We consider probabilistic theories in which the most elementary system, a two-dimensional system, contains one bit of information. The bit is assumed to be contained in any complete set of mutually complementary measurements. The requirement of invariance of the information under a continuous change of the set of mutually complementary measurements uniquely singles out a measure of information, which is quadratic in probabilities. The assumption which gives the same scaling of the number of degrees of freedom with the dimension as (...) in quantum theory follows essentially from the assumption that all physical states of a higher dimensional system are those and only those from which one can post-select physical states of two-dimensional systems. The requirement that no more than one bit of information (as quantified by the quadratic measure) is contained in all possible post-selected two-dimensional systems is equivalent to the positivity of density operator in quantum theory. (shrink)

'Des te erger voor de feiten.' Met die woorden vatte de Duitse filosoof G.W.F. Hegel ooit zijn wijsgerig project samen, een stoutmoedig pleidooi vóór theorie en tégen de journalistieke waan van de dag. Vanuit dat motto verzamelt deze bundel een half decennium aan essays met politiek-filosofische insteek. Die behandelen thema's van de bankencrisis over de coronacrisis tot de malaise van de democratie. In vogelvlucht worden enkele diepe verschuivingen zichtbaar in het politieke bestel na 2008 - zowel in België als in (...) het buitenland. Neemt populisme de plaats van partijdemocratie in? Slaat de postpolitiek van de jaren 1990 vandaag door in 'hyperpolitiek'? En is de tijd van de monsters aangebroken, of die van een progressieve dageraad? Des te erger voor de feiten voorziet context bij een oneindig verwarrend tijdperk."--Publisher information. (shrink)

In this pa per I will try to of fer a syn the sis be tween two con flict ing epistemological po si - tions on the re cent philo soph i cal scene: pos i tiv - ism, whose her i tage sur vives as the be lief that sci ence is the most gen u ine form of knowl edge, and the de fend ers of incommensur..

Review of: Fiona MacDonald: Individualising risk (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, 223 pp, 130€ HB). MacDonald advances several claims. First, the ‘gig economy’ and ‘cash-for-care’ marketisation of social care and health support work come with major pitfalls: These are explored with reference to specific cases in Australia and England. Second, processes that underlie the individualisation of care need to be identified and critically evaluated. For when risk and responsibility are shifted onto individual workers, what we can expect to see, given the (...) evidence, is a marked decrease in the quality of care that the elderly and people with disability receive. [...]. (shrink)

When St. Thomas wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles in the first half of the 1260s, he was contributing to a long-standing Christian effort to receive Aristotle’s writings without accepting his errors. If Aristotle was to be in the Christian world what everybody was proclaiming, namely, the Philosopher, he could not remain an ancient pagan thinker nor could his philosophy remain subject to the errors and, even more, the limitations that historically it contained. Clearly enough, an Aristotle who was merely freed (...) from his errors would not do. For if, though purified, he retained the perspective of his own ancient world, he could not speak for philosophy in a Christian climate and his philosophy could not serve as a human instrument in the exposition of Christian teaching. What Aristotle needed—so St. Thomas thought—was, beyond correction, a reconstruction and even a reestablishment of his doctrine on a different foundation from his own. (shrink)

Aristotle maintains that vicious people are blameworthy despite their moral ignorance, since becoming vicious was up to them and whatever is up to us we are able to do or not do. However, one’s upbringing shapes one’s moral character. Together, these claims invite an objection I call the horrible childhood challenge. According to this objection, vicious adults who suffered horrible childhoods through which they were taught to adopt bad ends as though they were good should not be held accountable for (...) their vice. Aristotle’s likely answer to this challenge reveals that, for Aristotle, a minimal degree of rationality is necessary for moral responsibility. I argue that, for Aristotle, a vicious agent is responsible for her vice only if 1) she is rational, which implies 2) she grasps a specific basic principle, thus consenting to become a certain kind of person through action. The thoroughly bad who satisfy both claims are moral idiots; those who do not may be blameless brutes. (shrink)

When communication is not disinterested, seemingly inconsistent preferences are predictable from language pragmatics and information non-equivalence. In addition, the classic risky choice framing effect found in the Asian disease task – risk-aversion with gains and risk-seeking with losses – applies to gambles, but tends to be overgeneralized to non-gambling situations.

The object of research is the connection between language and culture. The subject of the study is the mutual influence of language and culture in the socio-institutional aspect. The author examines in detail two functions of language in relation to social institutions. 1) Performing a socio-constitutive function, language is the basic condition for the existence of institutions. 2) Performing a socially representative function, language reflects the specifics of social relations of a particular culture. It is proved that the existence of (...) social institutions depends on the presence of language, and expressions about institutional facts have both performative and constative meanings. Special attention is paid to the hypothesis of linguistic relativity in the analysis of expressions about institutional facts. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the interdisciplinary consideration of the issue with the involvement of theoretical models from the philosophy of language, sociolinguistics, the science of social institutions. The author's special contribution to the research of the topic is to solve the problem of the connection between language and culture based on the theory of speech acts in its application to the study of social institutions and institutional facts. The main conclusion of the study is that the analysis of the constitution and representation of institutional facts is the most fruitful for substantiating the concept of linguistic relativism, since if an institutional fact is not presented linguistically, then it does not exist as such. (shrink)

I. The following essay aims to compare the proofs for the existence of God in four medieval theologians, namely, St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, Being theologians, all four men believed in a divine revelation and their personal intellectual activity took place within the world of revelation. Fides quaerens intellectum, which was St. Anselm’s title for the Proslogion before he gave it a name, is a formula that can be applied to all these (...) thinkers in their individual religious adventures. Their lives were spent in seeking after the God who had met them on earth and in responding to that meeting. St. Anselm belongs to the end of the eleventh century, St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas were active during the third quarter of the thirteenth century, and Henry of Ghent’s literary activity falls mainly in the embattled twenty years after Aristotelianism in all its forms was condemned in 1277 in Paris. This was the time when Christian theologians were beginning to build a new religious synthesis that reflected the conservative mood one can still read in the text of Giles of Rome’s De Erroribus Philosophorum. (shrink)