Physicalism is often characterized as an empirical hypothesis. But according to an alternative conceptualization, it is instead a stance or an attitude. I analyze Roy Wood Sellars’s materialist philosophy in order to show that it is a counterexample to a specific physicalist empirical hypothesis: the minimal completeness of the physical. However, it is arguably not reducible to a stance: it is a meaningful metaphysical thesis with substantive cognitive content.

The notion of common cause closedness of a classical, Kolmogorovian probability space with respect to a causal independence relation between the random events is defined, and propositions are presented that characterize common cause closedness for specific probability spaces. It is proved in particular that no probability space with a finite number of random events can contain common causes of all the correlations it predicts; however, it is demonstrated that probability spaces even with a finite number of random events can be (...) common cause closed with respect to a causal independence relation that is stronger than logical independence. Furthermore it is shown that infinite, atomless probability spaces are always common cause closed in the strongest possible sense. Open problems concerning common cause closedness are formulated and the results are interpreted from the perspective of Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle. (shrink)

The original proposal of H. H. Pattee (1971) of basing quantum theoretical measurement theory on the theory of the origin of life, and its far reaching consequences, is discussed in the light of a recently emerging biological paradigm of internal measurement. It is established that the "measurement problem" of quantum physics can, in principle, be traced back to the internal material constraints of the biological organisms, where choice is a fundamental attribute of the self-measurement of matter. In this light, which (...) is shown to be a consequence of Pattee's original suggestion, it is proposed that biological evolution is a gradual liberation from the inert unity of "subject" and "object" of inanimate matter (as "natural law" and "initial conditions"), to a split biological existence of them and, as a consequence, the "message of evolution" is freedom, rather than complexity in itself. Some classical philosophical systems are brought into context to show that the epistemologies of several strictly philosophical systems of the social sciences are well acquainted with the problem and their solutions support our conclusions. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to initiate the exploration of debiasing methods applicable in real-life settings for achieving lasting improvement in decision making competence regarding multiple decision biases. Here, we tested the potentials of the analogical encoding method for decision debiasing. The advantage of this method is that it can foster the transfer from learning abstract principles to improving behavioral performance. For the purpose of the study, we devised an analogical debiasing technique for 10 biases (covariation detection, insensitivity to (...) sample size, base rate neglect, regression to the mean, outcome bias, sunk cost fallacy, framing effect, anchoring bias, overconfidence bias, planning fallacy) and assessed the susceptibility of the participants ( N = 154) to these biases before and 4 weeks after the training. We also compared the effect of the analogical training to the effect of ‘awareness training’ and a ‘no-training’ control group. Results suggested improved performance of the analogical training group only on tasks where the violations of statistical principles are measured. The interpretation of these findings require further investigation, yet it is possible that analogical training may be the most effective in the case of learning abstract concepts, such as statistical principles, which are otherwise difficult to master. The study encourages a systematic research of debiasing trainings and the development of intervention assessment methods to measure the endurance of behavior change in decision debiasing. (shrink)

The current study investigates the effects of green advertising and a corporation’s environmental performance on brand attitudes and purchase intentions. A 3 × 3 (firm’s environmental performance and its advertising efforts as independent variables) experiment using n = 302 subjects was conducted. Results indicate that the negative effect of a firm’s low performance on brand attitudes becomes stronger in the presence of green advertising compared to general corporate advertising and no advertising. Further, when the firm’s environmental performance is high, both (...) green and general corporate advertising result in more unfavorable brand attitudes than no advertising. The study’s counter-intuitive findings are explained by attribution theory. (shrink)

Jeffrey conditioning is said to provide a more general method of assimilating uncertain evidence than Bayesian conditioning. We show that Jeffrey learning is merely a particular type of Bayesian learning if we accept either of the following two observations: – Learning comprises both probability kinematics and proposition kinematics. – What can be updated is not the same as what can do the updating; the set of the latter is richer than the set of the former. We address the problem of (...) commutativity and isolate commutativity from invariance upon conditioning on conjunctions. We also present a disjunctive model of Bayesian learning which suggests that Jeffrey conditioning is better understood as providing a method for incorporating unspecified but certain evidence rather than providing a method for incorporating specific but uncertain evidence. The results also generalize over many other subjective probability update rules, such as those proposed by Field and Gallow. (shrink)

We argue that the truth of determinism is not an interpretation-free fact and we systematically overview relevant interpretational choices that are less known in the philosophical literature. After bypassing the well known interpretational problem that arises in quantum mechanics we identify three further questions about the representational role of the mathematical structures employed by physical theories. Finally we point out that even if we settle all representational issues the received view of physical possibility may also allow the truth of determinism (...) to depend on prior philosophical convictions, notably on one's philosophical account of the nature of laws. (shrink)

Divine revelation as a subject matter cannot be properly considered in the framework of theology, as theology already presupposes revelation. In order to conceive revelation in a non-theological way, we need a philosophical approach. Thus we can recognize the need for a renewed understanding of revelation as God’s self-revelation. In this paper I argue for the understanding of God’s self-revelation as radical revelation, which is opposed to partial understandings ofrevelation, such as the propositional one. A given notion of divine revelation (...) goes together with a given notion of human persons; and as soon as it becomes clear that divine revelation is properly understood as radical revelation, the need of a radical understanding of human persons can be recognized too. Human persons can be determined in terms of their ad se or ad aliud dimensions, but it is the former that leads to a proper understanding of human persons as being basically related to the radically self-revealing God. (shrink)

The volume, stemming from the long-term cooperation of scholars working on East Central European intellectual history, discusses the patterns of patriotic and national identification in the light of the multiplicity of levels of ethnic, cultural and political allegiances characterizing this region in the early modern period.

Hawthorne, Landes, Wallmann and Williamson argue that the Principal Principle implies a version of the Principle of Indifference. We show that what the Authors take to be the Principle of Indifference can be obtained without invoking anything which would seem to be related to the Principal Principle. In the Appendix we also discuss several Conditions proposed in the same paper.

Religion After Auschwitz is a philosophical approach to the notion of revelation. Following such authors as A. Dulles, R. Swinburne, or K. Ward, Balazs Mezei investigates some of the main problems of revelation and connects them to the general problem of religion today. Religion is considered in the perspective of the age "after Auschwitz", an expression coined by Hans Jonas and further elaborated by J. B. Metz. Mezei develops the insights of these philosophers and investigates various aspects of religion and (...) revelation "after Auschwitz": contemporary theistic philosophy, phenomenology, art, mysticism, and the question of university education today. A fascinating amalgam of subjects and approaches, Religion and Revelation After Auschwitz is an important contribution to contemporary discussions on the possibility of Catholic philosophy. (shrink)

In this article I offer an interpretation of the fundamental problem of phenomenology in terms of a philosophy of revelation proposing in this way the renewal of the last important development of Western philosophy both in terms of its metaphysical aspiration and scientific relevance. After the general introduction, I outline the philosophical problem of revelation. I show how this philosophy influenced early phenomenology. I explain the underlying subject matter in the history of phenomenology, i.e. the notion of disclosure. I also (...) outline what I term “apocalyptic phenomenology” in order to focus on the understanding of revelation. In this part I offer details of the notion of newness and the appropriate method applied here. Finally, I summarize the scientific relevance of my approach in the context of logic, methodology, disciplinarity with a special emphasis on the study of religion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe general assumption that people fail to notice discrepancy between their answer and the normative answer in the conjunction fallacy task has been challenged by the theory of Logical Intuition. This theory suggests that people can detect the conflict between the heuristic and normative answers even if they do not always manage to inhibit their intuitive choice. This theory gained support from the finding that people report lower levels of confidence in their choice after they commit the conjunction fallacy compared (...) to when their answer is not in conflict with logic. In four experiments we asked the participants to give probability estimations to the options of the conflict and no-conflict versions of the tasks in the original set-up of the experiment or in a three-option design. We found that participants perceive probabilities for the options of the conflict version less similar than for the no-conflict version. As people are less confident when choosing between more similar options, this simil.. (shrink)

We investigate Maxwell's attempt to justify the mathematical assumptions behind his 1860 Proposition IV according to which the velocity components of colliding particles follow the normal distribution. Contrary to the commonly held view we find that his molecular collision model plays a crucial role in reaching this conclusion, and that his model assumptions also permit inference to equalization of mean kinetic energies, which is what he intended to prove in his discredited and widely ignored Proposition VI. If we take a (...) charitable reading of his own proof of Proposition VI then it was Maxwell, and not Boltzmann, who gave the first proof of a tendency towards equilibrium, a sort of H-theorem. We also call attention to a potential conflation of notions of probabilistic and value independence in relevant prior works of his contemporaries and of his own, and argue that this conflation might have impacted his adoption of the suspect independence assumption of Proposition IV. (shrink)

Is there anything political about politics? This question may well appear nonsensical, yet this is what has intrigued some of the best minds in political philosophy. The most straightforward answer was given by Carl Schmitt, for whom the distinction between friend and foe is definitive for politics. But it may be argued that some of the central concepts of other theories involve similar attempts to capture the intrinsically political aspect of politics. The harmonious working of Plato's Republic presupposes that every (...) citizen is satisfied with his role in it. This is possible only if each of them takes a part…. (shrink)

One of the most idiosyncratic features of human communities is the way they think of time, even though there has been little reflection on that in political theory. To mention just one example that indicates how different the collective experience of time may be, I allude to the South American Aymara people, who associate the past with the spatial front, and the future with the spatial back. That is, past is ahead of us, and future is behind us. In this (...) framework progress in time makes perhaps less sense, since the very concept of progress is, at its root, advance…. (shrink)

Though it may sound awkward to ask whether the political sovereign is happy or unhappy, the question is relevant to political theory, especially within a political theological perspective. Because man was created in the image of God, human happiness needs to be a reflection of divine beatitude, and as divine sovereignty is, at least analogically, related to political sovereignty, the conceptual coherence is secured. The main argument is, however, that the analogy does not hold. I shall show how St Thomas (...) Aquinas’s short treatment of God’s beatitude may mislead us about power, fame, riches, and dignity being essential to happiness, based on an analysis of Franz Kafka’s major novel, The Castle, and a few other writings by him. I shall argue that our tradition of political thinking and behavior remains ambivalent on this issue. The political sovereign is born out of our unhappy condition, yet its power, fame, riches, and glory suggests to us that it has appropriated our happiness. But for this very reason it cannot be happy, and it therefore suggests a false analogy between the divine and the political sovereign. It is fundamentally at variance with our happiness, which incites us to abandon, reject, and eventually, kill it. (shrink)

Biró, B. and I. Sain, Peano arithmetic as axiomatization of the time frame in logics of programs and in dynamic logics, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 63 201-225. We show that one can prove the partial correctness of more programs using Peano's axioms for the time frames of three-sorted time models than using only Presburger's axioms, that is it is useful to allow multiplication of time points at program verification and in dynamic and temporal logics. We organized the paper (...) as follows: 1. Preliminaries, 2. The main result, 3. Peano arithmetic with bounded multiplication, 4. Connections with temporal logics and dynamic logics, Acknowledgements, References. (shrink)

A particular subject-matter in Franz Brentano's philosophy is his approach to the history of philosophy. I shall consider the evolution of his concept of the history of philosophy, the sources of this concept, and, finally, its relationship to Edmund Husserl's understanding of the history of philosophy. Brentano's scheme of the four phases of the history of philosophy can serve as a principle of evaluation of what comes after Brentano's era in the history of philosophy.

Three distinct turning points (“bottleneck breakings”) in universal evolution are discussed at some length in terms of “self-reference” and (corresponding) “Reality Principles.” The first (origin and evolution of animate Nature) and second (human consciousness) are shown to necessarily precede a third one, that of Marxist philosophy. It is pointed out that while the previous two could occupy a natural (so in a sense neutral) place as parts of human science, the self-reference of Marxism, as a _social_ human phenomenon, through its (...) direct bearings on the _practice_ of society, did have a stormy history. I conclude that the fall of Bolshevism was unavoidable, and still, we might uphold our hope for a truly free society of humankind, just on the very basis of what we have learned of the fate of Marxist philosophy as such, as a _recursively evolving_ social _practice_: the freedom of humankind of its own ideological burdens (constraints). (shrink)

In this study, we investigated whether control of the conflict between incongruent heuristic and analytical answer options in a reasoning task is modulated by the presence of conflict on previous trials. In two experiments, we found that the incongruency of the previous trial has a significant effect on the control exhibited on the current trial. Our data also showed that this adaptation effect is modulated by the incongruency of the previous series of trials. These results demonstrate the same control adaptation (...) effects for a reasoning task as observed for standard response interference tasks. Coinciding control effects in the two research areas suggest that cognitive control might be an important mechanism underlying performance on reasoning tasks. Based on these results we argue that the study of cognitive control in reasoning could potentially facilitate the refinement of empirical predictions and provide a new tool to explore the exertion of top-down control in human thinking. (shrink)

This book argues for the case that governments develop with inherent constraints. These constraints support the case for the normative political theoretical defense of moderate governing.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 86-102.

This interesting book is a compilation of the lectures and discussions held during a four-day event "Grand Challenges for Science in the 21st Century" organized by Para Limes at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The elite group of speakers included Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner who called on all scientists to adopt a truth-seeking approach and not be afraid of challenging assumptions. The other panellists were Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and past President of the Royal Society, the much-cited Terrence Sejnowski (...) from the renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the well-known keynote speaker in economics and complexity sciences Brian Arthur, the former President of the European Research Council Helga Nowotny and the Director of the Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science Eors Szathmary. The lively sessions were moderated by the Danish writer Tor Norretranders. The panel tackled topics from evolution and the origin of the universe to modern technologies and artificial intelligence. The challenges presented during the event are bound to get the reader thinking about what may lie ahead in our future. (shrink)

The ingenious thought of Anton Günther (1783–1863) is rarely mentioned in the annals of nineteenth-century philosophy. However, in the eyes of his contemporaries, Günther belonged to the key thinkers of his age on par with Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. Günther was an original writer yet he left many of his insights undeveloped or ambiguously formulated. As a flamboyant and popular debater, he attacked the most influential philosophers of his time. His attacks were aimed especially at what he termed the (...) unavoidable pantheism of these thinkers, a pantheism Günther often identified with monism. Monism, semi-monism, pantheism, and semi-pantheism are recurring charges of Günther against many influential thinkers, including even Descartes, whose thought Günther considered otherwise epoch-making. Based on a reformed Cartesianism, Günther elaborated his antidote he termed dualism. Yet Güntherian dualism turns out to be a synthesis properly termed organicism. On such a basis, Günther carried out a heroic attempt to transcend the horizon of traditional views and open the vista of an I-centered philosophy built on the universal notion of revelation. By re-reading this Bohemia-born thinker, one can have a better understanding of the scope and influence of what we term Austrian Philosophy. (shrink)

We call attention to different formulations of how physical laws relate to what is physically possible in the philosophical literature, and argue that it may be the case that determinism fails under one formulation but reigns under the other. Whether this is so depends on our view on the nature of laws, and may also depend on the inter-theoretical relationships among our best physical theories, or so shall we argue.

The volume offers the first-ever synthetic overview of the history of modern political thought in East Central Europe. Covering twenty national cultures and languages wedged between Russia, Turkey, Austria and Germany, it goes beyond the conventional nation-centered narrative and offers a novel vision of transnational intellectual history. The authors focus on the ways political thinkers outside of Western Europe sought to bridge the gap between an idealized Western modernity and their own societies. Mapping these discourses and debates from the Enlightenment (...) to the First World War, the volume helps rethinking some of our basic assumptions about the history of modern European culture and politics. (shrink)

The article traces the development of Hungarian intellectual history of the early modern period from the emergence of the national romantic constructions of literary history to the recent turn towards contextualist and conceptual history. One of its main findings is the ideological importance of this period for the formation of the national canon, as it became a central point of reference for the emerging local methodological tradition of intellectual history, even if it was often compartamentalized under other categories. From this (...) perspective, the article puts particular emphasis on ideological constructions seeking to define the nation and depict the emergence of modern national identity. This finding also offers a vantage point for analyzing the interplay between literary history and the socio-culturally focused approaches, which can be considered the main framework for the developments of the last two decades, when these local historiographical traditions entered into an interesting dialogue with the Western European and American schools of intellectual history. Along these lines, while pointing out the discursive continuities with the previous paradigms, which are shaping even the contemporary historiographical production, the article also ponders the ways in which the inherited (post-)romantic constructions can be successfully challenged. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The paper discusses a possible political theological interpretation of arguments developed in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. What emerges is that Musil pose a fundamental challenge to the possibility of any real analogy between God and the political sovereign, as suggested by Carl Schmitt. At stake is Austria as a yet-to-be-born modern sovereign. However, the novel shows why attempts to conceive it in an image of God all fail. After surveying four such attempts, the main focus will be (...) the discussion of Anselm of Canterbury’s existential argument in this secular context. At Diotima’s inspiration it is General von Bordwehr, a largely neglected figure, who makes the most serious attempt to argue for the political sovereign as the greatest conceivable thing. The argument is that greatness entails containing every idea and its opposite, and this yields the concept of order. But order means the frozen end of everything. Hence, instead of a living God, we end up with a political sovereign marked by death. (shrink)