En 1534, le grand chancelier d'Angleterre, sir Thomas More, refuse de prêter serment à l'Acte de Suprématie par lequel Henri VIII d'Angleterre, s'opposant à l'Eglise de Rome, se proclame chef de l'Eglise anglicane. Condamné par le tribunal royal à la décapitation publique, Thomas More demeure pourtant fidèle : fidèle au roi, fidèle à la foi, et fidèle à sa conscience au prix de sa vie. En effet, s'il ne reconnaît pas le roi comme chef de l'Eglise nationale, il n'a jamais (...) remis en cause son autorité temporelle. Sir Thomas More, humaniste, juriste, théologien, diplomate, homme d'Etat et finalement martyr, est devenu un modèle pour ceux qui se dévouent au bien commun. L'Europe troublée du XVIe siècle n'est pas sans rappeler notre époque soumise à la difficile gestion des affaires publiques, aux scandales financiers et à l'avidité de quelques puissants. Ce livre, qui présente la vie de Thomas More et les valeurs fondatrices de son action, peut nous aider à trouver de nouveaux repères pour devenir ferment dans la pâte du monde. Le lecteur saisira alors toute la vérité des paroles adressées par l'humaniste anglais Roger Ascham à la petite- fille de More : "Par cet homme seul, c'est toute l'Angleterre qui s'est trouvée anoblie.". (shrink)

Histoire de la philosophie et liberté -- Le monde libre -- Le récit du commencement : une aporie de la raison grecque -- La vraisemblance du faux (Parménide, fragment I, 31-32) -- Sur le plan du Timée -- La cosmologie finale du Sophiste (265b4-e6) -- La communauté humaine dans la philosophie grecque -- Note sur la définition du mouvement (Physique III 1-3) -- Le fou stoïcien.

There is a growing discourse on “new sincerity,” and related terms like “quirky” and “metamodernism,” as a movement or sensibility in contemporary cinema developing from the late 1990s onward, exemplified by the work of filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman. However, what this new concept means in the context of cinema has so far remained under-defined and requires further philosophical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by offering a reconceptualization of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist-phenomenological notions of good faith (...) and sincerity, which will be connected to developments in film and elaborated in relation to Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012). I propose, against Sartre's own preference for the problematic term “authenticity,” to understand sincerity as the reflective resumption of good faith's pre-reflective acceptance of human-reality. This conception of sincerity as reflective allows us to accurately understand the combination of self-awareness and affirmation that characterizes new sincerity cinema: its self-awareness does not serve the postmodernist strategy of endless self-ironization; instead, its portrayals affirm the meaningfulness of its filmic reality, while also being aware of film as a medium. An analysis of Frances Ha illustrates how this concept of sincerity might be seen to function both on the level of story world, characters and themes, and on that of narrative structure and audio-visual style, thereby showing how we can meaningfully speak of sincerity in and of film. (shrink)

We develop a multi-agent deontic action logic to study the logical behaviour of two types of deontic conditionals: (1) conditional obligations, having the form "If group H were to perform action aH, then, in group F's interest, group G ought to perform action aG" and (2) conditional permissions, having the form "If group H were to perform action aH, then, in group F's interest, group G may perform action aG". First, we define a formal language for multi-agent deontic action logic (...) and a class of consequentialist models to interpret the formulas of the language. Second, we define a transformation that converts any strategic game into a consequentialist model. Third, we show that an outcome a* is a Nash equilibrium of a strategic game if and only if a conjunction of certain conditional permissions is true in the consequentialist model that results from the transformation of that strategic game. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt a un problème avec la philosophie. Si elle en joue et provoque, le trait s’avère constant, tout au long de sa vie, publique comme privée. Jamais elle ne cacha son peu d’appétence pour les « diseur[s] professionnel[s] de vérité »1. Elle poussa même le vice jusqu’à déclarer, en réponse à Günther Gauss qui, lors d’une célèbre entrevue datant de 1964 et tel le frais cabri qui, avec candeur et bonheur, se dirige guilleret, primesautier, vers la surprise party que (...) donne le loup en son... (shrink)

In the absence of the Arabic text of al-Khw's Arithmetic, which has not yet been found, the oldest Latin adaptations from the twelfth century are the only evidence documenting the genesis and the first spreading of a decimal arithmetic that uses nine figures and zero, i.e. the Indian reckoning known in the Middle Ages as algorismus. This paper studies these texts, their content, their sources, and identifies their authors and the milieus in which they were written.

A key argument of Dixon et al. in the target article is that prejudice reduction through intergroup contact and collective action work in opposite ways. We argue for a complementary approach focusing on extreme emotions to understand why people turn to non-normative collective action and to understand when and under what conditions extreme emotions may influence positive effects of contact on reconciliation.

Individualists claim that collective obligations are reducible to the individual obligations of the collective’s members. Collectivists deny this. We set out to discover who is right by way of a deontic logic of collective action that models collective actions, abilities, obligations, and their interrelations. On the basis of our formal analysis, we argue that when assessing the obligations of an individual agent, we need to distinguish individual obligations from member obligations. If a collective has a collective obligation to bring about (...) a particular state of affairs, then it might be that no individual in the collective has an individual obligation to bring about that state of affairs. What follows from a collective obligation is that each member of the collective has a member obligation to help ensure that the collective fulfills its collective obligation. In conclusion, we argue that our formal analysis supports collectivism. (shrink)

I apply Kooi and Tamminga's (2012) idea of correspondence analysis for many-valued logics to strong three-valued logic (K3). First, I characterize each possible single entry in the truth-table of a unary or a binary truth-functional operator that could be added to K3 by a basic inference scheme. Second, I define a class of natural deduction systems on the basis of these characterizing basic inference schemes and a natural deduction system for K3. Third, I show that each of the resulting natural (...) deduction systems is sound and complete with respect to its particular semantics. Among other things, I thus obtain a new proof system for Lukasiewicz's three-valued logic. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an argumentation formalism that allows for both deductive and abductive argumentation, where ‘deduction’ is used as an umbrella term for both defeasible and strict ‘forward’ inference. Our formalism is based on an extended version of our previously proposed information graph formalism, which provides a precise account of the interplay between deductive and abductive inference and causal and evidential information. In the current version, we consider additional types of information such as abstractions which allow domain experts (...) to be more expressive in stating their knowledge, where we identify and impose constraints on the types of inferences that may be performed with the different types of information. A new notion of attack is defined that captures a crucial aspect of abductive reasoning, namely that of competition between abductively inferred alternative explanations. Our argumentation formalism generates an abstract argumentation framework and thus allows arguments to be formally evaluated. We prove that instantiations of our argumentation formalism satisfy key rationality postulates. (shrink)

Considering the urgency of addressing grand challenges that affect human health and achieving the ambitious health targets set by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, the role of business in improving health has become critical. Yet, our systematic review of the business–health literature reveals that business research focuses primarily on occupational health and safety, health care organizations, and health regulations. To embrace the health externalities generated by business activities, we propose that future research should investigate the conditions under which business (...) articulates and participates in health challenges, engages in multilevel actions toward tackling health challenges, and improves health outcomes and its impact on the health of external stakeholders, including customers and local communities. We also urge business scholars to engage with the public health research community to increase impact. (shrink)

Consumer-based datasets are the products of data brokerage firms that agglomerate millions of personal records on the adult US population. This big data commodity is purchased by both companies and individual clients for purposes such as marketing, risk prevention, and identity searches. The sheer magnitude and population coverage of available consumer-based datasets and the opacity of the business practices that create these datasets pose emergent ethical challenges within the computational social sciences that have begun to incorporate consumer-based datasets into empirical (...) research. To directly engage with the core ethical debates around the use of consumer-based datasets within social science research, I first consider two case study applications of consumer-based dataset-based scholarship. I then focus on three primary ethical dilemmas within consumer-based datasets regarding human subject research, participant privacy, and informed consent in conversation with the principles of the seminal Belmont Report. (shrink)

We show that MRP + MA implies that ITP(λ, ω 2 ) holds for all cardinal λ ≥ ω 2 . This generalizes a result by Weiß who showed that PFA implies that ITP(λ, ω 2 ) holds for all cardinal λ ≥ ω 2 . Consequently any of the known methods to prove MRP + MA consistent relative to some large cardinal hypothesis requires the existence of a strongly compact cardinal. Moreover if one wants to force MRP + MA (...) with a proper forcing, it requires at least a supercompact cardinal. We also study the relationship between MRP and some weak versions of square. We show that MRP implies the failure of □(λ, ω) for all λ ≥ ω 2 and we give a direct proof that MRP + MA implies the failure of □(λ, ω 1 ) for all λ ≥ ω 2. (shrink)

If group members aim to fulfill a collective obligation, they must act in such a way that the composition of their individual actions amounts to a group action that fulfills the collective obligation. We study a strong sense of joint action in which the members of a group design and then publicly adopt a group plan that coordinates the individual actions of the group members. We characterize the conditions under which a group plan successfully coordinates the group members' individual actions, (...) and study how the public adoption of a plan changes the context in which individual agents make a decision about what to do. (shrink)

Two issues are addressed in this commentary: the universality and the “psychological reality” of locus equations as cues to place of articulation. Preliminary data collected in our laboratory suggest that locus equations do not reliably distinguish place of articulation for fricatives. Additionally, perception studies show that listeners can identify place of articulation based on much less temporal information than that required for deriving locus equations.

We use a deontic logic of collective agency to study reducibility questions about collective agency and collective obligations. The logic that is at the basis of our study is a multi-modal logic in the tradition of *stit* logics of agency. Our full formal language has constants for collective and individual deontic admissibility, modalities for collective and individual agency, and modalities for collective and individual obligations. We classify its twenty-seven sublanguages in terms of their expressive power. This classification enables us to (...) investigate reducibility relations between collective deontic admissibility, collective agency, and collective obligations, on the one hand, and individual deontic admissibility, individual agency, and individual obligations, on the other. (shrink)

We present and contrast two accounts of cooperative communication, both based on Active Inference, a framework that unifies biological and cognitive processes. The mental alignment account, defended in Vasil et al., takes the function of cooperative communication to be the alignment of the interlocutor's mental states, and cooperative communicative behavior to be driven by an evolutionarily selected adaptive prior belief favoring the selection of action policies that promote such an alignment. We argue that the mental alignment account should be rejected (...) because it neglects the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication, which skews its view of the dynamics of communicative interaction. We introduce our own conception of cooperative communication, inspired by a more radical ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. Cooperative communication, on our ecological conception, serves to guide and constrain the dynamics of the cooperative interaction via the construction and restructuring of shared fields of affordances, in order to reach the local goals of the joint actions in which episodes of cooperative communication are embedded. We argue that our ecological conception provides a better theoretical standpoint to account for the action-oriented nature of cooperative communication in the active inference framework. (shrink)

Quine's holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: *noncontradiction*, *universal revisability* and *pragmatic ordering*. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist's scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz's [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quine's empiricism is incoherent because its constitutive principles cannot themselves be rationally revised. Using (...) Gärdenfors and Makinson's logic of belief revision based on epistemic entrenchment, we argue that Katz wrongly assumes that the constitutive principles are *statements* within a holistic empiricist's theory of the world. Instead, we show that constitutive principles are best seen as *properties* of a holistic empiricist's theory of scientific inquiry and we submit that, without Katz's mistaken assumption, the paradox cannot be formulated. We argue that our perspective on the status of constitutive principles is perfectly in line with Quinean orthodoxy. In conclusion, we compare our findings with van Fraassen's [2002] argument that we should think of empiricism as a stance, rather than as a doctrine. (shrink)

In the face of challenging circumstances, many teachers turn to spirituality for sustenance and strength. Yet spirituality’s place in education and in educators’ lives has long been a matter of confusion and contention, not least because of the ambiguity of the term in its common usage. What is its relationship to religion? And what defines it? In this article, I submit that the later work of Michel Foucault offers a helpful approach to spirituality that displaces those questions—drawing attention away from (...) beliefs and/or attitudes professed, and towards the process of practical self-transformation that subjects undertake for the sake of a truth that is actualised in the body. To be spiritual in this sense is more a matter of what one does than what one believes or who one is. To offer a sense of why it matters in the lives of educators, I draw on the experiences of a San Diego high school teacher confronting interlocking personal, professional, and political challenges as a detailed example. (shrink)

This paper presents two systems of natural deduction for the rejection of non-tautologies of classical propositional logic. The first system is sound and complete with respect to the body of all non-tautologies, the second system is sound and complete with respect to the body of all contradictions. The second system is a subsystem of the first. Starting with Jan Łukasiewicz's work, we describe the historical development of theories of rejection for classical propositional logic. Subsequently, we present the two systems of (...) natural deduction and prove them to be sound and complete. We conclude with a ‘Theorem of Inversion’. (shrink)

C.S. Peirce's and Isaac Levi's accounts of the belief-doubt-belief model are discussed and evaluated. It is argued that the contemporary study of belief change has metamorphosed into a branch of philosophical logic where empirical considerations have become obsolete. A case is made for reformulations of belief change systems that do allow for empirical tests. Last, a belief change system is presented that (1) uses finite representations of information, (2) can adequately deal with inconsistencies, (3) has finite operations of change, (4) (...) can do without extra-logical elements, and (5) only licenses consistent beliefs. (shrink)

The power of some new entrants to the music industry derives from their position as brokers in computer-mediated environments. Brokers act instrumentally to exploit their position within a network which, in turn, depends on their ability to build and sustain links (and, in computer-mediated environments, hyperlinks). Bricolage in computer-mediated entrepreneurship refers to the intuitive manipulation of resources in order to achieve (perhaps tacit) goals. Without careful stewardship of the new intellectual wealth thus created, bricolage may profit neither the individual nor (...) the wider community. (shrink)

This paper examines the question of why consumers engage in ethical consumption. The authors draw on self-affirmation theory to propose that the choice of an ethical product serves a self-restorative function. Four experiments provide support for this assertion: a self-threat increases consumers’ choice of an ethical option, even when the alternative choice is objectively superior in quantity (Study 1) and product quality (Study 2). Further, restoring self-esteem through positive feedback eliminates this increase in ethical choice (Studies 2 and 3). As (...) an additional test of the robustness of our results, a final study examined the effect of self-threat on choice in a field setting (Study 4). The findings indicate that ethical purchases are not just altruistic. They hold purposeful individual value and can help in the self-restorative process. Implications for managers making decisions regarding investment in ethical product features are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an ecological account of communication according to which acts of communication are active inferences achieved by affecting the behavior of a target organism via the modification of its field of affordances. Constraining a target organism’s behavior constitutes a mechanism of socially extended active inference, allowing organisms to proactively regulate their inner states through the behavior of other organisms. In this general conception of communication, the type of cooperative communication characteristic of human communicative interaction is a (...) way of constraining interaction dynamics toward the goals of a given joint action by constructing and altering shared fields of affordances. This account embraces a pragmatist view according to which communication is a form of action aiming to influence the behavior of a target, and stands against the traditional transmission view according to which communication fundamentally serves to convey information. Understanding acts of communication as active inference under an ecological interpretation allows us to link communicative and ultimately linguistic behavior to the biological imperative of minimizing free energy and to emphasize the action-oriented nature of communicative interaction. (shrink)