories. Peter Woodruff addresses the relation between free logic and supervaluation semantics, presenting a novel condition which recovers desirable metatheoretic properties for free logic under that semantics. Terence Parsons shows how free logic can be utilized in interpreting sentences as purporting to denote events (true ones succeed and false ones fail) and how this helps to understand natural language. (shrink)

Functional explanations are regarded as a special type of explanation by many biologists. Philosophers of science tend to agree that they are weak forms of the common modes of explanation, although the elucidation of the logical structure involved is difficult. The present paper shows that Hempel's reconstruction of functional explanations is inadequate on pragmatic grounds. Thus his conclusion that such explanations are necessarily weak is also objectionable. There is no reason for allotting functional explanations a special logical status.

Es wird die Frage untersucht, ob die Annahme der Existenz von universellen Normen für die Annäherung der Wissenschaft an die Wahrheit nicht in praxi lediglich Gegenwartszentrismus und Ethnozentrismus heißt. Die griechisch-römische Zivilisation förderte die Wissenschaft durch ihre Demokratie, aber andere Zivilisationen haben sehr wertvolle Datensammlungen geliefert. Die Universalität der Wissenschaft impliziert u. a. daß, wo verschiedene Zivilisationen mit ihren Wissenschaften einander begegnen, sie von einander lernen können.

In this paper we propose a modern theory of linguistic iconicity, comparing it with similar, though more primitive ideas expounded in Plato's Cratylus. In the Cratylus two views on natural language compete: Hermogenes favours absolute arbitrariness of names, Cratylus defends the naturalness — iconicity — of names. In the end, both these extreme views are rejected, the main conclusion being that one should not base philosophy on the study of words. The ancient controversy shows up again as a clash between (...) Saussurean and Peircean thinking, though extreme views are avoided. Onomatopoeia and Plato's articulatory mimicry are instances of imagic iconicity, now recognized by everybody. Less known but more interesting for grammar is diagrammatic iconicity. A diagram is „a systematic arrangement of signs, none of which necessarily resembles its referent, but whose relationships to each other mirror the relationships of their referents” . A well-known example is word-order reflecting temporal sequence . The most interesting area of diagrammatic iconicity is to be found in the opposition between marked and unmarked structures in natural language. For example, the plural is marked as opposed to the singular. The iconicity lies in the fact that the unmarked form of the singular corresponds to an unmarked meaning, while the marked form of the plural matches a marked meaning, i.e. the more form, the more meaning. Unmarked meaning is then viewed not in objectivist but in experiential terms: ‘unmarked’ is related to ‘prototypical‘. Prototypical linguistic structures are seen to go back to biological, psychological and cultural properties of the prototypical speaker . A number of examples of this kind of iconicity are discussed. On the biological level, so-called freezes exist, whereby unmarked sounds precede marked counterparts . On the biologicalpsychological level, this is paralleled by lexical coordinations . In morphological categories, one finds pairs like singular-plural, definite-indefinite, animate-inanimate, masculine-feminine, present-past, positive-negative, locativetemporal. As to semantic-syntactic structures, direct perception and direct causation are unmarked in relation to the indirect counterparts. On the cultural level, politeness structures are adduced. We conclude that both Plato and Wittgenstein II rejected iconicity too radically : languages are more motivated, less arbitrary, than is commonly thought. Our view qualifies the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as well. Other consequences concern feminism, Montaguegrammar, the place of intensions in a reference-theory of names and philosophy as a ‘critique of language’. (shrink)

This paper attempts to systematically characterize critical reactions in argumentative discourse, such as objections, critical questions, rebuttals, refutations, counterarguments, and fallacy charges, in order to contribute to the dialogical approach to argumentation. We shall make use of four parameters to characterize distinct types of critical reaction. First, a critical reaction has a focus, for example on the standpoint, or on another part of an argument. Second, critical reactions appeal to some kind of norm, argumentative or other. Third, they each have (...) a particular illocutionary force, which may include that of giving strategic advice to the other. Fourth, a critical reaction occurs at a particular level of dialogue (the ground level or some meta-level). The concepts here developed shall be applied to discussions of critical reactions by Aristotle and by some contemporary authors. (shrink)

This paper discusses the debate over whether emotional expressions are spontaneous or intentional actions. We describe a variety of empirical evidence supporting these two possibilities. But we argue that the spontaneous-intentional distinction fails to explain the psychological dynamics of emotional expressions. We claim that a complex systems perspective on intentions, as self-organized critical states, may yield a unified view of emotional expressions as a consequence of situated action. This account simultaneously acknowledges the embodied status of environment, evolution, culture and mind (...) in theories of emotion. (shrink)

This paper presents a new model for how the voting worked at the Athenian dramatic competitions, and demonstrates its viability mathematically. Previous proposals have either failed to take full account of the ancient sources or have not considered all the possible permutations of judging results. As is generally recognized, ten votes were cast, but in most circumstances not all were counted. Sections I-IV consider the tragic competition at the Dionysia, in which three competitors vied for the prize. For the questions (...) we consider, two likely cases are examined (when the votes are divided 4-3-3 and 5-3-2), then a random distribution covering all possible cases, and finally the situation when two competitors are favoured against a third (when the votes are divided 5-5-0, 5-4-1 and 4-4-2). Section I presents the proposal and situates it within the Athenian cultural context. Section II asks how many lots are typically drawn before a victory is obtained. Section III considers how other places are determined. Section IV introduces the question of 'fairness': does the person who receives the most votes actually win? Section V considers adjudication for comedies and at the Lenaia. Section VI considers dithyrambic competitions. (shrink)

Criticism may degenerate into quibbling or nitpicking. How can discussants keep quibblers under control? In the paper we investigate cases in which a battle about words replaces a discussion of the matters that are actually at issue as well as cases in which a battle about minor objections replaces a discussion of the major issues. We survey some lines of discussion dealing with these situations in profiles of dialogue.

What if in discussion the critic refuses to recognize an emotionally expressed argument of her interlocutor as an argument, accusing him of having presented no argument at all. In this paper, we shall deal with this reproach, which taken literally amounts to a charge of having committed a fallacy of non-argumentation. As such it is a very strong, if not the ultimate, criticism, which even carries the risk of abandonment of the discussion and can, therefore, not be made without burdening (...) oneself with correspondingly strong obligations. We want to specify the fallacies of non-argumentation and their dialectic, i.e., the proper way to criticize them, the appropriate ways for the arguer to react to such criticism, and the appropriate ways for the critic to follow up on these reactions. Among the types of fallacy of non-argumentation, the emphasis will be on the appeal to popular sentiments. Our aim is to reach, for cases of non-argumentation, a survey of dialectical possibilities. By making the disputants themselves responsible for the place of emotion in their dialogues, we hope to contribute to a further development of the theory of dialectical obligations. (shrink)

How do people decide what to say in context? Many theories of pragmatics assume that people have specialized knowledge that drives them to utter certain words in different situations. But these theories are mostly unable to explain both the regularity and variability in people’s speech behaviors. Our purpose in this article is to advance a view of pragmatics based on complexity theory, which specifically explains the pragmatic choices speakers make in conversations. The concept of self-organized criticality sheds light on how (...) a history of utterances and subtle details of a situation surrounding a conversation may directly specify language behavior. Under this view, pragmatic choice in discourse does not reflect the output of any dedicated pragmatic module but arises from a complex coordination or coupling between speakers and their varying communicative tasks. (shrink)

Selection on grandparental investment is more complex than Coall & Hertwig (C&H) propose. Patterns of investment are subject to an intergenerational conflict over how resources should be distributed to maximize fitness. Grandparents may be selected to distribute resources unevenly, while their descendants will be selected to manipulate investment in their own favor. Here we outline the evolutionary basis of this conflict.

During the past three decades the Utrecht scholar Jaap Mansfeld has built up a formidable reputation in the field of the history of ancient philosophy. This state-of-the-art collection of articles is presented to him by colleagues and friends on his sixtieth birthday.

Cho and Martinez-Martin provide a wide-ranging analysis of what they label “digital simulacra”—which are in essence data-driven AI-based simulation models such as digital twins or models used for i...

Legal and moral reasoning share much methodology, and they address similar problems. This volume charts two shared problems: the relation between theory, principles and particular judgments; and the role of facts and factual assertions in normative settings. The relation between 'theory' and 'practice' and between 'principle' and 'particular judgment' has become the subject of much debate in moral philosophy. In the ongoing debate, some moral philosophers refer to legal philosophy for a support of their views on the primacy of 'practice' (...) over 'theory'. According to them, legal philosophy should have a more balanced view in that relation. In the contributions to Part One this claim is critically analysed. The role of the facts is underestimated in discussions on legal reasoning and legal theory, as well as moral reasoning and ethical theory. Factual statements enter into moral and legal discussions not only because they link the conclusion with a rule. They also play a role as background assumptions in supporting a theory. Its focus on the role of facts in normative reasoning makes this book of special interest to scholars of legal and moral argumentation. (shrink)

This paper examines how three Dutch political parties employ the Internet as a tool to enhance ‘digital democracy’. The potential of digital democracy is considered to be strongest in the sphere of collective action outside the domain of political institutions. In this article, however, attention is given to how institutionalized channels might be supportive of digital democracy. Three components of the democratic process – information provision, deliberation, and political decision-making – are examined in the content and user assessments of the (...) web sites of the Socialist Party, the Christian Democratic Party and the Green Party. Minor differences were found in the party web sites regarding information provision; substantial differences were found regarding the degree and nature of political deliberation available on the sites. Indicators of the third component, political decision-making, were least evident on all three web sites. User assessments of the sites and opportunities for political deliberation followed, more or less, the general public images of the related political parties. (shrink)

We shall investigate the similarities and dissimilarities between old and new dialectic. For the ‘old dialectic’, we base our survey mainly on Aristotle’s Topics and Sophistical Refutations, whereas for the ‘new dialectic’, we turn to contemporary views on dialogical interaction, such as can, for the greater part, be found in Walton’s The New Dialectic. Three issues are taken up: types of dialogue, fallacies, and strategies. Though one should not belittle the differences in scope and outlook that obtain between the old (...) and the new dialectic, the paper will show that in many respects the old dialectic foreshadows the new dialectic. (shrink)