The Handbook of Modal Logic contains 20 articles, which collectively introduce contemporary modal logic, survey current research, and indicate the way in which the field is developing. The articles survey the field from a wide variety of perspectives: the underling theory is explored in depth, modern computational approaches are treated, and six major applications areas of modal logic (in Mathematics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Game Theory, and Philosophy) are surveyed. The book contains both well-written expository articles, suitable for beginners (...) approaching the subject for the first time, and advanced articles, which will help those already familiar with the field to deepen their expertise. Please visit: http://people.uleth.ca/~woods/RedSeriesPromo_WP/PubSLPR.html - Compact modal logic reference - Computational approaches fully discussed - Contemporary applications of modal logic covered in depth. (shrink)

It has often been argued that, notwithstanding his commitment to the authoritarian state, Thomas Hobbes is a champion of the "minimal" version of liberty of conscience: namely, the freedom of citizens to think whatever they like as long as they obey the law. Such an interpretation renders Hobbes's philosophy more palatable to contemporary society. Yet the claim is incorrect. Alongside his notion of "private" conscience, namely, Hobbes develops a conception of conscience as a public phenomenon. In the following, it is (...) argued that this inconsistency serves the purpose of deception: it holds out the possibility of dissent while making it impossible to utilise. Arguably, moreover, this is the proper hermeneutical approach to take to Hobbes's inconsistencies in general. Indeed, said inconsistencies ought to alert contemporary normative theorists to the instability of the "minimal" version of liberty of conscience attributed to Hobbes: Hobbes himself, namely, shows that it is insufficient. (shrink)

In recent years, we have witnessed renewed interest in metaphors in political theory. In this context, Hobbes’s theory of metaphor is of great importance as it helps us understand aesthetic qualities in theory and politics. This article argues that in the work of Hobbes – often portrayed as hostile to the use of metaphor, especially so by himself – there is a remarkable discrepancy between his professed enmity to metaphor and his own use of the very word ‘metaphor’. In a (...) philosopher who censures conceptual imprecision, we find a fundamentally inconsistent and ever-changing use of this key term. This inconsistency can be accounted for if we relate it to Hobbes’s own often neglected poetics and his theory of the need for conceptual innovation. This will help solve riddles that have haunted Hobbes studies. Moreover, we must discover Hobbes’s theory of metaphor as a source of potential insights into the way in which political and theoretical languages operate with regard to aesthetic pleasure through linguistic change. Hobbes’s theory can thus make us understand the importance of something being new, that is, how theoretical languages need novelty in order to be pleasant and persuasive. (shrink)

This article is about the juxtaposition of the notion of perichoresis in the work and theology of the Cappadocian Fathers and the notion of Ubuntu in the African Traditional Religion. Perichoresis was a result of an attempt to understand and to resolve the relationships within the Trinity. The issue at hand was how to make sense between the one and the many at the same time. The Cappadocian Fathers understood the oneness of God as unity in plurality, not a singularity. (...) One Ousia and three hypostases were based on the understanding of the relationships within the trinity. The question of three yet one God, the apostles according to the information we have never question nor try to resolve the position and status of Jesus within the oneness. It appears as though they celebrated the tension rather than resolving it. They heard from Jesus, who said to them ‘you believe in God believe also in me’ and ‘if you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him … whoever has seen me has seen the Father’. They also heard him when he said ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’. The article is going to investigate and analyse the two notions, Perichoresis and Ubuntu, within the African Christian context. Yet there is a tension between Jesus and the ancestors. Can this tension be resolved? The notion of Ubuntu is based upon the understanding that a person becomes fully a person in the presence of other persons. It is a notion that deals with the relationships from an individual to the community and from physical to spiritual perspectives. The article shall also attempt to analyse any categories of thinking that are within the ATR that may better explain the relationship within the Trinity. (shrink)

Do citizens of liberal democratic states have a moral right to engage in civil disobedience? Famously, Joseph Raz argued that they do not. In this article, I defend his argument against some recent challenges, but show how it is tied to a particular model of civil disobedience. On this model, the purpose of civil disobedience is to protest and prevent particularly egregious violations of justice. A moral right to civil disobedience can be grounded on a different model, where the function (...) of civil disobedience is to identify and counterbalance democratic deficits. Against the widespread tendency amongst theorists of civil disobedience to want to defend civil disobedience as the exercise of a moral right, however, I do not then argue for the adoption of the democratic model. Whilst I acknowledge the reasons behind wanting a rights-based defence, and concede that different kinds of civil disobedience might have to be defended on different grounds, I sound a note of caution. The meta-theoretical relation between moral grounds and political function uncovered in this article works both ways. It should make theorists more mindful of the self-understanding to which a rights-based moral defence of civil disobedience commits protesters. (shrink)

Democracies worldwide are under stress. Two distinct families of explanation can be identified by the relative emphasis they place on the cultural versus the economic. Protesting against this dichotomy, there are those who insist that economic and cultural grievances interact. A conceptual scheme which ties together the economic and the cultural through interaction, however, rests on a prior separation. In this article, a richer and more plausible account of the relationship between transformations of work and contemporary democratic decay is developed. (...) This account is based on a social practice model of work, in which the economic and the cultural are entirely intertwined. The social practice of work is among other things a privileged site for the realisation of certain ‘goods of work’. These include self-respect, self-esteem and self-realisation. It is by altering expectations about the realisation of the goods of work that transformations of work have contributed to an environment within which democracies are under stress. (shrink)

This article attempts to present a reconstructive interpretation of the utopian self as portrayed in the writings of the young Marx. The main currents of interpretation claim that utopian society enhances individual liberty. However, the argument of this article is that Marx’s utopia entails the opposite, namely, the dissolution of the self. If human alienation in relation to nature is to be overcome, then the difference between man and nature must simply be annihilated. Thus, the utopian self appropriates and masters (...) nature completely and turns it into something that is identical to man himself. Likewise, the alienation inherent in human relations is eliminated through the disappearance of the differences between people. This means that individuality is annihilated in the utopian society; if the supersession of alienation means doing away with the difference between the self, the others and nature, then it also means the end of human liberty. (shrink)

Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is a general tool in survey sampling and causal inference, used in both Horvitz–Thompson estimators, which normalize by the sample size, and Hájek/self-normalized estimators, which normalize by the sum of the inverse probability weights. In this work, we study a family of IPW estimators, first proposed by Trotter and Tukey in the context of Monte Carlo problems, that are normalized by an affine combination of the sample size and a sum of inverse weights. We show how (...) selecting an estimator from this family in a data-dependent way to minimize asymptotic variance leads to an iterative procedure that converges to an estimator with connections to regression control methods. We refer to such estimators as adaptively normalized estimators. For mean estimation in survey sampling, the adaptively normalized estimator has asymptotic variance that is never worse than the Horvitz–Thompson and Hájek estimators. Going further, we show that adaptive normalization can be used to propose improvements of the augmented IPW (AIPW) estimator, average treatment effect (ATE) estimators, and policy learning objectives. Appealingly, these proposals preserve both the asymptotic efficiency of AIPW and the regret bounds for policy learning with IPW objectives, and deliver consistent finite sample improvements in simulations for all three of mean estimation, ATE estimation, and policy learning. (shrink)

This comment on Sven Ove Hansson's article on the history of the journal Theoria elaborates and corrects Hansson's characterisation of the political standpoint of the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila as "sympathetic towards the German regime". Although not an easy question, particularly considering Kaila's unfortunate publications during the Second World War, it is argued that the characterisation is plainly wrong if it refers to the mid-1930s.

_In this paper, we support the adoption of an empirical approach in development ethics research and show that the theoretical insights and methodological guidelines in Sen’s capability approach can offer helpful guidance to development ethicists on designing and execution of such research. To this end, we show how specific insights in the CA guide one to identify and engage with relevant stakeholders in extensive dialogues about the ethical issues underlying their development practices and in gathering empirical data for further ethical (...) reflections. Drawing on an empirical development ethics research project we conducted in the fisheries sector of Ukerewe District in Tanzania, we illustrate how the CA supported us in identifying 310 representatives of various categories of small-scale fishers and stakeholders, and in designing and executing empirical development ethics research in the form of progressive stages of dialogues in stakeholder groups. The participants in these stakeholder groups reflected on and assessed their individual and collective values, capacities, roles and interests in the fisheries sector. In turn, we gathered empirical data on the nature and causes of the poverty of small-scale fishers and ways to overcome it, the __moral roots of the prevalence of institutional and professional apathy, and stakeholders’ motivations and concrete actions to support the redressing of the challenges facing small-scale fishers. Later, we used these empirical data to theorise about moving small-scale fishers from poverty to prosperity, and about the development ethic best suited to guide future initiatives in combatting poverty and generating wealth through the fisheries sector in Ukerewe District._ _Keywords: _Empirical Ethics, Development Ethics, Capability Approach, Small-scale Fisheries, Poverty, Ukerewe District, Tanzania. (shrink)

Prolegomena It is fitting to begin this book on intuitionistic type theory by putting the subject matter into perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to ...

Spinoza and Education offers a comprehensive investigation into the educational implications of Spinoza’s moral theory. Taking Spinoza’s naturalism as its point of departure, it constructs a considered account of education, taking special care to investigate the educational implications of Spinoza’s psychological egoism. What emerges is a counterintuitive form of education grounded in the egoistic striving of the teacher to persevere and to flourish in existence while still catering to the ethical demands of the students and the greater community. -/- In (...) providing an educational reading of Spinoza’s moral theory, this book sets up a critical dialogue between educational theory and recent studies which highlight the centrality of ethics in Spinoza’s overall philosophy. By placing his work in a contemporary educational context, chapters explore a counterintuitive conception of education as an ethical project, aimed at overcoming the desire to seek short-term satisfaction and troubling the influential concept of the student as consumer. This book also considers how education, from a Spinozistic point of view, may be approached in terms of a kind of cognitive therapy serving to further a more scientifically adequate understanding of the world and aimed at combating prejudices and superstition. -/- Spinoza and Education demonstrates that Spinoza’s moral theory can further an educational ideal, where notions of freedom and self-preservation provide the conceptual core of a coherent philosophy of education. As such, it will appeal to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, theory of education, critical thinking, philosophy, ethics, and Spinoza studies. (shrink)

This book is a philosophical enquiry into the educational consequences of Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza’s political theory is of particular interest for educational thought as it brings together the normative aims of his ethical theory with his realistic depiction of human psychology and the ramifications of this for successful political governance. As such, the book aims to introduce the reader to Spinoza’s original vision of civic education, as a project that ultimately aims at the ethical flourishing of individuals, while being (...) carefully tailored and adjusted to the natural limitations of human reason. This author-meets-critics includes scholars in philosophy, education and Spinoza studies. (shrink)

Critical-Range Utilitarianism is a variant of Total Utilitarianism which can avoid both the Repugnant Conclusion and the Sadistic Conclusion in population ethics. Yet Standard Critical-Range Utilitarianism entails the Weak Sadistic Conclusion, that is, it entails that each population consisting of lives at a bad well-being level is not worse than some population consisting of lives at a good well-being level. In this paper, I defend a version of Critical-Range Utilitarianism which does not entail the Weak Sadistic Conclusion. This is made (...) possible by a fourth category of absolute value in addition to goodness, badness, and neutrality. (shrink)

Covers the entire field of philosophy and its history. It not only defines and describes philosophical terms and ideas, it also shows the connections between the different definitions of a term or idea. All the representative schools or systems of philosophy of the past are included, and contemporary thought is extensively covered. As well, all the important philosophers, both ancient and modern, are treated in the frame of their thought.

In this huge study the author presents a systematic and thematic overview of all concepts and ideas, that are basic and gave shape to Western thinking about history: Jewish and Christian concepts of redemptive history, particularism vs. universal concepts, ethnocentric concepts, typology, eschatology and the apocalyptic. He considers concepts of history in the Classical Age, the Middle Ages, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Age, Humanism, Positivism, the impact of the Holocaust and Postmodernism. He offers a critical treatment of (...) themes as the periodizing of history, continuity and discontinuity, optimistic and pessimistic theories, repetitive and non-repetitive theories. (shrink)

This article develops a new measure of freedom of choice based on the proposal that a set offers more freedom of choice than another if, and only if, the expected degree of dissimilarity between a random alternative from the set of possible alternatives and the most similar offered alternative in the set is smaller. Furthermore, a version of this measure is developed, which is able to take into account the values of the possible options.

In participatory activities in the workplace, employees are invited to raise problems and suggest improvements to the management. Although it is widely acknowledged that employees rarely control decisions in these settings, little is known about the interactional resources that employees and managers draw upon when negotiating consensus about which initiatives to pursue in the future. We analyse interactions from participatory meetings in an industrial setting in relation to the topic of work shoes, showing how the participants orient to both their (...) relative deontic rights and epistemic rights. The analysis suggests that besides their low deontic status, employees’ fragile epistemic status constitutes an important but overlooked challenge to achieving improved working conditions through the participatory activities. (shrink)

Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of institutions, which neither assumes that institutions are beneficial or oppressive, and where ideology is understood as a (...) structuring and stabilizing phenomenon that helps maintain specific distributions of rights and duties by conferring perceived legitimacy onto them. (shrink)

This letter responds to a letter by Moti Gorin in the same issue, September‐October 2024, of the Hastings Center Report.

Horizontes da religião (Horizons of religion) - DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2011v9n23p633.