With a few yet increasing number of exceptions, the cognitive sciences enthusiastically endorsed the idea that there are basic facial expressions of emotions that are created by specific configurations of facial muscles. We review evidence that suggests an inherent role for context in emotion perception. Context does not merely change emotion perception at the edges; it leads to radical categorical changes. The reviewed findings suggest that configurations of facial muscles are inherently ambiguous, and they call for a different approach towards (...) the understanding of facial expressions of emotions. Prices of sticking with the modal view, and advantages of an expanded view, are succinctly reviewed. (shrink)

The paper explicates unique events and investigates their epistemology. Explications of unique events as individuated, different, and emergent are philosophically uninteresting. Unique events are topics of why-questions that radically underdetermine all their potential explanations. Uniqueness that is relative to a level of scientific development is differentiated from absolute uniqueness. Science eliminates relative uniqueness by discovery of recurrence of events and properties, falsification of assumptions of why-questions, and methodological simplification e.g. by explanatory methodological reduction. Finally, an overview of contemporary philosophical disputes (...) that hinge on issues of uniqueness emphasizes its philosophical significance. (shrink)

The fifty entries in this _Companion_ cover the main issues in the philosophies of historiography and history, including natural history and the practices of historians. Written by an international and multi-disciplinary group of experts A cutting-edge updated picture of current research in the field Part of the renowned _Blackwell Companions_ series.

This book addresses the perennial question: What is justice?

Intuition in medical and moral reasoning -- Moral intuitionism -- The place of Aristotelian phronesis in clinical reasoning -- Aristotle's practical syllogism: accounting for the individual through a theory of action and cognition -- Individual and statistical physiognomy: the art and science of making the invisible visible -- Clinical intuition versus statistical reasoning -- Contingency and correlation: the significance of modeling clinical reasoning on statistics -- Abduction: the intuitive support of clinical induction -- Conclusion: medical ethics beyond ontology.

The epistemology of the historical sciences has been debated recently. Cleland argued that the effects of the past overdetermine it. Turner argued that the past is underdetermined by its effects because of the decay of information from the past. I argue that the extent of over- and underdetermination cannot be approximated by philosophical inquiry. It is an empirical question that each historical science attempts to answer. Philosophers should examine how paradigmatic cases of historical science handled underdetermination or utilized overdetermination. I (...) analyze such a paradigmatic case, Darwin’s phylogenetic inferences. Darwin proceeded in three consecutive stages. The initial inference that there was some common cause of homologies was usually overdetermined. The final inference of the character traits of ancestor species was usually underdetermined. The second stage inference of the causal net that connected the species that share some common cause was inbetween. A comparison with Comparative Historical Linguistics demonstrates similar three stages of inference that move from the over- to the underdetermined. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This is a philosophical treatment of the phenomenon of home. A distinction is drawn between home and permanent residence and birthplace. Through discussion of the philosophy of Vaclav Havel, home is discovered to be a multi‐level structure that may contain several homes on different and identical levels. Exclusionist concepts of home such as nationalism and fundamentalist monotheism deny this. Home is conditions that allow personal self fulfilment. Our actual home is the result of our efforts to reach our ideal (...) home, departing from our natural home. Hospitality, personal and collective, is extension of conditions of home to a guest who may be homeless or in exile. The current use of ‘home’ by inhospitable, excluding, territorial monopolies such as the European Community, the US immigration service, and Hong Kong officials, as in ‘returning refugees back home’, is an Orwellian misuse of the linguistically assumed, positive relations between person and home to legitimise morally abhorrent policies. (shrink)

In June 22-27,1970, an International Working Symposium on Pragmatics of Natural Languages took place in Jerusalem under the auspices of The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science.! Some thirty philosophers, logicians, linguists, and psychologists from Israel, U.S.A., West-Germany, England, Belgium, France, Scotland, and Denmark met in seven formal and a number of informal sessions in order to discuss some ofthe problems (...) around the use and acquisition oflanguage which in the eyes of an increasing number of scholars have been left under treated in the recent upsurge ofinterest in theoretical linguistics and philos ophy of language. More specifically, during the formal sessions the following topics were discussed: The validity of the syntactics-seman tics-pragmatics trichotomy The present state of the competence-performance issue Logic and linguistics The New Rhetoric Speech acts Language acquisition. The participants in the Symposium distributed among themselves re prints and preprints of relevant material, partly in advance of the meeting, partly at its beginning. Each session was introduced by one or two modera tors, and summaries of each day's proceedings were prepared and distri buted the next day. The participants were invited to submit papers after the symposium, written under its impact. The eleven essays published here are the result. (shrink)

This article offers a philosophic understanding of dissidence. We present a conceptual analysis of dissidence as connected to a net of other philosophic concepts such as ‘virtue’ and ‘truth’. ‘Dissidence’, like ‘right’ and ‘liberty’, is used both in precise philosophic discourse and with greater variations of meaning in ordinary language. Our discussion springs from a philosophic discourse of dissidence that flourished in Czechoslovakia in the seventies and eighties, during the ‘normalization’ period between the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the Velvet (...) Revolution of 1989. During that period, a small section of Czechoslovak society found itself in a situation that was commonly referred to by the word ‘dissidence’. Since some dissidents were philosophers by inclination, education, or approach, they understood their situation by drawing on their philosophic background. The towering figure of dissident philosophy was Jan Patocka, one of the first spokespersons of Charter 77 on human rights and a student of Husserl. Of his students, Václav Havel and Petr Rezek made significant contributions to the philosophical discourse of the meaning of dissidence. Though emerging out of a particular historical context, post-Stalinist Communism, the discourse itself attempted to understand dissidence in universal philosophical terms. (shrink)

How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific discipline (...) should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines. (shrink)

A collection of nine essays by one of the leading scholars in medieval Jewish Philosophy. The volume consists of two parts. Part I, entitled "Philosophy and History," includes essays on the study of medieval Jewish Philosophy, on the notion of Peace, on the political philosophy of Nissim of Gerona and Isaac Abrabanel, and on Maimonides' views on Messianism. In part II, "Philosophy and Faith," the subjects dealt with are: 'The God of the Philosophers and the God of the Kabbalists', the (...) notion of Miracle in medieval Jewish Philosophy, the esoteric character of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed, and a lost Arabic recension of Aristotle's Parva Naturalia. Professor Aviezer Ravitzky is Chairman of the Department of Jewish Thought, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (shrink)

I start with arguing what Nietzschean origins are not, by distinguishing them from other types of origins. I am interested here in distinguishing what is different, and pardon the pun, original, in Nietzsche’s concepts of origins and genealogies by comparing it with the alternative mythical, rationalist, and scientific concepts of origins. I identify four types of origins that share family relations: Mythical, Rationalist, Genealogical, and Scientific. I distinguish between them according to six criteria: The ontology of the origins and what (...) they transfer; how they transfer what they transfer; whether what they transfer is path dependent on the origin; teleology, do origins have a manifest destiny; value judgements about the origins, positive, negative, both, or neither; and finally, the epistemology of the inference of origins. (shrink)

Hillel Steiner; III*—Individual Liberty, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 75, Issue 1, 1 June 1975, Pages 33–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

The traditional Lockean account of a state's territorial rights construes them as arising from, and coextensive with, the property rights of whichever set of landowners mutually contract to form that state. The coherence of this individualistic account has recently been challenged by Cara Nine. I argue that the reasons offered in support of that incoherence charge are unpersuasive.

First attempt at applying contemporary philosophy of science to the basic problems of the philosophy of historiography that culminated in "Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography" (Cambridge University Press 2004).

This chapter contains sections titled: Some Common Cause vs. a Particular common Cause Type vs. Token Common Cause Information Preservation and the Inference of the Existence of Some Common Causes The Meaning of the Existence of Some Common Cause Likelihoods of the Variational Group given Common and Separate Causes Alternative Common Cause Hypotheses Bibliography.

ḥeleḳ 1. A-Ṭ -- ḥeleḳ 2. Y-P -- ḥeleḳ 3. Ts-T.

“Business,” wrote a professor of marketing in 1929, “is the work of the world, humanity's chiefest task.” On the doorstep of the Depression, Prof. George R. Collins was selling business, by which he meant the business economy, an economic order based on the systematic management of money. I do not intend to enter the volatile controversy between Collins and those like Aldous Huxley who accused business people of being venal and crass. Rather, I intend to trace one likely path by (...) which many in 1929 had come to regard business as a redemptive activity and the business person as a redeemer. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1-3. Toldot Bet Hilel -- ḥeleḳ 4. [without special title].

Introduction to a special issue on the philosophy of historiography.

The distinction between history and historiography and their philosophies.

Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on actual social contracts that are explicitly negotiated and signed between states and their prospective citizens. The explicit social contract, or a constitution, sets the terms under which a state may use coercion against its citizens and the conditions under which the contract may be annulled, revised, rescinded, or otherwise exited from. Panarchy does not advocate any particular model of the state or social justice, but intends to encourage political (...) variety, innovation, experimentation, and choice. With its emphasis on explicit social contracts, Panarchy offers an interesting variation on traditional social contract theories. Today, Panarchist political thought is particularly relevant and interesting in the context of globalization, increased international migration, the weakening of national sovereignty, the rise of the internet "cloud" as a non-territorial locus of political and protopolitical social networks that are not geographic, the invention of cryptocurrencies that may replace national currencies, and the rise of urban centers where people of many different political identities live and work together. This is the first volume to bring together key philosophically and politically interesting yet often overlooked Panarchist texts. From the first published translation of de Puydt seminal 1860 article to contemporary Silicon Valley political theory, the volume includes Panarchist texts from different eras, cultures and geographical regions. The amassed wealth of theoretical insight enables readers to compare different texts in this tradition of political thought and distinguish different streams and varieties within this political tradition, in comparison with Cosmopolitanism, Contractarianism, and Anarchism. (shrink)

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment. I will keep them from harm and injustice. The Hippocratic Oath formulates the ethical principle of medical beneficence and its negative formulation non-maleficence. It relates medical ethics to the traditional end of medicine, that is, to heal, or to make whole. First and foremost, the duty of the physician is to heal, and if this is not possible at least not to harm. This (...) ethical principle helped to establish the necessary trust between physician and patient in the pre-modern era when most of medicine was nothing more than a set of placebos (Shapiro 1960). Beginning in the seventeenth-century, Western .. (shrink)

Neste artigo, Bar-Hillel e Carnap apresentam pela primeira vez as ideias básicas de uma teoria da informação semântica. O conceito de informação, baseado em sentença declarativa em uma dada linguagem, é definido pelo conteúdo descritivo expresso pelas sentenças. A quantidade de informação é calculada com base em um conjunto de funções lógicas probabilísticas sobre conjuntos de conteúdos descritíveis. Esta teoria tem aplicabilidade dedutiva e indutiva, significando um marco para o desenvolvimento das teorias filosóficas da informação.

This paper advocates the reduction of the inference of common cause to that of common origins. It distinguishes and subjects to critical analysis thirteen interpretations of “the inference of common cause” whose conclusions do not follow from their assumptions. Instead, I introduce six types of inferences of common origins of information signals from their receivers to reduce, in the sense of supersede and replace, the thirteen inferences of common causes. I show how the paradigmatic examples of inferences of common cause, (...) as well as a broader scope of inferences in the historical sciences, are better explained by inferences of origins. Inferences of origins from information rich coherences between receivers of information signals both fit more closely and explain better the range of examples that have traditionally been associated with inferences of common causes, as well as a broader scope of examples from the historical sciences. Shannon’s concept of information as reduction in uncertainty, rather than physicalist concepts of information that relate it to entropy or waves, simplifies the inferences, preempts objections, and avoids the underdetermination of conclusions that challenge models of inferences of causes from information transmissions. In the second part of the paper I model inferences of information about common origins from information preserved in their receivers. I distinguish information poor inferences that there were some common origins of receivers from the information richer inferences of ranges of possible common origins and the information transmission channels by which they transmitted signals to receivers. Lastly and most information rich, I distinguish the inference of the defining properties of common origins. The information transmission model from origins to receivers allows the reconceptualization of the concepts of independence as absence of intersections between information channels and reliability as the preservation of information from origins in receivers. Finally, I show how inferences of origins form the epistemic basis of the historical sciences. (shrink)

This essay advances and defends two claims: (a) that rights cannot be inalienable and (b) that even if they could be, this would not be morally justifiable.

The scarcity of resources required to produce justice is manifested in the relation between the accuracy, depth, and scope of materially possible forms of justice. Ceteris paribus , increases in the accuracy of justice must come at the expense of its depth and scope, and vice versa, though they are not linearly proportioned. The accuracy of justice is the degree of agreement between the possible results of attempts to implement a theory or principles of justice and the desired result according (...) to that theory or those principles of justice. The scope of justice measures how broadly the principle or theory of justice is intended to apply. The depth of justice measures the gap between existing social norms and the theory or principles of justice we examine within the specified scope. This three-dimensional model explains public policies, laws, and regulations that increase the scope or depth of justice at the cost of a decrease in its accuracy – rough forms of justice such as measures of transitional justice, affirmative action, mandatory sentencing, simplified tax codes, collective guilt and victimhood, and general amnesties. The scarcity of resources necessary for justice can contract or expand. The normative choice between principles of justice that prefer accuracy and those that favor scope or depth usually corresponds, respectively, with rights-based deontological theories and consequentialist ethics. (shrink)

Islamism may already be showing signs of meeting a more powerful ideological force: state nationalism. Islamists devote far more energy to attempting to take over existing states than to attacking the West. It is conceivable that, as with Pan-Arabism before it, the grandiose ideals of Islamism will be no match for the economic, military, and media might of the nation-states into which both Arabs and Muslims are separated. These appear to shape people's identity even more than do their potentially revolutionary (...) shared religious tenets. (shrink)