Extending the language of the intuitionistic propositional logic Int with additional logical constants, we construct a wide family of extensions of Int with the following properties: (a) every member of this family is a maximal conservative extension of Int; (b) additional constants are independent in each of them.

We present a general formalism of causal reasoning that encompasses both Pearl’s approach to causality and a number of key systems of nonmonotonic reasoning in artificial intelligence.

In Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Frege tried to show that arithmetic is logical by giving gap-free proofs from what he took to be purely logical basic laws. But how do we come to judge these laws as true, and to recognize them as logical? The answer must involve giving an account of the apparent arguments Frege provides for his axioms. Following Sanford Shieh, I take these apparent arguments to instead be exhibitions: the exercise of a logical capacity in order to bring (...) us into a state of judgement. I provide an account of what sort of inferential capacities are at play in such exhibitions, and explain how they lead us to judge that Frege’s primitive laws are general and undeniable. I will also situate my account with respect to other rival interpretations, particularly the elucidatory interpretations of Joan Weiner and Thomas Ricketts. (shrink)

The classical principle of double effect offers permissibility conditions for actions foreseen to lead to evil outcomes. I shall argue that certain kinds of closeness cases, as well as general heuristic considerations about the order of explanation, lead us to replace the intensional concept of intention with the extensional concept of accomplishment in double effect.

Doch was das Spiel in der Ästhetik soll, so die These dieses Buches, klärt sich erst unter voller Berücksichtigung der praktizistischen Tendenz in Kants Ansatz.

I am grateful to the editors of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy for inviting me to write a comment on Kathleen Gill’s ‘On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events’. I readily concede that she is right in the central criticism she makes of my 1978 paper: that a properly metaphysical or ontological distinction between processes and events, if it is to be made at all, cannot be sustained on the basis of the informal linguistic criteria I offered in ‘Events, (...) Processes, and States.’ My main concern in that paper was to show that discussions of the Kenny-Vendler typology of activities, performances, and states had focused too narrowly on verb types, on adverbial phrases, on the domain of human action, and on English-language intuitions. Mine was one of several voices urging in the late 1970s that issues of tense logic and of the logic of verb types had to be placed in the broader context of verb aspect — a salient and pervasive structure in natural languages generally, and one that had been studied by philologists and linguists since the nineteenth century. Captivated, as I and others had become at the time, by evidence that the distinction between count nouns and mass nouns appears to be mirrored in verb predications, I went on to make some rather venturesome ‘ontological’ claims. It is satisfying, of course, that Gill accepts not only that there is ‘substantial evidence in favor of recognizing a grammatical distinction between the language of processes and [the language of] events’ but also that ‘similarities with count and mass expressions will allow us to apply techniques for han dling nominal expressions to verbal expressions’. It is more than satisfying that the phenomenon of verb aspect is now noticed and investigated by philosophers as well as by linguists. (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)

Since its inception, the institution of postmortem organ transplantation has faced the problem of organ shortage: Every year, the demand for donor organs vastly exceeds supply, resulting in the deaths of approximately 8,000 individuals in the United States alone.1 This is in large part due to the fact that the United States, for the most part, operates under an “opt-in” policy in which people are given the opportunity to voluntarily opt-in to organ donation by registering as organ donors.2 In the (...) United States, a person’s organs will not be removed for transplantation purposes unless she has registered as a donor or her family gives their consent for organ removal.3 Jointly, these policies generate a situation where we do not retrieve as many organs as we could. (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)

Ample sociological evidence demonstrates that binary gender ideologies are an intractable part of formal organizations and that transgender issues tend to be marginalized by a wide range of social institutions. Yet, in the last 15 years, more than 200 colleges and universities have attempted to ameliorate such realities by adopting gender-inclusive facilities in which students of any gender can share residential and restroom spaces. What cultural logics motivate these transformations? How can their emergence be reconciled with the difficulty of altering (...) the gender order? Using an original sample of 2,036 campus newspaper articles, I find that support for inclusive facilities frames such spaces as a resource through which an institution can claim improved standing in the field of higher education. This process of engendering reputation allows traditional gender separation in residential arrangements to be overcome, but it also situates institutional responsiveness to transgender issues as a means of enhancing a college or university’s public prestige. This, in turn, produces novel status systems in the field of higher education—albeit ones that perpetuate familiar forms of institutional and cultural exclusion. (shrink)

The preference for `reductive explanations', i.e., explanations of the behaviour of a system at one `basic' level of sub-systems, seems to be related, at least in the physical sciences, to the success of a formal technique –- perturbation theory –- for extracting insight into the workings of a system from a supposedly exact but intractable mathematical description of the system. This preference for a style of explanation, however, can be justified only in the case of `regular' perturbation problems in which (...) the zeroth-order term in the perturbation expansion (characterizing the `basic' level) is the uniform limit of the exact solution as the perturbation parameter goes to zero. For the much more frequent case of `singular' perturbation problems, various techniques have been developed which all introduce a hierarchy of levels or scales into the solutions. These levels describe processes or sub-systems operating simultaneously at different time or spatial scales. No single level, no reductive explanation in the above sense will provide an adequate explanation of the system behaviour. Explanations involving multiple levels should be recognized as far more common even in supposedly reductionist disciplines like physics. (shrink)

I discuss the prospects of perspectival realism for resolving the problem of incompatible models or theories in scientific practice. My diagnosis is that the perspectivist can secure the ‘realism’ in her position only by employing suitable relations between the models. It is such relations that do the work, not the general philosophical claim about the perspectival nature of knowledge claims. But appeal to such relations has also been the preferred strategy of scientific realist approaches to the problem. With respect to (...) the problem of incompatible models, then, it is not clear that perspectivism has a clear advantage—even though the issue was among the motivating problems for proposing this view. I suggest, however, that the required inter-model relations embody a narrower notion of perspective, a notion that is explicitly part of the models themselves and that is essential in maintaining a realist view. (shrink)

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)

Pt. II (pp. 239-329), "The Jewish People among the Nations, " contains essays, addresses, and letters by the author spanning the years 1938-1980. Discusses, among other topics, antisemitism in the USSR in the 1930s, antisemitism in Nazi Germany, Black antisemitism during the teachers' strike in New York City (1968), and ecumenism.

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)

Even good lawyers get a bad rap. One explanation for this is that the professional rules governing lawyers permit and even require behavior that strikes many as immoral. The standard accounts of legal ethics that seek to defend these professional rules do little to dispel this air of immorality. The revisionary accounts of legal ethics that criticize the professional rules inject a hearty dose of morality, but at the cost of leaving lawyers unrecognizable as lawyers. This article suggests that the (...) problem with both the professional rules and the extant accounts of legal ethics is that they treat the role of lawyer as largely uniform, whereas lawyers actually serve several importantly different roles in different contexts. The central insight of the article is that legal ethics must be fundamentally context-sensitive: what lawyers are morally permitted or required to do depends on the background context in which they are working. Additionally, by taking context into account, this article is the first to present a theory of legal ethics as appropriately shaped and constrained by normative political philosophy and norms of political legitimacy. -/- Specifically, the article argues that people act as lawyers in three different contexts: State v. Individual (situations in which the State seeks to apply some general law to a particular individual), Individual v. Individual (situations in which private individuals are engaged in a dispute), and Individual v. State (situations in which individuals object to State conduct on constitutional or other grounds unrelated to the question of whether a general law applies to their particular case); that the value of lawyers, qua lawyers, stems from a different source in each of these contexts; and that a theory of legal ethics must take into account both of these first two claims. This article develops one such theory - the Multi-Context View. To demonstrate how the theory applies in practice, the article applies the Multi-Context View to two significant issues in legal ethics: the ethical issues involved in deciding whether to represent a client and the moral permissibility of the use of tactical delay. (shrink)

The article analyzes the main parameters of the modern world development, its architectonics and the most important development trends. Modern communications and principles of interaction of various social systems are also considered. As a result, the most significant cultural-cum-civilizational systems are distinguished – the West, China, the Islamic world and Russia, which represent four global trends or four vectors of power that fundamentally affect the current state and prospects of world development. It is emphasized that the West and China have (...) a global strategy, provided by objective circumstances. The Islamic world and Russia occupy an important geopolitical position and also have a special status in the global world. (shrink)

The Anthropocene has been observed as an opportunity to generate new legal imaginaries capable of revising incumbent assumptions of legal and political thought. What opportunities do such ambitions afford for communication between geological and legal thought? Responding to Birrell & Matthews attempt to ‘re-story a lawfor, rather thanof, the Anthropocene,’ I wish to describe some ways in which the Anthropocene Working Group, who are pursuing formalisation of the Anthropocene as an official geological unit, are involved in a similar exercise of (...) re-storying geology. The Anthropocene theme is brought to bear as a geological reality through material practices of measurement and correlation, as well as through the invocation of previous judgements of the evaluative committees associated with the formalisation of new geological unit. This effort amounts to a redefinition of the practices of geological observation, i.e. what counts as geologically relevant and why. In keeping with the theme of an ‘ethics of encounter’, as encouraged by Birrell and Matthews, this article suggests that the AWG’s effort provides a model with which the elaboration of ‘laws for the Anthropocene’ might correspond. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGIm Diskurs zum Theodizeeproblem beschäftigen sich die einzelnen Autoren mit sehr unterschiedlichen Ausgangsfragen, und zwar meist ohne diese Tatsache zu reflektieren. Wenn man jedoch ernst nimmt, dass »das Theodizeeproblem« einen Sammelbegriff für sehr unterschiedliche Fragen darstellt, setzt eine sinnvolle Bearbeitung des Theodizeeproblems eine bewusste Benennung der genauen Ausgangsfrage und idealerweise eine sachliche Begründung für die Wahl eben dieser Frage voraus. Davon, ob die Ausgangsfrage im Horizont des Glaubens formuliert wird oder nicht, in existenzieller oder in abstrahierender Perspektive, mit Gott als (...) Adressat oder nicht, anhand eines schöpfungstheologischen, kreuzestheologischen oder eschatologischen Zugangs, unter Zugrundelegung eines traditionell-theistischen oder eines nicht traditionell-theistischen Gottesbegriffs, agnostisch oder atheistisch, logisch oder empirisch, hängt es ab, ob es eine Antwort gibt, welche Antwortmöglichkeiten in den Blick kommen können und welche nicht, welche Bedürfnisse des Fragenden befriedigt werden und welche nicht, kurz: was von der weiteren Problembearbeitung erwartet werden kann und was nicht.SUMMARYIn the discourse on theodicy, individual authors deal with very different initial questions and for the most part fail to reflect upon this very fact. However, if one does recognize the importance of understanding THE problem of evil as an umbrella term for quite distinct issues, a proper treatment of theodicy implies precisely specifying the initial question and, ideally, a factual justification for the choice of this question. Whether the initial question is phrased in the horizon of faith, in an existential or abstract perspective, whether it directly adresses God, whether it is approached by means of creation theology, a theology of the cross or eschatological theology, whether it is based on a traditional theistical idea of god, agnostic or atheistic, logical or empirical, ultimately determines the actual existence of an answer, which possible answers can be brought to the questioner's attention and which of his or her needs can be satisfied in this regard; in short, what can be expected from the treatment of the problem and what cannot. (shrink)

O presente artigo apresenta a visão e a interpretação de Bernardo de Claraval que nos oferece o abade cisterciense Isaac de Stella no seu Sermão 52 In Assumptione Beatae Mariae. Comparando esta homilia com o sermão De tribus generibus emissionum (= De diversis 91) de São Bernardo, o artigo salienta, por um lado, a importante dívida de Isaac em relação a S. Bernardo, ao mesmo tempo que, por outro lado, analisa a interpretação inovadora que Isaac aplica ao pensamento bernardino e (...) estabelece uma original relação sistemático-dogmática entre eclesiologia, mariologia e uma teologia da experiência religiosa individual. /// This paper presents Bernard of Clairvaux as seen and interpreted by the Cistercian Abbot Isaac of Stella in his Sermon 52 In Assumptione Beatae Mariae. A comparison between the latter and Saint Bernard's sermon De tribus generibus emissionum (= De diversis 91) does not only reveal the important debt of Isaac to Bernard, but it also points to the innovative interpretation Isaac applies to Bernard's thought. Thus Isaac is shown to establish an original relation among ecclesiology, mariology and a theology of individual religious experience. (shrink)

This study investigates the phenomenon of metastereotyping — that is, the linguistic parody of stereotypic mediatized personas. The analysis draws on data from the 2008 reality television program Big Brother Africa 3, in which contestants ironically perform the lead characters from a 1989 Hollywood teen comedy film who exemplify a highly mediatized California male slacker youth stereotype, the ‘dude’ persona. By examining the linguistic and embodied features deployed by the reality show contestants in their stylization of the film characters, the (...) article shows how metastereotyping involves forms both from within the original representation and beyond. The use by these African contestants of features with such varied semiotic trajectories reveals their globalized ideologies about California and American youth styles as well as their understanding of the film characters’ positions within these styles. (shrink)