In a well-known story constructed by Saul Kripke , Pierre, a rational but monolingual Frenchman who has never visited England, acquires, on the evidence of many magazine pictures of London, the belief that London is beautiful. He is happy to declare ‘Londres est jolie’. Pierre eventually moves to England and settles in one of the seedier areas of London, travelling only to comparably shabby neighbourhoods. He learns English by immersion, though he does not realize that ‘London’ and ‘Londres’ (...) are co-referential. Naturally enough, given his current circumstances, he acquires a belief that he is only too willing to express by uttering ‘It is not the case that London is beautiful’. So apparently he now holds contradictory beliefs. But rational people do not hold contradictory beliefs ….One popular response to Kripke's puzzle is that people …. (shrink)

Refutes Cristian Constantinescu's proposed solution of Kripke's puzzle about belief.

Hermann Weyl succeeded in presenting a consistent overarching analysis that accounts for symmetry in material artifacts, natural phenomena, and physical theories. Weyl showed that group theory is the underlying mathematical structure for symmetry in all three domains. But in this study Weyl did not include appeals to symmetry arguments which, for example, Einstein expressed as “for reasons of symmetry”. An argument typically takes the form of a set of premises and rules of inference that lead to a conclusion. Symmetry may (...) enter an argument both in the premises and the rules of inference, and the resulting conclusion may also exhibit symmetrical properties. Taking our cue from Pierre Curie, we distinguish two categories of symmetry arguments, axiomatic and heuristic; they will be defined and then illustrated by historical cases. (shrink)

L’édition critique des œuvres de Moïse ben Sabbataï, philosophe juif actif (à Rome?) vers 1340, avait signalé, parmi d’autres sources latines lues dans les traductions en hébreu de son contemporain Juda de Rome, un exemplum présentant le sage athénien Solon sur son lit de mort en champion de la doctrine de l’élévation intellectuelle en vue de la vie éternelle. Cette note identifie comme sa source un chapitre d’Albert le Grand, De natura et origine animae II, 13, dont la traduction en (...) hébreu se trouve dans un ouvrage inédit de Juda de Rome, son Commentaire du Qaddīš et de la Qeduššāh. La traduction du chapitre est éditée, l’histoire de l’ exemplum reconstituée et son emploi par les trois auteurs, remis en contexte et interprété. (shrink)

Recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, NIETZSCHE AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE is available here for the first time in English. Author Pierre Klossowski suggests that Nietzsche's ideas and beliefs did not stem from his personal pathology, but rather were applied in a pathological manner. Thereby Nietzsche's beliefs resonated dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

In this 1999 book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context. His sophisticated and accessible account of the phenomenological philosophy of (...) Husserl and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger will be of wide interest to students and specialists in these areas, while analytic philosophers of mind will be interested by the detailed parallels which he draws with a number of concerns of the analytic philosophical tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 277-278 [Access article in PDF] John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, editors. Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Journals Division, 2001. Pp. xiii + 376. Cloth, $39.00. Paper, $25.00. Some twenty years ago, when I submitted a dissertation proposal to explore connections between theologies of creation and views of scientific (...) knowledge in the seventeenth century, my doctoral committee was not initially enthusiastic—my idea might make a good dissertation in religion, but was it really history of science? I doubt I would have a similar experience today. Not only has the "warfare" thesis of science and religion been laid permanently to rest, historians have begun seriously to question whether it makes sense even to treat "religion" and "science" in an essentialist manner as separate ways of thinking that do not ordinarily interact. Many detailed case studies demonstrating a variety of fascinating, often important connections between science and religion have appeared from leading scholars in the past two decades. This trend continues in the latest volume of Osiris, which contains sixteen essays documenting various ways in which religious beliefs have influenced the actual content and presentation of science.The volume opens with two companion essays laying out the terrain. First, Brooke engages the new methodological and conceptual problems that confront historians following the demise of the "warfare" thesis. Then Stephen Wykstra offers criteria for sorting out the various roles for metaphysical and religious beliefs (which he distinguishes) in shaping scientific knowledge. The case studies begin with E. Jamil Ragep's essay on medieval Islamic astronomy, arguing that religion sometimes had a constructive role—a rather novel claim for Islamic science, he points out. Noah J. Efron and Menachem Fisch show how early modern Jewish exegetical practices influenced David b. Solomon Gans's interpretations of astronomical texts, and quite possibly his interpretation of nature also. A Christian astronomer is next, as Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein detail how Johannes Kepler's theology contributed directly to the discovery of scientific laws. Maurice A. Finnocchiaro then reviews various accounts of the Galileo affair, finding far more conflict in the subsequent historiography of the events than in the trial itself.Moving from astronomy to natural philosophy, Margaret G. Cook's essay on Robert Boyle examines the web of connections between theology, the mechanical philosophy, and [End Page 277] "the Aristotelian philosophy that he sought to replace." She demonstrates that Boyle used the classical art/nature distinction "to interpret the biblical account of the Creation and to argue that chemical techniques offered experimental confirmation that the world, created by art, worked by the same mechanical principles as artificial objects, not by the inherent agency of Aristotelian nature" (136). Margaret J. Osler also writes about Boyle. Contrary to the traditional view that final causes were expunged from science by the mechanical philosophy—a view that originated in the "positivism and scientific optimism" of the postwar period (168)—she proves that final causality remained central to the thought of Boyle and Pierre Gassendi. The essay by Stephen D. Snobelen presents substantial evidence that the famous General Scholium, appended to the second edition of Isaac Newton's Principia, was a carefully worded declaration of Newton's heterodox theology. "A Trinitarian," Snobelen concludes, "could not have written the General Scholium" (186). He also shows the degree to which Newton's theology shaped his overall natural philosophy, decisively debunking the late Richard S. Westfall's view that such influences could not be found.The final seven essays are mainly devoted to nineteenth-century science. Michael J. Crowe documents several ways in which Christian beliefs about divine goodness and the Incarnation affected astronomy. Martin Fichman shows how Alfred Russel Wallace's theism—not merely a vague spiritualism, as traditional accounts claim—"shaped the cognitive content of his mature evolutionary synthesis, which included a theoretical reconceptualization of the scope of natural selection" (227). In a revisionist account of Charles Darwin's philosophy of "nature," Phillip R. Sloan challenges the received view that... (shrink)

As the official UK COVID Inquiry is investigating the response by the government to the 2020 global pandemic, revealing the difficulties that the Johnson administration had to face and the overall lack of adequate preparedness at the top of the UK executive, people are becoming growingly aware of the many challenges that such situations pose in terms of crisis management and public governance. Beyond the somewhat sterile blame game played by leading political actors, this formal accountability forum has also revealed (...) competing narratives about the crisis that might have hampered any coherent political solution. This article proposes to focus on the ‘official’ narratives by the UK government and to analyse critically the way Boris Johnson narrativised his political response to the pandemic in order to examine how his unconventional style of leadership was deployed during a global crisis. Using a typology of crisis management inspired by crisis expert and leadership scholar Arjen Boin, the objective is to examine how ‘crisis narratives’ framed the way the UK government responded to the crisis. (shrink)

This paper develops a semantic solution to the puzzle of Free Choice permission. The paper begins with a battery of impossibility results showing that Free Choice is in tension with a variety of classical principles, including Disjunction Introduction and the Law of Excluded Middle. Most interestingly, Free Choice appears incompatible with a principle concerning the behavior of Free Choice under negation, Double Prohibition, which says that Mary can’t have soup or salad implies Mary can’t have soup and Mary can’t have (...) salad. Alonso-Ovalle 2006 and others have appealed to Double Prohibition to motivate pragmatic accounts of Free Choice. Aher 2012, Aloni 2018, and others have developed semantic accounts of Free Choice that also explain Double Prohibition. -/- This paper offers a new semantic analysis of Free Choice designed to handle the full range of impossibility results involved in Free Choice. The paper develops the hypothesis that Free Choice is a homogeneity effect. The claim possibly A or B is defined only when A and B are homogenous with respect to their modal status, either both possible or both impossible. Paired with a notion of entailment that is sensitive to definedness conditions, this theory validates Free Choice while retaining a wide variety of classical principles except for the transitivity of entailment. The homogeneity hypothesis is implemented in two different ways, homogeneous alternative semantics and homogeneous dynamic semantics, with interestingly different consequences. (shrink)

Triviality results threaten plausible principles governing our credence in epistemic modal claims. This paper develops a new account of modal credence which avoids triviality. On the resulting theory, probabilities are assigned not to sets of worlds, but rather to sets of information state-world pairs. The theory avoids triviality by giving up the principle that rational credence is closed under conditionalization. A rational agent can become irrational by conditionalizing on new evidence. In place of conditionalization, the paper develops a new account (...) of updating: conditionalization with normalization. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics (...) for modals into a dynamic semantics for modals with similar properties. (shrink)

The confrontations of stakeholder visions about agriculture and food production has become a focal point in the public sphere, coinciding with a diversification of agrifood models. This study analyzes the debates stemming from the coexistence of these models, particularly during the initial term of neoliberal-centrist Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in France. Employing collective monitoring from 2017 to 2021, a corpus of 958 online news and blog articles was compiled. Using a computational analysis, we reveal the framings and controversies emerging from this (...) media discourse. The macro-structuring of discourse on model coexistence revolves around scientific, economic and political framings. Coexistence is a complex of debates based on specific frames associated with specific arenas and actor configurations: growth of organic agriculture, transformations of agrifood systems, sciences of production and impacts, livestock and meat diet controversies, agroecological innovations, CAP reform criticism, discourse of peasant agriculture and State-Profession _co-gestion_. Employing global sentiment analysis and focusing on salient controversies, namely EGAlim law, pesticide regulations, and agribashing, we show the shift from conciliation to a hardening of debates. Finally, we discuss the causes and consequences of this trend. The political will to support the transition of agriculture remains influenced by the _co-gestion_ system, an inherited configuration of decision-makers instrumental in the agricultural modernization. As a consequence, significant agricultural challenges, particularly highlighted in the scientific macro-frame, persist unresolved. This lock-in of the agrifood system is based on defensive strategies that challenge the democratic debate about food and agricultural practices. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is a preface paradox for intention. The preface paradox for intention shows that intentions do not obey an agglomeration norm, requiring one to intend conjunctions of whatever else one intends. But what norms do intentions obey? I will argue that intentions come in degrees. These partial intentions are governed by the norms of the probability calculus. First, I will give a dispositional theory of partial intention, on which degrees of intention are the degrees (...) to which one possesses the dispositions characteristic of full intention. I will use this dispositional theory to defend probabilism about intention. Next, I will offer a more general argument for probabilism about intention. To do so, I will generalize recent decision theoretic arguments for probabilism from the case of belief to the case of intention. (shrink)

In this article, I analyse the role of the concepts of ‘practice,’ ‘relations,’ and ‘process’ in Rein Vihalemm’s philosophy of science and the way he defined and articulated these concepts to study the production of scientific knowledge. Then, following Vihalemm’s line of reasoning, I will show how this approach is promising for thinking in a new way about some developments in contemporary sciences and technology.

According to one tradition, uttering an indicative conditional involves performing a special sort of speech act: a conditional assertion. We introduce a formal framework that models this speech act. Using this framework, we show that any theory of conditional assertion validates several inferences in the logic of conditionals, including the False Antecedent inference. Next, we determine the space of truth-conditional semantics for conditionals consistent with conditional assertion. The truth value of any such conditional is settled whenever the antecedent is false, (...) and whenever the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. Then, we consider the space of dynamic meanings consistent with the theory of conditional assertion. We develop a new family of dynamic conditional-assertion operators that combine a traditional test operator with an update operation. (shrink)

This chapter first evokes the objects of chemistry and the role played by experimentation in the constitution of its objects. It then studies how chemists set up experimental protocols to deal with the dependence of chemical bodies on the inert or living environments in which they are found. To this end, its pays particular attention to the preparation of reference matrices for measurement and for the validation of results. In so doing, it stresses the fact that chemists use a dizzying (...) pluralism of instruments, procedures, reasonings, and methods in order to characterize and quantify substances, which are never truly detachable, except in the case of approximations satisfying particular objectives, from the empirical complex {apparatus-methods-chemical substances-associated medium} in which they are scrutinized. (shrink)

Free Choice is the principle that possibly p or q implies and is implied by possibly p and possibly q. A variety of recent attempts to validate Free Choice rely on a nonclassical semantics for disjunction, where the meaning of p or q is not a set of possible worlds. This paper begins with a battery of impossibility results, showing that some kind of nonclassical semantics for disjunction is required in order to validate Free Choice. The paper then provides a (...) positive account of Free Choice, by identifying a family of dynamic semantics for disjunction that can validate the inference. On all such theories, the meaning of p or q has two parts. First, p or q requires that our information is consistent with each of p and q. Second, p or q narrows down our information by eliminating some worlds. It turns out that this second component of or is well behaved: there is a strongest such meaning that p or q can express, consistent with validating Free Choice. The strongest such meaning is the classical one, on which p or q eliminates any world where both p and q are false. In this way, the classical meaning of disjunction turns out to be intimately related to the validity of Free Choice. (shrink)

The Russell class does not exist because the conditions purporting to specify that class are contradictory, and hence fail to specify any class. Equally, the conditions purporting to specify the Liar statement are contradictory and hence, although the Liar sentence is grammatically in order, it fails to yield a statement. Thus the common source of these and related paradoxes is contradictory (or tautologous) specifying conditions-for such conditions fail to specify. This is the diagnosis. The cure consists of seeking and destroying (...) the deep-seated preconceptions that make almost irresistible our belief in the existence of items which provably do not exist. (shrink)

Many have accepted that ordinary counterfactuals and might counterfactuals are duals. In this paper, I show that this thesis leads to paradoxical results when combined with a few different unorthodox yet increasingly popular theses, including the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Given Duality and several other theses, we can quickly infer the validity of another paradoxical principle, ‘The Counterfactual Direct Argument’, which says that ‘A> ’ entails ‘A> ’. First, I provide a collapse theorem for the ‘counterfactual direct argument’. (...) The counterfactual direct argument entails the logical equivalence of the subjunctive and material conditional, given a variety of assumptions. Second, I provide a semantics that validates the counterfactual direct argument without collapse. This theory further develops extant dynamic accounts of conditionals. I give a new semantics for disjunction, on which A or B is only true in a context when A and B are both unsettled. The resulting framework validates CDA while invalidating other commonly accepted principles concerning the conditional and disjunction. (shrink)

In Bohmian mechanics elementary particles exist objectively, as point particles moving according to a law determined by a wavefunction. In this context, questions as to whether the particles of a certain species are real---questions such as, Do photons exist? Electrons? Or just the quarks?---have a clear meaning. We explain that, whatever the answer, there is a corresponding Bohm-type theory, and no experiment can ever decide between these theories. Another question that has a clear meaning is whether particles are intrinsically distinguishable, (...) i.e., whether particle world lines have labels indicating the species. We discuss the intriguing possibility that the answer is no, and particles are points---just points. (shrink)

I will contrast the two main approaches to the foundations of statistical mechanics: the individualist approach and the ensemblist approach. I will indicate the virtues of each, and argue that the conflict between them is perhaps not as great as often imagined.

Reconstructions of Romantic-era life science in general, and epigenesis in particular, frequently take the Kantian logic of autotelic “self-organization” as their primary reference point. I argue in this essay that the Kantian conceptual rubric hinders our historical and theoretical understanding of epigenesis, Romantic and otherwise. Neither a neutral gloss on epigenesis, nor separable from the epistemological deflation of biological knowledge that has received intensive scrutiny in the history and philosophy of science, Kant’s heuristics of autonomous “self-organization” in the third Critique (...) amount to the strategic capture of epigenesis from nature, for thought, in thought’s critical transcendence of nature. This essay looks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his English contemporary Erasmus Darwin to begin to reconstruct the rigorously materialist, naturalist, and empiricist theories of epigenesis marginalized by Kantian argumentation. As theorists of environmental and social collaboration in the ontogeny of viable forms, Lamarck and Darwin illuminate features of our own epigenetic turn obscured by the rhetoric of “self-organization,” allowing us to glimpse an alternative Romantic genealogy of the biological present. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the astronomical tables in al-Zīj al-Muqtabis by Ibn al-Kammād (early twelfth century, Córdoba), based on the Latin and Hebrew versions of the lost Arabic original, each of which is extant in a unique manuscript. We present excerpts of many tables and pay careful attention to their structure and underlying parameters. The main focus, however, is on the impact al-Muqtabis had on the astronomy that developed in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib and, more generally, on (...) the transmission and diffusion of Indian astronomy in the West after the arrival of al-Khwārizmī’s astronomical tables in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in the tenth century. This tradition of Indian origin competed with the Greek tradition represented by al-Battānī’s astronomical tables and was much more alive in the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghrib than previously thought. From Spain, the Indian tradition entered mainstream European astronomy, where we find echoes of it in all versions of the Alfonsine Tables, both in manuscript and in the printed editions (beginning in 1483), as well as in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, published in 1543. (shrink)

At the end of the sixteenth century astronomers and others felt compelled to choose among different cosmologies. For Tycho Brahe, who played a central role in these debates, the intersection of the spheres of Mars and the Sun was an outstanding problem that had to be resolved before he made his choice. His ultimate solution was to eliminate celestial spheres in favour of fluid heavens, a crucial step in the abandonment of the Ptolemaic system and the demise of Aristotelian celestial (...) physics. These debates involved issues that had not previously been part of astronomy, and had the effect of undermining the traditional hierarchy of the sciences. While this complicated story involves many scientific personalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the present paper we will concentrate on one figure who has been assigned an unnecessarily minor role in most histories of science: Christoph Rothmann. In the present paper we show that ‘the dissolution of the celestial spheres’ depends on arguments about the substance of the heavens, following a mistaken argument of Gemma Frisius, elaborated by Joannes Pena and appropriated by Rothmann. We next consider the status and origin of the doctrine, as presented by Brahe, that the heavenly spheres are solid, and the impact on Brahe of Rothmann's treatise on the comet of 1585. Rothmann provided several key ideas that enabled Brahe to develop his system, and we suggest in passing that Rothmann may also have precipitated Brahe's re-evaluation of his attempt to detect the parallax of Mars during the opposition of 1582–83. We offer a new account of this central piece of evidence for the Tychonic system. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that in order for the study of arts education to continue to advance, we must delineate the effects of particular forms of arts education, offered in certain contexts, on specific domains of children’s socioemotional development. We explain why formulating precise hypotheses about the effects of arts education on children’s socioemotional development requires a differentiated definition of each arts education program or activity in question, as well as a consideration of both the immediate and broader contexts (...) in which that program or activity occurs. We then offer the New Victory Theater’s Schools with Performing Arts Reach Kids program as an illustrative example of how these considerations allow for the refinement of hypotheses about the impact of arts education on children’s socioemotional development. (shrink)

Advocates of biomimicry encourage a new industrial paradigm that ostensibly leaves behind the crude violence of Francis Bacon, the domination of nature-as-machine, and a history of toxic production processes that have given rise to a present and coming climate crisis. As part of a broader trend towards the conceptualization and development of a ‘bioeconomy’, we argue here that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ in new ways. At face value, these new approaches to valuing nature may seem less violent and exploitative. Yet, new (...) natures can and are tortured in new ways. We argue that biomimicry produces ‘nature’ through well-worn logics of resource enclosure and privatization, focusing upon two fundamental shifts in how nonhuman life is figured and put to work: the production of nature as intellectual property ; the production of nature as an active subject. (shrink)