Prawitz proposed certain notions of proof-theoretic validity and conjectured that intuitionistic logic is complete for them [11, 12]. Considering propositional logic, we present a general framework of five abstract conditions which any proof-theoretic semantics should obey. Then we formulate several more specific conditions under which the intuitionistic propositional calculus turns out to be semantically incomplete. Here a crucial role is played by the generalized disjunction principle. Turning to concrete semantics, we show that prominent proposals, including Prawitz’s, satisfy at least one (...) of these conditions, thus rendering IPC semantically incomplete for them. Only for Goldfarb’s [1] proof-theoretic semantics, which deviates from standard approaches, IPC turns out to be complete. Overall, these results show that basic ideas of proof-theoretic semantics for propositional logic are not captured by IPC. (shrink)

This special issue on general proof theory collects papers resulting from the conference on general proof theory held in November 2015 in Tübingen.

Several proof-theoretic notions of validity have been proposed in the literature, for which completeness of intuitionistic logic has been conjectured. We define validity for intuitionistic propositional logic in a way which is common to many of these notions, emphasizing that an appropriate notion of validity must be closed under substitution. In this definition we consider atomic systems whose rules are not only production rules, but may include rules that allow one to discharge assumptions. Our central result shows that Harrop’s rule (...) is valid under substitution, which refutes the completeness conjecture for intuitionistic logic. (shrink)

This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Dummett's justification of logical laws, Kreisel's theory of constructions, paradoxical reasoning, and the defence of model theory. The field of proof-theoretic semantics has existed for almost 50 years, but the term (...) itself was proposed by Schroeder-Heister in the 1980s. Proof-theoretic semantics explains the meaning of linguistic expressions in general and of logical constants in particular in terms of the notion of proof. This volume emerges from presentations at the Second International Conference on Proof-Theoretic Semantics in Tübingen in 2013, where contributing authors were asked to provide a self-contained description and analysis of a significant research question in this area. The contributions are representative of the field and should be of interest to logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians alike. (shrink)

Abstract Benefit sharing as envisaged by the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is a relatively new idea in international law. Within the context of non-human biological resources, it aims to guarantee the conservation of biodiversity and its sustainable use by ensuring that its custodians are adequately rewarded for its preservation. Prior to the adoption of the CBD, access to biological resources was frequently regarded as a free-for-all. Bioprospectors were able to take resources out of their natural habitat and develop (...) commercial products without sharing benefits with states or local communities. This paper asks how CBD-style benefit-sharing fits into debates of justice. It is argued that the CBD is an example of a set of social rules designed to increase social utility. It is also argued that a common heritage of humankind principle with inbuilt benefit-sharing mechanisms would be preferable to assigning bureaucratic property rights to non-human biological resources. However, as long as the international economic order is characterized by serious distributive injustices, as reflected in the enormous poverty-related death toll in developing countries, any morally acceptable means toward redressing the balance in favor of the disadvantaged has to be welcomed. By legislating for a system of justice-in-exchange covering nonhuman biological resources in preference to a free-for-all situation, the CBD provides a small step forward in redressing the distributive justice balance. It therefore presents just legislation sensitive to the international relations context in the 21st century. (shrink)

This open access book is a superb collection of some fifteen chapters inspired by Schroeder-Heister's groundbreaking work, written by leading experts in the field, plus an extensive autobiography and comments on the various contributions by Schroeder-Heister himself. For several decades, Peter Schroeder-Heister has been a central figure in proof-theoretic semantics, a field of study situated at the interface of logic, theoretical computer science, natural-language semantics, and the philosophy of language. -/- The chapters of which this book is (...) composed discuss the subject from a rich variety of angles, including the history of logic, the proper interpretation of logical validity, natural deduction rules, the notions of harmony and of synonymy, the structure of proofs, the logical status of equality, intentional phenomena, and the proof theory of second-order arithmetic. All chapters relate directly to questions that have driven Schroeder-Heister's own research agenda and to which he has made seminal contributions. The extensive autobiographical chapter not only provides a fascinating overview of Schroeder-Heister's career and the evolution of his academic interests but also constitutes a contribution to the recent history of logic in its own right, painting an intriguing picture of the philosophical, logical, and mathematical institutional landscape in Germany and elsewhere since the early 1970s. The papers collected in this book are illuminatingly put into a unified perspective by Schroeder-Heister's comments at the end of the book. Both graduate students and established researchers in the field will find this book an excellent resource for future work in proof-theoretic semantics and related areas. (shrink)

Thinking about the first coming and how it relates to visions of a second coming is one of the most important ways for the Christian tradition to contribute to serious reflection on the structure of history, the significance of anticipation, and their importance for the structure of action. This paper draws on two texts, Flannery O’Connor’s novel, Wise Blood, and Thomas Sheehan’s historical and theological study, The First Coming, to lay a groundwork for such reflection. Rather than treating the (...) texts sequentially, this article intertwines them, following the structure of Sheehan’s book but illuminating it with O’Connor’s story. (shrink)

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois, houses a trove of invaluable historical resources concerning all aspects of the Prairie State’s past. Treasures of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library commemorates the institution’s 125-year history, as well as its contributions to scholarship and education by highlighting a selection of eighty-five treasures from among more than twelve million items in the library’s collections. After opening with a historical overview and extensive chronology of the Library, the volume organizes the treasures by various (...) topics, including items that illustrate various locations and materials relating to business, the mid-nineteenth century and the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the oldest items, unusual treasures, ethnicity, and art. From the Gettysburg Address, Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s letters, and Governor Dan Walker’s boots to a Deering Harvester Company catalog, WPA publications, and an Adlai Stevenson I campaign hat, each entry includes a thorough description of the item, one or more images, and a discussion of its history and how the library acquired it, if known. Other treasures include the Thomas Yates General Store daybook, Dubin Pullman car materials, Civil War newspapers, a Lincoln coffin photograph, the Mary Lincoln insanity verdict, the Directory of Sangamon County’s Colored Citizens, andLincoln’s stovepipe hat. To highlight the academic importance of the Library, nineteen researchers share how study in the Library’s collections proved essential to their projects. Although these treasures only scrape the surface of the vast holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, together they epitomize the rich, varied, and sometimes quirky resources available to both serious scholars and curious tourists alike at this valuable cultural institution. 2015 ISHS Superior Achievement Award. (shrink)

The inversion principle for logical rules expresses a relationship between introduction and elimination rules for logical constants. Hallnäs & Schroeder-Heister proposed the principle of definitional reflection, which embodies basic ideas of inversion in the more general context of clausal definitions. For the context of admissibility statements, this has been further elaborated by Schroeder-Heister . Using the framework of definitional reflection and its admissibility interpretation, we show that, in the sequent calculus of minimal propositional logic, the left introduction rules (...) are admissible when the right introduction rules are taken as the definitions of the logical constants and vice versa. This generalizes the well-known relationship between introduction and elimination rules in natural deduction to the framework of the sequent calculus. (shrink)

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

forthcoming in reisner and steglich-peterson, eds., Reasons for Belief If I believe, for no good reason, that P and I infer (correctly) from this that Q, I don’t think we want to say that I ‘have’ P as evidence for Q. Only things that I believe (or could believe) rationally, or perhaps, with justification, count as part of the evidence that I have. It seems to me that this is a good reason to include an epistemic acceptability constraint on evidence (...) possessed…1 It is a truism that adopting an unjustified belief does not put you in a better evidential position with respect to believing its consequences. This truism has led many philosophers to assume that there must, at a minimum, be a justification condition (and perhaps even a knowledge condition) on what it takes to count as having evidence. This is the best (or only) possible explanation of the truism, these philosophers have believed. This paper explores an alternative explanation for the truism. According to the alternative explanation that I will offer, unjustified beliefs do not put you in a better evidential position with respect to believing their consequences because any evidence you have in virtue of having an unjustified belief is guaranteed to be defeated. Since the lack of justification for a belief guarantees its defeat, I will suggest, we don't need to postulate a special justification condition (much less a knowledge condition) on what it takes to count as having evidence. Why is this important? It is important because the assumption that there must be a justification condition (or perhaps a knowledge condition) on what it takes to count as having evidence places a high bar on what it takes to have evidence - such a high bar that it is difficult to see how this bar could be met in the case of basic, perceptually justified beliefs. As a result, the high bar set by this condition plays a fundamental role, I will claim, in central features of a core dialectic from the epistemology of basic perceptual belief which plays a central role in the debates between internalism and externalism, foundationalism and coherentism, and rationalism and empiricism.. (shrink)

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers (...) from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Scientists have the ability to influence policy in important ways through how they present their results. Surprisingly, existing codes of scientific ethics have little to say about such choices. I propose that we can arrive at a set of ethical guidelines to govern scientists’ presentation of information to policymakers by looking to bioethics: roughly, just as a clinician should aim to promote informed decision-making by patients, a scientist should aim to promote informed decision-making by policymakers. Though this may sound like (...) a natural proposal, I show it offers guidance that conflicts with standard scientific practices. I conclude by considering one cost of the proposal: that it would prevent scientists from acting as advocates in a way that is currently common in certain fields. I accept that the proposal would restrict scientists’ political advocacy rights, but argue that the benefits of adopting it — promoting democratic governance — justify the restriction. (shrink)

Joining the debate over the roles of reason and appetite in the moral mind, In Praise of Desire takes the side of appetite. Acting for moral reasons, acting in a praiseworthy manner, and acting out of virtue are simply acting out of intrinsic desires for the right or the good.

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

Metaethics is the study of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, insofar as they relate to the subject matter of moral or, more broadly, normative discourse – the subject matter of what is good, bad, right or wrong, just, reasonable, rational, what we must or ought to do, or otherwise. But out of these four ‘core’ areas of philosophy, it is plausibly the philosophy of language that is most central to metaethics – and not simply (...) because ‘metaethics’ was for a long time construed more narrowly as a name for the study of moral language. The philosophy of language is central to metaethics because both the advantages of and the open problems facing different metaethical theories differ sharply over the answers those theories give to central questions in the philosophy of language. In fact, among the open problems over which such theories differ, are included particularly further problems in the philosophy of language. This article briefly surveys a range of broad categories of views in metaethics and both catalogues some of the principal issues faced by each in the philosophy of language, as well as how those arise out of their answers to more basic questions in the philosophy of language. I make no claim to completeness, only to raising a variety of important issues. (shrink)

Imagine you are walking down a city street. It is windy and raining. Amidst the bustle you see a young woman. She sits under a railway bridge, hardly protected from the rain and holds a woolen hat containing a small number of coins. You can see that she trembles from the cold. Or imagine seeing an old woman walking in the street at dusk, clutching her bag with one hand and a walking stick with the other. A group of male (...) youths walk behind her without overtaking, drunk and in the mood for mischief. It doesn't need an academic to say what vulnerability is. We can all see it, much more often than we care to. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel (...) when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief. (shrink)

Common-sense allows that talk about moral truths makes perfect sense. If you object to the United States’ Declaration of Independence’s assertion that it is a truth that ‘all men’ are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’, you are more likely to object that these rights are not unalienable or that they are not endowed by the Creator, or even that its wording ignores the fact that women have rights too, than that this is not the sort of thing (...) which could be a truth. Whether it is a truth or not seems beside the point, anyway; the writers of the Declaration could just have well written, ‘We hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and also that it is self-evident that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ save only that its cadence would lack some of the poetic resonance of the version which garnered Hancock’s signature. Yet famously, ethical noncognitivists have proclaimed that moral sentences can’t be true or false – that, like ‘Hooray!’ or ‘dammit!’, they are not even the kinds of things to be true or false. Noncognitivism is sometimes even defined as the view that this is so, but even philosophers who define ‘noncognitivism’ more broadly, as consistent with the idea that moral sentences may be true or false, have believed that they needed to do important philosophical spadework in order to make sense of how moral sentences could be true or false. In this article we’ll look at the puzzle about moral truth as it is faced by early noncognitivists and by metaethical expressivists, the early noncognitivists’ contemporary cousins. We’ll look at what it would take for expressivists to ‘earn the right’ to talk about moral truths at all, and in particular at what it would take for them to earn the right to claim that moral truths behave in the ways that we should expect – including that meaningful moral sentences which lack presuppositions are true or false, and that classically valid arguments are truth-preserving.. (shrink)

Benefit sharing has been a recurrent theme in international debates for the past two decades. However, despite its prominence in law, medical ethics and political philosophy, the concept has never been satisfactorily defined. In this conceptual paper, a definition that combines current legal guidelines with input from ethics debates is developed. Philosophers like boxes; protective casings into which they can put concisely-defined concepts. Autonomy is the human capacity for self-determination; beneficence denotes the virtue of good deeds, coercion is the intentional (...) threat of harm and so on. What about benefit sharing? Does the concept have a box and are the contents clearly defined? The answer to this question has to be no. The concept of benefit sharing is almost unique in that various disciplines use it regularly without precise definitions. In this article, a definition for benefit sharing is provided, to eliminate unnecessary ambiguity. (shrink)

Michael Ridge claims to have ‘finessed’ the Frege-Geach Problem ‘on the cheap’. In this short paper I explain a couple of the reasons why this thought is premature.

In nearly forty years’ of work, Simon Blackburn has done more than anyone to expand our imaginations about the aspirations for broadly projectivist/expressivist theorizing in all areas of philosophy. I know that I am far from alone in that his work has often been a source of both inspiration and provocation for my own work. It might be tempting, in a volume of critical essays such as this, to pay tribute to Blackburn’s special talent for destructive polemic, by seeking to (...) take down that by which I’ve been most provoked over the years. But Blackburn’s biting wit has both more wit and more bite than I could hope to emulate. So instead I’ll try to emulate here what I’ve admired the most about Blackburn – the constructive vein of much of his work. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

Define teleology as the view that requirements hold in virtue of facts about value or goodness. Teleological views are quite popular, and in fact some philosophers (e.g. Dreier, Smith) argue that all (plausible) moral theories can be understood teleologically. I argue, however, that certain well-known cases show that the teleologist must at minimum assume that there are certain facts that an agent ought to know, and that this means that requirements can't, in general, hold in virtue of facts about value (...) or goodness. I then show that even if we grant those 'ought's teleology still runs into problems. A positive justification of teleology looks like it will require an argument of this form: O(X); if X, then O(Y); therefore O(Y). But this form of argument isn't in general valid. I conclude by offering two positive suggestions for those attracted to a teleological outlook. (shrink)

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995), Mike Thau (2002), Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage (...) of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions. (shrink)

According to the thesis of the guise of the normative, all desires are associated with normative appearances or judgments. But guise of the normative theories differ sharply over the content of the normative representation, with the two main versions being the guise of reasons and the guise of the good. Chapter 6 defends the comparative thesis that the guise of reasons thesis is more promising than the guise of the good. The central idea is that observations from the theory of (...) content determination can be used in order to constrain possible theories of the representational contents associated with desire. The authors argue that the initially most promising versions of the guise of the good fail to meet these constraints, and then explain the steep challenge confronting any who wish to craft a new guise of the good theory which meets the constraints while also preserving the initial motivations for adopting any guise of the normative theory at all. But a simple version of the guise of reasons not only avoids the troubles besetting the guise of the good but proceeds immediately from a deep diagnosis of the source of its difficulties. (shrink)

These essays bring Weber's sociology to bear on the current transformation of the political landscape. After the collapse of communism, many states are faced with the challenges of democratization: they need to establish their legitimacy in an uncertain economic climate and within a new geopolitical order. The essays in this volume develop Weberian concepts and apply his comparative-historical method to deepen our understanding of these problems. They cover a wide range of examples, from the United Stated to Western and Eastern (...) Europe, and from Russia and Japan to the Islamic States. (shrink)

As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive (...) tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”. (shrink)

Global bioethics is a bold project. In its moderate form, it aims to find solutions to the dilemmas posed by modern medicine and the biological sciences through intercultural understanding of human obligations and opportunities. In its more ambitious form, it endeavors to cover all possible ethical problems arising with regard to life and living things on earth. Given the ambitiousness of even the moderate aim, it is unsurprising that disputes are frequent and agreements are scarce. One of the most contentious (...) issues is whether human rights should play an important role in global bioethics or not. a. (shrink)

Theoretical and practical deliberation are voluntary activities, and like all voluntary activities, they are performed for reasons. To hold that all voluntary activities are performed for reasons in virtue of their relations to past, present, or even merely possible acts of deliberation thus leads to infinite regresses and related problems. As a consequence, there must be processes that are nondeliberative and nonvoluntary but that nonetheless allow us to think and act for reasons, and these processes must be the ones that (...) generate the voluntary activities making up ordinary deliberation. These nondeliberative, nonvoluntary processes by means of which we are able to deliberate for reasons are the fundamental processes by means of which we can think or do anything for a reason: once it has been seen that they must exist, it can be recognized that they are ubiquitous. As a result, the usefulness of deliberation to rational belief and action is intermittent, contingent, and modest. Deliberation is a tremendously valuable tool for increasing human capacities to think and act for good reasons in challenging contexts, but in the end it is merely a tool, wielded by people through the same nondeliberative, nonvoluntary capacities to think and act for reasons that they are enhancing the effectiveness of by deliberating. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

1. Bd. Einleitung. Der altarische Himmelsgott, das höchste gute Wesen. -- 2. Bd. Naturverehrung und Lebensfeste.

On September 28, 2002, 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, a banker's son, was abducted on the way to his parents' house in Frankfurt. A sum of one million Euro was demanded for his release. Three days after Jakob's disappearance, Magnus Gäfgen, a 32-year-old law student, collected the ransom from the arranged tram stop in Frankfurt during the night. While under observation by the police, he ordered a new Mercedes and booked a holiday abroad. Seventy-six hours after Jakob's disappearance, the police arrested (...) Gäfgen and his 16-year-old girlfriend while simultaneously searching his flat. There they found the missing ransom, but no sign of Jakob. a b. (shrink)