The critical node detection problem is a central task in computational graph theory due to its large applicability, consisting in deleting $k$ nodes to minimize a certain graph measure. In this article, we propose a new Extremal Optimization-based approach, the Pseudo-Deterministic Noisy Extremal Optimization (PDNEO) algorithm, to solve the Critical Node Detection variant in which the pairwise connectivity is minimized. PDNEO uses an adaptive pseudo-deterministic parameter to switch between random nodes and articulation points during the search, as well as other (...) features, such as noise induction to preserve diversity, greedy search to better exploit the search space and a greater search space exploration mechanism. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real-world networks show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared with existing methods. (shrink)

In this article, the author recalls the circumstances when he first met Alexandru Dragomir, together with André Scrima and Mihai Şora, with the occasion of a conference on the phenomenology of time at the New Europe College in Bucharest. Then, the author talks about his philosophical relationship with Alexandru Dragomir during the following years, insisting upon the phenomenological debates they had and upon the specific manner of Dragomir’s thinking.

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1322-1341, October 2021.

In this article I aim to counter Jason Brennan’s principled objection to the Representativeness Argument for compulsory voting, and to criticize the case in favour of voting lotteries, on which this challenge is predicated. In brief, Brennan claims that compulsory voting should be rejected because there is an alternative system, i.e. a voting lottery, which is able to ensure demographic proportionality in electoral turnouts without diminishing the freedom of citizens. But even on the most favourable conception of freedom which the (...) argument can employ, voting lotteries raise a number of serious concerns in respect to this value. Furthermore, while comparing voting lotteries and compulsory voting on the basis of freedom cannot provide any generalizable support for the former, a plausible case can instead be offered in support of the opposite idea, namely that compulsory voting outperforms voting lotteries with respect to freedom. (shrink)

In this article we aim to reduce the force of the expensive tastes objection to equality of welfare by constructing a pluralist welfare egalitarian theory which is not defeated by it. In the first part, we argue that Cohen’s condition of responsibility-sensitiveness is not able to provide a satisfactory rebuttal of the expensive tastes objection for at least a class of theories of justice, namely those that adhere to a methodologically fact-sensitive view. In the second part, we explore the possibility (...) of constructing a welfare egalitarian theory that gives weight to both equality and efficiency. We propose two alternatives, which integrate a utilitarian constraint and a Weak Pareto constraint on equality and show that both theories consistently differentiate between compensable and non-compensable expensive tastes, but should ultimately be rejected because of other unattractive implications. Finally, we develop a fairness-constrained theory of welfare egalitarianism and suggest that it can distinguish between compensable and non-compensable expensive tastes in both a conceptually consistent and a morally plausible manner, without generating decisive additional objections. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this paper I show that Elga’s argument for a restricted principle of indifference for self-locating belief relies on the kind of mistaken reasoning that recommends the ‘staying’ strategy in the Monty Hall problem.

Relations between some theories of semigroups (also known as theories of strings or theories of concatenation) and arithmetic are surveyed. In particular Robinson's arithmetic Q is shown to be mutually interpretable with TC, a weak theory of concatenation introduced by Grzegorczyk. Furthermore, TC is shown to be interpretable in the theory F studied by Tarski and Szmielewa, thus confirming their claim that F is essentially undecidable.

We prove that all infinite Boolean rings (algebras) have the property P ≠ NP according to the digital (binary) nondeterminism.

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)

In this paper I attempt a reading of Heidegger’s interpretations of St. Paul’s Epistles in light of the distinction between Eastern and Western thought. To this end, I suggest that Heidegger’s recourse to the Paulinic texts represents his endeavor to gain access to the original structures of life by circumventing the metaphysical framework of Greek (Plato’s and Aristotle’s) thought. Thus, I argue that by doing this, Heidegger actually approaches the Eastern way of thinking, i.e. a non-metaphysical alternative. In order to (...) better understand what defines Eastern thought, I discuss in some detail Zizioulas’s interpretations of temporality in Eastern Christianity. Along the lines of this different understanding of temporality, the proximity of Heideggerian thought can be seen. Finally, I show that the importance of my argument lies in that it can open a possible research path for what Heidegger in his latter works calls “the other beginning.”. (shrink)

In this article I aim to offer a first critical assessment of the most prominent arguments in favour of restricting the voting rights of senior citizens. The first argument discussed, most thoroughly articulated by van Parijs, maintains that intergenerational justice would be improved under schemes which restrict the voting rights of senior citizens, thereby diminishing their overall electoral weight. The second argument, reconstructed from Lau's defence of child enfranchisement, maintains that the cognitive decline associated with the process of aging should (...) lead us to treat children and senior citizens identically in respect to electoral rights; thus, if we agree that children should not have the right to vote, consistency dictates that senior citizens should be disenfranchised as well. I respond to these arguments with several objections, arguing that the former relies on a number of faulty empirical premises and has deeply unattractive implications for enfranchisement once consistently applied, and that the latter fails to make empirically salient distinctions between children and senior citizens when it comes to the political domain. (shrink)

With this nuanced and interdisciplinary work, political theorist Mihaela Mihai tackles several interrelated questions: How do societies remember histories of systemic violence? Who is excluded from such histories' cast of characters? And what are the political costs of selective remembering in the present? Building on insights from political theory, social epistemology, and feminist and critical race theory, Mihai argues that a double erasure often structures hegemonic narratives of complex violence: of widespread, heterogeneous complicity and of "impure" resistances, not (...) easily subsumed to exceptionalist heroic models. In dialogue with care ethicists and philosophers of art, she then suggests that such narrative reductionism can be disrupted aesthetically through practices of "mnemonic care," that is, through the hermeneutical labor that critical artists deliver—thematically and formally—within communities' space of meaning. Empirically, the book examines both consecrated and marginalized artists who tackled the memory of Vichy France, communist Romania, and apartheid South Africa. Despite their specificities, these contexts present us with an opportunity to analyze similar mnemonic dynamics and to recognize the political impact of dissenting artistic production. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the book intervenes in debates over collective responsibility, historical injustice, and the aesthetics of violence within political theory, memory studies, social epistemology, and transitional justice. (shrink)

We construct logical languages which allow one to represent a variety of possible types of changes affecting the information states of agents in a multi-agent setting. We formalize these changes by defining a notion of epistemic program. The languages are two-sorted sets that contain not only sentences but also actions or programs. This is as in dynamic logic, and indeed our languages are not significantly more complicated than dynamic logics. But the semantics is more complicated. In general, the semantics of (...) an epistemic program is what we call aprogram model. This is a Kripke model of ‘actions’,representing the agents' uncertainty about the current action in a similar way that Kripke models of ‘states’ are commonly used in epistemic logic to represent the agents' uncertainty about the current state of the system. Program models induce changes affecting agents' information, which we represent as changes of the state model, called epistemic updates. Formally, an update consists of two operations: the first is called the update map, and it takes every state model to another state model, called the updated model; the second gives, for each input state model, a transition relation between the states of that model and the states of the updated model. Each variety of epistemic actions, such as public announcements or completely private announcements to groups, gives what we call an action signature, and then each family of action signatures gives a logical language. The construction of these languages is the main topic of this paper. We also mention the systems that capture the valid sentences of our logics. But we defer to a separate paper the completeness proof. (shrink)

Finitism is given an interpretation based on two ideas about strings (sequences of symbols): a replacement principle extracted from Hilberts class 2 can be justified by means of an additional finitistic choice principle, thus obtaining a second equational theory . It is unknown whether is strictly stronger than since 2 may coincide with the class of lower elementary functions.

We develop an abstract proof calculus for logics whose sentences are ‘Horn sentences’ of the form: $(\forall X)H \Rightarrow c$ and prove an institutional generalization of Birkhoff completeness theorem. This result is then applied to the particular cases of Horn clauses logic, the ‘Horn fragment’ of preorder algebras, order-sorted algebras and partial algebras and their infinitary variants.

Introduction: Play, Power, and the Western Mentality Whereas play has always had an important, if sometimes unthemat- ized, role in Western literary ...

In this paper I aim to provide a novel account of the Democratic Argument for limitarianism. I first claim that the standard version of this argument is questionable due to its reliance on a problematic central premise, namely that excessive wealth damages democracy because of its detrimental impact on political equality. Subsequently, I relocate the fundamental democratic worry in regard to excessive wealth in the process of backsliding, and more specifically in the relation between excessive wealth and political polarization. I (...) then offer a new account of the Democratic Argument for limitarianism which envisages wealth capping as instrumental for democratic resilience, but I maintain that the argument is not unambiguously successful. (shrink)

In this article I aim to provide the first normative discussion of barter voting markets, namely markets which allow the trading of votes on issues/elections for votes on other issues/elections. The article is framed within the wider literature on the legal permissibility of vote buying, with a particular focus on the recent debate between Christopher Freiman and James Stacey Taylor. I argue that while Taylor's objections successfully defeat Freiman's case in favour of standard voting markets, they are unable to also (...) defeat the type of voting markets outlined here. Furthermore, I argue that there are at least two plausible prima facie reasons in favour of barter voting markets, grounded in their capacity to contribute to the alleviation of injustice for systematically disadvantaged socio‐economic groups and to their capacity to reduce one form of bad voting, i.e. voting from ignorance. (shrink)

In this annotated critical edition of Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_ Lambda Stefan Alexandru draws upon many hitherto unexplored sources of the direct and indirect tradition, _inter alia_ upon an independent Greek manuscript he has discovered in the Vatican Library.

Vehement resentment and indignation are rife in societies emerging from dictatorship or civil conflict. How should institutions deal with these emotions? Arguing for the need to recognize and constructively engage negative public emotions, Mihaela Mihai contributes theoretically to the growing field of transitional justice. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature and case studies of democratic transitions in South Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe, her book rescues negative emotions from their bad reputation and highlights the obstacles and the opportunities (...) such emotions create for democracy. By valorizing negative emotions, either through the judicial review of transitional justice bills or the criminal trials of victimizers, institutions realize the value of respect and concern for all while contributing to a public culture hospitable to democracy. (shrink)

His philosophical thinking was influenced by his legal knowledge, but when reading carefully his articles and papers we can notice a detachment from the philosophical premises in the development of the concepts of law. Like Del Vecchio, Djuvara makes no difference between law and philosophy and therefore the legal philosophy looks like a completion of law, these two concepts being comprehended only by a general, epistemological and philosophical approach; the issues related to the philosophy of law are not only isolated (...) from the big philosophical issues but there are closely related to them so that the philosophy of lawintegrates completely in the general philosophy. (shrink)