This paper sketches a dispositionalist conception of laws and shows how the dispositionalist should respond to certain objections. The view that properties are essentially dispositional is able to provide an account of laws that avoids the problems that face the two views of laws (the regularity and the contingent nomic necessitation views) that regard properties as categorical and laws as contingent. I discuss and reject the objections that (i) this view makes laws necessary whereas they are contingent; (ii) this view (...) cannot account for certain kinds of laws of nature and their properties. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions often involve appeals to verdicts about particular cases, sometimes actual, more often hypothetical, and usually with little or no substantive argument in their defense. Philosophers — on both sides of debates over the standing of this practice — have often called the basis for such appeals ‘intuitions’. But, what might such ‘intuitions’ be, such that they could legitimately serve these purposes? Answers vary, ranging from ‘thin’ conceptions that identify intuitions as merely instances of some fairly generic and epistemologically (...) uncontroversial category of mental states or episodes to ‘thick’ conceptions that add to this thin base certain semantic, phenomenological, etiological, or methodological conditions. As this chapter discusses, thick conceptions turn out to have their own methodological problems; some may even leave philosophers in the methodologically untenable position of being unable to determine when anyone is doing philosophy correctly. (shrink)

Let us call a property that is essentially dispositional a potency.1 David Armstrong thinks that potencies do not exist. All sparse properties are essentially categorical, where sparse properties are the explanatory properties of the type science seeks to discover. An alternative view, but not the only one, is that all sparse properties are potencies or supervene upon them. In this paper I shall consider the differences between these views, in particular the objections Armstrong raises against potencies.

In a recent article in this journal, Parker Crutchfield argues that if moral bioenhancement ought to be compulsory, as some authors claim, then it ought to be covert, i.e., performed without the knowledge of the population that is being morally enhanced. Crutchfield argues that since the aim of compulsory moral bioenhancement is to prevent ultimate harm to the population, compulsory moral bioenhancement is best categorized as a public health issue, and should therefore be governed by the norms and values that (...) apply in public health settings. In this article, I argue for two related claims. First, I question the extent to which compulsory moral enhancement should be considered a public health issue that ought to be governed by the norms and values that apply in public health settings. Second, I argue that Crutchfield's argument that covert moral bioenhancement would better respect people's autonomy than an overt program overlooks two important autonomy‐based reasons that, in fact, favor an overt moral enhancement program over a covert one. (shrink)

Intellectual property law operates with the ontological assumption that immaterial goods such as works, inventions, and designs exist, and that these abstract types can be owned like a piece of land. Alexander Peukert provides a comprehensive critique of this paradigm, showing that the abstract IP object is a speech-based construct, which first crystalised in the eighteenth century. He highlights the theoretical flaws of metaphysical object ontology and introduces John Searle's social ontology as a more plausible approach to the subject (...) matter of IP. On this basis, he proposes an IP theory under which IP rights provide their holders with an exclusive privilege to use reproducible 'Master Artefacts.' Such a legal-realist IP theory, Peukert argues, is both descriptively and prescriptively superior to the prevailing paradigm of the abstract IP object. This work was originally published in German and was translated by Gill Mertens. (shrink)

Natural selection of specific protobiomonomers during abiogenic development of the prototype genetic code is hindered by the diversity of structural, spatial, and rotational isomers that have identical elemental composition and molecular mass (M), but can vary significantly in their physicochemical characteristics, such as the melting temperature Tm, the Tm:M ratio, and the solubility in water, due to different positions of atoms in the molecule. These parameters differ between cis- and trans-isomers of dicarboxylic acids, spatial monosaccharide isomers, and structural isomers of (...) α-, β-, and γ-amino acids. The stable planar heterocyclic molecules of the major nucleobases comprise four (C, H, N, O) or three (C, H, N) elements and contain a single –C=C bond and two nitrogen atoms in each heterocycle involved in C–N and C=N bonds. They exist as isomeric resonance hybrids of single and double bonds and as a mixture of tautomer forms due to the presence of –C=O and/or –NH2 side groups. They are thermostable, insoluble in water, and exhibit solid-state stability, which is of central importance for DNA molecules as carriers of genetic information. In M–Tm diagrams, proteinogenic amino acids and the corresponding codons are distributed fairly regularly relative to the distinct clusters of purine and pyrimidine bases, reflecting the correspondence between codons and amino acids that was established in different periods of genetic code development. The body of data on the evolution of the genetic code system indicates that the elemental composition and molecular structure of protobiomonomers, and their M, Tm, photostability, and aqueous solubility determined their selection in the emergence of the standard genetic code. (shrink)

Let the chain antichain principle (CAC) be the statement that each partial order on $\mathbb{N}$ possesses an infinite chain or an infinite antichain. Chong, Slaman, and Yang recently proved using forcing over nonstandard models of arithmetic that CAC is $\Pi^1_1$-conservative over $\text{RCA}_0+\Pi^0_1\text{-CP}$ and so in particular that CAC does not imply $\Sigma^0_2$-induction. We provide here a different purely syntactical and constructive proof of the statement that CAC (even together with WKL) does not imply $\Sigma^0_2$-induction. In detail we show using a (...) refinement of Howard's ordinal analysis of bar recursion that $\text{WKL}_0^\omega+\text{CAC}$ is $\Pi^0_2$-conservative over PRA and that one can extract primitive recursive realizers for such statements. Moreover, our proof is finitary in the sense of Hilbert's program. CAC implies that every sequence of $\mathbb{R}$ has a monotone subsequence. This Bolzano-Weierstraß}-like principle is commonly used in proofs. Our result makes it possible to extract primitive recursive terms from such proofs. We also discuss the Erdős-Moser principle, which—taken together with CAC—is equivalent to $\text{RT}^2_2$. (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)

The Rhetorical Fabric of the Traditional Arabic Qaṣīda in Its Formative Stages: A Comparative Study of the Rhetoric in Two Traditional Poems by ʿAlqama l-Faḥl and Bashshār b. Burd. By Ali Ahmad Hussein. Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 98. Wiesbaden: Harraaaowitz, 2015. Pp. xv + 292. €78.

The goal of this thesis is to provide an account of phenomenal unity, the togetherness felt between our conscious experiences. I begin in the first chapter by spelling out the target phenomenon in more detail. I organize the discussion around the analysis question—what does phenomenal unity consist in or reduce to?—and clarify the desiderata we want an answer to the analysis question to meet. In the second and third chapter, I look at answers to the analysis question, organized under two (...) broad headings. In the second chapter, I examine a slate of monistic theories, which argue that phenomenal unity consists in a single relation which holds between phenomenal experiences. In the third chapter, I examine pluralistic theories, which argue that phenomenal unity consists in a plurality of relations between phenomenal experiences. My overall aim is twofold: 1) argue for a pluralistic approach to the analysis question, and 2) argue for a specific pluralistic account, the many relations account. Once I have argued for my specific pluralistic account, I apply it to other questions surrounding phenomenal unity in chapter 4. (shrink)

In this paper I defend epistemic circularity by arguing that the “No Self-Support” principle (NSS) is false. This principle, ultimately due to Fumerton ( 1995 ), states that one cannot acquire a justified belief in the reliability of a source of belief by trusting that very source. I argue that NSS has the skeptical consequence that the trustworthiness of all of our sources ultimately depends upon the trustworthiness of certain fundamental sources – sources that we cannot justifiably believe to be (...) reliable. This is a problem, I claim, because if the trustworthiness of all of our sources depends upon sources that we should not believe to be reliable, then a reflective individual should not trust any of his sources at all. The hidden cost of rejecting epistemic circularity is thus the unacceptable skeptical thesis that reflective individuals like you and I have no justified beliefs whatsoever. (shrink)

Retributivism is generally thought to forbid the punishment of the innocent, even if such punishment would produce otherwise good results, such as deterrence. It has recently been argued that because capital punishment always entails the risk of executing an innocent person, instituting capital punishment is tantamount to intentionally taking innocent lives and therefore cannot be justified on retributive grounds. I argue that there are several versions of retributivism, only one of which might categorically forbid risking punishing innocent persons. I also (...) argue that our moral practices reveal either that we do not hold this particular version of retributivism, or that we reject equating risking punishing the innocent with intentionally doing so. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A9102008 00005. (shrink)

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

We investigate the strength of the existence of a non-principal ultrafilter over fragments of higher-order arithmetic. Let [Formula: see text] be the statement that a non-principal ultrafilter on ℕ exists and let [Formula: see text] be the higher-order extension of ACA0. We show that [Formula: see text] is [Formula: see text]-conservative over [Formula: see text] and thus that [Formula: see text] is conservative over PA. Moreover, we provide a program extraction method and show that from a proof of a strictly (...) [Formula: see text] statement ∀ f ∃ g A qf in [Formula: see text] a realizing term in Gödel's system T can be extracted. This means that one can extract a term t ∈ T, such that ∀ f A qf). (shrink)

The comment endorses and reinforces Daniel W. Graham’s highly original and attractive proposal that early Greek cosmology develops in two stages. In what Graham calls the “meteorological stage” of the sixth century BCE, celestial objects are explained as formations either from fire or from watery exhalations in a roughly planar model of the cosmos. In the “lithic stage” of the mid- and late fifth century introduced by Anaxagoras, the model is that of a central earth around which solid stone-like celestial (...) objects revolve held aloft in a vortex. The change to the lithic stage comes about, according to Graham, as the implications of Parmenides’ epoch-making discovery that the moon is illuminated by the sun come to be understood and are then theoretically exploited. The present comment also proposes that the false explanations of lunar phases and lunar and solar eclipses in the meteorological-stage cosmologies, respectively, of Xenophanes and of Heraclitus may have played a helpful heuristic role in the theoretical breakthrough to heliophotism. (shrink)

The A-theory of time states that there is an absolute fact of the matter about what events are, respectively, in the past, present and future. The B-theory says that all there is to temporality are the relations of earlier-than, later-than and simultaneous-with, and the past, present and future are merely relative.

As Mark Murphy has recently shown, standard justifications of universal divine authority are insufficient. [1] By “divine authority” I shall mean the doctrine that obedience is morally owed to God by all. God would not give us a command that we did not have a reason to act in accordance with, Murphy argues, but it does not follow that we would be obliged, much less morally obliged, to have the fact of God’s having commanded the action be among our practical (...) reasons for the action. We might, for instance, think that what God has commanded us is prudentially the best policy for us or that it is the best possible evidence for what is on independent grounds morally obligatory. (shrink)

In The LEGO Movie, Vitruvius's notion of the "The Special" introduces what will be a central motif for the film. As it turns out, the one who finds this "Piece of Resistance" is not quite the hero he was expected to be. Emmet Brickowoski, a construction worker, will find this "Piece of Resistance". Throughout the film, others suggest to Emmet both implicitly and explicitly that he brings nothing of value to any particular individual or to society, and that consequently he (...) himself has no value. If one interpret The LEGO Movie as being driven by Emmet's quest for discovering his value, the real philosophical turning point in the film is not when Emmet's double‐decker couch permits the Master Builders to escape from the sinking submarine and they realize that Emmet's ideas actually are useful. Rather, it is when Emmet realizes their approval is irrelevant to his value. (shrink)

In his 1982 book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Saul Kripke develops a famous argument that purports to show that there are no facts about what we mean by the expressions of our language: ascriptions of meaning, such as “Jones means addition by ‘+’” or Smith means green by ‘green’”, are according to Kripke’s Wittgenstein neither true nor false. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues for a form of non-factualism about ascriptions of meaning: ascriptions of meaning do not purport to state (...) facts. Define semantic realism to be the view that ascriptions of meaning are apt to be assessed in terms of truth and falsity, and are, at least in some instances, true. Semantic realism, thus defined, is a form of cognitivism about semantic judgement, according to which judgements ascribing meaning express beliefs, states apt for assessment in terms of truth and falsity. Kripke’s Wittgenstein thus argues against semantic realism, and in favour of a form of semantic non-cognitivism.1 En route to semantic non-cognitivism, Kripke’s Wittgenstein argues against dispositionalist theories of meaning, which hold something roughly along the lines of the following: Jones means magpie by “magpie” if and only if Jones is disposed to apply “magpie” to magpies in ideal conditions (where the ideal conditions can be specified in terms that don’t presuppose the notion of meaning, and are such that in those conditions Jones applies “magpie” to a thing if and only if that thing is a magpie). (shrink)

This piece is a review essay on Victor Tadros’s The Ends of Harm. Tadros rejects retributive desert but believes punishment can be justified instrumentally without succumbing to the problems of thoroughgoing consequentialism and endorsing using people as means. He believes he can achieve these results through extension of the right of self-defense. I argue that Tadros fails in this endeavor: he has a defective account of the means principle; his rejection of desert leads to gross mismatches of punishment and culpability; (...) and he cannot account for punishment of inchoate crimes. (shrink)

It is a central political goal to secure disabled individuals the same opportunities as others to pursue their conception of a good life. This goal reflects an ambition to combine an egalitarian and a liberal moral intuition. In this article, we analyse how disabled individuals who take part in economic activity should be compensated in order to respect these two intuitions. The article asks how a system of disability compensation should be structured and what the level of such compensation should (...) be. It also analyses how the answers to these questions depend on whether the disabled individuals are held responsible for their choice of work effort. (shrink)

Sender–receiver games, first introduced by David Lewis ([1969]), have received increased attention in recent years as a formal model for the emergence of communication. Skyrms ([2010]) showed that simple models of reinforcement learning often succeed in forming efficient, albeit not necessarily minimal, signalling systems for a large family of games. Later, Alexander et al. ([2012]) showed that reinforcement learning, combined with forgetting, frequently produced both efficient and minimal signalling systems. In this article, I define a ‘dynamic’ sender–receiver game in (...) which the state–action pairs are not held constant over time and show that neither of these two models of learning learn to signal in this environment. However, a model of reinforcement learning with discounting of the past does learn to signal; it also gives rise to the phenomenon of linguistic drift. 1 Introduction2 Dynamic Signalling Games with Reinforcement Learning2.1 Introducing new states2.2 Swapping state–action pairs3 Discounting the Past3.1 Learning to signal in a dynamic world3.2 An unexpected outcome: linguistic drift4 ConclusionAppendix: A Markov Chain Analysis. (shrink)

This primarily diagnostic paper offers, from the perspective of relational egalitarianism, a normative analysis of three major injustices in the context of adaptation finance. Adaptation finance includes payments provided by the affluent countries of the Global North to low-income countries in the Global South, countries particularly exposed to the harms of climate change. Relational egalitarianism is the normative view that interactions between people and between institutions have to respect the equal moral status of every human being. The first injustice, from (...) this perspective, consists in the sheer fact that adaptation measures are required at all to deflect harm from people who did not significantly contribute to the causes of climate change. The second injustice consists in the persisting, even increasing adaptation finance gap, as countries of the Global North do neither provide adequate financial means to reduce climate risks, nor even fulfil their commitments to adaptation finance pledged in the Copenhagen Accord in 2009. The third injustice emerges from current procedures to determine criteria for distributing scarce financial resources that consolidate structural injustice. The paper concludes by providing the contours of a practical response to these injustices that respects the demands of relational egalitarianism. (shrink)

The ‘Platonic Ideas’ in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics are appearances. On the other hand, as the immediate objecthood of the will, they are the essences of species and the only object of true aesthetic cognition, which leads beyond mere appearance. To explain this apparent incongruence, I offer an analysis of Schopenhauer’s early metaphysics, and its transformation into the metaphysics of will, fleshing out the several and divergent concepts of ‘idea’. Specifically, first, as part of his religious and neo-Platonic early philosophy; second, in (...) the context of his ‘true criticism’ in the spirit of Kantian transcendental philosophy; third, as identical to the thing in itself as part of the metaphysics of will, heavily influenced by Kant’s notion of ideas from CR and CJ. Explaining Schopenhauer’s mature notion of Platonic Ideas genetically as a set of homonymic notions helps us better explain its divergent meanings in WWR. (shrink)

Einleitung Die Ausbreitung des Massentourismus und die Grundstücksspekulation gefährden frühbyzantinische und byzantinische archäologische Stätten im südwestlichen Kleinasien akut. Wie nun schon in den 1980er Jahren ein Vier-Sterne-Hotel einer spanischen Hotelkette direkt in das weit ausgedehnte spätantike und byzantinische Ruinengebiet von Kauniōn Panormos, das mittelalterliche Prepia (der heutige Name des benachbar ten Örtchens ist Sarigerme), das an der Mündung des Sarisu Çayi – zu deutsch: Gelbwasser-Fluß – im westlichen Lykien gelegen ist, hineingebaut wurde, so sind nun schon vorbereitende Hotelbauarbeiten im Auftrage (...) einer weiteren europäischen Hotelkette mitten im spätantiken Ruinengebiet der Ala-Kilise-Bucht (Anastasioúpolis?) in Karien im vollen Gange, nun soll hier in der Nähe noch eine Appartmenthaussiedlung entstehen. Ein Hilferuf des Verfassers bei der UNESCO Suborganisation ICOMOS verhallte bisher ungehört. Das Ruinengebiet von Sarigerme befindet sich südwestlich von Dalaman und südöstlich der Polis Kaunos. Auf der Kauniōn Panormos (Prepia) unmittelbar vorgelagerten Papas-Insel (Baba Adasi) befindet sich die Ruine eines antiken Mausoleums oder eines Leuchtturms und genauso wie Kaunos verfügte das Bistum (Kaunion) Panormos über ein in der Spätantike allerdings wohl noch intaktes, heute versumpftes, Hafenbecken. Offenbar im Zuge von Bauarbeiten in der Hotelanlage von Sarigerme wurden zwei im Ruinengebiet gefundene Kapitelle vor die Lobby des Hotels verschleppt. Es handelt sich hierbei zum einen um ein größeres korinthisches Normalkapitell aus Marmor mit einer durch ein Profil zweigeteilten Abakusleiste (vgl. Abb. 1), das möglicherweise ursprünglich aus einer der beiden großen Basiliken – von denen eine die Bischofskirche gewesen sein wird – des Ortes stammt und welches dem 5./6. Jh. zugeordnet werden kann, zum anderen um ein byzantinisches Kleinkapitell aus feinkristallinem weißen Marmor (vgl. Abb. 2–4). Das größere korinthische Kapitell gehört zu einem weit verbreiteten Standardtypus und soll deswegen hier nicht weiter besprochen werden. Das Kleinkapitell zeigt jedoch ein einzigartig gestaltetes Dekor, für das dem Verfasser bisher kein direktes Vergleichsbeispiel bekannt ist und das, durch diese kurze Vorlage, sicherlich eine Bereicherung des provinziellen byzantinischen Bauplastik-Katalogs sein wird. (shrink)