Any physical theory which seriously proposes that events in the future may be the efficient causes of events in the past certainly may be regarded—at least at first glance—as a rather revolutionary doctrine. In a recent issue of the Reviews of Modern Physics commemorating Niels Bohr's sixtieth birthday, and under the editorship of the latest Nobel Prize winner in physics, W. Pauli, there appeared such a theory—written by Bohr's former student, J. A. Wheeler and Wheeler's associate at Princeton, R. P. (...) Feynman. The title of their paper appears harmless enough: “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation.” It is one part of a more comprehensive three-part paper intended for later publication as a general constructive critique of classical field theory and of the theory of action at a distance as propounded by Schwarzschild and Fokker. (shrink)

This paper should be read against the backdrop of three lines of linguistic investigation: the investigation of the Perfect construction, which has received considerable attention, going back to Reichenbach ; the working hypothesis that certain verbal constructions can be described in terms of the semantics of determiners on nominal expressions, with which we are more familiar; the common observation that we talk about time the way we talk about space. The focus of the paper is a particular construction in (...) Greek. As always, however, the search for the solution of a particular question reveals many other questions in the process and this paper should be seen as being also about a number of related puzzles in English and other languages. (shrink)

Previous studies of children’s counterfactual reasoning have focused on scenarios in which a single causal event yielded an outcome. However, there are also cases in which an outcome would have occurred even in the absence of its actual cause, because of the presence of a further potential cause. In this study, 152 children aged 4-9 years reasoned counterfactually about such scenarios, in which there were ‘doubly-determined’ outcomes. The task involved dropping two metal discs down separate runways, each of which (...) was sufficient to knock over a toy pig. One of the runways was shorter than the other, meaning that one of the discs actually knocked over the pig whereas the other always arrived too late to do so. Children were asked whether the pig would have been knocked over in the absence of the first metal disc descending the runway. We found that children could accurately answer such counterfactual questions by 6-7 years. (shrink)

I discuss the foundations of predicate ontologies based on two model notions – elementary states of affairs and eventualities, i.e. ordered pairs of initial and end states of affairs. Vendlerian classifications are oriented towards elementary states and tense logic, while Davidsonian classifications deal with eventualities and event logic. There are two kinds of atemporal predicates - fact and properties. Facts are propositional arguments of second-order predicates which add a special meaning that the embedded proposition was verified. Properties are atemporal (...) first-order predicates that lack eventive interpretation and are not associated with factive frames. Davidsonian states are homogeneous durable spatiotemporal things distinct both from atemporal properties and spatiotemporal dynamic predicates. Davidsonian states are causally independent, while resultatives are causally determined as they reconstruct a preceding event that has caused the end state p. I discuss the contrast between external and internal Davidsonian states. The former lack a priority argument and can be quantified extensionally. The latter have a priority experiential argument and can only be quantified intensionally. External states can be observed, while internal states cannot. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper, I investigate the purported dilemma between a symmetrical conception of time and the denial of what I call Universal Logical Determinateness (ULD). According to the dilemma, the timeless and universal application of logical laws to all propositions necessitates either the view that the past and future are both open, or that they are both closed. My investigation proceeds by way of an assessment of Taylor's argument for fatalism, then of Dummet's presentation and refutation of the fatalistic (...) argument, and finally of Dummet's analogous argument which attempts to prove the possibility of an open past. In all cases, we find that the arguments implicitly rely upon the assumption that there exists a necessary connection between the truth aptness of propositions and the fixity (or non-fixity) of events. I question this assumption and conclude that any argument for the symmetry of time which relies upon it begs the question against the asymmetry of time. (shrink)

An 'Event' can refer to a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision... An event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes--and the space of an event is the distance of an effect from its causes. But, asks Slavoj Žižek, does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or (...) are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere? How can philosophy help us to determine what an event is and how it is possible?"--Page [4] of cover. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject: Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision. Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in (...) the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization. The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. Romano's diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event. (shrink)

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and (...) events leave it open which decision he will make, he does not settle which decision occurs, and thus “disappears.” My aim is to explain why this argument fails. In particular, I demonstrate that event-causal libertarians can dismantle the argument by enriching the reductive base in their analysis of free will to include a state that plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and with which the agent is identified. (shrink)

Genetic and molecular studies of development in Caenorhabiditis elegans have identified regulators that appear to control pattern formation in the cellularized nematode embryo. Two genes, skn‐1 and pie‐1, are required for specifying the different identities of two sister blastomeres in a 4‐cell embryo, called P2 and EMS. The skn‐1 gene encodes a DNA binding protein that may control blastomere development by regulating transcription in EMS and its descendants. ABa and ABp, the other two sisters in a 4‐cell embryo, are influenced (...) to develop differently by cell signaling events that require the two genes apx‐1 and glp‐1. In this review, I summarize evidence that some or all of these genes may encode embryonic determinants of blastomere identity. (shrink)

A “conceptual spaces” approach is used to formalize Aristotle’s main intuitions about time and change, and other ideas about temporal points of view. That approach has been used in earlier studies about points of view. Properties of entities are represented by locations in multidimensional conceptual spaces; and concepts of entities are identified with subsets or regions of conceptual spaces. The dimensions of the spaces, called “determinables”, are qualities in a very general sense. A temporal element is introduced by adding a (...) time variable to state functions that map entities into conceptual spaces. That way, states may have some permanency or stability around time instances. Following Aristotle’s intuitions, changes and events will not be necessarily instant phenomena, instead they could be processual and interval dependent. Change is defined relatively to the interval during which the change is taking place. Time intervals themselves are taken to represent points of view. To have a point of view is to look at the world as it is in the selected interval. Many important concepts are relativized to intervals, for instance change, events, identity, ontology, potentiality, etc. The definition of points of view as intervals allows to compare points of view in relation to all these concepts. The conceptual space approach has an immediate semantic and structural character, but it is tempting to develop also logics to describe them. A formal language is introduced to show how this could be done. (shrink)

It is generally thought that definite determiners exclusively mark nouns as definite. In several languages, however, definite determiners may modify both nouns and verbs. As I will argue, the existence of these “multi‐functional” elements suggests that determiners are in fact phrases. This syntactic move has a philosophical payoff. Among other things, it allows us to cast Donnellan's distinction as an ordinary consequence of the context‐invariant compositional semantics of natural language, not as a matter of contextual manipulation or (...) lexical ambiguity. Multi‐functional determiners show us that Donnellan's distinction is,contraDonnellan, a matter of grammar. (shrink)

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze effectively argues that two types of relation between events govern their ‘evental’ or ‘ideal play’, and ultimately underlie determined substances, that is, worldly individuals and persons. Leibniz calls these relations ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’. Deleuze calls them ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. This paper explores how Deleuze appropriates and extends a number of Leibnizian concepts in order to ground the idea that events have ontological priority over substances ‘all the way down’.

According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, (...) according to which an agent is identified with his desire to make most sense of himself. I develop two constraints that an adequate identification reductionist theory must satisfy and show that Velleman’s theory cannot satisfy both. In particular, I argue that Velleman’s account founders on cases of self-determined self-transformation. (shrink)

“If the tower is any taller than 320 ms, it may collapse,” Eiffel thinks out loud. Although understanding this counterfactual poses no trouble, the most successful interventionist semantics struggle to model it because the antecedent can come about in infinitely many ways. My aim is to provide a semantics that will make modeling such counterfactuals easy for philosophers, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists who work on causation and causal reasoning. I first propose three desiderata that will guide my theory: it (...) should be general, yet conservative, yet useful. Next, I develop a formalization of events in the form of an algebra. I identify an event with all the ways in which it can be brought about and provide rules for determining the referent of an arbitrary event description. I apply this algebra to counterfactuals expressed using underdeterministic causal models-models that encode non-probabilistic causal indeterminacies. Specifically, I develop semaphore interventions, which represent how the target system may be modified from without in a coordinated fashion. This, in turn, allows me to bring about any event within a single model. Finally, I explain the advantages of this semantics over other interventionist competitors. (shrink)

This book addresses cross-cutting aspects of sport that engage important foundational questions. Who benefits from sport? How does commodification drive sport development and meanings? What boundaries determine fan and participant? The contributors to this volume are interested in sport's social, political, and economic influences and roles, and show that the answers have many layers. Sport encompasses far more than the elite and professional levels that generate mass passions and large bank accounts, and impacts individuals in varying ways. The boundaries referred (...) to in the title are thus not the typical, geospatial boundaries that define our world but the limits and possibilities that are attached to and derive from sport. The events that comprise sport and the commodification that attends to it shape those limits and possibilities, and create the understandings that define both what sport is and what we want it to be. (shrink)

B-events are matters which are better known to listeners than to speakers. This paper studies the detectives’ use of B-event statements in two different environments in their interactions with suspects/witnesses. The first type of environment are relatively co-operative sequences during which the aim is the reconstruction of events and constructing the record; here, B-event statements are realised as confirmation seeking questions. The second type of environment, a hostile interactional environment, is composed of argumentative sequences in which detectives aim (...) to determine who are the perpetrators of crimes; in these sequences, the detectives’ B-event statements are realised as accusations. While performing the two activities, the detectives signal different epistemic levels and stances at the turn level. Thus, the former B-event statements are mostly epistemically downgraded, while the latter are mostly upgraded, in order to facilitate undertaking these different activities during police questioning. (shrink)

Spontaneous intrusive recollections follow traumatic events in clinical and non-clinical populations. To determine whether any relationship exists between SIRs and enhanced memory for emotional events, participants viewed emotional or neutral films, had their memory for the films tested two days later, and estimated the number of SIRs they experienced for each film. SIR frequency related positively to memory strength, an effect more pronounced in the emotional condition. These findings represent the first demonstration of a relationship between SIRs occurring after an (...) emotional experience and subsequent memory strength for that experience. The results are consistent with the possibility that emotional arousal leads both to elevated SIR frequency and better memory, and that the covert rehearsal associated with SIRs enhances memory for emotional relative to neutral stimuli. Additional evidence of menstrual cycle influences on SIR incidence in female participants appears to merit consideration in future work. (shrink)

A popular strategy for meeting over-determination and pre-emption challenges to the comparative counterfactual conception of harm is Derek Parfit’s suggestion, more recently defended by Neil Feit, that a plurality of events harms A if and only if that plurality is the smallest plurality of events such that, if none of them had occurred, A would have been better off. This analysis of ‘harm’ rests on a simple but natural mistake about the relevant counterfactual comparison. Pluralities fulfilling these conditions make no (...) difference to the worse for anyone in the over-determination cases that prompted the need for revising the comparative conception of harm to begin with. We may choose to call them harmful anyway, but then we must abandon the idea that making a difference to the worse for someone is essential to harming. I argue that we should hold on to the difference-making criterion and give up the plural harm principle. I offer an explanation of why Parfit’s and Feit’s plural harm approach seems attractive. Finally, I argue that the consequences of giving up the plural harm principle and holding on to the simple comparative counterfactual analysis of harm are less radical than we may think, in relation to questions about wrongness and responsibility. (shrink)

Crosslinguistically, the same modal words can be used to express a wide range of interpretations. This crosslinguistic trend supports a Kratzerian analysis, where each modal has a core lexical entry and where the difference between an epistemic and a root interpretation is contextually determined. A long-standing problem for such a unified account is the equally robust crosslinguistic correlation between a modal’s interpretation and its syntactic behavior: epistemics scope high (in particular higher than tense and aspect) and roots low, a fact (...) which has led to proposals that hardwire different syntactic positions for epistemics and roots (cf. Cinque’s hierarchy). This paper argues that the range of interpretations a modal receives is even more restricted: a modal must be keyed to certain time-individual pairs, but not others. I show that this can be captured straightforwardly by minimally modifying the Kratzerian account: modals are relative to an event—rather than a world—of evaluation, which readily provides a time (the event’s running time) and (an) individual(s) (the event’s participants). I propose that this event relativity of modals can in turn explain the correlation between type of interpretation and syntactic position, without stipulation of an interpretation-specific height for modals. (shrink)

Emotions are traditionally considered to be brief states that last for seconds or a few minutes at most. However, due to pioneering theoretical work of Frijda and recent empirical studies, it has become clear that the duration of emotions is actually highly variable with durations ranging from a few seconds to several hours, or even longer. We review research on determinants of emotion duration. Three classes of determinants are identified: features related to the emotion-eliciting event, emotion itself, and emotion-experiencing (...) person. Initial evidence on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie their effects is discussed. (shrink)

How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in _The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19_ _e_ _congrès international des linguistes_, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013 ), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed only (...) in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in _Journal of Semantics_ 35(1):1–41, 2017 ), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016 ; Portner and Rubinstein in _Natural Language Semantics_ 28:343–393, 2020 ) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss observations on when given by Sandström (1993) for constructions of the form ‘When A B’, where A and B both describe events (as opposed to states). Sandströ m proposes that for events described in the simple past, the temporal interpretation of such sequences varies according to whether A describes a culminated process (CP)(accomplishment) or a culmination (CULM)(roughly, an achievement). She offers an account of this behaviour based on the claim that culminations denote changes of state (...) while culminated processes do not. I argue that this claim is unmotivated, and in addition, draw attention to a range of counterexamples to her generalisation. I present an analysis which is not based on the CP/CULM distinction but relies instead on the distinction originally proposed by Dowty (1979) between the event structures CAUSE-BECOME and BECOME. I show that this distinction is closely related to whether the event has a prototypical agent. It is therefore thematic structure rather than temporal structure that determines the behaviour of when in these cases. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the features of the application of event management as a PR tool in the activities of public and business spaces. In this study, the concept of "event management" has been clarified; the role of event management in the activities of public and business spaces has been determined; the use of this tool in the B2B and B2C markets has been studied; a content analysis of the reviews of visitors to (...) the spaces has been carried out in order to determine the problem field and search for ways to improve the effectiveness of event management as a PR tool; a series of expert interviews with the leaders of public and business spaces has been carried out. The scientific novelty lies in the proposed model of event management of the social and business space. As a result, the authors propose three main directions in planning and organizing the activities of public and business spaces: development and implementation of their own projects and events; management of partner projects; management of relations with partners. (shrink)

The article attempts to comprehend the phenomenon of an event in the religious dimension. An event is considered as a phenomenon characterized by a singularity, that is, an individual character of expression, belongs to the sphere of non everyday life, does not coincide with the usual framework of understanding of the world and does not correspond to empirical factual. The need for a more active philosophical and religious discourse of the correlation between everyday and non everyday life in (...) the realm of religion led to the necessity of address to this problem. Thus, the purpose of the article is to find out the ontological status of the event, the religious context of which manifests itself as an opposition to everyday life and leads to a transformation of the established way of life of the believer. Everyday being is characterized by features of sacredness, demonstrates the attraction to the transcendent. For this reason, the obvious and justified is the combination of the phenomena of everyday empirical world with the values ​​of another dimension of being. The presence of non everyday in everyday life is evidenced, in particular, by elements of cult practice, since they are an expression of sacral time and space, as well as a way of incarnation of eternal values. The sphere of non everyday life includes the relationship between human and God described in the Gospels, prophecies, revelation, and vision as non everyday manifestations of religious experience. Event is the opposition of the world of phenomena to beyond the exquisite world of being, the transformation, which leads to the emergence of new orders and structures. Implementation of the event contradicts the previous ideas, therefore meeting the event with standard reality is accompanied by a transformation of everyday life. Establishing the rootedness of an event into being or its transcendental origin allows us to determine the causes of an event. In a secularized world, human, for the most part, demonstrates his willingness to recognize as significant events, including those in the universe, which correspond to scientific knowledge. This happens even when the fact of the event calls into question the fundamental postulates of science. Given this discovery in science, situations in politics, art, personal life are perceived as large-scale events. Moreover, the moment of meeting with the event can be described, for example, with a poetic language that expresses certain symbols of human existence and appears as a means of objectivizing the event as an unexpected innovation. Instead, the believer perceives events of a supernatural nature as an interference of the otherworldly reality in the usual way of life. Thus, the reception of religious experience is accompanied by the transformation of the individual's everyday life. The basis of the mystical experience of the religious tradition is the experience of meeting with the Divine, which results in a change in the believer's self-consciousness, transformation of its values, senses and meanings. That is, the awareness of an event that does not belong to an established order implies the prospect of new reality emersion, which contradicts previous notions. One of the forms of gaining religious experience is the process of conversion, which results in the transformation of the ideological orientation of a person, which enables the knowledge of their own hidden depths of consciousness. Conversion, the acquisition of grace and faith express the sudden or gradual process by which the individual achieves internal harmony, awareness of his righteousness, a sense of happiness, finds support in believing in the reality of what he has discovered in religious experiences. (shrink)

Traditional document clustering algorithms consider text-based features such as unique word count, concept count, etc. to cluster documents. Meanwhile, event mining is the extraction of specific events, their related sub-events, and the associated semantic relations from documents. This work discusses an approach to event mining through clustering. The Universal Networking Language -based subgraph, a semantic representation of the document, is used as the input for clustering. Our research focuses on exploring the use of three different feature sets for (...) event clustering and comparing the approaches used for specific event mining. In our previous work, the clustering algorithm used UNL-based event semantics to represent event context for clustering. However, this approach resulted in different events with similar semantics being clustered together. Hence, instead of considering only UNL event semantics, we considered assigning additional weights to similarity between event contexts with event-related attributes such as time, place, and persons. Although we get specific events in a single cluster, sub-events related to the specific events are not necessarily in a single cluster. Therefore, to improve our cluster efficiency, connective terms between two sentences and their representation as UNL subgraphs were also considered for similarity determination. By combining UNL semantics, event-specific arguments similarity, and connective term concepts between sentences, we were able to obtain clusters for specific events and their sub-events. We have used 112 000 Tamil documents from the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation data corpus and achieved good results. We have also compared our approach with the previous state-of-the-art approach for Router-RCV1 corpus and achieved 30% improvements in precision. (shrink)

Drawing on Foucault the author tries to answer the questions such as What is actually an event?, What is it that makes an usual phenomenon an event?, What is it that makes a historical event to emerge out of a set of banal events? It is evident, that the answers to these questions depend on the general view of history. Foucaultian history is nominalistic, i. e. stressing the uniqueness of historical event. The latter is never isolated, (...) but together with other events creating a net with an intrinsic structure. This structure determines the status or order and meanings of particular events and sheds light on the critical role of one of these events. And vice versa: due to this critical historical event a contingent set of events becomes structured and ordered. An illustration is Foucault's analysis of the origin of insanity as a mental illness. (shrink)

Summary One of the central questions concerning theories of reference has been the problem of how the reference of scientific terms gets fixed. Descriptive causal theories of reference, as discussed in this paper, have re-introduced the role of theoretical beliefs and conceptualisations in term introductions and reference-fixing. The present paper argues that the idea of reference-fixing as a dot-like event (baptism) is wrong: a number of episodes from the history of science are discussed to support the claim that reference-fixing (...) is a historical, drawn-out process. This, however, does not stand in the way of successful reference. The two processes are simply separated. A criterion is suggested to determine successful reference. From this approach two further ideas follow: not all scientific terms actually have the power of referring and even those that do will always retain a residual indeterminacy. (shrink)

According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, (...) according to which an agent is identified with his desire to make most sense of himself. I develop two constraints that an adequate identification reductionist theory must satisfy and show that Velleman’s theory cannot satisfy both. In particular, I argue that Velleman’s account founders on cases of self-determined self-transformation. (shrink)

For those who maintain that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, a persistent problem is to give a coherent characterization of action that is neither determined by prior events nor random, arbitrary, lucky or in some way insufficiently under the control of the agent to count as free action. One approach—that of Roderick Chisholm and others—is to say that a third alternative is for an action to be caused by an agent in a way that is not reducible to (...) event causal terms. A different approach than the Chisholmian appeal to primitive substance causation is one that, instead, involves causal relations purely among events. This paper presents a particular event-causal indeterminist account of free action, describing both its attractions and recent objections to it, and then proposes a revised version, with the aim of supporting the plausibility of an event-causal indeterminist approach to free will. (shrink)

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical (...) events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties. (shrink)

Mental causation, our mind's ability to causally affect the course of the world, is part and parcel of our ‘manifest image’ of the world. That there is mental causation is denied by virtually no one. How there can be such a thing as mental causation, however, is far from obvious. In recent years, discussions about the problem of mental causation have focused on Jaegwon Kim's so-called Causal Exclusion Argument, according to which mental events are ‘screened off’ or ‘preempted’ by physical (...) events unless mental causation is a genuine case of overdetermination or mental properties are straightforwardly reducible to physical properties. (shrink)

Consider the beginningless sequence: ... being less than 0.01 grams, being less than 0.1 grams, being less than 1 gram, being less than 10 grams ... There is no super-determinate in this chain. Just as the possibility of bottomless constitution shows that there may be no fundamental layer of reality with respect to objects , the possibility of bottomless determination shows that there may be no fundamental level of reality with respect to properties . This possibility supports Stephen Yablo's proportionality (...) principle that the cause of an event is the most specific property that makes a difference. (shrink)

The main topic of this paper will not be the notoriously difficult metaphysical question of freedom and determinism. An act of will is either determined by a causal chain of previous events or is a mere chance event. In either case there seems to be no room for freedom. This question is of such a high level of conceptual generality that it applies not only to human freedom but to any being that acts for reasons, even beings that lack (...) a brain. In this paper I try to answer the question whether freedom is possible for beings endowed with a brain. Can a being whose mental life involves a functioning brain determine its own actions? I will proceed in two steps. First, I will discuss a recent experiment that seems to prove empirically that freedom of the will is an illusion. I will argue that this kind of research is methodologically misguided. Then I will go on to discuss some of the metaphysical issues that must be dealt with if one wants to address the question whether freedom of the will is possible for a being endowed with a brain. And then I will ask if such a metaphysics is compatible with our best empirical theories. (shrink)

Hume thought that if actions were not determined causally by prior events they could depend on nothing more than chance. But we seem to think that even actions undetermined by prior events need not happen by mere chance. They could be still determined by their agents; they could therefore be free. What does this belief in freedom involve? Is it simply the theory that substances, in the form of agents, can be causes, and not just events? The chapter argues that (...) this is not so. Our conception of freedom is of a power radically unlike ordinary causation, not simply in respect of the bearer of the power, but in the way that the power determines outcomes. A cause determines an outcome only when its power excludes alternatives. But freedom is a power that far from excluding alternatives, makes them available. The chapter explores this difference between the two kinds of power, and the implications of Hume’s failure to distinguish them. (shrink)

Within a physicalist-mechanistic worldview, in which we cannot be more than intelligent, self-reproducing biomachines or biobots, fundamentals of a new approach to the science of human self-explanation are outlined. Some a priori logical necessities, or determinants, of any biobot’s control system design are recognized. Evolution had to satisfy them, but neuroscience and cognitive science so far do not clearly see these basics. It is concluded that the old part of the brain still contains the genetically fixed drives, responses, and the (...) physiological control. Here is the seat of an ancient somatic self that is not intelligent but is still the active center of our life. The neocortex has evolved to serve the somatic self with intelligence by individually building a virtual model of the external material and social world. This model is used by the somatic self to “pre-play” intended actions and responses to see whether they would satisfy its needs. This schema of global brain function provides the neurological foundation for the ego-id dichotomy in analytic psychology, as well as some critique of it. Following the groundbreaking experiments by Benjamin Libet and John-Dylan Haynes et al. , consciousness is taken as a “theater” that presents what the neural networks already have worked out, and freedom of the will is limited. The explosive growth of culture and civilization began when neocortical power exceeded a certain threshold. This can be taken as a quasi-mutation that projected us into a supra-biological space of existence that is new to natural history. It is not clear whether this event will lead to a positive future for humanity or to doom. Functional religion is seen as a neurosystemic attempt to bring back the earlier natural state. Thus, it can be valuable when cleared of mythological ballast. (shrink)

The problem of the nature and scope of Causation has again been raised into prominence by recent research on atomic structures and processes, the result being that many physicists maintain that the causational principle must now be restricted to macroscopic changes regarded as the averaged outcome of microscopic events, each of which alone may not be causally determined, or at least not completely so. Of this markedly new departure Professor Eddington is perhaps the best-known advocate. “Physics,” he asserts, “is no (...) longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law; the search for a scheme of strictly causal law not practical politics.” But the issue concerns not Physics only, for Dr. Eddington at once proceeds to interpret his viewpoint by contending that “science withdraws its opposition to free will”; and thus the realms of consciousness and conduct are once more brought into intimate connection with the realm of physical phenomena. It must of course be recognized that the question still remains highly debatable; for, as Sir Oliver Lodge has recently urged, “break down causality, and we are left with chance. That is wholly unsatisfactory. Chance is no solution”; and he likewise expands his survey beyond Physics by adding, “not in that way would I aim at freedom.” It is scarcely necessary to refer to current controversy in the biological sphere, between those who regard living processes as falling, if only to some degree, outside the domain of causal action, and those who insist that such action is universal, the indubitable proof of their position being prevented only by the difficulties of investigation. (shrink)

The problem of the nature and scope of Causation has again been raised into prominence by recent research on atomic structures and processes, the result being that many physicists maintain that the causational principle must now be restricted to macroscopic changes regarded as the averaged outcome of microscopic events, each of which alone may not be causally determined, or at least not completely so. Of this markedly new departure Professor Eddington is perhaps the best-known advocate. “Physics,” he asserts, “is no (...) longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law; the search for a scheme of strictly causal law not practical politics.” But the issue concerns not Physics only, for Dr. Eddington at once proceeds to interpret his viewpoint by contending that “science withdraws its opposition to free will”; and thus the realms of consciousness and conduct are once more brought into intimate connection with the realm of physical phenomena. It must of course be recognized that the question still remains highly debatable; for, as Sir Oliver Lodge has recently urged, “break down causality, and we are left with chance. That is wholly unsatisfactory. Chance is no solution”; and he likewise expands his survey beyond Physics by adding, “not in that way would I aim at freedom.” It is scarcely necessary to refer to current controversy in the biological sphere, between those who regard living processes as falling, if only to some degree, outside the domain of causal action, and those who insist that such action is universal, the indubitable proof of their position being prevented only by the difficulties of investigation. (shrink)

Within the context of the insurable interest in cargo insurance contracts, in this publication the writer analyses the theoretical aspects of the insurable interest and the relevant laws. Dealing with the problems of determining the insurable interest in cargo insurance contracts the writer has examined the possible options of insurance of the cargo in transit, and while analysing the law governing transport and the sale of goods he examines a person‘s insurable interest in the cargo insured and legal remedies to (...) protect such an interest by concluding a cargo insurance contract. The writer believes that the legal regulation of the insurable interest in Lithuania, interpreting the insurable interest as a loss sustained by a policyholder, the insured or the beneficiary upon an event insured against, fails to guarantee the protection of proprietary and economic interests of persons engaged in the circulation of commodities. Laws governing cargo insurance contracts in Lithuania do not provide a flexible protection of interests of the participants in trade operations and impedes the development of trade and transit, therefore the legal regulation of cargo insurance, especially of the insurable interest should be improved. (shrink)

Evolving signaling systems can be said to induce partitions on the space of world states as they approach equilibrium. Formalizing this claim provides a general framework for understanding what it means for language to “cut nature at its seams”. In order to avoid taking our current best science as providing the adaptive target for all evolving systems, the state space of the world must be characterized exclusively in terms of the coincidence of stimuli and payoffs that drives the evolution of (...) cognitive complexity. Cognition exploits the reliable clustering of events in this space. Using this framework to analyze our ordinary concepts of truth and justification, it appears that while justification can be a simple matter of conforming to historically entrenched strategies, truth cannot be fully specified on the basis of the system’s causal history, but requires a robust clustering in the larger world state space. (shrink)

I defend a dualist model of psychophysical causal relevance, according to which mental events are not causes in the physical domain, but are causally relevant in this domain because they enable — or, in other words, provide the appropriate structure for — physical events to be caused. More specifically, I defend the claim that mental events are ‘double preventers’ within the physical domain, where double preventers are a type of enabling event. The distinction that I make between causes and (...) enabling events and the dualist model of psychophysical causal relevance that I defend has emerged from my acceptance of the powers theory of causation. In this paper, I explore how this dualist model of psychophysical causal relevance offers a response to Papineau’s defence of the causal completeness principle via the conservation laws. (shrink)

Explanations of descriptions of events are undivided, holistic, units of analysis for the purpose of justification. Their justifications are based on the transmission of information about the past and its interpretation and analysis. Further analysis of explanations of descriptions of events is redundant. The “holistic” model of explanations fits better the actual practices of scientists, historians and ordinary people who utter explanatory propositions than competing models. I consider the “inference to the best explanation” model and argue that under one interpretation, (...) it cannot account for all the paradigmatic cases of explanation of description of events that I present, though under another interpretation it fits comfortably with my holistic model. Finally, I argue that there is nothing intrinsic or structural to distinguish holistic explanations of descriptions of events from other hypothetical propositions because the pragmatic context of inquiry may well determine exclusively whether a proposition is considered explanatory. (shrink)

Assigning the appropriate moral status to different stages of human development is an urgent problem in bioethics. Many philosophers have attempted to assess developmental events using strict ontological principles to determine when a developing entity becomes essentially human. This approach is not consistent with recent findings in reproductive and stem cell biology, including the discovery of the plasticity of early embryonic development and the advent of induced pluripotent stem cells. Substance ontology should therefore not be used to determine the moral (...) status of the embryo. (shrink)

In finite probability theory, events are subsets S⊆U of the outcome set. Subsets can be represented by 1-dimensional column vectors. By extending the representation of events to two dimensional matrices, we can introduce "superposition events." Probabilities are introduced for classical events, superposition events, and their mixtures by using density matrices. Then probabilities for experiments or `measurements' of all these events can be determined in a manner exactly like in quantum mechanics (QM) using density matrices. Moreover the transformation of the density (...) matrices induced by the experiments or `measurements' is the Lüders mixture operation as in QM. And finally by moving the machinery into the n-dimensional vector space over ℤ₂, different basis sets become different outcome sets. That `non-commutative' extension of finite probability theory yields the pedagogical model of quantum mechanics over ℤ₂ that can model many characteristic non-classical results of QM. (shrink)

RESUMEN El artículo ingresa en la ontología del acontecer y recorre cuatro momentos. En primer lugar, distingue la visión del mundo en general, propia de la llamada “metafísica” de la visión del ser como acontecer, y busca un diálogo entre la perspectiva del ser en la metafísica y ontología de Hans-Georg Gadamer. En segundo lugar, analiza la estructura del acontecer o el modo como se despliega el movimiento del sentido, para determinar la lógica de la pregunta como estructura del acontecer. (...) En tercer lugar, entabla un diálogo entre la idea de acontecer y la categoría de finitud, para evidenciar que, cuando se piensa en una ontología del acontecer, esta remite a la determinación de la finitud. Y, finalmente, plantea algunas líneas de desarrollo para profundizar en esta investigación. ABSTRACT The articles discusses the ontology of the event and covers four moments. First, it identifies the general worldview typical of the “metaphysics” of being as event, and seeks to establish a dialogue between the perspective of being in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s metaphysics and his ontology. Secondly, it analyzes the structure of the event or the way in which the movement of meaning unfolds, in order to determine the logic of the question as structure of the event. Third, through a dialogue between the idea of event and the category of finitude, the article shows that thinking the ontology of the event leads to the determination of finitude. Finally, the article suggests a few lines of inquiry for further in-depth research of this topic. (shrink)

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive (...) from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former. (shrink)

Although the notion of agency presents itself as an attractive solution to the puzzle of free will, itfaces a problem vis-à-vis the nature of reasons that are purported to lie behind actions. In this paper,I first point out the significance of a paradigm shift that emerges with the agency view. Then I arguethat the agency theories nonetheless fail in general to give a satisfactory account of various sorts ofreasons underlying our actions and choices. In trying to enlighten the multi-faceted nature (...) of actionsand agency, I define a novel concept, “substantive autonomy,” and claim that it is a basic fact valid forall animals, not only humans, that are capable of initiating action. Reasons may indeed be lying behind our actions in a non-deterministic and ubiquitous manner, but agency often works in the absenceof sophisticated reasons which are evidently characteristic of humans.Keywords: agency, event causation, free will, reasons, substantive autonomy. (shrink)