In a recent article Matty Häyry observes that human reproduction is both irrational and immoral1; hence, he suggests, those who seek help before conceiving, “could be advised it is all right not to have children”. Häyry believes that if prospective parents are told that “according to at least one philosopher it would be all right not to reproduce at all” this could empower people “to make the rational choice to remain childless”; valiantly, he suggests himself as “the one philosopher to (...) be blamed for this unpopular idea”.In a rejoinder to Matty Häyry, Søren Holm claims it is not strongly irrational to have children2; S Aksoy contends that having children is the biggest dream of many married couples, and “the major goal in a couple’s life”3; Rebecca Bennet, accepts that human reproduction may be irrational but in most cases she thinks this is morally defensible.4Matty Häyry does not need my help to defend himself; I will …. (shrink)

“The forms of thought are first set out and stored in human language,” we read in the preface to the second edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Man thinks through language, and everything he “transforms into language and expresses in it contains a category, whether concealed, mixed, or well defined”. Language, then, harbors thought categories. There is a philosophy of language, but there is also a philosophy implied in language. How is this supposed to work? More specifically, how is this (...) supposed to work in Hegel’s own use of language?This paper is an attempt to give a simple answer to this question. There have been scholarly attempts to tie Hegel’s philosophy to his use of language.1 This paper... (shrink)

The title of this symposium, “Formal Simplicity as a Weight in the Acceptability of Scientific Theories,” to some people might seem to suggest that we are to be making positive proposals about how the concept of simplicity could be defined for formalized languages, defined so as to figure in a formalized theory of confirmation. I must confess at the start that I do not have any such ambitious object in view. I now feel, indeed, that premature formalizations have little power (...) to illuminate the philosophically interesting questions which cluster round the problem of the role of simplicity in scientific thinking. So in this short paper I wish merely to present some elementary considerations, not very novel ones, concerning the role which simplicity seems to me to play in our non-demonstrative reasoning about matters of empirical fact. Although many writers have sought to analyze the logical character of such reasoning, little unanimity has been attained in their over-all views; thus it is that though the considerations which I wish to present are elementary, they are not wholly uncontroversial. But because these matters are elementary in nature, I do feel it appropriate in discussing them to use homely examples of uncomplicated kinds, rather than elaborate examples drawn from the more sophisticated reaches of scientific theory; in doing so, I am taking it for granted that scientific inference as regards its logical character is fundamentally a refinement of everyday thinking, rather than a procedure of some essentially different nature. (shrink)

During the early 19th century, a peculiarly systematic way of organizing books emerged in Germany. This systematization, which purported to be a rational organization of subject matter, was an outgrowth of the philosophy of Hegel. This article attempts to outline Hegel's organizational practice. It argues that Hegel's encyclopedia was a reaction against the Enlightenment encyclopedia, and that it attempted to restore the systematic mindset of pre-modern reference books. Yet it did this, not in a straightforward fashion, but by developing a (...) method for organizing material that both stresses the interconnectedness of knowledge and promises to be highly scalable. In its attempt to trace the Hegelian organizational method, this article revisits and calls attention to a forgotten work in Hegel scholarship by Michael John Petry, who was the first writer to seriously stress the importance of classification in Hegel's work. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that Hegelianism and information organization can be brought into fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue. (shrink)

BACKGROUND -/- The need for detailed description and modeling of cells drives the continuous generation of large and diverse datasets. Unfortunately, there exists no systematic and comprehensive way to organize these datasets and their information. CELDA (Cell: Expression, Localization, Development, Anatomy) is a novel ontology for the association of primary experimental data and derived knowledge to various types of cells of organisms. -/- RESULTS -/- CELDA is a structure that can help to categorize cell types based on species, anatomical localization, (...) subcellular structures, developmental stages and origin. It targets cells in vitro as well as in vivo. Instead of developing a novel ontology from scratch, we carefully designed CELDA in such a way that existing ontologies were integrated as much as possible, and only minimal extensions were performed to cover those classes and areas not present in any existing model. Currently, ten existing ontologies and models are linked to CELDA through the top-level ontology BioTop. Together with 15.439 newly created classes, CELDA contains more than 196.000 classes and 233.670 relationship axioms. CELDA is primarily used as a representational framework for modeling, analyzing and comparing cells within and across species in CellFinder, a web based data repository on cells (http://cellfinder.org). -/- CONCLUSIONS -/- CELDA can semantically link diverse types of information about cell types. It has been integrated within the research platform CellFinder, where it exemplarily relates cell types from liver and kidney during development on the one hand and anatomical locations in humans on the other, integrating information on all spatial and temporal stages. CELDA is available from the CellFinder website: http://cellfinder.org/about/ontology. (shrink)

But beyond doubt also, the primacy that Plato gives to the imitation of, or participation in the Ideas, apparently substantially existing, is the main reason why critics have refused to recognize or consider possible any mode of conceptual immanence in the mind of the Demiurge or whomever they regard as the Platonic God. Text on text could be cited to exemplify the role of the Ideas as archetypes. Yet it seems rather strange that Plato should conceive of two simultaneous objects (...) of imitation, the Supreme Being and the Ideas. Despite the plurality of Ideas, however, some critics have recognized a centripetal tendency in the dialogues toward the primacy of the Good, or the One, or the Beautiful, or Being, over subordinate Ideas. Was there possibly some similar tendency toward unity of some sort between the Supreme Intellect and the Intelligibles, his archetypes, which in the Timaeus are the ideal Living Exemplar of the cosmos? (shrink)

An updated and extended second edition supporting the findings of its well-known predecessor which claimed that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in determining legal responsibility.

Highlighting the relations between De Anima II.5 and De Anima III.4, this paper argues that Aristotle held a surprisingly dynamic view of the intellect. According to this view, the intellect is in...

Les résultats de la physique quantique rendent manifeste une vérité que les philosophes sont en général mal disposés à reconnaître : c’est que le déterminisme n’est pas une affirmation sur la structure des choses, mais une méthode qui ne sert qu’à prédire le cours futur des événements. Les savants, en découvrant ses limites, ont donné aux philosophes et surtout aux logiciens une leçon inestimable sur la methode de la science et la nature de la eonnaissance.

While today it is universally acknowledged that COVID-19 has generated immense challenges for businesses and societies worldwide, public perceptions varied significantly at the time of the pandemic’s initial appearance, even among democratic societies with comparable media systems. The growing scholarship on grand societal challenges in management and organization studies, however, tends to neglect the initial social construction of issues as complex, uncertain, evaluative, and widespread. We address this shortcoming by exploring the initial communicative enactment of COVID-19 in the media-based public (...) discourse in Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. By applying a social problem work lens, we identify three mechanisms that explain the maturation of COVID-19 into a grand challenge, further showing how these are contextually dependent on differences in discourse quality. We add to research on grand challenges, issue maturation, and framing dynamics by theorizing how issues become constructed and acknowledged as grand challenges in the first place. (shrink)

v. 1. Filosofía e historia de la ciencia -- v. 2. Lógica y filosofía del lenguaje.