The article discusses the accusation advanced by Plutarch and Cicero, according to which the Epicureans are unjust, as they would break the law to pursue pleasure if certain of impunity, and deals with this criticism by analyzing the Epicurean theory of law and justice and comparing it with friendship. The article argues that, from a doctrinal standpoint, philia has a higher place in the Epicurean’s priorities and a stronger efficacy than positive law in serving the naturally just. It thus concludes (...) that, as Plutarch and Cicero suspected, the Epicurean’s ultimate loyalty does not lie with positive law, in spite of its importance for social order, but rather with the naturally just, better secured by friendship. (shrink)

The present study provides an analysis of Socrates’ account of the first polis in Republic 2 as a thought experiment and draws attention to the fact that Socrates combines both explanatory and evaluative aspects in his scenario. The paper further shows how the analysis of the city of pigs as a thought experiment can explain the lack of pleonexia by saving both the letter of the text, according to which there are no “pleonectic” desires in the city of pigs, and (...) the fact that the first polis is nonetheless concerned with human beings. For, in contrast to the account offered by Glaucon earlier in Book 2, Socrates highlights our needs and lack of self-sufficiency as well as our compatibility with an advantageous and happy life in a community. (shrink)

Modern computer systems are ubiquitous in contemporary life yet many of them remain opaque. This poses significant challenges in domains where desiderata such as fairness or accountability are crucial. We suggest that the best strategy for achieving system transparency varies depending on the specific source of opacity prevalent in a given context. Synthesizing and extending existing discussions, we propose a taxonomy consisting of eight sources of opacity that fall into three main categories: architectural, analytical, and socio-technical. For each source, we (...) provide initial suggestions as to how to address the resulting opacity in practice. The taxonomy provides a starting point for requirements engineers and other practitioners to understand contextually prevalent sources of opacity, and to select or develop appropriate strategies for overcoming them. (shrink)

Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important rôle played by Prior's research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be (...) familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior's work in ancient and medieval logic. (shrink)

Does responsible conduct of research (RCR) training improve levels of trust between researchers? Using data gathered as part of a survey on the attitudes of master's and doctoral-level students toward RCR, we found that RCR training correlated with a weakened beliefs of students toward their supervisors' ethicality but a stronger belief in the ethicality of their peers. We believe that these findings point to new avenues of research on trust in the academic setting and to needs for curriculum changes in (...) RCR training. (shrink)

In Democracy without Shortcuts, Cristina Lafont identifies proceduralist or ‘deep pluralist’ conceptions of democracy alongside epistemic and lottocratic approaches as shortcuts that avoid the more challenging but, in her view, preferable path of engaging with and attempting to sway competing views, values and beliefs of fellow citizens. I argue that with the wholesale dismissal of proceduralist accounts of democracy Lafont herself takes two shortcuts: The first concerns the characterization of deep pluralism as unable to explain substantive disagreement after a decision (...) is settled, and the second undervalues proceduralism’s ability to evaluate and criticize the substance of the political decision-making process. While her critique is fitting for minimalist conceptions of proceduralism, a theory of normative proceduralism shares many objectives with Lafont’s vision of a participatory deliberative democracy. Integrating those approaches instead of dismissing proceduralism outright would render her project appealing to theorists who would not otherwise consider themselves deliberative democrats. (shrink)

Recently logic has shifted emphasis from static systems developed for purely theoretical reasons to dynamic systems designed for application to real world situations. The emphasis on the applied aspects of logic and reasoning means that logic has become a pragmatic tool, to be judged against the backdrop of a particular application. This shift in emphasis is, however, not new. A similar shift towards “interactive logic” occurred in the high Middle Ages. We provide a number of different examples of “interactive logic” (...) in the Middle Ages, all species of the disputation game obligatio. These games display a recognition of the importance of interaction in logical contexts and the way that interactive logic differs from single-agent inference. (shrink)

The current trend in knowledge revision in the Dynamic Epistemic Logic tradition focuses on the addition of new knowledge, rather than the possibility of losing knowledge. Yet there are natural situations, such as an agent who does not want another agent to know that she knows a certain piece of information, where there is a need to be able to model the retraction of a proposition from a knowledge base. One situation where this is systematically required is the variant of (...) the medieval theory of obligationes known as dubitatio, where one of the agents in the dialogue is obliged to hold the initial proposition, the dubitatum, as doubtful, regardless of what other propositions she may concede or deny during the disputation. In this paper, we use dubitatio as a motivation for studying deceitful agents, and we discuss various ways that an agent can move from a model where f is known to one where f is not known. (shrink)

The authors of this paper explore Gert Biesta's theorization of three domains of purpose of education: socialization, qualification, and subjectification. The aim is to study the interrelations of the domains and to develop further the theoretical discussion concerning schools' purpose for both individuals and society. Outlining the relationships of the domains of purpose allows one to see how the societal purpose of education is realized in the education of individual students. The domain of socialization sets the stage for the domains (...) of qualification and subjectification, making the balance of the latter two crucial for disadvantaged students as well as schools' societal purpose of both maintaining and reforming soci(et)al structures. Two key ideas are raised: First, in order to better understand the current dynamics of the three domains, the authors suggest separating the logic and content of “qualification.” Second, the authors discuss why it is equally useful to separate the everyday and societal dimension of purpose. The central question is this: Can individual educators find a balance between the three domains if the surrounding society overvalues the logic of qualification? (shrink)

Temporal logic as a modern discipline is separate from classical logic; it is seen as an addition or expansion of the more basic propositional and predicate logics. This approach is in contrast with logic in the Middle Ages, which was primarily intended as a tool for the analysis of natural language. Because all natural language sentences have tensed verbs, medieval logic is inherently a temporal logic. This fact is most clearly exemplified in medieval theories of supposition. As a case study, (...) we look at the supposition theory of Lambert of Lagny, extracting from it a temporal logic and providing a formalization of that logic. (shrink)

Formal dialogue systems model rule-based interaction between agents and as such have multiple applications in multi-agent systems and AI more generally. Their conceptual roots are in formal theories of natural argumentation, of which Hamblin’s formal systems of argumentation in Hamblin (Fallacies. Methuen, London, 1970, Theoria 37:130–135, 1971) are some of the earliest examples. Hamblin cites the medieval theory of obligationes as inspiration for his development of formal argumentation. In an obligatio, two agents, the Opponent and the Respondent, engage in an (...) alternating-move dialogue, where the Respondent’s actions are governed by certain rules, and the goal of the dialogue is establishing the consistency of a proposition. We implement obligationes in the formal dialogue system framework of Prakken (Knowl Eng Rev 21(2):163–188, 2006) using Dynamic Epistemic Logic (van Ditmarsch et al. in Dynamic epistemic logic, Synthese Library Series. Springer, Berlin, 2007). The result is a new type of inter-agent dialogue, for consistency-checking, and analyzing obligationes in this way also sheds light on interpretational and historical questions concerning their use and purpose in medieval academia. (shrink)

Many journals in the physical sciences require authors to submit assurances of compliance with human subjects and other research ethics standards. These requirements do not cover all disciplines equally, however. In this paper we report on the findings of a survey of perceptions of ethical and managerial problems from journal editors in political science and related disciplines. Our results show that few journals in political science require assurance statements common to journals for other scientific disciplines. We offer some reasons for (...) this as well as some recommendations for implementing ethical assurance safeguards for political science. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of attributing phenomenal consciousness to Artificial Intelligence (AI), a mistake that can lead to ethically dangerous consequences and that is becoming widespread due to the advances of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. We juxtapose advancements in AI with the notion of inner experience as it is present in humans. The study draws from various disciplines, including philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and theological texts such as "The Inner Castle" by Saint Theresa of Ávila and (...) "Confessions" by Saint Augustine. Firstly, it reviews the current state of the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and AI, followed by a critique of the idea that advanced language models, like ChatGPT, can achieve an inner experience in the same sense we use the term to describe the human inner experience. A common objection is raised, suggesting that AI can become conscious by increasing its complexity. This is countered by presenting theoretical and empirical evidence on the independence of computational intelligence and phenomenal consciousness. The study concludes that, despite AI's notable cognitive abilities, it lacks the inner experience that characterizes human experience. Then, our second main contribution is an analogy of the dwellings of the Inner Castle to the range of different subjective experiences that are available to human beings, together with actions associated to them, which can be useful to understand where the machine can perform tasks that are similar to the human and where subjective experience is key. We are now in a pivotal moment where it is essential to understand the limitations of AI for deploying it ethically. (shrink)

In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Diodoros Chronos gave a temporal definition of necessity. Because it connects modality and temporality, this definition is of interest to philosophers working within branching time or branching space-time models. This definition of necessity can be formalized and treated within a logical framework. We give a survey of the several known modal and temporal logics of abstract space-time structures based on the real numbers and the integers, considering three different accessibility relations between spatio-temporal (...) points. (shrink)

Norenzayan, Smith, Jun Kim, and Nisbett (2002) investigated cultural differences in the use of intuitive versus formal reasoning in 4 experiments. Our comment concerns the 4th experiment where Norenzayan et al. reported that, although there were no cultural differences in accuracy on abstract logical arguments, Koreans made more errors than U.S. undergraduates in judging the logical validity of concrete arguments. Norenzayan et al. concluded that Koreans are less likely than European Americans to decontextualize an argument's content from its logical structure, (...) as Koreans were more likely to consider the believability of the conclusion when assessing an argument's validity (a belief bias). Notably, Korean participants were more conservative (less likely to say an argument is valid) than European American participants when assessing arguments. An analysis of the average of the hit and correct rejection rates in each of the conditions (abstract, concrete–believable, concrete–nonbelievable) revealed that, contrary to conclusions of Norenzayan et al., European Americans were no better than Koreans at determining the validity of concrete deductive arguments with conclusions varying in believability. (shrink)

While public administration research is thriving because of increased attention to social scientific rigor, lingering problems of methods and ethics remain. This article investigates the reporting of ethics approval within public administration publications. Beginning with an overview of ethics requirements regarding research with human participants, I turn to an examination of human participants protections for public administration research. Next, I present the findings of my analysis of articles published in the top five public administration journals over the period from 2000 (...) to 2012, noting the incidences of ethics approval reporting as well as funding reporting. In explicating the importance of ethics reporting for public administration research, as it relates to replication, reputation, and vulnerable populations, I conclude with recommendations for increasing ethics approval reporting in public administration research. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on a physiotherapy consultation in which the first author of the contribution is the patient and the second author is the physiotherapist. It features analysis of video excerpts in which (1) the physiotherapist instructs the patient how to do an exercise and (2) the patient turns the physiotherapist's instructions into a course of action while (3) the physiotherapist monitors, assesses, guides, and corrects the patient's instructed actions by deploying touch. The investigation draws on video-recordings and transcriptions of (...) the physiotherapist’s and the patient’s interaction during the exercise instructions, the authors’ experience of touching/being touched during these instructions, and their shared understandings as discussed during data-sessions devoted to select video-clips of exercise instructions. In a learning process, the instructor’s instructional corrections are critical: they provide learners with relevant specifications and explanations as to how instructed actions and/or remedial actions are to be accomplished. Whereas monitoring and touching the patient allows the physiotherapist to feel, assess, correct, and guide the patient’s instructed actions, being touched permits the patient to feel how the physiotherapist’s touch resonates beyond locally circumscribed body contact and adapt her movements accordingly. Our contribution thus reveals touching/being touched configurations that establish joint attention and action on extended sensoriality as forming constitutive parts of a dynamic sensorimotor process of inter- and intrabodily resonance, which is challenging to investigate. (shrink)

La mercantilización se define como «la transformación de los bienes, servicios, ideas y personas en objetos de comercio estandarizados». Este artículo presenta una visión de la mercantilización como un proceso que se aplica no sólo a la naturaleza sino también a los bienes, al trabajo, al propio cuerpo, las experiencias y las relaciones. El artículo reflexiona sobre papel clave de la tecnociencia.El camino hacia la reconciliación —con la naturaleza, con el otro y con nosotros mismos— pasa por reconocer y apreciar (...) lo que en ellos es único e irremplazable. El artículo concluye con algunas ideas iniciales sobre cómo la tecnología puede utilizarse como una herramienta. Dar marcha atrás en el proceso de mercantilización es esencial si deseamos establecer una economía sostenible y una sociedad más humana. (shrink)

Las Tecnologías de la Comunicación y la Información han cambiado drásticamente la manera en la que accedemos al conocimiento y procesamos datos, cómo aprendemos y trabajamos y nuestra manera de relacionarnos con otros seres humanos. El interés creciente que despiertan las consecuencias del uso de las TCIs se ha manifestado en múltiples estudios aislados que analizan estos fenómenos desde puntos de vista diferentes. Este artículo tiene como objetivo proporcionar una perspectiva unificadora de estos trabajos, reflexionando sobre las consecuencias que el (...) uso de las TCI está teniendo en nuestras habilidades intelectuales y en cómo nos percibimos a nosotros mismos como seres humanos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Playing with Time. Ovid and the FastiSara MackNewlands, Carole E. Playing with Time. Ovid and the Fasti. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xii 1 254.I learned a great deal from Carole Newlands’ Playing with Time about a poem with which I have always had difficulty. Newlands takes the Fasti seriously as a poem. She sees it as an artistically shaped creation, not a mishmash of (...) religious and mythological lore, and she regards its constantly shifting perspectives as intended and effective. I think she is right.The introduction, “The Problem of Ovid’s Fasti,” looks briefly at past assessments of the poem before setting out Newlands’ own thesis: The Fasti is “an exciting, experimental game with genre that offers a profound meditation on the changes and tensions in Roman society in the latter years of Augustus’ reign and the early years of Tiberius’” and that expresses “disenchantment with a political system that could guarantee neither the peace nor the freedom in which the elegiac [End Page 149] poet could flourish” (18). The rest of the chapter is devoted chiefly to outlining the argument of the remaining chapters.Chapter 1, “Stellar Connections,” examines the star myths of the Fasti. “Far from providing attractive digressions from Roman ritual, the myths interact with the Roman material, occasionally confirming but more often challenging or undermining the points of view encoded there” (31). Whether they in fact “contribute substantially to the dynamic tension in the poem between Ovid’s former erotic preoccupations and his new national themes,” it is certainly true, as she claims, that Ovid’s introduction of the astronomical theme at F. 1.295ff. has more to do with poetics than it does with astronomy. As always Ovid writes with an eye on his predecessors.In chapter 2, “Narrator and Interlocutors,” Newlands argues that “Ovid invites us to follow his development as a student and teacher of ‘sacra’ who discovers in the Roman past not an inspirational repository of noble heroes, but a patchwork of license and repression, nobility and violence, that is contingent on a variety of competing interests” (52). The narrator becomes increasingly reliant on sub-narrators for information as he becomes less confident in his own ability as narrator and in the feasibility of his project: an elegiac poem on Roman themes.In chapter 3 Newlands argues the need to look at the description of the temple of Mars Ultor in the context of the whole of book 5 and with an eye to the bias of its narrator in order to assess its presence in a poem that initially claims to oppose aras to arma. “The star myths of Chiron (379–414) and Orion (493–544), offer divergent perspectives upon the key concepts of war, Roman history, and revenge that are enshrined in the temple” (89). Mars, who takes over the narrative, has his own perspective on things. Furthermore, Mars has taken over the role of the Scorpion in Ovid’s rewrite of the catasterism myth of Orion and Scorpio “in a substitution that... gives a hint that the concept of revenge, glorified in the war god’s new Augustan temple, cannot be wholly refined of brutal elements” (114). I found this a very interesting chapter, although I was not convinced by some of the details, such as the contrast between Achilles’ and Romulus’ pietas. The analogy with the dream vision in the Aeneid is a bit misleading because the proper parallel is not Aeneas in tears vs. Romulus dry-eyed, as the argument suggests, but rather Aeneas in tears vs. the twins’ parents in tears.Chapter 4, “Priapus Revisited,” examines book 6 as “a negative mirroring of the themes of Book 1” (125). One of its major topics is Ovid’s treatment of Vesta. Newlands examines the Priapus-Vesta episode in book 6 which is usually read as a failed and expendable doublet of Priapus-Lotis in book 1. I think she is right that each has a spot in the poem and that part of the fun of the Vesta episode is that Vesta doesn’t fit into a world where nymphs may get raped while they sleep off the... (shrink)

In recent years, and in the current climate crisis, the interest in veganism and sustainable diet/lifestyle has increased. This growing interest can also be seen within academia. Therefore, we set out to systematically document and organize the social psychological literature on veganism and vegan identity to identify where the field currently is, and what we need to do next. Following PRISMA guidelines we identified a data set of 26 academic papers published between 2010 and 2021. Through a thematic analysis of (...) the data, we created four categories of study focus and content: vegans as a disadvantaged/stigmatized group, the role of ideology in negative attitudes toward vegans, the role of moral and ethical beliefs in changing or sustaining dietary preferences, and veganism as a social movement and vegan activism. Our analysis emphasizes issues with merging all non-meat eaters, reduction of veganism into dietary or lifestyle choices neglecting the politicized content and movement, lack of processes underlying emergence and endurance of veganism, and decontextualization of vegan identity. What is needed is a more fine-grained exploration that addresses the identified issues to account for the content of vegan identity. This would expand, for example, the motives literature to include and emphasize intersectionality in a vegan identity context. Specifically, to facilitate a more sustainable lifestyle, the content of social dimensions needs to be qualitatively explored. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a novel philosophical methodology, fiction writing. Much has been made, in philosophy, of the relationship between fiction and thought experiments, but this literature focuses predominantly on completed pieces of fiction: Fully fledged and polished published pieces. In this paper I focus on how the process of writing fiction, especially speculative fiction such as science fiction and fantasy, not just the outcomes of this process, can be viewed as a distinctive philosophical methodology. This will be (...) bound up in arguing for two claims: (1) The process of writing short speculative fiction is essentially a process of argumentation. (2) The distinctive benefit of writing fiction as opposed to writing analytic philosophy is that the starting points need not be justified. These two claims -- which may seem like they are in tension with each other -- will each serve to justify two overall conclusions about the writing of fiction -- the very process whereby short stories or novels are created. The first is that this process is a legitimate philosophical methodology, sharing many relevant features with traditional analytical argument building and conceptual analysis. The second is that it is distinctive philosophical methodology, in that it can provide us with insights that would not be gained via other means. (shrink)

Medieval analyses of molecular propositions include many non-truthfunctional connectives in addition to the standard modern binary connectives (conjunction, disjunction, and conditional). Two types of non-truthfunctional molecular propositions considered by a number of 13th- and 14th-century authors are temporal and local propositions, which combine atomic propositions with `while' and `where'. Despite modern interest in the historical roots of temporal and tense logic, medieval analyses of `while' propositions are rarely discussed in modern literature, and analyses of `where' propositions are almost completely overlooked. (...) In this paper we introduce 13th- and 14th-century views on temporal and local propositions, and connect the medieval theories with modern temporal and spatial counterparts. (shrink)

In this short note we respond to the claim made by Christopher Viger in [4] that Anselm’s so-called ontological argument falls prey to Russell’s paradox. We show that Viger’s argument is based on a flawed premise and hence does not in fact demonstrate what he claims it demonstrates.

[This] is a... guide to both the major schools of literature and the political, philosophical and cultural theories informing them from the nineteenth century to the present. It covers the fundamental basics of each theory alongside discussions of current debates and contemporary usage..."--Back cover.

O presente artigo visa elucidar como o problema da verdade surge em Immanuel Kant a par da pergunta pelo critério de verdade, bem como assinalar a predominância deste. É com base na resposta a esta questão que, quanto ao autor, poderemos evitar incorrer em círculos dos quais se tornaria impossível sair. O problema assoma em como saber qual o critério de verdade? As reflexões remetem-nos para Kritik der reinen Vernunft e Prolegomena zu einer jeden kün ftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft (...) wird auftreten können, mas essencialmente, para Logik: ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen. (shrink)

Esta investigación es un estudio sobre las relaciones entre las Redes Sociales y la trasformación del lenguaje. Se parte de la hipótesis de que la sociedad posmoderna es una red relacional directamente modificada por el fenómeno digital. Así, la vida en la red genera un metalenguaje en cuya virtud se origina el “mundo real”. A través de un examen de la literatura científica y una aproximación teórica basada en encuestas realizadas a jóvenes usuarios de Redes Sociales, se presenta un análisis (...) hermenéutico de elementos clave de nuestro tiempo y tan controvertidos como el uso de la ironía o la posverdad. (shrink)

El mal no es. El significado del mal es revisado, desde la perspectiva spinozista, para teorizar al mal como carencia. El espacio que genera el uso inadecuado de las palabras es ocupado por una realidad que se concibe a sí misma por comparación. Las categorías bueno y malo dejan de tener sentido en el momento en el que el conocimiento prescinde de la imaginación para entender. Lo malo lo es para mí, pero el mal no es más que una negación (...) de lo particular, luego como tal no existe. (shrink)

Inferential or epistemic conditional sentences represent a blueprint of someone’s reasoning process from premise to conclusion. Declerck and Reed (2001) make a distinction between a direct and an indirect type. In the latter type the direction of reasoning goes backwards, from the blatant falsehood of the consequent to the falsehood of the antecedent. We first present a modal reinterpretation in terms of Argumentation Schemes of indirect inferential conditionals (IIC’s) in Declerck and Reed (2001). We furthermore argue for a distinction between (...) epistemic-modal strong and deontic-modal weak IIC’s. In addition, we extend the category of the indirect inferential conditionals in order to include several other deontic-modal subtypes. On the basis of the undesirability of the consequent the hearer in these cases infers that the antecedent is also undesirable. In this way the rhetoric-argumentative strategy of Reductio ad Absurdum is extended from the realm of deductive reasoning to that of practical reasoning. (shrink)

The thesis offers a reconstruction of Plotinus' reading of the Theaetetus, and it presents an account of his epistemology that rests on that reading. It aims to show that Plotinus reads the Theaetetus as containing two anti-sceptical arguments. The first argument is an answer to radical scepticism, namely, to the thesis that nothing is apprehensible and judgement must be suspended on all matters. The second argument is an answer to a more moderate form of scepticism, which does not endorse a (...) universal suspension of judgement, but maintains nonetheless that scientific knowledge is unattainable. (shrink)