"La célébration du tricentenaire de la naissance de Jean-Jacques Rousseau a donné lieu, en 2012, à un foisonnement d'initiatives, particulièrement à Genève, sa ville natale. L'une d'elles fut le colloque "Rousseau, la République, la paix", répondant à l'appel à projets de la Ville de Genève sous l'enseigne "2012, Rousseau pour tous". Cet ouvrage se propose à la fois d'examiner ce que pouvait signifier l'opposition de Rousseau à une certaine forme de cosmopolitisme et d'interroger le sens d'un républicanisme basé sur le (...) patriotisme défensif. Il s'efforce également de mettre en lumière l'actualité de ce positionnement républicain original à l'heure du dépassement annoncé des nations et de la recherche d'une citoyenneté européenne. Réunissant les contributions d'universitaires d'horizons disciplinaires et géographiques variés, ainsi que de trois acteurs politiques, suisses et français, témoignant de la force inspiratrice de Rousseau pour leur action publique, ce livre collectif confirme la nécessité de poser en termes moins convenus les interrogations relatives à la République et à la paix aujourd'hui, et l'importance que peut avoir l'oeuvre de Rousseau dans ce questionnement."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

What is it for a picture to depict a scene? The most orthodox philosophical theory of pictorial representation holds that depiction is grounded in resemblance. A picture represents a scene in virtue of being similar to that scene in certain ways. This essay presents evidence against this claim: curvilinear perspective is one common style of depiction in which successful pictorial representation depends as much on a picture's systematic differences with the scene depicted as on the similarities; it cannot be analyzed (...) in terms of similarity alone. The same problem arises for many other kinds of depiction. The essay concludes that depiction in general is not grounded in resemblance but geometrical transformation. (shrink)

This paper looks at philosophical questions that arise in the context of AI alignment. It defends three propositions. First, normative and technical aspects of the AI alignment problem are interrelated, creating space for productive engagement between people working in both domains. Second, it is important to be clear about the goal of alignment. There are significant differences between AI that aligns with instructions, intentions, revealed preferences, ideal preferences, interests and values. A principle-based approach to AI alignment, which combines these elements (...) in a systematic way, has considerable advantages in this context. Third, the central challenge for theorists is not to identify ‘true’ moral principles for AI; rather, it is to identify fair principles for alignment that receive reflective endorsement despite widespread variation in people’s moral beliefs. The final part of the paper explores three ways in which fair principles for AI alignment could potentially be identified. (shrink)

The book, written in a clear, engaging style, contains four chapters.

It is still a widespread assumption that metaphysics and ontology deal with roughly the same questions. They are supposed to be concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and to give an account of the meaning of 'existence' or 'being' in line with the broadest possible metaphysical assumptions. Against this, Markus Gabriel proposes a radical form of ontological pluralism that divorces ontology from metaphysics, understood as the most fundamental theory of absolutely everything. He argues that the concept of existence (...) is incompatible with the existence of the world and therefore proposes his innovative no-world-view. In the context of recent debates surrounding new realism and speculative realism, Gabriel also develops the outlines of a realist epistemological pluralism. His idea here is that there are different forms of knowledge that correspond to the plurality of fields of sense that must be acknowledged in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics. (shrink)

We look at recent accounts of the indefinite extensibility of the concept set and compare them with a certain linguistic model of indefinite extensibility. We suggest that the linguistic model has much to recommend over alternative accounts of indefinite extensibility, and we defend it against three prima facie objections.

Living Nonviolently: Language for Resisting Violence proposes distinctions of language that effectively address issues of force, power, aggressiveness, violence and war. No other book provides such a consistent language for living nonviolently through examples drawn from nonhuman animals, human infancy, personal transactions, domestic politics, and international conflicts.

Philosophers often explain what could be the case in terms of what is, in fact, the case at one possible world or another. They may differ in what they take possible worlds to be or in their gloss of what is for something to be the case at a possible world. Still, they stand united by the threat of paradox. A family of paradoxes akin to the set-theoretic antinomies seem to allow one to derive a contradiction from apparently plausible principles. (...) Some of them concern the interaction between propositions and worlds, and they appear to afford the means to map classes of propositions into propositions – or, likewise, classes of worlds into worlds – in a one-to-one fashion that leads to contradiction. Yet another family of paradoxes threaten the view that whatever could exist does, in fact, exist, which is in line with modal realism, for example. This article aims to survey and identify the source of each family of paradoxes as well as to outline some responses to them. (shrink)

The Russell–Myhill theorem threatens a familiar structured conception of propositions according to which two sentences express the same proposition only if they share the same syntactic structure and their corresponding syntactic constituents share the same semantic value. Given the role of the principle of universal instantiation in the derivation of the theorem in simple type theory, one may hope to rehabilitate the core of the structured view of propositions in ramified type theory, where the principle is systematically restricted. We suggest (...) otherwise. The ramified core of the structured theory of propositions remains inconsistent in ramified type theory augmented with axioms of reducibility. This is significant because reducibility has been thought to be perfectly consistent with the ramified approach to the intensional antinomies. Nor is the addition of reducibility to ramified type theory sufficient to restore other intensional puzzles such as Prior’s paradox or Kripke’s puzzle about time and thought. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper takes a close look at the thought that mereological relations on material objects mirror, and are mirrored by, parallel mereological relations on their exact locations. This hypothesis is made more precise by means of a battery of principles from which more substantive consequences are derived. Mereological harmony turns out to entail, for example, that atomistic space is an inhospitable environment for material gunk or that Whiteheadian space is not a hospitable environment for unextended material atoms.

Confirmation bias has been widely studied for its role in failures of reasoning. Individuals exhibiting confirmation bias fail to engage with information that contradicts their current beliefs, and, as a result, can fail to abandon inaccurate beliefs. But although most investigations of confirmation bias focus on individual learning, human knowledge is typically developed within a social structure. We use network models to show that moderate confirmation bias often improves group learning. However, a downside is that a stronger form of confirmation (...) bias can hurt the knowledge producing capacity of the community. (shrink)

This article is a libertarian critique of incest laws. On the basis of the libertarian “harm principle”, one must ask what exactly is the harm that incest brings forth. Traditionally, anthropologists have tried to rationalize the incest taboo in various theories, and lawmakers have used these principles as grounds for the criminalization of incest. These principles are the preservation of family structure, the enhancement of alliances and the avoidance of genetic risks. While I acknowledge that these rationalizations are plausible, I (...) argue that they are still not sufficient grounds for the preservation of incest laws, and consequently, there is an ethical need to reform them. (shrink)

In NIP theories, generically stable Keisler measures can be characterized in several ways. We analyze these various forms of “generic stability” in arbitrary theories. Among other things, we show that the standard definition of generic stability for types coincides with the notion of a frequency interpretation measure. We also give combinatorial examples of types in NSOP theories that are finitely approximated but not generically stable, as well as ϕ-types in simple theories that are definable and finitely satisfiable in a small (...) model, but not finitely approximated. Our proofs demonstrate interesting connections to classical results from Ramsey theory for finite graphs and hypergraphs. (shrink)

While much has been written on phronesis, there is a dearth of empirical work on the how the concept can be developed and implemented in practice, particularly in an educational setting. To address this problem, characteristics of phronesis were identified through a review of current literature and an examination of related themes from a special issue of the Philosophy of Management Journal on the philosophy of innovation. The implementation of the concept was investigated using an illustrative study of ongoing work (...) aimed at embedding phronesis in an innovation educational module. The study will contribute to the nascent debate by providing evidence of embedding Aristotle’s phronesis in the curriculum of future managers, in this case Engineering and Business students, working in cross-functional teams. A schema is proposed, based on concepts distilled from the literature and the illustrative study, to examine whether an educational project cultivates phronesis among the students. (shrink)

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of “philosophical anthropology”, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents' practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical-sociological investigations presupposed and, at (...) the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an “idea of the human being”. The article reconstructs Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory, and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim's thesis that “Society is God” and Sartre's idea that “hell is other people”. (shrink)

Tagging is the phenomenon in which regions of a picture, map, or diagram are annotated with words or other symbols, to provide descriptive information about a depicted object. The interpretive principles that govern tagged images are not well understood, due in part to the difficulty of integrating pictorial and linguistic semantic rules. Rather than directly combining these rules, I propose to use the framework of perspectival feature maps as an intermediary representation of content, in which the outputs of pictorial and (...) linguistic interpretation may be assimilated. The result is a simple and compositional semantics for tagged images. (shrink)

We give three counterexamples to the folklore claim that in an arbitrary theory, if a complete type p over a set B does not divide over $C\subseteq B$, then no extension of p to a complete type over $\operatorname {acl}(B)$ divides over C. Two of our examples are also the first known theories where all sets are extension bases for nonforking, but forking and dividing differ for complete types (answering a question of Adler). One example is an $\mathrm {NSOP}_1$ theory (...) with a complete type that forks, but does not divide, over a model (answering a question of d’Elbée). Moreover, dividing independence fails to imply M-independence in this example (which refutes another folklore claim). In addition to these counterexamples, we summarize various related properties of dividing that are still true. We also address consequences for previous literature, including an earlier unpublished result about forking and dividing in free amalgamation theories, and some claims about dividing in the theory of generic $K_{m,n}$ -free incidence structures. (shrink)

Busca-se neste artigo apresentar, ainda que de forma panorâmica, algumas inferências sobre o estatuto da Ética no primeiro Wittgenstein, a partir da noção de análise completa da proposição e com base na teoria pictórica exposta no Tractatus. Tais inferências terão como plano de fundo a exposição que Wittgenstein faz em sua Conferência sobre a Ética, de 1929, onde o filósofo parece sustentar uma relação intrínseca entre juízos de valor ético e a perspectiva da primeira pessoa.

Die Stellung der Philosophie zwischen Wissenschaft und Dichtung kommt in mannigfachen Formen zwischen Gedicht und Lehrbuchform zum Ausdruck. Die hier versammelten Beiträge gehen den Gründen für diese unterschiedlichen Darstellungsformen nach und zeigen deren methodische Bedeutung.

In this paper we show that first-order languages extended with partially ordered connectives and partially ordered quantifiers define, under a certain interpretation, their own truth-predicate. The interpretation in question is in terms of games of imperfect information. This result is compared with those of Kripke and Feferman.

Although stakeholder theory is widely accepted in environmental disclosure research, empirical evidence about the role of stakeholders in firms’ disclosure is still scarce. The authors address this issue for a setting of carbon disclosure. Our international sample comprises the Carbon Disclosure Project Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 350 reports from 2008 to 2011, resulting in a total of 1,120 firms with 3,631 firm-year observations. The authors apply Tobit regressions to analyze the relationship between carbon disclosure and the relevance of (...) the following stakeholder groups: government, general public, media, employees, and customers. Our results confirm that in addition to carbon performance, all stakeholders are associated with carbon disclosure. Only one stakeholder group acts as a moderator for the relationship between carbon performance and carbon disclosure. Furthermore, the authors find that carbon performance but not the affiliation to a carbon-intensive industry acts as a moderator between stakeholder relevance and carbon disclosure. (shrink)

La singularité de la démarche philosophique de Gabriel Marcel vient de ce qu'elle renoue avec ses origines socratiques ; elle se fonde résolument sur le concret, c'est-à-dire le corps-propre (par oposition au corps-objet ou instrument), la sensation traitée comme manière d'être au monde plutôt que comme message, la mémoire, la volonté.