There seems to be a "what it is like" to the experience of the flow of time in any conscious activity of ours. In this paper, I argue that the feeling that time passes should be understood as a phenomenal modifier of our mental life, in roughly the same way as the blurred or vivid nature of a visual experience can be seen as an element of the experience that modifies the way it feels, without representing the world as being (...) in a certain way. I defend my positions against the deflationary view according to which the passing of time does not have a specific phenomenal character, and the representationalist view according to which the feeling of time passing is a feature of the representational content of our experience, like being red or yellow. (shrink)

In this paper, we articulate a version of non-standard A-theory—which we call Flow Fragmentalism—in relation to its take on the issue of supervenience of truth on being. According to the Truth Supervenes on Being (TSB) Principle, the truth of past- and future-tensed propositions supervenes, respectively, on past and future facts. Since the standard presentist denies the existence of past and future entities and facts concerning them that do not obtain in the present, she seems to lack the resources to accept (...) both past and future-tensed truths and the TSB Principle. Contrariwise, positions in philosophy of time that accept an eternalist ontology (e.g., B-theory, moving spotlight, and Fine’s and Lipman’s versions of fragmentalism) allow for a “direct” supervenience base for past- and future-tensed truths. We argue that Flow Fragmentalism constitutes a middle ground, which retains most of the advantages of both views, and allows us to articulate a novel account of the passage of time. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that the adoption of an unrestricted principle of bivalence is compatible with a metaphysics that (i) denies that the future is real, (ii) adopts nomological indeterminism, and (iii) exploits a branching structure to provide a semantics for future contingent claims. To this end, we elaborate what we call Flow Fragmentalism, a view inspired by Kit Fine (2005)’s non-standard tense realism, according to which reality is divided up into maximally coherent collections of tensed (...) facts. In this way, we show how to reconcile a genuinely A-theoretic branching-time model with the idea that there is a branch corresponding to the thin red line, that is, the branch that will turn out to be the actual future history of the world. (shrink)

Der Band verzeichnet erstmals sämtliche Werke und Noten aus Nietzsches persönlicher Bibliothek (BN) bis Anfang Januar 1889. Er listet sowohl die Bestände der Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek als auch die des Goethe- und Schiller-Archivs in Weimar auf. Die kritische Analyse anderer Bestandslisten ermittelte zudem zahlreiche heute nicht mehr vorhandene Titel. Ferner wurden sämtliche Bücherrechnungen und -quittungen von Buchhändlern und Buchbindern ausgewertet, die im Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv aufbewahrt werden. Neben den ca. 2.200 Titeln aus Nietzsches rekonstruierter Bibliothek enthält der Band auch (...) ein Verzeichnis sämtlicher 'Lesespuren' Nietzsches (ca. 20.000), z.B. Anmerkungen, Unterstreichungen und Eselsohren. Ergänzt durch zahlreiche Faksimile-Reproduktionen sowie durch philosophische, historische und bibliographische Einführungen, stellt der Band ein unverzichtbares Arbeitsinstrument jeder zukünftigen Nietzsche-Forschung dar. (shrink)

Ostrich presentists maintain that we can use all the expressive resources of the tensed language to provide an explanation of why true claims about the past are true, without thereby paying any price in terms of ontology or basic ideology. I clarify the position by making a distinction between three kinds of explanation, which has general interest and applicability. I then criticize the ostrich position because it requires an unconstrained version of the third form of explanation, which is out of (...) place in metaphysics. (shrink)

To a greater extent than in other technical domains, research and progress in Artificial Intelligence has always been entwined with the fictional. Its language echoes strongly with other forms of cultural narratives, such as fairytales, myth and religion. In this essay we present varied examples that illustrate how these analogies have guided not only readings of the AI enterprise by commentators outside the community but also inspired AI researchers themselves. Owing to their influence, we pay particular attention to the similarities (...) between religious language and the way in which the potential advent of greater than human intelligence is presented contemporarily. We then move on to the role that fiction, science fiction most of all, has historically played and is still playing in the discussion of AI by influencing researchers and the public, shifting the weights of different scenarios in our collectively perceived probability space. We sum up by arguing that the lore surrounding AI research, ancient and modern, points to the ancestral and shared human motivations that drive researchers in their pursuit and fascinate humanity at large. These points of narrative entanglement where AI meets the wider culture should serve to amplify the call to engage ourselves with the discussion of the potential destination of this technology. (shrink)

Opponents of presentism have often argued that the presentist has difficulty in accounting for what makes true past-tensed propositions true in a way that is compatible with her metaphysical view of time and reality. The problem is quite general and concerns not only strong truth-maker principles, but also the requirement that truth be grounded in reality. In order to meet the challenge, presentists have proposed many peculiar present aspects of the world as grounds for truths concerning the past, such as (...) uninstantiated haecceities, Meinongian non-existents, ersatz times, and dispositional and distributional properties. The main problem with all such solutions is that any explanation of what grounds a TptP that involves the past is eo ipso a better explanation than any that involves only the present. Thus, the quest for an account of grounding for TptP that is compatible with the presentist ontology and ideology is doomed to be explanatorily deficient with respect to eternalism. In a recent article, Ben Caplan and David Sanson have claimed that presentists should change their strategy and, rather than seeking for exotic grounds for TptP, should adopt a more liberal view of explanation. That is, they should allow themselves to resort to “past directed” explanations, even if they do not accept the past in their ontology and ideology. I argue that such a proposal is not compatible with the tenet that there is a substantial distinction between the ideology of such a version of presentism and that of eternalism. Therefore, the presentist cannot endorse such “deflationist” explanations as an easy way out to the problem of the grounding of TptP. (shrink)

Sceptics about substantial disputes in ontology often argue that when two philosophers seem to disagree on a quantified claim, they are actually equivocating on the notion of existence that they are using. When temporal elements play a central role, as in the debate between presentists and eternalists, the hypothesis of an equivocation with respect to existence acquires more plausibility. However, the anti-sceptic can still argue that this hypothesis is unjustified.

As far as our experience goes, we live in a dynamic present. Those two phenomenal features of experience—presentness and dynamism—are obviously connected. However, how they are connected is not obvious at all. In this paper, I criticise the view according to which the former can explain the latter, which I call sophisticated representationalism. My criticism will be based on an ambiguity in the notion of tense found in the philosophical literature, that between the perspectival understanding and the dynamic understanding of (...) tenses. The distinction is not just of independent interest, but it has a role in providing indirect evidence for the claim that the feeling of passage of time should be understood in non-representationalist terms. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a problem for the realist with respect to the institutional sphere, and suggest a solution. Roughly, the problem lies in a contradiction that arises as soon as institutional contexts are allowed to influence the institutional profile of objects and events not only in the present, but also in the past. If such “retroactive enactments” are effective, in order to avoid contradiction the realist seems to have to accept the unpleasant conclusion that institutions can create a (...) past that has never been present. I will defend a solution which involves a distinction between temporal and atemporal types of institutional kinds that has, I maintain, independent interest. (shrink)

Many philosophers regard collective behavior and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviors; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this article, I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterized by the tendency to defer to elements that are external to the (...) content of collective intentions—such as laws, declarations, and contracts. According to institutional externalism, those elements are the grounds of institutional statutes, rights, and duties. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a semantic analysis of Lewis' counterfactuals. By exploiting the structural properties of the recently introduced boolean algebras of conditionals, we show that counterfactuals can be expressed as formal combinations of a conditional object and a normal necessity modal operator. Specifically, we introduce a class of algebras that serve as modal expansions of boolean algebras of conditionals, together with their dual relational structures. Moreover, we show that Lewis' semantics based on sphere models can be reconstructed in (...) this framework. As a consequence, we establish the soundness and completeness of a slightly stronger variant of Lewis' logic for counterfactuals with respect to our algebraic models. In the second part of the paper, we present a novel approach to the probability of counterfactuals showing that it aligns with the uncertainty degree assigned by a belief function, as per Dempster-Shafer theory, to its associated conditional formula. Furthermore, we characterize the probability of a counterfactual in terms of Gärdenfors' imaging rule for the probabilistic update. (shrink)

I criticize Lockwood’s solution to the “paradoxes” of time travel, thus endorsing Lewis’s more conservative position. Lockwood argues that only in the context of a 5D space-time-actuality manifold is the possibility of time travel compatible with the Autonomy Principle (according to which global constraints cannot override what is physically possible locally). I argue that shifting from 4D space-time to 5D space-time-actuality does not change the situation with respect to the Autonomy Principle, since the shift does not allow us to have (...) a coincidence-free local dynamical theory. (shrink)

The analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs has recently aroused interest among philosophers of language. A puzzling element of it is its erratic behaviour in embeddings, for instance negation or belief reports. The derogatory aspect seems sometimes to “scope out” from the embedding to the context of utterance, while at other times it seems to interact with the linguistic constructions in which the slur is implanted. I argue that slurs force us to maintain a kind of semantic indeterminacy which, (...) to my knowledge, has passed largely unnoticed in philosophy of language. (shrink)

In their manuscript, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) argue that controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) is compatible with the dead donor rule (DDR) by describing the DDR and the incor...

I present a new problem for the tense realist concerning the evaluation of cross-temporal claims, such as ‘John is now taller than Michael was in 1984’. Time can play two different roles in the evaluation of an utterance of a sentence: either as an element that completes the content expressed by the utterance (the completion role), or as part of the circumstances against which the content is evaluated (the evaluation role). It is this latter role that time plays in the (...) realist view of tenses. I argue that if the content of a cross-temporal sentence is taken at face value (as an ascription of a crosstemporally instantiated relation), time does not play the evaluation role. Therefore, the world of the tense realist seems to leave no room for cross-temporality. (shrink)

The logico-algebraic study of Lewis's hierarchy of variably strict conditional logics has been essentially unexplored, hindering our understanding of their mathematical foundations, and the connections with other logical systems. This work aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive logico-algebraic analysis of Lewis's logics. We begin by introducing novel finite axiomatizations for varying strengths of Lewis's logics, distinguishing between global and local consequence relations on Lewisian sphere models. We then demonstrate that the global consequence relation is strongly algebraizable in (...) terms of a specific class of Boolean algebras with a binary operator representing the counterfactual implication; in contrast, we show that the local consequence relation is generally not algebraizable, although it can be characterized as the degree-preserving logic over the same algebraic models. Further, we delve into the algebraic semantics of Lewis's logics, developing two dual equivalences with respect to particular topological spaces. In more details, we show a duality with respect to the topological version of Lewis's sphere models, and also with respect to Stone spaces with a selection function; using the latter, we demonstrate the strong completeness of Lewis's logics with respect to sphere models. Finally, we draw some considerations concerning the limit assumption over sphere models. (shrink)

Space and time are two obvious candidates as dimensions of reality. Yet, are they the only two dimensions of reality? Famously, David Lewis maintained the doctrine of.

Torrengo, Giuliano_Propositions and the Metaphysics of Time.

Many philosophers take for granted that there is a strong pre‐theoretical intuition that the future is open and that it is worth trying to make sense of that intuition in theoretical terms. In this paper, I give a characterisation of the ordinary intuition in terms of three elements: our sense of agency, the difference in normativity between memories and expectations and naïve understanding of causality. Those intuitions allow us to pin down certain desiderata that an account of openness should respect. (...) Firstly, the fact that the future is open is not merely due to our epistemic situation (the fact that we do not know what the future will bring). Secondly, openness is not merely a matter of nomological indeterminism; even if indeterminism is part of what makes the future open, it cannot be the end of the story. Thirdly, openness requires more than ‘modal flexibility’ (i.e. the fact that the future could be different from what actually will be). I provide a minimal theory of openness, which respects those desiderata and which is based on the semantic notion of unsettledness and the metaphysical notion of indeterminacy. Roughly, the future is open if future‐tensed claims concerning contingent matters are such that their truth value is presently unsettled, and they are semantically unsettled because the future is metaphysically indeterminate. I then argue that this theory is compatible with what I call the closed future view. According to the latter, there is only one way in which things will go, although, given indeterminism, it is unsettled which way it is. I then consider an objection to my compatibility claim: if the open future claim is metaphysically substantive, there should be a way to differentiate it from the closed future scenario. I consider whether a friend of openness could rely on a dynamic metaphysics of time (such as presentism, or the growing block view) in order to differentiate their position from the closed future scenario. I argue that the appeal to a dynamic universe is ineffective. (shrink)

According to Buddhist soteriology, fear is a direct cause of suffering and one of the main obstacles in the path to liberation. Pāli Suttas and Abhidhamma present a number of sophisticated strategies to deal with fear and to overcome it. Nevertheless, in the Nikāyas and in the Abhidhamma there are also consistent instructions about implementing fear in meditative practices and considering it as a valuable ally in the pursuit of nibbāna By means of a lexicographical study of selected passages and (...) especially of two compounds (bhayūparata and abhayūparata), this paper demonstrates that fear may have the crucial function of stimulating the meditator: through reiterated admonishments and reflections that evoke a feeling of dread, the meditator gets weary of unwholesome patterns and is prompted to put effort in his/her own practice. Evidence proves that this set of instructions is ultimately consistent with the several teachings that emphasize the importance of counteracting fear and fostering fearlessness, which is described as a quality of liberation as well as an attitude to be cultivated. In fact, a close analysis of the dynamics involved in bhaya (fear) and abhaya (fearlessness) as graphically depicted in the Nikāyas and in the Abhidhamma texts, reveals that stirring fear and letting go of fear are two essential steps of the same process. (shrink)

Entrevista realizada por Facundo Giuliano e Daiana Neil a Slavoj Žižek.

Active labor-market policies have developed significantly over the past two decades across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this article is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It starts by reviewing existing scholarship concerning political, institutional, and ideational determinants of ALMPs. It then argues that ALMP is too broad a category to be used without further specification, and it develops a typology (...) of four different types of ALMPs: incentive reinforcement, employment assistance, occupation, and human capital investment. These are discussed and examined through ALMP expenditure profiles in selected countries. The article uses this typology to analyze ALMP trajectories in six Western European countries and shows that the role of this instrument changes dramatically over time. It concludes that there is little regularity in the political determinants of ALMPs. In contrast, it finds strong institutional and ideational effects, nested in the interaction between the changing economic context and existing labor-market policies. (shrink)

This article analyses Valla’s historiographical stance in the light of his dialectical assumptions about possibility, verisimilitude, and truth. I argue that, at variance with most humanists, Valla believed that historical truth should satisfy the requirements of logical necessity, being therefore incompatible with verisimilar reconstructions of past events. However, Valla also realized that a critical method of assessment grounded in verisimilitude was indispensable to the analysis of doubtful accounts and traditions. In order to explore these matters, Valla developed a genre distinct (...) from history proper and closer to the forensic, inquisitorial tradition. While history had to deal with necessary truths, the aim of ‘historical inquisitio’ was to draw probable conclusions from pieces of conjectural evidence. According to Valla’s dialectical principles, these conclusions were not absolutely true but could be considered true thanks to the notion of intellectual acumen, which allowed Valla to take a leap from the field of possibility or verisimilitude to that of truth and necessity. (shrink)

This review-essay explores approaches to the thought of the creative Soviet Marxist thinker Evald Ilyenkov as discussed in a recent book edited by Alex Levant and Vesa Oittinen, Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism. The book consists of a series of commentaries and contextual essays which centre on the translated text of Ilyenkov’s Dialectics of the Ideal. The approach the authors take to Ilyenkov’s work differs from previous ones of exploring the totality of Ilyenkov’s thought or (...) eclectic aspects of it. By commenting on and contextualising Ilyenkov’s major text on the Ideal they locate the contribution of Ilyenkov in dialogue with traditions of classical European philosophy, and Western and Soviet Marxism, and in his importance to contemporary issues in philosophy and other disciplines. A deep analysis of Ilyenkov’s dense and often complex text is also given. By doing so the authors highlight the immense contribution of Ilyenkov to contemporary thought. (shrink)

The commitment of transplant physicians to protect the physical and psychological health of potential donors is fundamental to the process of living donor organ transplantation. It is appropriate that strict regulations to govern an individual’s decision to donate have been developed. Some may argue that adherence to such regulations creates a doctor-patient relationship that is rooted in paternalism, which is in drastic contrast with a doctor-patient relationship that is rooted in patients’ autonomy, characteristic of most other operative interventions.In this article (...) we analyze the similarities between cosmetic plastic surgery and living donor surgery as examples of surgeries governed by different ethical principles. It is interesting that, while the prevailing ethical approach in living donor surgery is based on paternalism, the ethical principle guiding cosmetic surgery is respect for patients’ autonomy. The purpose of this article is not to criticize either practice, but to suggest that, given the similarities between the two procedures, both operative interventions should be guided by the same ethical principle: a respect for patients’ autonomy. We further suggest that if living organ donation valued donors’ autonomy as much as cosmetic plastic surgery does, we might witness a wider acceptance of and increase in living organ donation. (shrink)

S. 76-92: "Die Kraft der 'Krise': Renan, Burckhardt und Nietzsche.

Causal Modeling Semantics (CMS, e.g., Galles and Pearl 1998; Pearl 2000; Halpern 2000) is a powerful framework for evaluating counterfactuals whose antecedent is a conjunction of atomic formulas. We extend CMS to an evaluation of the probability of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents, and more generally, to counterfactuals whose antecedent is an arbitrary Boolean combination of atomic formulas. Our main idea is to assign a probability to a counterfactual (A ∨ B) € C at a causal model M as a weighted (...) average of the probability of C in those submodels that truthmake A ∨ B (Briggs 2012; Fine 2016, 2017). The weights of the submodels are given by the inverse distance to the original model M, based on a distance metric proposed by Eva, Stern, and Hartmann (2019). Apart from solving a major problem in the epistemology of counterfactuals, our paper shows how work in semantics, causal inference and formal epistemology can be fruitfully combined. (shrink)

The Vimokkhakathā, a section of the Paṭisambhidāmagga, expounds the longest list of vimokkhas found in Pali; it also finely elaborates on the notion of vimokkha through a crucial shift in Theravāda exegesis. In order to explore the meaning and nuances of vimokkha in the Paṭisambhidāmagga, this article focuses on its classifications and definitions, discussing their relation to the standard lists found in the Nikāyas. This examination highlights a multifaceted soteriology that supplies meditative practice with a consistent wholesome attitude; I will (...) also demonstrate how various microstructure-levels affect the macrostructure of the Paṭisambhidāmagga, which in turn draws upon the wider structure of the Tipiṭaka. In addition, the commentary to the enunciation of the releases, translated in Appendix, clarifies the structure of the vimokkhas, and their relationship with the whole Paṭisambhidāmagga. (shrink)

This edited collection of eight original essays pursues the aim of bringing the spotlight back on Anton Marty. It does so by having leading figures in the contemporary debate confront themselves with Marty’s most significative contributions, which span from philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and ontology to meta-metaphysics and meta-philosophy. -/- The book is divided in three parts. The first part is dedicated to themes in philosophy of language, which were at the centre of Marty’s philosophical thinking throughout his (...) life. The second part focuses on the problem of the objectivity and phenomenology of time and space, upon which Marty was working in the final years of his life. The final part turns to Marty’s meta-metaphysical and meta-philosophical considerations. The intended audience of this book are primarily scholars and students interested in the relevant contemporary debates, as well as scholars working on the Austrian tradition. (shrink)

In the contemporary landscape about temporal experience, debates concerning the “hard question” of the experience of the flow—as opposed to debates concerning more qualitative aspects of temporality, such as change, movement, succession and duration—are gaining more and more attention. The overall dialectics can be thought of in terms of a debate between the realists (who take the phenomenology of the flow of time seriously, and propose various account of it) and deflationists (who take our description of temporal phenomenology as “flowy” (...) to be spurious, and propose various explanation of this spuriousness). In this paper we look inside the realist side. We distinguish primitivist realism, according to which the feeling of time flowing is an irreducible sui generis phenomenology, and various forms of reductionist realism, according to which the experience of the flow is ultimately explainable in terms of a more basic phenomenology. We present reasons to be sceptical against the various reductionist proposals. The conclusion is thus disjunctive: either primitivism or deflationism is the correct account of the purported experience of the flow of time. (shrink)

Even hard-core metaphysicians should admit that certain disputesmay indeed turn out not tobe substantive. The debate between presentism and eternalism has recently come undersceptical attack. The aim of the paper is to argue that a certain approach to presentism is indeedin danger of succumbing to the sceptic, and thus a no-go for the presentist.

The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, causation, (...) the A-theoretic interpretation of special relativity and time travel. The resulting picture, they argue, conveys the potential of a radically new understanding of time. (shrink)

What is the ontological status of the “objects” we find in the social realm, such as Universities, marriages, fines, meetings, and the like? In this paper I present three alternative answers to this question. Sanguine realism, according to which the existence and identity of social objects is independent from the existence and intentions of subjects. Moderate realism, according to which the identity of social objects is at least in part independent from that of the subjects, but their existence is not. (...) And anti-realism, according to which talk of social objects is a mere façon de parler. I focus on moderate realism, and argue that the fundamental constrain on the existence and identity of social objects is their dependence upon documents and inscriptions. (shrink)

In this paper I present a problem for the conventionalist regarding temporal metrics, and I defend an objectivist position on the ground of its explanatory force. Roughly, the conventionalist has it that there is no fact of the matter with respect to the truth or falsity of judgments of the kind “event e1 lasted as long as event e2”, while the objectivist thinks that they are grounded in objective features of space-time. I argue that, by positing grounds for judgments of (...) relative temporal length, the objectivist gains an explanatory force that the conventionalist position lacks. (shrink)

Las llamadas manāqib (sg. manqaba) son un género literario bastante extendido en los últimos siglos. Algunas de estas manāqib han sido publicadas en ediciones críticas, y su circulación entre los estudiosos suele referirse a la historia norteafricana o a ciertos aspectos de la religiosidad popular. Sin embargo, este tipo de obras ha recibido una atención muy limitada desde el punto de vista lingüístico, a pesar de que presentan características propias de las variedades habladas del árabe. Por lo tanto, las manāqib (...) constituyen una de las pocas fuentes que pueden utilizarse para analizar el árabe hablado y escrito en el pasado. El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la lengua de la obra titulada Rawḍat al-azhār wa-munyat al-sādāt al-abrār fī manāqib Sīdī ʿAbd al-Salām al-Asmar, una colección de manāqib relacionadas con el santo sufí libio ʿAbd al-Salām al-Asmar de la ciudad de Zlīten (siglo XV), escrita por Karīm al-Dīn al-Baramūnī al-Miṣrātī. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to an idea to be found in popularizations of time travel, one cannot more easily multiply oneself by taking younger versions of oneself back in time than by travelling back in time on one’s own. The reason is that the suggested multiplication of the traveller is, from a global perspective, only apparent.

Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?