The information technological progress that has been achieved over the last decades has also given the humanities the opportunity to expand their methodological toolbox. This paper explores how recent advancements in natural language processing may be used for research in the history of ideas so as to overcome traditional scholarship's inevitably selective approach to historical sources. By employing two machine learning techniques whose potential for the analysis of conceptual continuities and innovations has never been considered before, we aim to determine (...) the extent to which they can enhance conventional research methods. It will amount to a critical evaluation of how the advantages of computational in-breadth analysis could be combined with the merits of traditional in-depth analysis in a philosophically fruitful way. After a brief technical description, the approach will be applied to an example: the conceptual (dis)continuity between medieval and early modern philosophy. All the challenges encountered during development and application will be carefully evaluated. We will then be able to assess whether these tools and techniques present promising extensions to the methodological toolbox of traditional scholarship, or whether they do not yet have the potential for a task as complex as the analysis of philosophical literature. The present investigation can thus be seen as an experiment on how far one can go with current machine-learning techniques in this area of research. In doing so, it provides important insights and guidance for future advances in the field. (shrink)

According to Bayesian epistemology, rational learning from experience is consistent learning, that is learning should incorporate new information consistently into one's old system of beliefs. Simon M. Huttegger argues that this core idea can be transferred to situations where the learner's informational inputs are much more limited than Bayesianism assumes, thereby significantly expanding the reach of a Bayesian type of epistemology. What results from this is a unified account of probabilistic learning in the tradition of Richard Jeffrey's 'radical probabilism'. (...) Along the way, Huttegger addresses a number of debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science, including the status of prior probabilities, whether Bayes' rule is the only legitimate form of learning from experience, and whether rational agents can have sustained disagreements. His book will be of interest to students and scholars of epistemology, of game and decision theory, and of cognitive, economic, and computer sciences. (shrink)

Economic inequality is a pressing issue that the global community must address in an urgent and detailed manner if global peace is to be sustained. This paper makes the claim that viable alternative solutions to global economic inequality can be found outside the boundaries of western capitalism. This claim is defended via three movements: first, a critique of Christian teachings on the common good is presented as a pathway to this economic alternative. Second, insights from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (...) that call for strategic solidarity to help undo structures of inequality in our world are appropriated. Third, a cultural and philosophical notion of what it means to be human in African thought is presented as a means for justifying the relevance of the African ethic of Ubuntu as a global economic alternative; one that grounds cosmic flourishing in a vision and praxis of relationality and shared identity for all. Keywords: African Philosophy, Inequality, Political Theology, Ubuntu, Ujamaa, Wealth. (shrink)

In this article we study how reported speech markers are used as procedural resources in a laboratory based parapsychology experiment to investigate forms of anomalous communication, such as extrasensory perception. In particular, we focus on how specific activities in a key part of the experiment are mediated by the use of `you said' formulations which project that whatever is said next is a paraphrase or a verbatim report of what the recipient had said earlier. We identify two uses of reported (...) speech markers. First, they are used in utterances that initiate some form of repair, such as correction or clarification. Second, they cluster in sequential locations that mark, after a temporary suspension, the resumption of key activities in the experiment. In this we hope to contribute to the study of the institutional properties of reported speech. We conclude by discussing the ways in which broader cultural understandings of the inferential force of `you said' formulations inform their use in this institutional setting, and reflecting on the significance of these findings for parapsychological investigation of anomalous communication in this setting. (shrink)

Du grand ingénieur et mathématicien Simon Stevin (Bruges 1548 - La Haye ? 1620), l'histoire a retenu avant tout l'œuvre scientifique, marquante par sa diversité et sa vocation à constituer des manuels pratiques.

Simon Blackburn. 1985. Garrett, Don. Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Gaskin, J.C. A. Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Holden, T.The Architecture ...

The chapters in is collection examine various aspects of JJ Rousseau's work as it relates to the concept of desire.

Morally unequal treatment of different nonhuman species, like pigs and dogs, can seem troublingly inconsistent. A position Todd May calls moral individualism and relationalism appears to justify the moral discomfit attending such species-differentiated treatment. Yet some of its basic assumptions are challenged by a philosophical style Roger Scruton called narrative philosophy. Expanding upon Christopher Cordner’s discussion of narrative philosophy, this paper develops a narrative-style philosophical critique of Todd May’s moral individualism and relationalism, especially its reductionist understanding of moral reasons, consistency, (...) and relevance. Such criticism opens up the possibility that the unequal treatment of nonhuman species like pigs and dogs is perfectly consistent and even justified. However, the paper then presents a narrative-style argument that such species-differentiated treatment may be morally inconsistent and unjustified after all. (shrink)

This is a book about the religious life of the Greeks from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD, looked at in the context of a variety of different cities and periods. Simon Price does not describe some abstract and self-contained system of religion or myths but examines local practices and ideas in the light of general Greek ideas, relating them for example, to gender roles and to cultural and political life (including Attic tragedy and the trial (...) of Socrates). He also lays emphasis on the reactions to Greek religions of ancient thinkers - Greek, Roman, Jewish and Christian. The evidence drawn on is of all kinds: literary texts, which are translated throughout; inscriptions, including an appendix of newly translated Greek inscriptions; and archaeology, which is highlighted in the numerous illustrations. (shrink)

This is an essential guide to an thinker. Frederic Jameson sees Lyotard as responding to a contemporary "crisis of representation" in the sciences -- a crisis which calls into question "an essentially realistic epistemology, which conceives of representation as the reproduction, for subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies outside it -- projects a mirror theory of knowledge and art, whose fundamental evaluative categories are those of adequacy, accuracy, and Truth itself.".

The spontaneous emergence of signaling has already been studied in terms of standard evolutionary dynamics of signaling games. Standard evolutionary dynamics is given by the replicator equations. Thus, it is not clear whether the results for standard evolutionary dynamics depend crucially on the functional form of the replicator equations. In this paper I show that the basic results for the replicator dynamics of signaling games carry over to a number of other evolutionary dynamics. ‡This research was supported by the Konrad (...) Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research. †To contact the author, please write to: Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Adolf Lorenz Gasse 2, A-3422 Altenberg, Austria; e-mail: simon[email protected]. (shrink)

In Schleiermacher's thought, according to romanticism, history and historical evolution can only be understood as the revelation and realisation of an idea within empiric world. At the end of this evolution there will be the identity of Geist and nature, idea and reality. – For Schleiermacher church history ist the middle discipline of historical theology. Between 1806 and 1826 he held three lectures on this subject and made diverse attempts to appoint the relation in which church history stands to universal (...) history and to the idea of knowledge and science. (shrink)

One implication of Godel’s Proof is that, as Barry Barnes has observed, “For people to operate...rationally they need to have internalized some non-rational commitment to rationality”. In which case “The customary Enlightenment formula, according to which the process of demagification of the world leads necessarily from mythos to logos, seems . . .” Gadamer suggests, “. . . to be a modern prejudice”, or myth. Yet some myths are more useful than others, and therefore it may be on pragmatic grounds (...) that, following Nietzsche’s characterization of “. . . logic and the categories of reason as means to . . . useful falsification . . .” we may wish to resist the abandonment of reason that many take to be the corollary of its deconstruction. (shrink)