It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds of rule have (...) divergent forms, occupying opposite poles on a spectrum of naturalness. Symbolic rules are composed entirely of primitive juxtapositions of sign types with contents, while iconic rules determine contents entirely by uniform natural relations with sign types. This distinction is marked explicitly in the formal semantics of familiar sign systems, both for atomic first-order representations, like words, pixel colors, and dials, and for complex second-order representations, like sentences, diagrams, and pictures. (shrink)

A semantics of pictorial representation should provide an account of how pictorial signs are associated with the contents they express. Unlike the familiar semantics of spoken languages, this problem has a distinctively spatial cast for depiction. Pictures themselves are two-dimensional artifacts, and their contents take the form of pictorial spaces, perspectival arrangements of objects and properties in three dimensions. A basic challenge is to explain how pictures are associated with the particular pictorial spaces they express. Inspiration here comes from recent (...) proposals that analyze depiction in terms of geometrical projection. In this essay, I will argue that, for a central class of pictures, the projection-based theory of depiction provides the best explanation for how pictures express pictorial spaces, while rival perceptual and resemblance theories fall short. Since the composition of pictorial space is itself the basis for all other aspects of pictorial content, the proposal provides a natural foundation for further pictorial semantics. (shrink)

Effective altruism is a philosophy and a social movement that aims to revolutionise the way we do philanthropy. It encourages individuals to do as much good as possible, typically by contributing money to the best-performing aid and development organisations. Surprisingly, this approach has met with considerable resistance among activists and aid providers who argue that effective altruism is insensitive to justice insofar as it overlooks the value of equality, urgency and rights. They also hold that the movement suffers from methodological (...) bias, reaching mistaken conclusions about how best to act for that reason. Finally, concerns have been raised about the ability of effective altruism to achieve systemic change. This article weighs the force of each objection in turn, and looks at responses to the challenge they pose. (shrink)

Groups are ubiquitous in our lives. But while some of them are highly structured and appear to support a shared intentionality and even a shared agency, others are much less cohesive and do not seem to demand much of their individual members. Queues, for example, seem to be, at a given time, nothing over and above some individuals as they exemplify a certain spatial arrangement. Indeed, the main aim of this paper is to develop the more general thought that at (...) a given time, a group is nothing over and above some individual members as they exemplify a certain complex condition. The general conception of groups that emerges is able to accommodate a variety of constraints on a reasonable answer to the question of what are groups. (shrink)

In light of recent criticisms by Woodward (2017) and Rescorla (2018), we examine the relationship between mechanistic explanation and phenomenological laws. We disambiguate several uses of the phrase “phenomenological law” and show how a mechanistic theory of explanation sorts them into those that are and are not explanatory. We also distinguish the problem of phenomenological laws from arguments about the explanatory power of purely phenomenal models, showing that Woodward and Rescorla conflate these problems. Finally, we argue that the temptation to (...) pit mechanistic and interventionist theories of explanation against one another occludes important and scientifically relevant research questions. (shrink)

I would like to discuss the claim that the resources of plural reference and plural quantification are sufficient for the purpose of paraphrasing all ordinary statements apparently concerned with composite material objects into plural statements concerned exclusively with simples.

Philosophers often explain what could be the case in terms of what is, in fact, the case at one possible world or another. They may differ in what they take possible worlds to be or in their gloss of what is for something to be the case at a possible world. Still, they stand united by the threat of paradox. A family of paradoxes akin to the set-theoretic antinomies seem to allow one to derive a contradiction from apparently plausible principles. (...) Some of them concern the interaction between propositions and worlds, and they appear to afford the means to map classes of propositions into propositions – or, likewise, classes of worlds into worlds – in a one-to-one fashion that leads to contradiction. Yet another family of paradoxes threaten the view that whatever could exist does, in fact, exist, which is in line with modal realism, for example. This article aims to survey and identify the source of each family of paradoxes as well as to outline some responses to them. (shrink)

When viewed as the most comprehensive theory of collections, set theory leaves no room for classes. But the vocabulary of classes, it is argued, provides us with compact and, sometimes, irreplaceable formulations of largecardinal hypotheses that are prominent in much very important and very interesting work in set theory. Fortunately, George Boolos has persuasively argued that plural quantification over the universe of all sets need not commit us to classes. This paper suggests that we retain the vocabulary of classes, but (...) explain that what appears to be singular reference to classes is, in fact, covert plural reference to sets. (shrink)

This paper takes a close look at the thought that mereological relations on material objects mirror, and are mirrored by, parallel mereological relations on their exact locations. This hypothesis is made more precise by means of a battery of principles from which more substantive consequences are derived. Mereological harmony turns out to entail, for example, that atomistic space is an inhospitable environment for material gunk or that Whiteheadian space is not a hospitable environment for unextended material atoms.

This essay argues for a model of pictorial representation which aims to explain the relationship between pictorial content and pictorial accuracy. Focusing on cases where pictures are intended to convey accurate information, the model distinguishes between two fundamental representational relations: on one hand, a picture expresses a content; on the other, it aims at a target scene. Such a picture is accurate when the content it expresses fits the target scene it aims at. In addition, the model follows the traditional (...) division of content into two aspects: singular content specifies the particular individuals which a picture is of, and attributive content specifies the properties and relations which the picture ascribes to those individuals. For a picture to be accurate, both aspects must be matched in the target. I call this the Three-Part Model because it distinguishes between the triad of factors, singular content, attributive content, and target, which together determine pictorial accuracy. Though previous work on depiction has not recognized the distinctive role played by target, I will argue that it is essential in order to make sense of accuracy judgements across a range of central cases. (shrink)

This biography of Emil du Bois-Reymond, the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century, received an Honorable Mention for History of Science, Medicine, and Technology at the 2013 PROSE Awards, was shortlisted for the 2014 John Pickstone Prize (Britain's most prestigious award for the best scholarly book in the history of science), and was named by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as one of the Best Books of 2014. -/- In his own time (1818–1896) du Bois-Reymond (...) grew famous for his groundbreaking research in neuroscience and his provocative addresses on politics and culture. His discovery of the electrical transmission of nerve signals, his innovations in laboratory instrumentation, and his reductionist methodology all helped lay the foundations of modern neuroscience. -/- In addition to describing the pioneering experiments that earned du Bois-Reymond a seat in the Prussian Academy of Sciences and a professorship at the University of Berlin, this book also recounts du Bois-Reymond’s family origins, private life, public service, and lasting influence. In talks that touched on science, philosophy, history, and literature, du Bois-Reymond introduced Darwin to German students (triggering two days of debate in the Prussian parliament), asked on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War whether France had forfeited its right to exist, and proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, heralding the age of doubt. The first modern biography in any language, "Emil du Bois-Reymond" recovers an important chapter in the history of science, the history of ideas, and the history of Germany. (shrink)

Identity is a modally inflexible relation: two objects are necessarily identical or necessarily distinct. However, identity is not alone in this respect. We will look at the relation that one object bears to some objects if and only if it is one of them. In particular, we will consider the credentials of the thesis that no matter what some objects are, an object is necessarily one of them or necessarily not one of them.

Do mereological fusions have their parts necessarily? None of the axioms of non-modal formulations of classical mereology appear to speak directly to this question. And yet a great many philosophers who take the part-whole relation to be governed by classical mereology seem to assume that they do. In addition to this, many philosophers who make allowance for the part-whole relation to obtain merely contingently between a part and a mereological fusion tend to depart from non-modal formulations of classical mereology at (...) least when it comes to the axiom of Unique Fusion, which states that no two different mereological fusions ever fuse exactly the same objects. This is no coincidence. There are reasons of principle why one’s adherence to classical mereology should exert some pull towards the view that mereological fusions have their parts necessarily. There is, however, no direct route from the combination of classical mereology and propositional modal logic to the hypothesis that the part-whole relation obtains necessarily between a part and a mereological fusion. In order to bridge between a modal formulation of classical mereology and the hypothesis that fusions have their parts necessarily, one needs to strengthen the axiom of Unrestricted Fusion in a way that is agreeable to many philosophers on both sides of the debate. (shrink)

We shall introduce in this paper a language whose formulas will be interpreted by games of imperfect information. Such games will be defined in the same way as the games for first-order formulas except that the players do not have complete information of the earlier course of the game. Some simple logical properties of these games will be stated together with the relation of such games of imperfect information to higher-order logic. Finally, a set of applications will be outlined.

To achieve impact, academics need to create personal impact development plans, focused on what and on whom to have an impact and the necessary competencies to do so. Profession and university leaders play a critical role in the successful implementation of such plans.

The prelims comprise: To Kalon as Effective Teleological Order The Visibility of the Fine Pleasure and Praise The Value of the Fine Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes References Further reading.

The study aims at expanding the idea of knowledge beyond the notion of descriptive knowledge. It examines a pluralism of scientific, philosophical, literary, and aesthetic forms of knowledge. This pluralism is not relativistic but complementary. Different ways of knowing enrich each other thus facilitating a more comprehensive and differentiated conception of the world.".

This chapter contains section titled: Beauty and Goodness Patterns of Beautiful Poetry Human Excellence and the Standard of Poetic Beauty Moral Psychology Love of Beauty and Being Just Conclusion.

The standard model of precedential constraint holds that a court is equally free to modify a precedent of its own and a precedent of a superior court—overruling aside, it does not differentiate horizontal and vertical precedents. This paper shows that no model can capture the U.S. doctrine of precedent without making that distinction. A precise model is then developed that does just that. This requires situating precedent cases in a formal representation of a hierarchical legal structure, and adjusting the constraint (...) that a precedent imposes based on the relationship of the precedent court and the instant court. The paper closes with suggestions for further improvements of the model. (shrink)

Während die Bedeutung Freges für die Philosophie der Gegenwart, soweit sich diese der analytischen Philosophie verpflichtet fühlt, allgemeine Anerkennung gefunden hat, ist seine Stellung innerhalb der eigenen Zeit noch weitgehend unaufgeklärt geblieben. So herrscht die Auffassung vor, Frege habe seine Ideen ganz aus sich selbst oder geradezu im Gegensatz zur deutschen philosophischen Tradition seiner Zeit gewonnen. Bei genauerer Textanalyse weisen Freges Schriften dagegen vielfältige Beziehungen zur zeitgenössischen Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Sprachphilosophie und Philosophie der Mathematik auf, so dass bei ihm von einem (...) Bruch mit der kontinentalen Philosophie nicht die Rede sein kann. Weil die historischen Voraussetzungen unberücksichtigt geblieben sind, ist ein unzutreffendes Bild von Freges Einsichten entstanden. Dieses Bild wird durch die Entfaltung des historischen Kontextes korrigiert. Bestimmend ist dabei ein problemorientierter Zugang, der sich systematischer Bewertungen und Weiterführungen nicht enthält. (shrink)

A hugely important book that rediscovers three crucial, but long overlooked themes in German idealism: mythology, madness and laughter.

We show that if a first-order structure${\cal M}$, with universe ℤ, is an expansion of (ℤ,+,0) and a reduct of (ℤ,+,<,0), then${\cal M}$must be interdefinable with (ℤ,+,0) or (ℤ,+,<,0).

This paper looks at the question of what regions of space are possibly exactly occupied by a material object.

The so-called Trolley Problem was first discussed by Philippa Foot in 1967 as a way to test moral intuitions regarding the doctrine of double effect, Kantian principles and utilitarianism. Ever since, a great number of philosophers and psychologists have come up with alternative scenarios to further test intuitions and the relevance of conventional moral doctrines. Given that physicians routinely face moral decisions regarding life and death, the Trolley Problem should be considered of great importance in medical ethics. In this article, (...) five “classic” trolley scenarios are discussed: the driver diverting the trolley, a bystander pulling a lever to divert the trolley, a fat man being thrown from a bridge to stop the trolley, a bystander pulling a lever to divert a trolley so that a fat man may be run over, and a bystander pulling a lever so that a fat man falls off from a bridge to stop the trolley. As these scenarios are discussed, relevant moral differences amongst them are addressed, and some of the applications in medical ethics are discussed. The article concludes that Trolley scenarios are not the ultimate criterion to make ethical decisions in difficult ethical challenges in medicine cases but they do serve as an initial intuitive guide. (shrink)

According to Frank Jackson’s famous knowledge argument, Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist raised in a black and white room and bestowed with complete physical knowledge, cannot know certain truths about phenomenal experience. This claim about knowledge, in turn, implies that physicalism is false. I argue that the knowledge argument founders on a dilemma. Either (i) Mary cannot know the relevant experiential truths because of trivial obstacles that have no bearing on the truth of physicalism or (ii) once the obstacles have been (...) removed, Mary can know the relevant truths. If we give Mary the epistemological capabilities necessary to draw metaphysical conclusions about physicalism, she will, while trapped in the black and white room, be able to know every truth about phenomenal experience. (shrink)

In NIP theories, generically stable Keisler measures can be characterized in several ways. We analyze these various forms of “generic stability” in arbitrary theories. Among other things, we show that the standard definition of generic stability for types coincides with the notion of a frequency interpretation measure. We also give combinatorial examples of types in NSOP theories that are finitely approximated but not generically stable, as well as ϕ-types in simple theories that are definable and finitely satisfiable in a small (...) model, but not finitely approximated. Our proofs demonstrate interesting connections to classical results from Ramsey theory for finite graphs and hypergraphs. (shrink)

Humans, animals, and the environment face a universal crisis: antimicrobial resistance. Addressing AR and its multi-disciplinary causes across many sectors including in human and veterinary medicine remains underdeveloped. One barrier to AR efforts is an inconsistent process to incorporate the plenitude of stakeholders about what AR is and how to stifle its development and spread—especially stakeholders from the animal agriculture sector, one of the largest purchasers of antimicrobial drugs. In 2019, The Wellcome Trust released Reframing Resistance: How to communicate about (...) antimicrobial resistance effectively, which proposed the need to establish a consistent and harmonized messaging effort that describes the AR crisis and its global implications for health and wellbeing across all stakeholders. Yet, Reframing Resistance does not specifically engage the animal agriculture community. This study investigates the gap between two principles recommended by Reframing Resistance and animal agriculture stakeholders. For this analysis, the research group conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of United States animal agriculture stakeholders. Participants reported attitudes, beliefs, and practices about a variety of issues, including how they defined AR and what entities the AR crisis impacts most. Exploration of Reframing Resistance’s Principle 2, “explain the fundamentals succinctly” and Principle 3, “emphasis that this is universal issue; it can affect anyone, including you” reveals disagreement in both the fundamentals of AR and consensus of “who” the AR crisis impacts. Principle 2 may do better to acknowledge that animal agriculture stakeholders espouse a complex array of perspectives that cannot be summed up in a single perspective or principle. As a primary tool to combat AR, behavior change must be accomplished first through outreach to stakeholder groups and understanding their perspectives. (shrink)

It is shown how frege's problematic connection between truth-Value and "bedeutung" (of a sentence) becomes more plausible when set against the background of german language and philosophy, Especially by comparing frege's position with the value-Theoretical school of neo-Kantianism (w windelband).

We introduce several senses of the principle ofcompositionality. We illustrate the difference between them with thehelp of some recent results obtained by Cameron and Hodges oncompositional semantics for languages of imperfect information.

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)

While much has been written on phronesis, there is a dearth of empirical work on the how the concept can be developed and implemented in practice, particularly in an educational setting. To address this problem, characteristics of phronesis were identified through a review of current literature and an examination of related themes from a special issue of the Philosophy of Management Journal on the philosophy of innovation. The implementation of the concept was investigated using an illustrative study of ongoing work (...) aimed at embedding phronesis in an innovation educational module. The study will contribute to the nascent debate by providing evidence of embedding Aristotle’s phronesis in the curriculum of future managers, in this case Engineering and Business students, working in cross-functional teams. A schema is proposed, based on concepts distilled from the literature and the illustrative study, to examine whether an educational project cultivates phronesis among the students. (shrink)

David Kaplan observed in Kaplan that the principle \\) cannot be verified at a world in a standard possible worlds model for a quantified bimodal propositional language. This raises a puzzle for certain interpretations of the operator Q: it seems that some proposition p is such that is not possible to query p, and p alone. On the other hand, Arthur Prior had observed in Prior that on pain of contradiction, ∀p is Q only if one true proposition is Q (...) and one false proposition is Q. The two observations are related: ∀p is elusive in that it is not possible for the proposition to be uniquely Q. Kaplan based his model-theoretic observation on Cantor’s theorem, but there is a less well-known link between this simple set-theoretic observation and Prior’s remark. We generalize the link to develop a heuristic designed to move from Cantor’s theorem to the observation that a variety of sentences of the bimodal language express propositions that cannot be Q uniquely. We highlight the analogy between some of these results and some set-theoretic antinomies and suggest that the phenomenon is richer than one may have anticipated. (shrink)

This paper draws a distinction between the existential quantifier and the symbol ‘∃’ used to express it, on the one hand, and existence and ‘exists’, on the other. It argues that some popular arguments in metaphysics, including arguments against vague existence and arguments against deflationary metaontology (which views ontological disputes as lacking substance), are guilty of fudging this distinction. The paper draws some lessons for metaphysical debate about existence and highlights some heretofore ignored and attractive positions in logical space.

We present two studies investigating the impact of causal perceptions and the moral emotions of anger, shame, and guilt on the justification of deviant workplace behavior. Study 1 tests our conceptual framework using a sample of undergraduate business students; Study 2 examines a population of practicing physicians. Results varied significantly between the two samples, suggesting that individual and contextual factors play an important role in shaping the perceptual and emotional processes by which individuals form reactions to undesirable affective workplace events. (...) Implications of these findings for the study of ethics, emotions, and attributions, as well as for promoting ethical behavior, are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relation between modern transhumanism and Nietzsche’s philosophy of the superhuman. Following Loeb, I argue that transhumanists cannot claim affinity to Nietzsche’s philosophy until they incorporate the doctrine of eternal recurrence to their project of technological enhancement. This doctrine liberates us from resentment against time by teaching us reconciliation with time and something higher than all reconciliation. Unlike Loeb, however, I claim that this “something higher” is not a new skill (prospective memory), but rather a (...) love for the past in the form of loving that aspect of it that is still with us, namely, the will to power itself, which is the engine of all life. Love of the past is thus equivalent to love of life. Since human beings are conscious incarnations of the will to power, in our case, love of life manifests itself as love of our humanity or love for that aspect of ourselves that connects us to each other, for we recognize it to be the same in all of us. Thus, learning this kind of love enables us to joyfully coordinate our wills in the pursuit of Zarathustra’s superhuman ideal without turning it into a destructive mockery of itself. While learning this kind of love would facilitate a joyful version of transhumanism, I conclude by suggesting that it is unlikely to be achieved through technological interventions of the sort envisioned by transhumanists. Instead, it requires the kind of participatory pedagogical program that Nietzsche thought his Zarathustra would fulfill. (shrink)

In [12], Ernst Zermelo described a succession of models for the axioms of set theory as initial segments of a cumulative hierarchy of levelsUαVα. The recursive definition of theVα's is:Thus, a little reflection on the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory shows thatVω, the first transfinite level of the hierarchy, is a model of all the axioms ofZFwith the exception of the axiom of infinity. And, in general, one finds that ifκis a strongly inaccessible ordinal, thenVκis a model of all of (...) the axioms ofZF. Doubtless, when cast as a first-order theory,ZFdoes not characterize the structures 〈Vκ,∈∩〉 forκa strongly inaccessible ordinal, by the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. Still, one of the main achievements of [12] consisted in establishing that a characterization of these models can be attained when one ventures into second-order logic. For let second-orderZFbe, as usual, the theory that results fromZFwhen the axiom schema of replacement is replaced by its second-order universal closure. Then, it is a remarkable result due to Zermelo that second-orderZFcan only be satisfied in models of the form 〈Vκ,∈∩〉 forκa strongly inaccessible ordinal. (shrink)

In recent years, it has been acknowledged increasingly that the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy is one of complementarity rather than opposition, as previously often assumed. In this essay I will argue that, in fact, early analytic philosophy has its roots in the tradition of continental philosophy. The essay will focus on Hermann Lotze's influence on Frege and on Frege's relationship to the Neo‐Kantians Otto Liebmann and Wilhelm Windelband. It will provide new evidence for the claim that Frege's philosophy (...) should be seen as belonging to the tradition of Neo‐Kantianism and, along the way, exhibit the continental roots of Frege's context principle. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the bad company problem as an instance of a more general difficulty in the philosophy of mathematics. The paper focuses on the prospects of stability as a necessary condition on acceptability. However, the conclusion of the paper is largely negative. As a solution to the bad company problem, stability would undermine the prospects of a neo-Fregean foundation for set theory, and, as a solution to the more general difficulty, it would impose an unreasonable constraint on (...) mathematical practice. (shrink)

In this paper we show that first-order languages extended with partially ordered connectives and partially ordered quantifiers define, under a certain interpretation, their own truth-predicate. The interpretation in question is in terms of games of imperfect information. This result is compared with those of Kripke and Feferman.