This book consists of a series of papers "read and discussed at the first Symposium of Exact Philosophy" at Montreal in 1971. "Exact philosophy," the editor says, means "mathematical philosophy, i.e., philosophy done with the explicit help of mathematical logic and mathematics." Judging from the contents, a more accurate statement would be that "exact philosophy" means formal semantics and modal logic. Two thirds of the papers are on these topics. The others include an essay on "Concepts of Randomness" by Peter (...) Kirschenmann; a characteristically difficult paper on "Plato’s Phaedo Theory of Relations" by Hector Castañeda; a somewhat inexact discursus on "Foundations as a Branch of Mathematics" by William Hatcher with a reply by Charles Castonguay; and a paper by Raimo Tuomela on "Deductive Explanation of Scientific Laws", or, more exactly, on Ohmer’s discussion of that topic. The subject’s are highly specialized and their treatment is complex. In addition to those mentioned, other essays are "Matters of Relevance" by Hugues Leblanc, with an answer by Brian Chellas; "Translation and Reduction" by Lars Svenonius; "A Program for the Semantics of Science" by Mario Bunge; "S-P Interrogatives" by Nuel Belnap; "The Logic of Conditional Obligation" by Bas C. Van Frassen with commentary by Harry Beaty; and "The Intuitive Background of Normative Legal Discourse and Its Formalization" by Carlos E. Alchourron.—M.H. (shrink)

This paper defends a 'punctivist' conception of consciousness from recent attacks by Ian Phillips and Matthew Soteriou. As we intend it, 'punctivism' is the view that a subject's experience over some interval is determined by their experiential states at each instant during it. Phillips and Soteriou both offer ingenious arguments purporting to show that the punctivist is unable to make sense of motion perception; and that only by adopting an 'holistic' conception -- whereby a subject's instantaneous experiences are determined by (...) their experience over the interval -- can we make sense of the puzzles such phenomena pose. We contend that both arguments invoke dubious claims, their proffered solutions come with highly controversial commitments, and, if we take punctivism seriously, it is difficult to see why the so-called puzzles should be puzzling in the first place. A punctivist model of motion perception is proposed in response, and objections anticipated. (shrink)

The philosophy of medicine cum bioethics has become the socially recognized source for moral and epistemic direction in health-care decision-making. Over the last three decades, this field has been accepted politically as an authorized source of guidance for policy and law. The field's political actors have included the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical (...) and Behavioral Research , the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and the new Council on Bioethics; these groups and agencies have set forth rules on issues ranging from the role of humans in biomedical research to the production of human embryos for research, the definition of death, and the permissibility of human cloning. The members of the field are not just scholars and teachers in an academic realm directed to both theoretical and applied issues. They are, in addition, practitioners of a conceptual and moral trade that possesses a legal and political standing. This essay critically addresses the sudden emergence of bioethics as a societally recognized source of moral guidance, a source replete with authorized moral experts. Attention is directed to moral and conceptual assumptions that have led the philosophy of medicine, and especially bioethics, to acquire a quasi-juridical/political role in guiding clinical choices, framing health-care policy, and directing court holdings. (shrink)

Ruhollah Khomeini views on clergy and professional ethics.

This paper discusses the stability and Hopf bifurcation analysis of the diffusive Kaldor–Kalecki model with a delay included in both gross product and capital stock functions. The reaction-diffusion domain is considered, and the Galerkin analytical method is used to derive the system of ordinary differential equations. The methodology used to determine the Hopf bifurcation points is discussed in detail. Furthermore, full diagrams of the Hopf bifurcation regions considered in the stability analysis are shown, and some numerical simulations of the limit (...) cycle are used to confirm the theoretical outcomes. The delay investment parameter and diffusion coefficient can have great impacts on the Hopf bifurcations and stability of the business cycle model. The investment parameters for the gross product and capital stock as well as the adjustment coefficient of the production market are also studied. These parameters can cause instability in, and the stabilization of, the business cycle model. In addition, we point out that, as the delay investment parameter increases, the Hopf bifurcation points for the diffusion coefficient values decrease considerably. When the delay investment parameter has a very small value, the solution of the business cycle model tends to become steady. (shrink)

Extant literature suggests a correlation between the thematic core of an adolescent’s personal account of depression and the trajectory of her personality development. This possible correlation has not been explored in a way that includes detailed qualitative analyses of reported experiences of adolescent depression. By discussing a single case design, this contribution illustrates and justifies an interpretative procedure that has been implemented to assist such an exploration. The paper focuses on the suitability of this approach for the investigation of all-encompassing (...) alterations of the experiential field in psychopathological conditions. I argue that this suitability is grounded in a phenomenological understanding of the explicative task in terms of a disclosure of the intentional constitution of the life-world of adolescent depression. The discussion begins with a contextualization of the single case design within a multilayered and methodologically mixed study. Against this background, I illustrate the steps of a ‘systematic of interpretation’ aimed at exposing meaning horizons. Touching on issues concerning the empirical validity of the approach, these meaning horizons are construed as objectively plausible frames of intelligibility of a subjectively particular form of experience. Drawing on a characterization of transcendental arguments, I discuss the relationship between the illustrated procedure and the investigational attitude that, according to Husserl, defines phenomenology as a properly philosophical endeavor. In this context, I eventually characterize the illustrated procedure as a crossover approach to human experiential life aligned with the tradition of phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

There is a well-worn image and phrase for libertarianism: "atomized individualism." This hobgoblin has spread so thoroughly that even some libertarians think their philosophy unreservedly supports private persons, whatever the situation, whatever their behavior. Smith's Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism, corrects this misrepresentation with careful intellectual surveys of Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Butler, Mandeville, and Hutcheson and their respective contributions to political philosophy.

Spinoza speculated on how ethics could emerge from biology and psychology rather than disrupt them and recent evidence suggests he might have gotten it right. His radical deconstruction and reconstruction of ethics is supported by a number of avenues of research in the cognitive and neurosciences. This paper gathers together and presents a composite picture of recent research that supports Spinoza’s theory of the emotions and of the natural origins of ethics. It enumerates twelve naturalist claims of Spinoza that now (...) seem to be supported by substantial evidence from the neurosciences and recent cognitive science. I focus on the evidence provided by Lakoff and Johnson in their summary of recent cognitive science in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999); by Antonio Damasio in his assessment of the state of affective neuroscience in Descartes’ Error (1994) and in The Feeling of What Happens (1999) (with passing references to his recent Looking for Spinoza (2003); and by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues in the neural basis of emotional contagion and resonance, i.e., the neural basis of primitive sociality and intersubjectivity, that bear out Spinoza’s account of social psychology as rooted in the mechanism he called attention to and identified as affective imitation. (shrink)

Ḥāʼirī Yazdī, Mahdī - Criticism and interpretation ;Muslim philosophers - Iran ;Muslim scholars - Iran.