Review of Sandu Frunză, Experien ţa religioasă în gîndirea lui Dumitru Stăniloae. O etică relaţională. 2nd edition, București: Eikon, 2016, 262 pag.

Review of Sandu Frunză, O antropologie mistică. Introducere în gîndirea Părintelui Stăniloae. București: Eikon, 2016. 176 pag.

This is the first book on the provocative and innovative contributions to philosophy of language, metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics, and logic made by Kit Fine, one of the world's foremost philosophers. Topics covered include meaning and representation, arbitrary objects, essence, ontological realism, and the metaphysics of modality.

Fischer’s approach for structure elucidation of linear aldohexoses is still the most widespread alternative in textbooks for carbohydrates. However, in post-Fischer era, a series of remarkable discoveries and inventions were made in different laboratories, and by their use a more comprehensive and coherent strategy for structure elucidation of linear isomeric aldohexoses can be elaborated. Fischer used the exceptional properties of d-mannose for the knowledge of configuration of C-2 and called it the key of the gate to stereochemistry. We bring the (...) evidence that Fischer had an alternative to this monosaccharide, d-idose. Fischer discovered the correct structure of the enantiomers of tartaric acid by pure intuition but Bijvoet proved it experimentally by means of X-rays. Hybridization, a concept taken by L. Pauling from biology, reconciled physics and chemistry concerning the valence of carbon atom and explained the stereochemical picture that had been empirically elaborated by Van’t Hoff and Le Bel. Other chemical transformations of monosaccharides, useful in the elucidation of their structure, have been also discovered or invented in post-Fischer era. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to independent quantifiers, as originally introduced in Informational independence as a semantic phenomenon by Hintikka and Sandu [9] under the header of independence-friendly languages. Unlike other approaches, which rely heavily on compositional methods, we shall analyze independent quantifiers via equilibriums in strategic games. In this approach, coined equilibrium semantics, the value of an IF sentence on a particular structure is determined by the expected utility of the existential player in any of (...) the game’s equilibriums. This approach was suggested in Henkin quantifiers and complete problems by Blass and Gurevich [2] but has not been taken up before. We prove that each rational number can be realized by an IF sentence. We also give a lower and upper bound on the expressive power of IF logic under equilibrium semantics. (shrink)

Transmodern ethics establishes moral norms on liberal, pluralist and pragmatic principles. We see a comeback of the negation morals, however not of ontology-anchored morals, as is the case of the God who picks favourites or of the jealous God paradigm, and not even of morals anchored in a contractualist perspective, as is the case in the modern period. The preferred focus is on the value of positivism, of cooperation as a source of efficiency, of personal enrichment, be it cultural, spiritual, (...) or moral, derived from the access to alterity. Tolerance as an ethical value is legitimised by a new, utilitarian humanism. The ethical construction of identity revolves around the value of loyalty to a tradition, a dogma, a mentality, and by extension to any coherent system liable to generate a sense of belonging. Postindustrial ethics uses for instance the value of loyalty as a strategy in marketing, organisational development, political propaganda etc. The policies used in order to increase the loyalty of a shop's customers, the employee's loyalty for the company she works for, the supporter's loyalty to his team, are the translation in layman terms of the loyalty ethics that in spiritual terms was one of the foundations of orthodoxy as loyalty to the tradition of the holy fathers. The values of equality, liberty and fraternity have been more than that, as they have laid the foundations of the modern society. (shrink)

In the conventional approach to quantum mechanics, indeterminism is an axiom and nonlocality is a theorem. We consider inverting the logical order, making nonlocality an axiom and indeterminism a theorem. Nonlocal “superquantum” correlations, preserving relativistic causality, can violate the CHSH inequality more strongly than any quantum correlations.

The metaphor of “care drain” has been created as a womanly parallel to the “brain drain” idea. Just as “brain drain” suggests that the skilled migrants are an economic loss for the sending country, “care drain” describes the migrant women hired as care workers as a loss of care for their children left behind. This paper criticizes the construction of migrant women as “care drain” for three reasons: 1) it is built on sexist stereotypes, 2) it misrepresents and devalues care (...) work, and 3) it misses the opportunity for a theoretical change about how skills in migration contexts can be understood. (shrink)

If migration is more effective than aid for fighting poverty, should it replace aid? Not always. This article proposes a criterion that may be used to distinguish between cases where migration should serve as a substitute for development assistance and cases where it should supplement such aid. According to this criterion, development agendas are poverty-efficient when they lift the largest possible number of people out of poverty. Therefore, to be poverty-efficient, development agendas should always aim to complement aid with policies (...) for pulling people out of poverty. Development assistance that is not poverty-efficient should be abandoned and replaced by migration and other policies that can effectively fight poverty. (shrink)

Migrant women are often stereotyped. Some scholars associate the feminization of migration with domestic work and criticize the “care drain” as a new form of imperialism that the First World imposes on the Third World. However, migrant women employed as domestic workers in Northern America and Europe represent only 2% of migrant women worldwide and cannot be seen as characterizing the “feminization of migration”. Why are migrant domestic workers overestimated? This paper explores two possible sources of bias. The first is (...) sampling: conclusions about “care drain” are often generalized from small samples of domestic workers. The second stems from the affect heuristic: imagining children left behind by migrant mothers provokes strong feelings of injustice which trump other considerations. The paper argues that neither source of bias is unavoidable and finds evidence of gender stereotypes in the “care drain” construal. (shrink)

This paper argues that by overestimating the importance of citizenship rights, the ethics of immigration turns away from the more serious problem of closed borders. Precisely, this contribution is a threefold critique of Carens’ idea that "justice requires that democratic states grant citizenship at birth to the descendants of settled immigrants" (Carens, 2013: 20). Firstly, I argue that by making 'justice' dependent on states and their attributes (birthright citizenship), this idea strengthens methodological nationalism which views humanity as naturally divided into (...) bounded nation-states. Secondly, I analyze its justification and argue that grounding (citizenship) rights on the existence of social connections is logically and morally problematic. Thirdly, I analyze its scope (granting rights to the descendants of the ‘settled’) and its method of implementation (granting citizenship rights automatically ‘at birth’). While from a less sedentarist perspective, no one can be considered ‘settled’ in advance, I will express some doubts that granting citizenship rights is always automatically a way to extend people’s rights. All in all, I argue that by its justification, scope and method of implementation, this idea moves us away from, rather than gets us closer to, an open-borders world. (shrink)

The dissertation gives a second-order-logic-based explanation of modal incompleteness. The leading concept is that modal incompleteness is to be explained in terms of the incompleteness of standard second-order logic, since modal language is basically a second-order language. The development of Kripke-style semantics for modal logic has been underpinned by the conjecture that all modal systems are characterizable by classes of frames defined by first-order conditions on a binary relation. However, the discovery of certain incomplete modal systems has undermined the all-encompassing (...) feature of Kripke-style approach. There are logics not determined by any class of Kripke frames at all. ;In the dissertation I investigate a normal incomplete sentential modal system due to J. F. A. K. Van Benthem, and I address both the formal and the philosophical facets of modal incompleteness from the vantage point that modal logic is essentially second-order in its nature. Modal systems can be analyzed in terms of structures with a domain of second-order individuals that are assigned under an interpretation to propositional variables within languages of sentential modal logic. Hence, the phenomenon of there being incomplete modal systems can be accounted for through the incompleteness of standard second-order logic. ;Since second-order logic plays a crucial role in the explanation, Quine's animadversions upon second-order logic and in particular his views that second-order logic is 'Set Theory in Sheep's Clothing' are examined. Against Quine's stance I will seek to show that a vindication of second-order logic can be gotten provided a proper due is given to the sharp distinction between the logical notion of set which is the concern of second-order logic and the iterative notion of set which lies within the realm of set theory. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as (...) it fails to fully instantiate the value of political equality, while having some other unattractive implications as well. By contrast, we argue that weak limitarianism, which is supported by the argument from unmet urgent needs, should be endorsed, albeit in a qualified version which also takes responsibility constraints into consideration. (shrink)

Both Frege's Grundgesetze, and Lagrange's treatises on analytical functions pursue a foundational purpose. Still, the former's program is not only crucially different from the latter's. It also depends on a different idea of what foundation of mathematics should be like . Despite this contrast, the notion of function plays similar roles in their respective programs. The purpose of my paper is emphasising this similarity. In doing it, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of Frege's logicism, especially in relation (...) to its crucial differences with a set-theoretic foundational perspective. This should also spread some light on a question arisen by J. Hintikka and G. Sandu in a widely discussed paper, namely whether Frege should or should not be credited with the notion of arbitrary function underlying our standard interpretation of second-order logic. In section 1, I account for Lagrange's notion of function. In section 2, I advance some remarks on connected historical matters. This will provide an appropriate framework for discussing the role played by the notion of function in Frege's Grundgesetze. Section 3 is devoted to this. Some concluding remarks will close the paper. (shrink)

Hodges' Extension Theorem is perfectly designed for the kind of extension problem of principle of compositionality, which arises in the so-called IF languages. These languages satisfy the conditions of the application of the Extension Theorem. They are extensions of standard first-order languages closed under atomic and negations of atomic formulas and disjunctions and conjunctions of IF-formulas. Hodges' extension theorem shows that when certain conditions are satisfied, a language has a unique compositional interpretation, which agrees with the initially given partial one. (...) Accordingly, any two such compositional interpretations must be formally equivalent. Kaplan separates the indices, which contribute to the semantic value of a sentence into those that make the context of utterance, and those that constitute the circumstances of evaluation. The former determine what is said and the latter determine whether what is said is true or false. (shrink)

We study partiality in propositional logics containing formulas with either undefined or over-defined truth-values. Undefined values are created by adding a four-place connective W termed transjunction to complete models which, together with the usual Boolean connectives is shown to be functionally complete for all partial functions. Transjunction is seen to be motivated from a game-theoretic perspective, emerging from a two-stage extensive form semantic game of imperfect information between two players. This game-theoretic approach yields an interpretation where partiality is generated as (...) a property of non-determinacy of games. Over-defined values are produced by adding a weak, contradictory negation or, alternatively, by relaxing the assumption that games are strictly competitive. In general, particular forms of extensive imperfect information games give rise to a generalised propositional logic where various forms of informational dependencies and independencies of connectives can be studied. (shrink)

Ethical leadership is the best response in the crisis state of postmodern man. Ethical leadership is a construct that leads to personal transfiguration, organizational effectiveness, improved interpersonal communication, and the achievement of a joint platform for professional action. Its development has also a beneficial effect as it brings ethics back to the core of public action, to the front line of organizational life and personal development. Whether it follows a religious model or a model resulting from laicized religious values, leadership (...) construing is based on a personal development process that follows an initiating structure in the world of values and their practice in personal ethical action. This is doubled by an ethics institutionalization process in which the organization itself becomes a structure of ethical and effective communication both inside and outside. An authentic leadership supposes positing the leader in the center of an ethical edifice in which achieving public good is done through instruments of personal development, ethics management and managerial ethics, ethical responsibility and sustainability, human condition improvement, spiritual transfiguration and authenticity. Added to this is the leader’s personal effort of involvement in the organization. Ethical leadership relies on a person’s vocation of developing an ethical culture in professional situations and in all life experiences. (shrink)

The paper attempts to give a solution to the Fitch's paradox though the strategy of the reformulation of the paradox in temporal logic, and a notion of knowledge which is a kind of ceteris paribus modality. An analogous solution has been offered in a different context to solve the problem of metaphysical determinism.

Numerous groups race to discover the gene biomarker whose alteration alone is indicative of a particular disease in all humans. Biomarkers are selected from the most frequently altered genes in large population cohorts. However, thousands of other genes are simultaneously affected, and, in each person, the same disease results from a unique, never-repeatable combination of gene alterations. Therefore, our Genomic Fabric Paradigm (GFP) switches the focus from the alteration of one particular gene to the overall change in selected groups of (...) functionally related genes. Biomarkers are of little therapeutic value, their high alterability indicating low protection by the homeostatic mechanisms as for minor players. Instead of these most alterable genes in all patients, GFP identifies in each patient the genes whose highly protected expression governs major functional pathways by controlling the expression of numerous other genes. Smart manipulation of such (commander) genes would have the maximum therapeutic benefit not for everybody but for the treated person. The genomic fabric is defined as the transcriptome associated with the most interconnected and stably expressed network of genes responsible for a particular functional pathway. The fabric exhibits specificity with respect to race/strain, sex, age, tissue/cell type, and lifestyle and environmental factors. It remodels during development, progression of a disease, and in response to external stimuli. GFP is powered by mathematically advanced analytical tools whose application is illustrated by reprocessing data from previously published gene expression experiments. (shrink)

The postmodern human lives in a quest condition. Poetry and philosophy, as forms that integrate, shape, and deposit the sacred, are part of the instruments used by postmoderns to fulfill their need for communication and personal accomplishment. Although they use different means to construe reality, poetry and philosophy may serve a common end goal – to disclose philosophy as the art of living. As communication practice, philosophy and poetry are based on an expanded rationality involving the rational extended to the (...) sphere of the significance and hidden sense of existence. In other words, expanded rationality presupposes cultivating a symbolic consciousness that is adequate to the daily reality of human needs. To showcase the intimate relationship between philosophical reflection and poetic creation, I provide a short presentation of the poetry belonging to a Romanian poet, Rodica Dragomir. Her poems are an example of the quest for authenticity by means of the metaphysical stirring of existence. (shrink)

We show that a coherent theory of partially ordered connectives can be developed along the same line as partially ordered quantification. We estimate the expressive power of various partially ordered connectives and use methods like Ehrenfeucht games and infinitary logic to get various undefinability results.

In this paper I make a contribution to three distinct, but deeply interwoven subjects. Firstly, I argue that, at the level of ideal theory, the distribution of educational goods should follow a sufficientarian pattern and that the evaluative space of children’s advantage should be inspired by the capability approach. Secondly, the paper is delving into the more policy-oriented debates on the desirability of school choice. I argue that, given the non-ideal circumstances in which decision makers have to act, giving parents (...) the opportunity to choose the school for their children is a sine qua non condition for even approaching the ideals of sufficientarian justice. Lastly, I move the discussion on more empirical grounds, advancing a criticism of the Romanian educational legislation. I argue that the sufficiency-constrained school choice system that I envision could solve some of the problems that the Romanian educational system faces today. (shrink)

In an era of generalized communication, democratic societies cannot escape the radical changes that the development of different types of communication claims. Political communication determines new types of political practice and adhesion. As in the case of postmodern communication in general, in political communication, expressions of symbolic communication characteristic for traditional societies are still being used, even if those expressions are presented as contemporary symbolic constructs, as for example the construct of “postmodern tribes”. This text focuses on how these elements (...) are highlighted in the socio-analysis of Vasile Sebastian Dâncu, one of the most renowned experts in the Romanian political culture. The public space, shaped in the past by the intellectual elite, bearer of values and symbolic conscience, is being seized by television stars, by the online communication specialists. This leads to new fragmentations in and coagulation of political space, and to a prevalence of sentimentalities, mythical stories, and mystical experiences at the expense of rationality, civic involvement and ideologies. The new configuration of political groups of interest and the new ways of adhesion typical for “political followers” belonging to the Facebook generation are regarded from a mythic– symbolic mentality which links them to a behavior and a kind of solidarity characterizing tribal groups which are acting on a postmodern political scene. (shrink)