Here I respond to Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer’s “The Evil of Death: A Reply to Yi.” They developed an influential strategy in defense of the deprivation account of death’s badness against the Lucretian symmetry problem. The core of their argument consists in the claim that it is rational for us to welcome future intrinsic goods while being indifferent to past intrinsic goods. Previously, I argued that their approach is compatible with the evil of late birth insofar as an (...) earlier birth would have generated more goods in the future. In reply, Brueckner and Fischer argue that my critique fails to appreciate an important aspect of their thought experiment, which aims only to show that the deprivation of past goods per se is not bad for us. Thus, purportedly, my critique poses no threat to their view. Here I argue that since the deprivation account explains the evil of death with recourse to how one’s life would have fared had one lived longer, it ought to respond to the symmetry problem with reference to how one’s life would have fared had one been born earlier. However, it is not generally true that the life one would have had with an earlier birth is not preferable to one’s actual life, because in many cases such a life would contain more future goods. (shrink)

A primary argument against the badness of death (known as the Symmetry Argument) appeals to an alleged symmetry between prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. The Symmetry Argument has posed a serious threat to those who hold that death is bad because it deprives us of life’s goods that would have been available had we died later. Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer develop an influential strategy to cope with the Symmetry Argument. In their attempt to break the symmetry, they claim that (...) due to our preference of future experiential goods over past ones, posthumous nonexistence is bad for us, whereas prenatal nonexistence is not. Granting their presumption about our preference, however, it is questionable that prenatal nonexistence is not bad. This consideration does not necessarily indicate their defeat against the Symmetry Argument. I present a better response to the Symmetry Argument: the symmetry is broken, not because posthumous nonexistence is bad while prenatal nonexistence is not, but because (regardless as to whether prenatal nonexistence is bad) posthumous nonexistence is even worse. (shrink)

In this essay, I develop the concept of episodic value, which describes a form of value connected to a particular object or individual expressed and delivered through a narrative. Narrative can bestow special kinds of value on objects, as exemplified by auction articles or museum collections. To clarify the nature of episodic value, I show how the notion of episodic value fundamentally differs from the traditional axiological picture. I extend my discussion of episodic value to argue that the notion of (...) episodic value readily incorporates the role of narratives into the construction of identity in personal and social contexts. My main contentions are twofold. First, events or experiences from our personal narratives are episodically valuable insofar as they contribute to shaping our narrative identities. Second, when engaged in a collective action, we write a joint narrative with other participants that confers special meanings on the actions of each participant. (shrink)

The central claim of the Parfitian psychological approach to personal identity is that the fact about personal identity is underpinned by a non-branching psychological continuity relation. Hence, for the advocates of the Parfitian view, it is important to understand what it is for a relation to take or not take a branching form. Nonetheless, very few attempts have been made in the literature of personal identity to define the non-branching clause. This paper undertakes this task. Drawing upon a recent debate (...) between Anthony Brueckner and Harold Noonan on the issue, I present three candidates for the non-branching clause. (shrink)

In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the temporal bias approach claims that death is bad because it deprives us of something about which it is rational to care (e.g., future pleasures), whereas prenatal nonexistence is not bad because it only deprives us of something about which it is rational to remain indifferent (e.g., past pleasures). In a recent contribution to the debate on this approach, Miguel and Santos argue that a late beginning can deprive us of a future pleasure. Their (...) argument is based on the claim that for birth or death to deprive a person of any value in life, the historically closest counterfactual situation that contains the value is such that the person begins to exist earlier or dies later. This is what they call the Historical Condition. However, the Historical Condition is untenable for several reasons. First, this condition substantially weakens the explanatory capacity of the deprivation account because it implies that most ordinary sorts of pleasures are not deprived by death. In addition, the Historical Condition is vulnerable to counterexamples. In particular, what they offer as a standard case of the deprivation of future pleasure due to a late beginning (what they call Seeing The Beatles), or some of its variants, can be used to falsify this condition. Finally, the Historical Condition is theoretically indefensible because it is based on a faulty analysis of deprivation. (shrink)

Psychological Sequentialism holds that no causal constraint is necessary for the preservation of what matters in survival; rather, it is sufficient for preservation if two groups of mental states are similar enough and temporally close enough. Suppose one’s body is instantaneously dematerialized and subsequently, by an amazing coincidence, a group of molecules are configured to form a qualitatively identical human body. On this view, these events preserve what matters in survival. Despite its unpopularity, several philosophers have argued for this view. (...) One of the main arguments is that a psychologically sequential person is bound to have the same psychological traits and inclinations, and thus preserves what matters in the original person’s survival. In this paper, I argue that this argument fails to establish that no causal constraint is necessary. I also argue that if sequentialism is true, I should be content with the prospect of my bodily destruction followed by the creation of a series of short-lived beings whose mental states are sequential to mine. I suggest that the implausibility of this implication is sufficient to reject the view. (shrink)

In addressing the Lucretian symmetry problem, the content-based approach attends to the difference between the contents of the actual life and those of relevant possible lives of a person. According to this approach, the contents of a life with an earlier beginning would substantially differ from, and thus be discontinuous with, the contents of the actual life, whereas the contents of a life with the same beginning but a later death would be continuous with the contents of the actual life. (...) In this paper, I examine two versions of the content-based approach: the identity account and the preference account. The identity account holds that, in the sense of identity which is relevant to the evil of nonexistence, the subject of the actual life, though identical to the person in the life with a later death, is distinct from the subject of the life with an earlier beginning. The preference account maintains that, given one’s attachments to actual particulars, a life with an earlier beginning is not rationally preferable to one’s actual life, whereas a life with a later death is. I argue that each version of the content-based approach is implausible, while discussing some of the complications that face each of them. (shrink)

Psychological Sequentialism holds that no causal constraint is necessary for the preservation of what matters in survival; rather, it is sufficient for preservation if two groups of mental states are similar enough and temporally close enough. Suppose that one’s body is instantaneously dematerialized and subsequently, by an amazing coincidence, a collection of molecules is configured to form a qualitatively identical human body. According to Psychological Sequentialism, these events preserve what matters in survival. In this article, I examine some of the (...) main arguments for the view and argue that they fail to establish that no causal constraint is necessary. I also argue that Psychological Sequentialism yields implausible consequences that render it hard to accept the view. (shrink)

Consider a specific type of fission where psychological continuity takes a branching form, and one of the offshoots comes into being later than the other offshoot. Let us say that the earlier offshoot comes into being in the left branch at t, and the later offshoot comes into being in the right branch at t+1. With regard to the question how many persons are involved in this case, three answers are worth considering: (i) The original subject persists up to t; (...) a distinct person comes into being immediately after t and continues to exist in the left branch; and the third person comes into being in the right branch at t+1. (ii) The original subject persists up to the moment immediately before t+1; a distinct person comes into being at t+1 and continues to exist in the left branch; and the third person comes into being in the right branch at t+1. (iii) The original subject continues to exist in the left branch; a distinct person comes into being in the right branch at t+1. For those who hold that personal identity consists in psychological continuity of some sort, the aforementioned three options exhaust the sensible ways of understanding how one persists in delayed fission. However, I argue that complications arise for each answer. Hence, delayed fission poses a challenge for the psychological approach to personal identity. (shrink)

One response to the Frankfurtian attack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities is to advert to the observation that the agent’s actual action (or the particular event resulting from that action) is numerically distinct from the corresponding action (or the resultant event) he would have generated in the relevant counterfactual scenario. Since this response is based on taking actions and events to be fragile, I shall call it the fragilist account of alternative possibilities. This paper addresses an anti-fragilist argument delivered (...) by John Martin Fischer. I contend that, on close examination, Fischer’s counterargument does not undermine the fragilist account. (shrink)

In previous work we have presented a reply to the Lucretian Symmetry, which has it that it is rational to have symmetric attitudes toward prenatal and posthumous nonexistence. Our reply relies on Parfit-style thought-experiments. Here we reply to a critique of our approach by Huiyuhl Yi, which appears in this journal: Brueckner and Fischer on the evil of death. We argue that this critique fails to attend to the specific nature of the thought-experiments (and our associated argument). More specifically, (...) the thought-experiments seek to elicit attitudes about (say) past pleasures per se, and not insofar as such pleasures are connected to more pleasures in the future or a greater total amount of pleasures in one’s life overall. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize John Bigelow's account of number and present my own account that results from the criticism. In doing so, I argue that proper understanding of the nature of number requires a radical departure from the standard conception of language and reality and outline the alternative conception that underlies my account of number. I argue that Bigelow's account of number rests on an incorrect analysis of the plural constructions underlying the talk of number and propound an analysis (...) of numerical sentences, such as "Quine and Goodman are two", that conforms to the natural understanding of the plural constructions. The analysis leads to the account of number according to which natural numbers are properties, i.e., one-place relations: the number two, for example, is the property indicated by "to be two", which, I argue, is a one-place predicate that can combine with plural terms like "Quine and Goodman". (shrink)

How may feelings of love and hate impact people’s attention? We used a modified Attentional Blink (AB) task in which 300 participants were asked to categorise a name representing a person towards whom they felt either hate, love, or neutral (first target) plus identify a number word (second target), both embedded in a rapidly presented stream of other words. The lag to the second target was systematically varied. Contrary to our hypothesis, results revealed that both hated and loved names resulted (...) in higher accuracy for the second target than neutral names, which was largely independent of lag. Also, there we observed no sustained transfer effects of love and hate onto neutral name trials. The findings differ from prior research on attentional blink and transient, non-personal, stimulus-driven emotions, suggesting that interpersonal feelings activate different attention-relevant mechanisms. Relevant to future research, we speculate that love and hate are motivators of goal-directed behaviour that facilitate subsequent information processing. (shrink)

Humans must take moral and criminal responsibility for making a free choice between good and evil, according to Chŏng Yakyong, and this view was influenced by Matteo Ricci. Choosing to commit an evil action means committing a willful crime, so one must take responsibility for this action in the form of punishment. However, unintentional wrongdoings can be forgiven. For example, a man stealing to survive or killing a robber in order to live should not be punished, because these individuals have (...) no choice but to do so. Those claims of Chŏng are his own creation, not influenced by Ricci or Confucianism. By contrast, the idea that a child’s intentional hiding of his father’s crime should not be punished because of the child’s duty of filial piety was influenced by Confucianism. However, a large crime committed by a child on the basis of filial piety, such as committing murder to rescue one’s mother, only lends cause for commutation. Unlike Chŏng, Ricci regarded a child’s act of stealing bread to feed his family as an action of evil rather than an act of filial piety, since theft is an evil action. (shrink)

In addition to monocentric eukaryotes, which have a single localized centromere on each chromosome, there are holocentric species, with extended repeat‐based or repeat‐less centromeres distributed over the entire chromosome length. At least two types of repeat‐based holocentromeres exist, one composed of many small repeat‐based centromere units (small unit‐type), and another one characterized by a few large centromere units (large unit‐type). We hypothesize that the transposable element‐mediated dispersal of hundreds of short satellite arrays formed the small centromere unit‐type holocentromere in Rhynchospora (...) pubera. The large centromere unit‐type of the plant Chionographis japonica is likely a product of simultaneous DNA double‐strand breaks (DSBs), which initiated the de novo formation of repeat‐based holocentromeres via insertion of satellite DNA, derived from extra‐chromosomal circular DNAs (eccDNAs). The number of initial DSBs along the chromosomes must be higher than the number of centromere units since only a portion of the breaks will have incorporated eccDNA at an appropriate position to serve as future centromere unit sites. Subsequently, preferential incorporation of the centromeric histone H3 variant at these positions is assumed. The identification of repeat‐based holocentromeres across lineages will unveil the centromere plasticity and elucidate the mechanisms underlying the diverse formation of holocentromeres. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1. Kolel azharot ṿe-liḳuṭe dinim neḥutsim mi-Shu. ʻa. ṿe-aḥaronim ... -- ḥeleḳ 2. Ka-n.l. be-hosafat harbeh segulot le-yirʼat Shamayim ule-farnasah ... .

The paper studies the nature of understanding in condensed matter physics (CMP), mediated by the successful employment of its models. I first consider two obvious candidates for the criteria of model-based understanding, Van Fraassen's sense of empirical adequacy and Hacking's instrumental utility , and conclude that both are unsatisfactory. Inspired by Hasok Chang's recent proposal to reformulate realism as the pursuit of ontological plausibility in our system of knowledge, we may require the model under consideration to be understood (or intelligible) (...) before claiming model-based understanding. Here the understanding of a model typically consists of the following: figuring out at least one plausible (preferably realistic) physical mechanism for the model, determining the theoretical consequences of the model by mathematically probing it and developing our physical intuitions about the model. I consider the q-state Potts model to illustrate. After having understood a model, we may employ the model to understand its target phenomena in the world. This is done by matching one of the interpretative models of the model with the central features of the phenomena. The matching should be motivated (ideally both theoretically and empirically) in the sense that we have good reason to believe that the central features of the phenomena can be thought of as having more or less the same structure as postulated by the interpretative model. In conclusion, I propose a two-stage account of model-based understanding in CMP: (1) understanding of a model and (2) matching a target phenomenon with a well-motivated interpretative model of the model. Empirical success and instrumental utility both play their roles in the evaluation of how successful the model is, but are not the essential part of model-based understanding. (shrink)

An introduction to the philosophy of ʻAzīz al-Dīn ibn Muḥammad Nasafī, 13th cent. and Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, d. 1641 about mysticism and politics in Iran.

Plausible principles on truth seem to yield contradictory conclusions about paradoxical sentences such as the Strengthened Liar. Those who take the contextualist approach, such as Parsons and Burge, attempt to justify the seemingly contradictory conclusions by arguing that the natural reasoning that leads to them involves some kind of contextual shift that makes them compatible. This paper argues that one cannot take this approach to give a proper treatment of infinite descending chains of semantic attributions. It also examines a related (...) approach taken by Gaifman and argues that it has the same problem. (shrink)

This dissertation is intended to provide a formalism for those generics that trigger nonmonotonic inferences. The formalism is to reflect intentionality and exception-tolerating features of generics, and has an emphasis on the axiomatization of generic reasoning that encodes nonmonotonicity. ;A modal conditional approach is taken to formalize the nonmonotonic reasoning in general at the level of object language. A serial of logic systems---MN, NID, NCUM, N STCUM---are constructed in an increasing strength of the characterized nonmonotonic inference relation. In these systems, (...) two binary modal operators ⩾ and > are introduced in their syntax, and a ⊛ function lifted from the traditional * function is deployed in their semantics. These systems are shown to be sound and complete with respect to certain classes of frames defined in the semantics. They are decidable as well. The nonmonotonic inference is argued to be a ternary relation "[phi], Gamma |∼ alpha", and is defined in the system NSTCUM. Many widely discussed nonmonotonic inference patterns such as Defeasible Modus Ponens, Defeasible Transitivity, the Penguin Principle etc. are justified. The specificity rule is proved to be a theorem of the system N STCUM. The impact of negated defaults on an inference is also investigated and accounted for. ;A canonical form to read off generics is proposed: All generic sentences with subject-predicate structure can be re-written into their canonical form S . If S is a plural noun phrase, it can be further refined to be . Normal objects are selected based on the "meaning" of the subject and predicate terms. The second parameter provides an aspect with respect to which certain objects of a kind are considered normal. Due to such a way to select normal objects, the drowning problem is solved. ;The inference behaviors of generics are axiomatized in the system G, which is a quantificational extension of the system NSTCUM. It is proved to be sound and complete with respect to the class of L⩾,G -frames. Those benchmark examples of generic inferences are examined in the system G. (shrink)

Xunzi's philosophy provides a rich resource for understanding how ethical relationships between humans and nature can be articulated in terms of harmony. In this paper, I build on his ideas to develop the concept of reciprocal harmony, which requires us to reciprocate those who make our lives liveable. In the context of the environment, I argue that reciprocal harmony generates moral obligations towards nature, in return for the existential debt that humanity owes towards heaven and earth. This can be used (...) as a normative basis for an environmental ethic that enables humanity and nature to flourish together. (shrink)

ObjectiveBasic combat training is a kind of necessary high-intensity training to help each military recruit convert into a qualified soldier. In China, both the physical fatigue and passive psychological state have been observed in new recruits during BCT. However, after same-intensity training, the degree of fatigue and passive mood vary among recruits. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the effect of BCT on mood state of recruits with different physical fitness levels from a perspective of fatigue.Materials and methodsBefore and after (...) BCT, the degree of fatigue and mood state of participants were evaluated via the Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion Scale and Profile of Mood States Questionnaire immediately after 20 push-ups as RPE and POMS scores [total mood disturbance, passive mood and positive mood ]. The participants were divided into two groups according to the RPE score measured after BCT: group 1: RPE score after BCT < 13 and group 2: RPE score after BCT ≥ 13.ResultA total of 564 recruits were included. After BCT, in group 1, TMD and passive mood Ttension, Tfatigue, Tdepression, Tconfusion declined significantly, but positive mood both increased significantly ; while in group 2, only Tanger and Testeem increased significantly.ConclusionBCT could alleviate passive mood and add to positive mood for recruits with better physical fitness, while had no ameliorative effects on or even deteriorate most of the passive mood for recruits with worse physical fitness. (shrink)

The problem of God's subordination to laws of logic and mathematics in jewish philosophy and theology.