While there is a general consensus around the role of religion in the abolition of the Slave Trade, historians continue to give little to no detail on exactly how Christian theology influenced the abolitionist movement. This article seeks to interrogate one major theological factor inherent in the spirituality that underpinned the activism of the British abolitionists, namely their notion of Divine Providence, and particularly its moral-emotive correlate: the fear of God’s wrath. These theological notions are discussed based mainly on the (...) analysis of the primary sources and within the theoretical framework of judicial providentialism, aptly captured by John Coffey among others. (shrink)

While there is a general consensus around the role of religion in the abolition of the Slave Trade, historians continue to give little to no detail on exactly how Christian theology influenced the abolitionist movement. This article seeks to interrogate one major theological factor inherent in the spirituality that underpinned the activism of the British abolitionists, namely their notion of Divine Providence, and particularly its moral-emotive correlate: the fear of God’s wrath. These theological notions are discussed based mainly on the (...) analysis of the primary sources and within the theoretical framework of judicial providentialism, aptly captured by John Coffey among others. (shrink)

The debate over the semantics of demonstratives is in a stalemate between those positions attributing some referential significance to a speaker's referential intentions and those not doing so. The latter approach is supported by cases driving the non-intentional intuition in which the speakers mistakenly point at objects other than the ones they intend to refer to. The intentionalists, such as Martin Montminy, reply that once we think of potential extensions of such cases in which the speaker explains to the hearer (...) what her referential intention was, it is the intentionalist intuition that prevails. In this paper, I develop a semantics for demonstratives whose task is to accommodate both of these seemingly contradictory intuitions within the general non-intentionalist framework. The proposed idea is that the reference of a use of a demonstrative can change over time, as the discourse develops. This idea is handled formally by the addition of a parameter of the index of evaluation that represents the referentially relevant aspects of the state of the discourse. Also, I provide reasons for preferring my view over two rival positions: one by Palle Leth, and one that I adjust to the demands of the semantics of demonstratives from the theory that Kai von Fintel and Anthony Gillies offer for epistemic modals, and from Laura Delgado's polyreferentialism for proper names. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism is a phenomenon that describes the human tendency to see human-like shapes in the environment. It has considerable consequences for people’s choices and beliefs. With the increased presence of robots, it is important to investigate the optimal design for this tech- nology. In this paper we discuss the potential benefits and challenges of building anthropomorphic robots, from both a philosophical perspective and from the viewpoint of empir- ical research in the fields of human–robot interaction and social psychology. We believe (...) that this broad investigation of anthropomorphism will not only help us to understand the phenomenon better, but can also indicate solutions for facil- itating the integration of human-like machines in the real world. (shrink)

Both Hegel and the later Wittgenstein were concerned with the problem of how to begin speculation, or the problem of beginning. I argue that despite many differences, there are surprising similarities between their thinking about the beginning. They both consider different kinds of beginnings and combine them into complex analogies. The beginning has a subjective and an objective moment. The philosophizing subject has to begin with something, with an object. For Hegel, the objective moment is pure being. For Wittgenstein, the (...) objective moment is something that cannot be doubted. As regards the subjective moment, the philosophizing subject has to decide, without any reason, to conclude her quest for the presuppositionless beginning and finally begin at the beginning. The arational moment of this decision is echoed throughout any rational thought. Any application of a (rational) rule is, ultimately, a blind decision to apply this rule. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to formulate a universal characterization of consciousness, despite the conceptual vagueness of that term. The fundamental aspects of this phenomenon as studied by science consist of four features: its being accessible from the inside and the outside (subjectively and objectively), its being about something (referential), its being bodily determined, and its possessing a certain function (being useful). Approached in this way and in broad terms, consciousness seems to be a graded rather than all-or-none phenomenon. (...) However, it is argued that the main problem for the gradational approach is to establish reasonable, empirically justified limits on how extended (locally and globally) the range of a graded consciousness could be. Such constraints should then help to avoid the counterintuitive consequences of IIT (Integrated Information Theory), which ascribes consciousness even to such simple artificial systems as photodiodes. The article introduces global limits for conscious systems by pointing to the ability to individuate information as a necessary developmental condition of subjective perspectives. Local limits, meanwhile, are determined on the basis of a hypothesis about the action-oriented nature of the processes that select states of consciousness. Ultimately, the limits put forward imply that consciousness is to be characterized as individuated information in action. (shrink)

A key component of the susceptibility to cognitive biases is the ability to monitor for conflict between intuitively cued “heuristic” answers and logical principles. While there is evidence that pe...

According to panqualityism, a form of Russellian monism defended by Sam Coleman and others, consciousness is grounded in fundamental qualities, i.e. unexperienced qualia. Despite panqualityism’s significant promise, according to David Chalmers panqualityism fails as a theory of consciousness since the reductive approach to awareness of qualities it proposes fails to account for the specific phenomenology associated with awareness. I investigate Coleman’s reasoning against this kind of phenomenology and conclude that he successfully shows that its existence is controversial, and so Chalmers’s (...) critique is inconclusive. I then present a critique of panqualityism that avoids this controversial posit, arguing that the panqualityist treatment of awareness faces an explanatory gap, failing to account for the intimate cognitive access to qualities which we are afforded, i.e. for our ‘strong awareness’ of qualities. The real worry for panqualityists is thus not the contested phenomenology of awareness, which Chalmers relies on, but rather the special way in which we are aware of qualities. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, we address reports of “selfless” experiences from the perspective of active inference and predictive processing. Our argument builds upon grounding self-modelling in active inference as action planning and precision control within deep generative models – thus establishing a link between computational mechanisms and phenomenal selfhood. We propose that “selfless” experiences can be interpreted as cases in which normally congruent processes of computational and phenomenal self-modelling diverge in an otherwise conscious system. We discuss two potential mechanisms – within (...) the Bayesian mechanics of active inference – that could lead to such a divergence by attenuating the experience of selfhood: “self-flattening” via reduction in the depth of active inference and “self-attenuation” via reduction of the expected precision of self-evidence. (shrink)

Father Jakub Gorczyca, a Polish Jesuit, is a professor of philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. The subject of his particular concern is the set of problems encountered in philosophical anthropology, fundamental ethics and the philosophy of religion. Gorczyca draws philosophical inspiration from the intellectual tradition of Christianity, from phenomenology, and from the philosophy of dialogue.

We examine the verification of simple quantifiers in natural language from a computational model perspective. We refer to previous neuropsychological investigations of the same problem and suggest extending their experimental setting. Moreover, we give some direct empirical evidence linking computational complexity predictions with cognitive reality.<br>In the empirical study we compare time needed for understanding different types of quantifiers. We show that the computational distinction between quantifiers recognized by finite-automata and push-down automata is psychologically relevant. Our research improves upon hypothesis and (...) explanatory power of recent neuroimaging studies as well as provides<br>evidence. (shrink)

According to some interpreters, Foucault's encounter with the Greek and Roman ethics led him to reconsider his earlier work and to turn away from politics. Drawing mostly from Foucault's last and hitherto unpublished lecture course, this paper argues that Foucault's turn to ethics should not be interpreted as a turn away from his previous work, but rather as its logical continuation and an attempt to resolve some of the outstanding questions. I argue that the 1984 lectures on parrhesia should be (...) interpreted as Foucault's philosophical apology, as an attempt to defend himself against the charges of moral and epistemological nihilism, which were raised in response to his earlier work. In his last lectures, the Nietzschean Foucault somewhat surprisingly describes his earlier work as authentic Socratic philosophy and as ethical practice of freedom. In the conclusion, I assess the plausibility of Foucault's apology and speculate in which direction his work might have developed, had it not been cut off by his death. (shrink)

Father Jakub Gorczyca, a Polish Jesuit, is a professor of philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome. The subject of his particular concern is the set of problems encountered in philosophical anthropology, fundamental ethics and the philosophy of religion. Gorczyca draws philosophical inspiration from the intellectual tradition of Christianity, from phenomenology, and from the philosophy of dialogue.

Narrative identity theory in some of its influential variants makes three fundamental assumptions. First, it focuses on personal identity primarily in terms of selfhood. Second, it argues that personal identity is to be understood as the unity of one’s life as it develops over time. And finally, it states that the unity of a life is articulated, by the very person itself, in the form of a story, be it explicit or implicit. The article focuses on different contemporary phenomenological appraisals (...) of the narrative account. The survey of this partly critical debate is followed by concluding observations concerning a possible phenomenological theory of personal identity. (shrink)

This book brings together for the first time two philosophers from different traditions and different centuries. While Wittgenstein was a focal point of 20th century analytic philosophy, it was Hegel’s philosophy that brought the essential discourses of the 19th century together and developed into the continental tradition in 20th century. This now-outdated conflict took for granted Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s opposing positions and is being replaced by a continuous progression and differentiation of several authors, schools, and philosophical traditions. The development is (...) already evident in the tendency to identify a progression from a ‘Kantian’ to a ‘Hegelian phase’ of analytical philosophy as well as in the extension of right and left Hegelian approaches by modern and postmodern concepts. Assessing the difference between Wittgenstein and Hegel can outline intersections of contemporary thinking. (shrink)

Locke claims that a person’s identity over time consists in the unity of consciousness, not in the sameness of the body. Similarly, the phenomenological approach refuses to see the criteria of identity as residing in some externally observable bodily features. Nevertheless, it does not accept the idea that personal identity has to consist either in consciousness or in the body. We are self-aware as bodily beings. After providing a brief reassessment of Locke and the post-Lockean discussion, the article draws on (...) phenomenological arguments that show the body as lived, that is, lived as one’s own body, but also possibly as “other” or “strange.” Against what has been claimed in recent writing, especially in literature on Merleau-Ponty, the author argues that the “mineness” of the body and its “alterity” are not two mutually exclusive features. In the final part of the article, the author suggests that the becoming strange of one’s own body may legitimately be considered as a prominent experience of what it means to be a person. (shrink)

Cognitive architectures have often been applied to data from individual experiments. In this paper, I develop an ACT-R reader that can model a much larger set of data, eye-tracking corpus data. It is shown that the resulting model has a good fit to the data for the considered low-level processes. Unlike previous related works, the model achieves the fit by estimating free parameters of ACT-R using Bayesian estimation and Markov-Chain Monte Carlo techniques, rather than by relying on the mix of (...) manual selection + default values. The method used in the paper is generalizable beyond this particular model and data set and could be used on other ACT-R models. (shrink)

This volume on the semantic complexity of natural language explores the question why some sentences are more difficult than others. While doing so, it lays the groundwork for extending semantic theory with computational and cognitive aspects by combining linguistics and logic with computations and cognition. -/- Quantifier expressions occur whenever we describe the world and communicate about it. Generalized quantifier theory is therefore one of the basic tools of linguistics today, studying the possible meanings and the inferential power of quantifier (...) expressions by logical means. The classic version was developed in the 1980s, at the interface of linguistics, mathematics and philosophy. Before this volume, advances in "classic" generalized quantifier theory mainly focused on logical questions and their applications to linguistics, this volume adds a computational component, the third pillar of language use and logical activity. This book is essential reading for researchers in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, logic, AI, and computer science. (shrink)

Biobanki populacyjne stwarzają nowe możliwości prowadzenia badań biomedycznych oraz rozwoju medycyny personalizowanej i genomiki zdrowia publicznego. Z drugiej strony niosą wyzwania w zakresie zagwarantowania praw dawców (świadoma zgoda, zachowanie prywatności i poufności, niedyskryminacja w oparciu o dziedzictwo genetyczne). Główne wymiary, w których realizować się może ochrona praw dawców, to: właściwa komunikacja zarówno na poziomie społecznym (konsultacje społeczne) jak i indywidualnym (proces uzyskiwania świadomej zgody od dawców), odpowiednia organizacja biobanku (bezpieczny system informatyczny, kodowanie i anonimizacja danych, reguły dostępu do danych), właściwy (...) nadzór nad działalnością biobanku (zazwyczaj sprawowany przez komisję etyczną i komitet naukowy), a także stworzenie odpowiednich regulacji prawnych dotyczących pobierania, przechowywania i udostępniania ludzkiego materiału biologicznego oraz zapobiegających dyskryminacji ze względu na dziedzictwo genetyczne. W artykule opisane zostały również zasady organizacji i funkcjonowania biobanków populacyjnych w wybranych krajach europejskich (Estonia, Hiszpania, Wielka Brytania) w kontekście respektowania praw dawców. (shrink)

Quantifiers in phrasal and clausal comparatives often seem to take distributive scope in the matrix clause: for instance, the sentence John is taller than every girl is is true iff for every girl it holds that John is taller than that girl. Broadly speaking, two approaches exist that derive this reading without postulating the wide scope of the quantifier: the negation analysis and the interval analysis of than-clauses. We propose a modification of the interval analysis in which than-clauses are not (...) treated as degree intervals but as degree pluralities. This small change has significant consequences: it yields a straightforward account of differentials in comparatives and it correctly predicts the existence of hitherto unnoticed readings, viz. cumulative readings of clausal comparatives. Finally, this paper also makes the case that using degree pluralities is conceptually appealing: it allows us to restrict the analysis of comparatives by mechanisms that are postulated independently in the semantics of pluralities. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a concept of mind by the ethnologist Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogoroff, as a precursor for a specific turn taking place in contemporary cognitive science. Such a turn is visible in the discarding of explanations focusing on brain or on other vehicles of cognitive processes, which are typical of traditional cognitive science. The followers of this traditional trend are united by the methodological assumption that the key to understanding cognitive processes lies in the precise (...) comprehension of the vehicle’s functioning. Currently, cognitive science is developing a paradigm describing cognition as being embodied, embedded and extended. Similarly, Shirokogoroff's research in the anthropology of religion is part of his general concept of mind understood to be a set of cognitive processes linked with a broadly viewed environment (combining its material, ecological, biological, cultural and ritual aspects). (shrink)

Philosophical views of habit were deeply influenced by Aristotle. If we understand habit in relation to hexis, to the acquired disposition to act in a certain way, then habit becomes a key phenomenon of ethics. According to the famous quotation, "It makes no small difference, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference."1 And yet we can understand habit also as a dull and (...) rigid mechanism, as something that moves us away from humanity, as we read in Immanuel Kant: "The reason for being disgusted with someone's acquired habits lies in the fact that the animal here predominates over the man."2 Is habit more an expression of our... (shrink)