What do you get when you cross a fallacy with a good argument? A fugu, that is, a valid argument that tempts you to reach its conclusion invalidly. You have yielded to the temptation more than you realize. If you are a teacher, you may have served many fugus. They arise systematically through several mechanisms. Fugus are interesting intermediate cases that shed light on the following issues: bare evidentialism, false pleasure, philosophy of education, and the ethics of argument. Normally, a (...) fugu will not yield knowledge from known premises. But if the reasoning is only slightly fallacious, they do yield knowledge. These mild fugus show that we can gain knowledge by invalid reasoning. This is a conservative resource for historians. They want to credit discoveries to Euclid rather than those who made minor corrections to his proofs, such as David Hilbert. We also benefit from this practice of grandfathering in old standards of knowledge attribution. For we can compete spiritedly for priority. We do not need to worry that credit will instead go to future scholars who will make the minor amendments needed to raise present proofs to a future standard of demonstration. (shrink)

This paper will present a review of the approaches being taken to select the management of organizations resulting from mergers and the methods employed in determining the individuals who will be terminated when there are redundancies. Current approaches are ethically questionable and poor substitutes for a meaningful performance evaluation system.

In 1982 Posner and Schmidt surveyed the values of 1400 managers. The survey revealed that honesty was one of the qualities that these managers admired most in themselves. An earlier study by Brennan and Molander indicated that managers believed that honesty in communication was their greatest ethical challenge. If honesty is a prevalent value among managers then why is honesty in communication their greatest ethical challenge? This paper presents an insight into the answer to this question and into the beliefs (...) and norms of behavior that foster either a candid corporate culture or a culture that lacks candor. (shrink)

If you read this abstract, then you will understand what my essay is about. Under what conditions would the preceding assertion be a lie? Traditional definitions of lying are always applied to straight declaratives such as ‘The dog ate my homework’. This one sided diet of examples leaves us unprepared for sentences in which conditional probability governs assertibility. The truth-value of conditionals does not play a significant role in the sincere assertion of conditionals. Lying is insincere assertion. So the connection (...) between lying and falsehood is broken when lying with conditionals. Drawing on Frank Jackson's account of indicative conditionals. I argue that it is possible to lie with true conditionals by virtue of their false conventional implicatures. False conversational implicatures only guarantee misleading assertions, not lies. Lying remains a semantic rather than a pragmatic affair. (shrink)

A difficulty for alethic pluralism has been the idea that semantic evaluation of conjunctions whose conjuncts come from discourses with distinct truth properties requires a third notion of truth which applies to both of the original discourses. But this line of reasoning does not entail that there exists a single generic truth property that applies to all statements and all discourses, unless it is supplemented with additional, controversial, premises. So the problem of mixed conjunctions, while highlighting other aspects of alethic (...) pluralism worth investigating further, does not constitute an effective objection to it. (shrink)

When Bertrand Russell alerted Gottlob Frege to an inconsistency in his Grundgesetze, Frege relinquished deep commitments. When Edward Evans-Pritchard alerted the Azande to an inconsistency in their beliefs about witchcraft inheritance, they did not revise their beliefs. Nor did they engage in the defensive maneuvers depicted in Plato’s dialogues. Evans-Pritchard characterized their indifference to contradiction as irrational. My historical thesis is that the ensuing anthropological debate mirrors the debate about the sorites paradox. I favor a simple explanation of this parallelism: (...) Evans-Pritchard’s witchcraft inheritance argument is a sorites argument—albeit in a form masked by the different ontologies of the Azande and Evans-Pritchard. Evans-Pritchard failed to recognize his witchcraft inheritance argument as a sorites paradox because he was witchcraft nihilist in a community of witchcraft realists. My general conjecture is that many of the irrationalities that seem distinctive of alien cultures are actually paradoxes that are universal. The irrationality of the aliens is real and profound; it is just not distinctive of those aliens or their cultures. The universality of the irrationality helps to explain Evans-Pritchard’s surprising success at understanding the Azande. Since he shares their core irrationality, Evans-Pritchard could simulate Azande thinking. Although I am attributing an anthropological illusion to Evans-Pritchard, I think it is one that coheres nicely with his compelling account of Azande. I am a conservative follower of Evans-Pritchard, trying to debug his research programme. I endorse all of his central doctrines and I rely on his insights. (shrink)

In our recent book (Abraham and Roy 2010) we have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum as a model of consciousness. In this model, discrete space and time are derived from a discrete cellular dynamical network. As our model is essentially atomistic, we included in our book a short support chapter on atomism. In this aticle we expand on the few pages of that chapter devoted to the history of atomism, to place the current revival of atomism in (...) a larger context. (shrink)

Islamic building codes require mosques to face Mecca. The further Islam spreads, the more apt are believers to fall into a quandary. X faces Y only when the front of X is closer to Y than any other side of X. So the front of the mosque should be oriented along a shortest path to Mecca. Which way is that? Does the path to Mecca tunnel through the earth? Or does the path follow the surface of the earth?

For their testimonial value, Jean Améry's writings are obligatory reading for anyone interested in studies of the Holocaust. But Améry can and must also be read as philosophy, argues Roy Ben-Shai. In Améry's work, the combination of the testimonial and the philosophical constitutes a "twilight", a revolt against the separation of pathos (experience) and logos (the intellect), and a call for the insertion of the victim into philosophical discourse.

What duties, if any, do we the living have to future generations regarding the quality of the environment we shall bequeath to them? Does our responsibility diminish as we look further into the future? Do we have such a claim on those came before us? With Nat Heiner and Nikki Roy.

There will be more philosophy than physics in this paper for I make no pretentions to an expert knowledge of physics. Categories are, however, in my line; and here I may have some insight.In the theory of relativity much depends upon the conception of the velocity of light in empty space. Such is the expression Einstein employs. If this velocity is to be a quantity independent of the choice of the inertial system to which it is referred, no absolute meaning (...) can be assigned to the conception of the simultaneity of events that occur at points separated by a distance in space. Rather a special time must be allocated to every inertial system. “It is in consequence of this that space and time are welded together into a uniform four-dimensional continuum.” Thus succinctly does Einstein express the c hoice in his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. (shrink)

Viewed in the light of the discussions ofscientificlecturing in eighteenth-century London contained in this issue, the case of medicine may be said to be both more of the same but also something different.

En este artículo se intenta una fundamentación de los derechos humanos desde la perspectivade Bernard Lonergan. La universalidad de éstos está cimentada en la naturalezahumana, que es dinámica, operante e histórica. La intencionalidad humana busca laobjetividad, desplegando su poder en cuatro niveles: la experiencia, la comprensión, eljuicio y la acción. De este dinamismo se desprenden cuatro preceptos: sé atento, séinteligente, sé razonable y sé responsable. El descubrimiento del valor de estos imperativosfundamenta y salvaguarda los derechos humanos. Su desconocimiento engendra ladistorsión (...) del ser humano. Para corregir las desviaciones debe haber conversiones intelectuales,morales y religiosas, las cuales suponen la fe, ya que ésta permite reconocer conmás claridad los valores. (shrink)

The article examines a few short stories of Flora Annie Steel, a Scottish memsahib who spent a number of decades in the late nineteenth century in India with her husband, a British colonial official. Steel's short stories are interesting because they were produced at a time when most Anglo-Indian fictions (especially those authored by memsahibs) focused exclusively on station romances, and they explore with some seriousness and sense of complexity, issues related to the impact of Imperial reformatory intervention in the (...) lives of Indian women. Her female contemporaries wrote fictions that more often than not completely ignored the existence of Indians, and even famous male writers like Kipling stereotypically reduced Indian women either to sexually licentious or completely passive, voiceless entities. Steel, in her stories, examines questions of gender, sexuality and reform in the context of Indian women's lives in ways that often seem to go beyond such racial stereotypes. The stories have been examined within the context of the different political and social formations of the specific regions – Punjab or Bengal – in which they are based, since women's reform had very different trajectories in these regions. The remarkableness of Steel's stories, however, lies in their attempting to look at the reform question from the Indian women's perspectives. What cannot be ignored are the ways in which these stories attempt to go beyond the prevalent Anglo-Indian modes of stereotyping or completely erasing Indian women and register their voices in examining questions related to their reform. This is not to say that racial and Imperial hierarchies are entirely abandoned in her writings. In fact the omniscient narrator in these fictions often narrates in ways that sustain and strengthen such hierarchies. However, there are moments when the diegetic narrative mode gives way to an ironically nuanced narrative voice and to ambivalences that seem to gesture at complex questioning of the bases of Imperial authority and its ostensibly benevolent intervention in the lives of Indian women. It is these moments that make the stories worth exploring. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungLudwig Alsdorf (1904–1978) wird vornehmlich als Gelehrter des Jainismus erinnert. Dieser Aufsatz betrachtet einen weniger bekannten Aspekt seiner Karriere: seine Rolle als Experte des modernen Indiens im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Alsdorf, der 1930 bis 1932 in Indien war, trat 1933 der NSDAP und einigen ihrer Unterorganisationen bei. Sowohl seine politischen Kontakte als auch seine Behauptung, Indien „aus erster Hand“ zu kennen, sicherten ihm Schreibaufträge, die den politischen Zielen des Regimes dienten. Im Gegenzug konnte Alsdorf eine Karriere sowie den Ruf als Autorität (...) für das moderne Indien aufbauen. Dieser Aufsatz betrachtet Alsdorfs Werdegang im NS-Staat neu, indem er die folgenden Aspekte fokussiert: (1) die Art und Weise, wie Alsdorf dem NS-Regime sein Wissen anbot, (2) die materiellen und symbolischen Ressourcen, die er im Gegenzug erhielt, (3) die vergangenheitspolitischen Strategien, die Alsdorf und einige seiner Kollegen nach 1945 einsetzten und (4) die Art und Weise, wie Alsdorf und seine Kollegen, den „Nutzen“ von Indologie im „Dritten Reich“ und in Westdeutschland (re)präsentierten. (shrink)