Autorzy artykułu argumentują, że libertarianie (tacy jak Murray Rothbard, Stephan Kinsella), którzy jednocześnie podpisują się pod zasadą proporcjonalności w obronie własności prywatnej oraz pod poglądem, iż posiadanie prawa własności prywatnej oznacza posiadanie prawa do jej obrony, popadają tym samym w dylemat polegający na tym, iż jeżeli jedynym sposobem obrony prawa własności prywatnej jest jego nieproporcjonalna obrona, to to własności tej - wbrew temu, co ów pogląd głosi - nie towarzyszy prawo do jej obrony. Najlepiej uzasadnionym sposobem wyjścia z tego dylematu (...) jest osłabienie peremptoryjności praw własności prywatnej, czyli skonceptualizowanie tychże praw jako absolutnych jedynie w słabym sensie tego słowa (korzystając z dystynkcji zaproponowanej przez Matthew H. Kramera). Z kolei libertarianie, którzy tak jak Walter Block chcieliby wybrnąć z rzeczonego dylematu poprzez zastąpienie zasady proporcjonalności zasadą delikatności, popadają w innego rodzaju problemy (nieintuicyjność moralną czy ogólną niekoherencję), co jest tylko kolejnym argumentem na rzecz tezy, iż osłabienie wymogów praw własności prywatnej jest najlepiej uzasadnionym sposobem przezwyciężenia rozważanego tu dylematu. (shrink)

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements (...) usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase. (shrink)

Many philosophers deny that happiness can be equated with pleasurable experiences. Nozick introduced an experience machine thought experiment to support the idea that happiness requires pleasurable experiences that are “in contact with reality.” In this thought experiment, people can choose to plug into a machine that induces exclusively pleasurable experiences. We test Nozick’s hypothesis that people will reject this offer. We also contrast Nozick’s experience machine scenario with scenarios that are less artificial, and offer options which are less invasive or (...) disruptive than being connected to a machine, specifically scenarios in which people are offered an experience pill or a pill that improves overall functioning. (shrink)

This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the (...) paradoxes of the material conditional, nonmonotonic reasoning, and Adams’ Thesis. It also identifies the issue of updating on conditionals as an area which seems to call for a combined formal and empirical approach. (shrink)

Peut-on sentir et expérimenter que l'on est éternel? On dit parfois que l'art, la philosophie ou la religion peuvent nous permettre d'échapper à notre condition temporelle, et nous faire accéder à l'éternité. Mais sait-on alors ce qu'on dit? Prétendre à une telle expérience de l'éternité, ne serait-ce pas plutôt une marque de folie? Ce livre ne veut pas en préjuger. À l'écoute de la littérature, de la philosophie, de la théologie, mais aussi de la clinique psychiatrique, il veut saisir les (...) contours de ces expériences de l'extrême pour les évaluer et tâcher d'en tirer les enseignements pour la compréhension de l'expérience, de l'éternité et de notre condition temporelle. De Spinoza aux tatouages des individus borderline, de la deep ecology à Simone Weil, ce livre explore les manières de faire sentir et résonner l'éternité."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.

The present paper formulates the principled anarcho-capitalist case against the state and investigates the possible minarchist replies thereto. It identifies three and only three logically available ways of undermining the anarcho-capitalist case and argues that none of them works for minarchism due to the premises from which this theory starts. The sketch of the analysis presented in the paper suggests that minarchist research program falls short of theoretical soundness or even of logical validity.

Management of modern economic systems in the context of increasing influence of different types of risks requires significant improvement. Among such systems are logistics systems, which play an important role in the optimization of economic processes and require the use of information technology, which will facilitate faster and more accurate management decisions making. The purpose of scientific work is to develop a new approach to risk management of logistics systems, which will allow to plan more effectively, evaluate and control logistics (...) processes by using information technology. To ensure more flexible risk management, it is possible to change the parameters and configuration of the recommended model in accordance with the conditions of its formation. (shrink)

In this study we examined the applicability of personality measures to assessing God representations, and we explored how the overlap between personality judgments of self and God relate to strength of (dis)belief and closeness to God among atheists and agnostics. Using sample of 1,088 atheists/agnostics, we applied Goldberg’s Big Five bipolar markers as a standardized measure of personality dimensions, along with measures of identity fusion with God, belief strength, and sociosexuality, as this trait has been shown to be relevant in (...) predicting religiosity. Our study revealed that personality measures can be used for research on the personality of supernatural agents. We also found that personality self-assessments were related to the assessments of God personality. Agreeableness was positively related to the perception of emotional stability of God, while conscientiousness and surgency were negatively related to perceived intellect and surgency of god, respectively. Also, intellect of the participants was related negatively to perceptions of God’s emotional stability and intellect. Perceived distance between the assessment of one’s own personality and the personality of God predicted the strength of (dis)belief, thus opening new interpretations into possible sources of belief and disbelief. Finally, echoing previous studies, we found that conscientiousness of God had a negative effect on SOI-R score. (shrink)

Software vulnerabilities are the root cause for a multitude of security problems in computer systems. Owing to their efficiency and tight control over low-level system resources, the C and C++ programming languages are extensively used for a myriad of purposes, from implementing operating system kernels to user-space applications. However, insufficient or improper memory management frequently leads to invalid memory accesses, eventually resulting in memory corruption vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are used as a foothold for elaborated attacks that bypass existing defense methods. (...) In this paper, we summarise the main memory safety violation types (i.e. memory errors), and analyse how they are exploited by attackers and the main mitigation methods proposed in the research community. We further systematise the most relevant techniques with regards to memory corruption identification in current programs. (shrink)

The place of evidence regarding joint commitment and plural action is mostly reserved for documents and explicit linguistic expressions. This paper considers the problem of evidence in cases of engaged (jointly committed) social acts where there is no explicit expression or binding document, yet can still be ascribed to a plural subject. The argument rests on the double meaning of the term factum as fact (factum brutum) and deed (factum practica), as well as contemporary debates about the topic of fact (...) of reason in Kant. The text seeks to show that in certain cases, the execution of an act or the obligation produced by it can be considered evidence of a plural subject. Thus, these facts deserve a special position in relation to scientific evidence. (shrink)

The article focuses on the crucial changes that science as an established social institution and an epistemological enterprise is undergoing, the key one is the loss of its monopoly on the production of socially useful knowledge and gradual transformation into something new, which, due to institutional and cultural reasons, we continue to call ‘science’. We suppose that the most appropriate conceptualization of the new phenomenon, which is replacing science as an institution, is “technoscience”, since the technical component in scientific practices (...) has now taken a dominant position and technology production has become more important than fundamental knowledge. Technoscience has at least two sources: 1) capitalization of scientific activity that has led to classical science has been replaced with technoscience developing on first-priority funded applied research; 2) theorization and autonomy of the techno sphere, which have resulted in instrumentalization of all levels of knowledge production as well as in technological / symbolic construction of reality and tangled ontology of technoscientific objects. We discuss both of these sources, with particular attention being paid to such trends as epistemic strategies transformation, modified reality, social sciences and humanities conformation to technoscience norms, and knowledge bearers egalitarianization. A crucial transformation of both science itself and its position in society breaks inevitably a demarcation line that separates scientific knowledge from other types of knowledge while promotes the replacement of scientific theory with discourses. Apparently, in “technoscience” an ethos of its own is being formed, where interaction with the “external environment” (with other social spheres) is crucial. In this context, scientific activity is becoming more and more transepistemic, transinstitutional practice, and accordingly ceases to be guided by the classical scientific ethos determined by the goals and objectives of academic community itself. (shrink)

Michel Tournier was a philosopher before being a novelist. And even when he decided to become a novelist, he introduced himself as a « smuggler of philosophy ». But it is impossible to take full measure of this statement without considering the one and only philosophical text he ever published, in 1946: « L’Impersonnalisme ». This article, which he considered to be his « system of the world », is here presented in its historical and philosophical context.

David Earl Over is a leading cognitive scientist and, with his firm grounding in philosophical logic, he also exerts a powerful influence on the psychology of reasoning. He is responsible for not only a large body of empirical work and accompanying theory, but for advancing a major shift in thinking about reasoning, commonly known as the 'new paradigm' in the psychology of human reasoning. Over's signature mix of philosophical logic and experimental psychology has inspired generations of researchers, psychologists, and philosophers (...) alike over more than a quarter of a century. The chapters in this volume, written by a leading group of contributors including a number who helped shape the psychology of reasoning as we know it today, each take their starting point from the key themes of Over's ground-breaking work. The essays in this collection explore a wide range of central topics--such as rationality, bias, dual processes, and dual systems--as well as contemporary psychological and philosophical theories of conditionals. It concludes with an engaging new chapter, authored by David Over himself, which details and analyses the new paradigm psychology of reasoning. This book is therefore important reading for scholars, researchers, and advanced students in psychology, philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, including those who are not familiar with Over's thought already. (shrink)

In this work, we illustrate applications of a semantic framework for non-congruential modal logic based on hyperintensional models. We start by discussing some philosophical ideas behind the approach; in particular, the difference between the set of possible worlds in which a formula is true (its intension) and the semantic content of a formula (its hyperintension), which is captured in a rigorous way in hyperintensional models. Next, we rigorously specify the approach and provide a fundamental completeness theorem. Moreover, we analyse examples (...) of non-congruential systems that can be semantically characterized within this framework in an elegant and modular way. Finally, we compare the proposed framework with some alternatives available in the literature. In the light of the results obtained, we argue that hyperintensional models constitute a basic, general and unifying semantic framework for (non-congruential) modal logic. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the existing leading methodologies for building enterprise architecture. The purpose of the study is to develop a more accurate understanding of what methodologies exist for building an enterprise architecture. Knowledge is important for analyzing the company's activities, building its architecture for effective work, as well as for using ready-made solutions in conducting business. Scientific novelty lies in the structuring of data within a single study. As a result, leading methodologies were analyzed, described (...) structurally, and for top management the main stages of planning are given. (shrink)

The availability of free health care to all citizens has been regarded as a great achievement of the Soviet society. In recent decades, however, decreased funding of the state-run health care system has led to a deterioration in the quality and quantity of available medical equipment and services. More than 50 percent of the Russian population is dissatisfied with the health care system and the attitudes and moral standards of their health care providers. This article discusses the degree, nature, and (...) some of the causes of the public's dissatisfaction and concludes with a preliminary look toward the future of the Russian health care system. (shrink)

The relevance of the article is due to the fact that in the modern world, various utopian concepts do not lose their ideological strength, which for more than two centuries have significantly influenced public consciousness and have caused significant transformations in the socio-cultural life of mankind. The connection among social utopias and Christian eschatology has been noticed for a long time, and the thoughts expressed on this occasion by Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann in articles and diary entries can contribute to a (...) better understanding of deep cognitive processes that largely determine modern social realities. The purpose of the study was based on the analysis of the works of this worthy representative of the philosophy of the Russian diaspora, comparing the traditional religious eschatological "prototype" and later views on the "end of history". These views contributed to the development of utopianism and ideologism in the public mind. The authors focus attention on the antinomical nature of Christian eschatology, in contrast to the various socio-utopian modifications that define social ideals in a field transcendental to everyday human activities. The striving of religious thinking towards the "non-worldly" ideal, as Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann believed, made it possible to form a Christian's attitude to earthly life, which inevitably required a qualitative transformation corresponding to the notion of the ultimate goal. However, over time, the Christian faith paid less and less attention to the eschatological dimension of human life, which contributed to the formation of new eschatologies seeking their social ideals in the immediate givenness of earthly life and affirming the belief in the possibility of their empirical achievement. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that the most important factor in the formation and development of the "ideological faith" in the public consciousness, the concept of which is defined in the most general terms in the works of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, was the isolation of the dominant ideological structures based on social utopian ideas, from traditional faith grounds. Thus, ideologies ceased to be functional aspects of concrete historical religions, lost their official character and themselves became the foundation for pseudo-religious creativity. (shrink)

In this article the key aspects of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity on the market of air transport services have been defined, the structure of the airline’s innovation system, logistics approach to managing the innovation activity of an airline enterprise have been considered and the main objectives of logistical activity in the context of innovation activity support of airlines have been clarified. The importance and peculiarities of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity as an innovation flow control (...) system have been studied. The algorithm of formation of the logistical support mechanism for the airline’s innovation activity has been elaborated and specified. The objectives tree for improving the efficiency of logistical support of the airline’s innovation activity has been created. (shrink)

Judgments differ from decisions. Judgments are more abstract, decontextualized, and bear fewer consequences for the agent. In pursuit of experimental control, psychological experiments on bias create a simplified, bare-bone representation of social behavior. These experiments resemble conditions in which people judge others, but not how they make real-world decisions.

Let G be a group, and let X be an infinite transitive G-space. A free ultrafilter U on X is called G-selective if, for any G-invariant partition P of X, either one cell of P is a member of U, or there is a member of U which meets each cell of P in at most one point. We show that in ZFC with no additional set-theoretical assumptions there exists a G-selective ultrafilter on X. We describe all G-spaces X such (...) that each free ultrafilter on X is G-selective, and we prove that a free ultrafilter U on ω is selective if and only if U is G-selective with respect to the action of any countable group G of permutations of ω. A free ultrafilter U on X is called G-Ramsey if, for any G-invariant coloring χ:[X]2→{0,1}, there is U∈U such that [U]2 is χ-monochromatic. We show that each G-Ramsey ultrafilter on X is G-selective. Additional theorems give a lot of examples of ultrafilters on Z that are Z-selective but not Z-Ramsey. (shrink)

Through the analysis of certain aspects of Leonardo Bruni’s language, and in particular his use of “popolo” and “res publica”, we strive to understand the extent to which the politics of the early humanists remained rooted in the recent past of the City of Florence, despite the obvious ideological innovations (and without considering those of a stylistic and literary nature). Bruni seems to have inherited the primacy and unity of the Florentine people directly from the discourses of the 14th-century jurists. (...) On the other hand, “respublica” turns out to be, in his texts, both an entirely traditional notion and the emblem of the process of essentialisation of a people reconstituted in its universal dimension thanks to the definitive expulsion of conflict from the horizon of possibilities. At the same time, in a dialogue with Claudia Moatti in particular, we try to ascertain how, with which tools, some research on Roman history helps us grasp the metamorphoses of the ‘people’ in a much later period. (shrink)

Species, or ‘the Species Problem’, is a topic in science, in the philosophy of science, and in general philosophy. There is not one, but many, species problems, and these are dealt with in this volume. Species are often thought of as units of biology, to be used in ecology, conservation, classification, and theory. The chapters in this book present opposing views on the current philosophical and conceptual issues of the Species Problem in biology. -/- Divided into four sections Theories and (...) Concepts, Practice and Methods, Ranks, Trees and Names, and Metaphysics and Epistemologies, the book is authored by systematists, philosophers, historians and working biologists, many leaders in their fields. Topics include Essentialism and individuals, speciation modes, theory and the species rank, nomenclature and diagnosis, scale of species, and ecology, conservation, and species. -/- Species Problems and Beyond aims to clarify the contemporary issues of the Species Problem. It is ideal for use in upper-level seminars and courses in Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Systematics and Taxonomy, and Phylogenetics/Cladistics, and for any scholar in these fields. (shrink)

An advanced introduction to semantics that presents this crucial component of human language through the lens of the 'Meaning-Text' theory - an approach that treats linguistic knowledge as a huge inventory of correspondences between thought and speech. Formally, semantics is viewed as an organized set of rules that connect a representation of meaning (Semantic Representation) to a representation of the sentence (Deep-Syntactic Representation).

The growing support for voluntary active euthanasia is evident in the recently approved Dutch Law on Termination of Life on Request. Indeed, the debate over legalized VAE has increased in European countries, the United States, and many other nations over the last several years. The proponents of VAE argue that when a patient judges that the burdens of living outweigh the benefits, euthanasia can be justified. If some adults suffer to such an extent that VAE is justified, then one may (...) conclude that some children suffer to this extent as well. In an attempt to alleviate the suffering of extremely ill neonates, the University Medical Center Groningen developed a protocol for neonatal euthanasia. In this article, I first present the ethical justifications for VAE and discuss how these arguments relate to euthanizing ill neonates. I then argue that, even if one accepts the justification for VAE in adults, neonatal euthanasia cannot be supported, primarily because physicians and parents can never accurately assess the suffering of children. I argue that without the testament of the patient herself as to the nature and magnitude of her suffering, physicians can never accurately weigh the benefits and burdens of a child’s life, and therefore any such system would condemn to death some children whose suffering is not unbearable. I conclude that because the primary duty of physicians is to never harm their patients, neonatal euthanasia cannot be supported. (shrink)

There has long been tension between bioethicists whose work focuses on classical philosophical inquiry and those who perform empirical studies on bioethical issues. While many have argued that empirical research merely illuminates current practices and cannot inform normative ethics, others assert that research-based work has significant implications for refining our ethical norms. In this essay, I present a novel construct for classifying empirical research in bioethics into four hierarchical categories: Lay of the Land, Ideal Versus Reality, Improving Care, and Changing (...) Ethical Norms. Through explaining these four categories and providing examples of publications in each stratum, I define how empirical research informs normative ethics. I conclude by demonstrating how philosophical inquiry and empirical research can work cooperatively to further normative ethics. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 30-32.

In the United States, patients have a clear right to determine what is done to them by doctors. Starting in the early 20th century, multiple court cases paved the way for our current understanding...

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 6, Page 41-42, June 2011.