Bekenstein proposed that the spectrum of horizon area of quantized black holes must be discrete and uniformly spaced. We examine this proposal in the context of spherically symmetric charged black holes in a general class of gravity theories. By imposing suitable boundary conditions on the reduced phase space of the theory to incorporate the thermodynamic properties of these black holes and then performing a simplifying canonical transformation, we are able to quantize the system exactly. The resulting spectra of horizon area, (...) as well as that of charge are indeed discrete. Within this quantization scheme, near-extremal black holes (of any mass) turn out to be highly quantum objects, whereas extremal black holes do not appear in the spectrum, a result that is consistent with the postulated third law of black hole thermodynamics. (shrink)

The Franciscan Geraldus Odonis (d. 1349) presented his indivisibilist theory of continua in Paris at a time when similar theses were advanced in the studia across the Channel. The Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Henry of Harclay (d. 1317), caused considerable stir among his colleagues by endorsing a mathematical atomism, and his most famous follower, Walter Chatton, O. F. M., developed his brand of atomism in the early 1320s. The present article focuses on one of the five different redactions (...) of Odonis’s famous question De continuo, preserved in his commentary on Book ii of Peter Lombard’s Sentences (d. 44, q. 4). The first part of the article examines the main differences between the various redactions of the question De continuo. The second part explores the philosophical content and the circumstances surrounding the redaction found in Book ii of Odonis’s Sentences commentary. While acknowledging that Odonis’s atomism is similar to Harclay’s, it is argued that Odonis’s theory is a significant departure from the type of atomism espoused by Harclay. The Appendix provides the first complete critical edition of the said redaction of Odonis’s question De continuo. (shrink)

Although the idea of constitutionalism has been widely discussed and in fact, most countries in the world have a written Constitution, it is still an in- teresting question whether Constitutions are legitimate, topic that is ad- dressed in this study. The article, through a detailed analysis of the main arguments in favor and against constitutionalism, examines the main moral concerns regarding legitimacy of Constitutions.

In our paper, ‘Escaping hell: divine motivation and the problem of hell’, we defended a theory of hell that we called ‘escapism’. We argued that, given God's just and loving character, it would be most rational for Him to maintain an open-door policy to those who are in hell, allowing them an unlimited number of chances to be reconciled with God and enjoy communion with Him. In this paper we reply to two recent objections to our original paper. The first (...) is an argument from religious luck offered by Russell Jones. The second is an argument from Kyle Swan that alleges that our commitments about the nature of reasons for action still leaves escapism vulnerable to an objection we labelled the ‘Job objection’ in our original paper. In this paper we argue that escapism has the resources built into it needed to withstand the objections from Jones and Swan. (shrink)

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

The article analyzes the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence. The article considers the subjectivity of artificial intelligence, determines its necessity for solving intellectual problems depending on the possibility of representing the real world as a deterministic system. Methodological limitations of artificial intelligence, which is based on the use of big data technologies, are stated. These limitations cause the impossibility of forming a holistic representation of the objects of cognition and the world as a whole. As a tool for deterministic (...) description of the universe it is proposed to use empirical-metaphysical general theory of systems, which is an extension of existing general theories of systems due to ontological justification of the phenomenon of isomorphism and definition of a limited set of laws, rules, patterns and primitives of forms and relations of objects in the universe. The distinction of natural (human) and artificial intelligence is considered, including the realization of multisystem integration of intelligence in physical, biological, social and spiritual systems. A philosophically grounded approach to ensuring the evolutionary properties of artificial intelligence is formulated, based on the inclusion of non-equilibrium mechanisms through which stability is realized. (shrink)

We obtain an equivalent implicit characterization of Lp Banach spaces that is amenable to a logical treatment. Using that, we obtain an axiomatization for such spaces into a higher order logical system, the kind of which is used in proof mining, a research program that aims to obtain the hidden computational content of mathematical proofs using tools from mathematical logic. As an aside, we obtain a concrete way of formalizing Lp spaces in positive-bounded logic. The axiomatization is followed by a (...) corresponding metatheorem in the style of proof mining. We illustrate its use with the derivation for this class of spaces of the standard modulus of uniform convexity. (shrink)

A knowledge argument is offered that presents unique difficulties for Christians who wish to assert that God is essentially omniscient. The difficulties arise from the doctrine of the incarnation. Assuming that God the Son did not necessarily have to become incarnate, then God cannot necessarily have knowledge de se of the content of a non-divine mind. If this is right, then God’s epistemic powers are not fixed across possible worlds and God is not essentially omniscient. Some options for Christian theists (...) are discussed, including rejecting traditional theism in favour of some version of pantheism or panentheism. (shrink)

Social conventions are those arbitrary rules and norms governing the countless behaviors all of us engage in every day without necessarily thinking about them, from shaking hands when greeting someone to driving on the right side of the road. In this book, Andrei Marmor offers a pathbreaking and comprehensive philosophical analysis of conventions and the roles they play in social life and practical reason, and in doing so challenges the dominant view of social conventions first laid out by David (...) Lewis. Marmor begins by giving a general account of the nature of conventions, explaining the differences between coordinative and constitutive conventions and between deep and surface conventions. He then applies this analysis to explain how conventions work in language, morality, and law. Marmor clearly demonstrates that many important semantic and pragmatic aspects of language assumed by many theorists to be conventional are in fact not, and that the role of conventions in the moral domain is surprisingly complex, playing mostly an auxiliary and supportive role. Importantly, he casts new light on the conventional foundations of law, arguing that the distinction between deep and surface conventions can be used to answer the prevalent objections to legal conventionalism. Social Conventions is a much-needed reappraisal of the nature of the rules that regulate virtually every aspect of human conduct. (shrink)

I argue that an affirmative answer to the question whether entailments could figure as contents of CI is warranted. In particular, the two features of CI that could rule out entailments from the class of contents that could be conversationally implicated are cancellability and non-conventionality. Entailments are non-cancellable, but this is a reason to conclude that they cannot be CIs only if cancellability is a universal property of CIs; alternatively, one might accept CIs that are entailed by what is said (...) and, on this basis, reject the claim that all CIs are cancellable. I see no compelling reason to go one way or another. So, this criterion does not lead to a principled answer to our question. Turning to non-conventionality, this is a defining feature of CIs, according to Grice. I explore the reasons given in the literature for taking non-conventionality to be a defining feature of CI, and argued that none of them are compelling: lexicalization of dead metaphors does not lead to overgeneration of CIs, and calculability is sufficient to distinguish conventional from conversational implicatures. I propose a definition of CI in terms of calculability alone, which does not rule out entailments. So, the answer to our initial question is, eventually, a tentative ‘yes’. A notable consequence of this definition is that the argument against the cancellability test based on cases of CIs the content of which is entailed by what is said seems a good one after all. This means that CIs are not necessarily cancellable. However, that does not mean that the test is a bad one, inasmuch as non-entailed CIs are still expected to be cancellable. (shrink)

According to traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic theism, God is an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect agent. This volume shows that philosophy of religion needs to take seriously alternative concepts of the divine, and demonstrates the considerable philosophical interest that they hold.

The article is devoted to the study of the nature of consciousness within the framework of the information concept. The paper proposes a definition of consciousness as an informational environment in which an extended model of reality is realized. The process of realization of this extended model is defined as thinking. The result of thinking is information objects that form a system in the form of information environment. Information objects are reflections of the real world properties, not directly, but by (...) means of translation through a special object – a carrier of consciousness. In the case of human consciousness, such a carrier is a human being (represented in the form of his nervous system). As a result, consciousness can be qualified as a simulacrum of reality, i.e., a model of a model: an information model of the carrier of consciousness, which in turn is a means of physical modeling of the real "big" world. Possible mechanisms mediating thinking are considered. For this purpose, two new concepts are introduced: neural circuit and neurophysical pattern. An approach to the study of self-consciousness based on the localization of the consciousness carrier in the multidimensional space of states of initial real objects, as well as their reflections in the form of information objects is proposed. This localization is ensured by the presence of feedbacks. Summarizing the results of the study, the article states the following connection between consciousness, self-consciousness and subjectness: under certain conditions (when consciousness is localized in the state space of the carrier of consciousness), consciousness acquires the property of self-consciousness, a special case of which (when the initiator of changes determining localization is the carrier of consciousness) is self-consciousness endowed with subjectness. (shrink)

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

The author of the article turns to the modern discourse about man and his place in the humanities system. A retrospective analysis of the modern discourse about man allows us to distinguish three stages in its development: anti-humanism, anti-anthropology and post-anthropology. Despite the fact that the main topics around which he is focused are concentrated on criticism of "anthropocentrism" and "eurocentrism", the author concludes that the anti-anthropological narrative retains all the features of cultural and epistemological "narcissism". The anti-anthropological narrative continues (...) to function as a system of "recognizing oneself", as a system of "differentiating oneself and the other" and as a system of "justifying oneself through the other". (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the fallacy known as Complex Question or Many Questions. After a brief introduction, in Sect. 2 I highlight its pragmatic dimension, and in Sect. 3 its dialectical dimension. In Sect. 4 I present two accounts of this fallacy developed in argumentation theory, Douglas Walton’s and the Pragma-Dialectics’, which have resources to capture both its pragmatic and its dialectical nature. However, these accounts are unsatisfactory for various reasons. In Sect. 5 I focus on the pragmatic (...) dimension of the fallacy and I suggest amendments to the accounts mentioned drawing on the study of the phenomenon of presupposition in theoretical pragmatics. I argue that the central notion in the definition of the fallacy is that of an informative presupposition. In Sect. 6 I focus on the dialectical dimension of the fallacy. This dimension needs to be explicitly acknowledged in the definition of the fallacy in order to distinguish it from a different, non-dialectical, fallacious argumentative move involving presuppositions. (shrink)

This article discusses the poem written by Joseph Brodsky shortly after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in the early 1990s. It compares this poem with other pieces by the same author that deal with the paradigm of “independence vs. imperial unity.” These poems present a difference, which is striking at first glance: Brodsky welcomes Lithuanian independence, while simultaneously denying the same rights to Ukrainians and Aztecs. As for Afghanis … his disdain is even more palpable. The proposed explanation is the (...) concept of “Cultural Empire,” which the poet considers to be the ultimate good. This article briefly mentions the general problem of de-imperializing classical Russian literature in the context of post-colonial studies. (shrink)

The book builds on recent work in pragmatics and speech-act theory to explain how, and to what extent, legal content is determined by linguistic considerations. At the same time, the analysis shows that some of the unique features of communication in the legal domain - in particular, its strategic nature - can be employed to put pressure on certain assumptions in philosophy of language. This enables a more nuanced picture of how semantic and pragmatic determinants of communication work in complex (...) and large-scale systems such as law. (shrink)

In Philosophy of Law, Andrei Marmor provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary debates about the fundamental nature of law—an issue that has been at the heart of legal philosophy for centuries. What the law is seems to be a matter of fact, but this fact has normative significance: it tells people what they ought to do. Marmor argues that the myriad questions raised by the factual and normative features of law actually depend on the possibility of reduction—whether the legal (...) domain can be explained in terms of something else, more foundational in nature. In addition to exploring the major issues in contemporary legal thought, Philosophy of Law provides a critical analysis of the people and ideas that have dominated the field in past centuries. It will be essential reading for anyone curious about the nature of law. (shrink)

We propose a qualitatively new kind of governance for the emerging need to efficiently guide the densely interconnected, ever more complex world development, which is based on explicit and openly presented problem solutions and their interactive implementation practice within the versatile, but unified professional analysis of complex real-world dynamics, involving both the powerful central units and the attached creative worldwide network of professional representatives. We provide fundamental and rigorous scientific arguments in favour of introduction of just that kind of governance (...) at the modern development stage, after the complexity threshold in the real world dynamics evolution (sometimes intuitively designated as "globalisation"), where the traditional spontaneous-empirical kind of development and related administrative governance lose dramatically and inevitably their efficiency and the necessity of explicit consistent understanding and guidance of complex real-world dynamics becomes evident. (shrink)

In some recent work on omissions, it has been argued that the causal theory of action cannot account for how agency is exercised in intentionally omitting to act in the same way it explains how agency is exercised in intentional action. Thus, causalism appears to provide us with an incomplete picture of intentional agency. I argue that causalists should distinguish causalism as a general theory of intentional agency from causalism as a theory of intentional action. Specifically, I argue that, while (...) intentional actions may best be understood as the causal products or outcomes of causings, we should identify exercises of intentional agency with causal processes. With a causalist account of intentional agency sketched, I respond to the challenge to causalism from omissions. I argue that when an agent intentionally omits there is a causal process that has a zero-sum outcome. But the causal process is sufficient to make it true that the agent exercises intentional agency in intentionally omitting. (shrink)

Some quantitative results obtained by proof mining take the form of Herbrand disjunctions that may depend on additional parameters. We attempt to elucidate this fact through an extension to first-order arithmetic of the proof of Herbrand’s theorem due to Gerhardy and Kohlenbach which uses the functional interpretation.

The use of metaphors and analogies was widespread in English political literature during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and for contemporary readers they were more than merely rhetorical artifices – they were used to illustrate and, in some cases, even to provide evidence. In this regard, none was more apt than the most prominent of these analogies: that between the human body and the state. The political thought of the time established an unshakeable connection between the two, building an (...) argument for how their structures and ways of functioning mirrored each other. This paper examines one of the most extensive and thorough examples of corporal analogies in early modern English political literature – that of Edward Forset’s A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (1606) – and shows how such corporal analogies were used to construct an absolutist political model wherein the king was depicted as the soul, the head and the heart of the body politic. The paper integrates Forset’s A Comparative Discourse within the context of the ideological struggles from the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, while its place within the larger picture of the medieval and early modern metaphor of the body politic is also examined, in order to assess the lineage and originality of Forset’s ideas and point out how the same kind of analogies could be used to provide significantly different political interpretations. (shrink)

Mainstream political liberals hold that state coercion is legitimate only if it is justified on the grounds of reasons that all may reasonably be expected to accept. Critics argue that this public justification principle is self-defeating, because it depends on moral justifications that not all may reasonably be expected to accept. To rebut the self-defeat objection, I elaborate on the following disjunction: one either agrees or disagrees that it is wrong to impose one’s morality on others by the coercive power (...) of the state. Those who disagree reject PJP, they understand politics as war. Those who agree accept PJP, they understand politics as competition. Political competitors abide by PJP to avoid politics as war, by enforcing PJP on political combatants they engage in a war that is unavoidable. In both cases their exercise of political power has a justification that is reasonably acceptable to all. (shrink)

This Element focuses on some core conceptual and ontological issues related to pantheistic conceptions of God by engaging with recent work in analytic philosophy of religion on this topic. The conceptual and ontological commitments of pantheism are contrasted with those of other conceptions of God. The concept of God assumed by pantheism is clarified and the question about what type of unity the universe must exhibit in order to be identical with God receives the most attention. It is argued that (...) the sort of unity the universe must display is the sort of unity characteristic of conscious cognitive systems. Some alternative ontological frameworks for grounding such cognitive unity are considered. Further, the question of whether God can be understood as personal on pantheism is explored. (shrink)

In his landmark book on philosophical theology, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry, Mark Johnston develops a panentheistic metaphysic of the divine that he contends is compatible with ontological naturalism. On his view, God is the universe, but the ‘is’ is the ‘is’ of constitution, not identity. The universe and God are coinciding objects that share properties but have different essential modal properties and, hence, different persistence conditions. In this paper, I address the problem of accounting for what it is about (...) the organization or structure of the universe that makes it sufficient to constitute the Divine Mind. Specifically, I consider what kind of unity the universe exhibits in virtue of which it constitutes the Divine Mind. I consider how Johnston’s hylomorphic account of the unity of composite objects might be applied to provide a solution and offer an alternative that emends the Johnstonian proposal I present by exploiting a variant of a neo-Aristotelian ontology of causal powers that takes properties to be powerful qualities. On the framework I defend, we can understand the universe as a constellation of powers that displays the sort of unity sufficient to truthfully described it as a Divine Mind. The approach I recommend will, however, ultimately lend itself to a pantheistic metaphysic of the divine rather than Johnston’s preferred panentheism. (shrink)

Viebahn (2018) has recently argued that several tests for ambiguity, such as the conjunction-reduction test, are not reliable as tests for polysemy, but only as tests for homonymy. I look at the more fine-grained distinction between regular and irregular polysemy and I argue for a more nuanced conclusion: the tests under discussion provide systematic evidence for homonymy and irregular polysemy but need to be used with more care to test for regular polysemy. I put this conclusion at work in the (...) context of the debate over the alleged referential-attributive ambiguity of the definite article. In reply to various criticisms, defenders of the ambiguity view argue that this is a case of polysemy. But opponents object that the dual use of the definite article fails tests for ambiguity. The debate seems to have come to stalemate, unless the relevance of the tests is determined for cases of alleged polysemy. I conclude that the balance of considerations incline towards rejecting the ambiguity thesis. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is twofold: to demystify the ancient concept of courage, making it more palpable for the modern reader, and to suggest the reasonably specific constraints that would restrict the contemporary tendency of indiscriminate attribution of this virtue. The discussion of courage will incorporate both the classical interpretations of this trait of character, and the empirical studies into the complex relation between the emotion of fear and behavior. The Aristotelian thesis that courage consists in overcoming the fear (...) of significant harm for a worthy cause will be further developed by exploring its relevance for military professionals today. Specific criteria will be offered in order to restrict the application of the term?courageous? to a certain type of action, as well as to demarcate this virtue from the related vices, such as recklessness. The normative aspect of our study aims to make sense of what could qualify as a worthy goal of a fearless action in the modern world. It will be argued that a courageous agent aims at alleviating or preventing harm for others in a situation of potential risk for the agent himself, while respecting the factual conditions that determine the probability of success. (shrink)

Humean compatibilism combines a Humean conception of laws of nature with a strong dual-ability condition for free will that requires that agents possess the ability to decide differently when they make a free decision. On the Humean view of laws of nature, laws of nature are taken to be contingent non-governing descriptions of significant regularities that obtain in the entire history of the universe. On Humean compatibilism, agents are taken to possess dual ability when making free decisions because what the (...) laws of nature will finally be is (at least partially) dependent upon how an agent decides. In this paper, I argue that the tenability of Humean compatibilism depends in part upon what theory of time is correct. More specifically, I argue that Humean compatibilism is untenable in a deterministic universe if eternalism is true. (shrink)

When Aristotle limits the manifestation of true courage to the military context only, his primary target is an overly inclusive conception of courage presented by Plato in the Laches. At the same time, Aristotle explicitly tries to demarcate his ideal of genuine courage from the paradigmatic examples of courageous actions derived from the Homeric epics. It remains questionable, though, whether Aristotle is truly earnest in his efforts to distance himself from Homer. It will be argued that Aristotle's attempt to associate (...) with Homer the two forms of specious courage—courage of the citizen troops and spirit-caused courage—fails to provide sufficient criteria for the demarcation in question. All the essential elements of the Aristotelian account of courage, such as a voluntary choice, a noble goal, and a thumos-driven reaction guided by reason are exemplified by a number of Homeric characters as well. It is thus likely that the philosopher's account of courage largely incorporates the poetic tradition at a new level, rather than supersedes it. (shrink)

In her recent paper, “A Defense of Substance Causation,” Ann Whittle makes a case for substance causation. In this paper, assuming that causation is a generative or productive relation, I argue that Whittle’s argument is not successful. While substances are causally relevant in causal processes owing to outcomes being counterfactually dependent upon their role in such occurrences, the real productive work in causal processes is accomplished by the causal powers of substances.

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to show that general jurisprudence is in no need of reinvention. The sentiment shared by many contemporary legal philosophers that theories about the nature of law...

We review the recently proposed universal concept of dynamic complexity and its new mathematics based on the unreduced interaction problem solution. We then consider its progress-bringing applications at various levels of complex world dynamics, including complex-dynamical nanometal physics and living condensed matter, unreduced nanobiosystem dynamics and the integral medicine concept, causally complete management of complex economical and social dynamics, and the ensuing concept of truly sustainable world governance.

We explain why exactly the simplified abstract scheme of reality within the standard science paradigm cannot provide the consistent picture of “truly fundamental” reality and how the unreduced, causally complete description of the latter is regained within the extended, provably complete solution to arbitrary interaction problem and the ensuing concept of universal dynamic complexity. We emphasize the practical importance of this extension for both particular problem solution and further, now basically unlimited fundamental science development (otherwise dangerously stagnating within its traditional (...) paradigm). (shrink)

We prove that for a natural class of first-order formulas the validity problem is Π p 2 -complete.

Several critics have argued that private prisons are not only problematic because of their worse effects but also intrinsically wrong. This article analyzes two prominent arguments for this claim: the representation argument and the condemnation argument. The conclusion is that these arguments fail to show that there is something intrinsically wrong about private prisons. This is especially true if the arguments are extended to non-profit private prisons under social injustice contexts that states are responsible for. In such cases, non-profit private (...) prisons might not only be on a par with public prisons but be preferable to them. However, the arguments are also insufficient to oppose every conceivable for-profit private prison. (shrink)

Despite its frequent appearances in sociological textbooks, dictionaries and theoretical opuses, ethnomethodology is still one of the most misunderstood and undervalued domains of sociological inquiry. This is particularly evident in the case of the central sociological question: social order. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, provided a unique answer to the question of order. His answer emphasized a contingent, situated character of constitutive practices of local order production. Initially a response to Talcott Parsons’ question about the conditions of the stability (...) of social order, Garfinkel’s conception of constitutive order was later radicalized and used as the foundation of the programme of empirical ethnomethodological studies. To properly understand the radical character of the conception and programme, it is necessary to reveal the core elements of it and to separate them from the historically changed components. (shrink)

Unified and causal complex-dynamic origin of standard (special and general) relativistic and quantum effects revealed previously at the lowest levels of world interaction dynamics is explicitly generalised to all higher levels of unreduced interaction processes, thus additionally confirming the causally complete character of complex-dynamical, naturally quantised relativity, which does not contain any artificially added, abstract postulates. We demonstrate some elementary applications of this generalised quantum relativity at higher levels of complex brain and social interaction dynamics.