العدل عنوانه الوحيد: الحرية. فلا عدالة منتظرة من وراء قيود الحديد أو الحرير، ولا ثمرة حقٍ يمكن أن نجنيها من تكميم الأفواه. ليس هناك أخطر على الأمم من غياب العدل وإهدار قيمة القانون وأحكام القضاء. لكن السلطة لا تدري.. ولا تتعلم. فالسلطة، أو الولاية، "هي إنفاذ القول على الغير"؛ لذا سمعنا في التاريخ عن مصطلح "الأحكام السلطانية" التي قد لا تتفق بالضرورة مع مبادئ الحقوق والحريات ورد المظالم. تبحث السلطة التنفيذية عادةً عن رخصة استبداد، أو بنية تحتية للتسلط والوصاية. والضحية (...) الأولى لهذا المسعى هي العدالة، التي تمثلها السلطة القضائية. ليس صدفة، إذًا، أن يحظى القضاء بمكانة خاصة في الأنظمة الديمقراطية، وليس غريبـًا أن يكون في وضع استصغار في البلاد التي تعذر عليها استنبات الديمقراطية في مؤسساتها. وبقدر وجود ضمانات سياسية ودستورية ومؤسسية وثقافية تحفظ للقضاء استقلاله ونزاهته وقدرته على أداء مهامه بعيدًا عن مصادر الضغط والتدخل، بقدر ما تكون هذه الدولة أو تلك ديمقراطية. (shrink)

Islamic sermons, Arabic; Islamic ethics.

Quantum bit commitment is insecure in the standard non-relativistic quantum cryptographic framework, essentially because Alice can exploit quantum steering to defer making her commitment. Two assumptions in this framework are that: Alice knows the ensembles of evidence E corresponding to either commitment; and system E is quantum rather than classical. Here, we show how relaxing assumption or can render her malicious steering operation indeterminable or inexistent, respectively. Finally, we present a secure protocol that relaxes both assumptions in a quantum teleportation (...) setting. Without appeal to an ontological framework, we argue that the protocol’s security entails the reality of the quantum state, provided retrocausality is excluded. (shrink)

Reproductive medicine, a sector of a health care system increasingly captured by the demands of the marketplace, is enmeshed in a drive to sell certain human bits and pieces, such as gametes, cells, fetal eggs, and fetal ovaries, for reproductive purposes. The ethical objection raised by Kant and Radin to the sale of human organs -that this is incompatible with human dignity and worth - also applies to these sales. Moreover, such sales nullify the reproductive paradigm, irretrievably replacing it with (...) a ma nufacturing paradigm. This represents a change in kind, not just of degree, in the way that we view our capacity to generate children and destroys our concept of reproduction as an essentially human activity. In the face of a struggle to retain those common ethical values at the foundation of reproductive medicine, this form of commodification of the human body should be viewed as ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

Modern computing is generally taken to consist primarily of symbol manipulation. But symbols are abstract, and computers are physical. How can a physical device manipulate abstract symbols? Neither Church nor Turing considered this question. My answer is that the bit, as a hardware-implemented abstract data type, serves as a bridge between materiality and abstraction. Computing also relies on three other primitive—but more straightforward—abstractions: Sequentiality, State, and Transition. These physically-implemented abstractions define the borderline between hardware and software and between physicality and (...) abstraction. At a deeper level, asking how a physical device can interact with abstract symbols is the wrong question. The relationship between symbols and physical devices begins with the realization that human beings already know what it means to manipulate symbols. We build and program computers to do what we understand to be symbol manipulation. To understand what that means, consider a light switch. A light switch doesn’t turn a light on or off. Those are abstractions. Light switches don’t operate with abstractions. We build light switches, so that when flipped, the world is changed in such a way that we understand the light to be on or off. Similarly, we build computers to perform operations that we understand as manipulating symbols. (shrink)

What are the Early Memoranda?1 When were they written? What are their sources? What is their purpose and their relation to Hume's works? These questions, usually addressed separately, are in fact tightly interwoven: they require an articulated response that embraces them all. Our response could be summarised as follows: far from being current reading notes, or even less the exhaustive diary of Hume's intellectual experience, the Early Memoranda are most likely second-tier texts, or—as James Harris recently conjectured—"notes taken from notes."2 (...) More generally, the Memoranda, with some possible exceptions, are the result of a selection between those "loose bits of paper" and "uncorrect thoughts"3 which Hume began to... (shrink)

Sixty years after the famous ‘Conférence des écrivains et artistes noirs at the Sorbonne’, and sixty years after Black-Label, the third collection of poetry by French Guianese Leon-Gontran Damas, the word “nègre” and “nigger” remain offensive words all too much used in postcolonial Europe today. Even after the short lived Obamamania, Damas’s poetry remains actual as it expresses the censorship all too many times endured by the lyrical voice who cannot speak out loud against those violent verbal, physical, and thus (...) psychological assaults. Consequently, his “mors dans la bouche”, or “bit in the mouth” is incoporated in his less wellknown work which testifies to the “mort dans l’âme”, it is the constant feeling of depression and blues lurking on the Black or coloured citizen of France and the West Indies. Standing in the shadow of the cofounders, and quite neglected by the leading Martinicans of the post-Négritude era, Damas nevertheless understood the urgency of transcontinental and transcultural solidarities in this battle and wrote against the dichotomies of race, class, and gender. Damas and James knew each other for over forty years. Damas read James’s novel, Minty Alley before they met in Paris when James was doing the research for The Black Jacobins, his landmark history of Tousssaint L’Ouverture and the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Damas helped James with translations and discovering documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale. On one occasion, Damas brought James to the home of Robert Desnos. Both lived in Washington, DC, in the 1970s when Damas was at Howard University and James taught at Federal City College/University of the District of Columbia. (shrink)

The paper investigates the understanding of quantum indistinguishability after quantum information in comparison with the “classical” quantum mechanics based on the separable complex Hilbert space. The two oppositions, correspondingly “distinguishability / indistinguishability” and “classical / quantum”, available implicitly in the concept of quantum indistinguishability can be interpreted as two “missing” bits of classical information, which are to be added after teleportation of quantum information to be restored the initial state unambiguously. That new understanding of quantum indistinguishability is linked to the (...) distinction of classical (Maxwell-Boltzmann) versus quantum (either Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein) statistics. The latter can be generalized to classes of wave functions (“empty” qubits) and represented exhaustively in Hilbert arithmetic therefore connectible to the foundations of mathematics, more precisely, to the interrelations of propositional logic and set theory sharing the structure of Boolean algebra and two anti-isometric copies of Peano arithmetic. (shrink)

In this second paper, I continue my discussion of the problem of reference for scientific realism. First, I consider a final objection to Kitcher’s account of reference, which I generalise to other accounts of reference. Such accounts make attributions of reference by appeal to our pretheoretical intuitions about how true statements ought to be distibuted among the scientific utterances of the past. I argue that in the cases that merit discussion, this strategy fails because our intuitions are unstable. The interesting (...) cases are importantly borderline—it really isn’t clear what we ought to say about how those terms referred. I conclude that in many relevant cases, our grounds for thinking that the theoretical terms of the past referred are matched by our grounds for thinking that they failed to refer, in such a way that deciding on either result is arbitrary and bad news for the realist. In response to this problem, in the second part of the paper I expand upon Field’s account of partial reference to sketch a new way of thinking about the theoretical terms of the past—that they partially referred and partially failed to refer.Keywords: Scientific realism; Reference; Partial denotation; Theoretical terms; Philip Kitcher; Hartry Field. (shrink)

Rad se sastoji od dva dijela. U prvom dijelu, tragom prethodnih istraživanja, prvenstveno Petrovićevih i Marottijevih, ispitujem sadržaj i primjenu temeljnog filozofijskog pojmovlja zasnovanoga na riječi i pojmu biti, pri čemu je glavna primijenjena strategija filozofijsko tumačenje mišljenja tvorenog putem mehanizama hrvatskoga jezika. U drugom dijelu, tragom Veljakovih istraživanja o metafizičkim utvarama, ispitujem opasnosti usvajanja moguće nepotpuno razumljenog pojmovlja pomoću kojega oblikujemo predodžbe o (društvenoj) zbilji i po njoj djelujemo. Sidrište je razmatranja problem hipostaze jednoga, a u dijalogu s Veljakovim (...) razmatranjima hipostaziranja partikularnih bića nastojim raščistiti polazišno mjesto za mišljenje promjena u odnosu prema zbilji opstojanja. (shrink)

Unconditionally secure two-party bit commitment based solely on the principles of quantum mechanics (without exploiting special relativistic signalling constraints, or principles of general relativity or thermodynamics) has been shown to be impossible, but the claim is repeatedly challenged. The quantum bit commitment theorem is reviewed here and the central conceptual point, that an “Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen” attack or cheating strategy can always be applied, is clarified. The question of whether following such a cheating strategy can ever be disadvantageous to the cheater is (...) considered and answered in the negative. There is, indeed, no loophole in the theorem. (shrink)

Since Fodor 1970, negation has worn a Homogeneity Condition to the effect that homogeneous predicates, ) denote homogeneously—all or nothing —to characterize the meaning of – when uttered out-of-the blue, in contrast to –:The mirrors are smooth. The mirrors are not smooth. The mirrors circle the telescope’s reflector. The mirrors do not circle the telescope’s reflector. It has been a problem for philosophical logic and for the semantics of natural language that – appear to defy the Principle of Excluded Middle (...) while – do not—Smooth ¬Smooth Circle ¬Circle. An impoverished logical form – has been the occasion to embellish all else—Boolean algebra, lexical presuppositions, Strongest Meaning Hypothesis, trivalence, supervaluation, double strengthening, etc., enriching the semantics and pragmatics with what remains a special theory of negation, which may be dismissed when the logical syntax and semantics of negation reflects that negated sentences are also tensed sentences. (shrink)

Personalisation is the new mantra in social care; this article focuses on how personalisation can be achieved in practice, by presenting an analysis of data from people with learning disabilities and their personal assistants, where traditional care relationships have often been shown to be disempowering. The focus here is on the ways in which both parties use references to shared knowledge, joint experiences or personal-life information. These strategies can be used for various social goals, and instances are given where shared (...) references are used during non task-related talk. Both parties are seen on occasion to attempt to refer to shared information, and dense layers of inference can result, which move the interaction onto an ordinary, more symmetrical and friendly footing. The article concludes that shared knowledge referencing creates a way to shift between the personal and the professional, to blur the boundaries, and to create a new and more personalised relationship. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt den vorläufigen Versuch dar, Wesen und Zweck von Klages’ Charakterologie mittels seiner Grundlagen der Charakterkunde (Bonn: Bouvier 1951) zu bestimmen und mit Bahnsens Beiträgen zur Charakterologie (Leipzig: Brockhaus 1867) zu vergleichen. Sowohl Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) als auch Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) gelten als eminente Vertreter der Charakterologie. Sie wirkten, zwar nur durch wenige Jahrzehnte getrennt, in verschiedenen Jahrhunderten und mit unterschiedlichen Absichten. Die Unterschiedlichkeit in Bestimmung und Ausführung ihrer jeweiligen Charakterologie kann daher nicht überraschen; für Klages dient (...) sie, wie auch die Graphologie und andere Deutungsstützen, dem Zweck, seine ganzheitliche Schau fest im Anschaulichen zu gründen – oder wenigstens den Eindruck einer solchen Gründung zu vermitteln. Die Eigenheiten die ser Schau lassen sich aber nur aus dem Gegensatz von Geist und Leib/Seele im Sinne Klages verstehen. Daher sind die Grundlagen der Charakterkunde vor allem eine Einführung in das Weltbild Klages, ein Leitfaden, in dem, darauf sei vorab hingewiesen, eher postuliert als aufgeklärt wird. Die folgende Untersuchung stellt zunächst die Charakterologie Klages in ihren weltanschaulichen Grundzügen dar, bevor im zweiten Abschnitt Bahnsens Beiträge zur Charakterologie besprochen werden. Im letzten Abschnitt werden die sich daraus erge benden Rückschlüsse auf die intellektuellen Eigenarten Klages’ und Bahnsens dargelegt. (shrink)

Introduction Major scientific revolutions are rarely, if ever, started deliberately. They can be "in the air" for a long time before the first recognizable ...

Richard Morehouse has identified two crucial areas, central to the pedagogical core of Philosophy for Children. These, he claims enable techniques associated with P4C to be generalized to other contexts. After Lipman, he reminds us that the power of the P4C curriculum is found, first in the novels which are written to be "captivating and beguilding, designed to liberate the literary and illustrative powers of the children and to stimulate their thinking." This philosophical 'liberation' is both enabled by and enables (...) the child's insight into the individual as 'concrete wholes existing in relationships.' The reading of the novels is the basis for the other major program component, the discussion that prompts the 'reflection on that experience,' 'the pulling of leading ideas from the narrative and the application of conceptual tools to the understanding of those ideas.' The ideas that constitute the content of the P4C program are drawn from the philosophical texts and are applied to the text in the discussion. These ideas include the 'basic tools of philosophy.'. (shrink)

Despite the growing research and theoretical formulations tied to memory storage within the brain, the role of cortical columns has received relatively little attention. The current paper presents a theoretical formulation based on cortical columns as the binary units that contain all cortical information, and how memory and learning may occur based on the interaction patterns of columns. The described model is an extension of Lurian views, and suggests higher functions to result from the interaction of five systems. Specific mechanisms (...) by which the thalamus and cortex interact to create long term memory formation are delineated. There is the suggestion of two distinct, but interactive, sensory–cortical memory systems, one for factual/generic memories and the other for episodic/personal memories. Hemispheric lateralization of function is explained on the basis of speed and quantity of columnar activation. Conclusions focus on recent technological advances that may allow cortical models to be testable in the near future. (shrink)

The development of modern information and communication technologies has enabled the spread of tools and procedures dedicated to the discretization of reality, already involving inconceivable and unprecedented swathes of informations. The diversity, volume and velocity of data has made possible a vast set of digital contents: this is not just a form of technical externalization, of data storage, or of symbolic representation, but also the tangible basis for a new form of power, ‘algorithmic governmentality’, which uses the mathematical analysis of (...) this vast gathering of data to prescribe and proscribe particular concrete behaviours. Evaluating these procedures for the discretization of reality, together with processes of dividualization, data behaviourism and personal profiling, this article examines the complex of techniques applied to digital contents. The basis for this examination is here the Deleuzian concept of stratoanalysis: this will initially involve studying the forms and spaces generated and composed by digital technologies, so as to assess the viability of the concept of ‘digital stratum’. By then analysing the relationship between the anthropomorphic stratum and the digital stratum, and the way that algorithmic governmentality strives to control this relationship, it will become possible to propose a line of flight that sets out and sets off from this logic of control. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Lectures on Aesthetics contain valuable hints towards an aesthetics of everyday life. They lend plausibility to a broadly Kantian vision of aesthetic judgement and also shed light on the understanding of architecture and related practices.

There is a famous and important dictum reminiscent of the medieval age posited by Carl Jung in Alchemical Studies, the thirteenth volume of his collected works: in sterquiliniis invenitur—in filth it shall be found (35). Translated for modern society this might be better understood as “that which is most valuable will be found in the place you least want to look.” If there is one source in the corpus of popular culture that best typifies “the last place we would want (...) to look” for masculine values, it would be Mads Mikkelsen’s portrayal of Hannibal Lector, particularly Lector’s relationship with FBI profiler Will Graham during the first two seasons of the HBO series Hannibal. By stripping away the perverse horror of Lector’s actions toward Graham, and treating their relationship as an absolute value, I systematically explore the series’ portrayal of masculine nurturing in a way that reveals potentially praiseworthy facets relevant to modern masculinity. (shrink)