Although the popular referendum is part of Italy's 1948 constitution, the political parties in power delayed for more than 20 years putting it info practice. It was finally institutionalized in 1970 and has met on various occasions with caution or hostility from the political parties.Succeeding in mobilizing public opinion, shaking the political parties and speeding up the legislative process, the referendum disappointed in several respects. Especially the permanent conflict with parliament through the action of the radical party led to negativism (...) on its behalf. (shrink)

Ten years after they were set up, the Italian regions have fallen into general discredit. They are discredited by the central government who regards them as a source of support for the opposing Communist Party and has sought to undermine this reform by depriving the regions of all true autonomy. The regions are discredited by the public opinion by not fulfilling the expectations placed in them. Such an assessment does not stand up to a close examination of regional practices : (...) some geographical differences rapidly become obvious, but especially evident are the political differences. In fact, the regions are the product of an apparent agreement between the political parties and have always suffered from political bargaining which explains the national scale of the issues raised at the last elections. Strengthened by the favorable results obtained in certain regions, the Communist Party was quick to turn this statement of the electoral opinion into a « referendum » about the newly formed Cossiga government. (shrink)

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)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 685-698, December 2021.

Rational agents base their actions on information from observation, inference, introspection, or other sources. But this information comes in different kinds, and it is usually handled by different logical mechanisms. We discuss how to integrate external ‘updating information’ and internal ‘elucidating information’ into one system of dynamic epistemic logic, by distinguishing two basic informational actions: ‘bare seeing’ versus ‘conscious realization’.

The orthodox definition of hope suffers from an exclusion problem: it is unable to exclude subjects without hope. In fact, the orthodox definition even allows for despair to be falsely classified as hope. This problem suggests two basic desiderata for a successful analysis of hope: it should solve the exclusion problem, and it should have the resources to explain why, in a given situation, a subject does or does not form a hope. Bearing these desiderata in mind, I assess two (...) recent hope‐accounts offered by Jack M. C. Kwong and Cheshire Calhoun. I then offer my own view, which is based on the Jamesian notion of a “live possibility”. I suggest that a possibility needs to reach a certain probability threshold in order to count as live, and according to my account, to hope is to desire the truth of such a live possibility. This view is well‐equipped to solve the exclusion problem, and it can explain why a subject does or does not hope. (shrink)

Where should we meet? This may seem like a trivial decision, mostly focused on convenience. However, location can represent integral values, attitudes, and priorities. Especially when the meeting i...

According to an increasingly popular view known as non-doxasticism, religious faith need not include belief, but only some cognitively weaker attitude. This view comes with great promises, as it offers a way for the agnostic to partake in religion. My concern is how such a non-doxastic faith might be understood as a rational attitude. I offer three desiderata for any account of rational, non-doxastic faith. These desiderata are based on general considerations regarding epistemic rationality and on major themes from current (...) literature on the closely related notions of trust and hope. The first desideratum states that faith must be able to meet the demands of reason. The second requires, perhaps surprisingly, that faith should not imply trust. The third requires that faith should imply hope while excluding despair. I show how several prominent accounts of non-doxastic faith, by Lara Buchak, Daniel Howard-Snyder and Daniel McKaughan, all fail to meet at least one of these desiderata. I also suggest that the desiderata should make us prefer a reconstructive methodology. (shrink)

Intensional logic is the technical study of such intensional phenomena in human reasoning as modality, knowledge, or flow of time. These all require a richer semantic picture than standard truth values in one static environment. Such a picture is provided by so-called possible worlds semantics, a paradigm which is surveyed in this book, both as to its external sources of motivation and as to the internal dynamics of the resulting program. In particular, Manual of Intensional Logic presents the major classical (...) topics, including modal logic, tense logic, and conditional logic, all of which illustrate motivations coming from philosophy and linguistics. The Book also discusses recent computational applications in computer science and AI. Finally, Manual of Intensional Logic takes up recent developments in the study of language and information making themselves felt in the area. The Book examines the role of partial information--with illustrations drawn from different branches of Intensional Logic--and various influences stemming from current theories of the semantics of natural language, involving generalized quantifiers and theories of types. (shrink)

Current dynamic epistemic logics often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added for groups of agents. Still, postconditions regarding common knowledge express the essence of what communication achieves. We present some methods that yield so-called reduction axioms for common knowledge. We investigate the expressive power of public announcement logic with relativized common knowledge, and present reduction axioms that give a detailed account of the dynamics of common knowledge in some major communication types.

It is common in the literature to claim that legitimacy is the right to rule and that, accordingly, Hohfeldian rights analysis can be used to understand the concept. However, we argue that authors in the legitimacy literature have not generally realised the full potential of Hohfeldian analysis. We discuss extant approaches in the literature that conceptually identify legitimacy with one particular Hohfeldian incident, or, more rarely, a determinate set of incidents. Against these views, and building on parallel debates in property (...) theory, we suggest that Hohfeldian analysis pushes one towards the claim that legitimacy possesses no determinate essence. We provide a rationale for this novel view and disarm a series of objections. (shrink)

I provide a unified account of hope and fear as propositional attitudes. This “mirror account” is based on the historical idea that the only difference between hope and fear is the conative attitude involved, positive for hope and negative for fear. My analysis builds on a qualified version of the standard account of hope. The epistemic condition is formulated in terms of live possibility and the conative according to a non-reductive view on desire and aversion. The account demonstrates the theoretical (...) fruitfulness of accepting Jack M. C. Kwong’s distinction between hope and fear as propositional attitudes and experiential states. (shrink)

Paperback. This volume finds its origin in a colloquium on Logic and Argumentation, held in June 1994 in Amsterdam and sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The papers included have been selected for the role they can play in illuminating current thinking about the various kinds of relations between logic and argumentation.Aiming to provide some background to the academic endeavour of exploring the connections between logic and argumentation this volume offers the reader some representative specimina of (...) current thinking about this subject. (shrink)

Meer informatie over de uitgaven van Sdu Uitgevers en Academic Service kunt u verkrijgen bij: Sdu Klantenservice Postbus 20014 2500 EA Den Haag tel.: (070) 378 98 80 www.sdu.nl/service..

This is an introduction for readers with some basic knowledge of logic to contemporary logical analyses of information flow and multi-agent activity with an emphasis on new perspectives and new research directions. The first major topic are dynamic-epistemic logics for analyzing information dynamics and information update based on new observations, as well as the induced processes of knowledge change and belief revision. The second part of the book connects these dynamic-epistemic logics to richer mathematical models coming from dependence logic, topology (...) and probability. In a third and final part, all these systems are brought to bear on the study of agency in games, bringing together logics for analyzing games and games for analyzing logics in one perspective. An appendix discusses a recent view on how qualitative logical and quantitative arithmetical approaches to reasoning can live together and inform each other. A further appendix summarizes the background in modal logic that is needed for this course. (shrink)

Le Poidevin’s ‘new agnosticism’ concerns partaking in religious life while being uncertain whether religious discourse is fictional or not. Le Poidevin has offered two distinct versions of the new agnosticism, ‘semantic agnosticism’ and ‘meta-linguistic agnosticism’. I suggest that the first, ‘semantic agnosticism’, should be rejected, mainly because it involves a highly questionable view of truth and fails to properly distinguish fictional existence from real existence. The second, ‘meta-linguistic agnosticism’ seems acceptable as a view of religious discourse but not as a (...) foundation for a religious life. A meta-linguistic agnostic will not be able to take the proper attitude towards religious propositions, since what is the proper attitude varies greatly between realism and fictionalism. Even more importantly, she will not know when it is rationally permissible to perform religious actions, because she will not know whether real-life concerns should take precedence or not. Le Poidevin’s meta-linguistic agnostic is also a truth-agnostic, and I conclude that adding meta-linguistic agnosticism to truth-agnosticism only complicates matters without offering any benefits. (shrink)

This article discusses the meanings of “creativity”—tvorchestvo—as we encounter it in Georges Florovsky’s thought, first and foremost in his magnum opus Ways of Russian Theology (1937). Tvorchestvo had by this time become a key concept in Russian pre-revolutionary and later émigré thought. It is associated above all with Nikolai Berdyaev’s philosophy, but it also plays an important role in Sergei Bulgakov’s philosophy of economy. In both cases, it stands for the human response to divine creation. Moreover, and somewhat less famously, (...) it was also an epistemological concept in the religious idealism of Vladimir Solovyov as well as in Russian neo-Kantianism (Fyodor Stepun), where it stood for the active, synthetic faculty of our minds. Florovsky, meanwhile, used it as a description of how we should relate to the patristic heritage, but also to history more generally: Our attitude should be “creative,” active, as well as both backward- and forward-looking. This “return to the Fathers” was a central component of Florovsky’s neopatristic program, but, interestingly, in order to conceptualize this return, Florovsky took over a concept from traditions that his own approach otherwise firmly criticized. By analyzing Florovsky’s use of tvorchestvo, this article addresses the broader question as to the differences and parallels between the neopatristic movement and the legacy of the Russian Renaissance (Silver Age). (shrink)

Business Ethics has really taken off in Belgium. The author is Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, and an Associate Editor.

The digital computational technologies that over the past decades have come to be fully integrated into nearly all aspects of human life have varying forms, scales, interactive mechanisms, functions, configurations, and interconnections. Much of this complexity and associated implications for human experience are, however, hidden by prevalent notions of ‘the computer’ as an object. In this paper, we consider how everyday digital technologies collectively mediate human experience, arguing that these technologies are better understood as fluid assemblages that have as many (...) similarities with the infra-structural as they have properties typical for objects. We characterize these aspects in terms of ‘wicked interactions,’ drawing on and adapting the classic theory of wicked problems in design discourse that has similarly considered the complexity of interactions with and within other types of social infrastructure. In doing this we emphasize the need and the potential for building up connections between philosophy of technology and design discourse, with the hope that this might further the shared goals of understanding digital technologies and their consequences and determining how to act in relation to them and their design. (shrink)

The article discusses the notion of culture as it appears and is conceptualized in the works of G.P. Fedotov. The analysis focuses on two articles by Fedotov published in Russian migr journals, "The Holy Spirit in Nature and Culture" of 1932 and "Eschatology and culture" of 1938, and in his magnum opus in a Western context, The Russian Religious Mind of 1946. The author proposes to analyze Fedotov's ideas as a theology of culture due to the profoundly religious meaning the (...) Russian migr thinker attributed to cultural products and production, regardless of their religious intention. By implication, Fedotov understood culture in a religious framework as the human experience of and response to the divine, though not necessarily as dependent on firm belief. Viewing Fedotov as a theologian of culture enables us, furthermore, to compare him with other thinkers across the West-East cultural gradient, most notably Paul Tillich. This approach contextualizes Fedotov in a post-Schellingian pan-European idealist tradition, to which Russian thinkers' analyses of religious experience and imagination have made seminal contributions, in particular from Vladimir Solov'ev on. The article discusses these issues within the framework of the perspectives of global intellectual history, entangled history, and transnationalized Russian studies. (shrink)

Evert van der Zweerde’s book is the most recent result of the author’s long-time study of Russian philosophy and Russian philosophical culture. The latter concept has been one of Zweerde’s main con...

In the post-Soviet context, various cyclical models of recurrent Russian “Times of Troubles” have become increasingly popular. This perspective emerged first in Soviet dissident circles, who used it as a means to expose as mistaken the Soviet belief in continual historical progress on Russian soil. In post-Soviet Russia this critical approach has been continued by members of the “Akhezier circle,” the economist Egor Gaidar, and others. Meanwhile it was given an affirmative, conservative reinterpretation by Aleksandr Panarin, according to whom Russia (...) has always managed to overcome its phases of devastating Westernization and state collapse. This idea of Russian history has become influential; even Vladimir Putin has talked about Russia as a strong state able to survive various “Times of Troubles” from the early seventeenth century to the early post-Soviet period. It also figures prominently among members of the neoconservative Izborsk Club. This article analyzes different conceptions of Russian history as cyclical and their prominent place in the prevailing civilizational discourse of post-Soviet Russia. By means of postcolonial perspectives, this discourse is seen on the one hand as an attempt to question and reject Western hegemony, attempts that on the other hand nevertheless seem unable to liberate themselves from a normative dependence on the West. (shrink)

We advocate an analysis of meaning that departs from the pragmatic slogan that “meaning is use”. However, in order to avoid common missteps, this claim is in dire need of qualification. We argue that linguistic meaning does not originate from language use as such; therefore we cannot base a theory of meaning only on use. It is important not to neglect the fact that language is ultimately reliant on non-linguistic factors. This might seem to oppose the aforementioned slogan, but it (...) will be made clear how this opposition is chimerical. We propose that meaning traces back to the relation between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which is at the heart of the matter by inducing strong interdependency between intention and interpretation. But to base a full-fledged analysis of meaning in communicative dyads alone is also insufficient. What needs to be further acknowledged is that meaning sharing becomes regulated by the interactions of a community. This we call consensus and it is at play in framing all communicative acts. Hence arises a triadic structure – we call this the meaningsharing network. The main motivation behind this model is to capture that meaning is not “in the head”, nor is it autonomous of the individual members that constitute it. (shrink)

Taika Waititi's recent film ‘Hunt for the Wilderpeople’ (2016) portrays the coming‐of‐age of a young boy, Ricky, in a world with few recognisably responsible adults. While the film does not engage explicitly with formal education, it raises several questions central for understanding education as formation, highlighting the generational aspects of educational relations and pointing to the importance of an adult world taking responsibility for the formation and upbringing of the younger generation. Departing from a discussion on the role of formation (...) and intergenerational relations in Rousseau and Arendt, we will draw on the film's portrayal of an adult world in crisis in order to discuss some of its possible consequences for understanding education in terms of intergenerational relations and formation. This involves raising questions about the educational consequences of the absence of recognisably responsible adults and it involves investigating how this absence might impact our understanding of education as the formation and upbringing of educated human beings. (shrink)

A guide to aligning your life with the frequencies of the Nine Waves of Creation.

Analizamos las ideologías para demostrar que su raíz materialista está en el origen de muchos problemas en la sociedad. La economía –es decir, la producción y el consumo– define a la persona humana. El ser humano es un subproducto de la economía. Esta definición ofusca la conciencia que es la base de la ética y por lo tanto de la dignidad de la persona, porque la ciencia y la tecnología se dan siempre en relación con hombres libres cuyos encuentros tienen (...) un significado cultural-ético. No podemos ser indiferentes a lo transcendente que no se puede verificar por experimentos o deducir de manera racional. La fe nos abre un horizonte distinto. (shrink)

For the last 30 years, the Church of Sweden, along with other institutions, has offered special confirmation courses for the church’s young Sami members. The organisers and teachers involved with these Sami confirmation courses all stress the necessity of adapting their teaching to fit Sami contexts. Their views are supported by various steering documents, but the wording of these documents leaves room for differing interpretations, which has resulted in multiple understandings of what concrete adjustments should be implemented in the teaching. (...) The overarching aim of this article is to analyse the differing views of how to adapt the teaching in Sami confirmation courses so as to better fit the Sami contexts. In particular, I examine whether these different views can be traced to differing understandings of what contextualising Religious Education entails. Ten interviews with people involved in teaching or organising the courses were analysed, along with archival material, using qualitative content analysis and theories regarding contextual theology, religious education and indigenous education. To capture these different theoretical perspectives, I suggest the concept of contextualised religious education and three central analytical questions: (1) ‘who is the teacher?’, (2) ‘how is the teaching organised?’ and (3) ‘what is the content of the teaching?’ My in-depth analysis of the interviews and archival material, the sorting of the different views voiced in this material (based on the three questions above), together with inspiration from models of contextual theology, resulted in three new categories: dialogical contextual religious education, context-driven contextual religious education and faith-driven contextual religious education. (shrink)

Labeling of food consumption is related to food safety, food quality, environmental, safety, and social concerns. Future politics of food will be based on a redefinition of commodity food consumption as an expression of citizenship. “Citizen-consumers” realize that they could use their buying power in order to develop a new terrain of social agency and political action. It takes for granted kinds of moral selfhood in which human responsibility is bound into human agency based on knowledge and recognition. This requires (...) new kinds of food labeling practices. Existing research on consumer’s preferences often fails to recognize the full complexity of the motivations and intentions through which the identity of the moral self is built up in relation to food consumption practices. For citizens, not only food production practices matter but also the impact of what we eat on who we are and the ecological foot print of our food stuff. Two major drivers for this are the idea that we ourselves have to take care of our own bodies (“We are what we eat”) and that we are responsible for Planet Earth. Since both obesity and climate change have become major public concerns, also governments develop an increasing interest in defining how citizens ought to behave as consumers and how retailers and producers should facilitate such responsible behavior. Since they are supposed to defend the “bonum commune,” e.g., the public health of their citizens and a sound common future for all, a new consensus on “appropriate” consumption choices has to be found, balancing beneficence and autonomy. (shrink)

Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. They examine the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong learning and speech and language acquisition, considering vocal imitation, auditory learning, an early vocalization phase, the structural properties of birdsong and human language, and the striking (...) similarities between the neural organization of learning and vocal production in birdsong and human speech. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language. Contributors: Hermann Ackermann, Gabriël J.L. Beckers, Robert C. Berwick, Johan J. Bolhuis, Noam Chomsky, Frank Eisner, Martin Everaert, Michale S. Fee, Olga Fehér, Simon E. Fisher, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Jonathan B. Fritz, Sharon M.H. Gobes, Riny Huijbregts, Eric Jarvis, Robert Lachlan, Ann Law, Michael A. Long, Gary F. Marcus, Carolyn McGettigan, Daniel Mietchen, Richard Mooney, Sanne Moorman, Kazuo Okanoya, Christophe Pallier, Irene M. Pepperberg, Jonathan F. Prather, Franck Ramus, Eric Reuland, Constance Scharff, Sophie K. Scott, Neil Smith, Ofer Tchernichovski, Carel ten Cate, Christopher K. Thompson, Frank Wijnen, Moira Yip, Wolfram Ziegler, Willem Zuidema. (shrink)

Many logical systems today describe intelligent interacting agents over time. Frameworks include Interpreted Systems (IS, Fagin et al. [8]), Epistemic-Temporal Logic (ETL, Parikh & Ramanujam [22]), STIT (Belnap et al. [5]), Process Algebra and Game Semantics (Abramsky [1]). This variety is an asset, as different modeling tools can be fine-tuned to specific applications. But it may also be an obstacle, when barriers between paradigms and schools go up. This paper takes a closer look at one particular interface, between two systems (...) that both address the dynamics of knowledge and information flow in multi-agent systems. One is IS/ETL (IS and ETL are, from a technical point of view, the same up to model transformations, cf. [20]), which uses linear or branching time models with added epistemic structure induced by agents’ different capabilities for observing events. These models provide a Grand Stage where histories of some process unfold constrained by a protocol, and a matching epistemic-temporal language describes what happens. The other framework is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, [10, 4, 34]) that describes interactive processes in terms of epistemic event models which may occur inside modalities of the language. Temporal evolution is then computed from some initial epistemic model through a process of successive ‘product updates’. It has long been unclear how to best compare IS/ETL and DEL. Various aspects have been investigated in [10, 30, 32], but in this paper, we study the interface in a more systematic way. Often, DEL and ETL are presented as alternative ways of adding dynamics to multi-agent epistemic models. In this paper, we rather focus on how merging the two different modeling choices leads to interesting new questions. Our leading interest here will be a view of informational processes as evolving over time. To see what we mean, consider the simplest version of DEL, viz. the logic of public announcements PAL ([23]) which adds a very specific type of communicative 1 action to epistemic models: a public announcement.. (shrink)