An objection is presented to Lewis’s analysis of counterfactual conditionals in terms of relative closeness of possible worlds. The objection depends on no special assumptions about the ‘closer-than’ relation. The argument also casts doubt on Lewis’s claim that Antecedent Strengthening fails for counterfactuals.

PARC is an "appended numeral" system of natural deduction that I learned as an undergraduate and have taught for many years. Despite its considerable pedagogical strengths, PARC appears to have never been published. The system features explicit "tracking" of premises and assumptions throughout a derivation, the collapsing of indirect proofs into conditional proofs, and a very simple set of quantificational rules without the long list of exceptions that bedevil students learning existential instantiation and universal generalization. The system can be used (...) with any Copi-style set of inference rules, so it is quite adaptable to many mainstream symbolic logic textbooks. Consequently, PARC may be especially attractive to logic teachers who find Jaskowski/Gentzen-style introduction/elimination rules to be far less "natural" than Copi-style rules. The PARC system is also keyboard-friendly in comparison to the widely adopted Jaskowski-style graphical subproof system of natural deduction, viz., Fitch diagrams and Copi "bent arrow" diagrams. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anthony Close THE EMPIRICAL AUTHOR: SALMAN RUSHDIE'S THE SATANIC VERSES HOBBES, comparing the author ofan action to the owner ofgoods, asserts, "And as the right of possession, is called dominion; so the right of doing any action, is called authority" (Leviathan, Book I, chap. 16). My purpose in this essay is to apply this Hobbesian maxim to the relation Author/Text, expanding somewhat Hobbes's notion of authority. I presuppose that (...) in our day-to-day dealings with our fellow men, we envisage each others' acts as exhibiting purpose and commitment, which make them ours in more than the platitudinous sense that we performed them. By virtue of that, they confer on us a privileged, though clearly not unchallengeable, authority in saying what they are and what they are for. Such, in effect, is the position reached by Austin in How to Do Things with Words, and it broadly corresponds to that of various philosophical writings on human action—by Anscombe, Davidson, and Melden.1 To be sure, we may legitimately consider human behavior from other viewpoints (e.g., structuralist, anthropological, psychoanalytical, Marxist) trained on its unconscious presuppositions. Yet, insofar as such theorizing fails to acknowledge the priority of the Hobbesian perspective, it will seem perverse for a reason that has been well put by Charles Taylor. Precisely because history is made up of purposeful activity, Taylor argues, we need to explain historical patterns in a way that is "intelligible in relation to conscious action" even though they may not "issue from conscious action."2 By this criterion much of our modern literary theory is defective. A vivid measure of the deficiency is provided by the furor over Salman Rushdie's TL· Satanic Verses, culminatingin thefatwa pronounced against Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 248-267 Anthony Close249 him by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989. I take it that for anyone vocationally committed to the practice or study ofliterature and to the cause of freedom of expression, the defense of Rushdie cannot be a matter of indifference. Nor can one be indifferent to the chasm of misunderstanding that separates Rushdie and his apologists from the novel's Muslim opponents. I believe that these two causes—defending Rushdie and bridging the chasm—can be reconciled by offering better explanations ofhis novel in place ofcrude denunciations or, from some non-Muslim quarters, smug and knowing dismissals. Yet, as we shall see, the task of explanation could be considered hamstrung by our modern poetics. I was reminded ofHobbes's textby Rushdie's lucid and cogent defense of his novel in TL· Independent (London, February 4, 1990). Against the accusations that he had deliberately reviled the Islamic faith, he argued as follows. Though TL· Satanic Verses, like many novels that Rushdie esteems, is a work of radical dissent, questioning, and reimagining, it is motivated by a spirit of serious inquiry rather than debunking derision. More particularly, it reflects a determination that underlies all Rushdie's work: "to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience offormerly-colonised, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression." He continues: "It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis... that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.... [It] celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure." Note the insistence on how these themes flow direcdy from Rushdie's own experience. Two days after the publication of this article, Harold Pinter gave on Rushdie's behalf a lecture on the relationship of literature to religion and society at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In this lecture, Rushdie articulated a Bakhtinian view of the novelist's function: to dramatize ironically and noncommittally the clash of voices, languages, and ideologies in a world without gods and without traditionsanctioned truth. Rushdie referred specifically, I think, to a species of postmodernist novel which we may dub "palimpsest history";3 the species includes Rushdie's works, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra... (shrink)

This paper concerns the connection between speech act theory, especially the theory of assertion, and deduction, especially Natural Deduction.From a very abstract point of view, an assertion of a content p can be described as the ascription of the property of being p to the actual index, or point of evaluation. This is the abstract characterization of assertoric force. Let’s assume that the actual index is a possible world, namely the actual world. Thus, the conclusion of a (...) class='Hi'>closed argument, as an act, is an assertion, and thereby characterized as the ascription of the conclusion content as a property to the actual world.The question that will concern us in this talk is how this idea extends to the status of other acts in the practice of Natural Deduction. In these terms, what is the force of an inference that depends on one or more open assumptions? What is the force of the assumption itself? What is the force of an assertion that depends on an entire derivation? Do we need to ascribe a force to the derivation as a whole? Is there a coherent complete theory of act forces of Natural Deduction along these lines? What is the relation of such a theory to the theory of validity of an argument? (shrink)

To introduce this collection of research studies, which stem from the pro grams conducted by The World Phenomenology Institute, we need say a few words about our aims and work. This will bring to light the significance of the present volume. The phenomenological philosophy is an unprejudiced study of experience in its entire range: experience being understood as yielding objects. Experi ence, moreover, is approached in a specific way, such a way that it legitima tizes itself naturally in immediate (...) evidence. As such it offers a unique ground for philosophical inquiry. Its basic condition, however, is to legitimize its validity. In this way it allows a dialogue to unfold among various philosophies of different methodologies and persuasions, so that their basic assumptions and conceptions may be investigated in an objective fashion. That is, instead of comparing concepts, we may go below their differences to seek together what they are meant to grasp. We may in this way come to the things them selves, which are the common objective of all philosophy, or what the great Chinese philosopher Wang Yang Ming called "the investigation of things". It is in this spirit that the Institute's programs include a "cross-cultural" dialogue meant to bring about a profound communication among philosophers in their deepest concerns. Rising above artificial cultural confinements, such dialogues bring scholars, thinkers and human beings together toward a truly human community of minds. Our Institute unfolds one consistent academic program. (shrink)

In this book, the author presents two worldviews. The first is the theocentric view of divine providence: God governs and is involved in the development of the world, including that of the animal kingdom. The second worldview is atheistic-materialistic and secular. It regards the abundance of different life forms, human society, economics, beliefs, and emotions as the products of one factor: matter and its movement. Through an analysis of the foundations and assumptions of the secular worldview, the author demonstrates (...) its weakness and lack of rational basis. (shrink)

In this essay, I depart from the historical exclusion of trans women’s ethical insights from care ethics by focusing on trans literature as a source of knowledge expressed by trans women about care. I open up with the systematic denial of trans women as ethical knowers by analyzing Marilyn Frye's characterization of trans women as mindless servile robots under patriarchy. I then turn to trans literature to counter this portrayal. Specifically, I discuss short stories by Casey Plett and Ryka Aoki (...) as sources of knowledge about assumptive and futurebound practices of care. I begin by arguing that the work of Maria Lugones considers the spatial dimensions of love, and that this suggests that care involves giving space to another on their own terms. I then turn to Plett’s story “Other Women” to unpack assumptive care as a short-circuited form of caring in which a relationship to the other on their own terms is closed off by transphobic assumptions. I contrast this with Plett’s story “Winning,” which describes a futurebound care in which another’s space is kept open, permitting action that allows them to flourish on their own terms. After this, I discuss Aoki’s “To the New World” as an engagement with both racist assumptive care and futurebound care aimed at self-care. I conclude that these stories provide a rich space for considering trans ethical knowledge about care. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there (...) is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

This paper argues against a version of open theism defended by Gregory Boyd, which we call “limited risk,” according to which God could guarantee at creation at least the fulfillment of His most central purpose for the world: that of having a “people for himself.” We show that such a view depends on the assumption that free human decisions can be “statistically determined” within certain percentage ranges, and that this assumption is inconsistent with open theists’ commitment to (...) a libertarian conception of human freedom. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there (...) is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

This article argues that: (i) Defeasible reasoning is the use of distinctive procedures for belief revision when new evidence or new authoritative judgment is interpolated into a system of beliefs about an application domain. (ii) These procedures can be explicated and implemented using standard higher-order logic combined with epistemic assumptions about the system of beliefs. The procedures mentioned in (i) depend on the explication in (ii), which is largely described in terms of a Prolog program, EVID, which implements a system (...) for interactive, defeasible reasoning when combined with an application knowledge base. It is shown that defeasible reasoning depends on a meta-level Closed World Assumption applied to the relationship between supporting evidence and a defeasible conclusion based on this evidence. Thesis (i) is then further defended by showing that the EVID explication of defeasible reasoning has sufficient representational power to cover a wide variety of practical applications of defeasible reasoning, especially in the context of decision making. (shrink)

The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from ten original articles the author has previously published in leading academic (...) journals. The case begins with an exposition of the logical fallacies and internal contradictions of the reigning physicalist ontology and its popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism. It then advances a compelling formulation of idealism that elegantly makes sense of - and reconciles - classical and quantum worlds. The main objections to idealism are systematically refuted and empirical evidence is reviewed that corroborates the formulation presented here. The book closes with an analysis of the hidden psychological motivations behind mainstream physicalism and the implications of idealism for the way we relate to the world. (shrink)

An increasing number of scholars at the intersection of feminist philosophy and critical disability studies have turned to Merleau-Ponty to develop phenomenologies of disability or of what, following Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, I call "non-normate" embodiment. These studies buck the historical trend of philosophers employing disability as an example of deficiency or harm, a mere litmus test for normative theories, or an umbrella term for aphenotypical bodily variation. While a Merleau-Pontian-inspired phenomenology is a promising starting point for thinking about embodied experiences of (...) all sorts, I here draw a cautionary tale about how ableist assumptions can easily undermine accounts of non-normate experience. I first argue that the omission or misguided treatment of disability within the history of philosophy in general and the phenomenological tradition in particular is due to the inheritance of what I call “the ableist conflation” of disability with pain, suffering, and disadvantage. I then show that Merleau-Ponty’s famous reading of the blind man’s cane is problematic insofar as it omits the social dimensions of disabled experiences, misconstrues the radicality of blindness as a world-creating disability, and operates via an able-bodied simulation that confuses object annexation or extension with incorporation. In closing, I contend that if phenomenology is to overcome the errors of traditional philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty once hoped, it must heed the insights of “crip” or non-normate phenomenology, which takes the lived experience of disability as its point of departure. [French translation forthcoming in Pour une phénoménologie critique, ed. Donald A. Landes, Quebec City, Les Presses de l'Université Laval/Paris, J.Vrin]. (shrink)

I argue that Deutsch’s model for the behavior of systems traveling around closed timelike curves relies implicitly on a substantive metaphysical assumption. Deutsch is employing a version of quantum theory with a significantly supplemented ontology of parallel existent worlds, which differ in kind from the many worlds of the Everett interpretation. Standard Everett does not support the existence of multiple identical copies of the world, which the D-CTC model requires. This has been obscured because he often refers (...) to the branching structure of Everett as a “multiverse”, and describes quantum interference by reference to parallel interacting definite worlds. But he admits that this is only an approximation to Everett. The D-CTC model, however, relies crucially on the existence of a multiverse of parallel interacting worlds. Since his model is supplemented by structures that go significantly beyond quantum theory, and play an ineliminable role in its predictions and explanations, it does not represent a quantum solution to the paradoxes of time travel. (shrink)

Many developing and transitional countries have grown faster than advanced countries in the past decade, resulting in a shift in the distribution of world income in their favor. China is now the second largest economy in the world, behind the United States and ahead of Japan. As the relative economic weight of China and several others has come to match or exceed that of the middle-ranking G7 economies, the world economy has shifted from “unipolar” toward “multipolar,” less (...) dominated by the G7. How is this change being translated into changes in authority and influence within multilateral organizations like the G20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund? Alarm bells are ringing in G7 capitals about G7 loss of influence. According to a WikiLeaks cable from the senior U.S. official for the G20 process, from January 2010, “It is remarkable how closely coordinated the BASIC group of countries [Brazil, South Africa, India, China] have become in international fora, taking turns to impede US/eu initiatives and playing the US and EU off against each other.” This essay suggests that the shift in power is much smaller than the headlines or private alarm bells suggest. The United States remains the dominant state, and the G7 states together continue to exercise primacy, but now more fearfully and defensively. China is split between asserting itself as “the wave of the future” and defending itself as too poor to take on global responsibilities. The combination of G7 defensiveness and emerging states’ jealous guarding of sovereignty produces a spirit of Westphalian assertion in international fora, or “every state for itself.” On the assumption that the world economy is in a transitional period, the article suggests reforms in the G20 and the World Bank that would boost their role and legitimacy as multilateral organizations in a more multipolar world. (shrink)

In the eighteenth-century England, the aesthetic vision of most contemporary writers of the time was closely related to the social, political and religious system of belief. Augustan writers, satirists particularly, sought to reclaim for literature the morally privileged status, they thought, it supposedly held in the context of the Latitudinarian system of thought; the very rationale behind the ethic of good nature that distinguishes major writings of the time, namely the dramatic, journalistic and fictional works of the major eighteenth century (...) novelist and satirist Henry Fielding. His major dramatic works not only display the influence of the Latitudinarian philosophy but mainly Shaftesbury’s moral theory of innate goodness, which Fielding revokes, offering then a representation of a more universal moral frame which rather reflects and criticizes the society of the author’s time. The providential pattern that Fielding creates in his plays valorizes indeed the principle of good-nature and the triumph of virtue against all apparent social evils. Most significantly, it has positioned Henry Fielding himself in a “comedic” tradition in which characters are not ultimately responsible for themselves. In the present paper, and with reference to Earl of Shaftesbury’s assumptions about the ideal good-natured man, I intend to evince that Fielding uses the value of good-nature and virtue not as pure moral abstractions, but rather as nodal points around which he organizes, and through which he presents a broad cultural and historical vision. With reference to his major regular comedies, and a through a close study of his most representative characters, I will attempt to evince that this underlying moral vision is more than an abstract rumination of the relative power of good and evil. When we view and consider such concepts as virtue, good-nature and ill-nature in the immediate contexts of his plays, we conceive a picture of a broad cultural landscape in which ethical values become nodal points of meaning, in which Fielding represents both the most basic, traditional values and the most sordid everyday events and attitudes of his society. (shrink)

In this article, I turn my attention to the figure of the ignorant master, Joseph Jacotot, that is depicted in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (1991). I will show that the voice of Jacotot can actually be read as a reaction against the progressive figure of the teacher which, following Rancière's view, can be seen as effecting a stultification. In some respects, however, Rancière's analysis of the pedagogical order no longer seems to be valid in today's partly (...) reconfigured, pedagogical order that depicts the teacher in terms of facilitation. Yet, the figure of the facilitator can be seen as effecting a stultification as well. Therefore, I will stress that Jacotot's voice is highly relevant today. The most important difference between the figure of the (old and current) figure of the stultifyer and that of the ignorant master is identified in their starting point. The stultifying master starts from the assumption of inequality. S/he transforms taught material (words, text, images, etc.) into objects of knowledge or resources for competence development that open the door to another world. The ignorant master (Jacotot) assumes equal intelligence and draws attention to a thing in common. According to Rancière, the ignorant master keeps the door closed and puts his/her students in the presence of a thing in common. (shrink)

Tired of all the confusion about truth? Join us on a journey to discover your truth lens. Through the River is a challenging and fascinating book that takes the reader on a poignant journey through River Town, providing an eye-opening view on how people can live in close proximity while having radically contrasting perspectives. River Town 's three communities live and act so differently because each group is using a distinct set of assumptions about truth (truth lens). This journey exposes (...) the eternal consequences of how our truth lens influences whether we tell others what we know, insist that others accept what we know or be resigned to keep what we know to ourselves. Today the confusion about truth is great but the stakes are even greater. Our understanding of the different ways people view truth is crucial to building and maintaining constructive relationships. Through the River explores the tools God has given us to engage people who have different assumptions thereby enabling us to communicate Christ to a lost and damaged world. CONTENTS Chapter 1: Three Communities along the River Chapter 2: The River Town Story: How History Affects Truth Lenses Chapter 3: Positivism: Settling on the Rocky Shore Chapter 4: Instrumentalism: Into the River Chapter 5: Critical Realism Chapter 6: Experiencing Truth in Love Chapter 7: Holding Truth Lenses Up to the Bible Chapter 8: The Great Disturbance Chapter 9: Truth Lenses and Relationships Chapter 10: Interacting with Others on the Journey Chapter 11: The World through Your Truth Lens Chapter 12: Journeys through the River. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy is based on the assumption that our world is a world grasped in terms of (this or another) language and that the question of the character of any entity is closely connected with the question of the linguistic grasp of that entity. The father of this philosophical trend was Gottlob Frege: he showed the way to capture the semantic aspect of language in a systematic way without resorting into psychologism; he also showed that logical analysis (...) can be an extremely powerful tool for capturing meaning. Frege's teaching was further developed by Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Van Quine and other philosophers. This philosophy, in connection with which the term linguistic turn is also often mentioned, is characterized by viewing language as a means of picturing the world and truth as the correspondence between statement and reality. Whereas some of the analytic philosophers (Carnap, Alfred Tarski) understood the relation between language and the world as a matter of a better or worse adaptation of the structure of language to the autonomous structure of the world, others (Wittgenstein, Quine, Nelson Goodman) realized that the structure of the world is always a matter of the language we use approaching the world. (shrink)

The closed world assumption plays a fundamental role in the theory of deductive databases. On the other hand, multi-valued logics occupy a vast field in non-classical logics. Some questions are better explained and expressed in terms of such logics. To enhance the expressive power and the declarative ability of a deductive database, we extend various CWA formalizations, including the naive CWA, the generalized CWA and the careful CWA, to multi-valued logics. The basic idea is to embed logic (...) formulae into some polynomial ring. The extensions can be applied in a uniform manner to any finitely multi-valued logics. Therefore they have also computational interest. (shrink)

I have had the fortune to find a way to unite theology and science. It is and has been a bit overwhelming. My aim was to integrate science and hermeneutics but I ended up with a theory that integrates pretty much everything. In this paper I focus the fundamental principle that seems so simple that it could taken for a tautology but it is not. The principle, or, rather, the basic assumption, is that an ontologically homogeneous domain does not (...) cause an ontologically homogeneous domain. By this device all ontologically homogeneous domains are causally closed in relation to other ontologically homogeneous domains. Ontologically heterogeneous domains, on the other hand, are permitted to cause and to be caused by ontologically homogeneous domains. The very first ontologically homogeneous domain, also, is permitted to be caused by an ontologically heterogeneous domain. Science, therefore, would concern inquiries into all ontologically homogeneous and heterogeneous domains except for the first ontologically heterogeneous domain. The first ontologically heterogeneous domain would be the field of interest for theology. Consecutive ontologically homogeneous domains could be the platonic mathematical universe, the physical universe and ourselves as subjects. (shrink)

In his thoughtful defence of very modest moral enhancement, David DeGrazia1 makes the following assumption: ‘Behavioural improvement is highly desirable in the interest of making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’. Later in the paper, he gives a list of some psychological characteristics that ‘all reasonable people can agree … represent moral defects’. I think I am a reasonable person, and I agree that most if not all items (...) on the lists do represent moral defects—I certainly would regard them as such in a close family member or friend. But if I were in the business of ‘making the world a better place and securing better lives for human beings and other sentient beings’, I would hesitate to prescribe moral enhancement for everyone with these acknowledged defects. A lot of good work, from removing tumours to negotiating treaties, may be best done by people with serious moral defects.For a simple consequentialist, a moral defect is just a trait that tends to make the world a worse place. Not being a consequentialist, I think that moral defects should be identified independently of their tendency to produce worse outcomes. For this reason, I think it's necessary to qualify DeGrazia's starting assumption—I think behavioural improvement may sometimes be undesirable if our goal is to make the world a better place. My reasons will be familiar to readers of Bernard Williams.As …. (shrink)

The emergence of information, and more recently, mobile broadband telecommunication technologies, was accompanied by the hype that they could serve to close the economic, educational, digital, and social gaps of our planet among the rich and the poor regions. The hopes, which were based on a number of assumptions, were partly dismissed at the dawn of the new millennium for a number of reasons exemplified in this article. The authors propose a repertoire of pathways through which technology may still serve (...) to bridge the divide. They conclude that in order to achieve this goal, developing nations need not only to understand the complex interrelationships between technology and development, but moreover, to demonstrate their commitment and will by implementing a well-thought and aggressive strategy. (shrink)

Thomas Friedman’s best-selling The World is Flat has exerted much influence in the west by providing both an accessible analysis of globalisation and its economic and social effects, and a powerful cultural metaphor for globalisation. In this review, we more closely examine Friedman’s notion of the social contract, the moral centre of his hopeful vision of a globalised world. While Friedman’s social contract holds a more generous view of social and state obligation than his neoliberal economic analysis might (...) otherwise allow, his fallacious assumptions about education rest on poorly argued claims about the nature of human beings, the proper aims of schooling, and meanings of justice in a globalised world. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of the modern international. On the one hand, his supplementary critical legal thinking contributes to a ‘decolonial deconstructionist’ rethinking of the politics of (...) international law. His close reading of how modern international law (auto)grounds ‘itself’, for instance, offers a strident critique of the racist, imperial, and colonial lines of discrimination involved in the negative (auto)constitution of this (supposedly) universal legal being. On the other hand, he provides a conception of the ‘(inter)national’ which displaces conventional, modern understandings of the legal and political organization of ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’, problematizing their foundational assumptions and spatialized geometrical frames as being based on oppositional dualisms (‘inside/outside’, ‘national/international’, ‘empire/modernity’, ‘theological/secular’, etc.), while offering a deconstructionist engagement with the ‘constitutive outside’ of the modern (inter)national. As a form of postcolonial counter-archive, Peter’s work enacts a decolonial deconstruction of ‘our’ (inter)national ‘selves’, including the (inter)national commonality ‘itself’. Before an incalculable, quasi-ontological heteronomy, a dissymmetrical Law of originary sociability which I (re)articulate here with/as the ‘and’ of the world(s), Peter’s supplementary critical thinking of the (inter)national contributes to imagining the world, humanity, and our social being(s), including law and language, otherwise. (shrink)

King of the Castle examines closely many of the unquestioned assumptions by which we live our lives, comparing them with the beliefs that have shaped and guided human life in the past. It begins with a consideration of how secular societies attempt to possess their citizens, body and soul and how, as a consequence, the necessity of redefining human responsibility becomes an ever more urgent imperative. The book continues with a presentation of the traditional view of man as 'God's Viceroy (...) on Earth', with an eye to its practical implications in a world that has all but forgotten, under the pressure of mass social persuasion, that man must always be free to choose his own ultimate destiny. The author's thesis is a passionate yet incisive plea for the restoration of the sacred norms of religion, as against the debilitating and falsifying aims of a profane world-view based on no more than recent scientific and technological achievements. (shrink)

This article presents and argues for modal structuralism, which is loosely derived from a position described by Wilfrid Sellars. Modal structuralism holds that a fundamental property is identified by the role it plays in the structure of possibilities. It implies necessitarianism about laws, which holds that at least some laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. The argument for these positions derives from the following assumptions: the principle of the identity of indiscernible properties and a modest antiquidditism. These assumptions are weaker (...) than those of causal structuralism, which is a closely related view. (shrink)

This paper discusses the late Michael Dummett’s characterization of the estrangement between physics and philosophy. It argues against those physicists who hold that modern physics, rather than philosophy, can answer traditional metaphysical questions such as why there is something rather than nothing. The claim is that physics cannot solve metaphysical problems since metaphysical issues are in principle empirically underdetermined. The paper closes with a critical discussion of the assumption of some cosmologists that the Universe was created out of nothing: (...) In contrast to this misleading assumption, it is proposed that the Universe has a necessary existence and that the present epoch after the Big Bang is a contingent realization of the Universe. (shrink)

Alexandre Koyré. of the fixed stars is infinite commit a contradiction in adjecto. In truth, an infinite body cannot be comprehended by thought. For the concepts of the mind concerning the infinite are either about the meaning oftheterm "infinite,"  ...

This paper discusses in critical terms Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jabiri’s influential philosophical work. It engages, in particular, in the analysis of the assumptions underlying the radical contrast that al-Jabiri sets up between Avicenna’s philosophy – which is supposed to represent irrationality and Gnosticism – and that of Averroes who, according to him, breaks decisively with that current of thought and thus makes exercising philosophical thought once again possible. After a close discussion of the positions of classical philosophers , the author concludes (...) that it is the very validity of the notion of “Arab reason” that has to be questioned in al-Jabiri’s analysis. (shrink)

This paper takes as a starting point William Ophul's claim that the last 450 years amount to an 'era of exception' in terms of resource availability. Ophuls suggests that it is no accident that this exceptional era of abundance coincides with the birth and development of liberalism - that liberalism, in other words, would not/could not have occurred without the conditions provided by this era of exception. Some of the ways in which this suggestion might be critically examined are discussed, (...) and attention is drawn to one of its more interesting implications: if liberalism depends on abundance, what kind of political theory do we need if we are entering a new era of scarcity ('peak oil/peak everything')? (shrink)

Spirituality has mostly been studied in psychology as implied in the process of overcoming adversity, being triggered by negative experiences, and providing positive outcomes. By reversing this pathway, we investigated whether spirituality may also be triggered by self-transcendent positive emotions, which are elicited by stimuli appraised as demonstrating higher good and beauty. In two studies, elevation and/or admiration were induced using different methods. These emotions were compared to two control groups, a neutral state and a positive emotion (mirth). Self-transcendent positive (...) emotions increased participants' spirituality (Studies 1 and 2), especially for the non-religious participants (Study 1). Two basic world assumptions, i.e., belief in life as meaningful (Study 1) and in the benevolence of others and the world (Study 2) mediated the effect of these emotions on spirituality. Spirituality should be understood not only as a coping strategy, but also as an upward spiralling pathway to and from self-transcendent positive emotions. (shrink)

This essay proposes a cultural and historical explanation for the American Military's fascination with computing. Three key elements of post-WWII US political culture — apocalyptic struggle with the USSR, subsuming all other conflicts: a long history of antimilitarist sentiment in American politics; and the rise of science-based military power — contributed to a sense of the world as a closed system accessible to American technological control. A developing scientific systems discourse, centrally including computer science and AI, was adopted (...) for strategic thinking and military technology. The Strategic Computing and Strategic Defense Initiatives are discussed as contemporary examples of this conjunction. (shrink)

Inferential statistical tests-such as analysis of variance, t-tests, chi-square and Wilcoxin signed ranks-now constitute a principal class of methods for the testing of scientific hypotheses. In this paper I will consider the role of one statistical concept (statistical power) and two statistical principles or assumptions (homogeneity of variance and the independence of random error), in the reliable application of selected statistical methods. I defend a tacit but widely-deployed naturalistic principle of explanation (E): Philosophers should not treat as inexplicable or basic (...) those correlational facts that scientists themselves do not treat as irreducible. In light of (E), I contend that the conformity of epistemically reliable statistical tests to these concepts and assumptions entails at least the following modest or austere realist commitment: (C) The populations under study have a stable theoretical or unobserved structure that metaphysically grounds the observed values; the objects therefore have a fixed value independent of our efforts to measure them. (C) provides the best explanation for the correlation between the joint use of statistical assumptions and statistical tests, on the one hand, and methodological success on the other. (shrink)

Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America's abandoned state mental hospitals. For more than half the nation's history, vast mental hospitals were a prominent feature of the American landscape. From the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, over 250 institutions for the insane were built throughout the United States; by 1948, they housed more than a half million patients. The blueprint for these hospitals was set by Pennsylvania hospital superintendant Thomas Story Kirkbride: a central administration building (...) flanked symmetrically by pavilions and surrounded by lavish grounds with pastoral vistas. Kirkbride and others believed that well-designed buildings and grounds, a peaceful environment, a regimen of fresh air, and places for work, exercise, and cultural activities would heal mental illness. But in the second half of the twentieth century, after the introduction of psychotropic drugs and policy shifts toward community-based care, patient populations declined dramatically, leaving many of these beautiful, massive buildings—and the patients who lived in them—neglected and abandoned. Architect and photographer Christopher Payne spent six years documenting the decay of state mental hospitals like these, visiting seventy institutions in thirty states. Through his lens we see splendid, palatial exteriors and crumbling interiors—chairs stacked against walls with peeling paint in a grand hallway; brightly colored toothbrushes still hanging on a rack; stacks of suitcases, never packed for the trip home. Accompanying Payne's striking and powerful photographs is an essay by Oliver Sacks. Sacks pays tribute to Payne's photographs and to the lives once lived in these places, “where one could be both mad and safe.”. (shrink)

The suppression task challenges classical logic. Classical logic is monotonic. However, in the suppression task, an inference with the form of modus ponendo ponens is inhibited by adding a new premise. Several explanations have been given to account for this fact. The present paper indicates three of them as examples: that of the theory of mental models, that based on logic programming and closed world assumption, and that referring to Carnap's concept of state‐descriptions. Besides, the paper offers (...) one more explanation linked to Carnap's idea of reduction. It proposes sentences akin to a reduction sentence, a pair reduction, and a bilateral reduction sentence. Those sentences are related to the initial conditional in the suppression task. This proposal tries to stay within first‐order predicate logic. (shrink)

This paper introduces and studies a declarative framework for updating views over indefinite databases. An indefinite database is a database with null values that are represented, following the standard database approach, by a single null constant. Typically a database is represented by a single set of facts |$D$| that model what is known to be true. This paper proposes a model of an indefinite extensional database that is more expressive with respect to the closed-world assumption (CWA) adapted (...) for the setting of indefinite databases (Libkin, 1995, A semantics-based approach to design of query languages for partial information. In Semantics in Databases, vol. 1358 of LNCS, pp. 170–208. Springer; der Meyden, 1998, Logical approaches to incomplete information: a survey. In Logics for Databases and Information Systems, pp. 307–356. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, USA). More specifically, in our model, databases are determined by two sets of facts: |$D$| representing, as usual, all facts that are true in the database, and |$E$| that is meant to represent exceptions to the ‘unknown range’, i.e. facts that cannot be unknown. Intuitively, unless they are explicitly implied to be true by the first set, the facts specified as exceptions are assumed false. The semantics is given by means of a two-level CWA tailored to the case of indefinite information. The paper characterizes the semantics of indefinite databases in terms of their possible worlds that are obtained by instantiating occurrences of null values by concrete constants and defines several classes of database repairs that realize view-update requests. Most notable is the class of constrained repairs. Constrained repairs change the database ‘minimally’and avoid making arbitrary commitments. They narrow down the space of alternative ways to fulfill the view-update request to those that are grounded, in a certain strong sense, in the database, the view and the view-update request. (shrink)

Logic has been a—disputed—ingredient in the emergence and development of the now very large field known as knowledge representation and reasoning. In this book (in progress), I select some central topics in this highly fruitful, albeit controversial, association (e.g., non-monotonic reasoning, implicit belief, logical omniscience, closed world assumption), identifying their sources and analyzing/explaining their elaboration in highly influential published work.