ABSTRACT In recent debates about conceptual engineering, it appears that the internalist has an explanatory advantage when it comes to accounting for meaning change and conceptual change. In this paper, I argue against this impression. I show how two different varieties of externalism, originalism and anti-individualism, can coherently explain various cases of meaning change, irrespective of whether they involve proper names or kind terms; and also irrespective of whether they occur in everyday, legal, or scientific contexts. I point out which (...) mechanisms and interpretational strategies the originalist and anti-individualist can invoke, relative to their respective background assumptions about the nature of concepts. Furthermore, I offer an argument in favour of the claim that externalism as such has no implications concerning whether concepts can undergo change. I establish this by showing that originalism allows for conceptual change while anti-individualism insists on conceptual stability. (shrink)

In this volume, Baumstark deals with the transmission of Aristotelian philosophy into Syriac and Arabic. Syriac texts with German translations are included, alongside a detailed study of their textual interrelationships.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Anton C. P. CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA ' It is generally recognized that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was not born a poet but became one only through persistence and labor, reaching his "first step" sometime after the midpoint of his life. In his effort to assess the quality of his earlier poetic production and sharpen his sensitivity in facing self-criticism, he decided to put in writing his (...) personal thoughts on his work sometime in 1903. The text was written in English in a personal shorthand Cavafy had devised for his own use. It was found among the papers he left to A. Sengopoulos and published for the first time in 1963 by M. Peridis, who also supplied the suitable title Ars Poetica. It falls outside the scope of this essay to discuss the antecedents of this document. Taken as a whole, the text has all the clarity and directness required of a testament designed to serve as a personal guide and handbook. The problems it discusses are limited to the needs of the poet. In this regard, the Ars Poetica has neither the range of topics nor the theoretical scope of, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. It is quite certain that the ideas that preoccupy Cavafy in the Ars Poetica had been on his mind for a period of years. However, the Ars Poetica is his first prose piece where he gives a systematic treatment to technical and critical issues directly related to the assessment of his work and his role as a poet. In order to project here a clear image of Cavafy's struggle to reach his technical maturity which came after 1910, we need first to discuss the persistent problems he faced during this crucial decade, then to examine the attitudes and values he embodied in certain representative early poems, and finally to relate them to the guiding principles he formulated in his self-addressed poetics of 1903. A number of interrelated problems confronted Cavafy in his late twenties and throughout his thirties. They emerged one by one, to 85 86Philosophy and Literature make more pressing the demand for a consistent solution and a complete recasting of his outlook. Coming to terms with them was extremely difficult. Aside from the emotional and sexual pressures he had to face alone, there was the absence of suitable ideas and conceptual tools to provide him with even the rudiments of an intellectual framework. Whatever he borrowed from Europe and England, or resurrected from his own Hellenic heritage, proved either beyond assimilation or insufficiently digested. The lingering issues fell roughly into four areas. (i) Despite his determination to devote his life to the writing of poetry, the quality of his work was discouraging. He knew this and as a result he often expressed uncertainty about his ability to proceed. Time and again he appeared suffering from a feeling of inadequacy, but nevertheless he sought to engage a reflective mood from which to draw encouragement and hope. (ii) On the theoretical side, he identified with the long tradition which assigned a coveted cultural role to the savant-poet as discloser of truth and spokesman for humanity; this despite the prevailing climate of opinion in his immediate environment which recognized no such high position in his case. Cavafy knew that his standing with the Greek community of Alexandria had gradually dwindled with the loss of family wealth and his lowly employment, and also that his expectations to be respected in his role as a poet and leader in communal affairs were futile. This denial of personal recognition in a society dominated by commerce and finance contributed to his mood of depression. The feeling of being an outcast, despite his associations with the upper social circles of Alexandria, became a constant irritant to his sense of pride. (iii) The course of culture, the destiny of human institutions and the workings of history, became puzzles as he tried to view them through the opaque glass of disillusionment. These were the grand themes actively discussed in the writings of leading European intellectuals, but to the young poet they had a different personal urgency. His vital concern in this connection was not understanding science... (shrink)

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton.

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton, Edward M. Spencer, Ann E. Mills, and Carlton Hegwood Jr.

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton.

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton.

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton.

These CQ Sources were compiled by Bette Anton.

The socialist project is burdened by a history of brutal failures. The authors of the papers collected in this volume are convinced that a democratic and humane socialism is both desirable and possible. They lay out their view of different aspects of this new socialism in this book. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt are both the editors and contributors to this book. -/- Select chapters translated into Spanish have appeared in a volume in Barcelona, Spain.

Eighteenth-century scientist-turned-theologian Emanuel Swedenborg had a deep understanding of the nature of reality that resonates both with mystical traditions and with artists and poets. In this volume, philosopher José Antonio Antón-Pacheco explores Swedenborg's views on heaven, angels, primordial language, and the spiritual history of humanity, in the process linking Swedenborg's thought to that of Jorge Luis Borges, Soren Kirkegaard, Henry Corbin, and Ibn 'Arabi, among others.

Abstract: In this article, we explore what are ethical forms of holding service users responsible in mental health care contexts. Hanna Pickard has provided an account of how service users should be held responsible for morally wrong or seriously harmful conduct within contexts of mental health care, called the clinical stance. From a clinical stance one holds a person responsible for harm, but refrains from emotionally blaming the person and only considers the person responsible for this conduct in a detached (...) sense. Her account is based on what are considered best practices in the treatment of people with borderline personality disorder and addiction. We ask if this account generalizes across different diagnostic criteria and different clinical contexts. To begin to answer this question, we compare the clinical stance to an account of what are considered best practices in the treatment of service users at a specialized clinic for people with autism spectrum disorder in the Netherlands. We refer to this alternative account as the nurturing stance and highlight relevant similarities and differences between the clinical stance and the nurturing stance. We conclude with suggestions for further research and theorizing. (shrink)

Synthetic biology is often seen as the engineering turn in biology. Philosophically speaking, entities created by synthetic biology, from synthetic cells to xenobots, challenge the ontological divide between the organic and inorganic, as well as between the natural and the artificial. Entities such as synthetic cells can be seen as hybrid or transitory objects, or neo–things. However, what has remained philosophically underexplored so far is the impact these hybrid neo–things will have on (our phenomenological experience of) the living world. By (...) extrapolating from Walter Benjamin’s account of how technological reproducibility affects the aura of art, we embark upon an exploratory inquiry that seeks to fathom how the technological reproducibility of life itself may influence our experience and understanding of the living. We conclude that, much as technologies that enabled reproduction corroded the aura of original artworks (as Benjamin argued), so too will the aura of life be under siege in the era of synthetic lifeforms. This article zooms in on a specific case study, namely the research project Building a Synthetic Cell (BaSyC) and its mission to create a synthetic cell–like entity, as autonomous as possible, focusing on the properties that differentiate organic from synthetic cells. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a forward-looking account of the difference between the responsibility of children and the responsibility of adults. I do so by means of criticizing agency-cultivation accounts of responsibility. According to these accounts, the justification for holding a person to a norm is the cultivation of their moral agency, and children are, just like adults, considered responsible to the extent that they can have their moral agency cultivated in this manner. Like many forward-looking accounts, these accounts claim (...) that the purpose of holding adults to norms is similar to the purpose of holding children to norms. I argue that the justifications for holding adults to norms are different because of the particular ways in which adults can be in moral disagreement with one another, and the consequences that this has. Moral disagreement is relevant to consequentialist accounts because it impacts on whether and how we can secure beneficial outcomes via holding someone to a norm. One of the upshots of this analysis is that the forward-looking justification for holding adults to norms is qualitatively different from how and why we should hold children to norms. (shrink)

The decades following the civil rights and decolonization movements of the sixties and seventies - termed the post-soul era - created new ways to understand the aesthetics of global racial representation. Daphne Lamothe shows that beginning around 1980 and continuing to the present day, Black literature, art, and music resisted the pull of singular and universal notions of racial identity. Developing the idea of 'Black aesthetic time' - a multipronged theoretical concept that analyzes the ways race and time collide (...) in the process of cultural production - she assesses Black fiction, poetry, and visual and musical texts by Paule Marshall, Zadie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Dionne Brand, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Stromae, among others. Lamothe asks how our understanding of Blackness might expand upon viewing racial representation without borders - or, to use her concept, from the permeable, supple place of Black aesthetic time. Lamothe purposefully focuses on texts told from the vantage point of immigrants, migrants, and city dwellers to conceptualize Blackness as a global phenomenon without assuming the universality or homogeneity of racialized experience. In this new way to analyze Black global art, Lamothe foregrounds migratory subjects poised on thresholds between not only old and new worlds, but old and new selves. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)

Mental health-care clinicians report that they hold patients responsible for morally objectionable behaviour but at the same time consider blaming attitudes to be inappropriate. These practices present a conundrum for all Strawsonian theories of responsibility. In response to this conundrum, Pickard has proposed severing the Strawsonian connection between being responsible and being an appropriate target of blaming attitudes. In this article I will argue that her solution fails to explain the practices at stake and provide an alternative solution that uncovers (...) an under-theorized stance we take towards those whose abilities are underdeveloped or compromised. (shrink)

Background Our objective was to evaluate whether the description of a machine learning (ML) app or brain imaging technology to predict the onset of schizophrenia or alcohol use disorder (AUD) influences healthcare professionals’ judgments of stigma, empathy, and compassion. Methods We randomized healthcare professionals (N = 310) to one vignette about a person whose clinician seeks to predict schizophrenia or an AUD, using a ML app, brain imaging, or a psychosocial assessment. Participants used scales to measure their judgments of stigma, (...) empathy, and compassion. Results Participants randomized to the ML vignette endorsed less anger and more fear relative to the psychosocial vignette, and the brain imaging vignette elicited higher pity ratings. The brain imaging and ML vignettes evoked lower personal responsibility judgments compared to the psychosocial vignette. Physicians and nurses reported less empathy than clinical psychologists. Conclusions The use of predictive technologies may reinforce essentialist views about mental health and substance use that may increase specific aspects of stigma and reduce others. (shrink)

This paper introduces and discusses three models of future: a determinist model, a stochastic model, and the model of True Prophetic Knowledge. All three models coexist in natural languages and are represented both in their grammatical systems and in the text-building discourse strategies speakers and authors apply to.

We explore the computational complexity of justification, stability and relevance in incomplete argumentation frameworks (IAFs). IAFs are abstract argumentation frameworks that encode qualitative uncertainty by distinguishing between certain and uncertain arguments and attacks. These IAFs can be completed by deciding for each uncertain argument or attack whether it is present or absent. Such a completion is an abstract argumentation framework, for which it can be decided which arguments are acceptable under a given semantics. The justification status of an argument in (...) a completion then expresses whether the argument is accepted (in), not accepted because it is attacked by an accepted argument (out) or neither (undec). For a given IAF and certain argument, the justification status of that argument need not be the same in all completions. This is the issue of stability, where an argument is stable if its justification status is the same in all completions. For arguments that are not stable in an IAF, the relevance problem is of interest: which uncertain arguments or attacks should be investigated for the argument to become stable? In this paper, we define justification, stability and relevance for IAFs and provide a complexity analysis for these problems under grounded, complete, preferred and stable semantics. (shrink)

In their article on the limited duty to reinterpret genetic variants, Watts and Newson argue that clinical labs are not morally obligated to conduct routine reinterpretation despite its potential clinical and personal value.1 We endorse the authors’ argument for a circumscribed duty to reclassify genomic variants in certain cases, including to promote diagnostic equity for racial and ethnic minority populations that have been historically excluded from and exploited by genomic research and medicine. However, given the history and resilience of scientific (...) racism, the use of socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to enhance diagnostic equity raises several ethical and practical challenges. In the short term, using socially constructed racial and ethnic categories to identify patients for variant reclassification is a practical approach for addressing concerns of diagnostic equity. In contrast, diagnostic accuracy depends on patients’ genetic similarity to reference genomes, rather than their socially determined race or ethnicity.2 Thus, in the long term, securing both diagnostic equity and diagnostic accuracy through targeted variant reclassification will require a shift away from relying on race and ethnicity and towards assessing genetic similarity. Critically, the identification of patients for genomic variant reclassification using socially constructed race or ethnicity runs the risk of perpetuating the harmful …. (shrink)