Williamson has forcefully argued that Fitch's argument shows that the domain of the unknowable is non-empty. And he exhorts us to make more inroads into the land of the unknowable. Concluding his discussion of Fitch's argument, he writes: " Once we acknowledge that [the domain of the unknowable] is non-empty, we can explore more effectively its extent. … We are only beginning to understand the deeper limits of our knowledge. " I shall formulate and evaluate a new argument concerning the (...) domain of the unknowable. It is an argument about knowability. More specifically, it is an argument about what we can know about the natural numbers. Since the domain of discourse will be the natural numbers structure, the notion of knowability can for the purposes of the argument be identified with a priori knowability or – which amounts to the same thing – absolute provability .Suppose, for a reductio, that there exists a property θ of natural numbers such that it is provable that for some natural number n, θ is true but unprovable. …. (shrink)

Mobile health (mHealth) apps for self-monitoring increasingly gain relevance for public health. As a mobile technology, they promote individual participation in health monitoring with the aim of disease prevention and the mitigation of health risks. In this paper, I argue that users of mHealth apps must engage in value trade-offs concerning their fundamental dimensions of well-being when using mobile health apps for the self-monitoring of health parameters. I particularly focus on trade-offs regarding the user’s self-determination as well as their capacity (...) to form personal attachments. Depending on the user’s level of advantage or disadvantage, value trade-offs can pose a threat to the users’ sufficient fulfillment of the dimensions of well-being. As such, value trade-offs can entrench existing structural injustices and prevent disadvantaged users to benefit from this technology. I argue that value trade-offs are, to some, a type of injustice that can drive disadvantaged users away from a sufficiency threshold of well-being, risk users to fall below the threshold, or have an accumulative effect on different dimensions of the user’s well-being. (shrink)

A review by Samantha Power in the Sunday New York Times Book Review of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance constitutes the most sympathetic, comparatively fair and balanced discussion of Chomsky's political writing in years appearing in these pages, with only a hint of Chomsky bashing.

Debates about the theological implications of recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion have tended to focus on the question of theism. The question of whether there is any disagreement about the conceptualization of the individual human being has been largely overlooked. In this article, I argue that evolutionary and cognitive accounts of religion typically depend upon a view of cognition that conceptually isolates the mind from its particular social and physical environmental contexts. By embracing this view (...) of the mind, these accounts also unwittingly embrace an abstract individualist view of individual personhood that Christian theologians have explicitly battled against. Taken as a whole, the field leaves sufficient room for supplementary theories that are compatible with theological accounts of the relational individual, but in practice, no effort has been made to engage, or even to accommodate, any other view of individual personhood. (shrink)

In this article we investigate similarities between the role that ineffability of Absolute Infinity plays in class theory and in theology.

Tarski has shown how the argumentation of the liar paradox can be used to prove a theorem about truth in formalized languages. In this paper, it is shown how the paradox concerning the least undefinable ordinal can be used to prove a no go-theorem concerning the notion of satisfaction in formalized languages. Also, the connection of this theorem with the absolute notion of definability is discussed.

Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.

My Favorite Music I enjoy the original Country Music, BlueGrass, some Classical and Blues. But so what? Obviously, I would like to promote what I would like to hear (since I am a certified Selfish Person). It is quite annoying that I can find little good music on my radio.

"A class of men who are exceedingly tiresome are those who, having traveled, talk of nothing but their adventures, the countries which they have seen or traversed, the dangers, whether real or fictitious, which they have encountered, repeating the same things an hundred times over.

If the answer is yes, then we should to be able to demonstrate that an individual sacrifice has a real effect on the common good. If my single, personal sacrifice can alter the final result, then I can say that my sacrifice produces more in rewards than my personal costs. But if my sacrifice makes no difference to the final result, why should I make it, especially if I receive the benefits of the sacrifice of others even if I make (...) no personal sacrifice? (shrink)

The most puzzling aspect of Social Choice theory[1] is that people cooperate much more than the theory suggests. There are several reasons why this is so, including the fact that people are not always rational -- particularly by the definition of "rational" used by the Social Choice theorists! Another obvious reason is that people act out of ignorance much of the time.

I have written a major essay on the problems that vagueness causes in governance and the way government and politicians take advantage of these problems. It is online at http://perspicuity.net/paradox/vaguegov.html.

This paper outlines a framework for the abstract investigation of the concept of canonicity of names and of naming systems. Degrees of canonicity of names and of naming systems are distinguished. The structure of the degrees is investigated, and a notion of relative canonicity is defined. The notions of canonicity are formally expressed within a Carnapian system of second-order modal logic.

_Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach_ offers a new, short term psychotherapeutic approach to working dynamically with children who suffer from irritability, oppositional defiance and disruptiveness. _RFP-C_ enables clinicians to help by addressing and detailing how the child’s externalizing behaviors have meaning which they can convey to the child. Using clinical examples throughout, Hoffman, Rice and Prout demonstrate that in many dysregulated children, _RFP-C_ can: Achieve symptomatic improvement and developmental maturation as a result of (...) gains in the ability to tolerate and metabolize painful emotions, by addressing the crucial underlying emotional component. Diminish the child’s use of aggression as the main coping device by allowing painful emotions to be mastered more effectively. Help to systematically address avoidance mechanisms, talking to the child about how their disruptive behavior helps them avoid painful emotions. Facilitate development of an awareness that painful emotions do not have to be so vigorously warded off, allowing the child to reach this implicit awareness within the relationship with the clinician, which can then be expanded to life situations at home and at school. This handbook is the first to provide a manualized, short-term dynamic approach to the externalizing behaviors of childhood, offering organizing framework and detailed descriptions of the processes involved in _RFP-C_. Supplying clinicians with a systematic individual psychotherapy as an alternative or complement to PMT, CBT and psychotropic medication, it also shifts focus away from simply helping parents manage their children’s misbehaviors. Significantly, the approach shows that clinical work with these children is compatible with understanding the children’s brain functioning, and posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation, promoting an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology. Manual of Regulation-Focused Psychotherapy for Children with Externalizing Behaviors: A Psychodynamic Approach is a comprehensive tool capable of application at all levels of professional training, offering a new approach for psychoanalysts, child and adolescent counselors, psychotherapists and mental health clinicians in fields including social work, psychology and psychiatry. (shrink)

Zeami Motokiyo 世阿弥 元清 (1363–1443) gilt als Schöpfer des klassischen Nō-Theaters und war nicht nur ein herausragender Darsteller, sondern auch Autor vieler Stücke, die noch heute aufgeführt werden. Neben diesen Stücken hat Zeami aber auch theoretische Traktate zur Übungspraxis des Nō-Theaters verfasst, die über viele Jahrhunderte hinweg geheim überliefert wurden und als Anweisungen für seine Nachfolger gedacht waren. In diesen Traktaten reflektiert Zeami auf seine Kunst und stellt sie als einen Übungsweg nach buddhistischem Vorbild dar, als eine ästhetische, aber auch (...) spirituelle Praxis, einen Lebensweg (道 dō, michi), der auf die Verkörperung grundlegender Prinzipien abzielt. Im Folgenden möchte ich vor allem anhand dieser theoretischen Schriften nachvollziehen, welche Rolle der Ausdruck „von-selbst-so“ (自然 jinen, chin. zìrán) bzw. „von selbst“ (onozukara), der heutzutage als Übersetzung für den europäischen Natur-Begriff verwendet wird, in Zeamis Konzeption der leiblichen Übungspraxis spielt und dies mit Stellen aus anderen Schriften vergleichen. Zunächst werde ich aber in knapper Weise zurückverfolgen, was leibliche Praxis vor dem Hintergrund des Daoismus und des Zen-Buddhismus im Kontext der japanischen Übungswege bzw. Wegkünste bedeutet. (shrink)