Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by (...) Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice-which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion-Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago. (shrink)

This paper aims to articulate an anarchist challenge to a widespread assumption in the rapidly growing philosophical literature on models, modeling-practices, and model-based science. I argue that the various entities and practices called “models” and “modeling-practices” are too heterogeneous, too context-sensitive, and serve too many scientific purposes and roles, as to constitute unified scientific phenomena that would allow for useful epistemic and ontologies analyses. Just like Feyerabend once argued that there are no general useful inferences to be drawn about the (...) method of “science”, I argue that the same lesson will apply to “model-based science”, hence calling my view model anarchism. (shrink)

Walter applies the methodology of neurophilosophy to one of philosophy's centralchallenges, the notion of free will. Neurophilosophical conclusions are based on, and consistentwith, scientific knowledge about the brain and its functioning.

This paper presents a systematic study of the prehistory of the traditional subsystems of second-order arithmetic that feature prominently in the reverse mathematics program of Friedman and Simpson. We look in particular at: (i) the long arc from Poincar\'e to Feferman as concerns arithmetic definability and provability, (ii) the interplay between finitism and the formalization of analysis in the lecture notes and publications of Hilbert and Bernays, (iii) the uncertainty as to the constructive status of principles equivalent to Weak K\"onig's (...) Lemma, and (iv) the large-scale intellectual backdrop to arithmetical transfinite recursion in descriptive set theory and its effectivization by Borel, Lusin, Addison, and others. (shrink)

What is the origin of the concept of a law of nature? How much does it owe to theology and metaphysics? To what extent do the laws of nature permit contingency? Are there exceptions to the laws of nature? Is it possible to give a reductive analysis of lawhood, or is it a primitive? -/- Twelve brand-new essays by an international team of leading philosophers take up these and other central questions on the laws of nature, whilst also examining some (...) of the most important intuitions and assumptions that have guided the debate over laws of nature since the concept's invention in the seventeenth century. -/- Laws of Nature spans the history of philosophy and of science, contemporary metaphysics, and contemporary philosophy of science. Contents: 1. Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature, Walter Ott and Lydia Patton 2. Early Modern Roots of the Philosophical Concept of a Law of Nature, Helen Hattab 3. Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things: Descartes and Newton on Truth in Natural Philosophy, Mary Domski 4. Leges sive natura: Bacon, Spinoza, and a Forgotten Concept of Law, Walter Ott 5. Laws and Powers in the Frame of Nature, Stathis Psillos 6. Laws and Ideal Unity, Angela Breitenbach 7. Becoming Humean, John W. Carroll 8. A Perspectivalist Better Best System Account of Lawhood, Michela Massimi 9. Laws: An Invariance Based Account, James Woodward 10. How the Explanations of Natural Laws Make Some Reducible Physical Properties Natural and Explanatorily Powerful, Marc Lange 11. Laws and their Exceptions, Stephen Mumford 12. Are laws of nature consistent with contingency?, Nancy Cartwright and Pedro Merlussi. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explore the significance of Montague’s paradox—that is, any arithmetical theory $T\supseteq Q$ over a language containing a predicate $P$ satisfying $P\rightarrow \varphi $ and $T\vdash \varphi \,\therefore\,T\vdash P$ is inconsistent—as a limitative result pertaining to the notions of formal, informal, and constructive provability, in their respective historical contexts. To this end, the paradox is reconstructed in a quantified extension $\mathcal {QLP}$ of Artemov’s logic of proofs. $\mathcal {QLP}$ contains both explicit modalities $t:\varphi $ (...) and also proof quantifiers $x:\varphi $. In this system, the basis for the rule NEC is decomposed into a number of distinct principles governing how various modes of reasoning about proofs and provability can be internalized within the system itself. A conceptually motivated resolution to the paradox is proposed in the form of an argument for rejecting the unrestricted rule NEC on the basis of its subsumption of an intuitively invalid principle pertaining to the interaction of proof quantifiers and the proof-theorem relation expressed by explicit modalities. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic analysis of sufficientarian social evaluation. Sufficientarianism has emerged as an increasingly important notion of distributive justice. We propose a class of principles that we label generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings. The distinguishing feature of our new class is that its members exhibit constant critical levels of well-being that are allowed to differ from the threshold of sufficiency. Our basic axiom assigns priority to those below the threshold, a property that is shared by numerous other sufficientarian approaches. (...) When combined with the well-known strong Pareto principle and the assumption that there be a constant critical level, the axiom implies that the critical level cannot be below the threshold. The main results of the paper are characterizations of our new class and an important subclass. As a final observation, we identify the generalized critical-level sufficientarian orderings that permit us to avoid the repugnant conclusion and the sadistic conclusion, which are known as two fundamental challenges in population ethics. (shrink)

Public-policy choices frequently have to be carried out in the presence of incommensurabilities. These incommensurabilities may manifest themselves in the form of incompleteness—that is, some of the options under consideration are not comparable by a decision maker. As a consequence, it may be impossible to select policies that are at least as good as all competing proposals. When faced with incommensurabilities of this nature, transitivity can be considered too demanding a requirement. An attractive weakening of transitivity consists of a property (...) that Kotaro Suzumura (Economica, 43:381–390, 1976) introduced under the label of consistency. Suzumura consistency postulates that goodness cycles with at least one instance of betterness are to be avoided thus strengthening the well-known acyclicity condition that precludes the existence of betterness cycles. The property is compared to alternative weakenings of transitivity, and it is shown that it has numerous advantages over other contenders. For instance, Suzumura consistency is precisely what is needed to avoid a money pump. The issue of rational choice in the context of public decision-making is discussed in order to provide an illustration of the usefulness of Suzumura consistency. (shrink)

The Paradox of the Knower was originally presented by Kaplan and Montague [26] as a puzzle about the everyday notion of knowledge in the face of self-reference. The paradox shows that any theory extending Robinson arithmetic with a predicate K satisfying the factivity axiom K → A as well as a few other epistemically plausible principles is inconsistent. After surveying the background of the paradox, we will focus on a recent debate about the role of epistemic closure principles in the (...) Knower. We will suggest this debate sheds new light on the concept of knowledge which is at issue in the paradox – i.e. is it a “thin” notion divorced from concepts such as evidence or justification, or is it a “thick” notion more closely resembling mathematical provability? We will argue that a number of features of the paradox suggest that the latter option is more plausible. Along the way, we will provide a reconstruction of the paradox using a quantified extension of Artemovʼs [2] Logic of Proofs, as well as a series of results linking the original formulation of the paradox to reflection principles for formal arithmetic. On this basis, we will argue that while the Knower can be understood to motivate a distinction between levels of knowledge, it does not provide a rationale for recognizing a uniform hierarchy of knowledge predicates in the manner suggested by Anderson. (shrink)

In this radical reinterpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Walter E. Wehrle demonstrates that developmental theories of Aristotle are based on a faulty assumption: that the fifth chapter of Categories is an early theory of metaphysics that Aristotle later abandoned.

uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. ZUr Kritik der Gewalt. SChicksal und Charakter. GEschichtsphilosophische Thesen. THeologisch-politisches Fragment.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found many useful applications in recent years. Of particular interest have been those instances where their successes imitate human cognition and many consider artificial intelligences to offer a lens for understanding human intelligence. Here, we criticize the underlying conflation between the predictive and explanatory power of DNNs by examining the goals of modeling.

The Principle of Ariadne, formulated in 1988 ago by Walter Carnielli and Carlos Di Prisco and later published in 1993, is an infinitary principle that is independent of the Axiom of Choice in ZF, although it can be consistently added to the remaining ZF axioms. The present paper surveys, and motivates, the foundational importance of the Principle of Ariadne and proposes the Ariadne Game, showing that the Principle of Ariadne, corresponds precisely to a winning strategy for the Ariadne Game. (...) Some relations to other alternative. set-theoretical principles are also briefly discussed. (shrink)

A central aim of Michael Polanyi’s philosophy is to demonstrate the many ways in which human existence is meaningful to counter the nihilistic and positivistic accounts that contributed to the world wars and totalitarian governments in the twentieth century. Yet Polanyi’s references to various sorts of meaning is suggestive rather than systematic and coherent. The objective of this essay is to show the relationship between the different aspects of meaning by viewing their emergence in cosmological perspective beginning with simple forms (...) of life and culminating in the ways signals, perception, and language support human experiences of significance. Emergence, embodiment, and “from-via-to” interpretation are key ingredients in this Polanyian version of biosemiotics. (shrink)

In order to understand involuntary autobiographical memories and déjà vu experiences, we argue that it is important to take an evolutionary medicine perspective. Here, we propose that these memory anomalies can be understood as the outcomes of an inevitable design trade-off between type I and type II errors in memory processing.

The aim of this study was to investigate unconscious priming by the use of a spatial mirror-masking paradigm. Words and nonwords with no under-length letters are mirrored at their horizontal axis. The results are figures of geometric-like forms that contain letters in their upper part. In the three experiments reported in this study, a priming procedure used such mirrored words and nonwords as primes. Participants were ignorant of the nature of the construction of the stimuli. Perceptual reports of the participants (...) revealed that they did not realize that words were hidden in the primes. Nevertheless, they showed priming in all three experiments. Priming effects were replicated with prime–target SOAs of between 1 and 3 s. Functional dissociations were found between ignorant and informed participants. Informed groups showed perceptual and semantic priming, while ignorant groups showed only perceptual priming. (shrink)

It is a hotly contested issue whether polygenic scores should play a major role in the social sciences. Here, we defend a methodologically pluralist stance in which sociogenomics should abandon its hype and recognize that it suffers from all the methodological difficulties of the social sciences, yet nevertheless maintain an optimistic stance toward a more cautious use.

There is a puzzle in reconciling the widespread presence of puritanical norms condemning harmless pleasures with the theory that morality evolved to reap the benefits of cooperation. Here, we draw on the work of several philosophers to support the argument by Fitouchi et al. that these norms evolved to facilitate and scaffold self-control for the sake of cooperation.

Despite the once-common idea that a universal ideography would have numerous advantages, attempts to develop such ideographies have failed. Here, we make use of the biological idea of fitness landscapes to help us understand the nonevolution of such a universal ideographic code as well as how we might reach this potential global fitness peak in the design space.

In his theory of time Aristotle does not often mention the present time and nowhere gives a detailed account of it. Nonetheless, present time plays an important role in his conception. I primarily argue for the following claims: (1) According to Aristotle there is a perception of motion and there is a perception of time. These combined perceptions can neither occur in the past nor in the future nor in an indivisible now. Thus, there must be a present time. (2) (...) Aristotle acknowledges the passage of time. This passage of time can only be understood as a passing present. And since an indivisible now cannot pass, the passage of time delivers a further argument for the basic assumption of a present time. – For the most part I simply follow Aristotle’s argument in Physics IV 10 and 11. In doing so, I distinguish present time and now in the introductory puzzles, investigate the passing present in the co-perception of change and time, discuss the relation between change and the passage of time as well as the relation between the passing present and the different nows. (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 dissertation addresses a variety of foundational issues pertaining to the notion of algorithm employed in mathematics and computer science. In these settings, an algorithm is taken to be an effective mathematical procedure for solving a previously stated mathematical problem. Procedures of this sort comprise the notional subject matter of the subfield of computer science known as algorithmic analysis. In this context, algorithms are referred to via proper names of which computational properties are directly predicated )). Moreover, many formal results (...) are traditionally stated by explicitly quantifying over algorithms. These observations motivate the view that algorithms are themselves abstract mathematical objects -- a view I refer to as algorithmic realism. The status of this view is clearly related to that of Church's Thesis -- i.e. the claim that a function is computable by an algorithm just in case it is partial recursive. But whereas Church's Thesis is widely accepted on the basis of several well-known mathematical analyses of algorithmic computability, there is presently no consensus on how we can uniformly identify individual algorithms with mathematical objects. In the first chapter of this work, I attempt to illustrate the theoretical significance of algorithmic realism. I suggest that this view is not only of foundational significance to computer science, but also worth highlighting due to the role algorithms play in the fixation of mathematical knowledge and their relationship to intensional entities such as propositions and properties. Chapter Two presents a formal framework for reducing computational discourse to mathematical discourse modeled on contemporary discussion of mathematical nominalism. Chapter Three is centered on a case study intended to illustrate the technical exigencies involved with defending algorithmic realism. Chapter Four explores various ways in which algorithms might be identified with models of computation. And finally, Chapter Five argues that no such identification can uniformly satisfy all statements of algorithmic identity and non-identity affirmed by computational practice. I suggest that the technical crux of algorithmic realism lies in the necessity of reducing recursive specifications of algorithms to iterative models of computation in a manner which preserves algorithmic identity. (shrink)

The human genome project's lasting legacies are the emerging insights into human physiology and disease, and the ascendance of biology as the dominant science of the 21st century. Sequencing revealed that >90% of the human genome is not coding for proteins, as originally thought, but rather is overwhelmingly transcribed into non‐protein coding, or non‐coding, RNAs (ncRNAs). This discovery initially led to the hypothesis that most genomic DNA is “junk”, a term still championed by some geneticists and evolutionary biologists. In contrast, (...) molecular biologists and biochemists studying the vast number of transcripts produced from most of this genome “junk” often surmise that these ncRNAs have biological significance. What gives? This essay contrasts the two opposing, extant viewpoints, aiming to explain their bases, which arise from distinct reference frames of the underlying scientific disciplines. Finally, it aims to reconcile these divergent mindsets in hopes of stimulating synergy between scientific fields. (shrink)

Traducción de “Neue Dichtung in Rußland” escrito por Walter Benjamin originalmente en 1927 para la revista i10, publicada en Ámsterdam por Arthur Lehning entre 1927 y 1929. Tomamos el texto del tomo II/2 de la edición canónica de los escritos reunidos, Gesammelte Schriften, editados por Rolf Tiedemann y Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp, 1997 (pp. 755-762). Tomás Sufotinsky, [tradução, apresentação e notas].

This study aims at justifying one of Gilbert Durand’s postulates according to which all imaginaire (as a result of mental imagery) is anchored in our physiology but by directing it rather now towards our neurophysiology. New advances in neurobiology, connectome and neurogenomics lead to rethinking the framework of psychic activity and the induction of neural images.