Frank A. Lewis presents a close study of book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his most dense and controversial texts, commonly understood to contain his deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and related metaphysical issues. Lewis argues that Aristotle returns to the causal view of primary substance from his Posterior Analytics.

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

The false attribution of autonomy and related concepts to artificial agents that lack the attributed levels of the respective characteristic is problematic in many ways. In this article, we contrast this view with a positive viewpoint that emphasizes the potential role of such false attributions in the context of robotic language acquisition. By adding emotional displays and congruent body behaviors to a child-like humanoid robot’s behavioral repertoire, we were able to bring naïve human tutors to engage in so called intent (...) interpretations. In developmental psychology, intent interpretations can be hypothesized to play a central role in the acquisition of emotion, volition, and similar autonomy-related words. The aforementioned experiments originally targeted the acquisition of linguistic negation. However, participants produced other affect- and motivation-related words with high frequencies too and, as a consequence, these entered the robot’s active vocabulary. We will analyze participants’ non-negative emotional and volitional speech and contrast it with participants’ speech in a non-affective baseline scenario. Implications of these findings for robotic language acquisition in particular and artificial intelligence and robotics more generally will also be discussed. (shrink)

While the rule of law is surely a very important good, the familiar discussions found in the literature lead many to conclude that it is either a relatively trivial political ideal, or else a redundant one. What is needed is a new and persuasive defense of the rule of law that properly reflects its great significance for human well being. An important step towards building such an argument is to question a widely-shared but often unnoticed assumption that the rule of (...) law should be understood as a virtue of legal systems. The path is then cleared for a republican argument built on two theses: first, the thought that an ideal society would be one in which no one is the master of anyone else, and second, the thought that our freedom from domination is not natural or pre-institutional. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the historical text as a whole. It does so by conceiving of the historical text as representation - in the way the we may say of a photo or a painting that it represents the person depicted on it. It is argued that representation cannot be properly understood by modelling it on true description. So all the central questions asked since the days of Frege with regard to how the true statement relates to the world must (...) be asked anew, if we wish to understand how a historical representation relates to what it is about. Three claims are made. In the first place, representation is not a two-place but a three-place operator: apart from a representation (say, a book on Napoleon) and what the representation represents (Napoleon himself), a representation also indicates an aspect of represented reality (an aspect of Napoleon). The second claim is that this notion of the aspect is crucial for a proper understanding of (historical) representation. Thirdly, it is argued that traditional theories of reference cannot account for the relationship between a representation and the aspect indicated by it. (shrink)

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

In der Abschlussarbeit seiner Schulzeit "De Theognide Megarensi" beschäftigt sich der 20-jahrige Nietzsche zum ersten Mal mit dem Gegensatz swischen Adel und Volk, was der Schrift als Ausgangspunkts späteren Denkens besonderes Gewicht gibt. Sein Untersuchungstobjekt ist dabei die antike Stadt Megara, in der durch Entmachtung des Adels die erste europäische Demokratie entstand. Nietzsche sieht den Adel als Scharnier zwischen Göttern und Menschen; der Aufstieg des nur auf sienen eigenen Vorteil bedachten Volkes bereitete den Absteig von Megara vor. Der angehende Philosoph (...) finder scheinbar en Megara als historische Realität vor, was er später in leicht veränderter From zu einem Mittelpunkt seiner Philosophie macht: Den Wetrekonflikt zwischen Adelsgesellschaft und Demokratie. Der frühe Text erlaubt es, die Anfange von Nietzsches Philosophieren zu untersuchen und sie einer kritischen Prüfung zun untersehen.The 20 year old Nietzsche studies in his graduation essay "De Theognide Megarensi" for the first time the difference between aristocracy and people. It has an enormous importance as a starting point for his later way of thinking. He examines the city of Megara, where the nobility was being deprived of power by the first European democracy. Nietzsche considers aristocracy as a link between Gods and human beings. The rise of the people, who were just as interested in their own well-being, brought the city down. Young Nietzsche seems to find in Megara a historical proof for what he made later a central part of his philosophy: the conflict of values between aristocracy and democracy. The early text permits to observe more closely Nietzsche's beginning of his philosophy and to give it a critical examination. (shrink)

A groundbreaking exploration of Heidegger and embodiment, from which a radical ethical perspective emerges.

How does tacit knowledge inscribe itself into cultural and social practices? As the established distinction between tacit and explicit or discursive forms of knowledge does not explain this question, the contributions in this volume reconstruct, describe, and analyze the manifold processes by which the tacit reveals itself: They focus, for example, on metaphors, myths, and visualizations as explications of the tacit as well as on processes of embodiment. Taken together, they demonstrate that the tacit does not constitute a single or (...) unified knowledge complex, but has to be understood in its differentiated and fragmented forms. (shrink)