"Professor B. Petrov" is actually the nom de plume of Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev, a professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Law at Moscow University from 1917 to 1922, well known in Russian émigré circles as the author of a number of technically competent and stylistically brilliant studies in philosophy and psychology. His last published work, The Crisis of Industrial Civilization: Marxism, Neo-Socialism, Neo-Liberalism, is a significant contribution to social philosophy. Vysheslavtsev is distinguished by a scholar's intimacy with (...) the philosophic doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Lenin, together with an imaginative and disciplined command of at least the major contemporary developments in sociology, psychology, economics, and jurisprudence. (shrink)

During the last quarter of a century, a number of philosophers have become attracted to the idea that necessity can be analyzed in terms of a hyperintensional notion of essence. One challenge for proponents of this view is to give a plausible explanation of our modal knowledge. The goal of this paper is to develop a strategy for meeting this challenge. My approach rests on an account of modality that I developed in previous work, and which analyzes modal properties in (...) terms of the notion of a metaphysical law. I discuss what information about the metaphysical laws is required for modal knowledge. Moreover, I describe two ways in which we might be able to acquire this information. The first way employs inference to the best explanation. The metaphysical laws, including the essential truths, play a crucial role in causal and grounding explanations and we can gain knowledge of these laws by abductive inferences from facts of which we have perceptual or a priori knowledge. The second way of gaining information about the metaphysical laws rests on knowledge that is partly constitutive of competence with the concepts that are needed to express the relevant information. Finally, I consider how knowledge of the metaphysical laws can be used to establish modal claims, paying special attention to the much-discussed connection between conceiving and possibility. (shrink)

Aristotelian ideas have in the past been applied with mixed fortunes to quantum mechanics. One of the most persistent criticisms is that Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actuality are burdened with a teleological character long ago abandoned in the natural sciences. Recently this criticism has been met with a model of the actualization of quantum potentialities in light of Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘spontaneous events’. This presumably restores the nowadays acceptable idea of efficient causation in place of Aristotle’s original doctrine of (...) the ‘four causes’. In this article I challenge the model by arguing that when properly scrutinized Aristotle’s final cause poses no problems for an Aristotelian reading of quantum mechanics. Final causes in fact provide a better ontology for quantum mechanics than spontaneous causation. The idea of ‘spontaneity’ is unanalyzable and therefore of little use in quantum mechanics. In addition, it is ontologically sterile in the context of quantum measurement, as shown by a historical and conceptual review of the role of efficient causation in experimental physics. (shrink)

Although the brain enables us to perceive the external world and our body, it remains unknown whether brain processes themselves can be perceived. Brain tissue does not have receptors for its own activity. However, the ability of humans to acquire self-control of brain processes indicates that the perception of these processes may also be achieved by learning. In this study patients learned to control low-frequency components of their EEG: the so-called slow cortical potentials (SCPs). In particular ''probe'' sessions, the patients (...) estimated the quality of the SCP shift they had produced in the preceding trial. The correspondence between the recorded SCP amplitudes and the subjective estimates increased with training. The ability to perceive the SCPs was related to the ability to control them; this perception was not mediated by peripheral variables such as changes in muscle tonus and cannot be reduced to simple vigilance monitoring. These data provide evidence that humans can learn to perceive the neural activity of their brain. Alternative interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare Pierre-Simon Laplace's celebrated formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1814 Essai philosophique sur les probabilités with the formulation of the same principle offered by Roger Joseph Boscovich in his Theoria philosophiae naturalis, published 56 years earlier. This comparison discloses a striking general similarity between the two formulations of determinism as well as certain important differences. Regarding their similarities, both Boscovich's and Laplace's conceptions of determinism involve two mutually interdependent components—ontological and epistemic—and they are (...) both intimately linked with the principles of causality and continuity. Regarding their differences, however, Boscovich's formulation of the principle of determinism turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine. A detailed analysis of these similarities and differences, so far missing in the literature on the history and philosophy of the concept of determinism, is the main goal of the present paper. (shrink)

I will argue that Aristotle’s fourfold division of four causes naturally arises from a combination of two distinctions (a) between things and changes, and (b) between that which potentially is something and what it potentially is. Within this scheme, what is usually called the “efficient cause” is something that potentially is a certain natural change, and the “final cause” is, at least in a basic sense, what the efficient cause potentially is. I will further argue that the essences of things (...) and changes are not features or attributes of them, but paradigms that set the standards according to which these things and changes may be judged to be natural or typical. The “formal cause” of a natural thing will be shown to be its essence in this sense: it sets the standards of typicality that apply to instances of its kind. The final cause will be shown to set the standard of typicality for natural changes. When we understand Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in this way, it becomes clear on what basis he could convincingly argue that final causality is operative in the whole of nature. (shrink)

Much of the modern philosophy of causation has been governed by two ideas: (i) causes make their effects inevitable; (ii) a cause is something that makes a difference to whether its effect occurs. I focus on explaining the origin of idea (ii) and its connection to (i). On my view, the frequent attempts to turn (ii) into an analysis of causation are wrongheaded. Patterns of difference-making aren't what makes causal claims true. They merely provide a useful test for causal claims. (...) Moreover, what justifies us in using them as a test is idea (i). That's how (i) and (ii) are connected. (shrink)

British social survey movement ‘Mass-Observation’ (M-O) was founded in 1937 by a poet, a film-maker and an ornithologist. It purported to offer a new kind of sociology – one informed by surrealism and working with a ‘mass’ of Observers recording day-to-day interactions. Various commentators have debated the importance and precise identity of M-O in its first phase, especially in light of its combination of social science and surrealism. This article draws on new archival research, in particular into the ‘paperwork’ practices (...) of Charles Madge, arguing that M-O is best understood as an attempt to define a new relationship between the survey subject and information organiser. The latter – as sociologist, planner or artist – was a distinctive interwar persona, central to ‘scientific humanism’. Bathos, as a formal strategy in modernist aesthetics, is introduced as an explanation of the failure of this particular part of the M-O project. Questions of subjectivity and data link M-O to a longer history of heterodox sociological inquiry. This analysis resolves some of the apparent paradoxes that have been prominent in studies of M-O, and draws attention to the unfulfilled promise of a vast archive of social data. (shrink)

From the physical, mathematical, and conceptual points of view, Roger Joseph Boscovich’s original 1758 formulation of the principle of physical determinism and Pierre-Simon Laplace’s later 1814 ren...

In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction and a critical analysis of Abraham Maslow’s neglected psychological reading of Thomas Kuhn’s famous dichotomy between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ science, which Maslow briefly expounded four years after the first edition of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in his small book The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, and which relies heavily on his extensive earlier general writing in the motivational and personality psychology. Maslow’s Kuhnian ideas, put forward as part of a larger (...) program for the psychology of science, outlined already in his 1954 magnum opus Motivation and Personality, are analyzed not only in the context of Kuhn’s original ‘psychologizing’ attitude toward understanding the nature and development of science, but also in a broader historical, intellectual and social context. (shrink)

In this paper, we reflect on the connection between the notions of organism and organisation, with a specific interest in how this bears upon the issue of the reality of the organism. We do this by presenting the case of Buffon, who developed complex views about the relation between the notions of “organised” and “organic” matter. We argue that, contrary to what some interpreters have suggested, these notions are not orthogonal in his thought. Also, we argue that Buffon has a (...) view in which organisation is not just ubiquitous, but basic and fundamental in nature, and hence also fully natural. We suggest that he can hold this view because of his anti-mathematicism. Buffon’s case is interesting, in our view, because he can regard organisation, and organisms, as perfectly natural, and can admit their reality without invoking problematic supernaturalist views, and because he allows organisation and the organismal to come in kinds and degrees. Thus, his view tries to do justice to two cautionary notes for the debate on the reality of the organism: the need for a commitment to a broadly naturalist perspective, and the need to acknowledge the interesting features of organisms through which we make sense of them. (shrink)

The complete system of knowledge is a standard trope of science fiction, a techno-utopian dream and an aesthetic ideal. It is Solomon’s House, the Encyclopaedia and the Museum. It is also an ideology – of Enlightenment, High Modernism and absolute governance. Far from ending the dream of a total archive, 20th-century positivist rationality brought it ever closer. From Paul Otlet’s ‘Mundaneum’ to Mass-Observation, from the Unity of Science movement to Wikipedia, the dream of universal knowledge dies hard. As a political (...) tool, the total archive encompasses population statistics, gross domestic product, indices of the Standard of Living and the international ideology of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the World Health Organization, the free market and, most recently, Big Data. Questions of the total archive engage key issues in the philosophy of classification, the poetics of the universal, the ideology of surveillance and the technologies of information retrieval. What are the social structures and political dynamics required to sustain total archives, and what are the temporalities implied by such projects? This introduction and the articles that follow describe and place in historical context a series of concrete instances of totality. Our analysis is arranged according to four central themes: the relationship between the Archive (singular) and archives (plural); the image of the archive and the aesthetics of totality; pathologies of accumulation; and the specific historical trajectory of the total archive in the 19th and 20th centuries. (shrink)

Within the last decade, several approaches using quaternion numbers to handle and model multiband images in a holistic manner were introduced. The quaternion Fourier transform can be efficiently used to model texture in multidimensional data such as color images. For practical application, multispectral satellite data appear as a primary source for measuring past trends and monitoring changes in forest carbon stocks. In this work, we propose a texture-color descriptor based on the quaternion Fourier transform to extract relevant information from multiband (...) satellite images. We propose a new multiband image texture model extraction, called FOTO++, in order to address biomass estimation issues. The first stage consists in removing noise from the multispectral data while preserving the edges of canopies. Afterward, color texture descriptors are extracted thanks to a discrete form of the quaternion Fourier transform, and finally the support vector regression method is used to deduce biomass estimation from texture indices. Our texture features are modeled using a vector composed with the radial spectrum coming from the amplitude of the quaternion Fourier transform. We conduct several experiments in order to study the sensitivity of our model to acquisition parameters. We also assess its performance both on synthetic images and on real multispectral images of Cameroonian forest. The results show that our model is more robust to acquisition parameters than the classical Fourier Texture Ordination model. Our scheme is also more accurate for aboveground biomass estimation. We stress that a similar methodology could be implemented using quaternion wavelets. These results highlight the potential of the quaternion-based approach to study multispectral satellite images. (shrink)

In this article, logical concepts are defined using the internal syntactic and semantic structure of language. For a first-order language, it has been shown that its logical constants are connectives and a certain type of quantifiers for which the universal and existential quantifiers form a functionally complete set of quantifiers. Neither equality nor cardinal quantifiers belong to the logical constants of a first-order language.

A case of a particularly severe misbehavior in a review process is described. Two reviewers simply copied and pasted their critical comments from their previous reviews without reading the reviewed manuscript. The editor readily accepted the reviewers’ opinion and rejected the manuscript. These facts give rise to some general questions about possible factors affecting the ethical behavior of reviewers and editors, as well as possible countermeasures to prevent ethical violations.

Built on the results of collective experience expressed in language, cultural worlds are given to each of their inhabitants as integral ensembles constantly developing on the basis of unlimited semiosis via communication. Rooted in the very way of human intersubjectivity, communicative ability, and existence in time, historical narration serves as an important tool for increasing the meaningful potential and diachronic depth of cultural worlds. It should have integrity, thematic and plot certainty, problematic character, a chronotope system chosen by the author, (...) as well as an efficient intrigue and composition focused on the intended reader who is able to decode its content. The historical narrative, unlike the literary one, should be based on truthful and reliable empirical data, despite the fact that the linguistic description in both cases assumes a connection between the past and the present. The historical narratives themselves, from the point of view of their epistemological status, have only greater or lesser reliability, since they depend on the interpretative intentions of their authors. The unpredictability of an event may trigger a confrontation between different kinds of narratives, undermining the power of the existing Encyclopedia that describes a cultural world. This problem can be fruitfully approached today on a cooperative platform of hermeneutics, semiotics, and analytical philosophy. (shrink)

The sample space of the chance distribution at a given time is a class of possible worlds. Thanks to this connection between chance and modality, one’s views about modal space can have significant consequences in the theory of chance and can be evaluated in part by how plausible these implications are. I apply this methodology to evaluate certain forms of modal contingentism, the thesis that some facts about what is possible are contingent. Any modal contingentist view that meets certain conditions (...) that I specify generates difficulties in the philosophy of chance, including a problem usually associated with Humeanism that is known as ‘the problem of undermining futures’. I consider two well-known versions of modal contingentism that face this difficulty. The first version, proposed by Hugh Chandler and Nathan Salmon, rests on an argument for the claim that many individuals have their modal features contingently. The second version is motivated by the thesis that the existence of a possible world depends on the existence of the contingent individuals inhabiting it, and that many worlds are therefore contingent existents. (shrink)

Ces dernières années, des musées d’art contemporain sont apparus partout dans le monde occidental et au-delà. Le nombre de ce genre de musées augmente en permanence. Le touriste d’aujourd’hui, qui se rend dans une grande ville, s’attend à y trouver un musée d’art contemporain, de la même manière qu’il s’attend à y trouver un restaurant italien ou un cinéma. Dans la plupart des cas, ces attentes sont confirmées. Dans le pire des cas, le touriste va apprendre que le musée d’art (...) contemporain est encore en construction et qu’il sera ouvert l’année suivante. Quoi qu’il en soit, cette acceptation si facile de la notion de « musée d’art contemporain » par la culture d’aujourd’hui n’est pas sans importance. Traditionnellement, le musée d’art constituait un endroit dans lequel l’art du passé était collecté, conservé et montré au beau milieu de la vie contemporaine. Mais que signifie construire un musée d’art contemporain ? Que signifie « muséographier » la contemporanéité elle-même?Museums of contemporary art have appeared everywhere in the Western world and beyond in recent years, and they are constantly increasing in number. Any tourist visiting a major city today expects to find a museum of contemporary art, just as they expect to find an Italian restaurant or a cinema. In most cases, this is indeed what they find. At the very least, tourists will find that the city’s museum of contemporary art is still under construction and will open the following year. Whatever the case, the ready acceptance of the “museum of contemporary art” in today’s culture is significant. Traditionally, an art museum was a place where the art of the past could be collected, curated and displayed right in the heart of the contemporary world. But what does creating a museum of contemporary art really mean? In other words, what does it mean “to make a museum exhibit” of contemporaneity itself? (shrink)

In the debates on “post-metaphysical” philosophy, Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy has been widely seen as contributing to the understanding of human creativity and its role in constructing an imag...

In this article, modern standards of early years mathematics education are criticized and a proposal for change is presented. Today's early years mathematics education standards rest on a view of mathematics that became obsolete already at the end of the 19th century while the spirit of children's mathematics is precisely the spirit of modern mathematics. The proposal for change is not a return to the “new mathematics” movement, but something different.

Jan Baptist van Helmont’s development of the Paracelsian theory of the Archeus is often considered uncomfortably close to the animist theory that the specificity of organic bodies is largely due to the soul. In this paper, I argue that the historical assimilation of these two positions is mistaken. I show that van Helmont introduced his theory of the Archeus on the grounds that it guaranteed that natural processes are properly natural, and that his theory was driven by a specific conception (...) of what it means for a process to be properly natural. I also argue that the specific way in which van Helmont developed his theory of the Archeus put him at odds with the more animist positions defended in his own time, and that he stressed rather than downplayed the efficacy of natural secondary causes. This analysis runs counter to both the long tradition of reading van Helmont’s theory as a species of animism, and the more recent tendency to stress those Christian dimensions of his thought that seem to imply the inefficacy of natural causes. (shrink)

I argue that a tripartite analysis of simple statements such as “Bucephalus is a horse”, according to which they divide into two terms and a copula, requires the notion of a repeatable: something such that more than one particular can literally be it. I pose a familiar dilemma with respect to repeatables, and turn to Avicenna for a solution, who discusses a similar dilemma concerning quiddities. I conclude by describing how Avicenna’s quiddities relate to repeatables, and how both quiddities and (...) repeatables may contribute to a tripartite analysis of predication. (shrink)

Modeling a complex phenomena such as the mind presents tremendous computational complexity challenges. Modeling field theory (MFT) addresses these challenges in a non-traditional way. The main idea behind MFT is to match levels of uncertainty of the model (also, a problem or some theory) with levels of uncertainty of the evaluation criterion used to identify that model. When a model becomes more certain, then the evaluation criterion is adjusted dynamically to match that change to the model. This process is called (...) the Dynamic Logic of Phenomena (DLP) for model construction and it mimics processes of the mind and natural evolution. This paper provides a formal description of DLP by specifying its syntax, semantics, and reasoning system. We also outline links between DLP and other logical approaches. Computational complexity issues that motivate this work are presented using an example of polynomial models. (shrink)

Descartes’ metaphysics lays the foundation for the special sciences, and the notion of consciousness (conscientia) belongs to metaphysics rather than to psychology. I argue that as a metaphysical notion, ‘consciousness’ refers to an epistemic version of moral conscience. As a consequence, the activity on which science is based turns out to be conscientious thought. The consciousness that makes science possible is a double awareness: the awareness of what one is thinking, of what one should be doing, and of the possibility (...) of a gap between the two. (shrink)

Obwohl ‚conscientia’ ein zentraler Grundbegriff der cartesischen Metaphysik ist, sagt Descartes nirgends explizit, was er damit meint. Auch aus der Art und Weise, in der er das Wort verwendet, lässt sich dessen Bedeutung nicht vollends erschließen. Insbesondere handelt es sich nicht um einen reflexiven Denkakt (cogitatio), nicht um eine Disposition zum Haben solcher cogitationes und nicht um eine Art Aufmerksamkeit. Um die Bedeutung des Begriffes zu klären, schlage ich vor, auf klassische Texte von Augustinus, Thomas von Aquin und jesuitischen Autoren (...) zurückzugreifen. Es ergibt sich, dass man unter der conscientia traditionell ein Wissen um den moralischen Wert einer Handlung verstand, das der Handelnde mit einem idealen Beobachter (d.i. Gott) teilt. Ich behaupte, dass sich diese Begriffsbestimmung mehr oder weniger analog auf Descartes übertragen lässt. Die cartesische conscientia ist demnach ein Wissen um den spezifischen Wert eines Gedanken, das der Denker mit einem idealen Beobachter teilt. (shrink)

Beck uses the term `subpolitics' to refer to forms of politics outside and beyond the representative institutions of the political system of nation-states. From the perspective of the theory of reflexive modernization, the proliferation of subpolitics indicates a weakening of the `iron cage' of bureaucratic, state-oriented politics. We argue that subpolitics does indeed challenge conventional notions of politics. It mobilizes sources of societal influence that transcend the formal political system. In particular, subpolitics correlates with the command over positive or negative (...) sanctions and the capacity for uncertainty absorption. This can be illustrated in the areas of scientific expertise, corporate decision-making and political consumption. Those cases show that the political system cannot monopolize the means of societal influence. For a political system that regards itself as the centre of society, this must be irritating. For sociology, however, it provides the opportunity to part with such an inappropriate account of the role of politics in modern society. (shrink)

Nudge is a social innovation developed based on the achievements of behavioral science. According to this approach, when citizens make decisions about their behavior, they often react irrationally, based on heuristic factors related to their lives. Thus, collective goals are difficult to achieve, especially in conditions of unpredictability in social development and the prevailing influence of individualistic ideas. The nudge is a possible tool of modern politics that enables the liberal state to achieve collective goals and protect individual freedom simultaneously. (...) This makes it a valid policy tool, despite the criticisms of individualist theories as well as defenders of traditional democracy. (shrink)