The debate between critics of syntactic and semantic approaches to the formalization of scientific theories has been going on for over 50 years. I structure the debate in light of a recent exchange between Hans Halvorson, Clark Glymour, and Bas van Fraassen and argue that the only remaining disagreement concerns the alleged difference in the dependence of syntactic and semantic approaches on languages of predicate logic. This difference turns out to be illusory.

Geoffrey Hellman has argued that non-truth-functionality entails a change of meaning between classical and quantum logical connectives. This paper criticizes and significantly improves the argument.

In this paper, I discuss whether it is ever morally permissible to diminish the cognitive abilities or capacities of some cognitively gifted offenders whose ability to commit their crimes successfully relies on them possessing these abilities or capacities. I suggest that, given such cognitive diminishments may prevent such offenders from re-offending and causing others considerable harm, this provides us with at least one good moral reason in favour of employing them. After setting out more clearly what cognitive diminishment may consist (...) of, I then critically discuss variations of four plausible arguments against a proposal of using them on cognitive gifted offenders related to autonomy, harm, narrative identity, and a right to mental self-determination. I argue that none of these concerns should have us reject the use of cognitive diminishments. (shrink)

The 2018 eligibility regulation for female competitors with differences of sexual development (DSD) issued by World Athletics requires competitors with DSD with blood testosterone levels at or above 5 nmol/L and sufficient androgen sensitivity to be excluded from competition in certain events unless they reduce the level of testosterone in their blood. This paper formalises and then critically assesses the fairness-based argument offered in support of this regulation by the federation. It argues that it is unclear how the biological advantage (...) singled out by the regulation as an appropriate target for diminishment, is relevantly different from other biological advantages that athletes may enjoy, and specifically that Sigmund Loland’s recent attempt to drive a wedge between heightened levels of blood testosterone and other biological advantages fails. The paper also suggests that even if heightened blood testosterone levels do differ relevantly from other types of biological advantage, the regulation is further challenged by studies indicating that athletes with blood testosterone at the high end of the normal range have a competitive advantage over athletes with blood testosterone levels at the low end of it. Finally, the paper contends that the premises of the fairness-based argument do not unequivocally support the conclusion that DSD athletes with heightened levels of testosterone should diminish those levels, since, just as powerfully, they support allowing athletes with normal levels of testosterone to use performance-enhancing drugs in the name of fairness. (shrink)

The online version of the original article can be found under doi:10.1007/s11948-007-9045-2.

Kant's influence on the history of philosophy is vast and protean. The transcendental turn denotes one of its most important forms, defined by the notion that Kant's deepest insight should not be identified with any specific epistemological or metaphysical doctrine, but rather concerns the fundamental standpoint and terms of reference of philosophical enquiry. To take the transcendental turn is not to endorse any of Kant's specific teachings, but to accept that the Copernican revolution announced in the Preface of the Critique (...) of Pure Reason sets philosophy on a new footing and constitutes the proper starting point of philosophical reflection.In this volume a team of leading philosophers explore the concept of the transcendental as it developed through history, focusing on approaches to the transcendental project by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bernard Williams. By giving systematic shape to historical material, the volume provides a unique resource for systematic reflection on transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

In this reply to our commentators, we respond to ethical concerns raised about the potential use (or misuse) of personalized LLMs for academic idea and prose generation, including questions about c...

This paper proposes the use of an argumentation framework with recursive attacks to address a trust model in a collaborative open multi-agent system. Our approach is focused on scenarios where agents share information about the credibility (informational trust) they have assigned to their peers. We will represent informants’ credibility through credibility objects which will include not only trust information but also the informant source. This leads to a recursive setting where the reliability of certain credibility information depends on the credibility (...) of other pieces of information that should be subject to the same analysis. Credibility objects are maintained in a credibility base which can have information in conflict. In this scenario, we will formally show that our proposal will produce a partially ordered credibility relation; such relation contains the information that can be justified by an argumentation process. (shrink)

Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ is arguably the single most important work in western philosophy. The book introduces and assesses: * Kant's life and background of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ * the ideas and text of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ * the continuing relevance of Kant's work to contemporary philosophy. Ideal for anyone coming to Kant's thought for the first time. This guide will be vital reading for all students of Kant in philosophy.

In a recent paper in this journal, Derek Baker (Erkenntnis 83(4):829–852, 2018) raises an objection to expressivism as it has been developed by Mark Schroeder (Being for, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). Baker argues that Schroeder’s expressivist (1) is committed to certain sentences expressing rationally incoherent states of mind, and he objects (2) that the expressivist cannot explain why these states would be rationally incoherent. The aim of this paper is to show that Baker’s argument for (1) is unsound, and (...) that (1) is unlikely to be true. This obviates the need to explain the alleged rational incoherence, and so Baker’s objection to Schroeder’s expressivism is undermined. (shrink)

Laudan’s argument against the possibility of a demarcation criterion for scientific theories rests on establishing that any criterion must be a necessary and sufficient condition. But Laudan’s argument at most establishes that any criterion must provide a necessary condition and a possibly different sufficient condition. His own claims suggest that such a criterion is possible.

According to the biological objection against strong artificial intelligence (AI), machines cannot have human mindedness – that is, they cannot be conscious, intelligent, sentient, etc. in the precise way that a human being typically is – because this requires being alive, and machines are not alive. Proponents of the objection include John Lucas, Hubert Dreyfus, and John Searle. The present paper explains the nature and significance of the biological objection, before arguing that it currently represents an essentially irrational position.

One way to seek to reduce the risk of potential offenders engaging in certain types of crime in a public or semi-public area is to make it much more difficult, or even impossible, for them to gain access to the area in question and subject them to a sanction if they do enter the area. This paper considers whether preventive exclusion of this kind should be considered a pro tanto morally impermissible means of crime prevention because it violates the agency (...) of those excluded. Several variants of this agency objection to preventive exclusion are identified and critically assessed. It is argued that none persuasively show preventive exclusion to be pro tanto morally wrong. (shrink)

All forms of cognition, whether natural or artificial, are subject to constraints of their computing architecture. This assumption forms the tenet of virtually all general theories of cognition, including those deriving from bounded optimality and bounded rationality. In this letter, we highlight an unresolved puzzle related to this premise: what are these constraints, and why are cognitive architectures subject to cognitive constraints in the first place? First, we lay out some pieces along the puzzle edge, such as computational tradeoffs inherent (...) to neural architectures that give rise to rational bounds of cognition. We then outline critical next steps for characterizing cognitive bounds, proposing that some of these bounds can be subject to modification by cognition and, as such, are part of what is being optimized when cognitive agents decide how to allocate cognitive resources. We conclude that these emerging views may contribute to a more holistic perspective on the nature of cognitive bounds, as well as their alteration subject to cognition. (shrink)

The shift from state-led import-substitution industrialization to more market-oriented economic models often has the result of shrinking and demobilizing the labor movement. Yet, evidence from Argentina suggests that a subsequent resurgence of even a downsized labor movement may occur and furthermore that a type of “segmented neocorporatism” may be established in the new economic context. We argue that the establishment of this new form of interest intermediation is driven by economic and political factors that are both immediate and longer term. (...) In addition to the short-term condition of the labor market and the political strategy of the government in power, of longer-term importance are structural and institutional conditions that derive from the earlier process of market reform, specifically the nature of sectoral shifts in the economy and the degree of labor law deregulation affecting the “associational power” of unions. (shrink)

Es reconocido desde hace tiempo por la crítica que en su estructura y contenido el libro de los signos comparte cierta semejanza con las secciones iniciales de los tres primeros evangelios. También sus matices teológicos propios han sido resaltados, así como sus fuentes. Este encuentro y diferencia entre el cuarto evangelio y los sinópticos ha divido a los estudiosos respecto al análisis de sus fuentes y sus rasgos teológicos, como lo son el uso de sus fuentes, los relatos de milagros, (...) su escatología y cristología. Este artículo pretende dar una mirada de conjunto a las líneas de investigación más relevantes en estos puntos. (shrink)

The book offers an up-to-date introduction to the essential phenomena, issues, and theoretical approaches of linguistic semantics. It covers the key aspects of word and sentence semantics. In his step-by-step development of the theme, the author puts great stock in the consistency, coherence, and understandability of the scientific approach. The new edition has been extensively revised, expanded, and updated.

In the traditional understanding, human dignity is often portrayed as a «final», «inherent», and «absolute» value. If human dignity as the core of the status of a human being did indeed have thos characteristics, this would yield a severe limitation for obligations that stem from the moral status of non-human animals, plants, eco systems and other entities discussed in environmental ethics; for obligations that arise from human dignity standardly take priority over the duties toward entities with non-human moral status. Yet, (...) many theorists of human dignity nowadays have given up the traditional picture in favour of a more «contingent» understanding of human dignity that abandons one or more of its traditional characteristics.In this paper, I argue that to the contrary, we have good reasons to think that the three characteristics of human dignity just mentioned can indeed be attributed to a value that deserves the name «human dignity». In a first part, I argue for a specific understanding of the three value characteristics under consideration. After these preliminaries, I show in a second part that given such an understanding, we have ample evidence that we can indeed say that human dignity is an inherent, absolute and final value; and also that these three characteristics are properties of a single value. (shrink)

Review of Nicola Möβner’s 'Visual Representations in Science. Concept and Epistemology'. Forthcoming in Grazer Philosophische Studien.

Timothy Williamson has maintained that the applicability of classical mathematics in science raises a problem for the endorsement, in non-mathematical domains, of a wide range of non-classical logics. We show that this is false.

The 'late' Foucault and his purported 'return to the subject' is a much discussed issue. Over the past twenty years, various suggestions have been made as to how to integrate Foucault's ethics into his oeuvre as a whole. This paper holds that there is a 'conceptual continuity', rather than a break, between Foucault's earlier works on normalizing power, and his later works on ethical self-constitution. On the basis of a conceptual framework, which is developed in Section II, a reading of (...) two themes concerning certain practices of the self is offered in the following sections (namely, dietetics and spiritual guidance). The material, drawn from the recently published lecture series L'herméneutique du sujet as well as from other published works, is related back to Foucault's ideas on the process of 'subjectivation', in order to support the claim that 'fabrication' and 'self-constitution' are but two aspects of subjectivation. Keywords: late Foucault, ethics, practices of the self, self-constitution, discipline, power, surveillance, spiritual guidance, meditation, parrhesia, dietetics, art of living, aesthetics of existence, return of the subject, subjectivation, relation to self. (shrink)

The view that acting morally is ultimately a question of treating others with respect has had a profound influence on moral and legal philosophy. Not surprisingly, then, some scholars forcefully argue that the modes of punishment that the states mete out to offenders should not be disrespectful, and, furthermore, it has been argued that obliging offenders to receive neurological treatment is incompatible with showing them their due respect. In this paper, I examine three contemporary accounts of what showing respect for (...) offenders in our sentencing practices would amount to: that it involves not interfering with offenders’ capacities for rationality and autonomy, that it should not undermine offenders’ prospect of reform, and that it amounts to treating offenders as if opaque. I then critically discuss whether any of these accounts plausibly imply that mandating neurointerventions to some offenders is necessarily morally wrong. I argue that they do not. (shrink)

This entry reviews Carnap's philosophical views on the quantum mechanics of his time. It also offers some thoughts on how he might have reacted to some recent developments in the foundations of quantum mechanics.

An important question regarding the use of neurointerventions in criminal justice systems relates to the ethics of offering neurointerventions in exchange for a sentence reduction or as a condition of parole – what has been termed the _neurocorrective offer_. In this paper, we suggest that neurocorrective offers may sometimes involve manipulative pressure. That is, in some cases these offers will involve a pressure to comply with the manipulators’ (i.e., the state’s) bidding that does not rise to the level of coercion, (...) but which cannot be considered an instance of persuasion. We then suggest that offenders may fall victim to this pressure due to general facts about human psychology and their situational vulnerability. We end the paper by identifying three reasons for thinking it prima facie morally wrong for the state to make neurocorrective offers involving manipulative pressure even if such offers do not undermine offenders’ consent to the offer. Specifically, we suggest that such offers are plausibly pro tanto harmful to some offenders and that they sometimes disrespect their autonomy and rationality. (shrink)

Si la teoría del derecho persigue suministrar herramientas a los operadores jurídicos para gestionar los problemas de la práctica, resulta necesario disminuir la actual separación entre la actividad teórico-jurídica y la práctica del derecho. De ahí que, este trabajo persigue contribuir a reducir dicha distancia mediante el análisis de las principales propuestas en materia de ontología de las normas. Esta revisión se realiza a la luz de un extendido problema de los ordenamientos jurídicos contemporáneos: la identificación del derecho y sus (...) limitaciones conceptuales. El examen explicita cierta concomitancia entre las propuestas teóricas y presenta una serie de consideraciones necesarias para identificar el derecho y, en concreto, contribuir a la solución del citado problema. De esta manera, se sugiere girar la discusión sobre la ontología de las normas hacia la identificación de ellas y evaluar las discusiones teórico-jurídicas con base en las exigencias de la práctica normativa. (shrink)

We conducted a scoping review to map and critically examine the knowledge, perceptions and utilization of generics and biosimilars, among physicians, pharmacists, patients, the general population, and other stakeholders from LAC.

The book reviewed here is another publication devoted to the Golden Period of Polish philosophy, which is the first half of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, logical investigations conducted by P...

Para este trabajo, seleccionamos los programas Bailando por un sueño, Intratables y El show de la mañana, y retomamos algunas expresiones de los sujetos que participaron en grupos de discusión durante los meses de octubre, noviembre y diciembre de 2016 en Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Rosario y Córdoba.Estos programas televisivos, en tiempos de una “democracia mediatizada”, son centrales en la modelización de lo político en un sentido muy distinto a lo que definía el concepto de “videopolítica” en los 90. (...) Uno de los cambios a considerar remite al impacto del desarrollo de internet y a los dispositivos asociados para un tipo de “participación mediatizada” en vivo, que transforma sustantivamente el lugar y la posición que tenía el espectador de los viejos medios masivos de comunicación. Con relación al “objeto” de estos programas, es posible identificar y reconstruir una modelización recurrente en el qué se dice y cómo; construcción ideológica que encuentra en la macro forma compartida del panel, por ejemplo, una manera de presentar “diversidad de voces”, en tanto expresión resultante del proceso de trabajo que vincula estética y política en la construcción de una “verdad” sobre el contexto político actual.La estrategia expositiva y argumentativa es la siguiente: 1) Presentamos y caracterizamos estructuralmente a los programas seleccionados y los vinculamos con expresiones rescatadas de los grupos de discusión. 2) Seleccionamos ejes de comparación que posibilitan la precisión de recurrencias entre ellos. 3) Finalmente, con los resultados del recorrido descriptivo y analítico, exponemos rasgos y dinámicas de las novedosas formas de estetización de lo político —en el sentido benjaminiano— como proceso orientado a que las masas —en nuestro caso, los individuos— expresen sus demandas. (shrink)

Diese Aufsatzsammlung ist der erste ausführliche Versuch, eine Verbindung zwischen dem Denken der klassischen deutschen Philosophie und Husserls Phänomenologie herzustellen. Vorliegender Band versammelt eine Reihe neuer kritischer Artikel sowohl von etablierten Forschern wie jüngeren Philosophen aus beiden Traditionen, um diese Forschungslücke, als welche sie von beiderlei Forschungsrichtungen anerkannt ist, zu schließen. Dieser Band wirft neues Licht auf beide Traditionen und hebt ihre Bedeutung für die Philosophie der Gegenwart hervor, sowohl in historischer wie systematischer Hinsicht. Die in diesem Band behandelten Hauptthemen (...) sind Erkenntnistheorie, Moralphilosophie und die Geschichte der Philosophie, wobei diese Themen auf der Basis von mehreren Subthemen (Objekt, Idealismus/Realismus, Subjektivität/Intersubjektivität, Ethik, Geschichte, Kultur) diskutiert werden. Hierdurch wird das grundsätzliche Koordinatensystem für einen spekulativen Vergleich zwischen Husserl und der klassischen deutschen Philosophie präsentiert, indem die wichtigsten Deutungslinien verfolgt werden, um sowohl die Kontinuität wie auch die Diskontinuität beider Traditionen wertschätzen zu können. Eine Sektion des Bandes ist insbesondere der Rezeption der Husserl’schen Phänomenologie und der klassischen deutschen Philosophie gewidmet. Die Aufsätze dieses Bandes sind für eine generelle philosophische Leserschaft intendiert mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Forschern in den Gebieten der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel), des Neukantianismus und der phänomenologischen Tradition (insbesondere Husserl, aber ebenso andere wichtige Vertreter derselben).​. (shrink)

El presente artículo dialoga con la perspectiva del profesor de la Universidad de Stanford, John Searle en su perspectiva acerca de la conciencia, los actos de habla en lo que tiene que ver con la creación de hechos institucionales y su tesis emergentista. Esto con la idea de proponer la lectura del filósofo estadounidense en base a una pragmática de la expresión, que identifica al agente como centro de la creación y transformación social, y por tanto de movilización política, al (...) ser el reconocimiento colectivo quien mantiene el orden institucional. Por lo tanto, esa pragmática de la expresión identifica a los agentes como puntos esenciales de la creación del mundo social, desde el punto de vista del libre albedrio y la creación de mundos sociales posibles. (shrink)

Situational crime prevention (SCP) measures attempt to prevent crime by reducing the opportunities for crime to occur. One of the ways in which some SCP measures reduce such opportunities is by providing victims with advice about how to avoid being victimised, for instance through public awareness campaigns or safety apps. Some scholars claim that this approach to preventing crime often or always promotes victim-blaming and that it is therefore morally wrong to pursue such strategies. Others have made sweeping rejections of (...) this claim. However, in this paper, I suggest that neither view is correct. Specifically, I demonstrate that there are at least three distinct ways of interpreting what I term the victim-blaming argument against advice-giving SCP measures – i.e. as an argument based on a concern for direct victim-blaming, indirect victim-blaming, or self-blame – and that both SCP opponents and supporters have legitimate grounds for their position, depending on how the argument is spelled out. (shrink)

In this article, we present two accounts of intersubjectivity in Jaspers and Husserl, respectively. We argue that both can be brought together for a more satisfying account of empathy and communication in the context of psychiatric praxis. But while we restrict ourselves for the most part to this praxis, we also indicate the larger agenda that drives Jaspers and Husserl, despite all disagreement. Here we spell out, in particular, how a phenomenologically inspired account of empathy and intersubjectivity can have larger (...) ramifications for a theory of social life and interaction. Finally, we argue for a ‘relaxed' view concerning the relation between pure and applied phenomenology, such that both can mutually benefit from one another. (shrink)