Accepting a promise is normatively significant in that it helps to secure promissory obligation. But what is it for B to accept A’s promise to φ? It is in part for B to intend A’s φ-ing. Thinking of acceptance in this way allows us to appeal to the distinctive role of intentions in practical reasoning and action to better understand the agency exercised by the promisee. The proposal also accounts for rational constraints on acceptance, and the so-called directedness of promissory (...) obligation. Finally, the proposal, conjoined with Cognitivism about intentions, addresses recent criticism of Scanlon’s expectation-based view of promissory obligation. (shrink)

My concern here is to motivate some theses in the philosophy of mind concerning the interpersonal character of intentions. I will do so by investigating aspects of shared agency. The main point will be that when acting together with others one must be able to act directly on the intention of another or others in a way that is relevantly similar to the manner in which an agent acts on his or her own intentions. What exactly this means will become (...) clearer once we understand what it is to act directly on one’s own intentions. But I take it to be a fundamental assumption of the prevailing individualism of the theory of action—one at the core of its conception of the separateness of individuals—that one person cannot act directly on another’s intention. I agree that there is an important way in which we are or can be separate and autonomous thinkers and agents. But the way the individualist tries to capture this separateness is misguided. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The reasons for which I act are normally my reasons; I represent goal states and the means to attaining them, and these guide me in action. Can your reason ever be the reason why I act? If I haven’t yet taken up your reason and made it mine by representing it for myself, then it may seem mysterious how this could be possible. Nevertheless, the paper argues that sometimes one is entitled to another’s reason and that what one does is (...) to be explained in terms of it. The case for this draws on aspects of the interplay between reasons and intentions in individual agency that have not received the attention they deserve. The paper closes by exploring the limits of interpersonal entitlement to reasons by formulating a hypothesis about which reasons one might be entitled to, and by considering how defeaters can undermine entitlement. (shrink)

We motivate and introduce a new method of abduction, Matrix Abduction, and apply it to modelling the use of non-deductive inferences in the Talmud such as Analogy and the rule of Argumentum A Fortiori. Given a matrix $${\mathbb {A}}$$ with entries in {0, 1}, we allow for one or more blank squares in the matrix, say a i,j =?. The method allows us to decide whether to declare a i,j = 0 or a i,j = 1 or a i,j =? (...) undecided. This algorithmic method is then applied to modelling several legal and practical reasoning situations including the Talmudic rule of Kal-Vachomer. We add an Appendix showing that this new rule of Matrix Abduction, arising from the Talmud, can also be applied to the analysis of paradoxes in voting and judgement aggregation. In fact we have here a general method for executing non-deductive inferences. (shrink)

There is a way of talking that would appear to involve ascriptions of purpose, goal directed activity, and intentional states to groups. Cases are familiar enough: classmates intend to vacation in Switzerland, the department is searching for a metaphysician, the Democrats want to minimize losses in the upcoming elections, and the US intends to improve relations with such and such country. But is this talk to be understood just in terms of the attitudes and actions of the individuals involved? Is (...) the talk, to take an overly simple proposal as an example, a mere summary of familiar individual attitudes of the group members? Or is the ascription of attitudes and actions to groups to be taken more literally, as suggesting that the group for example believes that P, or intends to A, over and above what the members individually think and do? In short, are there groups with minds of their own? Philip Pettit has deployed the “discursive dilemma” to defend the thesis that there are such group minds. In what follows, I explore the relationship between the group allegedly with a mind of its own and the individuals it comprises, and I consider just how this relationship must be understood in order to give Pettit’s argument for group minds its best chance for success. As I understand it, the discursive dilemma has to be used in conjunction with what might be called an indispensability argument for group minds. It is useful to distinguish two forms of this argument. The explanatory version of the indispensability argument is, very schematically, as follows: there is a compelling explanatory theory T concerning the social, certain indispensable elements of T entail the group mind thesis, so the group mind thesis is true. Several questions immediately arise: What sort of theory is T? In what sense is it indispensable? Are there other forms of indispensability? I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. But how we settle them will have implications for the interaction and support the discursive dilemma provides the indispensability argument. In particular, using the discursive dilemma to defend what I characterize below as a practical version of the indispensability argument commits us to the rationality of individual participants in a way that the explanatory version of the indispensability argument does not. My point in the first part of the paper is that if Pettit wants to avoid the weaknesses of the explanatory indispensability argument and pursue the practical version, then he owes us a story about the rationality of individual participation in groups. Pettit also owes us a story about the agency an individual exercises as part of a group. If it takes the actions of individuals to execute the intentions of the group, how are we to understand those actions in order for the group to count as having a mind of its own? How must group intentions figure in the practical or deliberative perspective of individuals who execute those intentions? I will argue that the proponent of the group mind thesis must proceed with some care here, because some natural ways of answering these questions will undermine the thesis. But in the end, I think that these questions are interesting independently of whether Pettit is right to think that groups do have minds of their own. That’s because investigating Pettit’s arguments might lead to new ideas about how the rationality and agency of individuals can be exercised, and suggests new ways of understanding how individuals can act together, irrespective of whether the groups they compose ever have minds of their own. (shrink)

De acuerdo con los estudios antropológicos y sociológicos la mitad de los ovocitos que circulan por Europa proceden de España. De ahí que nos preguntemos por las exigencias de su regulación, en particular por el principio de no lucro. Este principio se concreta normativamente en un solo momento, a saber, en la donación de ovocitos. Las normas comunitarias y nacionales no extienden este principio a la exportación y la distribución de los ovocitos, abriendo la puerta a su mercantilización y conculcando (...) así el principio. Por ello proponemos una legislación acorde a las exigencias del principio de no lucro. (shrink)

1. ʻAmud Torah. ʻAmud ʻavodah, ḥ. 1 -- 2. ʻAmud ʻavodah, ḥ. 2. ʻAmud gemilut ḥasadim.

Certainty and Practical Reason is concerned with Kant's practical response to epistemological skepticism and radical doubt. ;It begins from Kant's remark that the concept of freedom is the keystone of the arch of reason, theoretical as well as practical, and sustains reason against skepticism; and from Kant's account of the practical motives of transcendental realism, the source of skepticism, in the First and Second Critiques. The Critiques suggest both that Kant's response to skepticism is practical, and that skepticism is itself (...) both practically motivated and associated with practical error. ;In the first chapter, it is argued that the Transcendental Analytic of the First Critique is not a final refutation of skepticism and radical doubt, and that Kant does not see it as such. The theoretical arguments of the Transcendental Analytic need to be completed with an appeal to practical reason if we are to ground Kant's starting assumption, the fact of experience. ;The second chapter considers epistemological skepticism as involving a practical error answered by the practical cure of the categorical imperative. ;The third chapter begins by considering Cartesian doubt as a practically motivated attempt to pose the problem of practical rationality, and Kant's response to this problem. It then discusses Kant's view that the transcendental realist demand for knowledge of the noumenal, which gives rise to skeptical doubt, is a pursuit of the unconditioned whose hidden meaning is practical; and explains how Kant responds to the doubt by responding to and interpreting transcendental realism as a practical project. ;The fourth chapter discusses the Critique of Judgment as a response to "enthusiasm" or the transcendental realist claim to knowledge of the unconditioned, and thereby to skepticism as well. (shrink)

The psychology of Aristotle has never been understood in a historically correct way. A new interpretation of the De anima will be proposed in which this work can be seen as compatible with the psychology that can be reconstructed from the fragments of Aristotle's lost dialogues and the De motu animalium and other biological works and the doxographical data gathered from ancient writers besides the commentators. In De anima, II, 412b5, where psychè is defined as 'the first entelecheia of a (...) natural body that is organikon,' the words 'natural body' should not be taken to mean 'the body of a living plant, animal or human being' but to stand for 'elementary body.' And the qualification 'organikon' should not be understood as 'equipped with organs' but in the sense of 'serving as an instrument to the soul.' This 'instrumental body' that is inseparably connected with the soul is the seat of desire, which physically influences the parts of the visible body. Besides those two corrections there are the words ta merè in 412b18 that should be taken as meaning not 'parts of the body' but 'parts of the soul.' Aristotle is arguing there that even those parts of the soul that are not yet actualized in the embryo of a new living being can be said to be 'not without body.'. (shrink)

Heidegger is one of the few Western thinkers to have succeeded in going beyond the Western philosophic tradition. Because his radical criticism is believed to have fractured the foundations of modern philosophy, his thinking is usually at the center of the controversy between the defenders of the tradition and those who wish to break with it and start afresh. In the heat of this debate, the question of Heidegger's place in relation to that tradition in general and to Cartesianism in (...) particular has been neglected. I wish to address the question by focusing on the major aspects of Heidegger's critique of Cartesian philosophy and the modern tradition. I will first show that the strength of his criticism lies in its all-encompassing penetration of the foundations of modern philosophy, running through both the ontological and epistemological channels. Ontologically, Heidegger presents a critique of subjectivism; epistemologically, he discredits the correspondence conception of truth and its underlying visual metaphor. I will then look at his view of history and the meaning of his concept of "overcoming" in order to show that his aim is not to destroy the tradition, but to provide a wider basis for it by rescuing forgotten elements imbedded in the tradition itself. Finally, I will show that in this process of "overcoming," Heidegger did not really depart from the tradition, but absorbed some of its basic tenets, as his concept of death echoes major elements of Cartesian doubt. (shrink)

A fair amount of the philosophical discussion about pain and unpleasantness has focused on providing a constitutive account of unpleasantness. These theories provide a more fundamental description of what unpleasantness is by appealing to other well-established notions in the architecture of the mind. In contrast, I address the nature of unpleasantness from a structural account. I will argue for how unpleasantness is built, rather than what unpleasantness is made of, as it were. I focus on the heterogeneity of experience, which (...) has been a somewhat neglected issue in the literature about unpleasantness: after careful introspection, there seems to be nothing phenomenal that all and only unpleasant experiences share. In order to address the heterogeneity of unpleasant experiences, I propose that the structure of the rich phenomenology of unpleasantness should be understood as a determinable property constituted by multiple essential dimensions. (shrink)

An innovative literary analysis of Freud's "Wolf Man.".

Several theorists have defended that unpleasantness can be explained by appealing to (intrinsic, simultaneous, de re) desires for certain experiences not to be occurring. In a nutshell, experiences are unpleasant because we do not want them, and not vice versa. A common criticism for this approach takes the form of a Euthyphro dilemma. Even if there is a solution for this criticism, I argue that this type of approach is limited in two important ways. It cannot provide an explanation for: (...) i) the motivation, from a psychological conscious point of view, nor ii) a non-instrumental justification, for having the relevant desires. The lack of these explanations is relevant since these are precisely the type clarifications that we would expect from a theory about unpleasantness. (shrink)

It is questionable whether counterfeiting in many areas of life contributes to unethical behavior to a wider extent. If the notion is supported by data, then the moral damage in a society could be prevented by reducing the counterfeit self and behavior to a bare minimum. This study aimed at empirically testing the measurement model of counterfeit self of Wood et al. (2008) among Indonesians as well as theoretically reviewing counterfeit self roles in unethical behavior. The participants of this study (...) were 1,655 high school students (764 males, 891 females; Mage = 15.76 years old; SDage = 1.08 years) recruited through a purposive sampling technique in North Sumatera and West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The data analysis technique used was Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results showed that the counterfeit self model--comprised of counterfeit self dimensions, namely Self-alienation (ALIEN), Inauthentic Living (LIVE), and Accepting External Influence (EXT)--was supported by the empirical data. However, the dimension of EXT could not be represented by its indicators. The study contributed to the psychological body of knowledge that the EXT dimension might need to be excluded from the measurement of counterfeit self on teenagers, especially in Indonesia and other Eastern countries. (shrink)

We present some techniques in c.c.c. forcing, and apply them to prove consistency results concerning the isomorphism and embeddability relations on the family of ℵ 1 -dense sets of real numbers. In this direction we continue the work of Baumgartner [2] who proved the axiom BA stating that every two ℵ 1 -dense subsets of R are isomorphic, is consistent. We e.g. prove Con). Let K H, be the set of order types of ℵ 1 -dense homogeneous subsets of R (...) with the relation of embeddability. We prove that for every finite model L, : Con iff L is a distributive lattice. We prove that it is consistent that the Magidor-Malitz language is not countably compact. We deal with the consistency of certain topological partition theorems. E.g. We prove that MA is consistent with the axiom OCA which says: “If X is a second countable space of power ℵ 1, and { U 0,\h.;, U n−1 } is a cover of D ▪ X x X -} x,x> ¦ x ϵ X } consisting of symmetric open sets, then X can be partitioned into { X i \brvbar; i ϵ ω } such that for every i ϵ ω there is l such that D ⊇ U l ”. We also prove that MA+OCA [xrArr] 2 ℵ 0 = ℵ 2. (shrink)

Marriage is one of the most important topics in the education field since life in this world is structured by interaction among families and between families and other social institutions. Dissatisfaction and unsustainability of marriage have led the urgency of premarital education in various countries. The problem is that the spread of virtual reality has made marriage itself to become more complex and experience reinterpretation and reconfiguration, moreover with the emergence of new kind of marriage in the digital era, i.e. (...) virtual marriage. Everybody who has observed, known, or even tried, certainly asks the question, “Could (or: should) I accept virtual marriage?” . This study was aimed to investigate the role of tolerance of ambiguity and illusion of intimacy in online dating in predicting the acceptance of virtual marriage. There were 420 adolescents and young adults (212 males, 208 females; Mage=21.10 years old, SDage=1.459 years; 338 students, 82 employees or entrepreneurs) in the Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, participated in this study. It was found that the acceptance was not predicted by the ambiguity tolerance, but by the illusion of intimacy in online dating. The psychometric issues, substantive discussion, and recommendation are presented at the end of this article. The trend of virtual marriage should not be allowed to roll away, by autopilot, without loaded by strategies in designing an online game as one of the pivotal educational technologies that needs to shape appropriate character and attitude for it. (shrink)

It is a matter of tacit consensus that rationalist adeptness in urban planning traces its foundations to the philosophy of the Renaissance thinker and mathematician René Descartes. This study suggests, in turn, that the planned urban environment of the Renaissance may have also led Descartes, and his intellectual peers, to tenets that became the foundations of modern philosophy and science. The geometric street pattern of the late middle ages and the Renaissance, the planned townscapes, street views and the formal garden (...) design, appeared as parables for the perfection of the universe and the supremacy of critical reason. It is within this urban metaphor that Descartes's philosophical narrative betrays perceptual and conceptual impact from the contrast between convoluted medieval townscapes and the emerging harmonious street patterns where defined vistas and predictable clarity of street views were paramount. The geometrically delineated street views of the Renaissance new town became the spark that lit the philosopher's sagacity in reflecting upon the concept of "clear and distinct ideas." Past suggestions that Descartes was led to his philosophical breakthroughs through his discovery of co-ordinate geometry reinforce further the stance that Renaissance planning predisposed rationalist thought. (shrink)

This present study aims at exploring the meaning of the building of Santa Maria de Fatima Catholic Church (abbreviated as: SMFCC) or Toasebio Parish located in District Glodok, Jakarta, Indonesia. The author exposes in advance the meaning of the physical elements of the building SMFCC as understood by history writers and building experts. These meanings are not inseparable from the elements of human activities in the building. Through qualitative methods and literature review, the author describes in the Results section, how (...) those meanings can be further interpreted through the existing studies and expressions of the SMFCC Parish Head. It is found that these meanings are contested − from the direction of religious faith and of culture − but complete our understandings of the church which is well-known as an Indonesian cultural heritage and dominated by Chinese and pastors from Europe. (shrink)

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded the built (...) environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form. (shrink)