Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself.

Wittgenstein did not write on the philosophy of religion. But certain strands of his later thought readily lend themselves to what I call Wittgensteinian Fideism. There is no text that I can turn to for an extended statement of this position, but certain remarks made by Winch, Hughes, Malcolm, Geach, Cavell, Cameron and Coburn can either serve as partial statements of this position, or can be easily used in service of such a statement. Some of their contentions will serve as (...) targets for my argumentation, for as much as I admire Wittgenstein, it seems to me that the fideistic conclusions drawn by these philosophers from his thought are often absurd. This leads me back to an inspection of their arguments and the premisses in these arguments. (shrink)

Identity, we're told, is the binary relation that every object bears to itself, and to itself only. But how can a relation be binary if it never relates two objects? This puzzled Russell and led Wittgenstein to declare that identity is not a relation between objects. The now standard view is that Wittgenstein's position is untenable, and that worries regarding the relational status of identity are the result of confusion. I argue that the rejection of identity as a binary relation (...) is perfectly tenable. To this end, I outline and defend a logical framework that is not committed to an objectual identity relation but is nevertheless expressively equivalent to first-order logic with identity. After it has thus been shown that there is no indispensability argument for objectual identity, I argue that we have good reasons for doubting the existence of such a relation, and rebut a number of attempts at discrediting these reasons. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time is a fundamental constituent of human consciousness and can be disturbed under conditions of mental disorders such as schizophrenia or affective disorders. Besides the scientific domain of psychiatry, time consciousness is a topic that has been extensively studied both by theoretical philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. It can be shown that both approaches exemplified by the philosophical analysis of time consciousness and the neuroscientific theory of cross-temporal contingencies as the neurophysiological basis of human consciousness implemented in (...) the prefrontal cortex converge in 2 respects. Firstly, a tripartite conception of consciousness divides human cognition in 3 different temporal domains comprising retention, presentation, and protention and the past, the present, and the future corresponding to working memory, interference control, and preparatory set. Secondly, both concepts refer to the present as an extended duration that integrates information from the recent past and the future. We propose that the integration of phenomenological and neuroscientific approaches can stimulate the development of enriched pathophysiological concepts of mental disorders. This approach appears to be particularly fruitful with respect to schizophrenia that is interpreted as a structural disturbance of time consciousness. (shrink)

In §93 of The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell observes that “the variable is a very complicated logical entity, by no means easy to analyze correctly”. This assessment is borne out by the fact that even now we have no fully satisfactory understanding of the role of variables in a compositional semantics for first-order logic. In standard Tarskian semantics, variables are treated as meaning-bearing entities; moreover, they serve as the basic building blocks of all meanings, which are constructed out of (...) variable assignments. But this has disquieting consequences, including Fine’s antinomy of the variable and an undue dependence of meanings on language. Here I develop an alternative, Fregean version of predicate logic that uses the traditional quantifier–variable apparatus for the expression of generality, possesses a fully compositional, non-representational semantics, and is not subject to the antinomy of the variable. The advantages of Fregean over Tarskian predicate logic are due to the former’s treating variables not as meaningful lexical items, but as mere marks of punctuation, similar to parentheses. I submit that this is indeed how the variables of predicate logic should be construed. (shrink)

This article re-examines the role of the brain in self-recognition. It reconsiders the idea that the frontal and cortical midline structures are important for self-specific experience in light of several recent reviews of neuroscience literature. The findings suggests that the frontal cortex and the cortical midline structure are not the only areas involved in self-related tasks and that these areas may be involved not because the tasks are self-specific, but because they are tasks that involve a specific kind of cognitive (...) operation, specifically reflective evaluation. (shrink)

Currently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider two curious subsystems ofFrege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik: Richard Heck's predicative fragment H, consisting of schema V together with predicative second-order comprehension (in a language containing a syntactical abstraction operator), and a theory T in monadic second-order logic, consisting of axiom V and 1 1-comprehension (in a language containing anabstraction function). I provide a consistency proof for the latter theory, thereby refuting a version of a conjecture by Heck. It is shown that both Heck and T (...) prove the existence of infinitely many non-logical objects (T deriving,moreover, the nonexistence of the value-range concept). Some implications concerning the interpretation of Frege's proof of referentiality and the possibility of classifying any of these subsystems as logicist are discussed. Finally, I explore the relation of T toCantor's theorem which is somewhat surprising. (shrink)

The purpose of the present paper is to challenge some received assumptions about the logical analysis of modal English, and to show that these assumptions are crucial to certain debates in current philosophy of language. Specifically, I will argue that the standard analysis in terms of quantified modal logic mistakenly fudges important grammatical distinctions, and that the validity of Kripke's modal argument against description theories of proper names crucially depends on ensuing equivocations.

Addressing the end-of-philosophy debate and the challenge it presents to contemporary philosophy, this book draws on Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Habermas and Foucault, among others. It develops the implications of Richard Rorty's arguments in particular.

The human self model comprises essential features such as the experiences of ownership, of body-centered spatial perspectivity, and of a long-term unity of beliefs and attitudes. In the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, it is suggested that clinical subsyndromes like cognitive disorganization and derealization syndromes reflect disorders of this self model. These features are neurobiologically instantiated as an episodically active complex neural activation pattern and can be mapped to the brain, given adequate operationalizations of self model features. In its unique capability of (...) integrating external and internal data, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) appears to be an essential component of the neuronal implementation of the self model. With close connections to other unimodal association cortices and to the limbic system, the PFC provides an internally represented world model and internal milieu data of the organism, both serving world orientation. In the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, it is the dysfunction of the PFC that is suggested to be the neural correlate for the different clinical schizophrenic subsyndromes. The pathophysiological study of psychiatric disorders may contribute to the theoretical debate on the neuronal basis of the self model. (shrink)

This paper explores how to deliberate about food choices from a Stoic perspective informed by the value of environmental sustainability. This perspective is reconstructed from both ancient and contemporary sources of Stoic philosophy. An account of what the Stoic goal of “living in agreement with Nature” would amount to in dietary practice is presented. Given ecological facts about food production, an argument is made that Stoic virtue made manifest as wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance compel Stoic practitioners to select locally (...) sourced, low resource input, plant-based foods whenever circumstances allow. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper we investigate the intuitionistic version $iI\!\Sigma_1$ of $I\!\Sigma_1$ (in the language of $PRA$ ), using Kleene's recursive realizability techniques. Our treatment closely parallels the usual one for $HA$ and establishes a number of nice properties for $iI\!\Sigma_1$ , e.g. existence of primitive recursive choice functions (this is established by different means also in [D94]). We then sharpen an unpublished theorem of Visser's to the effect that quantifier alternation alone is much less powerful intuitionistically (...) than classically: $iI\!\Sigma_1$ together with induction over arbitrary prenex formulas is $\Pi_2$ -conservative over $iI\!\Pi_2$ . In the second part of the article we study the relation of $iI\!\Sigma_1$ to $iI\!\Pi_1$ (in the usual arithmetical language). The situation here is markedly different from the classical case in that $iI\!\Pi_1$ and $iI\!\Sigma_1$ are mutually incomparable, while $iI\!\Sigma_1$ is significantly stronger than $iI\!\Pi_1$ as far as provably recursive functions are concerned: All primitive recursive functions can be proved total in $iI\!\Sigma_1$ whereas the provably recursive functions of $iI\!\Pi_1$ are all majorized by polynomials over ${\Bbb N}$ . 0 $iI\!\Pi_1$ is unusual also in that it lacks closure under Markov's Rule $\mbox{MR}_{PR}$. (shrink)

Wittgensteinian predicate logic (W-logic) is characterized by the requirement that the objects mentioned within the scope of a quantifier be excluded from the range of the associated bound variable. I present a sound and complete tableaux calculus for this logic and discuss issues of translatability between Wittgensteinian and standard predicate logic in languages with and without individual constants. A metalinguistic co-denotation predicate, akin to Frege’s triple bar of the Begriffsschrift, is introduced and used to bestow the full expressive power of (...) first-order logic with identity on W-logic in the presence of constants. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to present and compare two approaches to formalizing cross-world comparisons like John might have been taller than he is in quantified modal logics. One is the standard method employing degrees and graded positives, according to which the example just given is to be paraphrased as something like The height that John has is such that he might have had a height greater than it, which is amenable to familiar formalization strategies with respect to (...) quantified modal logic. The other approach, based on subjunctive modal logic, mimics the mixed indicative-subjunctive patterns typical of cross-world comparisons in many natural languages by means of explicit mood markers. This latter approach is new and should, for various reasons, appeal to linguists and philosophers. Along the way, I argue that attempts to capture cross-world comparison by means of sentential operators are either inadequate or subject to substantive logical and philosophical objections. (shrink)

Although thought suppression is a commonly used self-control strategy that has far-reaching consequences, its effect on ethical decision making is unclear. Whereas ironic process theory suggests that suppressing ethics-related thoughts leads to mental rebounds of ethicality and decreased unethical behavior, ego depletion theory suggests that thought suppression can lead to reduced self-control and increased unethical behavior. Integrating the two theories, I propose that the effect of thought suppression on unethical behavior hinges on the content of the suppressed thoughts. Participants who (...) suppressed ethics-related [-unrelated] thoughts engaged in less [more] cyber bullying, cheating, and dishonesty compared to participants in the control conditions. Explicit and implicit moral awareness was found to mediate this moderated effect. Experiment 4 further demonstrated that suppressing ethics-related thoughts reduces self-control performance on a subsequent amoral task, but not on subsequent ethical decision making. (shrink)

The method of appealing to considered judgments in Wide Reflective Equilibrium has been thought to have unwelcome relativistic or ethnocentric implications. This belief, which is widely held, is, I shall argue, mistaken. Wide Reflective equilibrium has no such untoward implications. I shall first specify what I am talking about in speaking of relativism, then generally characterize WRE, then deploy some central arguments for it and finally try to show that it has no relativistic implications.

It is not quite as easy to see that there is in fact no formula of this modal language having the same truth conditions (in terms of S5 Kripke semantics) as (1). This was rst conjectured by Allen Hazen2 and later proved by Harold Hodes3. We present a simple direct proof of this result and discuss some consequences for the logical analysis of ordinary modal discourse.

This paper studies the state of charge estimation of supercapacitors and lithium batteries in the hybrid energy storage system of electric vehicles. According to the energy storage principle of the electric vehicle composite energy storage system, the circuit models of supercapacitors and lithium batteries were established, respectively, and the model parameters were identified online using the recursive least square method and Kalman filtering algorithm. Then, the online estimation of SOC was completed based on the Kalman filtering algorithm and unscented Kalman (...) filtering algorithm. Finally, the experimental platform for SOC estimation was built and Matlab was used for calculation and analysis. The experimental results showed that the SOC estimation results reached a high accuracy, and the variation range of estimation error was [−0.94%, 0.34%]. For lithium batteries, the recursive least square method is combined with the 2RC model to obtain the optimal result, and the estimation error is within the range of [−1.16%, 0.85%] in the case of comprehensive weighing accuracy and calculation amount. Moreover, the system has excellent robustness and high reliability. (shrink)

Integrating research on empowering leadership with the literature on power in social psychology, we examine how empowering leaders affect the propensity of followers to engage in deviance. Across a multi-source, multi-wave field study and a controlled laboratory experiment, we find that, compared to the followers of less-empowering leaders, the followers of more empowering leaders feel subjectively more powerful and engage in more deviant behaviors. Moreover, we find that the propensity of empowered followers to engage in more deviance depends on their (...) prosocial attributes. Specifically, empowered followers engage in the highest levels of deviance when they have a weak moral identity and a strong desire for dominance. We further find that empowering leadership does not increase follower deviance when followers either have a strong moral identity or a weak desire for dominance. In sum, although past research suggests that empowering leadership may facilitate productivity and employee engagement, our work demonstrates that it can also cultivate harmful effects, such as increased deviance among certain types of followers. We discuss our theoretical contributions as well as practical implications for practicing empowering leadership. (shrink)

Ethical leadership research has primarily relied on social learning and social exchange theories. Although these theories have been generative, additional theoretical perspectives hold the potential to broaden scholars’ understanding of ethical leadership’s effects. In this paper, we examine moral typecasting theory and its unique implications for followers’ leader-directed citizenship behavior. Across two studies employing both survey-based and experimental methods, we offer support for three key predictions consistent with this theory. First, the effect of ethical leadership on leader-directed citizenship behavior is (...) curvilinear, with followers helping highly ethical and highly unethical leaders the least. Second, this effect only emerges in morally intense contexts. Third, this effect is mediated by the follower’s belief in the potential for prosocial impact. Our findings suggest that a follower’s belief that his or her leader is ethical has meaningful, often counterintuitive effects that are not predicted by dominant theories of ethical leadership. These results highlight the potential importance of moral typecasting theory to better understand the dynamics of ethical leadership. (shrink)

ABSTRACT By integrating theories of social learning and moral judgment, we developed a theoretical model on whether and when peers imitate employees’ unethical pro-organizational behavior in the workplace. The study, which involved 256 employees in a large manufacturing company in China, revealed that employees’ UPB positively predicted peers’ vicarious learning of UPB, with the effect strengthened by employees’ organizational tenure but weakened by peers’ deontic injustice. Moreover, the positive effect of employees’ UPB on their peers’ vicarious learning was mitigated, and (...) even turned negative when employees’ organizational tenure was low, but peers’ deontic injustice was high. (shrink)

While prior literature has widely acknowledged that the entrepreneurial environment significantly fertilizes entrepreneurship, the impact of workplace receives limited attention, and the vital role of organizations in linking social entrepreneurial environment and employee entrepreneurship has been largely ignored. Therefore, this study aims to unfold how multiple entrepreneurial environments shape employee entrepreneurship and then further reveal how such relationships vary with employees’ risk propensity. Drawn on the theoretical lens of mindsponge process, which offers an explanation of why and how organizations and (...) individuals adopt new values through the cost-benefit analysis, we proposed a research model to explain the influence mechanisms of the social entrepreneurial environment on the cost-benefit analysis of both organizations and individual employees. Specifically, given that organizations deeply embedded in the society need to balance the costs and benefits under the pressure of the social entrepreneurial environment, the social entrepreneurial environment affects the organizational entrepreneurial environment. Similarly, employees’ cost-benefit analysis under the pressure of organizational hostility will influence their entrepreneurial intentions. Through analyzing the data collected from a two-wave survey with 220 employees, we showed that organizational hostility toward employee entrepreneurship plays a mediating role between social entrepreneurial environment and employees’ entrepreneurial intentions. In addition, such mediation relationship is moderated by coworkers’ unethical behaviors during their entrepreneurship and employees’ risk propensity, which are expected to influence organizations’ and employees’ cost-benefit analysis, respectively. (shrink)

In Section 10 of Grundgesetze, Volume I, Frege advances a mathematical argument (known as the permutation argument), by means of which he intends to show that an arbitrary value-range may be identified with the True, and any other one with the False, without contradicting any stipulations previously introduced (we shall call this claim the identifiability thesis, following Schroeder-Heister (1987)). As far as we are aware, there is no consensus in the literature as to (i) the proper interpretation of the permutation (...) argument and the identifiability thesis, (ii) the validity of the permutation argument, and (iii) the truth of the identifiability thesis. In this paper, we undertake a detailed technical study of the two main lines of interpretation, and gather some evidence for favoring one interpretation over the other. (shrink)

I examine notions of equivalence between logics (understood as languages interpreted model-theoretically) and develop two new ones that invoke not only the algebraic but also the string-theoretic structure of the underlying language. As an application, I show how to construe modal operator languages as what might be called typographical notational variants of _bona fide_ first-order languages.

"Contemporary Critiques of Religion sustains a probing dialogue between belief and unbelief. After isolating the central intellectual perplexities of Judaeo-Christian belief, it examines contemporary empiricist critiques of religion to reveal how essentially problematic is the mature Judaeo-Christian concept of God. Rebuttals to such an empiricist critique of religion are then considered in some detail. In Chapter 5 a form of conceptual relativism is isolated and examined. The implications of such a relativism, it is agruged, are those of scepticism and not (...) those of a total commitment to either belief or unbelief. Finally, a careful examination reveals the conceptual incoherencies of the logic of non-anthropomorphic God-talk."-Publisher. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I ask whether quantifiers are intensional operators, with variable assignments playing the role of indices. Certain formulations of extensional type theory suggest an affirmative answer, but the most satisfactory among them suffer from a contamination of their semantic ontology with syntactic material. I lay out ‘Fregean’ versions of extensional type theory that are free from syntactic contamination and suggest a negative answer to our question.

§1. Introduction. By means of what semantic features is a proper name tied to its bearer? This is a puzzling question indeed: proper names — like “Aristotle” or “Paris” — are syntactically simple, and it therefore does not seem possible to reduce their meanings, by means of a principle of compositionality, to the meanings of more basic, and hence perhaps more tractable, linguistic elements.

We lead increasingly electronic lives, in which a significant part of our existence takes place online. The concepts of eGovernment, eCommerce, eHealth and eLiving are an indication of this development. Against this background, there is an ever growing urgency of thinking through the problem of building trust in an online context. This paper examines the contextual conditions which affect building trust online. It will be argued that different combinations of the contextual conditions of trust building will result in different views (...) of the trust by the customer. Some of these combinations are better than others, and while a holistic approach would likely result in the best solution, it is not necessarily always within reach. Online trust building could be defined as a successful combination of four basic elements: reputation, technology, expertise and relationship. Unlike previous research, this study attempts to take all of these four key elements and the dynamics of their interconnections into account. (shrink)

We theorize that victim anonymity is an important factor in ethical decision making, such that actors engage in more self-interested and unethical behaviors toward anonymous victims than they do toward identifiable victims. Three experiments provided empirical support for this argument. In Study 1, participants withheld more life-saving products from anonymous than from identifiable victims. In Study 2, participants allocated a sum of payment more unfairly when interacting with an anonymous than with an identifiable partner. Finally, in Study 3, participants cheated (...) more from an anonymous than from an identifiable person. Anticipated guilt fully mediated these effects in all three studies. Taken together, our research suggests that anonymous victims may be more likely to incur unethical treatment, which could explain many unethical business behaviors. (shrink)

In the first chapter of Karl Marx's Theory of History, G. A. Cohen contrasts Marx's image of history with Hegel's, contrasts, that is, a powerful form of historical idealism with historical materialism. Historical idealism stresses the “dominion of thought” ; social change, on such an account, is to be explained principally in terms of changes in consciousness, the course of history being determined by fundamental ruling ideas and conceptions. This view is to be contrasted with historical materialism. The central vision (...) of history in Hegel is formulated as follows by Cohen, “History is the history of the world spirit which undergoes growth in self-knowledge, the stimulus and vehicle of which is a culture, which perishes when it has stimulated more growth than it can contain”. Marx's vision, a historical materialist vision, is identical in structure with Hegel's, but endows the structure with a new content. This can be seen from the parallel formulation of it, given by Cohen: “History is the history of human industry, which undergoes growth in productive power, the stimulus and vehicle of which is an economic structure which perishes when it has stimulated more growth than it can contain. (shrink)

In ‘Eliminating Identity: A Reply to Wehmeier’, Robert Trueman attacks my claim that a commitment to a binary relation of identity is logically unnecessary and philosophically undesirable. I show that his two most serious objections are unconvincing.

We investigate and compare two major approaches to enhancing the expressive capacities of modal languages, namely the addition of subjunctive markers on the one hand, and the addition of scope-bearing actuality operators, on the other. It turns out that the subjunctive marker approach is not only every bit as versatile as the actuality operator approach, but that it in fact outperforms its rival in the context of cross-world predication.