A cohesive power of a structure is an effective analog of the classical ultrapower of a structure. We start with a computable structure, and consider its effective power over a cohesive set of natural numbers. A cohesive set is an infinite set of natural numbers that is indecomposable with respect to computably enumerable sets. It plays the role of an ultrafilter, and the elements of a cohesive power are the equivalence classes of certain partial computable functions determined by the cohesive (...) set. Thus, unlike many classical ultrapowers, a cohesive power is a countable structure. In this paper we focus on cohesive powers of graphs, equivalence structures, and computable structures with a single unary function satisfying various properties, which can also be viewed as directed graphs. For these computable structures, we investigate the isomorphism types of their cohesive powers, as well as the properties of cohesive powers when they are not isomorphic to the original structure. (shrink)

Scholarship in experimental jurisprudence has reported surprising findings about various concepts of legal significance: _acting intentionally_, _causation_, _consent_, _knowledge, recklessness_, _reasonableness,_ and _law_ itself. Often, these studies examine laypeople’s ordinary concepts and draw broader conclusions about legal experts’ concepts. This Article questions such inferences, from empirical findings about ordinary concepts to conclusions about the concepts of those with legal expertise. It presents a case study concerning what it means to act _intentionally._ An experiment examines intentionality judgments across four populations (N (...) = 774): laypeople, law students, non-law students, and United States judges. Legal training affected judgments in three ways that are consistent with the acquisition of a distinctive legal concept. This case study supports the Article’s broader claim: Laypeople’s ordinary concepts are not equivalent to experts’ legal concepts. The acquisition of legal concepts is an important form of legal expertise. (shrink)

Some argue that robots could never be sentient, and thus could never have intrinsic moral status. Others disagree, believing that robots indeed will be sentient and thus will have moral status. But a third group thinks that, even if robots could never have moral status, we still have a strong moral reason to treat some robots as if they do. Drawing on a Kantian argument for indirect animal rights, a number of technology ethicists contend that our treatment of anthropomorphic or (...) even animal-like robots could condition our treatment of humans: treat these robots well, as we would treat humans, or else risk eroding good moral behavior toward humans. But then, this argument also seems to justify giving rights to robots, even if robots lack intrinsic moral status. In recent years, however, this indirect argument in support of robot rights has drawn a number of objections. In this paper I have three goals. First, I will formulate and explicate the Kant-inspired indirect argument meant to support robot rights, making clearer than before its empirical commitments and philosophical presuppositions. Second, I will defend the argument against a number of objections. The result is the fullest explication and defense to date of this well-known and influential but often criticized argument. Third, however, I myself will raise a new concern about the argument’s use as a justification for robot rights. This concern is answerable to some extent, but it cannot be dismissed fully. It shows that, surprisingly, the argument’s advocates have reason to resist, at least somewhat, producing the sorts of robots that, on their view, ought to receive rights. (shrink)

This article offers the first systematic investigation of the linguistic forms in which Kant expresses his transcendental idealism since Gerold Prauss’ seminal book Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. It is argued that Prauss’ own argument for the claim that ‘in itself’ is an adverbial expression that standardly modifies verbs of philosophical reflection is flawed and that there is hence very poor exegetical evidence for so-called ‘methodological two-aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. A comprehensive investigation of Kant’s adverbial (...) uses of ‘in itself’ rather reveals that there are various groups of verbs that ‘in itself’ modifies, which can more or less all be reduced to a standard use in which ‘in itself’ modifies verbs of predicative being such as the copula. It is also discussed how these findings can be accommodated by the two main alternative kinds of interpretations, that is, two-object and ontological two-aspect interpretations. (shrink)

Unser Alltag ist von technisch erzeugter Virtualität nicht nur geprägt - er wird in vielen Bereichen durch sie bestimmt. Die Informationsgesellschaft pflegt einen selbstverständlichen Umgang mit sich immer weiter entwickelnden technischen Geräten. Als Schein oder Unwirklichkeit konnotiert, bleiben die neuen Phänomene der Virtualität dabei jedoch weitgehend unreflektiert. Tobias Holischkas phänomenologische Analyse zeigt, dass insbesondere der virtuelle Ort als versammelndes Prinzip eine Realität schafft, die - ganz im Gegensatz zum abstrakten Konzept des Cyberspace - eine ontologische Verbindung zur menschlichen Alltagswelt herstellt (...) und sie auf diese Weise erweitert. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Ausarbeitung setzt sich mit der Beziehung auseinander, die Subjekt (Erkenntnisvermögen) und Objekt (Erkenntnisgegenstand) im Denken Theodor W. Adornos zueinander einnehmen. Sie fragt, genauer gefasst, wie das Subjekt den darin angestrebten philosophischen Zugang zu seinem Objekt herstellen kann, der sich aus dezidierter Distanz und enger Nähe zugleich speisen soll. Dazu möchte sie dem dialektischen Gefüge von Subjekt und Objekt, wie es in Adornos Schriften zur Geltung kommt, weiter nachgehen: Sie möchte dessen zentrale Aspekte herausstellen, ihren Zusammenhang kenntlich machen und (...) das bei Adorno Ungesagte weiter ausdeuten. Der Autor Tobias Litterst studierte Philosophie und Musikwissenschaft. Er war Doktorand am Lehrstuhl von Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schlösser an der Universität Tübingen. Dort setzte er sich mit der Epistemologie Theodor W. Adornos auseinander. (shrink)

v. 1. Commentaria in Aristotelem Armeniaca-Davidis Opera.

v. 1. Commentaria in Aristotelem Armeniaca-Davidis Opera.

How can we portray the history of Renaissance knowledge production through the eyes of the students? Their university notebooks contained a variety of works, fragments of them, sentences, or simple words. To date, studies on these materials have only concentrated on a few individual works within the collections, neglecting the strategy by which texts and textual fragments were selected and the logic through which the notebooks were organized. The eight chapters that make up this volume explore students' note-taking practices behind (...) the creation of their notebooks from three different angles. The first considers annotation activities in relation to their study area to answer the question of how university disciplines were able to influence both the content and structure of their notebooks. The volume's second area of research focuses on the student's curiosity and choices by considering them expressions of a self-learning practice not necessarily linked to a discipline of study or instructions from teaching. The last part of the volume moves away from the student's desk to consider instructions on note-taking methods that students could receive from manuals of various kinds. (shrink)

A study on the complex relationship between Platonism and the East, and on the Neoplatonic interpretations of some eastern cults in the Roman world, including Isis, Magna Mater, Mithras, and Sol Invictus.

We examine whether a taxpayer’s decision to choose a taxpayer-favorable characterization of income is associated with contextual and individual dimensions of that decision. Using a 2 × 2 factorial experimental design, we manipulate the prevailing social norm on whether there is a general belief that a specific form of income should be characterized as a capital gain or as ordinary income, and the group affiliation on whether the individual is making a tax characterization decision as a sole proprietor or as (...) a member of a group practice. Moreover, we measure participants’ fairness perception of characterizing the income as capital gains versus ordinary. We study the decisions of 180 graduate business and accounting students from two US business schools to explore these dimensions using a tax-ambiguous income situation. Results indicate that both contextual and individual dimensions impact taxpayer decisions. Specifically, the social norm and fairness perception of characterizing income as capital gains affects the likelihood of choosing such a characterization. Being a sole proprietor or a member of a group practice does not have any significant main effect. However, relative to all other conditions, taxpayers are most likely to characterize income as capital gains when both the social norms are for capital gains characterization and when the taxpayer is a member of a group practice. Results remain largely robust to a variety of alternative explanations. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our findings and their implications for tax policy, enforcement, and research. (shrink)

The paper addresses the problem of imaginative resistance in science, that is, why and under what circumstances imagination sometimes resists certain scenarios. In the first part, the paper presents and discusses two accounts concerning the problem and relevant for the main thesis of this study. The first position is that of Gendler, The Architecture of the Imagination: New essays on pretence, possibility and fiction, Oxford University Press, New York, 2006a), The routledge companion to philosophy of literature, Routledge, New York, 2016), (...) according to which imaginative resistance mainly concerns evaluative scenarios, presenting deviant moral attitudes. The second account examined is that of Kim et al. Advances in experimental philosophy of aesthetics, Bloomsbury, London, 2018), who insisted on the link between imaginative resistance on the one hand and counterfactual and counterdescriptive scenarios on the other. In the light of both theories, this paper discusses the importance of addressing the problem of imaginative resistance in the scientific enterprise in the light of some mechanisms of embodied simulation, based on the activity of mirror neurons and investigated within the framework of the Embodied Simulation Theory. (shrink)

Theoretische Philosophie aus phänomenologischer Perspektive Das Verhältnis von Phänomenologie und Metaphysik ist ambivalent. Einerseits richtet sich phänomenologische Deskription gegen leere Spekulation. Andererseits betonen Husserl und seine Nachfolger die Möglichkeit einer kritischen Erneuerung der Metaphysik. Die zwanzig Beiträge dieses Kompendiums untersuchen das Problem einer phänomenologischen Metaphysik von Husserl bis in die Gegenwart und bieten so Antworten auf die Frage, was phänomenologische Metaphysik sein kann und sein sollte.

The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics provides an ecumenical introduction to Christian ethics, its sources, methods, and applications. With contributions by theological ethicists known for their excellence in scholarship and teaching, the essays in this volume offer fresh purchase on, and an agenda for, the discipline of Christian ethics in the 21st century. The essays are organized in three sections, following an introduction that presents the four-font approach and elucidates why it is critically employed through these subsequent sections. The (...) first section explores the sources of Christian ethics, including each of the four fonts: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason. The second section examines fundamental or basic elements of Christian ethics and covers different methods, approaches, and voices in doing Christian ethics, such as natural law, virtue ethics, conscience, responsibility, narrative, worship, and engagement with other religions. The third section addresses current moral issues in politics, medicine, economics, ecology, criminal justice and other related spheres from the perspective of Christian ethics, including war, genetics, neuroethics, end-of-life decisions, marriage, family, work, sexuality, nonhuman animals, migration, aging, policing, incarceration, capital punishment, and more. (shrink)

This article gives a basic account of Aquinas’s theory of “synderesis” and conscience. Aquinas understands synderesis as an infallible moral awareness and conscience as the fallible judgment that applies a general moral conviction to a concrete case. The article also compares Aquinas’s and his contemporaries’ theories of whether erring conscience is morally binding, that is, whether to act in accord with erring conscience or against erring conscience is sinful.

Bortolotti argues that we cannot distinguish delusions from other irrational beliefs in virtue of their epistemic features alone. Although her arguments are convincing, her analysis leaves an important question unanswered: What makes delusions pathological? In this paper I set out to answer this question by arguing that the pathological character of delusions arises from an executive dysfunction in a subject’s ability to detect relevance in the environment. I further suggest that this dysfunction derives from an underlying emotional imbalance—one that leads (...) delusional subjects to regard some contextual elements as deeply puzzling or highly significant. (shrink)

Disorders of agency could be described as cases where people encounter difficulties in assessing their own degree of responsibility or involvement with respect to a relevant action or event. These disturbances in one’s sense of agency appear to be meaningfully connected with some mental disorders and with some symptoms in particular—i.e. auditory verbal hallucinations, thought insertion, pathological guilt. A deeper understanding of these experiences may thus contribute to better identification and possibly treatment of people affected by such disorders. In this (...) paper I explore disorders of agency to flesh out their phenomenology in more detail as well as to introduce some theoretical distinctions between them. Specifically, I argue that we may better understand disorders of agency by characterizing them as dimensional. In §1 I explore the cases of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVH) and pathological guilt and I show that they lie at opposite ends of the agency spectrum (i.e. hypoagency versus hyperagency). In §2 I focus on two intermediate cases of hypo- and hyper- agency. These are situations that, despite being very similar to pathological ones, may be successfully distinguished from them in virtue of quantitative factors (e.g. duration, frequency, intensity). I first explore the phenomenon of mind wandering as an example of hypoagency, and I then discuss the phenomenon of false confessions as an example of hyperagency. While cases of hypoagency exemplify situations where people experience their own thoughts, bodies, or actions as something beyond their control, experiences of hyperagency provide an illusory sense of control over actions or events. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of "nostalgia studies" more broadly. Nostalgia is an area of intense interest across several disciplines as well as within society and culture more generally. This handbook brings together an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers to survey the current landscape and identify common trends, achievements and gaps in existing literature. Comprising forty-five chapters, the volume covers the following topics: (...) Disciplinary perspectives of nostalgias including philosophy, history, literature, and psychology. Conceptual aspects of nostalgia including homesickness, temporality, affectivity, and memory. Historical and political dimensions such as afro-nostalgia, populism, feminism, and queer nostalgia. Spatial and material aspects of nostalgia including ruins, regionalism, and objects. Media related nostalgia such as analogue and digital nostalgia, reboots, revivals, gaming, and graphic novels. Essential reading for students and researchers working in nostalgia studies, this book will also be beneficial to related disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and literature; cultural, media, heritage, museum and film studies courses; and more generally for readers interested in how the past is represented and used in the present. (shrink)

Die Frage nach einem neuen Materialismus hat gegenwärtig quer durch die Disziplinen Konjunktur. Dabei wird Materie oder 'Matter' nicht länger als passiver Träger von Bedeutung, Diskursen oder menschlicher Manipulation verstanden, sondern die Eigensinnigkeit und Kontingenz der materiellen Welt betont. Dieser Band versammelt Beiträge, die die bislang massgeblich im englischsprachigen Raum und auf theoretischer Ebene stattfindende Debatte aufgreift und sie mit Blick auf ihr gesellschaftskritisches Potenzial diskutiert. Bei aller Diversität der disziplinären und thematischen Zugänge hebt der Band eine grundlegende Tendenz hervor. (...) Zum einen die Unzufriedenheit über die gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Zustände, zum anderen die Unfähigkeit gegenwärtiger Analysen, die aktuellen Bewegungen und Umbrüche in der Gesellschaft anschaulich zu machen. Die unterschiedlichen im Band vorgestellten Ansätze, Materie neu zu denken, nehmen diese Herausforderung an: Sie versuchen, soziale und politische Zusammenhänge in ihrer Komplexität zu erfassen ohne den kritischen Impetus des 'alten' marxistischen Materialismus aufzugeben. Dabei wird versucht, neomaterialistische Ansätze für unterschiedliche Bereiche der Gesellschaftskritik fruchtbar zu machen, darunter Ökonomiekritik, Biopolitik, Feminismus, Raumtheorie, Ästhetik, Technologie und kritische Theorie"--Back cover. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue "The Bounds of Rationality".

Quelle est la place du scepticisme dans l'œuvre d'un philosophe des Lumières comme Denis Diderot? Cet ouvrage vise à mettre en évidence les caractéristiques de la réception des instances sceptiques dans les œuvres de Diderot. L'analyse prend en considération l'ensemble du corpus diderotien, y compris sa contribution à l'Encyclopédie. L'objectif est aussi de montrer que la méthode sceptique de Diderot, qui consiste en l'usage de certaines argumentations, mais aussi en un ensemble de choix stylistiques, permet de mieux interpréter certaines spécificités (...) de sa pensée philosophique et de son matérialisme. Une meilleure compréhension du rôle du scepticisme dans la pensée de Diderot vise à apporter une contribution aux études sur ce qu'on définit comme le scepticisme des Lumières, en montrant qu'il serait plus exact de parler de scepticismes au pluriel, en raison des différences qui subsistent parmi les philosophes. Pour cette raison, ce livre propose des confrontations entre Diderot et ses sources sceptiques, mais aussi avec d'autres philosophes de son époque comme Montesquieu, Voltaire, D'Alembert et Hume"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)