This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of 'probabilistic semantics' which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked through a (...) modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of 'assertibility conditions', whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses. (shrink)

The Unspeakable Girl is more important for Agamben’s thought than its short length, antiquarianism, and belletristic format suggest. In discussing ancient initiation rites through an analysis of the figure of the Kore – the unspeakable girl – it suggests how we might conceive of initiation into form-of-life, thus addressing a pressing question that emerges from Agamben’s Homo Sacer project: if Agamben’s thought aims at the demystification of philosophy, yet mystery is the essence of philosophical initiation as traditionally conceived and philosophy (...) needs some kind of initiation, how could one conceive of an initiation into that which is without mystery – into the profane. Yet by insisting on an opposition between “authentic” interior gestures and their vulgar betrayal, Agamben undermines his own most radical insight. Such a distinction can never be drawn, and hence a different kind of initiation must be envisioned: not into the critical spectatorship of the dance, but into the dance itself. (shrink)

Arguments between those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not have been at fever pitch. They have also reached an impasse, with equally entrenched views held by believer and atheist - and even agnostic - alike. This collection is one of the first books to move beyond this deadlock. Specially commissioned chapters address major areas that cut across the debate between the two sides: the origin of knowledge, objectivity and meaning; moral values and the nature of the human (...) person and the good life; and the challenge of how to promote honest and fruitful dialogue in the light of the wide diversity of beliefs, religious and otherwise. Under these broad headings leading figures in the field examine and reflect upon: Secular and religious humanism The idea of the sacred The vexed issue of science in both religious and secular accounts of knowledge Spirituality for the godless Non-western perspectives on the atheism/theism debate. A key feature of the collection is a dialogue between Raymond Tallis and Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury. _Religion and Atheism: Beyond the Divide _will interest anyone who is concerned about the clash between the religious and the secular and how to move beyond it, as well as students of ethics, philosophy of religion and religious studies. (shrink)

Until recently, the nature of children’s well-being or prudential value remained all but unexplored in the literature on well-being. There now exists a small but growing body of work on the topic. In this chapter, I focus on a cluster of under-explored issues relating to children’s well-being. I investigate, in specific, three distinct (and to my mind puzzling) positions about it, namely, that children’s lives cannot on the whole go well or poorly for them, prudentially speaking; that the prudential goods (...) of childhood count for less than the same goods of adulthood towards the prudential value of an individual’s life as a whole; and that children’s prudential goods (or goods more generally) are (at least in some cases) in some way special. This chapter is divided into four main sections. In the first section, I briefly describe some accounts of the nature of children’s well-being. In the next three sections, I address the three somewhat puzzling positions mentioned above. (shrink)

It is uncontroversial that our engagement with artworks is constrained by obligations; most commonly, these consist in obligations to other persons, such as artists, audiences, and owners of artworks. A more controversial claim is that we have genuine obligations to artworks themselves. I defend a qualified version of this claim. However, I argue that such obligations do not derive from the supposed moral rights of artworks – for no such rights exist. Rather, I argue that these obligations are instances of (...) duties of love: obligations that one incurs in virtue of loving some object, be it a person or, in this case, an artwork. (shrink)

What would it take for an artificial agent to be treated as having moral value? As a first step toward answering this question, we ask what it would take for an artificial agent to be capable of the sort of autonomous, adaptive social behavior that is characteristic of the animals that humans interact with. We propose that this sort of capacity is best measured by what we call the Embodied Turing Test. The Embodied Turing test is a test in which (...) intelligence is operationally defined in terms of autonomous, adaptive interaction with the environment and with other animals. Three versions of the Embodied Turing test were performed with a SONY AIBO robot. Human participants were asked to differentiate between AIBO in a human-controlled mode and AIBO in a software-controlled mode. Our results indicate that the human participants were guessing at how AIBO was controlled. Our data reveals that people do not have enough experience with robots to accurately evaluate its behavior. This indicates that today’s humans do not have enough experience with artificial agents to treat them as morally valuable. (shrink)

There has recently been considerable interest in accounts of fiction which treat fictional characters as abstract objects. In this paper I argue against this view. More precisely I argue that such accounts are unable to accommodate our intuitions that fictional negative existentials such as “Raskolnikov doesn’t exist” are true. I offer a general argument to this effect and then consider, but reject, some of the accounts of fictional negative existentials offered by abstract object theorists. I then note that some of (...) the sort of data invoked by the abstract object theorist in fact cuts against her position. I concludle that we should not regard fictional characters as abstract objects but rather should adopt a make-believe theoretic account of fictional characters along the lines of those developed by Ken Walton and others. (shrink)

This paper reviews the recent history of a subset of research in dynamical cognitive science, in particular that subset that allies itself with the sciences of complexity and casts cognitive systems as interaction dominant, noncomputational, and nonmodular. I look at this history in the light of C.S. Peirce's understanding of scientific reasoning as progressing from abduction to deduction to induction. In particular, I examine the development of a controversy concerning the use of the interaction dominance of human cognitive systems as (...) an explanation of the ubiquitous 1/f noise, multifractality, and complexity matching in human behavior. (shrink)

This paper suggests a structure that makes room for a class of solutions to the mental causation problem.

Persuasion is an activity that involves one party trying to induce another party to believe something or to do something. It is an important and multifaceted human facility. Obviously, sales and ma...

This study is the first to explicitly assess the connections between welfare state spending and the gendered and classed dimensions of unpaid care work across 29 European nations. Our research uses multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey data, examining childcare and housework burdens for people living with at least one child under the age of 18. Two key findings emerge: First, by disaggregating different types of unpaid care work, we find that childcare provision is more gendered than (...) classed—reflecting trends toward “intensive mothering”. Housework and cooking, on the contrary, demonstrate both gender and class effects, likely because they are more readily outsourced by wealthier individuals to the paid care sector. Second, while overall social expenditure has no effect on hours spent on childcare and housework, results suggest that family policy may shape the relationship between gender, income, and housework. Specifically, family policy expenditure is associated with a considerably smaller gender gap vis-à-vis the time dedicated to housework: This effect is present across the income spectrum, but is particularly substantial in the case of lower income women. (shrink)

Agamben’s self-professed epigonism underwrites his entire project, serving as an even more fundamental methodological concept than the signature, paradigm, and archeology. In Infancy and History, Agamben maintains that transcendental experience is no longer a viable source of philosophical insight; philosophers go astray referring their thinking back to an authentic yet esoteric experience that, itself unspeakable, grounds positive philosophical assertions. Neither mysterious nor ineffable, the experience founding philosophy is the completely patent, non-latent, experience of language’s pure exteriority. Rather than “deconstructing” metaphysics (...) by exposing its hidden contradictions, philosophy must “deconfabulate,” telling fables about philosophy to undo its enchantments, since it is through the fable that the spell of silence, which itself originates in fable, can be broken. This “epigonal” method, which follows after the tradition rather than seeking a new grounding, is itself justified through Agamben’s account, in The End of the Poem, of the Italian, as opposed to Germanic, physiognomy and of a specifically Italian relation to language going back to Dante. To be Italian is to embrace the “deadness” of one’s own language, rejecting the myth of the resurrection of the original potencies of a dead classical language through a living, modern language. (shrink)

The following paper seeks to show, through a close reading of lines 604-612 from the second book of the Aeneid, that Virgil develops an understanding of truth opposed to the dominant understanding of truth of the philosophical tradition. Whereas philosophy (as exemplified in the “cave analogy” of Plato’s Republic)regards truth as a power over deception, Virgil comes to understand truth instead as the effect of a deception that cannot be “disillusioned,” and that in turn summons us towards an obedience to (...) a power that deceives us. This way of understanding the truth, I further suggest, stands in a close relation to literature, and suggests a way to think of the possibilities of literature outside the perspective of philosophy. (shrink)

Are there truly fundamental entities in nature? Or are the things that we regard as fundamental in our theories – for example space, time or the masses of elementary particles – merely awaiting a derivation from a new, yet to be discovered theory based on elements that are more fundamental? This was the central question posed in the 2018 FQXi essay competition, which drew more than 200 entries from professional physicists, philosophers, and other scholars. This volume presents enhanced versions of (...) the fifteen award-winning essays, giving a spectrum of views and insights on this fascinating topic. From a prescription for “when to stop digging” to the case for strong emergence, the reader will find here a plethora of stimulating and challenging ideas - presented in a largely non-technical manner - on which to sharpen their understanding of the language of physics and even the nature of reality. (shrink)

This collection of prize-winning essays addresses the controversial question of how meaning and goals can emerge in a physical world governed by mathematical laws. What are the prerequisites for a system to have goals? What makes a physical process into a signal? Does eliminating the homunculus solve the problem? The three first-prize winners, Larissa Albantakis, Carlo Rovelli and Jochen Szangolies tackle exactly these challenges, while many other aspects feature in the other award winning contributions. All contributions are accessible to non-specialists. (...) These seventeen stimulating and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition in 2017.The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources. (shrink)

L'A. studia il concetto della perfezione umana nei primi commenti sull'Etica Nicomachea: prende in considerazione in particolare l'anonimo commento conservato in Napoli, BN, III.G.8, il testo pubblicato in Le cours sur l'«Ethica nova d'un maitre ès Arts de Paris , edito da R.A. Gauthier , la Divisio scientiarum di Arnulfo Provinciale, il commento attribuito erroneamente a Peckham e quello ascritto a Kilwardby. Questi commentatori si soffermarono sul significato della beatitudine imperfetta, la causa della felicità, la differenza tra virtù morali ed (...) intellettuali. A causa dell'indisponibilità dell'intero testo, e dell'ottica cristiana con cui essi lo affrontavano, convinti che fosse impossibile trovare la perfetta realizzazione umana nel mondo naturale, essi non videro una sostanziale soluzione di continuità tra la prospettiva aristotelica e il concetto di beatitudine, intesa come unione intellettuale con Dio. (shrink)

When, in my invitation to commentators, I told them I should write a brief editorial 'reflection', I little realised how shockingly accurate a reflection of JCS and its character -- both its strengths and limitations -- their own brief articles would provide. The disgraceful gender imbalance I mentioned in my introduction; what the commentaries also show is how confined we are to scientific materialism as a basic working paradigm. I knew it of course, and certain correspondents chide me for it (...) regularly, but I confess this exercise brought it home with a fresh force. (shrink)

Echnaton Tutanchamun: Daten, Fakten, Literatur, 5th edition. By Hermann Alexander Schlögl. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xiv + 137. €19.

The Medinet Habu Records of the Foreign Wars of Ramesses III. By Donald Redford. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 91. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xi + 197. $122.