Mereological principles are often controversial; perhaps the most stark contrast is between those who claim that Weak Supplementation is analytic—constitutive of our notion of proper parthood—and those who argue that the principle is simply false, and subject to many counterexamples. The aim of this paper is to diagnose the source of this dispute. I’ll suggest that the dispute has arisen by participants failing to be sensitive to two different conceptions of proper parthood: the outstripping conception and the non-identity conception. I’ll (...) argue that the outstripping conception (together with a specific set of definitions for other mereological notions), can deliver the analyticity of Weak Supplementation on at least one sense of ‘analyticity’. I’ll also suggest that the non-identity conception cannot do so independently of considerations to do with mereological extensionality. (shrink)

Individuals are a prominent part of the biological world. Although biologists and philosophers of biology draw freely on the concept of an individual in articulating both widely accepted and more controversial claims, there has been little explicit work devoted to the biological notion of an individual itself. How should we think about biological individuals? What are the roles that biological individuals play in processes such as natural selection (are genes and groups also units of selection?), speciation (are species individuals?), and (...) organismic development (do genomes code for organisms)? Much of our discussion here will focus on organisms as a central kind of biological individual, and that discussion will raise broader questions about the nature of the biological world, for example, about its complexity, its organization, and its relation to human thought. (shrink)

Fraenkel dismissed Epode 11 with the statement that it ‘is an elegant piece of writing, but there is little real life in it’. By this ambiguously expressed comment he did not mean that the poem fails to ‘come alive’, but that it is artificial: he saw the poem as little more than an assembly of themes and motifs which recur in other genres, especially epigram and elegy. This has also been the perspective of some other twentieth-century scholars: Georg Luck's self-styled (...) ‘interpretation’ of the poem consists largely of a numbered list of thirteen motifs which the epode has in common with elegy and which in Luck's opinion were derived by Horace from Gallus. Alessandro Barchiesi, on the other hand, capitalizes on the perceived elegiac motifs in order to see the poem as a dynamic fusion of elegy and iambus. As for commentators, although older representatives seem to have regarded Epode 11 as generally self-explanatory, the poem receives increasing attention from Cavarzere, Mankin and Watson, the last of whom originally discussed some of its problems in a paper published twenty years earlier. Yet various problems still remain, and in this paper I propose to re-examine lines 1–6 and 15–18 in the hope that a clearer view of the epode as a whole may emerge. (shrink)

In a recent re-assessment of the medical aspects of the Plague of Athens which is, to date, the most scholarly and comprehensive, Poole and Holladay have emphasized the tendency of many infectious diseases markedly to decline in virulence over decades and centuries and, sometimes, significantly to change their clinical manifestations. In the light of modern medicine they consider four possibilities: The Plague was a disease which still exists today. This they regard as improbable, It still exists in some remote place (...) or places unknown to medical science. This is discussed and dismissed, It became extinct, It was caused by an agent which nowadays causes a significantly different clinical syndrome. They conclude as follows: ‘The truth, we suggest, almost certainly lies in possibility or . But we can see no way of choosing between them. On either view the question: “What was the Athenian Plague?” is in principle unanswerable if the questioner is wanting to attach to the Plagsie the name of some modern disease or diseases’. (shrink)

Machine consciousness exists already in organic systems and it is only a matter of time -- and some agreement -- before it will be realised in reverse-engineered organic systems and forward- engineered inorganic systems. The agreement must be over the preconditions that must first be met if the enterprise is to be successful, and it is these preconditions, for instance, being a socially-embedded, structurally-coupled and dynamic, goal-directed entity that organises its perceptual input and enacts its world through the application of (...) both a cognitive and kinaesthetic imagination, that I shall concentrate on presenting in this paper. It will become clear that these preconditions will present engineers with a tall order, but not, I will argue, an impossible one. After all, we might agree with Freeman and Núñez's claim that the machine metaphor has restricted the expectations of the cognitive sciences (Freeman & Núñez, 1999); but it is a double-edged sword, since our limited expectations about machines also narrow the potential of our cognitive science. (shrink)

One of the most famous inscriptions to have survived from ancient Rome is the acta of the Ludi Saeculares of 17 b.c., and one of the most evocative of all epigraphic sentences occupies a line to itself : Carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus. This reference to the author of the Carmen Saeculare, says Fraenkel, ‘was the result of a carefully considered decision of the highest authorities’. The degree of careful consideration is initially evident from the prominent positioning of the poet's (...) name directly above those of Augustus and Agrippa in the following line. It will also be noticed that the sentence concludes with a clausula which is one of Cicero's favourites. A further refinement emerges, however, if the poet's name is spelled out in full, something precluded by the naming conventions of the inscription:Cārmēn cōmpŏsŭīt ´ Quīntŭs Hŏrātĭūs | Flaccus.The inscribed sentence incorporates an Asclepiad line, the ‘signature’ metre of Odes 1–3, which are framed by Horace's only two poems in stichic Asclepiads. In identifying the author of the Carmen Saeculare, the sentence also acknowledges the collection of poems which won him the commission. (shrink)

Towards the start of the elegy which prefaces his third book, Propertius rejects lengthy, martial epic in favour of slender poetry : it is on account of the latter that fame elevates him above the earth, his Muse triumphant ; accompanying him in the triumphal chariot are his Amores , and following the wheels is a crowd of writers . The latter, in the race for glory, rival the poet to no purpose . Many writers will praise Rome and sing (...) of future conquests , but Propertius’ pages, a special delivery from the Muses' mount, are the perfect peace-time reading. (shrink)

Biologically, pain is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but is a communication mechanism designed to serve organismal ends. Pain for any given person at any given time should be evaluated on the basis of “success” (or not) in serving those purposes. Yet, the physiological, psychological, and cultural complexity of the experience makes moral consideration of pain complicated. This is especially the case with infants in pain. The competence of the infant as a “decision maker” cannot, of course, be assumed. Even (...) if the child “thinks” about pain, an epistemological barrier exists in that the child cannot clearly communicate about the pain experience. Furthermore, any expressions of pain from the child may be necessary for diagnosis. Just coercion criteria provide a means of evaluating when and to what extent pain in infants should be controlled under the authority of surrogate decision makers. (shrink)

Seneca the Younger's tragedies are adaptations from the Greek. C. A. J. Littlewood emphasizes the place of these plays in the Latin literature and in the philosophical context of the reign of the emperor Nero. Stoics dismissed public reality as theatre, as illusion. The artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds are literary constructs, responds to this contemporary philosophical perception.

This study on the reception of Cartesianism is the result of a four-year fellowship as assistant-in-training at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen. Zie: Preface.

Rorty saw the course of philosophy in the twentieth century as an effort to part from two major philosophical trends, namely historicism and naturalism, only to inevitably return at the end of a tortuous path to these very same tendencies. If we can concede without major objections Rorty’s diagnosis of the trends in contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, which seem to reveal the exhaustion of modern philosophy, based as it has been on epistemology, we must, on the other hand, examine (...) carefully the three main questions that this diagnosis leaves open: How does Rorty reconcile continental idealist subjectivism with materialistic behaviorism? Is it really inevitable that philosophy blinded by Geist are unable to question prevalent beliefs? Finally, is the acceptance of a liberalism that is not able to give reasons for itself the most effective and pragmatic liberalism? In answering these questions, it may not be possible to avoid a non-dogmatic, but pragmatic, metaphysics: a vocabulary of vocabularies that allows Rorty to speak of the problems of justice in Plato and Rawls, of the soul in Aristotle and Descartes, of the dystopias in Moro and Orwell. On pragmatic terms, perhaps a modest version of a metaphysic’s “vocabulary” turns out to be as legitimate and practical as any other vocabulary. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to present a case for a heavily revised notion of heterophenomenology. l will refer to the revised notion as ‘enkinaesthesia’ because of its dependence on the experiential entanglement of our own and the other’s felt action as the sensory background within which all other experience is possible. Enkinaesthesia2 emphasizes two things: (i) the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, including the givenness and ownership of its experience, and (ii) the entwined, blended and situated co-affective (...) feeling of the presence of the other(s), agential (for example, human, horse, cat, beetle) and non-agential (for example, cup, bed, apple, paper) and, where appropriate, the anticipated arc of the other’s action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other’s intentionality. When the ‘other’ is also a sensing and experiencing agent it is their - in this case, the pair’s - affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding, and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of the deep integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies which bind us together, even when they pull us apart. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dialogical nature of the backgrounded feeling of being. (shrink)

Finitary sketches, i.e., sketches with finite-limit and finite-colimit specifications, are proved to be as strong as geometric sketches, i.e., sketches with finite-limit and arbitrary colimit specifications. Categories sketchable by such sketches are fully characterized in the infinitary first-order logic: they are axiomatizable by σ-coherent theories, i.e., basic theories using finite conjunctions, countable disjunctions, and finite quantifications. The latter result is absolute; the equivalence of geometric and finitary sketches requires (in fact, is equivalent to) the non-existence of measurable cardinals.