Hendrik Lorenz presents a comprehensive study of Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of non-rational desire. They see this as something that humans share with animals, and which aims primarily at the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. Lorenz explores the cognitive resources that both philosophers make available for the explanation of such desires, and what they take rationality to add to the motivational structure of human beings. In doing so, he finds conceptions of the mind that are coherent (...) and deeply integrated with both philosophers' views about such topics as the relation between body and soul, or the nature of the virtues. (shrink)

Aristotle takes practical wisdom and arts or crafts to be forms of knowledge which, we argue, can usefully be thought of as ‘empiricist’. This empiricism has two key features: knowledge does not rest on grasping unobservable natures or essences; and knowledge does not rest on grasping logical relations that hold among propositions. Instead, knowledge rests on observation, memory, experience and everyday uses of reason. While Aristotle’s conception of theoretical knowledge does require grasping unobservable essences and logical relations that hold among (...) suitable propositions, his conception of practical and productive knowledge avoids such requirements and is consistent with empiricism. (shrink)

Plato’s Utopia Recast is an exceptionally rich and ambitious book. Its central text is the Laws, and it inherits from that dialogue a focus on ethical and political theory. It also, however, operates on the assumption that the Laws is interconnected, more or less systematically, with other later dialogues. The Republic contains its own metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological theories, which provide support and philosophical context to its theory of justice. The Laws, by contrast, is devoted almost exclusively to ethics and (...) politics. It is Bobonich’s contention that other texts—especially the Phaedrus, the Philebus, the Statesman, the Theaetetus, and the Timaeus—supply philosophical underpinnings to the Laws’ ethical and political theory. Plato’s Utopia Recast thus includes not only careful and detailed discussions of various parts and aspects of the Laws, it also has a great deal to say about other later Platonic dialogues, and in particular about how they shed light on the commitments and peculiarities of the Laws. This synoptic program in itself would already make for a rather ambitious project. (shrink)

Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul psuchê] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word ‘soul’ meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the Phaedo, then (...) in the Republic), Aristotle (in the De Anima or On the Soul ), Epicurus, and the Stoics. These are by far the most carefully worked out theories of soul in ancient philosophy. Later theoretical developments — for instance, in the writings of Plotinus and other Platonists, as well as the Church Fathers — are best studied against the background of the classical theories, from which, in large part, they derive. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:I argue that there are, according to Aristotle, two importantly different kinds of goals or ends in the domain of human agency and that one of these two kinds has been frequently, though not universally, overlooked. Apart from psychological goals, goals that agents adopt as their purposes, there are also, I submit, goals that actions have by being the kinds of actions they are and, in some cases, by occurring in the circumstances in which they do. These latter goals belong (...) to suitable actions whether or not agents adopt them as purposes and whether or not agents are aware of them. There is evidence both in Aristotle's ethical writings and in his discussion of chance and luck in Physics II.4–6 that he recognizes goals of this latter kind. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III IV V.

The Brute Within proceeds in three parts, the first two (amounting to half the book) on Plato and the third on Aristotle. Each part, as well as the book itself, has an Introduction in which Lorenz helpfully signals what he is up to; the author frequently (though sometimes repetitively) summarizes his argument as he goes along. There is no mistaking his central claims: that in both Plato and Aristotle there are three types of desires--reason, spirit and appetite--such that the (...) last two may motivate conduct without any participation in reason at all. In human beings, reason may itself motivate conduct and also may share information with appetite and spirit to modify behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 122-123 [Access article in PDF] Andreas Kamp. Philosophiehistorie als Rezeptionsgeschichte. Die Reaktion auf Aristoteles' De Anima-Noetik. Der frühe Hellenismus. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 2001. Pp. viii + 315. Cloth, $82.00. This book is the first installment of an extraordinarily ambitious project. The plan is to investigate the reception of Aristotle's conception of the intellect, set out in De Anima 3.4-5, in (...) the subsequent history of philosophy, from Theophrastus to the present.The current volume deals with the natural starting-point for this project, philosophy in the early Hellenistic period, centering on Theophrastus and his tenure as head of the Peripatos, the school that Aristotle founded.Kamp begins with an engaging, somewhat lengthy introduction, which remains curiously remote from what one might expect it to concentrate on, namely Aristotle's conception of the intellect. Apart from presenting an outline of the reception of Aristotle's philosophical work in general from Theophrastus to Sigmund Freud, the introduction includes only one short paragraph specifically on the topic of the intellect (12). This paragraph, which comes closest to revealing Kamp's reason for focusing, of all things, on Aristotle's discussion of the intellect in De Anima3.4-5, simply makes two unsubstantiated claims. First, Kamp claims that the conception of the intellect, as presented in those chapters, is at the center of the Aristotelian system; and secondly, that this is, of all Aristotelian and perhaps all philosophical theories, the one that received the highest level of attention in the subsequent history of philosophy. The reader might be content to wait and let the second claim be borne out, in the present volume and beyond; but the first claim—concerning the centrality of the intellect, and of De Anima3.4-5, to Aristotle's thought—should at least have received some specification and illustration.The central part of the book, and philosophically by far the most interesting, concerns Theophrastus. Kamp begins with an extensive discussion of the political, social, and economic circumstances of Theophrastus's biography and of the history of the Peripatos. He then offers a reconstruction of Theophrastus's remarks on the nature of the intellect in the fifth book of his Physics. This reconstructive effort is based on a number of fragments [End Page 122] preserved in Themistius's De Anima paraphrase (written at about 350ad) and in Priscianus Lydus's Metaphrasis in Theophrastum (about 530ad). Kamp's discussion of these fragments is well informed, judicious, and illuminating throughout.It may be in order, though, to indicate one misgiving. One of the problems that Theophrastus addresses is that it might appear as if thinking were a matter of the intellect being changed by intelligibles, much as perceiving is, or may appear to be, a matter of sense being changed by sensibles. (If so, the question arises as to what the principle of thought is, the intellect itself or the intelligibles.) Kamp reconstructs the train of thought as follows (124-5).(1) The intellect stands to intelligibles the way sense stands to sensibles (intellect-sense analogy).(2) Sense is changed by sensibles.Therefore, the intellect is changed by intelligibles.Kamp proceeds to suggest (126) that Theophrastus attempted to avoid the conclusion by denying the first premise. According to Kamp, Theophrastus rejected the intellect-sense analogy by drawing attention to significant differences between (the activity of) the intellect and sense perception, one of these being that the intellect (in thinking) is changed only in a special sense, namely inasmuch as it undergoes a transition to activity, energeia. Kamp is right that the notion of a special kind of change that consists in a transition to activity is Aristotelian; it is presented in considerable detail in De Anima2.5 (417b2-16). But it would surely be puzzling if Theophrastus thought that one significant difference between (the activity of) the intellect and sense perception was that the intellect (in thinking) was changed in a special sense (whereas sense perception, to complete the... (shrink)

A review of Hendrik Lorenz, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006.

Conflicts in Interpretation applies novel methods of constraint interaction, derived from connectionist theories and implemented in linguistics within the framework of Optimality Theory, to core semantic and pragmatic issues such as polysemy, negation, (in) definiteness, focus, anaphora, and rhetorical structure. It explores the hypothesis that a natural language grammar is a set of potentially conflicting constraints on forms and meanings. Moreover, it hypothesizes that competent language users not only optimize from an input form to the optimal output meaning for this (...) form, or vice versa, but also consider the opposite direction of optimization, thus taking into account the speaker as a hearer and taking into account the hearer as a speaker. The book aims to show that such a bidirectional constraint-based grammar sheds new light on the relation between form and meaning, within a sentence as well as across sentence boundaries, within a single language as well as across languages, and within competent adult language users as well as during language development. An important dimension of the book is the structured investigation of issues at the interface of semantics with syntax and pragmatics, such as the effects of distinguishing between speaker's perspective and hearer's perspective in comprehension and production, stable and instable patterns of form and meaning across languages, and the development of a coherent pattern of form and meaning in children. Conflicts in Interpretation will be of interest to any researcher or advanced student in linguistics, cognitive science, language typology, or psycholinguistics who is interested in the capacity of our human mind to map meaning onto form, and form onto meaning. (shrink)

The revised edition contains a new chapter which provides an elegant description of the semantics. The various classes of lambda calculus models are described in a uniform manner. Some didactical improvements have been made to this edition. An example of a simple model is given and then the general theory (of categorical models) is developed. Indications are given of those parts of the book which can be used to form a coherent course.

In this paper, we first classify different types of second opinions and evaluate the ethical and epistemological implications of providing those in a clinical context. Second, we discuss the issue of how artificial intelligent could replace the human cognitive labour of providing such second opinion and find that several AI reach the levels of accuracy and efficiency needed to clarify their use an urgent ethical issue. Third, we outline the normative conditions of how AI may be used as second opinion (...) in clinical processes, weighing the benefits of its efficiency against concerns of responsibility attribution. Fourth, we provide a ‘rule of disagreement’ that fulfils these conditions while retaining some of the benefits of expanding the use of AI-based decision support systems in clinical contexts. This is because the rule of disagreement proposes to use AI as much as possible, but retain the ability to use human second opinions to resolve disagreements between AI and physician-in-charge. Fifth, we discuss some counterarguments. (shrink)

Duality in Logic and Language [draft--do not cite this article] Duality phenomena occur in nearly all mathematically formalized disciplines, such as algebra, geometry, logic and natural language semantics. However, many of these disciplines use the term ‘duality’ in vastly different senses, and while some of these senses are intimately connected to each other, others seem to be entirely … Continue reading Duality in Logic and Language →.

The project 'Facing Forward' started with a collaboration between five institutions: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, De Appel arts centre, W139, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the art magazine Metroplis M. Having previously organized the lecture series and publications 'Right About Now: Art & Theory in the 1990s' (2005/2006) and 'Now is the Time: Art & Theory in the 21st Century' (2008/2009), the organizing committee decided to take the final (...) step in this timeline and turn its attention to the far horizon. Informed by a shared interest in the role that history, speculation, and utopianism play in the field of contemporary art and design (as well as the larger context of global, socio-economic and political developments), a selection of seven themes emerged from the conversations of the initial organizers. These would eventually shape the seven lecture and discussions events - collected in this volume of essays - publicized under the banner Art & Theory From a Future Perspective. A great number of internationally renowned speakers were invited to reflect on the proposed themes during often sold-out events, which were presented at the Oude Lutherse Kerk in Amsterdam in 2011/2012. Yet, however compelling our desire as organizers to go beyond the framework of contemporary events and the current interest, well-nigh obsession, with history, it is obviously an illusion to think that we can escape the past by means of a turn towards the future."--Page 8. (shrink)

Descartes' works were not allowed to be read at Leiden University, even his name could not be pronounced. Read the compelling story about how his pupil Johannes de Raey has had the opportunity to preach Descartes fully in philosophy, but also in medicine, in a hostile anti-Cartesian climate during 20 years (1647-1668). This book is not only meant for philosophers and medical historians, but for all who want to take a look at the extensive menu of Cartesian cuisine. The 17th-century (...) philosopher René Descartes turned established science upside down by doubting all certainties. His critical mind rejected statements that could not be proven by the Ratio. The Ratio was the metaphor for the roots, the physics for the trunk and the medicine for the branches and leaves of the Cartesian tree. This premise was directly opposed to the established aristotelian theory in which observation formed the basis of knowledge. De Raey, who once called Descartes his best student, synthesized a hybrid model of the old Aristotelian and the new Cartesian concept. From 1658 to 1662 he gave private lessons in medicine at Leiden University and tried to use his model as a basis for explaining human physiology. Until now, nothing was known about the content of these lectures. The author recently found a dispute. It is a new dish on the Cartesian menu. (shrink)

Although Darwinian concepts have largely been banned from the social sciences of the last century, they have recently seen a revival in several disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, or economics. Most of the current proponents of evolutionary theorizing in the social sciences avoid references to the older literature on social evolution. On that background, this article presents a contribution to Darwinist thinking in early American sociology that has mainly been overlooked in the literature. As the leading figure of the Human (...) Ecology Approach, which was established during the 1920s and 1930s, Robert Ezra Park drew heavily on evolutionary concepts to explain human evolution. A systematic presentation of these concepts in the light of the modern discussion on sociocultural evolution is given, followed by a conclusion about what can be learned from Park today. (shrink)

This paper wants to shed light on the way the philosophical school of Stoicsm in Greco-Roman antiquity has dealt with the relationship of men and nature by pointing out to some of the key texts in which these issues are mentioned. Although the modern concept of sustainability or environmental protection did not really exist in antiquity, the Stoa was convinced that individual decisions had a direct impact on this world. Following the concept of environmental humanities, the ancient texts and authors (...) are collected as historical ideas of the multifaceted interactions between nature and men that can be fruitfully mirrored with the arguments of the current Anthropocene discourse and its focus on (post)industrialism. By doing so we might come across helpful approaches deeply rooted in our cultural heritage that we could possibly adopt and find practical answers for our age in terms of individual behaviour as well as management decisions to face the ecological and social challenges ahead. (shrink)

This paper explores the role and resolution of disagreements between physicians and their diagnostic AI-based decision support systems. With an ever-growing number of applications for these independently operating diagnostic tools, it becomes less and less clear what a physician ought to do in case their diagnosis is in faultless conflict with the results of the DSS. The consequences of such uncertainty can ultimately lead to effects detrimental to the intended purpose of such machines, e.g. by shifting the burden of proof (...) towards a physician. Thus, we require normative clarity for integrating these machines without affecting established, trusted, and relied upon workflows. In reconstructing different causes of conflicts between physicians and their AI-based tools—inspired by the approach of “meaningful human control” over autonomous systems and the challenges to resolve them—we will delineate normative conditions for “meaningful disagreements”. These incorporate the potential of DSS to take on more tasks and outline how the moral responsibility of a physician can be preserved in an increasingly automated clinical work environment. (shrink)

Brieven van de Nederlandse filosoof (1898-1955) uit de periode 1917-1927 aan een vriend.

In recent years, a number of authors have started studying Aristotelian diagrams containing metalogical notions, such as tautology, contradiction, satisfiability, contingency, strong and weak interpretations of contrariety, etc. The present paper is a contribution to this line of research, and its main aims are both to extend and to deepen our understanding of metalogical diagrams. As for extensions, we not only study several metalogical decorations of larger and less widely known Aristotelian diagrams, but also consider metalogical decorations of another type (...) of logical diagrams, viz. duality diagrams. At a more fundamental level, we present a unifying perspective which sheds new light on the connections between new and existing metalogical diagrams, as well as between object- and metalogical diagrams. Overall, the paper studies two types of logical diagrams and four kinds of metalogical decorations. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Arbeit hat den Leibnizschen metaphysischen Optimismus und einige der weniger bekannten Stationen und Zuge der Rezeption der "Essais de Theodicee" und des Theorems von der besten Welt im deutschen 18. Jahrhundert zum Gegenstand. Sie erhebt nicht den Anspruch, eine auch nur annahernd vollstandige Darstellung des Verlaufes der Debatte um die "beste Welt" zu geben. Angesichts der Fulle der zeitgenossischen Einlassungen und Ausserungen zum Thema war eine Auswahl bestimmter Rezeptionsmomente vorzunehmen. Auf die Prozesse der Verwandlung einer strikt metaphysischen Theodizee (...) hin zu einem populareren, dafur aber auch anfechtbareren Optimismus will diese Arbeit ebenso hinweisen wie auf den Umstand, dass nicht erst die Kantische Schrift "Uber das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee" von 1791 die (philosophische) Problematik der Lehre von der besten Welt dingfest macht. (shrink)

Inleiding tot de Duitse filosoof (1724-1804).

The aim of this paper is to initiate a systematic exploration of the model theory of epistemic plausibility models (EPMs). There are two subtly different definitions in the literature: one by van Benthem and one by Baltag and Smets. Because van Benthem's notion is the most general, most of the paper is dedicated to this notion. We focus on the notion of bisimulation, and show that the most natural generalization of bisimulation to van Benthem-type EPMs fails. We then introduce parametrized (...) bisimulations, and prove various bisimulationimplies- equivalence theorems, a Hennessy-Milner theorem, and several (un)definability results. We discuss the problems arising from the fact that these bisimulations are syntax-dependent (and thus not fully structural), and we present and compare two different ways of coping with this issue: adding a modality to the language, and putting extra constraints on the models. We argue that the most successful solution involves restricting to uniform and locally connected (van Benthem-type) EPMs: for this subclass the intuitively most natural notion of bisimulation and the technically sound notion coincide. Such EPMs turn out to correspond exactly with Baltag/Smets-type EPMs, which can be interpreted as constituting a methodological argument, favoring Baltag and Smets's definition of EPM over that of van Benthem. (shrink)

This paper studies the Lockean thesis from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic. The Lockean thesis states that belief can be defined as ‘sufficiently high degree of belief’. Its main problem is that it gives rise to a notion of belief which is not closed under conjunction. This problem is typical for classical epistemic logic: it is single-agent and static. I argue that from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic, the Lockean thesis fares much better. I briefly mention that it (...) can successfully be extended from single-agent to multi-agent settings. More importantly, I show that accepting the Lockean thesis (and a more sophisticated version for conditional beliefs) leads to a significant and unexpected unification in the dynamic behavior of (conditional) belief and high (conditional) probability with respect to public announcements. This constitutes a methodological argument in favor of the Lockean thesis. Furthermore, if one accepts Baltag’s Erlangen program for epistemology, this technical observation has even stronger philosophical implications: because belief and high probability display the same dynamic behavior, it is plausible that they are indeed one and the same epistemic notion. (shrink)

This paper studies John Buridan's octagons of opposition for the de re modal propositions and the propositions of unusual construction. Both Buridan himself and the secondary literature have emphasized the strong similarities between these two octagons (as well as a third one, for propositions with oblique terms). In this paper, I argue that the interconnection between both octagons is more subtle than has previously been thought: if we move beyond the Aristotelian relations, and also take Boolean considerations into account, then (...) the strong analogy between Buridan's octagons starts to break down. These differences in Boolean structure can already be discerned within the octagons themselves; on a more abstract level, they lead to these two octagons having different degrees of Boolean complexity (i.e. Boolean closures of different sizes). These results are obtained by means of bitstring analysis, which is one of the key tools from contemporary logical geometry. Finally, I argue that this historical investigation is directly relevant for the theoretical framework of logical geometry, and discuss how it helps us to address certain open questions in this framework. (shrink)

In the recent debate on future contingents and the nature of the future, authors such as G. A. Boyd, W. L. Craig, and E. Hess have made use of various logical notions, such as the Aristotelian relations of contradiction and contrariety, and the ‘open future square of opposition.’ My aim in this paper is not to enter into this philosophical debate itself, but rather to highlight, at a more abstract methodological level, the important role that Aristotelian diagrams can play in (...) organizing and clarifying the debate. After providing a brief survey of the specific ways in which Boyd and Hess make use of Aristotelian relations and diagrams in the debate on the nature of the future, I argue that the position of open theism is best represented by means of a hexagon of opposition. Next, I show that on the classical theist account, this hexagon of opposition ‘collapses’ into a single pair of contradictory statements. This collapse from a hexagon into a pair has several aspects, which can all be seen as different manifestations of a single underlying change. (shrink)

This paper studies Aumann’s agreeing to disagree theorem from the perspective of dynamic epistemic logic. This was first done by Dégremont and Roy (J Phil Log 41:735–764, 2012) in the qualitative framework of plausibility models. The current paper uses a probabilistic framework, and thus stays closer to Aumann’s original formulation. The paper first introduces enriched probabilistic Kripke frames and models, and various ways of updating them. This framework is then used to prove several agreement theorems, which are natural formalizations of (...) Aumann’s original result. Furthermore, a sound and complete axiomatization of a dynamic agreement logic is provided, in which one of these agreement theorems can be derived syntactically. These technical results are used to show the importance of explicitly representing the dynamics behind the agreement theorem, and lead to a clarification of some conceptual issues surrounding the agreement theorem, in particular concerning the role of common knowledge. The formalization of the agreement theorem thus constitutes a concrete example of the so-called dynamic turn in logic. (shrink)

This paper explores the interplay between logic-sensitivity and bitstring semantics in the square of opposition. Bitstring semantics is a combinatorial technique for representing the formulas that appear in a logical diagram, while logic-sensitivity entails that such a diagram may depend, not only on the formulas involved, but also on the logic with respect to which they are interpreted. These two topics have already been studied extensively in logical geometry, and are thus well-understood by themselves. However, the precise details of their (...) interplay turn out to be far more complicated. In particular, the paper describes an elegant and natural interaction between bitstrings and logic-sensitivity, which makes perfect sense when bitstrings are viewed as purely combinatorial entities. However, when we view bitstrings as semantically meaningful entities (which is actually the standard perspective, cf. the term ‘bitstring semantics’!), this interaction does not seem to have a full and equally natural counterpart. The paper describes some attempts to address this situation, but all of them are ultimately found wanting. For now, it thus remains an open problem to capture this interaction between bitstrings and logic-sensitivity from a semantic (rather than merely a combinatorial) perspective. (shrink)