Background: Evidence suggesting adverse drug reactions often emerges unsystematically and unpredictably in form of anecdotal reports, case series and survey data. Safety trials and observational studies also provide crucial information regarding the (un-)safety of drugs. Hence, integrating multiple types of pharmacovigilance evidence is key to minimising the risks of harm. Methods: In previous work, we began the development of a Bayesian framework for aggregating multiple types of evidence to assess the probability of a putative causal link between drugs and side (...) effects. This framework arose out of a philosophical analysis of the Bradford Hill Guidelines. In this article, we expand the Bayesian framework and add “evidential modulators,” which bear on the assessment of the reliability of incoming study results. The overall framework for evidence synthesis, “E-Synthesis”, is then applied to a case study. Results: Theoretically and computationally, E-Synthesis exploits coherence of partly or fully independent evidence converging towards the hypothesis of interest (or of conflicting evidence with respect to it), in order to update its posterior probability. With respect to other frameworks for evidence synthesis, our Bayesian model has the unique feature of grounding its inferential machinery on a consolidated theory of hypothesis confirmation (Bayesian epistemology), and in allowing any data from heterogeneous sources (cell-data, clinical trials, epidemiological studies), and methods (e.g., frequentist hypothesis testing, Bayesian adaptive trials, etc.) to be quantitatively integrated into the same inferential framework. Conclusions: E-Synthesis is highly flexible concerning the allowed input, while at the same time relying on a consistent computational system, that is philosophically and statistically grounded. Furthermore, by introducing evidential modulators, and thereby breaking up the different dimensions of evidence (strength, relevance, reliability), E-Synthesis allows them to be explicitly tracked in updating causal hypotheses. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre‐theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.

The study of social, ethical, and political issues from a naturalistic perspective has been pervasive in social sciences and the humanities in the last decades. This articulation of empirical research with philosophical and normative reflection is increasingly getting attention in academic circles and the public spheres, given the prevalence of urgent needs and challenges that society is facing on a global scale. The contemporary world is full of challenges or what some philosophers have called ‘existential risks’ to humanity. Nuclear wars, (...) natural and/or engineered pandemics, climate change, global totalitarianism, and emergent technologies, are some of the challenges mentioned by many authors devoted to the study of long-term potential risks for the survival of the human species. However, while there are many reasons to be a pessimist about the future of humanity, there is also a lot of ink wasted in showing that the world today is far better than we had in the past and also that there have been many instances of social and moral progress in the last centuries. Some authors have even claimed that “we have made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000”. According to ‘our world in data’, some of the most relevant advances of humanity in the last centuries have to do with the reduction of poverty and/or inequality, better health and security, the decline of violence and war, and the development of democracy and institutional mechanisms to guarantee individual freedom and rights. Yet, there is a more concrete concern that our world faces nowadays, and requires a particularly detailed analysis. In a few words, the advance in information and communication technologies, the huge volume of people migration because of prevalent instances of global inequality, and the reality of an interconnected world that just mirrors an extensive history of massive human intergroup relations open the question about the feasibility of social and moral progress in the contexts of diverse, multicultural, and unequal societies. This makes it crucial to reflect not only on whether human societies may keep advancing on a path of social progress, but how this can be achieved by addressing the challenges of inequality and potential intergroup conflict. This concern closely relates to the further consolidation of democratic values and the achievement of a more generalized consideration of the equal moral value of human individuals far from group, ethnic, or collective distinctions. This vision of progress follows the moral convictions that have been considered right and worthy to be pursued by most ethical theories explored by philosophers and social scientists so far. This work aims to contribute to the study of the mechanisms and feasibility of social and moral progress grounded on the precept of human equality and is guided by the idea that social and moral progress in a plural world requires the accomplishment of a more democratic and tolerant society. These forms of progress have already been defined by philosophers Allen Buchanan and Russel Powell as inclusivist forms of moral progress. According to these authors, inclusivist moral progress is featured by the transformation of moral judgments, motivations, and norms guided by the rejection of “group-based restrictions on moral standing and moral status” (2018). The work of Buchanan and Powell is fundamental for the argumentation developed in this work since they have pioneered a more complex debate in the field of evolutionary social sciences and philosophical anthropology. In brief, these authors have inquired how human nature, conceptualized by the advances in evolutionary thinking and the empirical sciences, is related to our moral convictions and the possibilities that we have to establish certain forms of social and moral progress. The work of Buchanan and Powell contributes to the debate on moral progress by incorporating empirically-informed concepts and arguments. With this objective in mind, they develop their discussion around a generalized tension between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of moral progress. This tension revolves around the question of whether and to what extent human moral concerns, motivations, and norms, are limited or bounded by social identities, group thinking, or collective values. This question is at the center of this work. In other words, I aim to answer whether and to what extent the nature of our social and moral cognition hinders or enables the development of inclusivist forms of morality and moral progress. As I mentioned so far, the distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of morality has a practical implication and facilitates the reflection on the mechanisms and feasibility of concrete forms of progress based on the precept of human equality, which is the road to progress that we should follow according to most ethical theories. The distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist morality is not used here as a form of summarizing highly divergent descriptive approaches to morality, but as a way to address the practical implications of morality research, particularly around the question of the feasibility of social forms of progress based on the precept of equality and tolerance. My objective then has less to do with offering a conceptualization of human morality or with the proposition of a new ethical perspective. Instead, I aim to identify, from an empirically informed perspective, what enables the achievement of egalitarian forms of social progress, to subsequently offer a normative reflection about what we should do if we want to accomplish such inclusivist forms of progress. This task is of great relevance, having in mind that some theoretical proposals on the matter have claimed that human prosocial behavior and morality are constrained by exclusivist fixed tendencies as a product of our evolutionary history. According to these views, human morality is a group-centered cognitive and behavioral expression that has severe limits in its scope and extent, which hinders in the end the emergence of inclusivist forms of moral concerns and behaviors. These claims align with the philosophical intuition about the ‘dissociation of empathy’, or the fact that human individuals tend to express empathy and sympathy preferably for members of their group whereas their empathic and moral concern and recognition for outgroup individuals tend to be reduced or eliminated in real-life social interactions. Multiple theorists have expressed, however, that these assumptions are wrong for empirical and philosophical reasons, which results in a serious challenge to the conception of human morality as exclusivist by nature. Furthermore, simple intuition and practical experience constantly show us that human individuals can develop and endorse a broad spectrum of moral considerations and adopt an arguably inclusivist stance concerning the kind of persons or agents that deserve moral concern. Moreover, and adopting a historical perspective, the expansion of cultural and commercial exchanges, the consolidation of democracy, the development of welfare states, or the emergence of institutions based on the concept of universal human rights, have partially driven human progress based on the impartial concern for the well-being of persons. These historical instances of cultural evolution and institutional design have shown that it is feasible to promote behaviors and attitudes grounded in impersonal prosocial and inclusivist principles. This optimistic perspective, however, still begs the question of the exact relationship between social, cultural, and historical contexts, and the emergence of certain behavioral expressions of inclusivist morality. This is crucial since a great number of human individuals around the world still do not make part of these instances of social progress, and some authors have suggested that such instances of social and moral progress are particularly favored by the contexts of the WEIRD world, that is the world of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Some of these approaches consider moral inclusivity a ‘luxury good’ and follow the ‘dependency thesis’ according to which the expression of moral inclusivity depends on the presence of very concrete material conditions that trigger inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. This thesis is problematic for various reasons and has led to incomplete explanations about the enabling and causal factors of inclusivist moral progress, as well as unsatisfactory suggestions about what we should do to foster the accomplishment of more generalized instances of progress based on inclusivist concerns. In an attempt to contribute to this debate, the main objective of this thesis is to offer an alternative proposal about the nature of human morality and a more detailed reflection on what we should do if we want to further accomplish such instances of progress. More precisely, this work adopts a particular developmental and constructivist vision of human morality to answer the question of how feasible it is to reach generalized forms of social progress based on the precepts of moral inclusivity. Furthermore, it offers some ideas about what are the most adequate and favorable conditions to foster such progress both at the individual and the collective level. At this point, a preliminary clarification of some starting points is necessary. In the first place, and contrary to what other authors have proposed when debating moral progress from an empirically-based approach, my perspective adopts a radical developmental and constructivist perspective, following particularly the conceptual and empirical ideas of the social-domain theory in moral psychology. From this perspective, morality is a domain of normative and social knowledge that develops and emerges in human interactions. Moral concerns, judgments, and norms are not only the result of the expression of innate adaptive intuitions, nor the product of social conformity and a simple process of mirroring the normativity that communities have established to organize their social life. Human individuals, instead, construct moral concerns and judgments during their situated interactions. More specifically, the constructivist tradition claims that we need to research how moral concerns, judgments, and reasons emerge in social interactions and how human beings construct the content of their moral knowledge in the first place. Based on these ideas, morality is defined here as the result of a constructive process through which human individuals, by the means of constant interactions on a background of mutual respect and recognition, develop evaluative concerns about how we ought to treat others, and how to ‘care’ and ‘respect’ others’ well-being, needs, and vulnerabilities. This developmental-constructivist theory of human psychology contributes to an alternative understanding of the origins of moral variability and informs a very particular normative stance about the most desirable contexts needed for the urgent accomplishment of inclusivist forms of morality in contemporary societies. This is so given that the very same definition of morality adopted presupposes the feature of inclusivity. The main objective of this work is then to argue, based on a developmental perspective, what are the most favorable conditions to foster the development of moral inclusivity and what we should do to accomplish concrete instances of moral progress that truly help us to overcome our most urgent moral challenges. The whole thesis is organized as follows. In part I, I show how received visions about human social evolution have informed conceptions of morality as an adaptive function evolved to solve the challenges of cooperative life. Based on these assumptions, some theories argue that human morality is limited by the boundaries of group thinking, and always obeys the mandates of collective interests and the will of the majority. However, this conception has problematic implications from a normative and ethical perspective. The aim of Chapter 1 is to present this introductory debate in detail. In chapter 2, I consider a relevant amount of scientific evidence that helps to consolidate a more optimistic and inclusivist perspective about the starting conditions of human prosocial behavior. Later, I will summarize some ideas offered to explain the possible evolutionary mechanisms that led to the consolidation of these inclusivist capacities. However, I will also show how evolutionary theories that share the same adaptationist foundations but initially seem relevant to explain the feasibility of moral inclusivity, result incomplete when considering the complexity of moral behavior and its ethical implications. Part II is devoted to presenting a developmental alternative to the adaptationist versions around the starting conditions of morality. In this section, I first summarize the epistemological, conceptual, and empirical basis of a constructivist perspective already proposed by several authors in the last decades. This is the goal of chapter 3. More precisely, I adopt the conceptualization of morality established by the social-domain theory school and clarify its conception of the situated development of moral concerns, motivations, and norms. All these ideas are essential for my argumentation on the feasibility of inclusivist moral progress offered later. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed idea of constructivist thinking about moral development, by analyzing one particular dimension: the development of moral concerns for fairness and the sense of justice in distributive dilemmas. In Part III, I assume a constructivist perspective on morality to contribute to the philosophy of moral progress. In particular, I discuss the implications of such a perspective for the conceptualization of human moral nature and discuss what are the most favorable conditions for moral inclusivity to emerge. Answering that question is of enormous relevance since favoring the transition of human societies towards more inclusivist forms of moral concern and behavior supposes a more generalized accomplishment of our most urgent moral convictions. Previous developmental or culturally-sensible attempts to explore this issue are already on the market. As mentioned before, most authors have approached the topic by situating the cultural evolution and development of (inclusivist) moral progress in the WEIRD world. For instance, some of these authors claim that very concrete material conditions (mostly present in the Western World) have been necessary for triggering inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. Despite their interest in explaining inclusivist morality and the feasibility of inclusivist forms of progress following a naturalistic and culturally situated approach, these theories are problematic for two main reasons. In the first place, most of the authors that explain moral progress tend to focus exclusively on the consolidation of liberal values in the Western world and the underlying adoption of laws, social-epistemic practices, and public narratives about tolerance and inclusivity, as unequivocal signs of inclusivist morality. Nevertheless, there is an enormous distance between the institutional and public support of inclusivist moral values or the construction of public images of tolerance and inclusivity, and the real materialization of impersonal moralities in situated social interactions. Secondly, the variability of human moral behavior is far bigger than most of the theories in moral psychology and moral progress tend to assume. Accordingly, inclusivist and exclusivist forms of morality may develop simultaneously in similar or divergent geographical and socio-ecological environments, including those with harsh conditions such as competition for scarce resources, potential intergroup conflict, and risks of disease transmission. In addition, harsh environmental conditions are usually present in almost all societies around the globe, and the presence of socio-ecological conditions such as physical security and prosperity, predominant in highly resourced populations, do not prevent the existence of exclusivist moral tendencies. My model explores a different perspective on the relationships between cultural, institutional, and historical factors, and the situated development of human morality. This supposes a clear distinction from previous approaches to the matter since it offers a different view on what we should do to pursue further instances of inclusivist social progress. In the fifth chapter, I first analyze the proposals of some defenders of the ‘dependency’ theory. The attention is focused on the ‘Evolutionary Developmental Model’ proposed by Buchanan and Powell (2018). Based on a critique of this approach, I will argue that to explain the evolution and development of human morality in its multiple manifestations, it is essential to put focus on social interactions. This also involves a different perspective on human-environment relations that in line with a constructivist worldview makes an innovative contribution to the philosophy of moral behavior and moral progress. Later, in the sixth chapter, I will define my alternative relational view of inclusivist morality and I will offer my view on how to establish favorable conditions that make inclusivist morality possible. Complementing the constructivist approach, my conception is based on the essential role of equality and individuality and on how moral inclusivity is favored if moral concerns do not develop driven by the accomplishment of group-centered, binding, and communitarian concerns and values. In brief, my relational model suggests that the accomplishment of moral inclusivity not only depends on the overall achievement of certain levels of physical security or economic prosperity. Instead, its development is favored by transforming the interactional contexts in which moral concerns towards autonomy and individuality emerge. In arguing so, I will need to start with a critique of contemporary situated and embodied approaches in ethics. Then, I will show how societies guided by the accomplishment of group-centered values of power, dominance, and relational inequality tend to express exclusivist moral behaviors, while individualistic societies tend to be more inclusivist. Starting from this diagnosis, my final attempt is then to reflect on which are the best conditions for the moral valuation of individuality to emerge and what we should do to promote the accomplishment of moral inclusivity at the societal level. (shrink)

Those who wish to defend the role of aesthetic values in science face a dilemma: Either aesthetic language is used metaphorically for what are ultimately epistemic features, or aesthetic language is used literally but it is difficult to see the importance of such values in science. I introduce a new account that gets around this problem by looking to an overlooked source of aesthetic value in science: the relation between form and content. I argue that a fit between the content (...) of a thought experiment, and the way in which that content is formulated, can have important epistemic pay offs through contributing to scientific understanding. (shrink)

RésuméQuels sont les objets de la perception? Deux réponses célèbres à cette question soutiennent que ce sont soit les images des objets extramentaux, c'est-à-dire la façon dont ils nous apparaissent, soit les objets eux-mêmes. Dans cet article, je présente une analyse de cette question par Abū l-Barakāt al-Baġdādī, un savant post-avicennien dont l'impact sur l'histoire de la philosophie islamique a été largement négligé. Abū l-Barakāt s'est opposé au dualisme épistémologique traditionnel aristotélicien-avicennien, qui établit une distinction entre la perception sensorielle des (...) particuliers matériels et la conception des universaux immatériels, notamment en ce qui concerne le percevant et/ou la structure de la perception. Selon la théorie d'Abū l-Barakāt, tous les actes épistémiques ont la structure unifiée d'une relation directe entre un même percevant et les objets eux-mêmes – matériels et immatériels. Sa thèse principale consiste à dire qu'avoir des organes corporels n'est pas nécessaire pour la perception sensorielle. Dans la dernière section de cet article, je montre que la critique d'Abū l-Barakāt de la tradition aristotélicienne-avicennienne fut considérée comme une innovation révolutionnaire en épistémologie. Cela peut avoir déterminé les théories épistémologiques de deux des philosophes arabes postavicenniens les plus importants : Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī et Šihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī. (shrink)

We provide a Bayesian justification of the idea that, under certain conditions, the absence of an argument in favour of the truth of a hypothesis H constitutes a good argument against the truth of H.

In his book “Schiller as Philosopher”, Frederick Beiser laments that “contemporary Kant scholars have been intent on ignoring him. If they know anything at all about Schiller, it is only as the author of an epigram satirizing Kant”. Therefore, Beiser calls us “to consider Schiller as a philosopher, to reconstruct and appraise the arguments of his philosophical writings” (Beiser, 2005, p. vii). In this paper, I shall argue that it is Schiller's conception of freedom of the will as “heautonomy” that (...) stands behind his critique and modification of Kant's ethics. However, the systematic significance of Schiller's theory of freedom is not obvious. Its argumentative structure must first be reconstructed—as Beiser has demanded—because it is concealed by an esthetic discourse. A reconstruction of Schiller's theory of freedom shows that he contrasts his concept of heautonomy as individual self‐determination with the Kantian concept of an autonomy or autocracy of reason by the universal moral law. Schiller's own philosophical contribution to the debate on freedom after Kant must therefore not be understood as a mere esthetic balancing and softening of Kant's ethical rigorism. Rather, it shows serious transformations of Kant's approach, which justifies understanding it as a critical step beyond Kant's theory of the autonomy of reason. (shrink)

Integrated Information Theory is one of the leading models of consciousness. It aims to describe both the quality and quantity of the conscious experience of a physical system, such as the brain, in a particular state. In this contribution, we propound the mathematical structure of the theory, separating the essentials from auxiliary formal tools. We provide a definition of a generalized IIT which has IIT 3.0 of Tononi et al., as well as the Quantum IIT introduced by Zanardi et al. (...) as special cases. This provides an axiomatic definition of the theory which may serve as the starting point for future formal investigations and as an introduction suitable for researchers with a formal background. (shrink)

Structuralism about mathematical objects and structuralist accounts of physical computation both face indeterminacy objections. For the former, the problem arises for cases such as the complex roots i and \, for which a automorphism can be defined, thus establishing the structural identity of these importantly distinct mathematical objects. In the case of the latter, the problem arises for logical duals such as AND and OR, which have invertible structural profiles :369–400, 2001). This makes their physical implementations indeterminate, in the sense (...) that their structural profiles alone cannot establish whether a given physical component is an AND-gate or an OR-gate. Doherty has recently shown both problems to be analogous, and has argued that computational structuralism is threatened with the absurd conclusion that computational digits might be indiscernible, such that, if structural properties are all that we have to go on, the binary digit 0 must be treated as identical to the binary digit 1. However, we think that a solution to the indiscernibility problem for mathematical structuralists, drawing on the work of David Hilbert, can be adapted for the analogous problem in the computational case, thereby rescuing the structuralist approach to physical computation. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The same method that creates adversarial examples to fool image-classifiers can be used to generate counterfactual explanations that explain algorithmic decisions. This observation has led researchers to consider CEs as AEs by another name. We argue that the relationship to the true label and the tolerance with respect to proximity are two properties that formally distinguish CEs and AEs. Based on these arguments, we introduce CEs, AEs, and related concepts mathematically in a common framework. Furthermore, we show connections between current (...) methods for generating CEs and AEs, and estimate that the fields will merge more and more as the number of common use-cases grows. (shrink)

Quality of democratic arrangements does matter. This kind of conceptual breakthrough has been made through painfully engagement with the nonphilosophical area of inquiry arisen by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has dramatically emphasized that health is a highly political domain. No surprise then that it made possible to challenge common thought about democratic procedures in political theory that considers procedure-independent standards suspicious. Therefore it is fair to state that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the quality of democratic outcomes back on (...) center stage in the debate in political theory, which has been dominated by fair proceduralism’s claim not to refer to any procedure-independent standards of good political decisions. Procedural values have traditionally been seen as a defining element of fair deliberation and essential for democracy. They have been extolled in social choice theory that claims that democracy does not exhibit any particular disposition to lead to good or just political arrangements. They are the focus of attention in Jürgen Habermas’ procedural rationality, though philosophers are now more skeptical about the divorce between procedures and substantive standards. Overall, issues surrounding the topic of ensuring citizens’ health make the topic politically central and philosophically interesting for epistemic theories and impartial proceduralism theories of democracy alike. The aim of this paper is to justify the legitimacy and authority of public health policies on the basis of arguments that do not simply are a matter of their being democratic. In the first part, I want to display and criticize the idea that proceduralism’s not getting one’s hands dirty with the substance of decisions and remaining neutrally adherent only to procedures is untenable in the present case. Having criticized democratic theories that want to restrict themselves to purely procedural values, in the second part I will focus on the idea of knowledge and make explicit its characters of being practical and shared. Eventually, it will help to have one example. M-Health will show that many valuable insights would be incompatible with the restrictions of the proceduralism. Philosophical consideration of health will combine epistemic issues with political ones triggered by technology and sharpened by the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The same method that creates adversarial examples to fool image-classifiers can be used to generate counterfactual explanations that explain algorithmic decisions. This observation has led researchers to consider CEs as AEs by another name. We argue that the relationship to the true label and the tolerance with respect to proximity are two properties that formally distinguish CEs and AEs. Based on these arguments, we introduce CEs, AEs, and related concepts mathematically in a common framework. Furthermore, we show connections between current (...) methods for generating CEs and AEs, and estimate that the fields will merge more and more as the number of common use-cases grows. (shrink)

The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure of the degree of theory-confirmation this yields. The issue of confirmation for an entire framework either does not arise, or is dismissed in so far as frameworks are thought not to be the kind of thing that admits scientific confirmation. I argue that there is another form of (...) scientific reasoning that has not received philosophical attention, what I call Newtonian abduction, that does provide confirmation for frameworks as a whole, and does so in two novel ways. I further argue that Newtonian abduction is at least as important a form of reasoning in science as standard deductive and inductive forms. The form is beautifully summed up by Maxwell : “The true method of physical reasoning is to begin with the phenomena and to deduce the forces from them by a direct application of the equations of motion.”. (shrink)

The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure of the degree of theory-confirmation this yields. The issue of confirmation for an entire framework (e.g., Newtonian mechanics en bloc, as opposed, say, to Newton’s theory of gravitation) either does not arise, or is dismissed in so far as frameworks are thought not to be the kind of (...) thing that admits scientific confirmation. I argue that there is another form of scientific reasoning that has not received philosophical attention, what I call Newtonian abduction, that does provide confirmation for frameworks as a whole, and does so in two novel ways. (In particular, Newtonian abduction is not inference to the best explanation, but rather is closer to Peirce’s original idea of abduction.) I further argue that Newtonian abduction is at least as important a form of reasoning in science as standard deductive and inductive forms. The form is beautifully summed up by Maxwell (Proc Camb Philos Soc II:292–294, 1876): “The true method of physical reasoning is to begin with the phenomena and to deduce the forces from them by a direct application of the equations of motion.”. (shrink)

Discusses Armstrong's and Roman Ingarden's ontology, criticises substance ontology, and defends tropes and a field ontology.

In this paper we discuss sequent calculi for the propositional fragment of the logic of HYPE. The logic of HYPE was recently suggested by Leitgeb as a logic for hyperintensional contexts. On the one hand we introduce a simple \-system employing rules of contraposition. On the other hand we present a \-system with an admissible rule of contraposition. Both systems are equivalent as well as sound and complete proof-system of HYPE. In order to provide a cut-elimination procedure, we expand the (...) calculus by connections as introduced in Kashima and Shimura. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss sequent calculi for the propositional fragment of the logic of HYPE. The logic of HYPE was recently suggested by Leitgeb as a logic for hyperintensional contexts. On the one hand we introduce a simple \-system employing rules of contraposition. On the other hand we present a \-system with an admissible rule of contraposition. Both systems are equivalent as well as sound and complete proof-system of HYPE. In order to provide a cut-elimination procedure, we expand the (...) calculus by connections as introduced in Kashima and Shimura. (shrink)

RésuméCet article analyse Ḥayawān III, 1 d'Avicenne, qui traite du désaccord bien connu entre médecins et philosophes sur l'origine des vaisseaux sanguins et des nerfs. Cependant, l'analyse proposée ne se limite pas à ce chapitre et à son sujet principal. L'objectif plus général de cet article est de reconstruire le contexte psycho-médical dans lequel s'inscrit l'exposé d'Avicenne, c'est-à-dire l'unicité de l’âme et les conditions qui en découlent pour l'animation du corps. L'article expose ensuite la stratégie par laquelle Avicenne présente des (...) positions médicales qui remettent en cause son modèle anatomique, lequel est cohérent avec sa théorie de l’âme. À cet égard, l'article montre tout d'abord comment Avicenne démonte les arguments des médecins dans un contexte philosophique. Ensuite, il clarifie l'apport de l'anatomie pour déterminer les conditions de l'animation du corps et, finalement, comment concilier la pratique médicale avec les vérités philosophiques, le cas échéant. (shrink)

I present and discuss recent work in analytic philosophy of religion on apophaticism and divine ineffability. I focus on three questions: how can we call God ineffable without contradicting ourselves? How can we refer to an ineffable God? What is the point of talking about an ineffable God?

In his introductions to the encyclopaedic Philosophy of Nature and to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel distinguishes between three ‘attitudes’ (Verhaltensweisen, Einstellungen) towards nature—the theoretical, the practical and the philosophical attitude. According to him there is a certain ‘contradiction’ or tension between our theoretical attitude towards nature, which makes it an object of scientific inquiry, and the practical attitude that we assume as living rational beings who intervene in nature and shape it according to our purposes. This (...) article focuses on how exactly to pinpoint that tension and on how it is resolved in what Hegel calls the ‘philosophical’ or ‘comprehending’ attitude towards nature. (shrink)

It is widely believed that immigrants, after some time, acquire a claim to naturalize and become citizens of their new state. What explains this claim? Although existing answers (may) succeed in justifying some of immigrants' rights claims, they cannot justify the claim that immigrants are owed the opportunity to naturalize because these theories lack a sufficiently rich account of the purpose of citizenship. To fill this gap, I offer a novel egalitarian account of citizenship. Citizenship, on this account, partially protects (...) immigrants against social hierarchy by realizing social equality in a publicly accessible manner. This explains claims to naturalize. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a unified account of conditionals inspired by Frank Ramsey. Most contemporary philosophers agree that Ramsey’s account applies to indicative conditionals only. We observe against this orthodoxy that his account covers subjunctive conditionals as well—including counterfactuals. In light of this observation, we argue that Ramsey’s account of conditionals resembles Robert Stalnaker’s possible worlds semantics supplemented by a model of belief. The resemblance suggests to reinterpret the notion of conditional degree of belief in order to overcome a (...) tension in Ramsey’s account. The result of the reinterpretation is a tenable account of conditionals that covers indicative and subjunctive as well as qualitative and probabilistic conditionals. (shrink)

What role do human relationships play within the moral domain? There appears to be a lot of agreement that relationships play an important role in and for morality, but certainly not any foundational one. Yet, there has been a recent interest in seeking to explain the foundation of morality in relational terms. According to these relational proposals, the very foundation of impartial morality, and in particular the domain of “what we owe to each other” can be found in the same (...) normative structures that are characteristic of interpersonal relationships and the partial reasons they give rise to. This suggestion has been met with serious criticism, according to which any seeming appeal to a so-called moral relationship does no work in grounding morality and the obligations that we owe to each other. The present paper intends to challenge this conclusion by arguing that the objections rendered are not decisive, as a result of which we can begin to make sense of the idea that we do share a reason-giving relationship with each other in the moral sphere. The moral relationship, the paper argues, is one we simply share with each other in virtue of our shared vulnerability to attitudinal injury as rational agents. (shrink)

It is astonishing that we humans are able to have, act on and express moral beliefs. This dissertation aims to provide a better philosophical understanding of why and how this is possible especially when we assume metaethical expressivism. Metaethical expressivism is the combination of expressivism and noncognitivism. Expressivism is the view that the meaning of a sentence is explained by the mental state it is conventionally used to express. Noncognitivism is the view that the mental state expressed by a moral (...) sentence is a noncognitive, desire-like state. The central question of this dissertation is this: "How can metaethical expressivists explain that we are able to express moral beliefs?" The shortest answer this dissertation will give is the following: "by becoming `dispositional expressivists´." Dispositional expressivists hold that moral beliefs are dispositions to be in certain mental states that resemble desires. More precisely, a central thesis of this study is that to hold a moral belief is to be disposed to be in a desire-like, noncognitive state where this state has some specific structure. This dissertation arrives at and justifies this thesis by making a number of steps. It starts with preparing the ground by developing a general theory of what it is for a sentence to express a mental state. Roughly, this theory states that for a sentence to express a mental state is for that sentence to be conventionally used to perform a speech act which counts as sincere only if the user or speaker is in that mental state. This theory of expressing satisfies all the constraints that must be satisfied for it to be compatible with the purposes of metaethical expressivism. The next step is to provide a solution to the most notorious semantic problem confronting metaethical expressivism, the problem of explaining how sentences containing moral words can have compositional meaning and stand in logical relations also known as the Frege-Geach or embedding problem. Building on the research of Mark Schroeder, a new expressivist semantics, called `Attitude Semantics´, will be developed for a first-order language. The motivating idea underlying attitude semantics is that expressivists can avoid the problematic feature of so-called `biforcation´ if they treat the structures of the mental states expressed by moral sentences as well as that expressed by non-moral sentences as being isomorphic. In order to give those structures a philosophically interesting interpretation, it will be suggested that we treat sentences as expressing dispositional states. As a toy example we will treat the sentence `murder is wrong´ as expressing the disposition to be for blaming for murder. After dealing with the Frege-Geach problem, I turn to the metaethical expressivists' project of quasi-realism. Two major goals of this project are to explain how moral sentence can be truth-apt and how the states expressed by them can be regarded as moral beliefs. In order to establish those goals I critically examine a number of theories of truth-aptness by providing counterexamples to them. I then present my own theory which says that a sentence is truth-apt iff and because there is a conventional way to use it to express a belief. What is new about this theory is that it treats expressing a belief as being explanatorily more basic than being truth-apt. Belief, according to this theory, explains truth-aptness, not vice versa. This has the important consequence that it shows that what I call the `orthodox strategy´ of quasi-realists is mistaken and needs to be inverted: expressivists must `earn the right´ to moral belief before they can establish that moral sentences are truth-apt, and not the other way round. The second part of this dissertation is then concerned with the question of what it is to hold a moral belief and how they can figure in rational reasoning. In short: it is concerned with earning the right to moral belief. After discussing the major problems confronting a noncognitivist theory of belief, most importantly what I call the `tightrope problem´, I argue for a dispositional form of noncognitivism about moral belief that combines elements from Eric Schwitzgebel's dispositionalism about belief and Sebastian Köhler's `conceptual role expressivism´. This dispositional noncognitivism perfectly matches and justifies the dispositionalist interpretation of the expressivist semantics developed before. In order to fully earn the right to moral belief, however, metaethical expressivists must also deal with several epistemological objections concerning the rationality of moral belief. The first objection I deal with comes from Derek Baker and is directed against Mark Schroeder's specific development of expressivism. I deal with this objection because my own theory bears close resemblance to Schroeder's theory and so it might be worried that it confronts the same issues. Fortunately, we will see that Baker's objection rest on a number of mistaken assumptions and so neither applies to Schroeder's expressivism nor to the version which I defend in this study. The other epistemological objection to metaethical expressivism I deal with is Cian Dorr's famous wishful-thinking objection. In contrast to previous replies to this objection I attack it by directly questioning the central assumption on which it rests, namely that reasoners can never be justified in basing a factual belief on a desire-like state. I argue that this is false, and that under certain conditions reasoning from desire-like mental states to factual beliefs is justified. My argument shows that even if holding a moral belief is being in a desire-like noncognitive state, basing factual belief on a moral belief can give one an epistemic reason for the factual belief. Hence, even if moral thoughts are wishes, moral thinking is not wishful thinking. I take my arguments to earn the dispositional expressivist the right to moral belief. By the previously defended theory of truth-aptness in terms of belief, this allows the dispositional expressivists to conclude that moral sentences are also truth-apt. This finishes the quasi-realist project of this dissertation. In the last part of this dissertation I switch gears and present two unnoted problems for metaethical expressivists having to do with explaining moral motivation. Both arguments are surprisingly simple. The first one is this: if motivation requires a belief as well as a desire (Humeanism), and moral judgments motivate by themselves (internalism), then moral judgments cannot be desires only. If this argument is sound, it shows that the famous `motivation argument´ not only entails the falsity of cognitivism, but also the falsity of noncognitivism. The second argument is the following: moral judgments when combined with suitable external desires motivate to act (externalism), but if motivation requires belief as well as desire (Humeanism), then moral judgments cannot be desires only. I discuss several ways in which noncognitivists might want to deal with those problems, but leave it as an open question whether those solutions will ultimately be viable. Overall, this dissertation makes serious contributions to the research program of metaethical expressivism. It makes proposals for how to solve a number of notorious problems, such as the Frege-Geach problem in semantics and the wishful-thinking problem in epistemology. Besides this, however, it also raises two new problems for metaethical expressivism in the philosophy of action. For those reasons this dissertation will be of interest for anyone who wants to defend or criticize expressivism in metaethics, and more generally, anyone who wants to better understand our astonishing ability to express moral beliefs. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In comparing classical and non-classical solutions to the semantic paradoxes arguments relying on strength have been influential. In this paper I argue that non-classical solutions should preserve the proof-theoretic strength of classical solutions. Leitgeb’s logic of HYPE is then presented as an interesting possibility to strengthen FDE with a suitable conditional. It is shown that HYPE allows for a non-classical Kripkean theory of truth, called KFL, that is strong enough for the relevant purposes and has additional attractive properties.

Carlos J. Álvarez Universidad de La Laguna, España El presente artículo está motivado por la celebración de los 100 años … Read More →.

'100 Conversations You Need to Have' is an accessible and thought-provoking collection of life's big questions and corresponding answers from some of history's greatest philosophers. Readers are provided with the opportunity to answer each question, turn the page and receive a short piece of advice from thinkers on topics that include happiness, friendship, discipline, patience, the meaning of life and death, and other essential topics. The list of philosophers that are featured in each notebook is very multicultural. It includes both (...) men and women and spans across time, including, among others, Aristotle, Seneca, Simone de Beauvoir, Lao Tzu, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Alfarabi, Jean-Paul Sartre and Pema Chodron. These notebooks duplicate the Socratic dialogue method and embody the idea of philosophy being a pathway to a more fulfilling life by creating 100 meaningful dialogues between the reader and a diverse array of interlocutors who will guide them on their journey to crafting a good life. (shrink)

Carlos J. Álvarez y Melchor Hernández Castilla Universidad de La Laguna, España Asociación Wolfgang Köhler, España … Read More →.

Linguistic exersizes for the students and language teachers.

100 × Congo: A Century of Congolese Art in Antwerp museum aan de stroom, antwerp. 3 october 2020–12 september 2021.

The operationalization of scienti?c notions is instrumental in enabling experimental evidence to bear on scienti?c propositions. Conceptual change should thus translate into operationalization change. This article describes some important experimental works in the psychology of concepts since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that since the early days of this ?eld, psy- chologists.