The present paper analyzes the dialogue between Gilles Deleuze and François Jullien. We focus on three axes articulated by the idea of immanence. Firstly, we shall compare the usage of the expression “absolutization of immanence”, coined by the sinologist in order to play down transcendence in Chinese thought, which was eventually applied by Deleuze within the realm of belief in this world. Secondly, we shall examine Jullien’s critic to Deleuze on the relation between philosophy and wisdom. We sustain that even (...) if the deleuzian description presents ambivalence in the “pre-philosophical” plane of immanence, it does not entail the superiority of philosophy. Thirdly, we shall confront the divergent perspectives on immanence: Deleuze’s treatment as plan and Jullien’s conception as fonds. Finally, we shall expose the hardship to think the idea of immanence present in the work of both authors. (shrink)

En el marco del debate sobre los lineamientos fundamentales de la ética de Deleuze, diversos autores han reparado en nociones destacadas de su obra: el deseo, el devenir, la afirmación, el nomadismo. Mi propuesta en este artículo es desarrollar una vía poco estudiada, que gira alrededor de la idea de prudencia práctica experimental. Según mi hipótesis, este concepto reúne perspectivas relevantes de la producción deleuzeana posterior a L'Anti-Œdipe, en particular su orientación vitalista, su opción por la desubjetivación y su apelación (...) a una dimensión ascética vinculada con el deseo como impulsor de la experimentación. Within the realm of debate on fundamental layouts of Deleuze's ethics, several authors have concentrated on significant notions in his work: desire, becoming, affirmation, nomadism. In this article my proposal is to develop a road, scarcely studied yet, in connection with the idea of experimental practical prudence. Respect to my hypothesis, this concept assembles relevant perspectives of Deleuze's post L'Anti-Œdipe production, especially his orientation towards vitalism, his choice for desubjectivation and his appeal to an ascetic dimension linked to desire as motor to experimentation. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este artículo abordamos la cuestión del poder en el pensamiento de Deleuze. Según nuestra hipótesis, no hay en su obra un único concepto de poder sino diferentes enfoques no incompatibles entre sí pero que no se dejan reducir a un solo punto de vista. Esta variedad de abordajes puede ser reunida alrededor de dos posiciones generales adoptadas por Deleuze: primero, tiende a relativizar su eficacia respecto de otros elementos más fundamentales, realzando así los límites o la impotencia del (...) poder; segundo, le quita valor con relación a otras entidades y procesos en los que deposita su apuesta filosófica. Nos proponemos desarrollar estas perspectivas a fin de ofrecer un panorama integral de una temática relevante de la filosofía política deleuziana. ABSTRACT In this article, we address the question of power in Deleuze's thinking. According to our hypothesis, there is not a single concept of power in his work, but different approaches not incompatible with each other but that cannot be reduced to a single point of view. This variety of approaches can be gathered around two general positions about power, adopted by Deleuze: first, he tends to relativize its effectiveness with respect to other more fundamental elements, thus enhancing the limits or impotence of power; second, he takes away value in relation to other entities and processes in which he places his philosophical commitment. We intend to develop these perspectives in order to offer a comprehensive overview of a relevant theme of Deleuzian political philosophy. (shrink)

Tras elaborar una versión de la Historia Universal motorizada por la producción deseante, Deleuze adoptó un viraje anti-historicista, desplazándose a los devenires no históricos y multiplicando perspectivas negativas sobre la historia. En el marco del debate entre quienes le adjudican posiciones exclusivamente anti-historicistas y quienes le atribuyen una filosofía de la historia o una metodología historicista, proponemos elucidar las críticas deleuzianas a la historia sirviéndonos de la distinción entre la historia como realidad objetiva y la disciplina histórica. Además, analizamos la (...) primacía otorgada a la filosofía sobre la historia a partir de su concepción del acontecimiento y su temporalidad. (shrink)

El artículo presenta la “inmanencia práctica” como clave de la ética que G. Deleuze elabora a partir de B. Spinoza y F. Nietzsche. La noción involucra tres tesis que manifiestan la reivindicación incondicional de la inmanencia y la crítica a toda trascendencia: valorización del cuerpo en detrimento de la conciencia; apelación a lo bueno y lo malo, en lugar del bien y el mal; y apología de la alegría e inocencia del devenir. Se sostiene que esta ética naturalista y pluralista (...) se apoya en criterios de valoración ligados a la vida como punto fundamental de apreciación, y se propone la creación de nuevas maneras de ser como medio de enfrentar al sistema del juicio moral sobre el que descansa el nihilismo. (shrink)

RESUMEN El artículo presenta la “inmanencia práctica” como clave de la ética que G. Deleuze elabora a partir de B. Spinoza y F. Nietzsche. La noción involucra tres tesis que manifiestan la reivindicación incondicional de la inmanencia y la crítica a toda trascendencia: valorización del cuerpo en detrimento de la conciencia; apelación a lo bueno y lo malo, en lugar del bien y el mal; y apología de la alegría e inocencia del devenir. Se sostiene que esta ética naturalista y (...) pluralista se apoya en criterios de valoración ligados a la vida como punto fundamental de apreciación, y se propone la creación de nuevas maneras de ser como medio de enfrentar al sistema del juicio moral sobre el que descansa el nihilismo. ABSTRACT The article presents ‘practical immanence’ as the key to the ethics developed by G. Deleuze on the basis of B. Spinoza and F. Nietzsche. This notion involves three theses that show the unconditional vindication of immanence and the critique of all transcendence: affirmation of the body over consciousness; appealing to the good things and the bad things rather than to good and evil; and the defense of the joy and innocence of becoming. The article argues that this naturalistic and pluralistic ethics is grounded in assessment criteria linked to life as the focal point of appreciation, and suggests the creation of new ways of being as a means to tackle the system of moral judgment on which nihilism is based. (shrink)

El concepto de "inmanencia" ha adquirido una creciente relevancia en el campo filosófico contemporáneo. Dos destacados pensadores franceses, Gilles Deleuze y Franfois Jullien, le han otorgado un lugar fundamental en sus investigaciones. El propósito de este artículo es indagar el diálogo, poco explorado aún, entre ambos autores. Nuestra hipótesis de trabajo propone los siguientes ejes de análisis: primero, comparamos los usos de la expresión "absolutización de la inmanencia", acuñada por el sinólogo a fin de relativizar la trascendencia en el pensamiento (...) chino y luego empleada por Deleuze en el marco de la creencia en este mundo. En segundo lugar, examinamos las críticas que Jullien le dirige a Deleuze respecto a la relación entre la filosofía y la sabiduría. En tercer lugar, confrontamos sus perspectivas divergentes sobre la inmanencia en tanto "plano" (Deleuze) y como "fondo" (Jullien). Finalmente, ponemos de manifiesto la dificultad presente en ambos autores para pensar la idea de inmanencia. The concept of "immanence" has acquired substantial relevance within the contemporary philosophical field. Two influential french thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Franfois Jullien, have conferred this concept a fundamental standing in their research. The purpose of this work is to explore the dialogue between both authors as this exploration has not been concluded. Our hypothesis puts forward the following axes of analysis. First, we shall compare the usage of the expression "absolutization of immanence" coined by the sinologist in order to put in perspective the idea of transcendence in Chinese thought. This expression was then applied by Deleuze within the frame of the belief in this world. Second, we shall examine Jullien's critique of Deleuze concerning the relationship between Philosophy and Wisdom. Third, we shall confront the divergent perspectives on immanence: as "plane" (Deleuze) and as "buttom" (Jullien). Finally, we shall show the difficulty to ponder the idea of immanence in both authors. (shrink)

The more common scheme to explain the classical limit of quantum mechanics includes decoherence, which removes from the state the interference terms classically inadmissible since embodying non-Booleanity. In this work we consider the classical limit from a logical viewpoint, as a quantum-to-Boolean transition. The aim is to open the door to a new study based on dynamical logics, that is, logics that change over time. In particular, we appeal to the notion of hybrid logics to describe semiclassical systems. Moreover, we (...) consider systems with many characteristic decoherence times, whose sublattices of properties become distributive at different times. (shrink)

While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children. For the same level of SES, children in rural settings performed consistently worse (...) than children in urban settings. These differences could be accounted mostly by the months of past preschool attendance and the father’s completed level of education. These results should inform policies and programs for children living in rural poverty worldwide, and specially in Latin America. (shrink)

Defeasible argumentation has been applied successfully in several real-world domains in which it is necessary to handle incomplete and contradictory information. In recent years, there have been interesting attempts to carry out argumentation processes supported by massive repositories developing argumentative reasoning applications. One of such efforts builds arguments by retrieving information from relational databases using the DBI-DeLP framework; this article presents eDBI-DeLP, which extends the original DBI-DeLP framework by providing two novel aspects which refine the interaction between DeLP programs and (...) relational databases. First, we expand the expressiveness of dbi-delp programs by providing ways of controlling how the information in databases is recovered; this is done by introducing filters that enable an improved fine-grained control on the argumentation processes which become useful in applications, providing the semantics and the implementation of such filters. Second, we introduce an argument comparison criterion which can be adjusted at the level of literals to model particular features such as credibility and topic expertise, among others. These new tools can be particularly useful in environments such as medical diagnosis expert systems, decision support systems, or recommender systems based on argumentation, where datasets are often provided in the form of relational databases. (shrink)

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This essay argues (...) that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, self-control does powerfully illustrate the importance of a feature of the mind. What it illustrates, I argue, is the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. It is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. If we think of Humeanism as the view that there is fundamentally only one kind of motivational system and that all action is based in that system, then this essay contributes to a defense of Humeanism. On the other hand, the essay also shows that any model of agency in terms of only beliefs and desires, motivational and representational states, or preferences and credences is incomplete. A different conception of Humeanism as the view that every mental state is either motivational, representational, or a combination of them, is false. (shrink)

Trataremos los diseños más icónicos “hechos en España” durante la década del boom de los años ochenta. Son numerosas las publicaciones que se hacen eco de ellos, no obstante, nuestra aportación radica en ponerlos en relación con el diseño internacional de esa misma década tomando como referencia los diseños premiados en los Premios Delta del diseño español y la colección del MoMA (disponible online), puesto que es un referente en cuanto a que fue uno de los primeros museos de arte (...) contemporáneo que musealizó objetos de diseño y valoró su componente estético, su funcionalidad y su innovación tecnológica. (shrink)

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element (...) of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments are proliferating at an astonishing rate. Unsurprisingly, the number of meaningful studies addressing the social impacts of AI applications in several fields has been remarkable. More recently, several contributions have started exploring the ecological impacts of AI. Machine learning systems do not have a neutral environmental cost, so it is important to unravel the ecological footprint of these techno-scientific developments. In this chapter, we discuss the sustainability of AI from environmental ethics approaches. We examine the moral (...) trade-offs that AI may cause in different moral dimensions and analyse prominent conflicts that may arise from human and more-than-human-centred concerns. (shrink)

Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions about error in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moral error, rather than an account of judgments about moral error. In this paper I argue that the (...) challenge can be reinstated, even if we focus only on the expressivist's account of judgments about moral error. (shrink)

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

Solidarity within bioethics is increasingly being recognized as an important means of improving health for all. Its contribution seems particularly relevant when there are injustices or inequalities in health and different individuals or groups are disadvantaged. But the current context of ecological collapse, characterized mainly by a loss of biodiversity and ecosystem decline, affects global health in a different way to other factors. This scenario creates new challenges, risks and problems that require new insights from a bioethical perspective. I, therefore, (...) propose an argument in favor of ecological solidarity. The aim of this article is to re-define this concept, outlining which causes should incite action through ecological solidarity and who should be the main recipient of it. To this end, I discuss what the background for practicing ecological solidarity might be: an intrinsically altruistic motivation to attempt to be a better person or a forced response to a political obligation. Finally, by way of example, I argue for rewilding as an effective, practical strategy through which ecological solidarity can be applied in the belief that building ecological solidarity supports a number of key interdependencies and ensures ethical care for the health of the planet. (shrink)

The author outlines a spiritually oriented model of cosmic education inspired by Advaita Vedanta philosophy. The description of the general principles of this Nondual Vedantic Cosmic Education (NVCE) will be preceded by a brief review of the writings of two Indian authors, Vivekananda and Aurobindo, who led the revitalisation of nondual vedantic philosophy. In order to utilize the nondual vedantic spiritual wisdom as a curriculum substrate for teaching/learning processes in classrooms, the NVCE model uses some core ideas from Ken Wilber’s (...) Integral Theory, which can serve as an interface theory between nondual vedantic philosophy and this new conception of cosmic education. NVCE will be organized around three main curriculum realms: a) “Purifying the mind”, b) “Controlling the Mind” and c) “Expanding the Mind”. These three curriculum realms are shown to respectively correspond with three processes in Wilber’s Integral Theory, such as a) Show Up, b) Wake Up and c) Grow Up), and also with the four classical yogas mentioned in the wisdom traditions of Hinduism: a) Bakhti Yoga and Karma Yoga, b) Raja Yoga and c) Jnana Yoga. The author holds that this world has no future unless spirituality becomes the substrate of educational processes. In NVCE, which is a proposal to raise the educational building from spiritual pillars, to educate is to guide others and ourselves on the path that leads to the nondual experience. From the nondual vedantic perspective, cosmic education is the path through which human beings progressively dissolve their limited individualities into the nature of God. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...) their phenomenal character, such as the often-remarked vivacity or immediacy of perception. Second, the way in which they represent the world, e.g. the non-propositional nature of the contents, or non-discursive character of the vehicles, that have been held to characterise perceptual representation. Third, their place in cognitive architecture, i.e., roughly, in the information-flow of the mind, such as their alleged (non-)modularity. Fourth, their mind-world relations, e.g. the way in which perceptions seem to be tightly causally linked with distal or proximal stimuli. Against this background, we distinguish some main options for an account of the perception/cognition distinction, in particular concerning whether there is one, several, or no interesting and principled distinction(s) to be drawn here. (shrink)

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a field (...) of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic conception of (...) attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest. (shrink)

Given the pervasiveness of AI systems and their potential negative effects on people’s lives (especially among already marginalised groups), it becomes imperative to comprehend what goes on when an AI system generates a result, and based on what reasons, it is achieved. There are consistent technical efforts for making systems more “explainable” by reducing their opaqueness and increasing their interpretability and explainability. In this paper, we explore an alternative non-technical approach towards explainability that complement existing ones. Leaving aside technical, statistical, (...) or data-related issues, we focus on the very conceptual underpinnings of the design decisions made by developers and other stakeholders during the lifecycle of a machine learning project. For instance, the design and development of an app to track snoring to detect possible health risks presuppose some picture or another of “health”, which is a key notion that conceptually underpins the project. We take it as a premise that these key concepts are necessarily present during design and development, albeit perhaps tacitly. We argue that by providing “justificatory explanations” about how the team understands the relevant key concepts behind its design decisions, interested parties could gain valuable insights and make better sense of the workings and outcomes of systems. Using the concept of “health”, we illustrate how a particular understanding of it might influence decisions during the design and development stages of a machine learning project, and how making this explicit by incorporating it into ex-post explanations might increase the explanatory and justificatory power of these explanations. We posit that a greater conceptual awareness of the key concepts that underpin design and development decisions may be beneficial to any attempt to develop explainability methods. We recommend that “justificatory explanations” are provided as technical documentation. These are declarative statements that contain at its simplest: (1) a high-level account of the understanding of the relevant key concepts a team possess related to a project’s main domain, (2) how these understandings drive decision-making during the life-cycle stages, and (3) it gives reasons (which could be implicit in the account) that the person or persons doing the explanation consider to have plausible justificatory power for the decisions that were made during the project. (shrink)

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare and epidemiology undoubtedly has many benefits for the population. However, due to its environmental impact, the use of AI can produce social inequalities and long-term environmental damages that may not be thoroughly contemplated. In this paper, we propose to consider the impacts of AI applications in medical care from the One Health paradigm and long-term global health. From health and environmental justice, rather than settling for a short and fleeting green honeymoon between (...) health and sustainability caused by AI, it should aim for a lasting marriage. To this end, we conclude by proposing that, in the upcoming years, it could be valuable and necessary to promote more interconnected health, call for environmental cost transparency, and increase green responsibility. (shrink)

What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

No cinema brasileiro recente, o diálogo entre o documentário e a ficção tem merecido destaque, com produções de baixo orçamento e ideias originais. É o caso de Santiago (João Moreira Salles, 2007) e Viajo Porque Preciso, Volto Porque Te Amo (Marcelo Gomes, Karim Aïnouz, 2009), filmes que trabalham esse diálogo de forma sutil e diegética, ressignificando imagens de um arquivo próprio, pessoal.

What is the philosophical significance of attention? The present article provides an overview of recent debates surrounding the connections between attention and other topics of philosophical interest. In particular, it discusses the interplay between attention and consciousness, attention and agency, and attention and reference. The article outlines the questions and contemporary positions concerning how attention shapes the phenomenal character of experience, whether it is necessary or sufficient for consciousness, and whether it plays a special role in the best philosophical theories (...) of action or conceptual reference. Various interdependencies between the answers to these questions are indicated, as well as how these answers might depend on the metaphysics of attention. Together with its companion piece this article serves as an introduction to the philosophy of attention. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the nature, the phenomenal character and the philosophical significance of attention. According to its central thesis, attention is the ongoing mental activity of structuring the stream of consciousness or phenomenal field. The dissertation connects the scientific study of attention in psychology and the neurosciences with central discussions in the philosophy of mind. Once we get clear on the nature and the phenomenal character of attention, we can make progress toward understanding foundational issues concerning the nature and the (...) structure of conscious mentality itself. We understand better how consciousness is connected to self-awareness and to agency, and we get a better grip on the nature of perceptual experience, the unity of consciousness, and its subjective character. The dissertation also aims at showing that the current empirical investigation of attention should be complemented with work at the level of generality that a philosophical analysis can provide; it shows how such an analysis is relevant for the scientific study of attention by providing a new conceptual framework and suggesting several new areas of research. (shrink)

This article studies the origin and continuity of the identity of the entities inscribed in a distributed ledger. Specifically, it focuses on the differences between the identities of the entities that exist in a distributed ledger and those of the entities that exist outside the ledger but must be represented in the ledger in order to interact with it. It suggests that a distributed ledger that contains representations of entities that exist outside the ledger can yield a continuum of interconnected (...) existing and past identities that is constantly redefined to represent new conceptual entities. This continuum can be understood as a metasortal—or a sortal of sortals—that resembles the mathematical structure of a set of sets. Further, the article presents the dilemma that arises when representing the identities of entities in a distributed ledger, and it draws an analogy between this dilemma and Russell's Paradox. (shrink)

We provide a model in which students must choose whether or not to cheat on a course exam. By assuming that the moral cost of acting dishonestly decreases as the number of other people who behave in the same way increases, our model explains one important channel by which unethical behavior of other individuals can influence observers’ behavior. Through the use of the Global Games approach of equilibrium selection, we build a framework that provides the micro-foundations of peer effects on (...) academic dishonesty and shows how better student technology of cheating and higher disutility of effort make the cheating equilibrium more likely to be selected. By extending the model, we find that the peer effect strength is not affected by the level of homogeneity of the cohort, but decreases in the size of the class. Our approach may be seen as an important step towards reduced-form models of peer effects on dishonest behavior. (shrink)

But never let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. (Styron, 1990, p. 62)There is nothing wrong with our biology or our intelligence; sometimes we are just stuck. (Cvetkov...

The logics of formal inconsistency (LFIs, for short) are paraconsistent logics (that is, logics containing contradictory but non-trivial theories) having a consistency connective which allows to recover the ex falso quodlibet principle in a controlled way. The aim of this paper is considering a novel semantical approach to first-order LFIs based on Tarskian structures defined over swap structures, a special class of multialgebras. The proposed semantical framework generalizes previous aproaches to quantified LFIs presented in the literature. The case of QmbC, (...) the simpler quantified LFI expanding classical logic, will be analyzed in detail. An axiomatic extension of QmbC called QLFI1o is also studied, which is equivalent to the quantified version of da Costa and D'Ottaviano 3-valued logic J3. The semantical structures for this logic turn out to be Tarkian structures based on twist structures. The expansion of QmbC and QLFI1o with a standard equality predicate is also considered. (shrink)

Perceptual illusions have often served as an important tool in the study of perceptual experience. In this paper I argue that a recently discovered set of visual illusions sheds new light on the nature of time consciousness. I suggest the study of these silencing illusions as a tool kit for any philosopher interested in the experience of time and show how to better understand time consciousness by combining detailed empirical investigations with a detailed philosophical analysis. In addition, and more specifically, (...) I argue against an initially plausible range of views that assume a close match between the temporal content of visual experience and the temporal layout of experience itself. Against such a widely held structural matching thesis I argue that which temporal changes we are experiencing bears no close relation to how our experience itself is changing over time. Explanations of the silencing illusions that are compatible with the structural matching thesis fail. (shrink)

From the early to mid-1970s, Michel Foucault posited that power consists of a relation rather than a substance and that this relation is comprised of unequal forces engaged in a warlike struggle against each other, resulting invariably in the domination of some forces over others. This understanding of power, which he retrospectively dubbed `Nietzsche's hypothesis' and `the model of war', underpinned his well-known analyses of disciplinary power. Yet, Foucault in his Collège de France course from the academic year 1975-6, `Society (...) Must Be Defended', suddenly began to call into question this understanding and his doubts about it did not abate well into the late 1970s. In this article, we suggest that his militant politics in the early 1970s sustained his adherence to the war model and that his more cautious political attitude later in the decade underpinned his suspicions about this model. Key Words: biopolitics • Henri de Boulainvilliers • Michel Foucault • Thomas Hobbes • militancy • F. W. Nietzsche • politics • power • race • war. (shrink)

In “Risk Based Passenger Screening in Aviation Security: Implications and Variants of a New Paradigm”, Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann describes the current paradigm shift from ‘traditional’ forms of screening to ‘risk based passenger screening’ (RBS) in aviation security. This paradigm shift is put in the context of the wider historical development of risk management approaches. Through a discussion of Michel Foucault, Herfried Münkler and Ulrich Beck, Weydner-Volkmann analyses the shortcomings of such approaches in public security policies, which become especially evident in the (...) aviation security context. As he shows, the turn towards methods of RBS can be seen as an attempt to address a trade-off ‘trilemma’ between the effective provision of security, the implied costs for industry and passengers, and the ethical, legal and societal implications of the screening procedures. In order to analyse foreseeable outcomes of embracing RBS, he differentiates three prototypical variants of the new paradigm on the basis of their main referent and rationale. For each variant, he then subsequently assesses the implications for the ‘trilemma’, after having unveiled the criteria of analysis that will necessarily have to be followed within a serious appraisal of RBS methods. (shrink)

In 1988, J. Ivlev proposed some (non-normal) modal systems which are semantically characterized by four-valued non-deterministic matrices in the sense of A. Avron and I. Lev. Swap structures are multialgebras (a.k.a. hyperalgebras) of a special kind, which were introduced in 2016 by W. Carnielli and M. Coniglio in order to give a non-deterministic semantical account for several paraconsistent logics known as logics of formal inconsistency, which are not algebraizable by means of the standard techniques. Each swap structure induces naturally a (...) non-deterministic matrix. The aim of this paper is to obtain a swap structures semantics for some Ivlev-like modal systems proposed in 2015 by M. Coniglio, L. Fariñas del Cerro and N. Peron. Completeness results will be stated by means of the notion of Lindenbaum–Tarski swap structures, which constitute a natural generalization to multialgebras of the concept of Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras. (shrink)

What should we believe when epistemic and practical reasons pull in opposite directions? The traditional view states that there is something that we ought epistemically to believe and something that we ought practically to (cause ourselves to) believe, period. More recent accounts challenge this view, either by arguing that there is something that we ought simpliciter to believe, all epistemic and practical reasons considered (the weighing view), or by denying the normativity of epistemic reasons altogether (epistemic anti-normativism). I argue against (...) both accounts and defend the traditional view. An agent can be blameworthy in doxastic dilemmas for complying with their practical but not their epistemic reasons. This reveals how epistemic reasons are normative: the concept of epistemic blame helps us track epistemic normativity. (shrink)

In 1986, Mikenberg et al. introduced the semantic notion of quasi-truth defined by means of partial structures. In such structures, the predicates are seen as triples of pairwise disjoint sets: the set of tuples which satisfies, does not satisfy and can satisfy or not the predicate, respectively. The syntactical counterpart of the logic of partial truth is a rather complicated first-order modal logic. In the present article, the notion of predicates as triples is recursively extended, in a natural way, to (...) any complex formula of the first-order object language. From this, a new definition of quasi-truth is obtained. The proof-theoretic counterpart of the new semantics is a first-order paraconsistent logic whose propositional base is a 3-valued logic belonging to hierarchy of paraconsistent logics known as Logics of Formal Inconsistency, which was proposed by Carnielli and Marcos in 2002. (shrink)

Could the organization of consciousness be the key to understanding its unity? This paper considers how the attentional organization of consciousness into centre and periphery bears on the phenomenal unity of consciousness. Two ideas are discussed: according to the first, the attentional organization of consciousness shows that phenomenal holism is true. I argue that the argument from attentional organization to phenomenal holism remains inconclusive. According to the second idea, attentional organization provides a principle of unity for conscious experience, i.e. it (...) is a relationship between the phenomenal parts that occurs in the real definition or essence of consciousness. Conscious experience provides subjects with a subjective perspective, or point of view, because its various parts are structured by attention into what is more central and what is more peripheral. (shrink)