An entity x is said to be generically dependent on a type F if x cannot exist without at least one entity of type F existing. In this paper several varieties of generic dependence are distinguished, differing in the nature of the relationship between an entity and the instances of a type on which it generically depends, and in the light of this, criteria of identity for generically dependent entities are investigated. These considerations are then illustrated in detail in a (...) series of three case studies, covering shapes, linguistic entities such as letters, words and sentences, and collectives. Each case study examines how far the entities involved have robust identity criteria, and to the extent that they do not it is questioned whether they can be regarded as bona fide examples of generic dependent entities. Finally, in the light of this, a number of possible accounts that may be given of the ontological status of such entities are considered. (shrink)

So-called ‘reified temporal logics’ were introduced by researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the early 1980s, and gave rise to a long-running series of debates concerning the proper way to represent states, events, causation, action, and other notions identified as crucial to the knowledge representation needs of AI. These debates never resulted in a definitive resolution of the issues under discussion, and indeed continue to produce aftershocks to the present day; none the less, we are now sufficiently far removed in (...) time from their heyday for it to be a worthwhile exercise to stand back and review them as a connected piece of history. (shrink)

FOIS is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications, a non-profit organization which promotes interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science. This book presents the papers delivered at FOIS 2023, the 13th edition of the Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference. The event was held as a sequentially-hybrid event, face-to-face in Sherbrooke, Canada, from 17 to 20 July 2023, and online from 18 to 20 (...) September 2023. In total, 62 articles from 19 different countries were submitted, out of which 25 were accepted for inclusion in the conference and for publication; corresponding to an acceptance rate of 40 percent. The contributions are separated into the book’s three sections: (1) Foundational ontological issues; (2) Methodological issues around the development, alignment, verification and use of ontologies; and (3) Domain ontologies and ontology-based applications. In these sections, ontological aspects from a wide variety of fields are covered, primarily from various engineering domains including cybersecurity, manufacturing, petroleum engineering, and robotics, but also extending to the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and dentistry. A noticeable trend among the contributions in this edition of the conference is the recognition that improving the tools to analyze, align, and improve ontologies is of paramount importance in continuing to advance the field of formal ontology. The book will be of interest to all formal and applied ontology researchers, and to those who use formal ontologies and information systems as part of their work. (shrink)

Expressions designating collectives, such as “the committee” or “the ships in the port”, may be interpreted de re or de dicto, depending on context, according as they pick out collectives defined by their members or collectives defined by some criterion for membership. We call these E-collectives and I-collectives respectively, and in this paper we explore in depth the relationship between these two categories. In particular, we identify important respects in which they differ, regarding the nature of the dependence of the (...) collective on its members, the nature of the parthood relation in which the members stand to the whole, and, from an application perspective, the different methods used for identifying the two forms of collective from large spatio-temporal data-sets. (shrink)

The goal of the 2010 Ontology Summit was to address the current shortage of persons with ontology expertise by developing a strategy for the education of ontologists. To achieve this goal we studied how ontologists are currently trained, the requirements identified by organizations that hire ontologists, and developments that might impact the training of ontologists in the future. We developed recommendations for the body of knowledge that should be taught and the skills that should be developed by future ontologists; these (...) recommendations are intended as guidelines for institutions and organizations that may consider establishing a program for training ontologists. Further, we recommend a number of specific actions for the community to pursue. (shrink)

In this paper we consider two key concepts from software engineering—‘specification’ and ‘implementation’—and explore their possible applications outside software engineering to other disciplines, notably the philosophy of action, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. Throughout, the emphasis is on the gain in conceptual clarity that can be afforded by these concepts; it is not so much a matter of new knowledge or new theories but of a reorganization of existing knowledge and theories in a way that facilitates the transfer of insights (...) across a range of related fields. (shrink)

The value of logic techniques in circuit design has been well-known for many years, but a thorough grounding in mathematical logic is needed for all stages of software development, especially program specification, verification and program transformation. In all these stages, logic underpins the theory, bearing out the dictum that Logic is the calculus of computer science. This book presents the subject of mathematical logic in order to provide a grounding for students in computer science.

The notion of specification plays a key role in the developing science of computing. It is typically considered to be the keystone in the software development process. However, there is no single, generally agreed meaning of specification that bears close scrutiny. Instead there is a variety of different, although partially interlocking and overlapping interpretations of the term.We catalogue this varietal profusion and attempt to lay bare both the sources and consequences of each major alternative. We attempt to present the full (...) range of possibilities, and the biases inherent in each style of interpretation. (shrink)

In this long-awaited book, Antony Duff offers a new perspective on the structures of criminal law and criminal liability. His starting point is a distinction between responsibility (understood as answerability) and liability, and a conception of responsibility as relational and practice-based. This focus on responsibility, as a matter of being answerable to those who have the standing to call one to account, throws new light on a range of questions in criminal law theory: on the question of criminalisation, which (...) can now be cast as the question of what we should have to answer for, and to whom, under the threat of criminal conviction and punishment; on questions about the criminal trial, as a process through which defendants are called to answer, and about the conditions (bars to trial) given which a trial would be illegitimate; on questions about the structure of offences, the distinction between offences and defences, and the phenomena of strict liability and strict responsibility; and on questions about the structures of criminal defences. The net result is not a theory of criminal law; but it is an account of the structure of criminal law as an institution through which a liberal polity defines a realm of public wrongdoing, and calls those who perpetrate (or are accused of perpetrating) such wrongs to account. (shrink)

In order to understand what we are talking about when we talk about joint attention, I will scrutinize how the mainstream view that builds on representational and intentionalist theories of mind is constituted. My aim is to show that much of the theory of joint attention is quite narrowly constructed and comes with tacit disciplinary biases that exclude much of what is existentially important in our practices of sharing our perceptions and guiding others to attend to the world in novel (...) ways. By using the frameworks of classical phenomenology and enactivist theories of mind, I aim to show how we, in our interactions, share our perceptions even with beings that are distinctly different from us. And, that this _difference_ in our personal worldview, our cognitive capacities, and our sensory modalities should be seen as a constitutive aspect of our practices of shared attention. I will articulate attention as a revelatory practice that aids us in discovering a shared world through the plurality, rather than similarity, of our perceptual actions. Attention is, in this sense, not solely driven by subjective intentions; it is also formed and co-constituted by my being addressed by the other. (shrink)

The question "What can justify criminal punishment ?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own, of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of punishment, but about the very legitimacy of the whole penal system. Recent theorizing about punishment offers a variety of answers to that question-answers that try to make plausible sense of the idea that punishment is justified as being deserved for past crimes; answers that try to (...) identify some beneficial consequences in terms of which punishment might be justified; as well as abolitionist answers telling us that we should seek to abolish, rather than to justify, criminal punishment. This book begins with a critical survey of recent trends in penal theory, but goes on to develop an original account (based on Duff's earlier Trials and Punishments) of criminal punishment as a mode of moral communication, aimed at inducing repentance, reform, and reconciliation through reparation-an account that undercuts the traditional controversies between consequentialist and retributivist penal theories, and that shows how abolitionist concerns can properly be met by a system of communicative punishments. In developing this account, Duff articulates the "liberal communitarian" conception of political society (and of the role of the criminal law) on which it depends; he discusses the meaning and role of different modes of punishment, showing how they can constitute appropriate modes of moral communication between political community and its citizens; and he identifies the essential preconditions for the justice of punishment as thus conceived-preconditions whose non-satisfaction makes our own system of criminal punishment morally problematic. Punishment, Communication, and Community offers no easy answers, but provides a rich and ambitious ideal of what criminal punishment could be-an ideal of what criminal punishment cold be-and ideal that challenges existing penal theories as well as our existing penal theories as well as our existing penal practices. (shrink)

In a series of influential articles, Rae Langton has argued that Austinian speech-act theory can illuminate the way in which pornography contributes to the subordination of women. I will argue that Langton’s application of Austin is incorrect. In earlier work, I have argued against Langton’s view on the grounds that being subordinated is not the sort of condition that can be brought about through an illocutionary act. In this paper, however, I will set aside that objection and focus instead on (...) Langton’s claims about the type of illocutionary act pornography might be. I will argue, first, that Langton cannot say what she wants to say about the content of pornography and still have it that pornography is a verdictive or exercitive speech act, in Austin’s sense. Verdictive and exercitive speech acts do not, and cannot describe the states of affairs they bring about. Second, I will argue that pornography does not in any case satisfy the conditions necessary for a speech act to be verdictive or exercitive. Specifically, there do not exist accepted background conventions that would give the pornographer authority to render verdicts or to take executive action. This objection to Langton’s view has been made before; I’ll show that her response to the objection betrays a confusion of authority with power. (shrink)

The present article commences analyzing the origins and influences of the religious discourse on the configuration of the modern constitutional discourse and the contributions of the jus-positivism in the consolidation of this sacred-civil language. The second issue is the definition of the U.S. Constitution as a mixed and not as a democratic constitution, with regard to the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius to the Drafters of the first modern constitutional text; stability and equilibrium took preference over democracy in (...) a wide sense. I also analyze how the Drafter’s decision has conditioned the modern constitutional system up to the present. (shrink)

In ”Embodiment and Epistemology,” Louise Antony considers a kind of ”Cartesian epistemology” according to which, so far as knowing goes, knowers could be completely disembodied, that is, pure Cartesian egos. Antony examines a number of recent challenges to Cartesian epistemology, particularly challenges from feminist epistemology. She contends that we might have good reason to think that theorizing about knowledge can be influenced by features of our embodiment, even if we lack reason to suppose that knowing itself varies relative (...) to such features. She also argues that a masculinist bias can result in mishandling of cognitive differences in cases where they actually exist and she examines a number of the ways in which the maleness of philosophy has, according to feminists, distorted epistemology. Even if a Cartesian approach offers one indispensable part of a comprehensive epistemology, according to Antony, we still need an epistemology that answers questions raised by our everyday, embodied lives. (shrink)

Given Locke’s views on primary and secondary qualities, it seems he is committed to there being real underlying properties in objects, the arrangement and disposition of which underlies and produces the observed properties of that object. It might be natural to think that these primary qualities provide a general system for classifying objects into classes: that we could delineate the real kinds of objects in nature by looking at what their real primary qualities were. A list of the particular qualities (...) of some object would define that object perfectly precisely; by looking at which properties were shared or divergent between this object and others, we group the object with others in the same kind. These real kinds in nature can play several important theoretical roles. They can support real scientific understanding, including inductive inferences (iof things are of the same real kind, then observed properties of one support the inference to unobserved properties of the other); they can form the basis for our judgements about the powers and capacities of particular objects, based on the what other things of that type can do; and these real kinds can provide the meanings for general terms: the thought being that the meanings of class names are empty without real classes to which they correspond. (shrink)

Con el fin de desentrañar el papel que las más actuales corrientes filosóficas desempeñan en la educación, los autores de este libro parten de un crítico análisis de los acontecimientos de mayo del 68.Se intuyen dos vías de intervención de la filosofía sobre el pensamiento y la práctica educativa: por un lado, la tendencia anti constructivista a los discursos posmodernos, sistémicos y tecnológicos ; por otro, la persistencia del humanismo asentado ahora en el intento de prolongar la modernidad" y en (...) nuevas perspectivas tales como el pacifismo y el ecologismo. (shrink)

A complete history of Islamic political thought from early Islam to the present Now in its 2nd edition, this textbook describes and interprets all schools of Islamic political thought, their origins, inter-connections and meaning. It examines the Qur'an, the early Caliphate, classical Islamic philosophy and the political culture of the Ottoman and other empires. It covers major thinkers such as Averroes and Ibn Taymiyya as well as a number of lesser authors, and Ibn Khaldun is presented as one of the (...) most original political theorists ever. It draws on a wide range of sources including writings on religion, law, philosophy and statecraft expressed in treatises, handbooks and political rhetoric. The new edition analyses the connections between religion and politics, covering the most recent developments in Islamic political thought and the most recent historical scholarship. It ends with a critical survey of reformism and Islamism from the late-19th century up to the present day. (shrink)

Does the unconscious exist? Cultural critic Antony Easthope answers with a witty, lucid, informed "yes" and draws out its implications for the way we live, how we enjoy art, and how we think about people in society and history. Drawing on the writings of Freud and Lacan, he argues that the study of the unconscious is a way of analyzing meanings across culture as an effect of desire. Easthope tests for unconscious significance in an amazing variety of examples, including (...) jokes, Tampax advertisements, Hamlet , Hitchcock's Psycho , the life and death of Princess Di, Terminator 2 , Bob Geldof's autobiography, and the film Titanic. (shrink)

Rather than entailing that a particular outcome will occur, many scientific theories only entail that an outcome will occur with a certain probability. Because scientific evidence inevitably falls short of conclusive proof, when choosing between different theories it is standard to make reference to how probable the various options are in light of the evidence. A full understanding of probability in science needs to address both the role of probabilities in theories, or chances, as well as the role of probabilistic (...) judgment in theory choice. In this chapter, the author introduces and distinguishes the two sorts of probability from one another and attempt to offer a satisfactory characterization of how the different uses for probability in science are to be understood. A closing section turns to the question of how views about the chance of some outcome should guide our confidence in that outcome. (shrink)