Introduction -- Rational explanation of belief -- Rational explanation of action -- (Non-human) animals and their reasons -- Rational explanation and rational causation -- Events and states -- Physicalism.

In this paper we will study the properties of the least extension n(Λ) of a given intermediate logic Λ by a strong negation. It is shown that the mapping from Λ to n(Λ) is a homomorphism of complete lattices, preserving and reflecting finite model property, frame-completeness, interpolation and decidability. A general characterization of those constructive logics is given which are of the form n(Λ). This summarizes results that can be found already in [13, 14] and [4]. Furthermore, we determine the (...) structure of the lattice of extensions of n(LC). (shrink)

Marcus Giaquinto presents an investigation into the different kinds of visual thinking involved in mathematical thought, drawing on work in cognitive psychology, philosophy, and mathematics. He argues that mental images and physical diagrams are rarely just superfluous aids: they are often a means of discovery, understanding, and even proof.

Given a normal (multi-)modal logic a characterization is given of the finitely presentable algebras A whose logics L A split the lattice of normal extensions of . This is a substantial generalization of Rautenberg [10] and [11] in which is assumed to be weakly transitive and A to be finite. We also obtain as a direct consequence a result by Blok [2] that for all cycle-free and finite A L A splits the lattice of normal extensions of K. Although we (...) firmly believe it to be true, we have not been able to prove that if a logic splits the lattice of extensions of then is the logic of an algebra finitely presentable over ; in this respect our result remains partial. (shrink)

This papers gives a survey of recent results about simulations of one class of modal logics by another class and of the transfer of properties of modal logics under extensions of the underlying modal language. We discuss: the transfer from normal polymodal logics to their fusions, the transfer from normal modal logics to their extensions by adding the universal modality, and the transfer from normal monomodal logics to minimal tense extensions. Likewise, we discuss simulations of normal polymodal logics by normal (...) monomodal logics, of nominals and the difference operator by normal operators, of monotonic monomodal logics by normal bimodal logics, of polyadic normal modal logics by polymodal normal modal logics, and of intuitionistic modal logics by normal bimodal logics. (shrink)

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are treasured today--as they have been over the centuries--as an inexhaustible source of wisdom. And as one of the three most important expressions of Stoicism, this is an essential text for everyone interested in ancient religion and philosophy. Yet the clarity and ease of the work's style are deceptive. Pierre Hadot, eminent historian of ancient thought, uncovers new levels of meaning and expands our understanding of its underlying philosophy. Written by the Roman emperor for (...) his own private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations set forth principles for living a good and just life. Hadot probes Marcus Aurelius's guidelines and convictions and discerns the hitherto unperceived conceptual system that grounds them. Abundantly quoting the Meditations to illustrate his analysis, the author allows Marcus Aurelius to speak directly to the reader. And Hadot unfolds for us the philosophical context of the Meditations, commenting on the philosophers Marcus Aurelius read and giving special attention to the teachings of Epictetus, whose disciple he was. The soul, the guiding principle within us, is in Marcus Aurelius's Stoic philosophy an inviolable stronghold of freedom, the "inner citadel." This spirited and engaging study of his thought offers a fresh picture of the fascinating philosopher-emperor, a fuller understanding of the tradition and doctrines of Stoicism, and rich insight on the culture of the Roman empire in the second century. Pierre Hadot has been working on Marcus Aurelius for more than twenty years; in this book he distills his analysis and conclusions with extraordinary lucidity for the general reader. (shrink)

The present paper is based on [11], where a number of conjectures are made concerning the structure of the lattice of normal extensions of the tense logicKt. That paper was mainly dealing with splittings of and some sublattices, and this is what I will concentrate on here as well. The main tool in analysing the splittings of will be the splitting theorem of [8]. In [11] it was conjectured that each finite subdirectly irreducible algebra splits the lattice of normal extensions (...) ofK4t andS4t. We will show that this is not the case and that on the contrary only very few and trivial splittings of the mentioned lattices exist. (shrink)

Four questions are raised about the semantics of Quantified Modal Logic. Does QML admit possible objects, i.e. possibilia? Is it plausible to admit them? Can sense be made of such objects? Is QML committed to the existence of possibilia? The conclusions are that QML, generalized as in Kripke, would seem to accommodate possibilia, but they are rejected on philosophical and semantical grounds. Things must be encounterable, directly nameable and a part of the actual order before they may plausibly enter into (...) the identity relation. QML is not committed to possibilia in that the range of variables may be restricted to actual objects. Support of the conclusions requires some discussion of substitution puzzles; also, the semantical distinction between proper names which are directly referring, and descriptions even where the latter are "rigid designators". Views of W.V. Quine, B. Russell, K. Donnellan, D. Kaplan as well as S. Kripke are invoked or evaluated in conjunction with these issues. (shrink)

To better understand how to solve large-scale social dilemmas such as common-pool resource management, this paper provides a interdisciplinary critical analysis of scholarship to reveal the vicious cycle we are currently mired in. It proposes that current approaches to promote pro-environmental behaviour will be limited in their efficacy without a preliminary change in the level of trust among individuals and the systems that purport to support them. It then advances a new focus on large-scale trust building, suggesting paths for future (...) research and a new direction for successful outcomes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Co-parents who differ in their ideal child rearing policies should compromise, argues Marcus William Hunt. Josh Milburn and Carlo Alvaro dispute this when it comes to veganism. Milburn argues that veganism is a matter of justice and that to compromise over justice is (typically) impermissible. I suggest that compromise over justice is often permissible, and that compromise over justice may be required by justice itself. Alvaro offers aesthetic, gustatory, and virtue-based arguments for ethical veganism, showing that veganism involves (...) sensibilities and virtues, and argues that veganism involves a belief. Alvaro takes this to show that parental compromise is impermissible. I suggest that Alvaro’s arguments are implausible and that the shaping of a child’s sensibilities and virtues is an apt matter for parental compromise. (shrink)

In recent decades, a view of identity I call Sortalism has gained popularity. According to this view, if a is identical to b, then there is some sortal S such that a is the same S as b. Sortalism has typically been discussed with respect to the identity of objects. I argue that the motivations for Sortalism about object-identity apply equally well to event-identity. But Sortalism about event-identity poses a serious threat to the view that mental events are token identical (...) to physical events: A particular mental event m is identical with a particular physical event p only if there is a sortal S such that m and p are both Ss. If there is no such sortal, the doctrine of token-identity is not true. I argue here that we have no good reason for thinking that there is any such sortal. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists must understand not just what the mind does, but how it does what it does. In this paper, I consider four aspects of cognitive architecture: how the mind develops, the extent to which it is or is not modular, the extent to which it is or is not optimal, and the extent to which it should or should not be considered a symbol‐manipulating device (as opposed to, say, an eliminative connectionist network). In each case, I argue that insights (...) from developmental and evolutionary biology can lead to substantive and important compromises in historically vexed debates. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

It has been suggested that a substitutional semantics for quantification theory lends itself to nominalistic aims. I should like in this paper to explore that claim.

Using a policy-capturing approach with a broad student sample we examine how individuals’ economic, social and environmental values influence their propensity to engage in a broad range of sustainability-related corporate actions. We employ a multi-dimensional sustainability framework of corporate actions and account for both the positive and negative impacts associated with corporate activity—termed strength and concern actions, respectively. Strong economic values were found to increase the propensity for concern actions and the willingness to work in controversial industries. Individuals with balanced (...) values were as likely as those with strong economic values to pursue positive economic outcomes, but without the same downside potential for concern actions. We also found significant gender effects, with females being less likely to engage in concern actions and more supportive of social and environmental strength actions. (shrink)

Originally published in 1984, this book broke new ground in assessing Freud as both an exemplary late-Victorian and as a pivotal figure in the creation of modern thought and culture. In his close reading of various of Freud’s theoretical and clinical texts, including two of the most famous case histories, Steven Marcus uncovers the steps in the development of Freud’s thought, the dynamics and contradictions and ‘the intellectual and emotional urgings, forces and conflicts that were at work… as the (...) first original insights and discoveries that constituted the inception of psychoanalysis as a theory, discipline of inquiry, and new kind of therapy, came suddenly, often unexpectedly and without being bidden, upon Freud’. Central to Professor Marcus’ inquiry is the relationship of Freud’s work to cultural change and to the very process of disclosure, formation and construction in the transition to modernity. Freud’s writings, and the psychoanalytic discipline of which they are the foundations, are placed in the context of their contribution to modern modes of thought, and of their influence on our notions of the centres of significance of each existence as a whole. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis is a major contribution to our understanding of how ideas and theories become internalized into the intellectual framework of our lives and affect the way we think about the world. By moving backward and forward from pre-Freudian to post-Freudian thinkers, Professor Marcus takes us on a journey through cultural transition that is also an exploration of how the individual interacts with his own moment in history to forge new modes of consciousness. (shrink)

Ethics consultation is a commonly applied mechanism to address clinical ethical dilemmas. However, there is little information on the viewpoints of health care providers towards the relevance of ethics committees and appropriate application of ethics consultation in clinical practice. We sought to use qualitative methodology to evaluate free-text responses to a case-based survey to identify thematically the views of health care professionals towards the role of ethics committees in resolving clinical ethical dilemmas. Using an iterative and reflexive model we identified (...) themes that health care providers support a role for ethics committees and hospitals in resolving clinical ethical dilemmas, that the role should be one of mediation, rather than prescription, but that ultimately legal exposure was dispositive compared to ethical theory. The identified theme of legal fears suggests that the mediation role of ethics committees is viewed by health care professionals primarily as a practical means to avoid more worrisome medico-legal conflict. (shrink)

The new explanatory or enhanced indispensability argument alleges that our mathematical beliefs are justified by their indispensable appearances in scientific explanations. This argument differs from the standard indispensability argument which focuses on the uses of mathematics in scientific theories. I argue that the new argument depends for its plausibility on an equivocation between two senses of explanation. On one sense the new argument is an oblique restatement of the standard argument. On the other sense, it is vulnerable to an instrumentalist (...) response. Either way, the explanatory indispensability argument is no improvement on the standard one. (shrink)

This book offers a re-examination of the evidence about citizens' capacity for self-governance and what it means for the future of democratic politics, from both empirical and normative perspectives. Are ordinary citizens capable of governing themselves? For more than three decades, social scientists have accumulated evidence of the undemocratic propensities of many ordinary citizens. This has caused some to worry about the stability of existing democratic institutions, while others argue that the institutions themselves are the problem: politics needs to be (...) democratized further, giving citizens more opportunities to practice democratic politics and acquire democratic values. The thirty-three contributors to this volume enter this debate with new evidence on citizens' capacity for deliberative politics. They argue that previous methods of investigation significantly underestimate people's ability to govern themselves, and that the prospects for democracy are better than conventional wisdom suggests. Realization of these prospects will depend on citizens grasping the interplay of emotions and reason in political life, creating new opportunities for citizen deliberation, and reinvigorating the institutions of representative government. Theories of democracy in turn will have to accommodate this changing reality as citizens show themselves to be self-determining in their political activities. (shrink)

Reminiscence of the author's education in infinity and how it turned him toward philosophy.

In the 1980s, leading philosophers at Oxford, Chicago and UCLA undertook a controversial reassessment of Marxism using the techniques of analytical philosophy. The aim of these so-called "Non-Bullshit" Marxists was no less than the complete reconstruction of Marxist theory, recasting it on a logical and rigorous basis, free from all metaphysical jargon and sentimentality. Marcus Roberts's study serves as a lucid survey of the Analytical Marxists' contributions to the understanding of historical materialism, exploitation, class structure, method, politics and ethics—a (...) panoramic tour de force which he brings up to date with considerations on John Roemer's recent work on models of socialism. Roberts charts the sinuous progress of the growth, development and ultimate dilution or disintegration of the bold theses originally put forward by such figures as Gerry Cohen, Jon Elster and John Roemer. For Roberts, the Analytical Marxist project, for all its elegance and richness, failed on its own terms, and in terms of Marxism more generally. However, as this book so persuasively demonstrates, along its winding route, the project raised questions of fundamental importance for social and political theory—questions that anyone interested in emancipation cannot avoid taking seriously. (shrink)

Relational Grammar (RG) was introduced in the 1970s as a theory of grammatical relations and relation change, for example, passivization, dative shift, and raising. Furthermore, the idea behind RG was that transformations as originally designed in generative grammar were unable to capture the common kernel of, e.g., passivization across languages. The researchconducted within RG has uncovered a wealth of phenomena for which it could produce a satisfactory analysis. Although the theory of Government and Binding has answered some of the complaints, (...) still it left many phenomena unaccounted for. Referent Systems (RSs) have been introduced by Vermeulen (1995) to overcome certain weaknesses of Dynamic Semantics. Their usefulness has not yet been realized in semantical theory. We shall show here that their significance cannot be overestimated. Namely, we will show in this paper that there exists a fundamental affinity to RG. Both handle the relation between an argument and a functor by means of a shared relational sign, which is unique for each argument. This assignment can be changed. What is interesting is that the notion of a chômeur, which is central to RG, finds a natural treatment in RSs. This coincidence is in our view not accidental but reveals some fundamental properties of the human language faculty. (shrink)