Recent work on representing action and change has introduced high-level action languages which describe the effects of actions as causal laws in a declarative way. Among such action languages, the language A is the first and the most basic language. In dynamic domains, an agent needs the ability to react against changes of environment and to generate robust plans for a long-term goal, and appropriate representation is necessary for this purpose. In real problems, however, it (...) is difficult to describe complete causal laws for the domain, but it is easier to get observations. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to learn causal laws from an incomplete domain description in the language A, given observations after performing action sequences. Our learning algorithm generates causal laws based on an algorithm to learn finite automata. We also prove the correctness of the learning algorithm. From the result in this work, induction of the effects of actions can now be formally characterized within action languages. (shrink)

The tapestry of Wilfrid Sellars’s writings is dauntingly rich in stimulus and suggestion. I shall take up here an intriguing strand of thought that was woven into one of his early papers ‘Language, Rules and Behavior’, and I shall discuss some of the issues to which it gives rise. Sellars was concerned in that paper with the procedures by which people evaluate actions as right or wrong, arguments as valid or invalid, and cognitive claims as well or ill grounded. He (...) sought to map out a true vïa media, in his treatment of such procedures, between rationalistic apriorism and what, for want of a better term then, he called ‘descriptivism’, by which he understood the claim that all meaningful concepts and problems belong to the empirical or descriptive sciences, including the sciences of human behaviour. Sellars was thus led to ask not only ‘What sort of a thing is justification?’ but also ‘How do we come to accept the rules or laws that license justifications?’ And he saw these questions as arising in relation to any dialogue in which one party seeks to justify something to another. With regard to the justification of actions he held that the intuitionism of Ross, Prichard and Ewing was reasonably faithful to the phenomenology of moral thought and experience, though he did not agree with their belief in a nonnatural quality or relation that may belong to actions over and above their empirical characteristics. With regard to the justification of predictions he held that the relevant covering laws are ultimately rendered acceptable by an appeal to instances of their application. But he was reluctant to conceive this kind of appeal as an inductive procedure. Instead he called it an application of Socratic method, since the purpose of this method is to make explicit the rules that we have implicitly adopted for thought and action, and Sellars interpreted our judgments to the effect that A causally necessitates B as the expression of a rule governing our use of the terms ‘A’ and ‘B’: science consists in the attempt, by remodeling human language, to develop a system of rule-governed behaviour which will adjust the human organism to the environment. (shrink)

THE ART OF CAUSAL CONJECTURE Glenn Shafer Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction........................................................................................ ...........1 1.1. Probability Trees..........................................................................................3 1.2. Many Observers, Many Stances, Many Natures..........................................8 1.3. Causal Relations as Relations in Nature’s Tree...........................................9 1.4. Evidence............................................................................................ ...........13 1.5. Measuring the Average Effect of a Cause....................................................17 1.6. Causal Diagrams..........................................................................................20 1.7. Humean Events............................................................................................23 1.8. Three Levels of Causal Language................................................................27 1.9. An Outline of the Book................................................................................27 Chapter 2. Event Trees............................................................................................... .....31 2.1. Situations and Events...................................................................................32 2.2. The Ordering of Situations and Moivrean Events.......................................35 2.3. Cuts................................................................................................ ..............39 (...) 2.4. Humean Events............................................................................................43 2.5. Moivrean Variables......................................................................................49 2.6. Humean Variables........................................................................................53 2.7. Event Trees for Stochastic Processes...........................................................54 2.8. Timing in Event Trees.................................................................................56 2.9. Intersecting Event Trees...............................................................................60 2.10. Notes on the Literature...............................................................................61 Chapter 3. Probability Trees...........................................................................................63 3.1. Some Types of Probability Trees.................................................................64 ii 3.2. Axioms for the Probabilities of Moivrean Events.......................................68 3.3. Zero Probabilities....................................................................................... ..70 3.4. A Sample-Space Analysis of the Event-Tree Axioms.................................72 3.5. Probabilities and Expected Values for Variables.........................................74 3.6. Martingales......................................................................................... .........79 3.7. The Expectation of a Variable in a Cut........................................................83 3.8. Conditional Expected Value and Conditional Expectation.........................87 Chapter 4. The Meaning of Probability...........................................................................91 4.1. The Interpretation of Expected Value..........................................................92 4.2. The Interpretation of Expectation................................................................95 4.3. The Long Run..............................................................................................98 4.4. Changes in Belief.........................................................................................101 4.5. The Empirical Validation of Probability......................................................106 4.6. The Diversity of Uses of Probability...........................................................108 4.7. Notes on the Literature.................................................................................110 Chapter 5. Independent Events.......................................................................................113 5.1. Independence........................................................................................ .......114 5.2. Weak Independence.....................................................................................118 5.3. The Principle of the Common Cause...........................................................121 5.4. Conditional Independence............................................................................128 5.5. Notes on the Literature.................................................................................133 Chapter 6. Events Tracking Events.................................................................................135 6.1. Tracking............................................................................................ ...........137 6.2. Tracking and Conditional Independence.....................................................142 6.3. Stochastic Subsequence...............................................................................143 6.4. Singular Diagrams for Stochastic Subsequence...........................................147 6.5. Conjunctive and Interactive Forks...............................................................149 Chapter 7. Events as Signs of Events..............................................................................153 iii 7.1. Sign................................................................................................ ..............154 7.2. Weak Sign................................................................................................ ....159 7.3. The Ethics of Causal Talk............................................................................160 7.4. Screening Off...............................................................................................16 2 Chapter 8. Independent Variables...................................................................................167 8.1. Unconditional Independence........................................................................170 8.2. Conditional Independence............................................................................175 8.3. Independence for Partitions.........................................................................177 8.4. Independence for Families of Variables......................................................182 8.5. Individual Properties of the Independence Relations...................................186 Chapter 9. Variables Tracking Variables........................................................................189 9.1. Tracking and Conditional Independence: A Summary...............................190 9.2. Strong Tracking............................................................................................ 192 9.3. Strong Tracking and Conditional Independence..........................................198 9.4. Stochastic Subsequence...............................................................................201 9.5. Functional Dependence................................................................................203 9.6. Tracking in Mean.........................................................................................204 9.7. Linear Tracking............................................................................................ 207 9.8. Tracking by Partitions..................................................................................210 9.9. Tracking by Families of Variables...............................................................212 Chapter 10. Variables as Signs of Variables...................................................................215 10.1. Sign................................................................................................ ............219 10.2. Linear Sign................................................................................................ .222 10.3. Scored Sign................................................................................................ 225 10.4. Families of Variables.................................................................................227 Chapter 11. AnTheory of Event Trees.............................................................229 11.1. Event Trees as Sets of Sets........................................................................230 11.2. Event Trees as Partially Ordered Sets........................................................232 iv 11.3. Regular Event Trees...................................................................................240 11.4. The Resolution of Moivrean Variables......................................................244 11.5. Humean Events and Variables...................................................................246 Chapter 12. Martingale Trees..........................................................................................247 12.1. Examples of Decision Trees......................................................................249 12.2. The Meaning of Probability in a Decision Tree.........................................253 12.3. Martingales......................................................................................... .......257 12.4. The Structure of Martingale Trees.............................................................261 12.5. Probability and Causality...........................................................................265 12.6. Lower and Upper Probability.....................................................................269 12.7. The Law of Large Numbers.......................................................................272 12.8. Notes on the Literature...............................................................................274 Chapter 13. Refining............................................................................................ ...........275 13.1. Examples of Refinement............................................................................277 13.2. A Constructive Definition of Finite Refinement.......................................281 13.3. Axioms for Refinement..............................................................................282 13.4. Lifting Moivrean Events and Variables.....................................................288 13.5. Refining Martingale Trees.........................................................................288 13.6. Grounding........................................................................................... .......294 Chapter 14. Principles of Causal Conjecture..................................................................299 14.1. The Diversity of Causal Explanation.........................................................302 14.2. The Mean Effect of the Happening of a Moivrean Event..........................305 14.3. The Effect of a Humean Variable..............................................................311 14.4. Attribution and Generality.........................................................................316 14.5. The Statistical Measurement of the Effect of a Cause...............................319 14.6. Measurement by Experiment.....................................................................320 14.7. Using Our Knowledge of How Things Work............................................322 v 14.8. Sampling Error...........................................................................................329 14.9. The Sampling Frame..................................................................................329 14.10. Notes on the Literature.............................................................................330 Chapter 15. Causal Models.............................................................................................3 31 15.1. The Causal Interpretation of Statistical Prediction....................................333 15.2. Generalizing to a Family of Exogenous Variables....................................337 15.3 Some Joint Causal Diagrams......................................................................339 15.4. Causal Path Diagrams................................................................................342 15.5. Causal Relevance Diagrams.......................................................................346 15.6. The Meaning of Latent Variables..............................................................352 15.7. Notes on the Literature...............................................................................357 Chapter 16. Representing Probability Trees...................................................................359 16.1. Three Graphical Representations...............................................................361 16.2. Skeletal Simplifications.............................................................................368 16.3. Martingale Trees in Type Theory...............................................................371 Appendix A. Huygens’s Probability Trees.....................................................................379 Huygens’s Manuscript in Translation..................................................................380 Appendix B. Some Elements of Graph Theory..............................................................385 B1. Undirected Graphs........................................................................................385 B2. Directed Graphs............................................................................................38 6 Appendix C. Some Elements of Order Theory...............................................................393 C1. Partial and Quasi Orderings.........................................................................393 C2. Singular and Joint Diagrams for Binary Relations.......................................394 C3. Lattices............................................................................................ .............395 C4. The Lattice of Partitions of a Set..................................................................396 Appendix D. The Sample-Space Framework for Probability.........................................399 D1. Probability Measures....................................................................................399 D2. Variables........................................................................................... ...........400 vi D3. Families of Variables...................................................................................401 D4. Expected Value............................................................................................402 D5. The Law of Large Numbers.........................................................................405 D6. Conditional Probability................................................................................406 D7. Conditional Expected Value........................................................................407 Appendix E. Prediction in Probability Spaces................................................................409 E1. Conditional Distribution...............................................................................411 E2. Regression on a Single Variable...................................................................412 E3. Regression on a Partition or a Family of Variables......................................415 E4. Linear Regression on a Single Variable.......................................................418 E5. Linear Regression on a Family of Variables................................................422 Appendix F. Sample-Space Concepts of Independence.................................................425 F1. Overview............................................................................................ ...........426 F2. Independence Proper.....................................................................................432 F3. Unpredictability in Mean..............................................................................434 F4. Simple Uncorrelatedness..............................................................................437 F5. Mixed Uncorrelatedness...............................................................................438 F6. Partial Uncorrelatedness...............................................................................440 F7. Independence for Partitions..........................................................................442 F8. Independence for Families of Variables.......................................................445 F9. The Basic Role of Uncorrelatedness.............................................................448 F10. Dawid’s Axioms.........................................................................................449 Appendix G. Prediction Diagrams..................................................................................453 G1. Path Diagrams............................................................................................ ..454 G2. Generalized Path Diagrams..........................................................................462 G3. Relevance Diagrams.....................................................................................466 G4. Bubbled Relevance Diagrams......................................................................475 Appendix H. Abstract Stochastic Processes...................................................................479 vii H1. Probability Conditionals and Probability Distributions...............................477 H2. Abstract Stochastic Processes......................................................................479 H3. Embedding Variables and Processes in a Sample Space.............................480 References.......................................................................................... ..............................491. (shrink)

Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics are related facets of cutting edge therapeutic research in a field that relates pharmacological properties to the genetic characteristics of human beings. An optimistic interpretation suggests that “One-Size-Fits-All” therapeutics, whose effects can only be predicted in probabilistic terms, will give way eventually to individual tailor-made therapies with entirely predictable properties in each patient. Yet the concept of anticipating individual pharmacotherapeutic response appears to disregard some of the fundamental limitations of causal understanding in the biological world (...) of structure–action relationships. It is not simply a problem of confronting complexity – which might be overcome in time with advances in biotechnology and computing power – but the inescapable paradox of the genetic characteristics of individuals within the human species. The aleatory process of evolution ensures that with the exception of monozygotic twins, every human being is genetically unique. At the same time there appears to be more in common than divides. Pharmacogenomics provides a climate in which to explore and better understand the variable causal relationships between genetic element, protein and therapeutic or toxic actions, but can only do so in abstraction. Thus␣predictive power may be enhanced but is ultimately constrained by insuperable probabilistic considerations. (shrink)

Kant’s formula of universal law (FUL) is standardly understood as a test of the moral permissibility of an agent’s maxim: maxims which pass the test are morally neutral, and so permissible, while those which do not are morally impermissible. In contrast, I argue that the FUL tests whether a maxim is the cause or determining ground of an action at all. According to Kant’s general account of causality, nothing can be a cause of some effect unless there is a (...) law-like relation between the putative cause and effect. Applied to the case of action, no maxim can be the cause of an agent’s action unless there is a law-like relation between maxims of that kind and actions of that kind. The special capacity to act according to maxims as law-like causes is what Kant calls a will; the basic constitutive principle of the will is a non-normative principle I call the categorical declarative. While the actions of a perfectly good will would be described by the categorical declarative alone, human action is determined not only by the causality of the will, but also by competing causes, namely those stemming from inclination. There is thus need for a causal test for putative maxims. The test contained in the FUL is meant to determine whether an action could be grounded solely on the agent’s maxim, or whether it requires a cause external to the will. This account permits one to build eventual distinctions concerning the morality of actions on prior and independent distinctions concerning their causality. (shrink)

Current dynamic epistemic logics for analyzing effects of informational events often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added for groups of agents. Still, postconditions involving common knowledge are essential to successful multi-agent communication. We propose new systems that extend the epistemic base language with a new notion of ‘relativized common knowledge’, in such a way that the resulting full dynamic logic of information flow allows for a compositional analysis of all epistemic postconditions via perspicuous ‘reduction axioms’. We (...) also show how such systems can deal with factual alteration, rather than just information change, making them cover a much wider range of realistic events. After a warm-up stage of analyzing logics for public announcements, our main technical results are expressivity and completeness theorems for a much richer logic that we call LCC. This is a dynamic epistemic logic whose static base is propositional dynamic logic (PDL), interpreted epistemically. This system is capable of expressing all model-shifting operations with finite action models, while providing a compositional analysis for a wide range of informational events. This makes LCC a serious candidate for a standard in dynamic epistemic logic, as we illustrate by analyzing some complex communication scenarios, including sending successive emails with both ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ lines, and other private announcements to subgroups. Our proofs involve standard modal techniques, combined with a new application of Kleene’s theorem on finite automata, as well as new Ehrenfeucht games of model comparison. (shrink)

The subject of the "Dialogues" is the nature of the Humean "objects" which are "constantly conjoined" or historically and repetitively given in the same (mere) spatio-temporal relations. One participant contends that scientific knowledge is of indefinite possibilities of action, prevention, invention, and complication as functions of historically-changing and changeable causally affecting contingencies; and hence is not reducible to mere exceptionless (and hence fatalistic) correlations. The other participant contends that this reflects a "persistent misunderstanding of Hume": it is the "total" (...) cause and effect which are given as (merely) constantly conjoined, but only contingently so. The "Dialogues" explore the defensibility of these positions, and their implications for our conceptions of uniformity, lawfulness, induction, sampling, verification, and theory construction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LettersJames L. Walsh, Moira M. McQueen, Kevin O'Rourke, and Jean deBloisEarly Delivery of the Anencephalic InfantMadam:In the March 1994 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Kevin O'Rourke and Jean deBlois have replied to an article of ours (KIEJ, December 1993) on the early induction of the anencephalic fetus. They agree with our conclusion that such early delivery may be morally acceptable, but argue that our justification (...) is flawed. Exchanges on the subject probably could continue ad nauseam; here we simply state some of the elements of their article that leave us perplexed.1. The phrase "prolonging the life of" (p. 49) has one meaning in the case of artificial life supports, which may be unwarranted interventions, but it has a different meaning when it refers to not interfering with a person's enjoyment of necessary natural means of preserving his or her life. Inducing labor prior to viability, which denies the natural means of life support without a possible substitute, has more in common with smothering a dying patient than the nonemployment of or withdrawing of artificial means of life support. To refer to the death of the fetus here as an effect is rather like saying that I suffocated you and the effect of the suffocation is your death. This is quite different from induction after viability where the induction can have different effects.2. If the authors were correct that "the prohibition on inducing delivery before viability is predicated upon the assumption that the fetus in utero is a human being with the potential for further development" (p. 49) and the anencephalic has none, why is there need to employ the principle of double effect? They say that there is no moral obligation to prolong the life of the anencephalic fetus. Just as there is no need for the principle in cases of withdrawing unwarranted artificial life support, so there would be no need for it here. Because the authors seem to perceive a complete disjunction between direct and indirect killing (allowing to die being in the category of indirect killing), it seems that they are unable to let their argument rest here, but have to justify the death that occurs.3. The example concerning smothering and the nonemployment of aggressive interventions (p. 49) explains well the difference between killing and allowing to die. But allowing to die is not indirectly killing since it occurs as a result of the disease and not from the causality of the agent.4. How can we cause something and not intend it? There are instances in which we simply "permit" evil events, but where we are not the cause. For example, evil events may be attributable to the bad will of others. Legislators make just laws knowing that some people of bad will will break them for their own advantage. Here the legislators really do permit evil. Neither are we the cause of death when we allow a person to die by not imposing unwarranted means of life support; we permit his or her death. But can we so readily designate by "permit" [End Page 184] what we knowingly choose to bring about? O'Rourke and deBlois use interchangeably "indirectly intended" and "unintended" for what is caused by our actions; "indirectly intended" is a better designation than "unintended." The whole package, including all foreseen effects, is intended. Evil "happening" (p. 51) as a result of an action that I place can refer either to evil as caused by my action or to evil as arising from a cause apart from my action. Only in this latter sense do I permit evil and not intend it, either directly or indirectly.5. The fourth condition of the principle of double effect is given as follows: "There must be a proportionately grave reason for placing the act. The greater the evil, the more cogent the reason must be for performing the act" (p. 50). How the authors can abstract from balancing goods and evils here is beyond us.6. We cannot follow the authors' use of the term "morally good" with respect to the induced delivery (p. 50). The problem is concerned with the morally right... (shrink)

What do biologists mean when they say that to live is to react? Why was the termabreaction invented and later abandoned by the first generation of psychoanalysts? What is meant byreactionary politics? These are but a few of the questions the internationally renowned scholar JeanStarobinski answers in his conceptual history of the word pair, action and reaction.Not simply ahistory of ideas, Action and Reaction is also a semantic and philological history, a literaryhistory, a history of medicine, and a (...) history of the biological sciences. By concentrating on themoment when scientific language and ordinary language diverge, Starobinski uncovers a genealogy ofthe human and natural sciences through their usage of action and reaction as metaphors. Newton's law-- to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction -- becomes a point of departure for anexploration of the lexical and metaphorical traces left in its wake. Starobinski analyzes thescientific, literary, and political effects of the use of the terms action and reaction to describeand explain the material universe, the living body, historical events, and psychological behavior.In what he calls a "polyphonic score" -- a kind of mosaic -- he uses his subject to offer newinsights into the work of philosophers (Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, Jaspers), scientists(Newton, Bichat, Bernard, Bernheim, Freud), and writers (Diderot, Constant, Balzac, Poe, Valry).Ultimately, the book explores the power and danger of metaphorical language and questions theconvergence and collapse of scientific and moral explanations of the universe. (shrink)

We can see from the analysis set out here that the two accounts that were the focus of consideration are complementary to one another. It has been my contention that a problem like specifying a concept such as ‘refrain’ is highly complex. One part of it is the problem of determining the relation between the action (or event) and the result. Another part of the problem is that of describing the event itself; what kind of an event is it? (...) These two projects are related and so it is clear that the results must be consistent. However, it is equally clear that the definition which is useful for one project is not the same as that which is helpful for another. The point is that it should not be assumed that an account that initially looks incompatible with one's own must be refuted. It is sometimes better to consider what is needed for a complete account, and whether many different approaches may contribute pieces to the puzzle.We have here one puzzle piece: an analysis of refraining. It should not be assumed that we have thereby completed the puzzle of omission, but omission can be approached the same way; that is, by coordinating parallel projects.Accordingly, the first benefit of the present analysis is that it sets up an approach which is modular in nature. It allows for parallel projects to be pursued separately and coordinated. This kind of approach is sorely needed in this area to counter unproductive dispute.To see how such an approach can be applied to further problems profitably consider the following persistent controversy. Many philosophers are at odds over the importance of the notion of duty, or more informally, reasonable expectation in the understanding of refraining. A number of them (e.g., Hart and Honore, John Casey, and Phillipa Foot) hold that the determining feature for the ascription of responsibility to an agent for not doing something to prevent a harm (say, a death) is the presence of a duty or reasonable expectation that the agent do something about the situation. For example, John Casey holds, “If a man does not do x, we cannot properly say that his not doing x is the cause of some result y, unless in the normal course of events he could have been expected to do x.” Casey, Actions and Consequences (1978).Other philosophers object that a person can cause a result by refraining from (causally) preventing it, and that such an event can be explained without any reference to duty. These two views appear to conflict, but in fact they are both right (but both incomplete). The reason that the above statements are generally thought to constitute a disagreement is that ‘refrain’ is generally taken as the fundamental term of analysis for omissions. Thus, if Casey says, “If a man does not do x...” he is taken to mean “...if a man refrains from doing x...” But he need not mean that. He may mean to say only that the man failed to do x. See my analysis in “Contemplating Failure,” supra note 10. Failing to do something can be, and ordinarily is, thought of as stronger than simple nonaction. But it is much weaker than refraining. For one thing, it has no awareness requirement. Thus, an account like Casey's can explain the ascription of responsibility and the presence of an omission where Green's account (or the account offered here) cannot, and vice versa. Casey's view can explain why we hold (or at least that we hold) responsible the night watchman who forgets to check one of the windows, the bookkeeper who (accidentally) omits an entry in the accounts, or the private duty nurse who fails to prevent a death by falling asleep on the job. No refraining is present in any of these cases. Consequently, any thesis based on refraining alone cannot explain them. But in many cases refraining is precisely what is important, and Green (and others of the same persuasion) are correct to point out that no reference to duty is necessarily required to account for these cases. Analysis based on refraining best explains intentional or conscious omission. Analysis based on duty or reasonable expectation is the only way to explain unconscious omission. More often than not, both elements are present. A complete account of omission needs both. So here again, the better way to view these putatively competing accounts is as parallel projects which work toward a common, but complex end. The approach taken here allows for this kind of much needed coordination. The second benefit of the present analysis is that it clarifies and focuses on the significance of the mental element of refraining. Refraining is conscious omission. Consciousness and omission are its distinguishing features. The effects of seeing the concept this way are pervasive. Here is one example. If I refrain from reporting my full income to the IRS, I have committed fraud, and punitive or even criminal sanctions may be reasonable. If I fail to report my full income through ignorance or mistake (say, I misunderstood the instructions) correcting the error and requiring payment is reasonable, but certainly criminal sanction is not. This oversimplifies the distinction, but it illustrates the focus of my pursuit.With regard to positive actions, law and philosophy have long recognized this important distinction as manifested in the difference between negligence and intentional tort, or manslaughter and murder. Due (I think) to the extraordinary flexibility of language and the weakness and variability of social conventions regarding omissions, this distinction has not been clearly articulated. I think such an analysis is worth pursuing. The present account is one step in that pursuit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Matter and Mathematics: An Essentialist Account of the Laws of Nature by Andrew YOUNANDominic V. CassellaYOUNAN, Andrew. Matter and Mathematics: An Essentialist Account of the Laws of Nature. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. xii + 228 pp. Cloth, $75.00Andrew Younan’s work situates itself between two opposing philosophical accounts of the laws of nature. In one corner, there are the Humeans (or Nominalists); in the (...) other, the Anti-Humeans (or Platonists). The goal of the book is to find an explanation for the orderliness of the natural world that avoids falling into the difficulties of the two opposing philosophies. For example, the Humeans treat “events” as fundamental, and the laws of nature follow from these “events.” For the Humeans, reality is essentially random, with any order being something of our own contrivance. Whereas for the Anti-Humeans, the laws of nature are fundamental and are treated as causing events, turning the effect of necessity into the cause of material [End Page 166] characteristics. Looking to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, Younan proposes the recovery of a third option, the Essentialist position. This Essentialist position understands substances, that is, individual beings, as fundamental and all else (for example, events and laws of nature) follow from these individual beings. The thesis of the book, generally understood, is that Essentialism evades the critiques that the Humeans and Anti-Humeans put against one another while retaining what is right in each approach.The book is divided into two parts. The book’s first part deals with general objections and replies and is divided into three chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 address the two opposing accounts of nature mentioned, while chapter 3 argues for the benefits of recovering an Essentialist position. Chapter 1 examines the objection that Aristotelian natural philosophy is incompatible with modern science, an objection raised by Descartes. Chapter 2 addresses the objections of the Humeans, namely, that natural philosophy and, with it, causality and induction have been debunked. Chapter 3 looks at the fathers of quantum theory, specifically Heisenberg, and argues that a return to Aristotle’s understanding of nature would benefit the modern scientific project. The book’s second part is an argument for the Essentialist position and is divided into three chapters. Chapters 4 and 5 are the foundation for chapter 6. Chapter 4 is an abstractive account of mathematics, differing from Descartes and his conceptions, which draws on the texts of Aristotle and Aquinas’s Division and Methods. Chapter 5 situates necessity and its role in Aristotelian natural philosophy. Chapter 6 is the author’s attempt at defining what it is to be a law of nature.Younan argues that adopting an essentialist understanding of nature in a system where all knowledge begins in the senses has three significant “payoffs.” The first is that it avoids governance language, that is, it avoids making laws themselves causes of necessity; the second is that it avoids the assertion of a priori knowledge; the third is that it understands individual things as the fundamental primitives in nature, restoring the substance to its proper place as the thing that “stands under” accidental being.The book is concluded with an appendix that explores and rearticulates Thomas Aquinas’s fifth way under the consideration of everything the author had argued for in the book’s main text. Taking as established by the rest of the book that necessity and teleology go hand in hand, Younan argues for a creator God who establishes a universe freely but within certain parameters that follow upon being itself. Younan concludes, with Thomas Aquinas, that laws of nature are “ordinances of reason” that must come from a rational mind. To be as consistent as they are, the laws of nature must be promulgated by God, and they are discoverable within the nature of matter itself.Younan’s book often engages its interlocutors on the big-picture scale, frequently giving generalizations and not going into details to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds. The author is very aware of what he is doing. [End Page 167] It is appropriate since engaging the multiheaded hydra of the schools of thought that Younan... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 351-383 [Access article in PDF] Hume's Pyrrhonian Skepticism and the Belief in Causal Laws Graciela De Pierris Hume endorses in no uncertain terms the normative use of causal reasoning. The most striking example of this commitment is Hume's argument in the Enquiry against the possibility of miracles. The argument sanctions, in particular, the use of scientific reflection on uniform (...) experience issuing in causal laws of nature (E 114): "A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." 1 These words should give us pause; for how can Hume so confidently say, after his skeptical conclusions concerning our causal beliefs, that "a firm and unalterable experience has established" the laws of nature, and that we can therefore produce "proofs" against miracles? The Treatise gives rise to the same puzzle. In this text, too, Hume confidently prescribes methodical reflection based on causal reasoning. For example, in Book One, Part Three, Section Fifteen, Hume offers eight "Rules by which to judge of causes and effects." These rules are more than descriptions of our natural causal inferences. They are meant to guide us in making better causal inferences; in Hume's words they "ought to regulate" our probable reasoning since (T 149): "by them we learn to distinguish the accidental circumstances from the efficacious causes." 2Moreover, Hume consistently takes Newtonian science as a model for the proper employment of causal inferences in inquiries into matters of fact and, [End Page 351] in particular, as a model to be followed in his own science of human nature. 3 This paradigm of what the science of nature ought to be is understood by Hume as an inductive, experimental inquiry. 4 In the Enquiry, for example, Hume uses the label "sciences" for "politics, natural philosophy, physic, chemistry, &c." and in the preceding discussion argues that these sciences are not a priori but are based on causal reasoning (E 164-165). Thus, there are for Hume inquiries into matters of fact and existence that amount to more than blindly following natural propensities and habit. The sciences and many of our causal inferences in common life involve more than mere belief as a sentiment. They involve, in addition, careful reflection that results in improved causal inferences and thus provides normative standards. Yet, in thus upholding the normative use of causal reasoning in science and in everyday life, Hume appears to contradict his own radical skeptical conclusions concerning our knowledge of causation and induction. I here propose a novel way to resolve this puzzle.To acknowledge the existence of a puzzle, however, amounts to accepting the now controversial view that Hume provides, and takes at face value, a radical skeptical argument concerning our knowledge of causation and induction. 5 Moreover, the attempt to resolve this puzzle involves rejecting the suggestion [End Page 352] that Hume, without awareness or concern, happily holds flatly inconsistent views. 6 It also goes against the more sophisticated suggestion that Hume lightly alternates among different psychological moods, or perhaps different perspectives, which might eventually issue in results that contradict each other but are sufficiently localized so as to prevent serious conflict. Such a view might lead us to conceive Hume's texts as an unstructured and arbitrary patchwork of reflections, driven by different psychological moods or by the embellishments of a radiant literary style. This kind of reading is unacceptable as an interpretative tool, however, as H. J. Paton has acutely noted in his criticism of the patchwork interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. 7 For such a reading would place no constraints at all on the task of establishing which parts of Hume's text belong to which moods or perspectives. The suggestion that Hume offers an unstructured patchwork of reflections masks the novel and systematic distinction Hume draws between his radical philosophical... (shrink)

To find adequate answers to a changing reality heavily influenced by advances in technology, medical professionals have developed and adopted an array of terms that have brought new concepts into the profession. “Dignity,” “vegetative state,” “futility,” “double effect,” and “brain death” have become indispensable words in the medical setting. In the following discussion, the attention is on terminology. If we believe in phenomenology, the assumption is that we should closely reflect on the words we use in all spheres of life, (...) especially in those that concern life and death. This article calls for a sincere discussion about these terms and concepts. The thesis put forward is that the language in the medical setting serves primarily the physicians, at times at the expense of the patients’ best interests. This language and the concepts it describes have generated an unhealthy atmosphere for patients, which might lead to undesirable actions at the end of patients’ lives. (shrink)

Beginning with a review the logically first stages in the project of Random Dynamics, hoping for all laws nature being emergent, we also review what can be considered a consequence of Random Dynamics, a model—by myself and Masao Ninomiya—, which in principle predicts the initial conditions in such a way as to minimize a certain functional of the history of the Universe through both past and future. This functional is indeed the imaginary part of the action, which exists (only) (...) in our model of complex action. The main point of the present is to suggest this complex action model to be also helpfull in solving some problems for quantum mechanics. Especially as our model almost makes it possible in principle to calculate the full history of the universe, it even makes it in principle calculable, which one among several measurement results in a quantum experiment will actually be realized!Our “complex action model” thus is a special case of superdeterminism—in Bells way—and does not have true causality, but rather even in some cases true backward causation. In fact we claim in our model that the SSC(Superconducting Supercollider) were stopped by the US Congress due to the backward causation from the big amounts of Higgs particles, which it would have produced, if it had been allowed to run. The noumenon (“das Ding an sich”) in our model is the Feyman path integrand or better some fundamental quantities determined from second order effects of the latter integrand. The quantum mechanics interpretation here is strongly similar to the much criticized “transactional interpretation” by John Cramer (Rev. Mod. Phys. 58:647–688, 1986), but we might respond to some of the criticism. (shrink)

In this paper we present the syntax and semantics of a temporal action language named Alan, which was designed to model interactive multimedia presentations where the Markov property does not always hold. In general, Alan allows the specification of systems where the future state of the world depends not only on the current state, but also on the past states of the world. To the best of our knowledge, Alan is the first action language which incorporates causality with (...) temporal formulas. In the process of defining the effect of actions we define the closure with respect to a path rather than to a state, and show that the non-Markovian model is an extension of the traditional Markovian model. Finally, we establish relationship between theories of Alan and logic programs. (shrink)

Whether or not an intentional explanation of action necessarily involves law-like statements is related to another question, namely, is it a causal explanation? The Popper-Hempel Thesis , which answers both questions affirmatively, inevitably faces a dilemma between realistic and universalistic requirements. However, in terms of W.C. Salmon’s concept of causal explanation, intentional explanation can be a causal one even if it does not rely on any laws. Based on this, we are able to refute three characteristic (...) arguments for the claim “reason is not a cause of action,” namely, the “proper logical” argument, the “logical relation” argument, and the “rule-following” argument. This rebuttal suggests that the causal relationship between reason and action can provide a justification for intentional explanations. (shrink)

Tranquillity’s Secret Presents A New Understanding Of The World And Ourselves, And A Forgotten Meditation Technique That Protects You From Traumatic Harm. There Is A Way Of Seeing The World Different. -/- My goal in this book is two-fold: to introduce a revolutionary paradigm for understanding ourselves and the world; and to explain an ancient meditation technique that brought me to the insights upon which it is founded. This technique appears in different forms in the extant spiritual and religious traditions (...) over millennia which have used it — and in which it has been acknowledged as the most efficacious way to reach a direct experience of mind, or the most direct path to a union with God. Unfortunately, the proper way to use it has been largely lost over the last few centuries along with a clear understanding of why it was claimed to be so highly efficient. The primary reason for this loss is the mechanical materialism that frames all our scientific knowledge today. Lady Anne Conway, an English philosopher and a contemporary of René Déscartes, the French Metaphysician of the Seventeenth Century, was the first to characterize his philosophy as the “Mechanical philosophy.” It was Déscartes’ fascination with garden automata (moving statues) that he saw throughout Paris during his time, that led to his idea that the bodies of animals are nothing more than machines of varying complexity – which could be replaced by metal cogs, axles, and wheels. This very contemporary idea is in fact his legacy to humanity — along with the mind-body split that it entails — as mechanism became the standard to which Nature and all life was compared, and still is. This was the genesis of the modern reductive scientific understanding of life as discovered mechanisms made up of dead matter. -/- Although Déscartes’ philosophy was not materialism proper, as he held mind to not be material in nature, his was the most significant move to a cognitive framing of all phenomena as the result of mechanical interactions, and he went so far as placing all non-human animals into the machine-only category, because, he argued, they didn’t have minds. While a full account of Déscartes’ thought is not useful in this work, I want to use Lady Conway’s term to make a distinction between a mechanical materialism, which materialism has evolved into, and a less severe understanding that is not so destructive of the primacy of two aspects of being alive — mind and cognizance — which today are asserted to be by-products or epiphenomena of material processes in the brain by strict adherents to the mechanical philosophy. -/- This frame allows nothing but dead matter, and all that is comprised of dead matter, to be entertained as real. Anything beyond that is either ignored, or considered to be nothing more than figments of someone’s imagination — and this both limits and structures our thoughts about everything. Even those who believe they have moved on from this limiting understanding continue to be fenced in by language, which is structured by it — so that there is no escaping its limitations via a simple substitution or redefinition of concepts. Rather, it will take a truly revolutionary new paradigm and a concomitant reframing of our understanding of ourselves, this world, and reality, and how they come together in the new paradigm. I characterize the difficulty of this change as being like that of meeting an alien race and trying to work out how they see reality before communication can begin — which is very difficult to do when one’s own view is so limited. -/- I call this revolutionary paradigm Responsive Naturing. -/- Responsive Naturing replaces the current paradigm and its concomitant idea of deterministic causality which is foundational in scientific practice today. It can do this because, as you will see, it better accounts for all categories of phenomena, and thus includes all the most important human experiences, such as that of being alive, of beauty, of love, and the ultimate unity of all things. Responsive Naturing provides a sound foundation for the sciences, without the imposed limitation of mechanical materialist explanations, so that both science and spirituality can be founded upon this single common understanding of how things work. -/- This novel paradigmatic understanding of reality intrinsically applies to all dimensions of mental phenomena — be it of perceptions, sensations, or thoughts — and from the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics to the stochastic nature of most physical phenomena, to the often accidental, sometimes fortunate, but never sure, character of all human activities. This makes this new paradigm immediately productive in a practical way — it simply works, as I will show. It empowers us in ways that our disjointed and parochial schools of thought lock us out of completely, opening up new possible methods of looking at problems and finding solutions across disciplines. However, understanding the repercussions of the new paradigm upon one’s cognitive frame and the concomitant structure of language is difficult to comprehend simply because it is alien to the existing frame and paradigm. The impetus to make the effort is becoming quite clear: -/- Today, the sciences are ruled by the limiting cognitive framing of mechanical materialism, and over the last century, the limitations of that frame and its associated scientific paradigm of physical causality have become obvious: science has become schizophrenic. On one hand, some scientists say everything is strictly determined by the laws of nature, and neither free will nor conscious intent have any involvement in what happens; but others say that the state of the underlying quanta that make-up everything is indeterminate until consciously observed with the intent to measure it. Mechanical materialism is why scientists say you have no free will, while you obviously experience that you do — and you are held responsible for your actions by society because you do. It is also why scientists cannot find a non-speculative explanation of consciousness on an evolutionary or biological level, even though being conscious is the most obvious aspect of being alive. And these contradictions have infected every aspect of our lives, and our world, by limiting our ability to see the world any other way. Even the formulation of spiritual doctrines is constrained today by this cognitive frame’s presence in our language. This is not an academic matter, as we see clearly in our failure, so-far, to change the path that has brought us to a global environmental collapse and the ecocide of life on Earth. -/- What is unique about the book’s approach is that it does not speculate about what might be the case, like so much of philosophy does. Instead, it relies upon meditative and contemplative insights that were gleaned directly from a dedicated advanced meditation practice over 60+ years of the author’s life. These insights were then confirmed by subsequent research into similar forms of this advanced meditation technique found across the world and throughout human history. In conjunction with my meditation practice, I have doctoral-level education in Philosophy and a 30-year career in Software Engineering. The latter was in part focused on automated software development, during which I was confronted with the unsolvable enigma — within the mechanical materialist understanding that I was enculturated into, and inculcated with — of Human Creativity. An enigma that set me on my path of discovery. -/- I have discovered, and continue to discover, just how productive this novel paradigm is in understanding ourselves and our world, by its ability to explain — in detail — so many of our experiences that are today either inexplicable, paradoxical, or ignored “for the present” by scientists until some hoped for mechanical description can be found. For the most part, scientists constrain themselves to describing mechanisms, but describing how is not explaining why — and that is why so much of our modern knowledge has a best-used-by-date. On the other side, seemingly all spiritual traditions accept this modern characterization of the world, ourselves, and reality that is manifest in our language, so that even spiritual phenomena and ideas are necessarily structured by it. We accept the ideas of separate beings, intentional entities, levels of consciousness, and attainment of enlightenment or unification with God, all of which are necessary because dead matter, and unconsciousness, are considered to be the starting point. It isn’t. Rather than just present this novel paradigm as a fait accompli, the book’s five sections bring the reader through stages of reconfiguration of our understanding: -/- Volume 1. The Way of Unsaying — The need for the articles in the first volume is not to tell the reader how things are, but to unsay the things that they have heard throughout their lives and have taken to heart. This is accomplished by exposing the logical and explanatory limitations of those ideas that usually go unnoticed. This is necessary to do in order to open the reader’s mind to other ways of accounting for phenomena, and navigating life, so that the reader will understand: first, why the meditation technique I will present is so effective; and second, why the novel paradigm that I propose will truly advance human knowledge and enable us to change our way of being in the world. In order to liberate oneself from seeing the world in a particular way I use skillful means to unseat all the understandings that we have all been inculcated with. This can be destabilizing, and you might find yourself getting annoyed, or even frightened. To paraphrase a Buddhist proverb: Better not to start; but if started, better to finish: -/- Volume 2. The Way of Contemplation — In this volume, the paradigm of Responsive Naturing is developed, building upon the dialogs in volume 1. This volume challenges the reader, since breaking free of one’s existing cognitive frame and paradigmatic understanding is not a trivial exercise, and neither is restructuring one’s thoughts to fit into a new paradigm. This section explains what Responsive Naturing means, how it works in both spiritual and scientific senses, my specific arguments for why it is the answer to our need for a better way to account for phenomena and experience, and how our way of being in the world can change because of it. I attempt to show, via a myriad of independent fields of study, just how powerful this paradigm is in explaining the various phenomena that until now, either had no scientific explanation, or had an incoherent and never proven one. -/- Volume 3. The Way of Tradition — This volume provides the reader with traditional descriptions of similar types of meditation to that which I am presenting. These techniques are related by the unusual support for meditation that they use: that of Inner Spontaneous Sound. This information is provided for two reasons: 1) to validate the technique I present in volume 4, The Way of Meditation, by showing the high esteem that these techniques have been held in by all spiritual traditions, and 2) to present a rational explanation for the technique’s effectiveness, based upon responsive naturing. Volume 4. The Way of Meditation — This volume describes the practice that I call “Great Responsiveness Meditation” which will allow the reader to: 1) engage in a long-term meditative and contemplative practice in order to attain the insights that are the foundation for the novel paradigm that I am presenting; and 2) to benefit from two unique side-effects of using inner spontaneous sound: one which protects the meditator during traumatic and extreme emotional experiences, especially of the kind now expected because of the current global environmental and societal crises; and the other — which is widely attested to — is an alchemical-like change in the meditator, who quickly displays compassion without self-centered concern. In Buddhism, this is known by the Sanskrit word “Mahākaruṇā,” which is the type of responsive compassion displayed by all enlightened beings. It is a permanent change in how we live our life, and it enables each of us to overcome our worst inculcated selfish behaviors. 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The law of contracts, at least in its orthodox expression, concerns voluntary, or chosen, legal obligations. When Brody accepts Susan’s offer to sell him a canoe for a set price, the parties’ choices alter their legal rights and duties. Their success at changing the legal landscape depends on a background system of rules that specify when and how contractual acts have legal effects, rules that give the offer and acceptance of a bargain-exchange a central role in generating obligations. Contract (...) law conceived as a body of rules empowering individuals to shape their own rights and responsibilities presents an object of philosophical study. The philosophy of contract includes two broad sets of projects. One set, the focus of the first part of this entry, targets the basic structure and normative justification of the law of contracts. The aim is to subsume a salient body of contract law rules under general principles in order to clarify contract law’s conceptual categories, distinguish it from other areas of law, and specify criteria relevant to its normative appraisal. This kind of philosophical work presupposes detailed knowledge of the law in existing legal regimes, and the entry begins by outlining the common law of contracts. A second set of projects draws on resources from the philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and moral and political philosophy to address debates within contract law. Questions about the nature of meaning and interpretation, intentionality, freedom in contract, and distributive justice drive contemporary legal debates concerning contract formation, interpretation, and enforcement. Philosophical work on these topics has attracted significant commentary which serves as the focus of the second part of this entry. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NARRATIVE AND EXPLANATION: EXPLAINING ANNA KARENINA IN THE LIGHT OF ITS EPIGRAPH Marina Ludwigs University ofCalifornia, Irvine In this paper, I will be examining the relation of explanation to narrative, looking briefly at the theoretical side ofthe problematic and in more detail at specific explanatory issues that arise in Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. Although the use itselfofthe term "explanation" is not as visible in the humanities as it is (...) in the sciences, the explanatory enterprise by other names is just as prominent. For indeed, an animating impetus behind textual interpretation is an explanation ofhowatextcan be brought into a correspondence with another text, while contemporary critical-theoretical activities of demystifying aesthetic and cultural assumptions, contextualizing historical knowledge, or laying bare ideological presuppositions are, in one way or another, engagements in the explanation ofthe workings of language. I approach humanistic explanation via a brief detour of scientific explanation, which constitutes an already established discourse with a set of defined issues and standard arguments, limiting myself to touching upon issues relevant to the narrativization of explanation. In scientific debates, explanation is defined as an answer to the question of "why?," in contradistinction to the question of "what?," which prompts a description of a phenomenon in question. Descriptive and explanatory conceptual frameworks, however, are interdependent. A physical description involves an "in-depth" understanding of underlying regularities. An explanatory answer to a question is, in its turn, an argument that logically deduces the explanandum (the description ofa phenomenon to be explained) from the explanans (well-understood regularities). This Marina Ludwigs125 formal definition of an explanation necessitates a symmetry between explanation and prediction, because the reconstructed logical sequence can also be read in the other direction, demonstrating the inevitability of what has occurred. Thus the sight of shattered glass and a baseball lying about allows me to explain the accident by invoking the law ofthe conservation ofmomentum and the low shock-resistance ofglass. But the knowledge of these regularities would have also allowed me to predict the same outcome had I seen the baseball flying in its direction ofthe window. The ontological status of "regularities" has elicited a lively debate in the scientific community pertaining to the problem ofthe "real." The standard view of regularities defines them as general laws (the kind we learn about in physics classes) that could be deductive or inductive, deterministic or statistical. A general law may be subsumed under another, even more general law, thus forming a unifying hierarchy of laws. A rival conception appeals to causal mechanisms and defines regularities as established chains oftemporal succession. Both models, the covering-law and the causal one, have been criticized: the former—for its failure to distinguish a law from an accidental generalization; the latter—for its resurrection ofthe metaphysical notion ofcausal influence and its inability to deal with probabilistic events. One of the later contenders is Nancy Cartwright's model, that proposes to conceive of regularities as so-called "nomological machines"—"fixed (enough) arrangements] ofcomponents, or factors, with stable (enough) capacities that in the right sort of stable (enough) environment will, with repeated operation, give rise to the kind of regular behavior that we represent in our scientific laws" (Cartwright 50). Cartwright claims that scientific models work on the ceteris paribus (everything else being equal) basis. That is to say they "hold only in circumscribed conditions or so long as no factors relevant to the effect besides those specified occur" (Cartwright 28), such as inside a battery, refrigerator, or a rocket—insofar as special shielding conditions are in effect (as a counterexample, imagine usingNewton's laws ofmechanics for describing the motion of a dropped crumpled dollar). Cartwright's explanatory framework is thus pragmatic and local, avoiding the twin pitfalls of the metaphysical assumptions underlying the two older models—the totalizing and unifying idea of a covering law, on the one hand, and the influence of causal "force," on the other. What is instead emphasized by her is a procedural aspect of scientific knowledge that has been historically prevalent and reflects the practical exigencies of human existence—the experience of dangers and natural obstacles to human 126Explaining 'Anna Karenina ' desires. When ill-defined impediments are analyzed and reduced to concrete difficulties, specific... (shrink)

And this paper is an attempt to say precisely how, thus addressing a philosophical problem which is commonly taken to be a serious one. It does so, however, in quite an idiosyncratic way. It is based on the account of inductive schemes I have given in (1988) and (1990a) and on the conception of causation I have presented in (1980), (1983), and (1990b), and it intends to fill one of many gaps which have been left by these papers. Still, I (...) have tried to make this paper self-contained. Section 1 explains the philosophical question this paper is about; in more general terms it asks what might be meant by objectifying epistemic states or features of them and to which extent epistemic states can be objectified. The next sections introduce the basis I rely on with formal precision and some explanation; section 2 deals with induction and section 3 with causation. Within these confines, section 4 attempts to give an explication of the relevant sense of objectification and section 5 investigates the extent to which various features of epistemic states are objectifiable. The two most salient results are roughly that the relation "A is a reason for B" cannot be objectified at all and that the relation "A is a cause of B" can be objectified only under substantial, though reasonable restrictions. What has all of this to do with probability? A lot. The paper trades on a pervasive duality between probabilistic and deterministic epistemology, between a probabilistic representation of epistemic states together with a theory of probabilistic causation and another representation of epistemic states which I call deterministic because it lends itself, in a perfectly parallel fashion, to a theory of deterministic causation. Here I explicitly deal only with the deterministic side, but the duality should pave the way for further conclusions concerning objective probabilities and statistical laws. This outlook is briefly expanded in the final section 6. (shrink)

Different approaches to causation often diverge very significantly on ontological issues, in the case of both causal laws, and causal relations between states of affairs. This article sets out the main alternatives with regard to each. Causal concepts have surely been present from the time that language began, since the vast majority of action verbs involve the idea of causally affecting something. Thus, in the case of transitive verbs describing physical actions, there is the idea of (...) causally affecting something external to one — one finds food, builds a shelter, sows seed, catches fish, and so on — while in the case of intransitive verbs describing physical actions, it is very plausible that they involve the idea of causally affecting one's own body — as one walks, runs, jumps, hunts, and so on. (shrink)

While understanding and expressing causal relations are universal aspects of human cognition, language users may differ in their capacity to perceive, interpret, and express events. One source of variation in descriptions of caused motion events is agentivity, which refers to the attribution of a result to the agent's action. Depending on the perspective taken, the same event may be described with agentive or non-agentive interpretations. Does language play a role in how people construe and express caused motion events? (...) The present study investigated the use of agentive vs. non-agentive language by speakers of different languages (i.e., monolingual speakers of English and Korean, and Korean learners of English). All three groups described prototypical causal events similarly, using agentive language (active transitive sentences). However, when it came to non-prototypical causal events (where the agent was not shown in the scene), they diverged in their choice of language: English speakers favored agentive language (passive transitive sentences), whereas Korean speakers preferred non-agentive language (intransitive sentences). Korean learners of English patterned with Korean speakers, demonstrating L1 influence on their use of English. These findings highlight the effects of language on motion event construal. (shrink)

We present a Hilbert style axiomatization and an equational theory for reasoning about actions and capabilities. We introduce two novel features in the language of propositional dynamic logic, converse as backwards modality and abstract processes specified by preconditions and effects, written as \({\varphi \Rightarrow \psi}\) and first explored in our recent paper (Hartonas, Log J IGPL Oxf Univ Press, 2012), where a Gentzen-style sequent calculus was introduced. The system has two very natural interpretations, one based on the familiar relational (...) semantics and the other based on type semantics, where action terms are interpreted as types of actions (sets of binary relations). We show that the proof systems do not distinguish between the two kinds of semantics, by completeness arguments. Converse as backwards modality together with action types allow us to produce a new purely equational axiomatization of Dynamic Algebras, where iteration is axiomatized independently of box and where the fixpoint and Segerberg induction axioms are derivable. The system also includes capabilities operators and our results provide then a finitary Hilbert-style axiomatization and a decidable system for reasoning about agent capabilities, missing in the KARO framework. (shrink)

We suggest that developing automata theoretic foundations is relevant for knowledge theory, so that we study not only what is known by agents, but also the mechanisms by which such knowledge is arrived at. We define a class of epistemic automata, in which agents’ local states are annotated with abstract knowledge assertions about others. These are finite state agents who communicate synchronously with each other and information exchange is ‘perfect’. We show that the class of recognizable languages has good (...) closure properties, leading to a Kleene-type theorem using what we call regular knowledge expressions. These automata model distributed causal knowledge in the following way: each agent in the system has a partial knowledge of the temporal evolution of the system, and every time agents synchronize, they update each other’s knowledge, resulting in a more up-to-date view of the system state. Hence we show that these automata can be used to solve the satisfiability problem for a natural epistemic temporal logic for local properties. Finally, we characterize the class of languages recognized by epistemic automata as the regular consistent languages studied in concurrency theory. (shrink)

David Hume and other philosophers doubt that causality can be perceived directly. Instead, observers become aware of it through inference based on the perception of the two events constituting cause and effect of the causal relation. However, Hume and the other philosophers primarily consider causal relations in which one object triggers a motion or change in another. In this paper, I will argue against Hume’s assumption by distinguishing a kind of causal relations in which an agent is (...) controlling the motion or change of an object. I will call this kind of causal relations ‘causation-as-control’. In instances of causation-as-control, the observer does not become aware of the causality through inference based on the perception of two events (cause and effect). Rather, she perceives the two events directly and without further inference as cause and effect of a causal relation, and, therefore, the causality at work. (shrink)

Congress's national-security legislation will often require clear and specific congressional authorization before the executive can undertake certain actions. The War Powers Resolution, for example, prohibits any law from authorizing military hostilities unless it "specifically authorizes" them. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 required laws to amend FISA or repeal its "exclusive means" provision before they could authorize warrantless electronic surveillance. But efforts to legislate clear-statement regimes in national-security law have failed to induce compliance. The Clinton Administration inferred congressional (...) "authorization" for the 1999 Kosovo War from an appropriations statute that failed to specifically authorize the conflict. And the Bush Administration inferred congressional "authorization" for the NSA surveillance program from ambiguous language in the post-September 11th Authorization to Use Military Force. In both situations, executive-branch lawyers employed expansive theories of implied repeal and constitutional avoidance to evade the codified clear-statement requirements, and Congress and the courts acquiesced to the President's actions. Recent proposals to strengthen the clear-statement requirements in Congress's national-security framework legislation are unlikely to be effective without institutional mechanisms, such as points of order, that can deter future legislators from enacting vague or ambiguous legislation from which the executive might claim implicit congressional "authorization," and that can induce Congress to confront Presidents that act without specific congressional authorization. Simply enacting more narrow or explicit clear-statement requirements, or adding funding restrictions to Congress's framework legislation, fails to counter the aggressive interpretive doctrines that executives of both political parties have used to concoct congressional "authorization" from vague or ambiguous statutory language. (shrink)

This article investigates the idea that meanings of proper names are their references which is popular in the philosophy of language. The aim is to show, first, that there is no satisfactory answer to the question “How references as stable relations between words and objects appear, due to accomplishment of what conditions these properties of linguistic expressions may be produced?”, and, second, that we can still use the notion of reference in our explanations of some effects of communication if (...) we treat reference as pragmatic rather than semantic phenomenon. The actuality of this research is provided by the fact that the identification of meanings of certain types of terms, proper names first of all, with their references is still very influential account in the philosophy of language. The author uses the methods of historical exposition and philosophical analysis of the main theories of reference, such as theory of descriptions and causal theory of reference. It is shown that these theories in their different modifications fail to explain how references as semantic relations between proper names and their bearers may be produced in the course of communication and social interaction. But although there are alternative concepts of the nature meanings of proper names it is concluded that we still may apply the notion of reference in our explanations of natural language communication if we treat reference as pragmatic effect caused by mutual coordination of actions achieved by the participants of certain communicative situation. (shrink)

The basic kinds of physical causality that are foundational for other kinds of causality involve objects and the causal relations between them. These interactions do not involve events. If events were ontologically significant entities for causality in general, then they would play a role in simple mechanical interactions. But arguments about simple collisions looked at from different frames of reference show that events cannot play a role in simple mechanical interactions, and neither can the entirely hypothetical causal relations (...) between events. These arguments show that physics, which should be authoritative when it comes to the metaphysics of causality, gives no reasons to believe that events are causal agents. Force relations and some cases of energy-momentum transfer are examples of causal relations, with forces being paradigmatic in the macroscopic world, though it is conceivable that there are other kinds of causal relation. A relation between two objects is a causal relation if and only if when it is instantiated by the two objects there is a possibility that the objects that are the terms of the relation could change. The basic metaphysics of causality is about objects, causal relations, changes in objects, and a causal primitive. The paper also includes a discussion of the metaphysics of forces and a discussion of the metaphysics of energy and momentum exchanges. (shrink)

It seems plausible to suppose that (a) the vocabulary of action is distinct from and irreducible to that of mere movement, And (b) the causal laws of the natural sciences are couched solely in terms of the latter vocabulary. From these two suppositions, The falsehood of determinism has sometimes been said to follow. I argue that whether this does follow depends on our conception of causal explanation; on the interpretation of this concept that seems to me the (...) most interesting, The falsehood of determinism follows only given the supplementary premise that there are no correlations between the relevant movement-Descriptions and action-Descriptions. But those who propose the two-Vocabularies argument have not shown the impossibility of establishing these correlations, And so have not proven determinism false. (shrink)

Since Donald Davidson issued his challenge to anticausalism in 1963, most philosophers have espoused the view that our actions are causally explained by the reasons why we do them. This Davidsonian consensus, however, rests on a faulty argument. Davidson’s challenge has been met, in more than one way, by anticausalists such as C. Ginet, G. Wilson, and S. Sehon. Hence I endeavor to support causalism with a stronger argument. Our actions are correlated with our motivating reasons; to wit, we often (...) do what we have reason to do. In yet other words, we are often rational. Our frequent rationality is easily explained if causalism is correct, but looks like a staggering coincidence otherwise. Anticausalism thus appears to be ill-equipped to account for the very existence of rational behavior, and so far no attempts in this direction have succeeded. (shrink)

Davidson's account of action explanation is at the core of his theory of action and hence of his philosophy in general. Usually, Davidson is regarded as the typical exponent of a standard causal understanding of action explanation. A closer look at his writings reveals, however, that his approach is much more sophisticated, for example, by distinguishing between causes and causal powers and counting reasons among the latter, which allows him to give satisfactory answers to a (...) number of standard problems in action theory, for example, the validity of the logical connection argument, the problem of causal exclusion, and the problem of wayward causal chains. Moreover, it becomes clear in which way his understanding of action explanations fits with his thesis about the anomalous nature of the mental and his theory of radical interpretation in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that Descartes was wrong when he characterized animals as purely physical automata – robots devoid of consciousness. It seems to them obvious that animals (tigers, lions, and bears, as well as chimps, dogs, and dolphins, and so forth) are conscious. There are other philosophers who argue that it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that robots and other artificial agents may someday be conscious – and it is certainly practical to take the intentional stance toward them (...) (the robots as well as the philosophers) even now. I'm not sure that there are philosophers who would deny consciousness to animals but affirm the possibility of consciousness in robots. In any case, and in whatever way these various philosophers define consciousness, the majority of them do attribute consciousness to humans. Amongst this group, however, there are philosophers and scientists who want to reaffirm the idea, explicated by Shadworth Holloway Hodgson in 1870, that in regard to action the presence of consciousness does not matter since it plays no causal role. Hodgson's brain generated the following thought: neural events form an autonomous causal chain that is independent of any accompanying conscious mental states. Consciousness is epiphenomenal, incapable of having any effect on the nervous system. James (1890, 130) summarizes the situation. (shrink)

This book has the virtue of sketching what might seem the implications of a Gricean theory of meaning. Mr. Landsman explicitly accepts the psychologism of Grice’s approach: the attempt to explain linguistic meaning by nonlinguistic, psychological notions, i.e., speaker’s intention that hearers have certain beliefs, etc. What turns out universal are actions, of which linguistic actions are a non-basic kind. Landsman is to be complimented for emphasizing that a Gricean account is psychologistic and that it loosely implies non-linguistic universals of (...) action, which are to provide the principles of individuation for beliefs, intentions, propositions, sayings, etc., which are the "connate accusatives," or adverbials, of action universals. He does not, I think, do much to rid Grice’s account of its fundamental difficulty: viz., that what is to do the explaining seems less clear and less well individuated than what it is to explain. It does not help much to write: "I do not wish to deny that, as a matter of fact, people often think in words. This means that a factual condition of having certain thoughts is the mastery of speech. Linguistic conventions thus may constitute causal conditions of certain intentional states. What I am claiming is that the notion of a convention does not enter into our concept of an intentional state." It is not sufficiently clear what the difference between mere "causal conditions" and "logical conditions" is supposed to be. Some might say that the notion of thought presupposes the notion of logic and that logic, unless we are to mix it with empirical psychology and talk of "laws of thought," presupposes the notion of language. Unfortunately, Landsman has little to say about the criticisms that have been made of Grice’s theory, mentioning Ziff’s criticisms in a brief aside and not so much as mentioning John Searle’s attempt to improve Grice’s theory of meaning. Also Landsman has nothing to say about recent and closely related work in linguistic theory: e.g., 1) though Landsman maintains that all ordinary speakings are performative actions, he has nothing to say about whether or not there is any relevance, and if so what, in J. R. Ross’ fairly recent claims to the effect that all sentences, in their syntactic deep structure, begin with a general performative verb coupled with the speaker’s pronoun; 2) much of what Landsman says relates to the distinction between the pragmatics and semantics of language, and to the success of Davidsonians and "generative semanticists" in their equation of deep syntax and logical form, but Landsman does not explain what his position comes to in such terms, nor does he explain why he does not have to explain. These last points are more a plea for catholicism in talking about meaning than a criticism of Landsman’s able exposition. The second half of this book consists largely of two papers: on the indeterminancy of translation and on abstract particulars and passages from The Problem of Universals, which Landsman edited.—R. B. (shrink)

Law provides a rich language for thinking about bioethical issues and is a tool for action as well as talk. But the language of the law, often inapt, regularly fails to achieve its desired effect.

Theory of Computation -- Computation by Abstracts Devices.

If mental causal explanations are grounded in facts about physical causes and effects, and if there are no psychophysical laws, how can we avoid the conclusion that the mental is causally, and causally explanatorily, irrelevant? The chapter analyses the ways in which this objection has been raised against non‐reductive monism in general, and Davidson's anomalous monism in particular. Then a conception of explanatory relevance for non‐basic physical properties is set out: properties are candidates for explanatory relevance if they (...) play a role in a simple model of causal action; it is intelligible how a property can be causally explanatorily relevant only if it supervenes on low‐level physical properties; but such supervenience does not provide a self‐standing condition of explanatory relevance. A parallel model is developed for the mental case, exploiting the intuitive model of rational action and appealing to supervenience. Anomalous monism is thereby defended against one objection; but, it is argued, this defence challenges the original motivation for thinking that mental events must be physical events. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of action theories have relied on a Humean model of causality and of explanation; even those theories that explicitly reject aspects of that model uncritically adopt others. The atomistic presuppositions embodied in the model are unable to account for either the dynamic and fabric-like nature of action or the features of control and meaning present therein. It is these atomistic presuppositions that give rise to the “Gettier-like vexations” that are common counterexamples in action theory. (...) The Humean requirement that cause and effect be only contingently connected and generalizable into a covering law is also discussed with respect to the explanation of action.Representatives of the three major approaches to the problem of action: causal (including intentional, volitional, as well as agent causation and reasons-as-causes theories), behaviorist, so-called “contextual”, and teleological theories are examined. (shrink)

The argument from causal closure of the physical is usually considered the most powerful argument in favor of the ontological doctrine of physicalism. Many authors, most notably Papineau, assume that CCP implies that physicalism is supported by physics. I demonstrate, however, that physical science has no bias in the ontological debate between proponents of physicalism and dualism. I show that the arguments offered for CCP are effective only against the accounts of mental causation based on the action of (...) the mental forces of a Newtonian nature, i.e. those which manifest themselves by causing accelerations. However, it is conceivable and possible that mental causation is manifested through the redistribution of energy, momentum and other conserved quantities in the system, brought about by altering the state probability distribution within the living system and leading to anomalous correlations of neural processes. After arguing that a probabilistic, interactionist model of mental causation is conceivable, which renders the argument from causal closure of the physical ineffective, I point to some basic features that such a model must have in order to be intelligible. At the same time, I indicate the way that conclusive testing of CCP can be done within the theoretical framework of physics. (shrink)

Causal theories of action are attempts to develop an account of actions in terms of events which have the right kind of causal ancestry. The causal ancestry must be traced back to some kind of intentional state in the agent, such intentional state must have the right kind of content, and it must cause the bodily movement in the ‘right’ way. Causal accounts differ on the nature of the intentional state, the nature of the content (...) it must have, and the specification of the ‘right’ kind of causal connection to bodily movements or other effects. Causal accounts also differ on the identification of the action itself. Some acounts say that the action is the bodily movement, provided that it was caused in the right way and had the right kind of effects. Others identify the action with the triggering intentional state, provided that it has the right kind of effects. Yet others identify the action with the composite event of the intentional state's causing the appropriate effects. Finally there are those which fail to identify the action with any of these events or combinations of them. (shrink)

If, as I argue, the law of karma is a special application of the causal law to moral causation, then one has to account for the differences between the two laws. One possibility is to distinguish between "phalas" (immediate effects actions produce in the world) and "samskaras" (invisible dispositions or tendencies to act or think), and to suggest that karma produces the latter but not the former. This subjectivist account, however, raises questions concerning the relation between a person's (...) "samskaras" and the environmental conditions that cause him pleasure and pain. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that certain stimulus-response learning models which are adequate to represent finite automata (acceptors) are not adequate to represent noninitial state input-output automata (transducers). This circumstance suggests the question whether or not the behavior of animals if satisfactorily modelled by automata is predictive. It is argued in partial answer that there are automata which can be explained in the sense that their transition and output functions can be described (roughly, Hempel-type covering law explanation) while (...) their behaviors are in principle not predictable short of possession of their complete histories or of information concerning present internal states by indirect observation. (shrink)

Humans exhibit enhanced memory performance when information is encoded by physically enacting it, as opposed to passively reading or hearing the same information; an effect referred to as “enactment effect.” The present study explored the effects of language (native vs. non-native) and semantic repetition (repeated vs. non-repeated) on the enactment effect in action memory. Forty-eight subjects learned action phrases either by enacting or by reading the items. Results showed (i) better memory for enacted phrases, (ii) better memory (...) for non-native repeated phrases that were only read, (iii) no difference in memory between repeated and non-repeated phrases that were enacted, and (iv) that semantic repetition affected memory of phrases that were read but not of those that were enacted. Partly in line with the multimodal theory, findings support that enacting action phrases can enhance item-specific processing and that this is insensitive to cognitive strategies like semantic repetition. (shrink)

In her paper entitled "Causal Laws and Effective Strategies" (1979), Cartwright sets out to establish the connection between laws of association and causal laws. In part Cartwright is trying to show the sense in which a cause increases the probability of its effect, and to explain what causal laws assert by giving an account of how causal laws are related to certain kinds of statistical laws. In section II we explicate the essential features of Cartwright's for- (...) mulation and in section III we argue that there are several reasons for believing that Cartwright's formulation is inadequate and must be rejected. Nonetheless, we believe Cartwright's formulation does contain two key insights into the nature of causation. In section IV we use these two insights to sketch out the key features of an alternative formulation that holds the certain laws of association are necessary conditions for causal laws. The alternative formu- lation, we believe, explains what it means to say a cause increases the probability of its effect. (shrink)

Generic language (e.g., “tigers have stripes”) leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these effects by testing how correcting generics might affect the development of these beliefs about novel social and animal kinds (Study 1) and about gender (Study 2). Correcting generics by narrowing their (...) scope to a single individual limited beliefs that the referenced categories could explain what their members would be like while broadening the scope to a superordinate category (Study 2) uniquely limited endorsement of gender norms. Across both studies, correcting generics did not alter beliefs about feature heritability and had mixed effects on inductive inferences, suggesting that additional mechanisms (e.g., causal reasoning about shared features) contribute to the development of full-blown essentialist beliefs. These results help illuminate the mechanisms by which generics lead children to view categories as having rich inductive and causal potential; in particular, they suggest that children interpret generics as signals that speakers in their community view the referenced categories as meaningful kinds that support generalization. The findings also point the way to concrete suggestions for how adults can effectively correct problematic generics (e.g., gender stereotypes) that children may hear in daily life. (shrink)

People’s causal judgments are susceptible to the action effect, whereby they judge actions to be more causal than inactions. We offer a new explanation for this effect, the counterfactual explanation: people judge actions to be more causal than inactions because they are more inclined to consider the counterfactual alternatives to actions than to consider counterfactual alternatives to inactions. Experiment 1a conceptually replicates the original action effect for causal judgments. Experiment 1b confirms a novel prediction (...) of the new explanation, the reverse action effect, in which people judge inactions to be more causal than actions in overdetermination cases. Experiment 2 directly compares the two effects in joint-causation and overdetermination scenarios and conceptually replicates them with new scenarios. Taken together, these studies provide support for the new counterfactual explanation for the action effect in causal judgment. (shrink)

This book offers a discussion about how people think, talk, learn, and explain things in causal terms in terms of action and manipulation. Sloman also reviews the role of causality, causal models, and intervention in the basic human cognitive functions: decision making, reasoning, judgement, categorization, inductive inference, language, and learning.

Kant claims that empirical laws of nature “carry with them an expression of necessity” (Kant, 1998 ; A159/B198). What precisely is this “expression of necessity” and what grounds it? The metaphysical necessitation approach asks “What are laws of nature for Kant?” It answers that, for Kant, empirical laws possess necessity and are grounded in the properties and causal powers essential to natural kinds. The epistemological systematization approach claims that empirical natures, kinds and causal laws are rightly viewed as (...) necessitating in virtue of the place they ideally take within an ultimate systematic conception of nature. The paper defends a hybrid transcendental-idealist approach to empirical necessity. It argues that Kant offers a transcendental deduction of the a priori principle of the systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature. In contrast to the systematization approach, this builds necessity into our most fundamental, conceptually articulated experience of nature. The approach can furthermore complement metaphysical necessitation accounts by showing that the commitment to necessitation follows from the metaphysical doctrine of transcendental idealism and the critical project of articulating the a priori transcendental conditions of experience. Recognizing the transcendental status of the principle of the systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature thus allows us to merge valuable insights of both the epistemological systematization and the metaphysical necessitation views. (shrink)