In the 1940s, Georges Canguilhem has established the concept of biological normativity on the level of the organism in his key work on “ The Normal and the Pathological ”. We would like to present a contemporary analysis of Canguilhem’s work, set it in context with more recent results from the field of complexity and immunology, and evaluate the problematic whether normativity is a genuine capacity of the organism. Based on Canguilhem’s conditions of the definition of biological normativity, we show (...) that the immune system as one of the complex systems of the living equally shares the capacity to be normative. We will then conclude that normativity can also be conceptually independently displayed on the level of complex systems of the living. (shrink)

The Joint Battle Management Language (JBML) is an XML-based language designed to allow Command and Control (C2) systems to interface easily with Modeling and Simulation (M&S) systems. While some of the XML-tags defined in this language correspond to types of entities that exist in reality, others are mere syntactic artifacts used to structure the messages themselves. Because these two kinds of tags are not formally distinguishable, JBML messages in effect confuse data with what the data represent. In this paper we (...) show how a realism-based ontology combined with a rule language can be used to make these distinctions explicit. The approach allows storage of the contents of JBML messages in a Referent Tracking System in a format that mimics the structure of reality thereby providing an aid to message validation. (shrink)

While discussing his notion of objective knowledge Popper introduces the idea of dispensability of knowing subjects, the autonomy of knowledge and the argumentative function of language. The main claim of our paper is that, on our view, objective knowledge produced by argumentative interaction is not achieved by dispensing knowing subjects but by differentiating between the play and the strategic levels of argumentation, where a distinction should be drawn between a particular concrete knowing subject engaged in that interaction, say Karl, and (...) an arbitrary one. Moreover, the theory of meaning deployed at the level of plays, the so-called local meaning, provides already some kind of objective knowledge, since it is player-independent and it does not reduce to the purely logical one of the strategy level. In fact, despite our criticism we think that Popper's discussion of the notion objective knowledge still deserves to be reflected on, particularly so in view of new results concerning the formalization of Brouwer’s Creating Subject and the dialogical interpretation of the notion of epistemic assumption. (shrink)

Article traitant du problème des Ajnād omeyyades. Il s'agit des vastes districts militaires constitués dans l'Orient byzantin après la conquête arabe et qui ont persisté jusqu'à l'époque médiévale. Ils sont la source d'un des problèmes majeurs de l'histoire omeyyade comme de celle de l'Orient proto-byzantin.

This monograph proposes a new way of studying the different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiyās. According to the authors’ view, qiyās represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into legal argumentation in general but also furnishes a fine-grained pattern for parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical reasoning (...) studied in contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview of the emergence of qiyās and of the work of al-Shīrāzī penned by Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shīrāzī’s classification of correlational inferences of the occasioning factor. The second part of the volume deliberates on the system of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance. The third part develops the main theoretical background of the authors’ work, namely, the dialogical approach to Martin-Löf's Constructive Type Theory. The authors present this in a general form and independently of adaptations deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in general. (shrink)

Despite the significant amount of debate that Merleau-Ponty’s work has seen over the years, it remains an unresolved issue whether his phenomenology offers what he announces as a ‘new definition of the a priori’. In this paper, I make a case in favor of his claim by clarifying his commitments to the a priori against two dominant lines of interpretation, naturalist and Kantian. I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s view that the sciences themselves rely on the a priori method of Wesensschau establishes (...) his basic commitment to apriority. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the a priori differs in important respects from the Kantian a priori and its transcendental idealist ramifications because, on his view, the subject is not the unique ground of constitution. Having tackled these obstacles to understanding Merleau-Ponty’s commitments to the a priori, I argue in light of his conception of ‘radical reflection’ that rather than being a static element of experience, the a priori stands in a dynamic relation with the a posteriori as a distinctive way of articulating structures of lived experience. (shrink)

Despite the fact that it has been more than 40 years since Henry Corbin and Hossein Ziai pointed out that the work of Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī (549/1155, 587/1191) has not yet been systematically studied, a thorough investigation of his work is still in its infancy. The present brief study, which aims to contribute to filling such a gap by further developing some of the points contained in Rahman & Seck's (2022) paper, articulates some remarks on the relevance of Suhrawardī's epistemology (...) of presence for contemporary studies on temporal logic. More specifically, we will focus our brief presentation on the fruitfulness of his postulate of the priority of experience of immediate knowledge discussed in the Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq and how this postulate is related to the concept of self-consciousness (وعي الذاتي).Thus the particularity of this study is that Suhrawardī's epistemology of presence, unlike contemporary temporal logic developed for example by Prior, emphasizes the temporalization of the instantiation of an event or the performance of an act rather than of the propositions that express that event or act. Moreover, in Suhrawardī's modal syllogistic, there is an analysis of contingency that differs from most contemporary authors and that also involves several dimensions of time. More generally, Suhrawardī's notion of direct knowledge offers new insights into the logical and ontological status of the now. (shrink)

The intellectual legacy of Confucianism has loomed large in efforts to understand China's past, present, and future. While Confucian ethics has been thoroughly explored, the question remains: what exactly is Confucian political thought? Classical Confucian Political Thought returns to the classical texts of the Confucian tradition to answer this vital question. Showing how Confucian ethics and politics diverge, Loubna El Amine argues that Confucian political thought is not a direct application of Confucian moral philosophy. Instead, contrary to the conventional view (...) that Confucian rule aims to instill virtue in all members of society, El Amine demonstrates that its main aim is to promote political order. El Amine analyzes key aspects of the Confucian political vision, including the relationship between the ruler and the people, the typology of rulers, and the role of ministers and government officials. She also looks at Confucianism’s account of the mechanisms through which society is to be regulated, from welfare policies to rituals. She explains that the Confucian conception of the political leaves space open for the rule of those who are not virtuous if these rulers establish and maintain political order. She also contends that Confucians defend the duty to take part in government based on the benefits that such participation can bring to society. Classical Confucian Political Thought brings a new understanding to Confucian political theory by illustrating that it is not chiefly idealistic and centered on virtue, but rather realistic and driven by political concerns. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates the impact of cognitive board diversity in education, expertise, and tenure facets on financial distress likelihood in the emerging economy of China. This study examines how this relationship varies across State-Owned Enterprises and Non-State-Owned Enterprises. Paper argues that the Chinese stock market, as a typical emerging market, is an excellent laboratory for studying the impact of board diversity on the probability of financial distress. Its underdeveloped financial system and inadequate investor protection leave firms unprotected from financial (...) hardship. A sample of 12,366 observations from 1,374 firms from 2010 to 2018 shows that cognitive diversity qualities are positively linked with Z-score, implying that directors with different educational backgrounds, financial skills, and tenures can assist in reducing the probability of financial distress. Cognitive board diversity reduces the likelihood of financial distress in SOEs and NSOEs. However, tenure diversity is insignificant in all cases. Furthermore, the robustness model “two-step system Generalized Methods of Moments ” demonstrated a positive association between educational diversity, financial expertise, and financial distress scores. The results have significant implications for researchers, managers, investors, regulators, and policymakers. (shrink)

The main aim of the present paper is to understand the debate between Descartes and Leibniz about eternal truths as providing the structure of several possible dialogues involving counter-logic . According to this analysis the positions of Descartes and Leibniz are understood as constituting dual and dynamic perspectives in relation to the availability of some specific choices that should provide norms of rationality. Each of these dialogues has both a universal, monological aspect (given by the winning strategy) and a contextual, (...) dialogical one (given by the play level). I conclude with the suggestion that a notion of rationality that contains both the universal and the contextual aspects does not yield a specific logic, but rather a frame of normative rationality. The conception of such a frame seems to be closely linked to the notion of a universal perfectible language discussed by Olga Pombo. The central idea is that the Leibniz’s notion of rationality is a fondateur de discursivité if we use Marcelo Dascal´s quote of Foucault. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that the past holds the potential for liberating us from modern categories and thus for helping us envision alternative political futures. More specifically, I show how China’s non-feudal past offers resources for a future model of governance based on unity and social mobility.

Sociological studies of culture have made significant progress on conceptual clarification of the concept, while remaining comparatively quiescent on questions of measurement. This study empirically examines internal conflicts (or “infighting”), a ubiquitous phenomenon in political organizing, to propose a “resinous culture framework” that holds promise for redirection. The data comprise 674 newspaper articles and more than 100 archival documents that compare internal dissent across two previously unstudied lesbian and gay Marches on Washington. Analyses reveal that activists use infighting as a (...) vehicle to engage in otherwise abstract definitional debates that provide concrete answers to questions such as who are we and what do we want. The mechanism that enables infighting to concretize these cultural concerns is its coupling with fairly mundane and routine organizational tasks. This mechanism affords one way to release the culture concept, understood here as collective self-definitions, from being “an amorphous, indescribable mist which swirls around society members,” as it was once provocatively described. (shrink)

Réseau LACTO (Langage, Argumentation et Cognition dans les Traditions Orales) Quatrième Rencontre du Réseau Lacto CELHTO, bureau de l'Union Africaine, Niamey, Niger, du 22 au 25 septembre 2015 : JEU ET ORALITE DANS LES SOCIETES A TRADITION ORALE According to the main stream approaches to epistemic notions, knowledge and belief are understood as propositional operators. Thus, • Gildas believes that there is a witch in his village is understood as expressing a proposition. Moreover, • Gildas knows that Gödel proved the (...) completeness of first-order logic, expresses a proposition too. The difference between both is that a belief-proposition can be true if it is " factually " false: in our case the proposition can be true in relation to Gildas's belief, that is, despite the fact that there is no witch in his village. Furthermore, assuming that there is not witch in his village, the following proposition is false • Gildas knows that there is a witch in his village. If the latter is false, from the point of view of the mainstream, there was not knowledge at all, rather it was from the start a belief that has not been verified. 1 The present paper is part of an ongoing project in the context of the research-program Argumentation, Decision, Action (ADA) and the project Logique, Argumentation et Cognition dans les Traditions Orales (LACTO) both supported by the Maison Européenne des Sciences de l' Homme et de la Société-USR 318 and by the laboratory UMR 8163: STL. (shrink)

Thinking About Almost Everything brings together original thinking on a staggering range of topics across the sciences, arts and humanities, grouped into nine imaginative and sometimes startling thematic categories. Entries on terror, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and climate change are juxtaposed in the 'settlement' section, while 'Presences' brings together plant genetics, race, humans and animals, music theology, and the Willmore Conjecture. The short essays are written in a lively and accessible style, and the book is illustrated with original and (...) challenging images. Thinking About Almost Everything shows how even the most intricate and complex knowledge can enliven public curiosity and spark new thinking on issues either known or yet to be discovered. (shrink)

Preliminary words One important feature of Poincaré's conventionalism of geometry is linked to the relation between the abstract notion of space geometry and the representations of the free mobility of our bodies. In this sense «the group of rigid motions» identified by Helmholtz and Lie as the foundation of geometries of constant curvature is, according to Poincaré, an idealization of the primitive experience that acquaints us with the properties of space in the first place. 2 Furthermore, since Poincaré thinks that (...) the only adequate candidates for physical geometry – the geometries of constant curvature – are equivalent from a mathematical point of view (they are homeomorphic), we can choose any one of these. Actually, according to Poincaré, the idealization involved in passing from our own local motions to the group of motions makes use of temporal intuition: our notion of the large-space structure of space assumes that our displacements are infinitely iterables and this assumes temporal intuition. 3 Thus, it looks as Poincaré's notion of convention assumes some kind of idealization process. Indeed, the notion of convention involved in this cases seems to assume that in relation to a target system the choice between two idealizations is determined by some kind of equivalence relation, which in our case is displayed 1. (shrink)

Around the 1960's, C. Perelman / L. Olbrechts–Tyteca and S. Toulmin endorsed the separation between argumentation and logic. In fact, both assumed a gap between everyday reasoning, closer to legal reasoning, and scientific reasoning based on mathematics. The main claim was that both paradigms are incommensurable, since the legal paradigm makes use of the notion of formality, that has a procedural nature with roots on a conversational and dialectical practice, and logic is based on the notion of form, that involves (...) static (and syntactic) features. I will contest the incommensurability of both paradigms, as J. van Benthem (2009) did already, and plea that what we need is more rather than less logic. There are no juridical solutions to logical problems, if the problem is related to reasoning, then the solution relates to inferences drawn on the basis of juridical knowledge. (shrink)

Physically and intellectually, man is not the same as a million years ago. This “improvement” in humans has occurred over a period of time and not as a result of any outside biotechnical intervention. So, the question is what is the need now? The fine line between what can be done technically and what should be done morally is the reason for biomedical ethics. What is the nature of man, and what is his relationship with his creator and his environment? (...) Whose interest are we as scientists and physicians to guard? What are the rights of the unborn, and who protects those rights? While seeking medical treatment for infertility and reconstructive surgery for a malformation or genetic manipulation for a genetic disease might perhaps be appropriate and recommended, is it also appropriate to create a super healthy, super human with genetic manipulation? If so, then are we embarking on the path of ethnic cleansing of humans of lesser ability, and is it appropriate to discriminate? In this paper, such questions and concerns are discussed from an Islamic perspective. (shrink)

The sources of Singer's moral philosophy -- The origins of ethics -- Reason and ethics -- Key aspects of Singer's ethical system -- Singer's critique of human dignity -- Infanticide a new frontier.

'Communities of practice', like 'social capital' and 'networks', is an idea that has been widely adopted in the social sciences, particularly in discussion of innovation and creativity. This book evaluates the concept and its uses, and will be an essential guide for students and researchers.

The present paper, that provides an introduction to standard dialogical logic, has mainly didactic purposes. Thus, the study of the metalogical properties has been left totally by side. However, two sections have been added for those readers willing to go through a technically more demanding material. The first one contains a technically rigorous presentation of standard dialogical logic the second one presents, some very recent work towards a logic with content, applied to modal logic, where modal logic is developed in (...) a purely dialogical way: instead of worlds, we have contexts, constituted by hypothetical assertions and where transitions between worlds are understood as extending contexts by the means of questions. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to study the notion of conditional right by means of a dialogical approach to constructive type theory (CTT). We will develop this idea in a framework where the distinction between local-reason and strategic-reason leads to the further distinction between two basic kinds of pieces of evidence, factual and logical. The present paper is based on Rahman (2015). However, though the underlying CTT-analysis is the same, the dialogical reconstruction makes use of a new way (...) of linking dialogical logic and CTT. (shrink)

The paper presents a very brief overview of Per Martin-Löf's Constructive Type Theory (CTT for short). It is thought as handout for a mastersl level seminar? Sicne it is an overview on existing literatures there is no claim on originaliyt here.

The main idea animating the present paper is that the general aim of debates, such as the one involving the notorious case of the Master Argument, is the ponderation of logical principles by confronting them with some set of assertions and other endorsed principles on the meaning explanation of connectives, quantifiers and modality. As suggested by Seel (2017), the point of the specific case of the MA is about examining Aristotle’s notion of possibility – as implemented by the Possibility Principle (...) (i.e., If it is necessary that if A then B, then B is possible if A is) and the Possibility Rule (i.e., If A is possible, and if B follows from the assumption of A, then B is is possible) in the context of a dialectical debate where it has been asserted that a given proposition is possible, even it is neither true now nor it will ever be, and where at the same time the irrevocability of the past has been endorsed. This suggests to study the MA debate in a setting based on Marion’s (2020) reconstruction of Aristotle’s Dialectical Bouts, adapted to propositions affected by modalities. The setting of Dialectical Bouts for the MA proposed includes•Propositions affected by Reichenbach’s (1948, § 5) three-folded temporal reference, namely: the point of speech S, the point of reference R and the point of the event E. This constitutes our take on Vuillemin’s (1977, 1979, 1984, 1996) suggestion of a “double indexation”.•The dialogical meaning explanation for modalities understood as involving hypotheticals. •The dialogical rules that settle the commitments undertaken when endorsing Aristotle’s Possibility Principle. In fact, in relation to the notion of possibility at work in Vuillemin’s (1996) reconstruction we explored different formulations of the Possibility Rule. Still, there remains a dearth of researches confronting the different formulations of the Possibility Rule with the texts studied by Crubellier (2010) and Rosen and Malink (2012). More generally and coming back to my remarks above, one of the most fruitful insights that can be gained from Vuillemin’s writings on the MA, is that such kind of debates provide an instance of a general pattern for reasoning that I shall call Dialectical Bouts of Material Admissibility (BMA). The rationale behind such kind of argumentation-pattern is to examine the incorporation of new (epistemological, ontological or logical) principles against the background of the commitments undertaken by endorsing a specific set of assertions and meaning explanations. They display the kind of abductive procedure stressed by Crubellier’s (2014) study of syllogism. Under this perspective Ebbinghaus’s (1964) casting of the inferential moves that reduce imperfect syllogisms to perfect ones as implementing an admissibility procedure, represents a logical generalization of the material procedures at stake in the Dialectical Bouts of Material Admissibility. Furthermore if, as stressed by Duthil-Novaes (2005) Medieval Obligations represent a development of Aristotelian Bouts aimed at the ludic exercise of consistency maintenance, DMA should be rather linked to the Islamic tradition of dialectical theory [jadal, munāẓara, ādāb al-baḥth], aimed at the epistemological task of what Young (2017) calls the forging of principles, including legal and deontic ones. In a more contemporary setting, DMA can be related to Brandom’s (2000, pp. 66-77) considerations on Non-Conservative Extensions, where the point of dialectical procedures is put under public Socratic scrutiny the discovery and elucidation of concepts. This general point on Dialectical Bouts of Material Admissibility can be seen as underlying Vuillemin’s project of linking the study of the MA with the classification of philosophical systems.The present paper does not contain a fully developed study on such Dialectical Bouts, but it is rather is an invitation to pick up the gauntlet that Jules Vuillemin threw into the ring. (shrink)