By extending geometrodynamical phase space by embeddings and their conjugate momenta, one can homomorphically map the Lie algebra of space-time diffeomorphisms into the Poisson algebra of dynamical variables on the extended phase space.

Free logic is an important field of philosophical logic that first appeared in the 1950s. J. Karel Lambert was one of its founders and coined the term itself. The essays in this collection explore the philosophical foundations of free logic and its application to areas as diverse as the philosophy of religion and computer science. Amongst the applications on offer are those to the analysis of existence statements, to definite descriptions and to partial functions. The volume contains a proof (...) that free logics of any kind are non-extensional and then uses that proof to show that Quine's theory of predication and referential transparency must fail. The purpose of this collection is to bring an important body of work to the attention of a new generation of professional philosophers, computer scientists and mathematicians. (shrink)

The mystical experiences of the ṛṣis , the spiritual giants of the early Vedic times, led to the creation of the Vedic hymns and eventually to the formation of the whole elaborate structure of the Vedic religion, as upheld by the Indian priesthood. But there were obviously others who pursued mystical experiences without themselves engaging, like the ancient ṛṣis , in attempts to transmit their experiences through mythological poetry and religious leadership. They adopted mystical ecstasy as their way of life. (...) Mysticism as a conscious way of life is, in India, called Yoga. Being outside the trend of Vedic mythological creativity and the Brāhmanic religious orthodoxy, the Yogis of Vedic times left little evidence of their existence, practices and achievements. And such evidence as has survived in the Vedas is scanty and indirect. (shrink)

The authors contend that most contemporary logic textbooks fail the average student because they emphasize the evaluation of arguments over their clarification, assuming that the student already understands what motivations underlie logic.

El artículo se refiere a una de las tesis de R. Barbaras, a saber, que « […] todo sentimiento es sentimiento de la naturaleza”. Este sentimiento es, en definitiva, el amor del mundo y corresponde a la apertura enigmática de la subjetividad por el mundo. Esta apertura hace posible el paso del proceso anónimo de la manifestación del mundo a su aparición para los sujetos, centralizada alrededor de sus movimientos desecantes. Si esta motricidad del deseo es desencadenada por el sentimiento, (...) el origen de este último es el acontecimiento de la separación del mundo que, sin embargo, se encuentra en la más estrecha adhesión a él. El sentimiento equivale, así, a un desgarramiento del aparecer de las realidades intramundanas, lo que recuerda la descripción de la trascendencia del Otro en E. Levinas. Si nada del mundo se manifiesta en el rostro del Otro según Levinas, porque toda su fenomenalidad se desvanece, éste no es el caso para Barbaras, para quien el sentimiento es una manera de participar en la manifestación primaria del Mundo, es decir, en la physis. De ahí nuestra propuesta de vincular el sentimiento al rostro de la naturaleza. (shrink)

In the Philebus, Plato elaborates an image of our soul as a book where a scribe and a painter are constantly at work. This book examines the implicit premises of this image and aims at overcoming the general polarity of ancient phantasia and modern imagination.

As our work is ever evolving from agrarian to more service-oriented tasks, the rise of machine learning is the advent of an intelligence that contrasts with the natural intelligence exhibited by humans. Many see the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as simply another opportunity for business to exploit. Additionally, as coding becomes the new language of the business world, the challenge of using data and analytics to help foster a new generation of human flourishing lessens with organizations solidifying their protocols (...) for the use of AI. As our work changes, it is vital for business to recognize that being a force for good requires policies, procedures, and programs that will respect and promote human dignity at all levels, even amidst the changes brought by AI initiatives. This person-first philosophy needs to be a critical component of any future strategies business utilizes to uphold the well-being of all stakeholders. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the difficult task of balancing access to misinformation with respect for patient decision-making. Due to its innate antagonism, the paradigm of “physician paternalism” versus “patient autonomy” may not adequately capture the clinical relationship. The authors hypothesized that most patients would, in fact, prefer significant physician input as opposed to unopinionated information when making medical decisions. There is a lack of empirical data corroborating this in the United States. To that end, a survey was distributed to (...) 650 individuals through Amazon Mechanical Turk, of which 499 responses met pre-determined quality criteria. Most respondents believed their doctor's insight would be better than their own if injured or gravely ill. When asked to affirm preferences separately, a significantly higher proportion of respondents preferred guidance from their doctor when making medical decisions compared to being presented with unopinionated information ( p < 0.001). Encouragingly, 93.1% believed that the doctor's primary goal was their health. When asked directly to compare physician guidance to unopinionated information, 69.1% respondents stated they would prefer physician guidance. We found a consistent association between educational/economic background and affirmative responses ( p < 0.001), suggesting particular attention should be paid to patients that are disadvantaged with respect to these demographic factors. The belief in a shared goal, and a consistent preference for physician input, suggests that patients endorse a more collaborative view of the clinical dynamic than is suggested by the paternalism-autonomy paradigm. This pilot study suggests physicians should not be afraid to communicate conviction with regard to treatment decisions. (shrink)

Depuis des années, Anca Vasiliu poursuit un projet de relecture des textes anciens, y compris les dialogues de Platon, avec une attention particulière à ce qui se montre à travers la parole philosophique, non pas à titre de description, mais par l’agencement des logoi qui agissent sur l’âme qui les organise en s’organisant ainsi elle-même. Afin de situer son dernier ouvrage dans un contexte plus ample, mais important pour bien saisir la démarche de l’auteur, on doit rappeler que son intérêt (...) p... (shrink)

Publikace nechce ani plnit požadavky kladené na učebnici, ani podat soustavu logiky. Chce však formulovat koncepci odpovídající soudobému stavu poznatků a založenou na vědeckém světovém názoru. Úvodem objasňuje populární formou základní termíny a některé logické teorie. Poté vykládá teorii deduktivních soustav a předmět logiky, kritizuje současné názory na logiku a její místo v soustavě věd a vymezuje její vztah k ostatním vědním oborům, zejména k filosofii. Závěrem klade otázku, jak lze aplikovat logiku v metodologii, technice a kybernetice.

In Liberalism’s religion, Laborde defends a liberal egalitarian position and tackles, from a new perspective, some issues dealt with in his republican writings. This article examines some of these issues, paying attention to the place that the recognition of identities occupies both in her republican and in her liberal theories, as well as the type of justification advanced in both cases. The article shows that the recognition of identities has gone from having a peripheral and instrumental role in her republican (...) writings to having a central role in her liberal theory. (shrink)

The influence of Eugen Fink on Jan Patocˇka is undeniable. Fink was his first advisor in questions concerning the phenomenology of the late Husserl in the mid-1930s. But as one can see in the correspondence between Patocˇka and Fink, there are also some hints to divergences, which this paper tries to make explicit, mainly on the basis of some later works and manuscripts by Patocˇka. They concern the status of the whole of the world (Weltganzes) as being different from the (...) human lifeworld (Menschenwelt) and the double concept of appearing in the cosmology of Fink, which Patocˇka – in the early 1970s – confronts with a project of an “asubjective” phenomenology. This project, introduced by an unambiguous criticism of the Cartesianism in Husserl, still maintains a certain proximity to Husserl, defining itself as a formal transcendentalism of appearing as such that is not divided into two modes of appearing as in Fink. It can be read as Patocˇka’s radicalization of the originary Husserlian project of phenomenology, rather than as its cosmological abandonment in an accordance with Fink. (shrink)

Indian Philosophy. A Very Short Introduction. Sue Hamilton. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001. xvi, 153 pp. Pb £5.99. ISBN 0-19-285374-0.

The article discusses two passages,Republic IX 571d6–572b1, andTimaeus71a3–72b5, where Plato does not use dream as a metaphor for the soul’s deficit in knowledge but, instead, focuses on the actual process of dreaming during sleep, and the origin and nature of the images involved. In both texts, Plato’s account is closely connected to the soul’s tripartition, with the resulting emphasis on reason’s capacity to control, and even to create, the dream images that influence the lower parts of the soul. While taking (...) a closer look at the differences between the two accounts (and, therefore, at the physiology of dreaming described only in theTimaeus), the article concludes that, despite these differences, both dialogues agree on the possible alliance between reason and dreaming, an alliance that presupposes a virtuous character and further reinforces the reason’s dominance over appetite.Republic IX and theTimaeusthus converge on the idea that dreams, in virtue of their continuity with waking thoughts, can convey and fortify a certain kind of knowledge, and especially self-knowledge, which is of an ethical rather than strictly epistemic relevance. This is also why Plato’s two accounts of rational dreaming anticipate the issue of our moral responsibility for the content of our dreams. (shrink)

Dostoevsky wrote that love in action is a harsh and terrible thing compared to love in dreams. That reality is particularly evident in medicine, where there is an almost universal, involuntary participation of physicians and other healthcare workers in the suffering of their patients. This paper explores this phenomenon through the paradigm of ‘mystery’ as explained by the French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel. A mystery is different from a problem in the sense that the former requires the active immersion of (...) the person involved in order to be truly experienced. It is a ‘meta-problem’ that cannot be analyzed objectively and separately from the person that it affects, without changing the nature of the thing experienced. The authors contend that the human suffering encountered in medicine is one such phenomenon, and the paper draws on illustrations of this concept in art and literature. Awareness of the subtle but important difference between mystery and problem may help physicians better understand their personal entanglement with the suffering of patients. (shrink)

In his 1906 book The problem of becoming and the notion of matter in Greek philosophy from its origins till Theophrastus, Albert Rivaud puts forward an entirely original (and nowadays largely forgotten) interpretation of the receptacle or chôra in Plato’s Timaeus. On his reading, Timaeus’ introduction of chôra signals the limits of the possibility to explain the formation of the cosmos by means of the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible. Opposing Aristotle and others in his wake, Rivaud firmly (...) rejects the understanding of chôra as matter, without however identifying it as space in the sense of a system of intra‑cosmic coordinates. Instead, he sees the receptacle as a notion borrowed from a philosophical system otherwise alien to Plato’s thought, namely the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. Neither the atomistic void nor chôra are like the modern space ; rather, in virtue of evoking “the unchanging theater of all changes”, they are “like the chaos, immense, gaping, populated by the infinite crowd of forms”. Rivaud concludes that, by introducing chora as a notion irreducible to the concept of becoming, Plato recognizes that the cosmogonic processes cannot be fully explained either on the basis of the relation of the cosmos to its intelligible model or through the logic of opposites that governs all change in the sensible realm. At the same time, the introduction of chôra (described through a variety of mostly biological metaphors) marks the limits of the artisanal model preeminent in the Timaeus, a model that endows the cosmogonic story with a new transparency and ensures the teleological dimension of the fully formed universe. The aim of the article is to re‑evaluate Rivaud’s audacious reading of the Timaeus with an eye to larger issues pertinent to a variety of ancient cosmogonies. (shrink)

Abstrakt/Abstract Na příkladu dvou myslitelů ze zcela odlišných období dějin filosofie lze předvést otázku nejobecnějších podmínek pravdivé řeči, které se projevují na pomezí sémantiky v užším slova smyslu a utváření širšího pojmu světa jakožto pojmu, k němuž patří vytyčení jasných mezí smysluplného vypovídání o tom, co je. Od této velmi obecné otázky se příspěvek obrací k užšímu tématu negace čili k pravidlům užití řeči, která je sice správná a v některých případech pravdivá, avšak postrádá svůj vlastní a specifický korelát v (...) plné osnově skutečnosti samé. Výchozími texty jsou zlomky Parmenidovy básně O jsoucím a její moderní výklady od čtení Russellova až po tzv. modální interpretaci, kladoucí důraz na motivy nutného jsoucího a nemožného nejsoucího, a dále pasáže z Wittgensteinova Traktátu i Filosofických zkoumání (§ 50). Podrobnější srovnání postoje obou myslitelů k negaci umožňuje prohloubit i rozšířit starší srovnávání Parmenidova argumentu o nemožnosti mluvit o tom, co není, a Wittgensteinova důrazu na nutnou existenci jednoduchých objektů. Choosing two thinkers from two entirely different periods of the history of philosophy, one can fruitfully illustrate the issue of the most general conditions of truthful speech, which take effect on the crossroad of the narrowly conceived semantics and a broadly construed concept of the world as a concept that implies the posting of neat limits of the meaningful linguistic articulation of what there is. From this very general issue, the article turns to the narrower question of negation, and thus of the rules of the use of the correct and sometimes true speech that, nevertheless, lacks its specific referent in the full structure of reality. The texts under scrutiny are the fragments of Parmenides’ poem On Being and its modern exegeses ranging from Russell to the modal interpretation that emphasizes the necessary being and the impossible not-being, plus passages from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and also his Philosophical Investigation (§ 50). A more detailed comparison of the attitude of both thinkers towards negation helps to both deepen and expand the earlier suggested parallel between Parmenides’ argument about the impossibility to speak about what is not and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the necessary existence of simple objects. (shrink)

We investigate how negative news coverage of borrower’s impacts on climate change affects bank loan contracting. Using a sample of publicly traded US firms for the period 2000–2016, we show that loans initiated following negative news coverage about firm’s adverse climate-related incidents have significantly higher spreads, shorter maturities, more covenant restrictions, and a higher likelihood of collateral security requirements. We find no changes in client firm’s credit fundamentals after such incidents, indicating that lender’s reputational concerns rather than the longer-term environmental (...) impacts of their borrower’s actions are the primary drivers of these changes. This observation highlights the need for increased scrutiny of banks’ lending practices to ensure that they are genuinely committed to sustainability rather than merely engaging in symbolic actions. (shrink)