Engaging citizens with digital technology to co-create data, information and knowledge has widely become an important strategy for informing the policy response to COVID-19 and the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation in cyberspace. This move towards digital citizen participation aligns well with the United Nations’ agenda to encourage the use of digital tools to enable data-driven, direct democracy. From data capture to information generation, and knowledge co-creation, every stage of the data lifecycle bears important considerations to inform policy and practice. Drawing on (...) evidence of participatory policy and practice during COVID-19, we outline a framework for citizen ‘e-participation’ in knowledge co-creation across every stage of the policy cycle. We explore how coupling the generation of information with that of social capital can provide opportunities to collectively build trust in institutions, accelerate recovery and facilitate the ‘e-society’. We outline the key aspects of realising this vision of data-driven direct democracy by discussing several examples. Sustaining participatory knowledge co-creation beyond COVID-19 requires that local organisations and institutions incorporate adaptive learning mechanisms into their operational and governance structures, their integrated service models, as well as employing emerging social innovations. (shrink)

Drawing on Husserlian resources and existentialist and hermeneutical approaches, this book argues that critique is largely a question of method. It shows that phenomenological discussions of social and political problems draw from a tradition of radically critical investigations in epistemology, social ontology, political theory, and ethics.

The paper contends that transcendental phenomenology is a form of radical immanent critique able to explicate the necessary structures of meaning-constitution as well as evaluate our present situation through the historically traditionalized layers of concrete, lived experience. In order to make this case, the paper examines the critical dimension of phenomenology through the lens of one of its core conditions for possibility: the imagination. Building on—yet also departing from—Husserl’s own analyses, the paper contends that the imagination is both self- and (...) lifeworld-constituting. The imagination is anchored in our everyday senses of self and world as well as able to distance itself from being naively moored in normalized and deeply sedimented commitments. It is precisely this ‘anchored distance,’ rather than a sweeping doxic and ontic neutrality and negative freedom, that reveals the critical dimension of the imagination. (shrink)

George Molnar came to see that the solution to a number of the problems of contemporary philosophy lay in the development of an alternative to Hume's metaphysics. This alternative would have real causal powers at its centre. Molnar set about developing a thorough account of powers that might persuade those who remained, perhaps unknowingly, in the grip of Humean assumptions. He succeeded in producing something both highly focused and at the same time wide-ranging. He showed both that the (...) notion of a power was central and that it could serve to dispel a number of long-standing philosophical problems.Molnar's account of powers is as realist as any that has so far appeared. He shows that dispositions are as real as any other properties. Specifically, they do not depend for their existence on their manifestations. Nevertheless, they are directed towards such manifestations. Molnar thus appropriates the notion of intentionality, from Brentano, and argues that it is the essential characteristic of powers. He offers a persuasive case for there being some basic and ungrounded powers, thus ruling out the reducibility of the dispositional to the non-dispositional. However, he does allow that there are non-power properties as well as power properties. In this respect, his final position is dualistic.This is contemporary metaphysics of the highest quality. It is a work that was almost complete when its author died. It has been edited for publication by another specialist in the subject, Stephen Mumford, who has also provided an introduction that will allow non-specialists to become acquainted with the issues. David Armstrong, one of the greatest living metaphysicians and personal friend of George Molnar, has provided a Foreword. (shrink)

In Yesterday's Self, Andreea Ritivoi explores the philosophical and historical dimensions of nostalgia in the lives of immigrants, forging a connection between current trends in the philosophy of identity and intercultural studies. The book considers such questions as, Does attachment to one's native culture preclude or merely influence adaptation into a new culture? Do we fashion our identity in interdependence with others, or do we shape it in a non-contingent frame? Is it possible to assimilate in an unfamiliar world (...) without risking self-alienation? Ritivoi's response: nostalgia is both the poison and the cure in such situations. (shrink)

In this article I focus on two conflicting directions of supraindividualism concerning joint agency. The two representative authors here are Schmitt (2003b) and Pettit (2003). The tension lies between assuming there is a joint agent, without ontologically committing to such an agent, any reference to it being just a façon de parler, or, on the contrary, assuming there is a joint agent and ontologically committing to it. The problem of joint agency is discussed in relation to the problem of joint (...) action. My aim is to provide a critical discussion of the problem of joint agency. For this, I provide an overview of Schmitt’s and Pettit’s approaches to joint agency, and an example meant to raise some doubts regarding Schmitt’s criterion for possessing agency. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 1, I discuss the key concepts concerning this problem. In Section 2, I present Schmitt’s noncommittal approach to joint agency. In Section 3, I present Pettit’s committal approach. In Section 4 and 5, I discuss Schmitt’s criterion for being an agent and why there cannot be a joint agent in the strict existential sense. His criterion relies on a system of beliefs that should be possessed by an agent. In this context, I formulate a critique of this requirement. In the last Section, I follow some of Pettit’s (2003) and Gilbert’s (2004) ideas to provide an example concerning the interaction between individual and group beliefs, which also supports the critique of Schmitt’s criterion. (shrink)

Students from a small, private, religious college and a large, public university completed questionnaires asking their perceptions of academic dishonesty at their institution. The questionnaires used a 5-point Likert scale to determine whether the students felt it was acceptable to cheat for a specific reason such as plagiarizing or copying homework both using and not using technology. Between fall 2005 and fall 2013, 1792 usable questionnaires were collected using similar methodology, questionnaires and respondents to control for possible extraneous variables. An (...) analysis of the data provides indications that student acceptance of many types of academic dishonesty has decreased over the past 9 years. (shrink)

This paper challenges the standard interpretation of Descartes’s view that the essence of the mind is thinking. Most commentators take the essence of the mind to be constituted by thoughts as objects of awareness. By contrast, the position defended here is that willing is as much part of the essence of the Cartesian meditating mind as awareness. Willing is not just a type of thought, but whenever thinking occurs it invariably involves both awareness and willing. To substantiate the claim that (...) Descartes could not separate willing from the one meditating, the paper examines the role of the will at all the key junctures of the Meditations: the cogito, the clarity and distinctness of some of our ideas, the arguments for God’s existence, and the propensity to believe that our ideas of sensible things comefrom those things. (shrink)

In this article the authors are reconstructing the dichotomies which the young Theodor Adorno was trying to detect in the music of the bourgeois epoch and personify in two antipodes - Franz Schubert and Ludwig van Beethoven. Although already a devotee of Arnold Sch?nberg and the 20th century music avantgardism, Adorno was, in his works prior to his exile from Germany, intensively dealing with Schubert and his opposition towards Beethoven. While Beethoven was a bold and progressive revolutionary, fascinated by the?practical (...) reason? and the mission to rise up and reach the stars, Schubert wanted none of it. Instead, he was looking backwards, to primordial nature and the possibility of man to participate in its mythic cycles of death and regeneration. The lack of synthesis between this two opposing tendencies in the music of early bourgeois epoch lead to the?negative dialectics? of Sch?nberg and 20th century music avantgardism and to the final separation of Beethovenian musical progress and Schubertian musical mimesis. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present some important ideas about the relation between religious experience and metaphysics in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. This endeavor is significant for the topic from two points of view: firstly, Whitehead's thinking is among the most comprehensive and widely extended from the 20th Century, the applications of his 'speculative scheme' covering issues from ecology, physics and the foundations of mathematics, to art and religion; secondly, the concept of '˜God', with a meaning ascribed to it by (...) Whitehead in relation both with the history of philosophy and with his own ideas, plays a key-role in Process and Reality, his most important treatise. For Whitehead, religion is linked, broadly speaking, to the most intimate inner evolution of a human person. Although this assertion may seem trivial, in the context of his thinking, which defines terms such as 'process', 'value' or 'satisfaction' as essentially bounded with the evolution of any actual being, to associate a kind of experience, the religious one, to the fact itself of inner becoming conveys to this experience a fundamentally profound and inalienable metaphysical character. It is this character and 'definiteness' which I will describe and analyze. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present a personal reflection regarding the theoretical/philosophical relation between the generally accepted theological grounding of icon painting and other contemporary artistical endeavours to integrate the religious feeling – of Christian-Orthodox inspiration. This reflection is based on a mixture of ideas from different thought-frameworks which have as common ground the need for speculating on issues such as ‘tradition understanding’, ‘personal expression’, ‘art and religiousness’, exactly those key-themes that are constituting the fundamental threads of my (...) argumentation. Hence, my appeal to authors like Lucian Blaga, Leonid Uspensky, Martin Heidegger, Paul Evdochimov, and Christos Yannaras. The point of departure for my study is the powerful and unavoidable conflict between the need for personal artistic interpretations of religious themes – expressed through contemporary artistic techniques and the application of contemporary metaphysical modelings – and the need for attaching oneself to an ‘authentic’ tradition of religious experience and to a community with deep roots in history. My all-round thesis is that this conflict cannot be, at least, clarified by choosing, from the artistic point of view, between two extremes: contemporary secular art on the one hand, and sacred, canonical art on the other hand, but by finding conceptual common pathways. (shrink)

This study examined the relationship between the perceived fairness of the assessment process and the intention of participants to appeal the process, while taking into consideration the influence of two personality traits. Specifically, two of the Big Five traits, neuroticism and agreeableness, were included in the model, based on their special importance in predicting “anger-like” reactions similar to that triggered by unfairness. This study builds on the theoretical integration of the two dominant frameworks of organizational justice, and on two separate (...) empirical studies that use different methodologies : a personnel selection simulation and a study of an academic examination process. The pattern of results was similar in both studies. Neuroticism was not detected as a moderator based on the significance of the interaction term, but conditional effect analysis identified the specific area of scores where neuroticism was found to have a buffer effect on intention to appeal. Agreeableness weakens the relationship between perceived fairness and intention to appeal. However, contrary to our expectation, high agreeableness does not decrease but rather increases the probability of appealing the assessment process when it is perceived as unfair, thus providing evidence for the Pollyanna myth, i.e., that highly agreeable individuals are more likely to react to and appeal unfairness. (shrink)

U clanku autori ispituju tri pozicije u estetickoj raspravi o uzvisenom koja se vodila u 18. veku - Edmunda Berka, Imanuela Kanta i Fridriha Silera. Oni takodje pokusavaju da rekonstruisu politicku pozadinu svake od ovih teorijskih pozicija: starorezimski konzervativizam, republikanski liberalizam i romanticarsku zudnju za 'trecim putem'. Najsofisticiraniju i najzreliju teoriju uzvisenog pronalaze u Silerovim estetickim delima, pogotovo u onima koja su usledila nakon njegovog razocarenja u Francusku revoluciju i u kojima su najtemeljnije razmatrani odnosi izmedju uzvisenog i paradoksa istorijskog (...) nasilja. (shrink)

In 1992, the much acclaimed prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates publishes Black Water – a very harsh and condensed literary reenactment of a gruesome event having taken place more than twenty years before and known as the “Chappaquiddick incident”. Another twenty years later, through her 2012 novel Mudwoman, the author seems to revisit the topic that had haunted her for decades. This paper aims at establishing a certain narrative pattern connecting the two novels not only thematically, but also phantasmatically: (...) the sudden “resurrection” of Joyce Carol Oates’s character in the 2012 novel is, as we see it, far from being “incidental”. By “textual anastomosis”, we understand a subjective association of narratives in order to show how the disembodied consciousness “travels” from one character’s fictional body to another’s, triggering a whole bunch of personal memories which also resurrect in this other character’s fictional biography. (shrink)

This paper investigates how the distribution of negative polarity items can inform our understanding of the underlying semantic representation of constituent questions. It argues that the distribution of NPIs in questions is governed by the same logical properties that govern their distribution in declarative constructions. Building on an observation due to Guerzoni and Sharvit that strength of exhaustivity in questions correlates with the acceptability of NPIs, I propose a revision of the semantics of questions that can explain this link in (...) terms already familiar from the literature of negative polarity, namely the availability of a local downward entailing environment. I argue for a new theory of questions that takes strength of exhaustivity to be encoded internal to the question nucleus rather than in different answer-hood operators. This switch, while conceptually a simple move, has far-reaching consequences in the domain of questions. I also show how this new analysis can account for a host of issues related to NPIs, such as the subject–object asymmetry noted by Han and Siegel, the interaction between NPIs and high versus low wh-adjuncts, the varying acceptability of NPIs in the restrictor of which-phrases, and the contrast between weak and strong NPIs. (shrink)

The paper contends that abstraction lies at the core of the philosophical and methodological rupture that occurred between Husserl and his mentor Franz Brentano. To accomplish this, it explores the notion of abstraction at work in these two thinkers’ methodological discussions through their respective claims regarding the structure of consciousness, and shows that how Husserl and Brentano analyze the structure of consciousness conditions and strictly delineates the nature and reach of their methods of inquiry. The paper pays close attention to (...) intentionality, founding (Fundierung), and qualitative modification (qualitative Modifikation) understood as principles of consciousness. While intentionality has been the topic of numerous discussions surrounding these two thinkers’ work, founding and qualitative modification have slipped under the radar despite the fact that they hold—as I intend to show—the key to shedding new light on their respective methods of inquiry. More specifically, the paper explicates the ways in which Brentano’s notion of founding (understood as a relationship between whole acts) and his failure to identify radical-qualitative modification as a principle of consciousness preclude him from offering a successful model for philosophical universalizing thought. It is my hope to show that Husserl’s rethinking of founding as a relationship between certain structural moments of acts along with his novel notion of qualitative modification ground his attempt to carve a new method of philosophical inquiry—albeit jejune and ambiguous at the time of the Investigations, yet nevertheless able to successfully negotiate the problems faced by his predecessor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IS GOD ESSENTIALLY DIFFERENT FROM HIS CREATURES? RAHNER'S EXPLANATION FROM REVELATION INTRODUCTION IN THIS PAPER we shall discuss two questions concerning the doctrine of God in the theology of Karl Rahner. What is it? On what is it based? In the process, we shall critically examine the relationship between the doctrine of God and Rahner's view of Christian revelation, focusing on the nature of theological method. Analysis will proceed (...) in two ways: comparison of Rahner's method with what I see as the method of scripture (faith seeking understanding) and with that of traditional Thomism as represented by Etienne Gilson. In Foundatians of Christian Faith, Chapter ~. "Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery," Theological Investigations, volume 4, "The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology," and Theological ln1Yestigations, volume 11, "The Experience of God Today " Rabner develops his doctrine of God from his concept of absolute mystery which is drawn from human experience of reality according to his transcendental method. This method itself establishes the foundation for answering the first question, as we shall see. In answering the second question it is important that we examine carefully the foundation and determining element for any concept of God and of the creature's relation with God. The following issues will have to be discussed also: the nature of and need for Christian revelation, the role of faith and the kind of relation which exists between the Creator God and creatures. We shall discuss how Rahner deals with the free grace of God's revelation and presence in history while synthesizing creaturely self-tran575 576 PAUL D. MOLNAR scendent experience with grace and revelation according to his transcendental method. Such synthesis perceives the reality of God according to the constructs of natural theology and eliminates any practical need for revelation and faith in the triune God as the only true God. Moreover, we hope to show that the starting point for Rahner's transcendental method [human experience] is the very £actor which causes irreconcilable conflicts for a theology which claims to be a theology based on revelation. Rahner's analysis of experience is profound and has been useful for many in describing the creature's relation with the Creator. But as long as it is thought that our self-transcending experiences provide a point of departure for knowing the true God, Christian theologians will always have difficulty actually distinguishing God from their ideas about Hirn. For scriptural faith the point of departure for knowing the reality of God was and remains God's own free self-manifestation in His historical interventions within the realm of experience. As we shall see, this very point is what Rahner seeks to uphold. But in fact his method causes him to be inconsistent. While he would insist that this historical intervention is what happened in Israel, in Christ and in the Church; his method cannot a11ow him to hold consistently that the only point of departure for knowing the truth about our experiences is the Word of God revealed and active in Christ and the Spirit. Thus, true knowledge of God for Rahner is simultaneously ascribed to the grace of God and to our innate knowledge of absolute being. This claim is actually indebted to the Cartesian method and, as we shall see, it causes logical and theological problems for a theology that claims to be a theology of revelation. Concerning Rahner's doctrine of God, then, we return to the opening questions: What is it? On what is it based? Following Rahner's own outline in Fottndations of Christian Faith these questions can only be answered together by tracing the development of his own logic based upon the transcendental experience of our" horizon." Rahner's doctrine of God begins RAHNER'S EXPLANATION FROM REVELATION 577 from the assumption that an experience of one's "horizon " is an experience of God. And this assumption dictates what it is. Therefore, in Rahner's thought, these two questions cannot in fact be separated. Rahner provides no other foundation for this assumption than the idea that man must think and act in light of this horizon. Instead of pointing beyond the circle of human experience to show us... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REFLECTIONS ON PANNENBERG'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 1 PAUL D. MOLNAR St. John's University Jamaica, New York RADING PANNENBERG leaves no doubt that one is encountering an intellectual giant. His thought is clear, systematic, comprehensive, and fact-filled. In many respects this book is exciting; topics are introduced and developed with details from scripture, from obscure and renowned Protestant theologians, from Aquinas, Augustine, Origen, Duns Scotus, Barth, Jiingel, Moltmann, Rahner, and (...) many others until Pannenberg 's own position is clarified and fully developed. Its six chapters explore : 1) how truth is the foundation of systematic theology; 2) how the concept of God relates to this truth (natural theology) ; 3) how the reality of God is understood in relation to other religions; 4) how to understand revelation; 5) the trinity; and 6) the unity and attributes of God. This last lengthy chapter (337-448) presents a very challenging description of God's attributes arguing that " the trinitarian life of God in his economy of salvation proves to be the true infinity of his omnipotence " (415). Hence the doctrine of the trinity makes it possible to speak correctly about God's immanence and transcendence without falling into pantheism, dualism, modalism, or subordinationism. This book is essential reading for any serious student of theology. Because of its complexity and difficulty, however, we shall focus on the relation of theology and philosophy and briefly explore the roles of experience and faith, natural theology, the 1 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids : William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991). 501 502 PAUL D. MOLNAR trinity, revelation, God's being and act, and the person and work of Jesus, with a view toward seeing how Pannenberg's philosophy affects his theology. In spite of his view that Rahner may succumb to " subjectivism " through a consensus theory of truth ( 14, n.22), many of Pannenberg's ideas, e.g., that "Nonthematic knowledge of God" is real and " part of our original situation " ( 115), and that, in the context of modern secularism, the word " God " still reminds us that "the wholeness of human existence has become an unanswered question" (71), would resonate positively with a Rahnerian method. And while he believes Barth did not succeed in grounding the doctrine of the trinity in revelation (327, 296), he contends that Rahner made progress with his thesis of identity, even though by allowing the Father to remain transcendent, he did not go far enough and should have seen that the Father " has made himself dependent upon the course of history " (329, emphasis mine). While Pannenberg deliberately intends to emphasize God's freedom and to avoid subjectivism (36ff., 127ff., 376-7, 391, 419), as when he argues that dogmaticians do not decide what is true, but only God decides (56), fundamental problems do affiict his approach to theology from the beginning. For example: The natural theology of the philosophers had formulated a criterion for judging whether any God could be seriously considered as the author of the whole cosmos, and Christian theology had to meet this criterion if its claim could be taken seriously that the God who redeems us in Jesus Christ is the Creator of heaven and earth and thus the one true God of all peoples (79). The obvious question which arises here is whether it is philosophy or God the creator, known through faith, who determines the meaning of creation and redemption; problems connected with this assertion arise within each chapter. Even though Pannenberg recognizes the problem of establishing our knowledge of God by negating our limited experience ( 184£., 406), he actually attempts to understand God's being in terms of the limits of creaturely experience when he argues that finite knowledge " is grounded especially in the time-bound nature PANNENBERG'S SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY 503 of the knowledge" (54). Thus all of our statements about God, who is not an object in the world, "rest on anticipations of the totality of the world and therefore on the as yet nonexistent future of its uncompleted history " (55, emphasis mine) ; following Descartes, he writes " We attain a sense of the infinite only by negation of the limit of the finite "; while our direct unthematic... (shrink)

Husserl’s extensive analyses of image consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) and of the imagination (Phantasie) offer insightful and detailed structural explications. However, despite this careful work, Husserl’s discussions fail to overcome the need to rely on a most problematic concept: mental images. The epistemological conundrums triggered by the conceptual framework of mental images are well known—we have only to remember the questions regarding knowledge acquisition that plagued British empiricism. Beyond these problems, however, a plethora of important questions arise from claiming that mental images (...) are structural moments of imaging and imagining. Any attempt to clarify the structure and conditions for the possibility of aesthetic experience must first provide an unambiguous account of pictorial depiction—a task unattainable through the mental images discourse. Similarly, exposing the import of the imagination for theoretical scientific inquiries (be they positive or eidetic) requires an initial explication of the structure of this consciousness; this explication, however, must address our ability to imagine non-spatially determined objects—something the conceptual framework of mental images utterly fails to accomplish. In this paper I argue against Husserl’s reliance on mental images in his phenomenological analyses of imaging and imagining and propose an alternative structural account for both. This account is free of this reliance and able to steer clear of its insidious implications for epistemology, aesthetics, and methodological reflections. By closely following the development of Husserl’s account I suggest alternative descriptions while building on Husserl’s important work. (shrink)

This chapter gives a broad description of the nature of properties and explains the foundations of metaphysics. It provides general statements about properties and how they describe parts of a metaphysical environment. These properties are used to develop the theory of causal powers. The chapter also attempts to address the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of nominalism and realism, including selective realism and its properties. The chapter also introduces conceptual distinctions such as derivative-basic, first-order-higher-order, simple-complex, essential-necessary-accidental, extrinsic-intrinsic, and transferable-non-transferrable. Secondary definitions are (...) also given. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the emotional make-up of Descartes’s generous person. Described as having complete control over the passions, the generous person is not passion-free; she feels compassion for those in need but unable to bear their misfortunes with fortitude, hates vice, takes satisfaction in her own virtue, etc. To bring to light the coherence of the generous person’s emotional configuration, a compare and contrast analysis with Descartes’s deficient moral type, the abject person, is provided. Real life as well as (...) literary examples (Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes himself and Kadhy Demba, one of the main characters of Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois Femmes Puissantes) further refine the portrait of Descartes’s generous person and show that generosity is achievable by anyone who uses their will well. Descartes’s position on harmonizing the passions is reconstructed as a developmental trajectory: harmonizing the emotions is possible courtesy of God who put this sphere of created affairs under our jurisdiction; harmonizing the passions is required since the alternative is sub-optimal (souls enslaved and miserable); finally, harmonizing the emotions is satisfying. Since, as the above examples demonstrate, in the process of making their emotional composition coherent, different people take different routes and thus “create for themselves a personal, quite personal ideal,” acquiring Cartesian generosity points the way to Nietzsche’s later notion of self-creation. (shrink)

Many have deemed ineluctable the tension between Husserl’s transcendental eidetics and his Crisis method of historical reflection. In this paper, I argue that this tension is an apparent one. I contend that dissolving this tension and showing not only the possibility, but also the necessity of the successful collaboration between these two apparently irreconcilable methods guarantees the very freedom of inquiry Husserl so emphatically stressed. To make this case, I draw from Husserl’s synthetic analyses of type and concept constitution as (...) well as his later work on sedimentation and streaming-in and develop a richer modal taxonomy than the one Husserl proposed. I employ this taxonomy in an examination of the structures and conditions for the possibility of transcendental eidetic variation in order to show this method’s reliance on historically sedimented epistemic and normative resources. This reliance brings to light the necessity for a methodological critique, which is precisely what I take to be the work of teleological–historical reflection as Husserl comes to conceive it in the Crisis. (shrink)

Regression testing is applied whenever a code changes, ensuring that the modifications fixed the fault and no other faults are introduced. Due to a large number of test cases to be run, test case prioritization is one of the strategies that allows to run the test cases with the highest fault rate first. The aim of the paper is to present an optimized test case prioritization method inspired by ant colony optimization, test case prioritization–ANT. The criteria used by the optimization (...) algorithm are the number of faults not covered yet by the selected test cases and the sum of severity of the faults. The cost, i.e. time execution, for test cases is considered in the computation of the pheromone deposited on the graph’s edges. The average percentage of fault detected metric, as best selection criterion, is used to uncover maximum faults with the highest severity, and reducing the regression testing time. Several experiments are considered, detailed and discussed, comparing various algorithm parameter’s alternatives. A benchmark project is also used to validate the proposed approach. The obtained results are encouraging, being a cornerstone for new perspectives to be considered. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the continued relevance of Descartes' philosophy for present-day concerns can be demonstrated by bringing to bear on his Meditations state-of-the-art developments in Informal logic and Argumentation theory, specifically Leo Groarke’s approach to multimodal arguments. I show that the meditative exercises that Descartes viewed as preconditions of establishing the metaphysical tenets of his system can be recast in present-day form using technological tools and media that we are familiar with. We will see that, due to (...) the different historical and cultural contexts, the 21st century Cartesian meditating process can be: 1) technology-enhanced (a customizable, multimodal process using images and nonverbal sounds alongside verbal claims) and 2) interdisciplinary (sensitive to and informed by the history of philosophy, of ideas and of art). Reformulated and practised in this way, Descartes’ meditative exercises can serve as tools for honing much-needed critical thinking skills and dispositions, as well as for promoting autonomous decision-making. After providing examples of this contemporary Cartesian meditation, I suggest that Groarke’s multimodal approach can be extended to reconstructing the arguments of other philosophers thus supplying a way of doing history of philosophy that is both novel and has personal benefits for its practitioners. (shrink)

In artificial intelligence literature, “delusions” are characterized as the generation of unfaithful output from reliable source content. There is an extensive literature on computer-generated delusions, ranging from visual hallucinations, like the production of nonsensical images in Computer Vision, to nonsensical text generated by (natural) language models, but this literature is predominantly taxonomic. In a recent research paper, however, a group of scientists from DeepMind successfully presented a formal treatment of an entire class of delusions in generative AI models (i.e., models (...) based on a transformer architecture, both with and without RLHF—reinforcement learning with human feedback, such as BERT, GPT-3 or the more recent GPT-3.5), referred to as auto-suggestive delusions. Auto-suggestive delusions are not mere unfaithful output, but are self-induced by the transformer models themselves. Typically, these delusions have been subsumed under the concept of exposure bias, but exposure bias alone does not elucidate their nature. In order to address their nature, I will introduce a formal framework that clarifies the probabilistic delusions capable of explaining exposure bias in a broad manner. This will serve as the foundation for exploring auto-suggestive delusions in language models. Next, an examination of self- or auto-suggestive delusions will be undertaken, by drawing an analogy with the rule-following problematic from the philosophy of mind and language. Finally, I will argue that this comprehensive approach leads to the suggestion that transformers, large language models in particular, may develop in a manner that touches upon solipsism and the emergence of a private language, in a weak sense. (shrink)

A hagyományunk egyik kérdése az, hogy az eszményeinknek van-e, és mekkora szerepe az emberi cselekvések terén. Az eszményi európai ember valamilyen, esetleg vitatható, esetleg megalapozhatatlan eszményt követ, de uralja szenvedélyeit, vágyait, érzelmeit és érdekeit. A kereszténység ezt felfokozta az erkölcsi cselekvése terén, míg a felvilágosodás a politikában tette mindenek feletti problémává a politikai tudást és eszményeket. Ezt az intellektualizált cselekvési eszményt azonban rendre kikezdik, és ezek a kihívást jelentő magyarázatok a romantikától a marxizmusig a valós cselekvésekre hivatkoznak, amelyek többé vagy (...) kevésbé eltérnek az eszménytől. Egy nemzedékkel ezelőtt, de még ma is sokak számára a valódi cselekvésmotívum az (osztály)érdek volt, míg a mai wokery a személyes érzéseket tette legitim és bármilyen cselekvést igazoló motívummá, míg az eszményeket az elnyomás eszközeinek tekinti, hiszen az eszményeket követni próbáló ember korlátozza önmagát. A kötet írásai a cselekvés szkeptikus megközelítését sugallják: a cselekvéseknek mindig sokféle motívuma lehet, valamilyen eszmény követésétől kezdve érdekek, szenvedélyek és érzelmek követéséig, és ezekről csak feltételezéseink lehetnek. A tapasztalatunk az, hogy a túlmoralizált politika ugyanúgy kellemetlen világot eredményez, mint az alulmoralizált. (shrink)

The Vagrant scholar -- Doxa -- Practical reasoning -- Epideictic -- The polis.

This paper discusses the relation between the human security paradigm and the cosmopolitan democracy scenario as models for humanizing and changing the current international system and transforming it in a global security and development system centered on the individual rather than on the nation state. The main idea for which I argue is that the human security paradigm and the changes it determined in international relations (especially through the responsibility to protect principle) are compatible with the cosmopolitan democracy scenario for (...) changing and transforming the current international system. (shrink)