The source of this presentation is the thesis PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY AND JEWISH EDUCATION: THE LAWS OF TORAH STUDY OF THE CODE GUIDE Maimonides. The thesis argues that in response to the challenge of transmitting Judaism to the new generations, in a world often hostile to the Jewish worldview, there is a proposal that is halachika vision of Jewish education that is based on the articulation of knowledge of the ways Jewish laws or mandatory (Hebrew: halachot), transformed into concrete actions and (...) behaviors that carry, which is fundamental and structuring a philosophical question about the principles that underlie and its applications in other cases and situations. (shrink)

The author presents his views on the factors that led the Church to dialogue with Jews, after a history marked by Catholic rule and persecution of the Jewish people. Also exposes some biblical Jewish contribution to the topic such as technic of discussion / study called pilpul and the content of extensive discussions found in the Talmud, that demonstrate the central role that dialogue and philosophical inquiry have in Judaism. It also adds the contemporary Jewish contributions to the universal thought (...) made by the philosophy developed by the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, corroborating the central and uninterrupted place of dialogue in Judaism since its birth. Throughout the presentation connections are made with the Nostra Aetate Declaration, showing the Church key position in the theme of dialogue with the Jews and the 10 points of Seelisberg and the “12 points of Berlin”, result of the interaction between Christians and Jews after the Holocaust. (shrink)

Once one draws a distinction between loyal non-existent items, which do not exist in a non-universal sense of the first-order existence predicate, and non-items, which fail to exist in a universal sense of that predicate, one may allow for the former but not for the latter in the overall ontological domain, so as to adopt a form of soft Parmenideanism. There are both theoretical and empirical reasons for this distinction.

Within the general framework of the theory of direct reference, there is no agreement as to whether unactualised possible objects (from now on, possibilia) can be referred to by means of directly referential singular terms (from now on, DR terms). While some have maintained that such a direct reference can be established e.g. via some fixing-reference description (Kaplan, Salmon, and perhaps Kripke himself), others have denied any such possibility. In what follows, I will scrutinise such denials by attempting at the (...) same time to provide some counterarguments to them. Indeed, I believe that possibilia can be referred to directly, primarily if the appropriate fixing-reference description is provided. (shrink)

In The Theory of Objects, Alexius Meinong used true negative existentials to argue in favour of non-existent objects: in order to assert veridically that an object O does not exist, one has to refer to O itself1. From Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" onwards, it has become a commonplace to say that this argument does not work. For every sentence apparently concerning non-existents one can provide a paraphrase which eliminates the singular term contained in it and therefore dispels the illusion of (...) a reference to a non-existent item2. As is well known, this strategy implies that such a singular term is a camouflaged definite description. However, Saul Kripke and other supporters of the so-called new theory of reference have claimed that singular terms directly referring to their designation (ordinary proper names, indexicals, mass and substance terms: from now on, DR terms) are not at all synonymous with descriptions. In their opinion, true negative existentials represent no exception to this claim. In what follows I would like to stress that, though Kripke's critique of the Russellian treatment of negative existentials is convincing, his treatment of true negative existentials containing a DR term is flawed. Nor do other contemporary accounts that share Kripke's critique as far as these sentences are concerned fare any better. In fact, I think that Meinong's argument may be correct where true negative existentials containing DR terms are concerned. But I shall aim to demonstrate this elsewhere. (shrink)

In his new book, Carlos Alberto Torres, an internationally renowned critical theorist of education, explores the early writings of Paulo Freire whose ideas have had a tremendous and long-lasting impact on the world of pedagogy and politics. Torres analyzes Freire's works, from the 1960s and 1970s, before Freire gained worldwide recognition for his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Offering an in-depth look into the formative thinking of Freire, Torres identifies how his ideas produced frameworks for educating global citizens, building community (...) and mutual respect, creating social responsibility, instilling an appreciation for diversity, promoting multiple literacies, and social justice education. This volume is the result of more than 3 decades of research with access to Freire's personal library and the archives of the Paulo Freire Institute, as well as the author's extensive conversations with Paulo Freire over two decades--Dr. Torres was Freire's adviser during his tenure as Secretary of Education in the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil, 1989-1991. (shrink)

No Brasil, ao contrário de outros países, o número de estudiosos da Filosofia Medieval, como aliás também da Filosofia Antiga, é relativamente pequeno. Os medievalistas tomaram consciência dos problemas que enfrentavam, quando se reuniram pela primeira vez, em Brasília, no ano de 1982. Daquele primeiro Encontro surgiu um livro dedicado especialmente ao tema Filosofia Medieval. De lá em diante, reuniões periódicas, ou ocasiões especiais, permitiram que outros textos sobre o mesmo assunto fossem publicados. Criou-se também a Comissão Brasileira de Filosofia (...) Medieval, dirigida inicialmente pelo colega Prof. Dr. José Antônio de Camargo Rodrigues de Souza. (shrink)

Se trata de la reseña de _E__picteto. El arte de vivir (en tiempos difíciles)_, obra publicada por Alianza Editorial en Madrid este 2023. El Dr. Ignacio Pajón Leyra es autor de la introducción, de la traducción y de las notas del volumen, que contiene el _Manual _(Ἐγχειρίδιον) de Epicteto y una antología de textos extraídos, en su mayor parte, de sus _Disertaciones _(Διατριβαί), junto a noticias y fragmentos de otras fuentes.

Everything you wanted to know about direct reference and always dared to ask is contained in Recanati's new book, which is not only a comprehensive survey on the received doctrine but also an original attempt to find a new way out of the many puzzles which surround the "new theory of reference" (in H. Wettstein's words) since its origins. Principles and conceptions are indeed acutely specified and Recanati's own theses are argued for in a very subtle and rigorous way. One (...) cannot leave the volume without the impression that his understanding of the subject has been radically deepened and enlightened. A thorough analysis of such a detailed work would probably need a paper as long as the volume itself. Thus, I will limit myself to reconstruct three general aims of the book and to discuss some of the issues they raise. These aims are: i) to find a new criterion for the referentiality of directly referential terms (from now on, DR terms); ii) to develop a multi-layered pragmatics which allows one to deal pragmatically with what has been hitherto considered as belonging to a semantic layer only; iii) to put forward a truth-conditional pragmatic analysis of belief reports which accounts for the semantic import of the non truth-conditional thought underlying a linguistic utterance. Let me deal with i) first. Recanati puts forward a criterion of referentiality which in his mind allows one to tell de jure rigid designators (names, indexicals: what we have above labeled DR terms) from de facto ones (definite descriptions such as "the cube root of 27"). The former, not the latter, directly designate their referent since they are type-referential. He defines type-referentiality as follows: A term is (type)-referential if and only if its linguistic meaning includes a feature, call it 'REF', by virtue of which it indicates that the truth-condition ... of the utterance where it occurs is singular. (p.17) Suppose we take the following two utterances, "3 is odd" and "The cube root of 27 is odd", where the former contains a de jure, the latter a de facto, rigid designator. Although both utterances have singular truth-conditions, let us say are associated with a singular proposition to the effect that the number 3 is odd, the former, but not the latter, presents itself as true iff 3 is odd, i.e.. (shrink)

Summary Canfield and Lehrer argued in [1] that it is impossible to predict an event deductively from given laws and initial conditions. In [2] I showed (1) that there are counterexamples to C&L's claim, (2) that their argument was based on an assumption which they failed to recognize, let alone support (the assumption that there are ‘rejectible’ facts), (3) that if certain simple conditions on predictability were granted, it could be shown that C&L's tacit assumption is false. In a recent (...) issue of this Journal Dr. Harnatt has criticized (3) (ignoring (1) and (2)), and he has concluded that we should still wonder whether there are any deductive predictions. Dr. Harnatt's arguments are shown to be defective. (shrink)

“Exercise starts and ends in the brain”: this was the title of a review article authored by Dr. Bengt Kayser back in 2003. In this piece of work, the author highlights that pioneer studies have primarily focused on the cardiorespiratory-muscle axis to set the human limits to whole-body exercise tolerance. In some circumstances, however, exercise cessation may not be solely attributable to these players: the central nervous system is thought to hold a relevant role as the ultimate site of exercise (...) termination. In fact, there has been a growing interest relative to the “brain” response to exercise in chronic cardiorespiratory diseases, and its potential implication in limiting the tolerance to physical exertion in patients. To reach these overarching goals, non-invasive techniques, such as near-infrared spectroscopy and transcranial magnetic stimulation, have been successfully applied to get insights into the underlying mechanisms of exercise limitation in clinical populations. This review provides an up-to-date outline of the rationale for the “brain” as the organ limiting the tolerance to physical exertion in patients with cardiorespiratory diseases. We first outline some key methodological aspects of neuromuscular function and cerebral hemodynamics assessment in response to different exercise paradigms. We then review the most prominent studies, which explored the influence of major cardiorespiratory diseases on these outcomes. After a balanced summary of existing evidence, we finalize by detailing the rationale for investigating the “brain” contribution to exercise limitation in hitherto unexplored cardiorespiratory diseases, an endeavor that might lead to innovative lines of applied physiological research. (shrink)

_This article presents the main ethical challenges faced by social work professionals in Spain during the "first wave" of COVID-19 in 2020. The pandemic had a serious impact not only on the health sector, but also in the field of social work. During this time, social workers had to address serious ethical questions regarding issues such as confidentiality breaches, how to fairly distribute available resources, the lack of personal contact and emotional connection with the service users, the difficulties of working (...) in isolation and online, doubts about the reliability of the information they were handling and the difficulty of making proper diagnoses. An international research group led by Dr. Sara Banks conducted a broader research project in collaboration with the International Federation of Social Workers, which collected information through an online questionnaire aimed at social workers from various countries. In this article we analyse the results related to the main ethical challenges faced by social workers in Spain. The research group identified two types of ethical challenges that they have separated into two sections: the first section is related to direct intervention with users, which includes topics such as the lack of emotional support, reliability, use of technology, the appropriate care, compliance with the highest professional standards, confidentiality, vulnerability, and the fair distribu-tion of resources. The other section is related to the ethical challenges around the daily work within social entities, which involved dealing with issues such as the e-social work and coordination difficulties, the management of pressure in social bodies and changes in the intervention methodology__._ _Keywords_: Social work ethics, pandemic, international research, COVID. (shrink)

Se realizó una investigación con el objetivo de elaborar una semblanza del Comandante Dr. Alberto Oscar Ibietatorremendía Vega en el décimo aniversario de su fallecimiento. Hombre de positivos valores morales, políticos y sociales, que además de ejercer la Medicina y practicar varios deportes, integró varios procesos revolucionarios de izquierda con carácter antiimperialista, desde la Joven Cuba hasta el Movimiento 26 de Julio. Continuó en las filas del movimiento revolucionario donde asumió todas las tareas asignadas, especialmente el cumplimiento de misiones (...) internacionalistas en Argelia y Nicaragua. Su vida constituye un digno ejemplo para las nuevas generaciones, por lo que debe figurar en la historia de la Medicina cubana. An investigation was carried out with the objective of developing a biographic profile of the medical doctor and commander Alberto Oscar Ibietatorremendía Vega as a way to pay tribute to him during the tenth anniversary of his demise. Being a man of high moral, political and social values, he was a member of several revolutionary groups such as Joven Cuba and Movimiento 26 de Julio. Moreover, he practiced medicine and was active in several sports. After the triumph of the Revolution, he continued his work as a member of the revolutionary process. He held different responsibilities, especially those in international missions in Algeria and Nicaragua. His life is an example to the new generations and must therefore have a place in the history of Cuban medicine. (shrink)

The articles in the symposium “Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: New Approaches” provide theoretical reflections and practical advice on new ways of teaching undergraduate survey courses in early modern philosophy. This introduction lays out the rationale for the symposium and summarizes the articles that compose it.

Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

In Ockhamist branching-time logic [Prior 67], formulas are meant to be evaluated on a specified branch, or history, passing through the moment at hand. The linguistic counterpart of the manifoldness of future is a possibility operator which is read as `at some branch, or history (passing through the moment at hand)'. Both the bundled-trees semantics [Burgess 79] and the $\langle moment, history\rangle$ semantics [Thomason 84] for the possibility operator involve a quantification over sets of moments. The Ockhamist frames are (3-modal) (...) Kripke structures in which this second-order quantification is represented by a first-order quantification. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the notions of modal definability, validity, and axiomatizability concerning 3-modal frames which can be viewed as generalizations of Ockhamist frames. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the relation between Christian Wolff's philosophy and the methodological views of early modern experimental philosophers. The chapter argues for three claims. First, Wolff's system relies on experience at every step and his views on experiments, observations, hypotheses, and the a priori are in line with those of experimental philosophers. Second, the study of Wolff's views demonstrates the influence of experimental philosophy in early eighteenth-century Germany. Third, references to Wolff's empiricism and rationalism are best identified or replaced with (...) references to his endorsement of the tenets of experimental philosophers and of a mathematical demonstrative method. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

A completeness theorem is established for logics with congruence endowed with general semantics (in the style of general frames). As a corollary, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with congruence provided that congruence is retained in the resulting logic. The class of logics with equivalence is shown to be closed under fibring and to be included in the class of logics with congruence. Thus, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with equivalence and general semantics. (...) An example is provided showing that completeness is not always preserved by fibring ligics endowed with standard (non general) semantics. A categorial characterization of fibring is provided using coproducts and cocartesian liftings. (shrink)

We study the computability-theoretic complexity and proof-theoretic strength of the following statements: (1) "If X is a well-ordering, then so is ε X ", and (2) "If X is a well-ordering, then so is φ(α, X)", where α is a fixed computable ordinal and φ represents the two-placed Veblen function. For the former statement, we show that ω iterations of the Turing jump are necessary in the proof and that the statement is equivalent to ${\mathrm{A}\mathrm{C}\mathrm{A}}_{0}^{+}$ over RCA₀. To prove the (...) latter statement we need to use ω α iterations of the Turing jump, and we show that the statement is equivalent to ${\mathrm{\Pi }}_{{\mathrm{\omega }}^{\mathrm{\alpha }}}^{0}{-\mathrm{C}\mathrm{A}}_{0}$ . Our proofs are purely computability-theoretic. We also give a new proof of a result of Friedman: the statement "if x is a well-ordering, then so is φ(x, 0)" is equivalent to ATR₀ over RCA₀. (shrink)

Es ist in der Literatur weithin bekannt, dass im Gesundheitswesen auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen Allokationsentscheidungen getroffen werden. Während es auf der Makroebene um gesellschaftlich-politische Strukturfragen geht, stehen die Akteure der Mikroebene vor der Aufgabe, begrenzte Ressourcen in einer Organisation sinnvoll einzusetzen. In den ethischen Analysen der Mikro-Allokationsebene werden zumeist Entscheidungen der Healthcare Professionals thematisiert, weil sie eine unmittelbare Auswirkung auf die konkreten Patienten haben. Weniger in den Blick geraten Allokationen des Managements, welche die Rahmenbedingungen für Ressourcenzuteilungen beim Patienten betreffen. Hierbei geht (...) es nicht bloß um den Einsatz von Sachmitteln (z. B. Medikamenten- oder Gerätebudgets), sondern auch um den Personaleinsatz. Das Personalmanagement ist damit in wichtige Allokationsentscheidungen eingebunden und trägt eine dreifache Verantwortung: für die Gesundheit der Patienten, der Mitarbeiter und der Organisation. Der vorliegende Beitrag geht der Frage nach, welche Aspekte der Allokationsethik aus der Sicht des Personalmanagements in einem Krankenhaus zu bedenken sind, um der dreifachen Verantwortung gerecht zu werden. Dadurch zeigt sich, dass Allokationsethik in einem Krankenhaus nicht adäquat erfasst werden kann, ohne sich mit dem Personalmanagement zu beschäftigen, da das Personal die wertvollste Ressource ist, die es in einem Krankenhaus zu allozieren gilt. (shrink)

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925-1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of (...) logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion (...) is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. (shrink)

This open access book discusses individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to vaccination from the perspective of philosophy and public health ethics. It addresses the issue of what it means for a collective to be morally responsible for the realisation of herd immunity and what the implications of collective responsibility are for individual and institutional responsibilities. The first chapter introduces some key concepts in the vaccination debate, such as ‘herd immunity’, ‘public goods’, and ‘vaccine refusal’; and explains why failure (...) to vaccinate raises certain ethical issues. The second chapter analyses, from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to the realisation of herd immunity. The third chapter is about the principle of least restrictive alternative in public health ethics and its implications for vaccination policies. Finally, the fourth chapter presents an ethical argument for unqualified compulsory vaccination, i.e. for compulsory vaccination that does not allow for any conscientious objection. The book will appeal to philosophers interested in public health ethics and the general public interested in the philosophical underpinning of different arguments about our moral obligations with regard to vaccination. (shrink)

A brief theoretical review of the current state of the art of embodiment research in clinical psychology has been expounded in order to highlight the key role that embodied conceptualization has on the understanding and explanation of several mental disorders, such as eating disorders, schizophrenia and depression. Evidence has suggested that mental disorders may be explained as disturbances of embodiment, from the disembodiment to the hyperembodiment. In order to understand how some clinical conditions are affected by cultural models, we propose (...) and define a new framework called Exbodiment, complementary to the Embodiment approach to cognition. Mental disorder is strictly related to the subject-culture interaction that may be explained as a two way process in which embodiment and exbodiment are complementary points of view. In this perspective, embodiment may be seen as the “top-down” process, while exbodiment the “bottom-up” one. The introduction of exbodiment conceptualization highlights how subject is both receiver and interpreter of social influence. Subject is the target of a cultural pressure and, at the same time, enacts its own embodied culture in world. Exbodiment conceptualization may help clinicians to better understand and explain the role of culture in the onset and maintenance of mental disorders. (shrink)

In recent works, Chomsky has once more endorsed a computational view of rulefollowing, whereby to follow a rule is to operate certain computations on a subject’s mental representations. As is well known, this picture does not conform to what we may call the grammatical conception of rule-following outlined by Wittgenstein, whereby an elucidation of the concept of rule-following is aimed at by isolating grammatical statements regarding the phrase ‘to follow a rule’. As a result, Chomskyan and Wittgensteinian treatments of topics (...) immediately connected with rule-following, namely linguistic competence and understanding, are utterly different from one another. There are two possible stances that computationalists like Chomsky may adopt with regard to the discrepancy between the two aforementioned modes of dealing with rule-following, namely a conciliatory and a non-conciliatory attitude. According to the former attitude, grammatical remarks on and computationallyoriented theories of rule-following investigate one and the same topic although admittedly at different levels, namely a conceptual and an empirical one. According to the latter attitude, grammatical remarks are just a preliminary step in the investigation of rule-following which scientific advancement, presently represented by computationally-oriented theories on this matter, is well entitled to put aside. In what follows, however, I will try to show that both stances are problematic. The conciliatory attitude simply does not work, for it hardly copes with the fact that the concept of rule-following does not supervene, even weakly, on the property of rule-following, namely the property instantiated in the mental/cerebral phenomena that computationally-oriented theories of rule-following study. To take the contrary attitude, on the other hand, is to end up with another disappointing result, namely that the computational treatment of rule-following ultimately deals with something different from that which we wished to gain knowledge of when we began our inquiry into rule-following.. (shrink)

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 participants) (...) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment (_N_ = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission. (shrink)

In ancient China, art has never been a substitute for the category of ‘truth’ in the sense of Western aestheticism, but a mimic for goodness and beauty. The image in traditional Chinese aesthetics never transcended the idea to the level of Western abstraction, and that is because the artistic expression bore a social synthesis, rather than metaphysical, between human beings, reality, and the world. However, the Ming Dynasty introduces a Dionysian discourse that challenges the Apollonian tradition.

The basic notions in Prior's Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history. In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of a non-Archimedean topology on the set (...) of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories. (shrink)

In just the last decade, many conference proceedings have been published on Plato’s Timaeus and its influence on the history of philosophy. The present vo­lume, which is the result of a symposium held at Seoul National University in September 2011, testifies to the enduring and widespread interest the Platonic dia­logue is able to elicit. The nine studies here collected by Euree Song center on the figure of the demiurge as maker of the world and they all deal with authors who, (...) while having di... (shrink)

Temporal logic is one of the many areas in which a possible world semantics is adopted. Prior's Ockhamist and Peircean semantics for branching-time, though, depart from the genuine Kripke semantics in that they involve a quantification over histories, which is a second-order quantification over sets of possible worlds. In the paper, variants of the original Prior's semantics will be considered and it will be shown that all of them can be viewed as first-order counterparts of the original semantics.

The branching-time logic called Peircean by Arthur Prior is considered and given an infinite axiomatization. The axiomatization uses only the standard deduction rules for tense logic.

In the tree-like representation of Time, two histories are undivided at a moment t whenever they share a common moment in the future of t. In the present paper, it will first be proved that Ockhamist and Peircean branching-time logics are unable to express some important sentences in which the notion of undividedness is involved. Then, a new semantics for branching-time logic will be presented. The new semantics is based on trees endowed with an indistinguishability function, a generalization of the (...) notion of undividedness. It will be shown that Ockhamist and Peircean semantics can be viewed as limit cases of the semantics developed in this paper. (shrink)

I argue that there are significant moral reasons in addition to harm prevention for making vaccination against certain common infectious diseases compulsory. My argument is based on an analogy between vaccine refusal and tax evasion. First, I discuss some of the arguments for compulsory vaccination that are based on considerations of the risk of harm that the non‐vaccinated would pose on others; I will suggest that the strength of such arguments is contingent upon circumstances and that in order to provide (...) the strongest defence possible of compulsory vaccination, such arguments need to be supplemented by additional arguments. I will then offer my additional argument for compulsory vaccination: I will argue that in both cases of vaccine refusal and of tax evasion individuals fail to make their fair contribution to important social and public goods, regardless of whether each individual contribution ‘makes a difference’. While fairness considerations have sometimes been used to support a moral duty to vaccinate, they have not been appealed to in order to argue for a legal duty to vaccinate. I will suggest that this is due, among other things, to a misapplication of the principle of the least restrictive alternative in public health. Finally, I will address nine possible objections to my argument. (shrink)

We experimentally investigated the influence of context-based biases, such as prestige and popularity, on the preferences for quotations. Participants were presented with random quotes associated to famous or unknown authors, or with random quotes presented as popular, i.e. chosen by many previous participants, or unpopular. To exclude effects related to the content of the quotations, all participants were subsequently presented with the same quotations, again associated to famous and unknown authors, or presented as popular or unpopular. Overall, our results showed (...) that context-based biases had no, or limited, effect in determining participants’ choices. Quotations preferred for their content were preferred in general, despite the contextual cues to which they were associated. We conclude discussing how our results fit with the well-known phenomenon of the spread and success of misattributed quotations, and we draw some more general implications for cultural evolution research. (shrink)

The basic notions in Prior’s Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history (or course of events). In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical (and ontological) dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of (...) a non-Archimedean topology on the set of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories. (shrink)

We describe a form of moral artificial intelligence that could be used to improve human moral decision-making. We call it the “artificial moral advisor”. The AMA would implement a quasi-relativistic version of the “ideal observer” famously described by Roderick Firth. We describe similarities and differences between the AMA and Firth’s ideal observer. Like Firth’s ideal observer, the AMA is disinterested, dispassionate, and consistent in its judgments. Unlike Firth’s observer, the AMA is non-absolutist, because it would take into account the human (...) agent’s own principles and values. We argue that the AMA would respect and indeed enhance individuals’ moral autonomy, help individuals achieve wide and a narrow reflective equilibrium, make up for the limitations of human moral psychology in a way that takes conservatives’ objections to human bioenhancement seriously, and implement the positive functions of intuitions and emotions in human morality without their downsides, such as biases and prejudices. (shrink)