One of the reasons which has induced philosophers to enquire about animal psychology is the hope of arriving at a more precise understanding of human mental faculties. For example, in relatively recent times, this motive was evident among various authors of the seventeenth century, who were more or less directly influenced on the issue by Descartes. Over and above the varying lines which they pursued, what they most often have in common, is an essentially anthropocentric approach to the study of (...) animals. The general categories which they used were mainly defined by specific reference to “human nature,”. The identity of this nature was to be highlighted by the complex of differences from, and similarities to, that of the animals. (shrink)

Among the rules which govern the "language-games" discussed by Wittgenstein there are some which seem to have particular functions which can be more effectively brought to light by considering the logical and pragmatic effects of their breakage. Indeed, if we extend progressively the analysis of possible breakages of such rules from particular language-games to broader and broader areas of language, we arrive at a point where (as happened in the Tractatus) it seems possible to draw a limit between what, in (...) general terms, is endowed with sense, and what is devoid of it. This possibility, offered by a "rule-breaking" approach, also opens a promising perspective from which to look afresh at some classical problems connected with skepticism. (shrink)

Among the rules which govern the "language-games" discussed by Wittgenstein there are some which seem to have particular functions which can be more effectively brought to light by considering the logical and pragmatic effects of their breakage. Indeed, if we extend progressively the analysis of possible breakages of such rules from particular language-games to broader and broader areas of language, we arrive at a point where (as happened in the Tractatus) it seems possible to draw a limit between what, in (...) general terms, is endowed with sense, and what is devoid of it. This possibility, offered by a "rule-breaking" approach, also opens a promising perspective from which to look afresh at some classical problems connected with skepticism. (shrink)

Political Freedom By George G. Brenkert Routledge, 1991. Pp. 278. ISBN 0–415–03372–1. £35 hbk.Wittgenstein: A Bibliographical Guide By Guido Frongia and Brian McGuinness Basil Blackwell, 1990. Pp. x + 438. ISBN 00631–13765–3. £60.00.Metaphysics By Peter van Inwagen Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 222. ISBN 0–19–8751400. £11.95 pbk.The Nature of Moral Thinking By Francis Snare Routledge, 1992. Pp. 187. ISBN 0–415–04709–9. £9.99 pbk.Filosofía analitica hoy: Encuentro de tradiciones Edited by Mercedes Torrevejano Servicio de Publications Universidade de Santiago (...) de Compostela, 1991. Pp. 284. ISBN 84–7191–722‐X. $15.5 pbk.The Puzzle of Experience By J.J. Valberg Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. 227. ISBN 0–19–824291–3. £25.Religion and Philosophy Edited by Martin Warner Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 31 Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 155. ISBN 0–521–42951‐X. £10.95 pbk.The Uses of Philosophy By Mary Warnock Blackwell, 1992. Pp. 256. ISBN 0–631–18038–9. £35.00 hbk. £11.95 pbk.The Disappearance of Time: Kurt Godel and the Idealistic Tradition in Philosophy By Palle Yourgrau Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. x + 182. ISBN 0–521–41012–6. £27.50. (shrink)

According to virtue epistemology, the main aim of education is the development of the cognitive character of students (Pritchard, 2014, 2016). Given the proliferation of technological tools such as ChatGPT and other LLMs for solving cognitive tasks, how should educational practices incorporate the use of such tools without undermining the cognitive character of students? Pritchard (2014, 2016) argues that it is possible to properly solve this ‘technology-education tension’ (TET) by combining the virtue epistemology framework with the theory of extended cognition (...) (EXT) (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). He argues that EXT enables us to consider tools as constitutive parts of the students’ cognitive system, thus preserving their cognitive character from technologically induced cognitive diminishment. The first aim of this paper is to show that this solution is not sufficient to solve the TET. Second, I aim to offer a complementary and more encompassing framework of tool-use to address the TET. Then, I apply it to the educational uses of ChatGPT as the most notable example of LLM, although my arguments can be extended to other generative AI systems. To do so, in Sect. 1.1, I present Pritchard’s framework of cognitive character and virtue epistemology applied in education, to which I am committed in this treatment. In Sects. 2 and 3, I respectively illustrate Pritchard’s (2014) solution to the TET, and I highlight the general limitations of his proposal. Thus, in Sect. 4.1 I characterize ChatGPT as a computational cognitive artifact using Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts. In Sect. 4.2, I introduce my proposal, which combines Pritchard’s account of virtue epistemology with Fasoli’s (2017, 2018) taxonomy of cognitive artifacts to address the TET. Finally, in Sect. 5.1, I present some epistemically virtuous uses of ChatGPT in educational contexts. To conclude, I argue in favor of a multidisciplinary approach for analyzing educational activities involving AI technologies such as ChatGPT. (shrink)

Given the metaphysical and explanatory stalemate between Embedded and Extended cognition, different authors proposed moral arguments to overcome such a deadlock in favor of EXT. Farina and Lavazza attribute to EXT and EMB a substantive moral content, arguing in favor of the former by virtue of its progressiveness and inclusiveness. In this treatment, I criticize four of their moral arguments. In Sect. 2, I focus on the argument from legitimate interventions and on the argument from extended agency. Section 3 concerns (...) the argument from better protection and the argument from better treatment. Sections 4 and 5 are dedicated to counterarguments against each respectively. By distinguishing between EXT and the extended view, I argue that it is sufficient to use this second version for directly addressing and evaluating moral problems on normative grounds, independently of the causal or constitutive cognitive influence of the external resource on the agents’ minds. Moreover, I argue that the arguments and assumptions used by EXT theorists do not foster values of progressiveness and inclusiveness. To conclude, in Sect. 6, I show that the analysis of each argument converges on the conclusion that EXT does not have substantive moral content and implications per se, since they always depend on further assumptions. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how to represent and reason about legal abrogations and annulments in Defeasible Logic. We examine some options that embed in this setting, and in similar rule-based systems, ideas from belief and base revision. In both cases, our conclusion is negative, which suggests to adopt a different logical model. This model expresses temporal aspects of legal rules, and distinguishes between two main timelines, one internal to a given temporal version of the legal system, and another relative (...) to how the legal system evolves over time. Accordingly, we propose a temporal extension of Defeasible Logic suitable to express this model and to capture abrogation and annulment. We show that the proposed framework overcomes the difficulties discussed in regard to belief and base revision, and is sufficiently flexible to represent many of the subtleties characterizing legal abrogations and annulments. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of how concepts pertinent to legal contracts can influence certain aspects of their digital implementation through smart contracts, as inspired by recent developments in distributed ledger technology. We discuss how properties of imperative and declarative languages including the underlying architectures to support contract management and lifecycle apply to various aspects of legal contracts. We then address these properties in the context of several blockchain architectures. While imperative languages are commonly used to implement smart contracts, we (...) find that declarative languages provide more natural ways to deal with certain aspects of legal contracts and their automated management. (shrink)

In this paper we show that the Hilbert system of agency and ability presented by Dag Elgesem is incomplete with respect to the intended semantics. We argue that completeness result may be easily regained. Finally, we shortly discuss some issues related to the philosophical intuition behind his approach. This is done by examining Elgesem's modal logic of agency and ability using semantics with different flavours.

In this paper we present a Gentzen system for reasoning with contrary-to-duty obligations. The intuition behind the system is that a contrary-to-duty is a special kind of normative exception. The logical machinery to formalise this idea is taken from substructural logics and it is based on the definition of a new non-classical connective capturing the notion of reparational obligation. Then the system is tested against well-known contrary-to-duty paradoxes.

Los fetos, los animales, los cristos malapartianos y pasolinianos nos recuerdan, por encima de todo, que la diagnosis del final de Europa y de su cultura dos veces milenaria comienza con el eclipse del llanto, con la desaparición de la piedad. Porque, a fin de cuentas, de las lágrimas de Aquiles sobre la cabeza canosa de Príamo nació todo. Pasolini y Malaparte sienten intensamente este colapso de la civilización y responden de maneras sorprendentemente afines. Esta contribución inicia una verificación sobre (...) la relación entre los dos escritores más heterodoxos del Novecientos italiano. (shrink)

Recent years have yielded many discussions on how to endow autonomous agents with the ability to make ethical decisions, and the need for explicit ethical reasoning and transparency is a persistent theme in this literature. We present a modular and transparent approach to equip autonomous agents with the ability to comply with ethical prescriptions, while still enacting pre-learned optimal behaviour. Our approach relies on a normative supervisor module, that integrates a theorem prover for defeasible deontic logic within the control loop (...) of a reinforcement learning agent. The supervisor operates as both an event recorder and an on-the-fly compliance checker w.r.t. an external norm base. We successfully evaluated our approach with several tests using variations of the game Pac-Man, subject to a variety of “ethical” constraints. (shrink)

This chapter examines the contribution of Francis Bacon to early modern philosophy. It argues that Bacon's work is not limited to epistemology and scientific methodology, and explains that he also wrote treatises on such disparate topics as ethics, politics, aesthetics, religion, and law. The chapter discusses Bacon's theory of matter, his view about the relationship between art and nature, and his critique of the anthropocentric view of the universe. It also highlights his belief on the importance of understanding the difference (...) between the unaware perception of nature and the sentient awareness of human knowledge. (shrink)

IL MOSTRO E L'EROE. Quando Pomponio Algieri da Nola, all’età di soli 24 anni, viene bruciato vivo a Roma in piazza Navona, Giordano Bruno di anni ne ha appena otto. Oltre che per la giovane età del condannato, l’esecuzione è insolita anche per il luogo e il metodo scelto dall’Inquisizione: anziché le solite fascine, per alimentare il fuoco viene approntato un pentolone di pece, olio e trementina, nel quale viene immersa la povera vittima.

This paper provides a computational framework, based on defeasible logic, to capture some aspects of institutional agency. Our background is Kanger-Lindahl-Pörn account of organised interaction, which describes this interaction within a multi-modal logical setting. This work focuses in particular on the notions of counts-as link and on those of attempt and of personal and direct action to realise states of affairs. We show how standard defeasible logic (DL) can be extended to represent these concepts: the resulting system preserves some basic (...) properties commonly attributed to them. In addition, the framework enjoys nice computational properties, as it turns out that the extension of any theory can be computed in time linear to the size of the theory itself. (shrink)

Creativity is intrinsic to Humanities and STEM disciplines. In the activities of artists and engineers, for example, an attempt is made to bring something new into the world through counterfactual thinking. However, creativity in these disciplines is distinguished by differences in motivations and constraints. For example, engineers typically direct their creativity toward building solutions to practical problems, whereas the outcomes of artistic creativity, which are largely useless to practical purposes, aspire to enrich the world aesthetically and conceptually. In this essay, (...) an artist (DHS) and a roboticist (GS) engage in a cross-disciplinary conceptual analysis of the creative problem of artificial consciousness in a robot, expressing the counterfactual thinking necessitated by the problem, as well as disciplinary differences in motivations, constraints, and applications. We especially deal with the question of why one would build an artificial consciousness and we consider how an illusionist theory of consciousness alters prominent ethical debates on synthetic consciousness. We discuss theories of consciousness and their applicability to synthetic consciousness. We discuss practical approaches to implementing artificial consciousness in a robot and conclude by considering the role of creativity in the project of developing an artificial consciousness. (shrink)

_Brill's Companion to Medieval and Early Platonism_ explores the impact exercised by Platonism on philosophy and many other fields of European culture, and the links it established with Christian, Jewish, Byzantine and Arabic traditions of thought during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

After a brief reconstruction of the principle of precaution’s juridical rising, I will discuss in short the question of the juridical nature of the same principle and then examine some of its extra-juridical implications, showing how the intrinsic logic of the principle of precaution implies a strict connection with the needs and proper forms of a conception of democracy as participative.

While the legal concept of a subject of rights is eminently an abstraction, Ricoeur’s philosophical challenge seeks to rethink its identity within the philosophy of action, in correlation with the ideas of capacity, attestation, and recognition. The terminology Ricoeur employs presents some significant marks of this theoretical stance, as he speaks of a “veritable” or a “real” subject of rights as distinguished from the purely formal one. I argue that Ricoeur’s approach to the legal subject attains its highest meaning in (...) connection with the renewal of the semantics of responsibility in a prospective sense. In particular, I contend that Ricoeur’s idea of a “veritable” subject of rights deploys its full theoretical potential in relation to a prospective idea of responsibility in contrast to the “static” perspective of the ascription of rights and duties. Reciprocally, a prospective idea of responsibility deploys its full meaning in relation to a subject of rights not reduced to a legal abstraction since, as far as narrative identity is implied, this subject is and has to be an embodied one. I shall show that the thesis advocating a projection of responsibility towards the future may have some significant theoretical implications, in particular in relation to the effect of techno-scientific development in areas such as Artificial Intelligence. (shrink)

Cette contribution entend examiner la place que la référence au droit, et plus largement au phénomène juridique, occupe dans la dernière phase de la réflexion de Ricœur autour du sujet capable. Le droit joue en effet un rôle d’une importance croissante dans l’articulation de l’anthropologie capacitaire définie dans la “petite éthique” à travers une reconfiguration profonde de ses catégories fondamentales, notamment celle de sujet de droit et celle de responsabilité. Les implications d’un tel renouveau théorique seront prises en compte, tant (...) pour l’articulation interne de la pensée du dernier Ricœur que pour leurs potentielles retombées dans la théorie du droit contemporaine. (shrink)

Most of the theories on formalising intention interpret it as a unary modal operator in Kripkean semantics, which gives it a monotonic look. We argue that policy-based intentions exhibit non-monotonic behaviour which could be captured through a non-monotonic system like defeasible logic. To this end we outline a defeasible logic of intention. The proposed technique alleviates most of the problems related to logical omniscience. The proof theory given shows how our approach helps in the maintenance of intention-consistency in agent systems (...) like BDI. (shrink)

The question of the moral acceptability of infertility treatment to HIV positive persons raises a number of interesting ethical points regarding the responsibility of the infertility specialist for the outcome of his or her actions. The analysis of the physician’s responsibility is conducted within the framework of accomplice liability. The physician is a collaborator in the parental project of the principals—that is, the intentional parents. Both causal contribution and intention are considered as elements of complicity. It is concluded that a (...) two per cent risk of vertical transmission when the woman is HIV positive is insufficient to blame the infertility specialist who helps her to conceive. Helping an infertile HIV positive infertile couple to have a child does not constitute reckless behaviour. When the couple is fertile, infertility treatment is directed at risk reduction and falls under the physician’s obligation to act in the best interests of his patients. (shrink)

The communication process between the political elites and the general public, crucial as it is in a democratie system, is suffering increasingly from an information overlaad. The best way to tackle this problem seems to be the improvement of the communication medium, i.e. ofthe political language. Ideology is the most «rational» political language available : it can carry more information about elite decision-making to a relatively modest cost.This problem-definition suggest a sequence of three critical questions. Do the decisionmakers have a (...) political ideology? If so, is it instrumental in the actual decision-making process? If so, why does this ideological factor rarely reach the general public? The article deals with the two last questions from a format point of view. It can be shown, after the necessary conceptual clarifications and contrary to current opinion, that ideology can hold its own in the private forum of political decision-making and fades away when the elites address the public in the public forum.The private forum is dominated by the need for policy output and by the necessity of coalition-formation. The adaptation of ideology to this situation depends on its degree of articulation and on the type of coalition-formation. In general the «salience» aspect of ideology is likelyto suffer less than its «position» aspect.The public forum is dominated by the needs of recruiting support and legitimizing proposals. Generally ideology is too costly a device to be used for these purposes. (shrink)

Following the distinctions proposed by Gamson and Easton the complex phenomenon of political alienation among the young was empirically subdivided in several dimensions. Within the 'input'dimension of political alienation we distinguished between the ability to process information and the ability to participate. Within the 'output'dimension we distinguished between two referents of distrust, political actors and authorities on the one hand, and the political system on the other. We succeeded in constructing reliable scales for each of these dimensions which were then (...) used as dependent variables in regression models. When turning to the explanation of the phenomenon our attention was focused first and foremost on the cultural factors. This was amply rewarded. Some of the normative aspects of culture, namely 'presenteism' and 'dionysianism', have a significant influence on various dimensions of political alienation. The impact of cognitive aspects appears to be even more significant. This means that an effective policy to counter the rise of political alienation wilt have to cope with a phenomenon solidly embedded in contemporary culture. (shrink)

The Belgian civil servants who are involved in the working groups of the European Council of Ministers on a full-time basis are a small elite corps which is hardly typical for the Belgian civil service as a whole. Most of its members belong to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or to other ministries as these have delegates in the Permanent Representation. Their responsibilities too are rather different from those of the normal Belgian civil servant. The latter are typically engaged in (...) the implementation of the policies designed by their political masters, the farmer are largely autonomous policy makers and negotiators, though mostly in matters of minor political importance. In one regard though, these Euro-Belgians are still recognizable as typically Belgian. Their political culture is characterized, tough to a lesser degree than that of the other senior civil servants in Belgium, by a technocratism which is very distrustful of political actors and by a remarkable level of distrust of their organisational infrastructure. Such a culture should lead to a poor performance in the working groups of the Council of Ministers. But it does not. That is the paradox this contribution intends to examine. (shrink)

The Belgian senior civil servants do have a political ideology which, with respect to coherence and constraint, is not inferior to that of the members of Parliament and, therefore, far superior to that of the common man. The first characteristic of this ideology is its centrism: senior civil servants tend to shun the extremes, especially the socio-economic extremes. A second characteristic is its bias toward the center-right. But the latter may be an effect of recruitment and promotion practices under the (...) recent Belgian governing coalitions, rather than of the bureaucratic experience under all kinds of governments.That the bureaucratie experience leaves its mark on the ideological constructs of the bureaucratie elite can also be inferred from other data. They are inclined to centralism because the recent federalisation process imposes a heavy burden on their routines. They do not have a distinctive ideological profile with respect to religious and philosophical issues because these rarely appear on the agenda of most of the civil servants.The consequences of these characteristic ideological options are not to be underestimated. There is a clear affinity between a leftist ideology and a less technocratic and less alienated political attitude. At the same time leftist civil servantsare more inclined to commit themselves to active partisan politics. Their colleagues of the right tend more to up hold the traditional distance between bureaucracy and partisan politics. The optimal prescription for administrative reform would, perhaps, consist in furthering a more political, less technocratic style of administrative policy making, and in maintaining the traditional wariness of partisan politics. (shrink)