Hinduism is above all a way of life and a philosophy of life. Looking more closely, we can see that in India life and religion are inseparable. The objective of this paper is to analyze the influences of religion, in time, on the economic growth of India, a continuously changing country. The Indian economy is an economy of contrasts due to its caste system and its legal aspects that govern the society and which have been imposed since ancient times. After (...) analyzing the Hindu culture and civilization and seeing the impact of religion in the social sphere, we can say that, indeed, Hinduism represents a part of the socio-economic system, a way of life. This country was contemporary with the glory of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome and it saw all of them disappear. No doubt that it is hiding a secret in its way of life and in its spirituality. The secret of life without death, which India knows, results from the primacy of the spirituality. (shrink)

In an increasingly urbanized world, construction industry is called upon to serve the needs of human society, such as environmental protection and safety in terms of infrastructure. In this context, a sustainable and ethical development means a close connection between buildings and environment. This connection can be achieved through, for example, the concept of ecological concrete or green concrete, as it is often called. The conventional process of obtaining cement and mineral aggregates from the concrete composition generates pollution, especially through (...) greenhouse gas emissions. Also, one should not ignore the fact that extraction of the raw materials affects the habitats of the sites and of the neighboring areas. When construction materials are questioned, the ethical issues lay not in the means of expression, but mainly in the means of production. More to the point, the present contribution aimed to find solutions for enhancing the adhesion of vegetal aggregates with the cement matrix, in order to obtain a material with optimal mechanical properties, which is valued as an ethical approach of building industry. Results showed that plant aggregates can be used to obtain a building material which can be improved by using partial substitution of cement by silica fume, fly ash, or by using additives and that green concrete as an environmentally friendly material offers the alternative for lower energy use and fewer CO2 emissions. Marketers must understand not only the advantages of these green materials, but also that they have an ethical commitment to provide consumers with environmentally friendly materials. (shrink)

In this article I focus on two conflicting directions of supraindividualism concerning joint agency. The two representative authors here are Schmitt (2003b) and Pettit (2003). The tension lies between assuming there is a joint agent, without ontologically committing to such an agent, any reference to it being just a façon de parler, or, on the contrary, assuming there is a joint agent and ontologically committing to it. The problem of joint agency is discussed in relation to the problem of joint (...) action. My aim is to provide a critical discussion of the problem of joint agency. For this, I provide an overview of Schmitt’s and Pettit’s approaches to joint agency, and an example meant to raise some doubts regarding Schmitt’s criterion for possessing agency. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 1, I discuss the key concepts concerning this problem. In Section 2, I present Schmitt’s noncommittal approach to joint agency. In Section 3, I present Pettit’s committal approach. In Section 4 and 5, I discuss Schmitt’s criterion for being an agent and why there cannot be a joint agent in the strict existential sense. His criterion relies on a system of beliefs that should be possessed by an agent. In this context, I formulate a critique of this requirement. In the last Section, I follow some of Pettit’s (2003) and Gilbert’s (2004) ideas to provide an example concerning the interaction between individual and group beliefs, which also supports the critique of Schmitt’s criterion. (shrink)

Drawing on Husserlian resources and existentialist and hermeneutical approaches, this book argues that critique is largely a question of method. It shows that phenomenological discussions of social and political problems draw from a tradition of radically critical investigations in epistemology, social ontology, political theory, and ethics.

In artificial intelligence literature, “delusions” are characterized as the generation of unfaithful output from reliable source content. There is an extensive literature on computer-generated delusions, ranging from visual hallucinations, like the production of nonsensical images in Computer Vision, to nonsensical text generated by (natural) language models, but this literature is predominantly taxonomic. In a recent research paper, however, a group of scientists from DeepMind successfully presented a formal treatment of an entire class of delusions in generative AI models (i.e., models (...) based on a transformer architecture, both with and without RLHF—reinforcement learning with human feedback, such as BERT, GPT-3 or the more recent GPT-3.5), referred to as auto-suggestive delusions. Auto-suggestive delusions are not mere unfaithful output, but are self-induced by the transformer models themselves. Typically, these delusions have been subsumed under the concept of exposure bias, but exposure bias alone does not elucidate their nature. In order to address their nature, I will introduce a formal framework that clarifies the probabilistic delusions capable of explaining exposure bias in a broad manner. This will serve as the foundation for exploring auto-suggestive delusions in language models. Next, an examination of self- or auto-suggestive delusions will be undertaken, by drawing an analogy with the rule-following problematic from the philosophy of mind and language. Finally, I will argue that this comprehensive approach leads to the suggestion that transformers, large language models in particular, may develop in a manner that touches upon solipsism and the emergence of a private language, in a weak sense. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on totalitarian regimes. For her, such a political development becomes possible particularly because people abrogate their faculty of thinking. Totalitarianism, in turn, breeds conformity, engenders an ethics of alienation. Moreover, language, too, loses its hermeneutical ability to conjure up other possible, alternative, imaginative scenarios, as the regime clamps down on the use of words and phrases, creating a rhetorically univocal echo chamber from which it becomes increasingly more difficult to escape. (...) The observations of Stanislav Aseyev, a Ukrainian journalist, corroborates Arendt’s reflections, underscoring her perennial relevance on this matter. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a personal reflection regarding the theoretical/philosophical relation between the generally accepted theological grounding of icon painting and other contemporary artistical endeavours to integrate the religious feeling – of Christian-Orthodox inspiration. This reflection is based on a mixture of ideas from different thought-frameworks which have as common ground the need for speculating on issues such as ‘tradition understanding’, ‘personal expression’, ‘art and religiousness’, exactly those key-themes that are constituting the fundamental threads of my (...) argumentation. Hence, my appeal to authors like Lucian Blaga, Leonid Uspensky, Martin Heidegger, Paul Evdochimov, and Christos Yannaras. The point of departure for my study is the powerful and unavoidable conflict between the need for personal artistic interpretations of religious themes – expressed through contemporary artistic techniques and the application of contemporary metaphysical modelings – and the need for attaching oneself to an ‘authentic’ tradition of religious experience and to a community with deep roots in history. My all-round thesis is that this conflict cannot be, at least, clarified by choosing, from the artistic point of view, between two extremes: contemporary secular art on the one hand, and sacred, canonical art on the other hand, but by finding conceptual common pathways. (shrink)

In Yesterday's Self, Andreea Ritivoi explores the philosophical and historical dimensions of nostalgia in the lives of immigrants, forging a connection between current trends in the philosophy of identity and intercultural studies. The book considers such questions as, Does attachment to one's native culture preclude or merely influence adaptation into a new culture? Do we fashion our identity in interdependence with others, or do we shape it in a non-contingent frame? Is it possible to assimilate in an unfamiliar world (...) without risking self-alienation? Ritivoi's response: nostalgia is both the poison and the cure in such situations. (shrink)

As Larry Laudan pointed out in the 1970s, in a convincing attempt to revive Auguste Comte’s positive philosophy, one overlooked aspect of Comte’s nineteenth-century philosophy of science was his categorical rejection of causal notions and their explanatory role in physical science. For example, Comte was skeptical about Laplace’s interpretation of Newtonian mechanics and the expansion of Laplace’s model of particles and forces to electricity, magnetism, and heat. But Laudan himself was not very clear on how Comte’s overall skepticism about causation (...) was modern rather than, say, naive. Much earlier, John Stuart Mill made the case that Comte was in fact confused about the notion of cause, which impeded Comte from distinguishing between “metaphysical” and “physical” causes and which stemmed from a narrow and uncritical attachment to Comte’s antimetaphysical program. This article is an attempt to argue against Mill that Comte was not naive: he envisioned a construction of physical theories that did not need to rely on causal notions. By stressing this point, I hope to make more transparent the sense in which Comte’s rejection of causation in physical science had a “modern ring about it.”. (shrink)

This article assesses the relevance of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy for the study of online forms of communication. In particular, the article deals with the appropriateness of using the concept of language game for the purpose of describing what happens in a virtual community. Testing Wittgenstein’s concept of language game in online context, we also analyse the language practices of one specific virtual community (patterns of communication, style, roles of members, internal organization of this ‘form of life’).

The Vagrant scholar -- Doxa -- Practical reasoning -- Epideictic -- The polis.

This paper investigates how the distribution of negative polarity items can inform our understanding of the underlying semantic representation of constituent questions. It argues that the distribution of NPIs in questions is governed by the same logical properties that govern their distribution in declarative constructions. Building on an observation due to Guerzoni and Sharvit that strength of exhaustivity in questions correlates with the acceptability of NPIs, I propose a revision of the semantics of questions that can explain this link in (...) terms already familiar from the literature of negative polarity, namely the availability of a local downward entailing environment. I argue for a new theory of questions that takes strength of exhaustivity to be encoded internal to the question nucleus rather than in different answer-hood operators. This switch, while conceptually a simple move, has far-reaching consequences in the domain of questions. I also show how this new analysis can account for a host of issues related to NPIs, such as the subject–object asymmetry noted by Han and Siegel, the interaction between NPIs and high versus low wh-adjuncts, the varying acceptability of NPIs in the restrictor of which-phrases, and the contrast between weak and strong NPIs. (shrink)

This study examined the relationship between the perceived fairness of the assessment process and the intention of participants to appeal the process, while taking into consideration the influence of two personality traits. Specifically, two of the Big Five traits, neuroticism and agreeableness, were included in the model, based on their special importance in predicting “anger-like” reactions similar to that triggered by unfairness. This study builds on the theoretical integration of the two dominant frameworks of organizational justice, and on two separate (...) empirical studies that use different methodologies : a personnel selection simulation and a study of an academic examination process. The pattern of results was similar in both studies. Neuroticism was not detected as a moderator based on the significance of the interaction term, but conditional effect analysis identified the specific area of scores where neuroticism was found to have a buffer effect on intention to appeal. Agreeableness weakens the relationship between perceived fairness and intention to appeal. However, contrary to our expectation, high agreeableness does not decrease but rather increases the probability of appealing the assessment process when it is perceived as unfair, thus providing evidence for the Pollyanna myth, i.e., that highly agreeable individuals are more likely to react to and appeal unfairness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This paper underlines the relationship between rhetoric and postmodernism. In lack of a unique definition, postmodernism is seldom described as a non-centred set of rhetorical, critical and discursive practices; rhetoric offers a fertile frame for the interpretation of postmodernism. In my approach, I analyze both the type of rhetoric through which we can grasp the current of postmodernism and the use of rhetoric inside the postmodern discursiveness. The former was born out of its relationship with modernism and from this (...) standpoint I am interested in investigating the rhetorical relevance of themes such as rupture, continuity, palimpsest, anamnesis, incompleteness. The latter is discussed mainly by focusing on the effects of the repositioning of rhetoric in postmodernism. These analyses create a cluster of motifs that constitute the nucleus of the contemporary rhetoric imaginary. RESUMO. Este trabalho evidencia a relação entre a retórica e o pós-modernismo. Na ausência de uma definição única, o pós-modernismo é muitas vezes como sendo um conjunto não centrado de práticas retóricas, críticas e discursivas. Dessa maneira, a retórica oferece um ambiente fértil de uma adequada interpretação do pós-modernismo. Dentro da minha abordagem, analisei tanto o tipo de retórica através do qual podemos entender o movimento pós-moderno, quanto o uso de retórica dentro da discursividade pós-moderna. O primeiro tipo de retórica nasceu do relacionamento com o modernismo e, nesse contexto, é investigada a relevância retórica de alguns temas como a ruptura, continuidade, palimpsesto, anamnese, incompletude. O segundo tipo de retórica é investigado especialmente através da concentração sobre os efeitos do reposicionamento da retórica no pós-modernismo. Essas análises se amparam em um conglomerado de razões que constitui o núcleo do imaginário da retórica contemporânea. (shrink)

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- and (...) lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination. (shrink)

Husserl’s extensive analyses of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and of the imagination (Phantasie) offer insightful and detailed structural explications. However, despite this careful work, Husserl’s discussions fail to overcome the need to rely on a most problematic concept: mental images. The epistemological conundrums triggered by the conceptual framework of mental images are well known—we have only to remember the questions regarding knowledge acquisition that plagued British empiricism. Beyond these problems, however, a plethora of important questions arise from claiming that mental images (...) are structural moments of imaging and imagining. Any attempt to clarify the structure and conditions for the possibility of aesthetic experience must first provide an unambiguous account of pictorial depiction—a task unattainable through the mental images discourse. Similarly, exposing the import of the imagination for theoretical scientific inquiries (be they positive or eidetic) requires an initial explication of the structure of this consciousness; this explication, however, must address our ability to imagine non-spatially determined objects—something the conceptual framework of mental images utterly fails to accomplish. In this paper I argue against Husserl’s reliance on mental images in his phenomenological analyses of imaging and imagining and propose an alternative structural account for both. This account is free of this reliance and able to steer clear of its insidious implications for epistemology, aesthetics, and methodological reflections. By closely following the development of Husserl’s account I suggest alternative descriptions while building on Husserl’s important work. (shrink)

Moral emotions (i.e. guilt, shame) and interpersonal processes such as fairness have been theorised to facilitate cooperation within society. However, empirical tests to support this association have yielded inconsistent results. The present research investigated whether guilt and shame have an impact on fairness-related decision-making and reciprocity-driven cooperation. College students (N = 94) were assigned to one of three experimental conditions (Guilt vs. Shame vs. Control) and instructed to complete an iterated Ultimatum Game against two anonymous partners. We manipulated social context (...) so that one partner would appear as predominantly fair, and the other as predominantly unfair. For guilt, we found that participants (assigned as proposers) reciprocated fair partners with significantly larger amounts of money (i.e. positive reciprocity). For shame, we found that participants had higher rejection rates of unfair splits, and subsequently offered less money to unfair partners (i.e. negative reciprocity). We argue that both guilt and shame benefit fairness-related judgments, guilt by endorsing fairness, and shame by punishing unfairness. Our results also show that guilt and shame benefit reciprocity-driven cooperation, although they do so via different pathways. Our findings suggest that guilt promotes cooperation via positive reciprocity, whereas shame stabilises cooperation via negative reciprocity. (shrink)

This article brings to light the role and importance of Descartes' concept of freedom for his ethics of belief. For Descartes, I argue, correctly assigning epistemic praise/blame means tracking authentic freedoms: ascertaining whether an act of assent is spontaneous or perverse both before and after eliciting the act of will. Authentic spontaneity ensures that the agent receives praise for his epistemic accomplishment, which includes the right results as well as the right order of steps. Authentic perversity leads to the agent (...) being blamed for not accepting the truth while fully aware of the gravity of the gesture. (shrink)

This article examines the controversial issue of blasphemy in literature from the viewpoint of reception inside and outside the academia. The thesis of the article is that blasphemy in literature, though inherently related to religion and language, has a plurality of connotations and interpretations (dissidence, intertextuality, critique of colonialism, discursive strategy, alterity/Otherness, ethnicity, subversive text). Consequently, blasphemy in literature is an incentive for fruitful discussions regarding tolerance, freedom of expression, and the re-situation of the (post)modern self in today’s world, dominated (...) by an uncanny admixture of secular and religious values. (shrink)

In 1992, the much acclaimed prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates publishes Black Water – a very harsh and condensed literary reenactment of a gruesome event having taken place more than twenty years before and known as the “Chappaquiddick incident”. Another twenty years later, through her 2012 novel Mudwoman, the author seems to revisit the topic that had haunted her for decades. This paper aims at establishing a certain narrative pattern connecting the two novels not only thematically, but also phantasmatically: (...) the sudden “resurrection” of Joyce Carol Oates’s character in the 2012 novel is, as we see it, far from being “incidental”. By “textual anastomosis”, we understand a subjective association of narratives in order to show how the disembodied consciousness “travels” from one character’s fictional body to another’s, triggering a whole bunch of personal memories which also resurrect in this other character’s fictional biography. (shrink)

Regression testing is applied whenever a code changes, ensuring that the modifications fixed the fault and no other faults are introduced. Due to a large number of test cases to be run, test case prioritization is one of the strategies that allows to run the test cases with the highest fault rate first. The aim of the paper is to present an optimized test case prioritization method inspired by ant colony optimization, test case prioritization–ANT. The criteria used by the optimization (...) algorithm are the number of faults not covered yet by the selected test cases and the sum of severity of the faults. The cost, i.e. time execution, for test cases is considered in the computation of the pheromone deposited on the graph’s edges. The average percentage of fault detected metric, as best selection criterion, is used to uncover maximum faults with the highest severity, and reducing the regression testing time. Several experiments are considered, detailed and discussed, comparing various algorithm parameter’s alternatives. A benchmark project is also used to validate the proposed approach. The obtained results are encouraging, being a cornerstone for new perspectives to be considered. (shrink)

The paper examines Husserl’s notion of teleology through the lens of necessity and argues that there are two senses of teleology—historical and transcendental—at work in the task of phenomenology, especially as Husserl comes to conceive it in theCrisis. To understand not only how these two senses are related but also how their relationship shapes Husserl’s notions of normativity, reason, and progress, I argue that we must look closely at phenomenology as a distinctive form of critique, namely critique ‘from within’. What (...) emerges is a philosophical stance that is fundamentally ambiguous: at once historical and transcendental-eidetic. This productive notion of ambiguity, I contend, differentiates Husserl’s conceptions of normativity, reason and progress from their Enlightenment guises. (shrink)

Many have deemed ineluctable the tension between Husserl’s transcendental eidetics and his Crisis method of historical reflection. In this paper, I argue that this tension is an apparent one. I contend that dissolving this tension and showing not only the possibility, but also the necessity of the successful collaboration between these two apparently irreconcilable methods guarantees the very freedom of inquiry Husserl so emphatically stressed. To make this case, I draw from Husserl’s synthetic analyses of type and concept constitution as (...) well as his later work on sedimentation and streaming-in and develop a richer modal taxonomy than the one Husserl proposed. I employ this taxonomy in an examination of the structures and conditions for the possibility of transcendental eidetic variation in order to show this method’s reliance on historically sedimented epistemic and normative resources. This reliance brings to light the necessity for a methodological critique, which is precisely what I take to be the work of teleological–historical reflection as Husserl comes to conceive it in the Crisis. (shrink)

This paper discusses the relation between the human security paradigm and the cosmopolitan democracy scenario as models for humanizing and changing the current international system and transforming it in a global security and development system centered on the individual rather than on the nation state. The main idea for which I argue is that the human security paradigm and the changes it determined in international relations (especially through the responsibility to protect principle) are compatible with the cosmopolitan democracy scenario for (...) changing and transforming the current international system. (shrink)

This paper challenges the standard interpretation of Descartes’s view that the essence of the mind is thinking. Most commentators take the essence of the mind to be constituted by thoughts as objects of awareness. By contrast, the position defended here is that willing is as much part of the essence of the Cartesian meditating mind as awareness. Willing is not just a type of thought, but whenever thinking occurs it invariably involves both awareness and willing. To substantiate the claim that (...) Descartes could not separate willing from the one meditating, the paper examines the role of the will at all the key junctures of the Meditations: the cogito, the clarity and distinctness of some of our ideas, the arguments for God’s existence, and the propensity to believe that our ideas of sensible things comefrom those things. (shrink)

The present article dwells on the idea of the empowerment of women as it was used by the Communist regime. Eugenics, a field much discussed in inter-war Romania, was the main tool in controlling women. The principles of this science, related to the idea of biology as destiny, were adopted and applied so that the private sphere became public. My thesis is that even if these principles were used in the communist strategy in order to strengthen the nation, in fact, (...) their core aspect – reproduction – became only a means for increasing work force and in the end weakened the family and implicitly the nation. (shrink)

We talk about groups as doing something, we talk as if groups have agency. Is our talk legitimate? Are there group agents? Is there something like group agency? In this paper, I discuss two ontological frameworks concerning existence questions: the Quinean framework and the Thomasson-Carnap framework. I apply them to the problem of group agency. I review the Quinean-oriented literature debating the existence of group agents and its methodological background. I argue, via Thomasson’s easy approach to ontology, that deflationism can (...) simplify the debate surrounding group agents. Thus, I argue for a Thomasson-Carnap framework and show that it is better suited to answer the particular question whether there are group agents. More specifically, I argue for a non-reductive simple realist view on group agents, i.e. I argue for the truth of “There are group agents,” via analytic entailments, by truths about the actions and deeds of groups. (shrink)

The paper contends that abstraction lies at the core of the philosophical and methodological rupture that occurred between Husserl and his mentor Franz Brentano. To accomplish this, it explores the notion of abstraction at work in these two thinkers’ methodological discussions through their respective claims regarding the structure of consciousness, and shows that how Husserl and Brentano analyze the structure of consciousness conditions and strictly delineates the nature and reach of their methods of inquiry. The paper pays close attention to (...) intentionality, founding (Fundierung), and qualitative modification (qualitative Modifikation) understood as principles of consciousness. While intentionality has been the topic of numerous discussions surrounding these two thinkers’ work, founding and qualitative modification have slipped under the radar despite the fact that they hold—as I intend to show—the key to shedding new light on their respective methods of inquiry. More specifically, the paper explicates the ways in which Brentano’s notion of founding (understood as a relationship between whole acts) and his failure to identify radical-qualitative modification as a principle of consciousness preclude him from offering a successful model for philosophical universalizing thought. It is my hope to show that Husserl’s rethinking of founding as a relationship between certain structural moments of acts along with his novel notion of qualitative modification ground his attempt to carve a new method of philosophical inquiry—albeit jejune and ambiguous at the time of the Investigations, yet nevertheless able to successfully negotiate the problems faced by his predecessor. (shrink)

Following Husserl’s analyses of perception and imagination, the paper introduces two basic modes of intelligibility – the normalizing and the imagining – and argues that they are deeply intertwined, despite radical qualitative differences between them. What sets these two modes apart are their distinctive teleological orientations. To show this, the paper looks closely at the ways in which we experience difference in these respective modes. This discussion requires, however, that we challenge Husserl’s own framework for analyzing the imagination, which emerges (...) as non-exhaustive, perhaps even misleading. What transpires is that imagining consciousness exhibits a unique critical dimension, a potentially powerful resource for socio-cultural critique. (shrink)