The Logic of Law Making in Islam: Women and Prayer in the Legal Tradition. By Behnam Sadeghi. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xxi + 215. $99.99, £64.99.

“Ezekiel is the Old Testament prophet who proclaims more radically than any other that no righteousness of the people called by God can stand up before God.”.

Imagine a world where everyone is healthy, intelligent, long living and happy. Intuitively this seems wonderful albeit unrealistic. However, recent scienti c breakthroughs in genetic engineering, namely CRISPR/Cas bring the question into public discourse, how the genetic enhancement of humans should be evaluated morally. In 2001, when preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF), enabled parents to select between multiple embryos, Julian Savulescu introduced the principle of procreative bene cence (PPB), stating that parents have the obligations to choose (...) the child that is expected to have the best life. In this paper I argue that accepting the PPB and the consequentialist principle (CP) that two acts with the same consequences are morally on par, commits one to accepting the parental obligation of genetically enhancing one's children. (shrink)

As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, I shall (...) argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present a paraconsistent formal system and a corresponding intended interpretation according to which true contradictions are not tolerated. Contradictions are, instead, epistemically understood as conflicting evidence, where evidence for a proposition A is understood as reasons for believing that A is true. The paper defines a paraconsistent and paracomplete natural deduction system, called the Basic Logic of Evidence, and extends it to the Logic of Evidence and Truth. The latter is a logic of (...) formal inconsistency and undeterminedness that is able to express not only preservation of evidence but also preservation of truth. LETj is anti-dialetheist in the sense that, according to the intuitive interpretation proposed here, its consequence relation is trivial in the presence of any true contradiction. Adequate semantics and a decision method are presented for both BLE and LETj, as well as some technical results that fit the intended interpretation. (shrink)

This article bears on four topics: observational predicates and phenomenal properties, vagueness, strict finitism as a philosophy of mathematics, and the analysis of feasible computability. It is argued that reactions to strict finitism point towards a semantics for vague predicates in the form of nonstandard models of weak arithmetical theories of the sort originally introduced to characterize the notion of feasibility as understood in computational complexity theory. The approach described eschews the use of nonclassical logic and related devices like degrees (...) of truth or supervaluation. Like epistemic approaches to vagueness, it may thus be smoothly integrated with the use of classical model theory as widely employed in natural language semantics. But unlike epistemicism, the described approach fails to imply either the existence of sharp boundaries or the failure of tolerance for soritical predicates. Applications ofmeasurement theory(in the sense of Krantz, Luce, Suppes, & Tversky (1971)) to vagueness in the nonstandard setting are also explored. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to connect the Brazilian Paulo Freire’s well known educational thinking with the “philosophy for children” movement. It considers the relationship between the creator of philosophy for children, Matthew Lipman and Freire through different attempts to establish a relationship between these two educators. The paper shows that the relationship between them is not as close as many supporters of P4C have claimed, especially in Latin America. It also considers the context of Educational Policies in our time (...) and why Freire’s understanding of the politics of education makes it impossible to be Freirean and at the same time be neutral or favorable to the actual status quo. Finally, after presenting Lipman’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy, education and democracy and their connection to capitalism, it proposes ways to begin the political path of philosophizing with children inspired by Paulo Freire’s educational thinking. As a result, a more politically committed path to doing philosophy with children is offered. (shrink)

In his Treatise on the Figure of the Stars (1732), Maupertuis described bright and elliptic phenomena in the night sky. Based on Maupertuis’s account of these astronomical observations, Kant developed an explanation of his own in his early book on the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). For him, these figures were seemingly stars, suns and even whole galaxies, subsystems orbiting a central body or a central sun, held by Kant to be the middle of the universe (...) and a whole, an immense and immeasurable system of many uncountable solar systems. Since Kant did not read Maupertuis’s treatise, he derived his knowledge from a review of the Collected Essays of Maupertuis, in which the Treatise was published (1744). This review appeared in the Nova Acta Eruditorum in April 1745. Alongside this known source, another possible and complementary source on Maupertuis’s theory may have influenced Kant in his thinking: Gottsched’s philosophical textbook First Elements of all Philosophical Disciplines (5th edition, Theoretical part, Vol. I, 1748). The plate beneath the front matter of this book shows a picture of many solar systems. It depicts in detail, and according to Maupertuis’s account, comets signifying the center of different solar systems by the alignment of their tails, pointing in the opposite direction of the center. Gottsched’s book was known to Kant, who mentioned it in at least three lectures on logic. In addition, it was widely read in Königsberg’s intellectual and academic circles, since Gottsched was born not far from Königsberg and was a friend of Knutzen, Flottwell, Scheffner, the Imperial Countess of Keyserlingk, and others. (shrink)

Huemer [33] argues against the killing of animals. I offer a critical libertarian analysis of his claim.

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks’, or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks’. Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, (...) and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option ‘I agree’ vs ‘I disagree’. In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’ was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD-group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude towards the speaker’s meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction towards violations of informativeness of these two groups in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities. (shrink)

In the abstract I sent to the organizing committee of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, I announced that I would attempt a dialogue between phenomenology and decoloniality, understanding that both are theoretical frames by means of which transcendental phenomenology and the lifeworld, on the one hand, and modernity/coloniality, on the other, came into being. Phenomenology and transcendental consciousness/lifeworld are mutually constitutive. One cannot exist without the other; and so it is for the mutual constitution of decoloniality and modernity/coloniality. (...) There cannot be modernity/coloniality without decoloniality, and vice versa. The axis around which the dialogue I... (shrink)

In light of the magnitude of interpersonal harm and the risk of greater harm in the future, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu have argued for pharmacological enhancement of moral behaviour. I discuss moral bioenhancement as a set of collective action problems. Psychotropic drugs or other forms of neuromodulation designed to enhance moral sensitivity would have to produce the same or similar effects in the brains of a majority of people. Also, a significant number of healthy subjects would have to participate (...) in clinical trials testing the safety and efficacy of these drugs, which may expose them to unreasonable risk. Even if the drugs were safe and effective, a majority of people would have to co-operate in a moral enhancement programme for such a project to succeed. This goal would be thwarted if enough people opted out and decided not to enhance. To avoid this scenario, Persson and Savulescu argue that moral enhancement should be compulsory rather than voluntary. But the collective interest in harm reduction through compulsory enhancement would come at the cost of a loss of individual freedom. In general, there are many theoretical and practical reasons for scepticism about the concept and goal of moral enhancement. (shrink)

Even though theistic philosophers and scientists agree that God created, sustains, and providentially governs the physical universe and even though much has been published in general regarding divine action, what is needed is a fine-grained, conceptually coherent account of divine action, causation, dispositions, and laws of nature consistent with divine aseity, satisfying the widely recognized adequacy conditions for any account of dispositions.1 Such an account would be a basic part of a more comprehensive theory of divine action in relation to (...) the fundamental concepts of science and of mathematics. Our aim in this article is simply to present such a theory. (shrink)

There are two foundational, but not fully developed, ideas in paraconsistency, namely, the duality between paraconsistent and intuitionistic paradigms, and the introduction of logical operators that express meta-logical notions in the object language. The aim of this paper is to show how these two ideas can be adequately accomplished by the Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs) and by the Logics of Formal Undeterminedness (LFUs). LFIs recover the validity of the principle of explosion in a paraconsistent scenario, while LFUs recover the (...) validity of the principle of excluded middle in a paracomplete scenario. We introduce definitions of duality between inference rules and connectives that allow comparing rules and connectives that belong to different logics. Two formal systems are studied, the logics mbC and mbD, that display the duality between paraconsistency and paracompleteness as a duality between inference rules added to a common core– in the case studied here, this common core is classical positive propositional logic (CPL + ). The logics mbC and mbD are equipped with recovery operators that restore classical logic for, respectively, consistent and determined propositions. These two logics are then combined obtaining a pair of logics of formal inconsistency and undeterminedness (LFIUs), namely, mbCD and mbCDE. The logic mbCDE exhibits some nice duality properties. Besides, it is simultaneously paraconsistent and paracomplete, and able to recover the principles of excluded middle and explosion at once. The last sections offer an algebraic account for such logics by adapting the swap-structures semantics framework of the LFIs the LFUs. This semantics highlights some subtle aspects of these logics, and allows us to prove decidability by means of finite non-deterministic matrices. (shrink)

A non-inferiority design accepts the possibility of some efficacy loss, as part of a “successful”, statistically significant result. That loss may be excessive when the non-inferiority threshold is lenient. However, even stringent significance thresholds and safety monitoring may fail to adequately protect study participants when the primary outcome is death. The OPTIMAAL trial, a large randomized clinical trial performed in high-risk patients, is discussed as an example, using the Belmont Report principles as an ethical frame of reference. OPTIMAAL compared losartan, (...) a new drug, to captopril, a drug known to reduce the risk of death in patients with heart failure after a myocardial infarction. Serious ethical challenges occurred in that study. Firstly, subjects had to tolerate captopril to participate, meaning that participation implied the possibility of higher risk of death if randomized to the losartan arm, as compared to the standard of care. Additionally, the stopping rules had to ensure enough powe... (shrink)

Spatial memory relies on encoding, storing, and retrieval of knowledge about objects’ positions in their surrounding environment. Blind people have to rely on sensory modalities other than vision to memorize items that are spatially displaced, however, to date, very little is known about the influence of early visual deprivation on a person’s ability to remember and process sound locations. To fill this gap, we tested sighted and congenitally blind adults and adolescents in an audio-spatial memory task inspired by the classical (...) card game “Memory.” In this research, subjects had to find pairs among sounds displaced on an audio-tactile device composed of loudspeakers covered by tactile sensors. To accomplish this task, participants had to remember the spatialized sounds’ position and develop a proper mental spatial representation of their locations. The test was divided into two experimental conditions of increasing difficulty dependent on the number of sounds to be remembered. Results showed that sighted participants outperformed blind participants in both conditions. Findings were discussed considering the crucial role of visual experience in properly manipulating auditory spatial representations, particularly in relation to the ability to explore complex acoustic configurations. (shrink)

This book aims merely to study the human values that were sought and realized by Greek democracy, the chief problems that it faced, the measure of success and ...

In spite of the intuitiveness of epistemic closure, there has been a stubborn stalemate regarding whether it is true, largely because some of the “Moorean” things we seem to know easily seem clearly to entail “heavyweight” philosophical things that we apparently cannot know easily—or perhaps even at all. In this paper, I will show that two widely accepted facts about what we do and don’t know—facts with which any minimally acceptable understanding of knowledge must comport—are jointly inconsistent with the truth (...) of CLR. The proof works by supposing the truth of “Categorialism,” a thesis about the relation between basic categories and common nouns and predicates, which is itself a heavyweight claim that cannot be easily known to be either true or false. (shrink)

The ideal, my friend, is the lifebuoy. Let's say one is taking a swim, floundering around, trying as hard as possible not to sink. One might try to swim in a safe direction despite contrary currents; the essential thing is to use a classic stroke according to recognized swimming principles...Some eccentrics who try to swim faster in order to get there, come what may, splash all over everybody and always end by drowning, involving I don't know how many other poor (...) souls who might have been able to continue splashing around tranquilly enough- in the soup. (Jean Anouilh). (shrink)

Dumézil’s trifunctional theory applied to the only grail plot in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal proves to be neither faithful nor worthy of credit. Philological, historical, cultural, cognitive and narratological arguments raise critical objections and question its artificial character. In fact, the incidental episode of the grail functions as a narrative drawer in a plot belonging to the global tale ATU 910B (Good precepts) relating to the part of the work regarding Perceval.

According to the conventionalist doctrine of space elaborated by the French philosopher-scientist Henri Poincaré in the 1890s, the geometry of physical space is a matter of definition, not of fact. Poincaré’s Hertz-inspired view of the role of hypothesis in science guided his interpretation of the theory of relativity (1905), which he found to be in violation of the axiom of free mobility of invariable solids. In a quixotic effort to save the Euclidean geometry that relied on this axiom, Poincaré extended (...) the purview of his doctrine of space to cover both space and time. The centerpiece of this new doctrine is what he called the ‘‘principle of physical relativity,’’ which holds the laws of mechanics to be covariant with respect to a certain group of transformations. For Poincaré, the invariance group of classical mechanics defined physical space and time (Galilei spacetime), but he admitted that one could also define physical space and time in virtue of the invariance group of relativistic mechanics (Minkowski spacetime). Either way, physical space and time are the result of a convention. (shrink)

Wie frei sind wir? Ist der freie Wille eine Illusion? Mit dem Disput zwischen Philosophie und empirischen Wissenschaften um unsere Freiheit greift dieser Band eine Debatte auf, die in jüngster Zeit nicht nur akademisch mit Vehemenz geführt wurde, sondern auch auf breite öffentliche Resonanz gestoßen ist. Der Autor kritisiert den empirischen Angriff auf unseren freien Willen, stellt aber zugleich die abstrakte philosophische Freiheitsdebatte auf eine solide empirische Basis und deckt so nicht nur die Grenzen, sondern auch die Perspektiven einer empirischen (...) Annäherung an die philosophische Frage Wie frei sind wir? auf. (shrink)