Cet ouvrage est d'une grande actualité. il propose une étude riche et originale sur la signification des concepts d'Éthique et de Morale, sur le plan anthropo-philosophique et théologique. Partant de la problématique selon laquelle ce qui est important, ce n'est pas " un prétendu absolu de chaque racine ", de chaque culture, mais le rapport avec " d'autres racines ", la relation avec d'autres cultures, l'auteur enrichit la réflexion sur les concepts d'Éthique et de Morale au confluent de la pensée (...) de plusieurs cultures et courants philosophiques contemporains. La réflexion a l'intérêt de poser avec courage le problème de l'inculturation de l'Ethique Chrétienne. Elle montre que la pratique du Nazaréen invite à reconsidérer aujourd'hui dans l'Eglise la problématique du rapport entre Foi et Culture. L'inculturation de l'Ethique Chrétienne ouvre le débat de la rencontre de l'homme en quête de sens et de vie avec le Nazaréen. Une telle rencontre est le lieu de la transformation totale de la personne et de sa réponse à vivre ce que signifie le Nom de Dieu incarné dans notre histoire. Cette approche permet à l'auteur d'enrichir la recherche sur la question de la spécificité de l'Ethique Chrétienne. Le Professeur Bénezet Bujo écrit au sujet de la portée théologique africaine de cet ouvrage : " L'étude de Nathanaël Soédé nous montre avec évidence que les réflexions éthiques chrétiennes en Afrique n'ont plus rien à envier aux autres disciplines théologiques en matière d'inculturation et de systématisation. Avec elle, la morale africaine entre en profondeur dans le processus théologique de l'inculturation ". (shrink)

Teaching and the research of theology and philosophy in Africa faces serious challenges: Contents and methods of study programs are often coined by European universalism. Tertiary institutions depend largely on foreign funding. This study analyzes the situation and suggests a closer collaboration.

This book aims to answer two main questions about Aristotle’s theory of causality and causal explanation, especially in relation to natural science: (1) How does he answer the main philosophical questions about causes to which he thinks his predecessors’ answers are flawed? (2) How do his answers bear on the main questions we confront in thinking about causality in general? The texts that deal with causality directly are analyzed against the background of his criticisms of his predecessors and his broader (...) views about explanation, highlighting their theoretically important commitments. This allows us to reveal the conceptual architecture of his theory. The basic theory is then applied to two questions about causality, one metaphysical and one epistemological. The metaphysical question is how to account for the relation between causes and what they cause, in light of a fundamental tension between different desiderata for causal explanations. Aristotle’s answer is pluralistic: he does not think that there is one metaphysical relationship between causes and what they cause even within a given mode of causality. The epistemological question asks how we grasp causes, and grasp them in a way that yields scientific understanding. Aristotle’s answer is again a pluralist one: metaphysically different phenomena demand different cognitive resources, and some are more accessible than others. Nevertheless, there is a discernible path from simpler to more sophisticated types of cognitive grasp on causality, in such a way that Aristotle can plausibly satisfy the epistemological constraints he thinks his predecessors cannot. Aristotle thus aims to provide a non-reductionist account of causality that still leaves room for a substantive conception of understanding in natural science. (shrink)

We describe an approach to textual inference that improves alignments at both the typed dependency level and at a deeper semantic level. We present a machine learning approach to alignment scoring, a stochastic search procedure, and a new tool that finds deeper semantic alignments, allowing rapid development of semantic features over the aligned graphs. Further, we describe a complementary semantic component based on natural logic, which shows an added gain of 3.13% accuracy on the RTE3 test set.

Aristotle opens his discussion of time in Physics 4.10-14 with a puzzle, an argument which purports to show that time does not exist, since its only parts – the past and future – do not exist. He does not discuss the puzzle again, and so we are left with the question of how he would or could solve it. A full solution would involve not only a justification of realism about time, but also an account of why the puzzle arises, (...) what must be corrected to prevent it from arising, and how much of our pre-theoretical picture of time survives these adjustments. This paper argues that we can provide such a solution by (i) distinguishing between two ways of being committed to the reality of past, present, and future, and (ii) examining Aristotle’s remarks in Physics 4.12 on the notions of being in time and being surrounded by time. (shrink)

O genocídio indígena esteve presente na ditadura civil-militar brasileira (1964-1985), assim como em todos os períodos após as invasões portuguesas de 1500. A partir do uso dos ideais coloniais e da estrutura capitalista, as políticas de desenvolvimentismo com as invasões às terras indígenas culminaram no genocídio que foi protagonizado pelo Exército Brasileiro. Segundo a Comissão Nacional da Verdade, mais de 8.350 indígenas foram mortos durante o período de 1946 a 1988, número este que pode ser bem maior, dado que o (...) levantamento da CNV contabilizou apenas 10 povos –, dentre eles, 2.650 do povo Waimiri Atroari. O principal evento em que as mortes dos Waimiri Atroari ocorreram foi a construção da BR-174 que liga Manaus a Boa Vista. A Comissão Nacional da Verdade, estabelecida com a Lei 12.528/2011, teve o objetivo de examinar e esclarecer as graves violações de direitos humanos praticadas no período de 1946 a 1988. Por meio do campo teórico-metodológico da História do Tempo Presente foi possível analisar os temas elencados para apontar as feridas ainda abertas na história e memória nacional. (shrink)

All too often, the requirements for actionability and accountability of data infrastructures are conceptualised as incompatible and leading to a trade-off situation where increasing one will unavoidably decrease the other. Through a comparative analysis of two data infrastructures used to share genomic data about the SARS-COV-2 virus, we argue that making data actionable for knowledge development involves a commitment to ensuring that the data in question are representative of the phenomena being studied and accountable to data subjects and users. This (...) in turn presupposes that: (1) enough data are contributed by a wide and diverse set of relevant sources; (2) mechanisms of feedback and inclusion are set up to ensure that data contributors can participate data governance and interpretation, thereby helping to adequately contextualise data; and (3) accountability extends to the ways in which data infrastructures are run, financed and positioned vis-à-vis the communities they are meant to serve. Such a model of data sharing can only work on the understanding that data do not need to be easily accessible to be actionable; rather, actionability depends on the responsiveness and accountability of data infrastructures, and the efforts invested in ensuring open communication among contributors. (shrink)

Though not often discussed as such, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge is a work of queer utopianism. Myra herself is an entrancing figure—a self-created goddess who is determined to save humanity by abolishing gender itself. That her efforts ultimately fail is a testament to the queerness of her utopianism. Using Lee Edelman's discussion of “reproductive futurism” and José Esteban Muñoz's insights into the queerness of utopianism, this article analyzes the ways in which Myra Breckinridge channels both hopeful and destructive urges as (...) a way of imagining a counter-narrative to the human catastrophe represented by the atomic bomb and the threat of overpopulation. (shrink)

Aristotle is no exception in seeing a connection between causation and necessity, and teleological causation is no exception for Aristotle. His discussions of teleology in the Physics and in Parts of Animals i 1 both make this connection explicitly, by presenting final causation as involving necessity ‘from a hypothesis (ex hupotheseôs)’, usually referred to in the literature as ‘hypothetical necessity’. Hypothetical necessity is evidently invoked to express the thought that, given the functions and activities of living things, certain of their (...) features cannot be otherwise. Further, it appears that these necessity claims are meant to have explanatory force: that is, it seems that according to Aristotle, to grasp that A hypothetically necessitates B is to understand, at least in part, why B is the case. The trouble is that while Aristotle and his commentators do indeed seem to think that his appeals to hypothetical necessity are supposed to have explanatory power, their various glosses on the notion make it difficult to see how this could be the case. That is, he and his commentators seem, contrary to their intentions, to present appeals to hypothetical necessity as exemplifying patterns of inference that do not, in fact, have explanatory power. The challenge, then, is to provide an understanding of hypothetical necessity that allows us say how the patterns of inference invoking it are successful as explanations, and to distinguish them from patterns of inference that are not. I suggest that if we look in closer detail at the patterns of explanation Aristotle associates with hypothetical necessity, and the ways in which these are supposed to be distinctive, we can offer an account of what hypothetical necessity is and how it can have explanatory power. (shrink)

"Culverwell's Discourse of the Light of Nature, composed in a period of religious and political unheaval, and delivered as lectures to Cambridge students in 1646, is an imaginative statement of the teachings of Christian humanism concerning the nature and limits of human reason and the related concepts of natural and divine law. Culverwell has much in common with the Cambridge Platonists, sharing with them a spiritual home at Emmanuel College; yet his thought is grounded in the scholasticism of Aquinas and (...) Suarez, and it is within this context that he explores the rich potential of the biblical metaphor from Proverbs which is his central text: 'The understanding of a man is the Candle of the Lord.' Heeding Bacon's call for an appraisal of the rôle of reason in religious matters, and drawing on the ideas of Grotius and Selden concerning natural law, Culverwell offers a critique of reason that attempts to preserve the attitudes of Calvinism and yet reveals a strong tendency to credit reason with more authority than that tradition allows. faith and reason, nature and grace, revealed truth and common notions, the priority of divine will or divine reason—these inherited dilemmas are examined with insight and flashes of poetic brilliance. The pattern that emerges reveals a suggestive parallel with Milton's intellectual development in the same period, illuminates the Whichcote-Tuckney controversy of 1651, and probably provided John Locke with an intellectual stimulus for his early Essays on the Law of Nature. Alter to the currents of his day (the Discourse, for example, is one of the first English writings to refer to Descartes), Culverwell offers an interesting approach to schools of thought in mid-century England, while his treatment of such stock themes of renaissance philosophy as Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, innate ideas, and the nature of the soul, shows the mental and rhetorical habits of the seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar. His significance as a thinker, however, lies in his ability to draw the varied elements of his study, ancient and modern, into an individual synthesis which has a distinctive form and style. The text has been carefully and faithfully transcribed by the editors, and translations of the Greek and Hebrew passages are supplied in square brackets. In a lengthy, explanatory introduction, the editors discuss the part played by the Discourse in the controversies of the day and the thinkers from whom Culverwell drew his material, thus shedding light on the evolution of English rationalism in the seventeenth century. Full documentation is supplied in the form of notes following the text, plus a section of textual notes listing all departures in this edition from the first edition of 1652. The annotation also established for the first time ull range of Culverwell's sources—classical, mediaeval, and renaissance—and enables the reader to appreciate his manner of citing authority and handling illustration. The Discourse makes fascinating reading. It will appeal especially to students of seventeenth-century theology, English, philosophy, and history; and it provides a background against which Locke's thought may be understood."-Publisher. (shrink)

This paper argues identity documents (ID) prefigure wearables as artefacts connected with archives. As participants with human practices, they constitute an apparatus that engenders sensibilities about the proper way to participate in society, through the use of socio-technical systems. The use of these artefacts is necessary to make individuals legible to the state. Refusing them renders us insensible. Through a media archaeology of the history and use of IDs through modern Europe, an understanding emerges of the agential properties of artefacts (...) and their essential role in establishing a social imaginary of the state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:arrêt sur visagefrom Hatred of Translation1Nathanaël (bio)or else isolated in silence—Danielle Collobert, Ça des motsIn the language of film there are often extraordinary divergences between English and French, which prove at times to be irreconcilable.2 If this tendency toward discrepancy is true of translation as a rule, it reveals itself to be particularly true in the case of this work in translation. Danielle Collobert's Recherche,3 rendered as Research, in (...) which the search of re-search must be read as detachable, with emphasis on its repetitive motion—but also in its slide from substantive to predicate (search>searches)—makes salient such divergences, through the implied camera movement panning over the evacuated faces of A and B and the marked distances especially that define the space of their bodies, in proximity and in remove, as though the text were annotating a form of recusal that is implicit in the spaces of desire to which their mortiferous movements owe everything; an intimacy of anticipated death, and seizure, from which the camera extracts movements of degradation through violent stillness.Indeed the term still here is adopted to render the French arrêt, proposing a false equivalency between the (film) still and its seemingly concordant locution, the arrêt (sur image). These are "attested" terms that reveal something of the contexts in which each seeks to function. In Recherche Collobert limits herself [End Page 138] to the use of arrêt sur, designating in each instance a specific detail on which the camera is to stop. "Stop" of course is one of the translations of the lone substantive "arrêt," which also implies "arrest" (from the verb arrêter), replete with its juridical (enforceable/enforcible) intent.4One might just as readily translate "arrêt sur" as "stop at," stopping at nothing to achieve the irresistible demands of such a transitive language that subverts its own objectivity through a persistent preference for passive forms, abdicating one's responsibility to the law in abject deference to its capital aims. Regimens of grammar are coincident with regimens of power now as always.5More than one frontier has now been crossed, and reading the three works6 gathered by Françoise Morvan under the title Expériences (experiments and/ or experiences) in this so-called America is a serious transposition indeed in which the sands of north-western France adjoining the virulent Atlantic, may readily allow themselves to be supplanted by an imagined far-ouest of burnt deserts shimmering with radioactive particulate, under some gun. These are voided investigations that succeed only in subtracting the body from its criminality—a condemnation of ages pressed into moments, a crime committed to each and every one.Meurtre (Murder), the title of Collobert's first acknowledged work,7 is just as operative in these cinematic and radiophonic works; indeed, it can be read as a mot d'ordre for her entire oeuvre,8 and with which its entire topography is suffused. The stills of Recherche and "Polyphonie" attest to this, as does the recurrence of the isolate arrêt, whether in its designation of a bus stop or a pause in action (breaks in the fight, for example, between B and the man on the dock), toppling into the near untranslatable arrêts in the plural, stops, which invites, again, a transitive reading rather than the congealment of the plural substantive, and this, in keeping with the stares that transfix and bore into the faces verging on the dunes. The polysemic displacement of arrêt is such that the cumulative effect of its multiply transposed sense is that of a filmstrip caught in a projector, and it isn't clear whether the image is held or whether it is caught in the mechanism; in either case, the reader is among those held captive by a language that forbids release, burrowing instead, more deeply, into a thickeningly menacing interiority with its inscription of fear similar to that elicited by the perceived approach of the beast in Kafka's "The Burrow." The time of exposure holds the permanent promise of such a threat. [End Page 139]Nathanaël Nathanaël... (shrink)

The third author has shown that Shelah's eventual categoricity conjecture holds in universal classes: class of structures closed under isomorphisms, substructures, and unions of chains. We extend this result to the framework of multiuniversal classes. Roughly speaking, these are classes with a closure operator that is essentially algebraic closure (instead of, in the universal case, being essentially definable closure). Along the way, we prove in particular that Galois (orbital) types in multiuniversal classes are determined by their finite restrictions, generalizing a (...) result of the second author. (shrink)

Aristotle thinks that we understand something when we know its causes. According to Aristotle but contrary to most recent approaches, causation and explanation cannot be understood separately. Aristotle complicates matters by claiming that there are four causes, which have come to be known as the formal, material, final, and efficient causes. To understand Aristotelian causation and its relationship to explanation, then, we must come to a precise understanding of the four causes, and how they are supposed to be explanatory. Aristotle’s (...) discussion of the causes, however, is compact, and he typically presents them without arguing for them. He thus leaves us with a number of questions, ranging from the highly specific to the highly general. One question in particular has captured the attention of scholars and philosophers over the last century, and it has had a strong influence on recent treatments of the four causes – namely, whether we are right to understand Aristotle as committed to a plurality of kinds of causation, or rather a plurality of kinds of explanation. Sometimes the question is raised as one of whether it would be more accurate to speak of the four ‘becauses’ rather than the four ‘causes’. This worry is highly general, and there are in fact several ways in which it might be formulated; nonetheless, it is important to clarify the precise nature of the problem, and the possible ways of responding to it. At issue is not just whether Aristotle’s notions are sufficiently like the modern notion of causation to be relevant to our concerns, but, more importantly, whether the distinctions he draws are ultimately metaphysical or epistemological in character. (shrink)

Central to Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology is the claim that ‘aitia’ – ‘cause’ – is “said in many ways”, i.e., multivocal. Though the importance of the four causes in Aristotle's system cannot be overstated, the nature of his pluralism about aitiai has not been addressed. It is not at all obvious how these modes of causation are related to one another, or why they all deserve a common term. Nor is it clear, in particular, whether the causes are related to (...) one another as species under a single genus, such that there is a univocal definition of ‘aitia’ which applies to all of them, or whether Aristotle means to assert that the four causes are homonyms. It is argued here that although there are strong reasons to group the four causes together, there are also powerful considerations on the side of homonymy. It is further argued that the four causes are more closely tied to the ontological theory of categories and predication than is often recognized. As a result, we can reconcile the competing demands of unity and plurality by taking one mode of causation, the formal cause, as basic, and accounting for the other modes with reference to it, in the manner of so-called pros hen homonyms. (shrink)

Our contribution concerns the continuous training of teachers that will be forming future teachers during their traineeship. It aims to describe how the professional development of the trainees’ coaches, both the training supervisors as well as the supervisors form the trainees’ schools, was used during a course proposed by a university and during meetings where practices were shared by the participants. In this manner, we identified the ideal moments for development of the trainees, as well as the most important levers (...) for the transformation of the coaches. We paid particular attention to the reflexive contract co-defined by the group, as well as to the principle of social moderation at the heart of the collaborative group’s dynamic. (shrink)

Like many realists about causation and causal powers, Aristotle uses the language of necessity when discussing causation, and he appears to think that by invoking necessity, he is clarifying the manner in which causes bring about or determine their effects. In so doing, he would appear to run afoul of Humean criticisms of the notion of a necessary connection between cause and effect. The claim that causes necessitate their effects may be understood—or attacked—in several ways, however, and so whether the (...) view or its criticism is tenable depends on how we understand the necessitation claim. In fact, Aristotelian efficient causation may be said to involve two distinct necessary connections: one is a relation between causes considered as potential, while the other relates them considered as active. That is, the claims that (1) what has the power to heat necessarily heats what has the power to be heated, and that (2) a particular flame which is actually under a pot necessarily heats it, both of which appear to be true for Aristotle, involve distinct notions of necessity. The latter kind of necessity is based on the facts, as Aristotle sees them, about change, whereas the former is based in the nature of properties. Though different, both kinds of necessity are instances of what contemporary philosophers would call metaphysical necessity, and together they also amount to a theory of causal determination. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that imagination is heterogeneous: we need to draw a series of cross-cutting distinctions even to begin any serious general discussion of the range of activities we take to be typical instances. The nature of the heterogeneity being exhibited is usually left unclear, however, and thus so are its consequences both for our understanding of imagination and for assessing certain challenges such as reductionism. Here it is argued that we can accept heterogeneity while recognizing important forms of (...) unity among the various kinds of imaginative activity. Four distinct but compatible strategies are considered, three of which have historical precedents in Aristotle’s and Hegel’s work. These proposals yield an interesting and plausible answer to the problem raised by heterogeneity, and have consequences for how we should respond to it. They share a plausible framework for thinking about the relationships among the various activities contemporary thinkers take to involve imagination. However, there are some ways in which deploying them is not straightforward, given some differences between modern approaches and older ones, and they conflict with a common thought about the epistemic status of imagination. (shrink)

Let G be a model of Presburger arithmetic. Let be an expansion of the language of Presburger. In this paper, we prove that the ‐theory of G is ‐minimal iff it has the exchange property and is definably complete (i.e., any bounded definable set has a maximum). If the ‐theory of G has the exchange property but is not definably complete, there is a proper definable convex subgroup H. Assuming that the induced theories on H and are definable complete and (...) o‐minimal respectively, we prove that any definable set of G is ‐definable. (shrink)

Let be the field of p‐adic numbers in the language of rings. In this paper we consider the theory of expanded by two predicates interpreted by multiplicative subgroups and where are multiplicatively independent. We show that the theory of this structure interprets Peano arithmetic if α and β have positive p‐adic valuation. If either α or β has zero valuation we show that the theory of has the NIP (“negation of the independence property”) and therefore does not interpret Peano arithmetic. (...) In that case we also prove that the theory is decidable if and only if the theory of is decidable. (shrink)

Sartre analyse l’imagination dans le contexte d’une radicalisation de l’intentionnalité husserlienne. Alors que Husserl opérait avec un concept de constitution qui explicitait le statut de la transcendance à partir de l’immanence, la phénoménologie sartrienne semblerait faire l’économie de la notion de constitution. Mais ce point est plus délicat qu’il n’y paraît. Sartre rencontre plusieurs types de transcendances problématiques : celle de l’Ego (en 1936), de certaines images (1940), et celle du « soi » (1943). Cette étude vise à montrer comment (...) ces transcendances amènent à un remaniement implicite : il existerait un concept de constitution opératoire chez Sartre qui se passe de toute référence à l’immanence. Au moyen de l’imagination, nous proposons de clarifier le lexique sartrien : unité, identité et individualité sont des termes impliqués dans une analyse de la constitution. On montrera en quoi la « constitution sartrienne » met en évidence une dimension transcendantale de la phénoménologie de Sartre qui permet d’apprécier à nouveaux frais l’enjeu et les limites de ses prétentions ontologiques. (shrink)

Sartre analyse l’imagination dans le contexte d’une radicalisation de l’intentionnalité husserlienne. Alors que Husserl opérait avec un concept de constitution qui explicitait le statut de la transcendance à partir de l’immanence, la phénoménologie sartrienne semblerait faire l’économie de la notion de constitution. Mais ce point est plus délicat qu’il n’y paraît. Sartre rencontre plusieurs types de transcendances problématiques : celle de l’Ego (en 1936), de certaines images (1940), et celle du « soi » (1943). Cette étude vise à montrer comment (...) ces transcendances amènent à un remaniement implicite : il existerait un concept de constitution opératoire chez Sartre qui se passe de toute référence à l’immanence. Au moyen de l’imagination, nous proposons de clarifier le lexique sartrien : unité, identité et individualité sont des termes impliqués dans une analyse de la constitution. On montrera en quoi la « constitution sartrienne » met en évidence une dimension transcendantale de la phénoménologie de Sartre qui permet d’apprécier à nouveaux frais l’enjeu et les limites de ses prétentions ontologiques. (shrink)

Aristotle presents four causes in Posterior Analytics 2.11, but where we expect matter we find instead the confusing formula, ‘what things being the case, necessarily this is the case’, and an equally confusing example. Some commentators infer that Aristotle is not referring to matter, others that he is but in a non-standard way. I argue that APo. 94a20-34 presents not matter, but determination by general features or facts, including facts about something’s genus. The closest connection to matter is Aristotle’s view (...) that the relation between genus and species is analogous to that between matter and a hylomorphic compound. (shrink)

Working in a fixed Grothendieck topos Sh(C, J C ) we generalize \({\mathcal{L}_{{\infty},\omega}}\) to allow our languages and formulas to make explicit reference to Sh(C, J C ). We likewise generalize the notion of model. We then show how to encode these generalized structures by models of a related sentence of \({\mathcal{L}_{{\infty},\omega}}\) in the category of sets and functions. Using this encoding we prove analogs of several results concerning \({\mathcal{L}_{{\infty},\omega}}\) , such as the downward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem, the completeness theorem and (...) Barwise compactness. (shrink)

Every set can been thought of as a directed graph whose edge relation is ∈. We show that many natural examples of directed graphs of this kind are indivisible: for every infinite κ, for every indecomposable λ, and every countable model of set theory. All of the countable digraphs we consider are orientations of the countable random graph. In this way we find indivisible well‐founded orientations of the random graph that are distinct up to isomorphism, and ℵ1 that are distinct (...) up to siblinghood. (shrink)

Companies often benefit from others’ attributions of moral conviction for prosocial behavior, for example, attributions that a company has a sincere moral desire to improve the environment when behaving sustainably. Across four studies, we explored how organizations’ changing resource positions influenced people’s attributions for the motivations underlying prosocial organizational behaviors. Observers attributed less moral conviction following prosocial behavior when they believed an organization was losing economic resources. This effect was primarily a “penalty” assessed against organizations that were losing resources, as (...) opposed to a “reward” given to organizations gaining resources. Finally, we found that this effect occurred because people perceive organizations that are losing resources as more situationally constrained, leading them to attribute less dispositional moral conviction. We discuss theoretical and practical implications stemming from how changes in resource access can lead people to be more skeptical of organizations’ motivations following prosocial behavior. (shrink)

In this paper we define a notion of relativization for higher order logic. We then show that there is a higher order theory of Grothendieck topoi such that all Grothendieck topoi relativizes to all models of set theory with choice.

We have reason to think that a fundamental goal of natural science, on Aristotle’s view, is to discover the essence-specifying definitions of natural kinds—with biological species as perhaps the most obvious case. However, we have in the end precious little evidence regarding what an Aristotelian definition of the form of a natural kind would look like, and so Aristotle’s view remains especially obscure precisely where it seems to be most applicable. I argue that if we can get a better understanding (...) of how the forms of natural kinds are or come to be known, and how they make things intelligible, we can get a better appreciation of the nature of form in general, as well as solve certain puzzles about form and definition. (shrink)

George Eliot strikingly describes one of her characters as making a mistake because he has gotten his thoughts “entangled in metaphors,” saying that we all do the same. I argue that Eliot is here giving us more than an illuminating description, but drawing our attention to a distinctive kind of mistake—a form of irrationality, in fact—of which metaphor can be an ineliminable part of the correct explanation. Her fictional case helps illuminate both a neglected function of the imagination, and a (...) pervasive way in which metaphor can affect it. The function is the creation and maintenance of what I call imaginative expectations, which are relatively stable imaginative representations of future events or experiences, analogous to latent memories. These imaginative expectations have a distinctive causal profile and distinct ways of interacting with other mental activities. I argue that their formation is subject to at least two norms—a “source” norm and an “experience” norm—and show how metaphorical framing can give rise to violations of either. (shrink)

We show how to encode, by classical structures, both the objects and the morphisms of the category of complete metric spaces and uniformly continuous maps. The result is a category of, what we call, cognate metric spaces and cognate maps. We show this category relativizes to all models of set theory. We extend this encoding to an encoding of complete metric structures by classical structures. This provide us with a general technique for translating results about infinitary logic on classical structures (...) to the setting of infinitary continuous logic on continuous structures. Our encoding will also allow us to talk about not only the relations between complete metric structures, but also the potential relations between complete metric structures, i.e. those which are satisfied in some larger model of set theory. For example we will show that given any two complete metric structures we can determine if they are potentially isomorphic by looking at any admissible set which contains them both. (shrink)

Define a second order tree to be a map between trees. We show that many properties of ordinary trees have analogs for second order trees. In particular, we show that there is a notion of “definition by recursion on a well-founded second order tree” which generalizes “definition by transfinite recursion”. We then use this new notion of definition by recursion to prove an analog of Lusin’s Separation theorem for closure spaces of global sections of a second order tree.

Suppose that $\sigma\in{\mathcal{L}}_{\omega _{1},\omega }$ is such that all equations occurring in $\sigma$ are positive, have the same set of variables on each side of the equality symbol, and have at least one function symbol on each side of the equality symbol. We show that $\sigma$ satisfies Vaught’s conjecture. In particular, this proves Vaught’s conjecture for sentences of $ {\mathcal{L}}_{\omega _{1},\omega }$ without equality.

This article examines Tacitus’ exploration of the motives of Near-Eastern dynasts in Histories 2 and Annals 2. In these books, Tacitus presents Near-Eastern “enslavement” to the Roman empire as an act of will. Near-Eastern dynasts desired to “seduce” Romans into becoming masters and assuming the same despotic and morally enslaved dispositions that they as dynasts exerted. Their slaving helped frame, forge, and actuate a Roman imperial system that subjected Romans to despotic figures amid the unceasing threat of civil discord. In (...) this sense, Near-Eastern seduction and its products symbolized Rome’s enslavement to autocracy and its circumvention of Republican governance. (shrink)

Philosophers discussing causation take on, as one of their responsibilities, the task of specifying an ontology of causation. Both standard and non-standard accounts of that ontology make two assumptions: that the ontological category of causal relata admits a unique specification, and that cause and effect are of the same ontological type. These assumptions are rarely made explicit, but there is in fact little reason to think them true. It is argued here that, if the question has any interest, there are (...) some considerations in favor of rejecting Uniqueness and Uniformity, no good reasons in favor of them, but good reason to think that we are not in a position to make a decisive pronouncement, since some of the information needed to make a judgement on the matter is empirical in character. Philosophers have therefore made two mistakes about the relata of causation: one is to have accepted unwarranted restrictions on the categories pertinent to causation; the other is to have wrongly assumed that we are in a position to name them. (shrink)

In this note, we present a new observation of relevance to Aquinas’s third way. Scholars have noted that Aquinas recognizes the existence of a multiplicity of necessary beings, but it has not been recognized that Aquinas’s views concerning the eternality of the world commit him to the epistemic possibility that the world itself is a necessary being. We explain how Aquinas is committed to this possibility and explore its bearing on the success or failure of the third way as a (...) demonstration of God’s existence. (shrink)

The alleged but unclear distinction between so-called “immanent” and so-called “transeunt” causation is structurally similar to an Aristotelian distinction between two kinds of potentiality (dunamis). It is argued that Aristotle’s distinction is in turn grounded in one between a metaphysically basic notion, rooted in his property theory, and a metaphysically posterior notion proper to the understanding of change in the science of nature. By examining Aristotle’s distinction, we can give a satisfying account of immanent and transeunt causation more generally. Furthermore, (...) once we clarify the distinction in this way, some contemporary appeals to immanent causation turn out to be misguided, while others look promising. (shrink)

A puzzle about false judgement is raised in the Theaetetus (187d-200c), but not successfully answered there. On the proposed account, the confusion that explicitly vitiates Theaetetus’ final attempt to define knowledge is already at work implicitly in this puzzle. Theaetetus shares popular assumptions about knowledge (epistēmē), but also accepts that there are cognitive constraints on judgement (doxa): the puzzle arises because he fails to distinguish the one cognitive condition from the other.

Hayek and the Efficient Market Hypothesis are often seen as proposing a similar theory of prices. Hayek is seen as proposing to understand prices as information conveyer, incorporating inform...

Depuis plusieurs décennies, s’est instaurée « une nouvelle ère » pour le corps, caractérisée par une évolution des pratiques médicales, mais aussi et surtout par le développement de nouvelles utopies. Face aux envahissantes mythologies et agitations idéologiques, l’objectif de cet article est donc de tenter de définir la réalité du « surhomme » d’aujourd’hui et d’analyser quelques-uns des mécanismes idéologiques qui participent à la fabrication de ce mythe.