It is essential for social robots to fit in the human society. In order to facilitate this process we propose to use the family dog’s social behaviour shown towards humans as an inspiration. In this study we explored dogs’ low level social monitoring in dog-human interactions and extracted individually consistent and context dependent behaviours in simple everyday social scenarios. We found that proximity seeking and tail wagging were most individually distinctive in dogs, while activity, orientation towards the owner, and exploration (...) were dependent on the context and/or the activity of the owner. The functional analogues of these dog behaviours can be implemented in social robots of different embodiments in order to make them acceptable and more believable for humans. Keywords: dog-owner interaction; social robotics; low-level social monitoring; greeting behaviour; individually distinctive behaviours. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to reconstruct David Hume's use of the label ?experimental? to characterise his method in the Treatise. Although its meaning may strike the present-day reader as unusual, such a reconstruction is possible from the background of eighteenth-century practices and concepts of natural inquiry. As I argue, Hume's inquiries into human nature are experimental not primarily because of the way the empirical data he uses are produced, but because of the way those data are theoretically processed. He (...) seems to follow a method of analysis and synthesis quite similar to the one advertised in Newton's Opticks, which profoundly influenced eighteenth-century natural and moral philosophy. This method brings him much closer to the methods of qualitative, chemical investigations than to mechanical approaches to both nature and human nature. (shrink)

For Jerry Fodor, Hume’sTreatise of Human Natureis “the foundational document of cognitive science” whose significance transcends mere historical interest: it is a source of theoretical inspiration in cognitive psychology. Here I am going to argue that those reading Hume along Fodor’s lines rely on a problematic, albeit inspiring, construction of Hume’s science of mind. My strategy in this paper is to contrast Fodor’s understanding of the Humean mind (consonant with the widely received view of Hume in both cognitive science and (...) much of Hume scholarship) with an alternative understanding that I propose. I thereby intend to show that the received view of Hume’s science of mind can be fruitfully revised while critically engaging with Fodor’s contemporary appropriation. Consequently, I use this occasion to put forward a rather unorthodox interpretation of Hume’s theory in dialogue with Fodor as my guide. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct the central concept of the young Lukács’s and Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, as they present it in their writings in the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that this concept, namely Weltanschauung, is used to refer to some conceptually unstructured totality of feelings, which they take to be a condition of possibility of intellectual production, and this understanding is contrasted to an alternative construal of the term that presents it as logically structured, quasi-theoretical (...) background knowledge. This concept has Kantian reminiscences: it is a condition of possibility of intellectual production in general. The young Mannheim and Lukács rely on 'Weltanschauung' so understood as a phenomenon mediating between the facts of society and individual intellectual production and reception: it is seen as being conditioned by sociological facts and therefore as a historical and sociological category through which, and therefore indirectly, society enters into intellectual production. (shrink)

This chapter introduces several versions of mental fictionalism, along with the main lines of objection and reply. It begins by considering the debate between eliminative materialism (“eliminativism”) versus realism about mental states as conceived in “folk psychology” (i.e., beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). Mental fictionalism offers a way to transcend the debate by allowing talk of mental states without a commitment to realism. The idea is to treat folk psychology as a “story” and three different elaborations of this are reviewed. First, (...) prefix semantics paraphrases a sentence like ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’ as ‘According to folk psychology, Biden believes that Trump lost’, whereby ontological commitment to belief is avoided. Similarly, pretense theory suggests that we do not assert ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’, but only pretend to assert it. Third, affective theory proposes that such discourse is used in a metaphorical way to understand a person’s affective and dispositional states vis-a-vis the community. The main objections concern whether folk psychology has the features of storytelling, and whether mental fictionalism ends up being self-refuting. The chapter also recaps a less discussed fictionalist view about “qualia” or phenomenal states, and closes by summarizing the papers contained in the volume. (shrink)

Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. To understand ways of thinking, to understand patterns of whatever is real, to recognize what is possible and to reject the nonsensical and the impossible is to comprehend the categories. This was a in thought and in fact, recurring motive of European thought from the earliest self-aware beginnings, and Tamas knows that history well, as his critical respect (...) demonstrates. Ancient, medieval, and modern thinkers appear in this book, set forth in their own words; and likewise we see that Tamas has built upon the historians and commentators, upon the pioneering historical investigation of the categories by Trendelenburg a century ago and by Bochenski in our days. Tamas has two principal goals here: to investigate the logic, which is to say the structure and the relations, of the philosophical categories; and to set forth the logic of thought which may then be based upon the critically established system of categories obtained by that investigation. Ancillary but of striking value is his style of historical relevance which enables the reader to engage in a discussion that is both analytically sharp and developmentally insightful. Furthermore, Tamas draws upon his contem porary colleagues with similar critical respect: Lukasiewicz, Quine, Patzig, Menne, Tavanets and others. (shrink)

In his famous clarification Kant claimed that philosophy of Fichte is „nothing more or less than mere logic". In contrast with this interpretation Fichte from the beginning agreed with Kant and Reinhold on the fact that philosophy and logic are different from each other moreover the classical principles of logic can not be the principles of philosophy as well. However according to Fichte Reinhold did not succeed in explaining the relationship between philosophy and logic sufficiently. Hence Fichte proceeding from the (...) detailed critique of Reinhold laid in Review of Aenesidemus gives a new concept for the principles of both logic and philosophy. Accordingly in Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge he building upon this idea chooses such principle of the logic that possesses material validity and special content to be the absolutely primordial axiom of the science of knowledge. As we have seen the differences from the logic conception of Kant and Reinhold we can conceive better the meaning of the sentence from Fichte: “Everything to which the proposition ‘A = A’ is applicable, has reality, insofar as that proposition is applicable to it.” – This is one of the sentences dragged away from the context could provoked Kant’s ire reasonably.In seiner berühmten Erklärung äußerte Kant, die Wissenschaftslehre sei „nichts mehr oder weniger als bloße Logik“. Dieser Meinung widerspricht Fichtes Selbstinterpretation, weil er von Anfang an mit Kant und Reinhold darin einig war, dass sich Philosophie und Logik voneinander unterscheiden, und die klassischen Prinzipien der Logik nicht als Grundsätze der Philosophie gelten können. Nach seiner Auffassung gelingt es allerdings Reinhold nicht, das Verhältnis von Logik und Philosophie befriedigend zu klären. Ausgehend von einer gründlichen Kritik an Reinhold in der Rezension des Aenesidemus führt Fichte eine neue Konzeption vom Verhältnis der Grundsätze der Logik und der Philosophie ein. In der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre wählt er einen mit realer Gültigkeit und besonderem Inhalt ausgestatteten Grundsatz der Logik zum absolut ersten Grundsatz der Wissenschaftslehre. Betrachtet man die Veränderungen der Kantschen und Reinholdschen Logikauffassung, wird es verständlicher, wenn Fichte schreibt: „Alles, worauf der Satz A = A anwendbar ist, hat, inwiefern derselbe darauf anwendbar ist, Realität“–einer von vielen Sätzen, die aus dem Kontext herausgenommen mit Fug und Recht Kants Missfallen ausgelöst haben könnten. (shrink)

Chromatic induction is a major contextual effect of color appearance. Patterned backgrounds are known to induce strong chromatic induction effects. However, it has not been clarified whether the spatial extent of the chromatic surrounding induces a chromatic contrast or assimilation effects. In this study, we examined the influence of the width of a center line and its flanking white contour on the color appearance when the line was surrounded by chromatic backgrounds. A strong color shift was observed when the center (...) line was flanked by white contours with the L/M- and S-cone chromatic backgrounds. There was a difference between the optimal widths of the center line and the contour for the shift in color appearance for the L/M-cone chromaticity and the S-cone chromaticity. The optimal width of the center line for the L/M-cone was finer than the resolution-limit width of the chromatic contrast sensitivity and coarser than that of the luminance contrast sensitivity. Thus, the color appearance of the center line could be obtained by integrating broad chromatic information and fine luminance details. Due to blurring and chromatic aberrations, the simulated artifact was large for the darker center line and S-cone background, thus suggesting that the artifact could explain the luminance dependency of the induction along the S-cone chromaticity. Moreover, the findings of this study reveal that the dominant factor of the color shift is neural instead of optical. (shrink)

In this introductory paper I sketch the tradition, several early aspects of which are discussed in the following essays and reviews. I introduce the main figures whose work initiated and maintained the sociological orientation in Hungarian philosophy thereby tracing its evolution. I suggest that its sociological outlook, if taken to be a characteristic tendency that gives Hungarian philosophy its distinctive flavour, provides us with the framework of a possible narrative about the history of Hungarian philosophy in the broader context of (...) Central European philosophy. This narrative, in turn, suggests a way of integrating the latter into the history of Western philosophy rather than restricting its scope to a handful of canonical works only. (shrink)

I argue that there is a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of mental realism, and I draw some lessons for the realism-antirealism debate. Although it is already at hand, the distinction has not yet been drawn clearly. The difference to be shown consists in what realism is about: it may be either about the interpretation of folk psychology, or the ontology of mental entities. I specify the commitment to the fact-stating character of the discourse as the central component (...) of realism about folk psychology, and from this I separate realism about mental entities as an ontological commitment towards them. I point out that the two views are mutually independent, which provides the possibility of considering folk psychology as not being in cognitive competition with scientific psychology. At the end I make a tentative suggestion as to how to interpret the former in order to avoid this conflict. (shrink)

Introduction -- The Marx project : a brief overview -- Origins of totalitarianism : ideology and terror -- The tradition -- First pillar : "labor is the creator of man" : on labor, necessity, and loneliness -- Third pillar : the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach -- Second pillar : violence is the midwife of history -- Die Aufhebung : as the state withers a new politics arises and philosophy fades away.

We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a (...) ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive. Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together. (shrink)

What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, (...) we simply talk "as if" people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field, the book reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and mental representation. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals alike. (shrink)

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is arguably the best candidate for the first ever overarching attempt at a descriptive-explanatory science of the mind. This paper characterizes the key tenets of Hume’s undertaking and situates its central features in the context of then-contemporary science. According to the present argument, Hume’s science of man provides a chemical-organismic account of mental functioning that fits an intellectual environment dominated by post-Newtonian natural philosophy.

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study aims to clarify the relationship between nature and God in Pascalian thought. This relationship is based on the concept of unity. In a letter of 1648, Pascal wrote that God is present in nature through the ontological and formal unity of things which represents perfect divine unity. A few years later, through his mathematical research, Pascal discovered the principle of double infinity which he considered to be the essential attribute of nature. The unity of nature is defined as (...) the omnipresence of double infinity in nature. However, these two interpretations of unity are mutually exclusive because double infinity destroys all ontological and formal unity in things. The question is how Pascal maintains the relationship between nature and God if the principle of double infinity destroys formal unity in nature. The paper argues that the presence of the double infinite in nature does not destroy the relationship of resemblance and representation between nature and God but makes it more complex. The double infinite does not represent God in nature directly but is inscribed in things as the image of the hidden God. (shrink)

The shift of interest from community to individuality and freedom brought by modernity challenged the central place once occupied by religion, pushing it to the outskirts of human life. All these led to an increased indifference towards any transcendental guarantor that could act in a neutral reason-governed space. In the case of Islam, such a situation is impossible to tolerate, because it would mean God’s desecration by reducing the Qur’an to the statute of a simple book like many others that (...) offer an opinion on a Supreme Being who does not decide the destiny of humanity any more, but becomes a simple matter of opinion. While Western Christianity adjusted to modernity reaching even to justify the developments which led to a dissolution of sacred, stating that they were consistent with its essence, Islam accepted modernity only to the extent of this one’s capacity to verify the realities stated by the Qur’an. (shrink)

Volume 32, Issue 6, December 2024, Page 1438-1447.

In this paper, I introduce a prominent classical scholar, József Balogh, whose work can be read as a significant contribution to the historiography of ancient, and in some sense modern, philosophy. Following a summary biography, I sketch the relevance of Balogh''s interpretation of Augustine. I draw some analogies between his and Eric Havelock''s treatment of the problems in ancient philosophy, and argue that the obvious similarities between them have a common origin, namely the perspective of the orality/literacy chasm which both (...) treated, in connection with their research into Augustine and Plato, as crucial. Subsequently, I show how the problem of reading aloud, which Balogh was the first to treat systematically, has acquired significance in some current debates in philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this study is an analysis of the possible adaptive consequences of delivery of low birth weight infants. We attempt to reveal the cost and benefit components of bearing small children, estimate the chance of the infants’ survival, and calculate the mothers’ reproductive success. According to life-history theory, under certain circumstances mothers can enhance their lifetime fitness by lowering the rate of investment in an infant and/or enhancing the rate of subsequent births. We assume that living in a (...) risky environment and giving birth to a small infant may involve a shift from qualitative to quantitative production of offspring. Given high infant mortality rates, parents will have a reproductive interest in producing a relatively large number of children with a smaller amount of prenatal investment. This hypothesis was tested among 650 Gypsy and 717 non-Gypsy Hungarian mothers. Our study has revealed that 23.8% of the Gypsy mothers had low birth weight (<2,500 g) children, whose mortality rate is very high. These mothers also had more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths than those with normal weight children. As a possible response to these reproductive failures, they shortened birth spacing, gaining 2–4 years across their reproductive lifespan for having additional children. Because of the relatively short interbirth intervals, by the end of their fertility period, Gypsy mothers with one or two low birth weight infants have significantly more children than their ethnic Hungarian counterparts. They appear to compensate for handicaps associated with low birth weights by having a larger number of closely spaced children following the birth of one or more infants with a reduced probability of survival. The possible alternative explanations are discussed, and the long-term reproductive benefits are estimated for both ethnic groups. (shrink)

In Opticks, Newton notes that by following the method of analysis and synthesis, ’the bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged’. Hume’s Treatise fulfills this vision, albeit with significant caveats. The chapter argues: 1) Hume’s affinity with Newton is primarily methodological, and Hume’s project is closer to the Queries of Opticks than to the Principia. 2) For Hume, moral philosophy is an experimental study of moral beings qua moral beings which results in ‘an anatomy of the mind’ embodying an (...) epistemic ideal closer to Scottish philosophical chemistry than to any kind of mechanical philosophy. 3) Hume primarily inquires into qualitatively different active principles of human nature that explain why humans function as they do. 4) The knowledge that Hume’s project offers can be used normatively. 5) Thus, in Hume’s hands the boundaries of moral philosophy are enlarged. Yet, being entirely secular, it was not what Newton had envisioned. (shrink)

We investigate whether classical combinatorial theorems are provable in ZF. Some statements are not provable in ZF, but they are equivalent within ZF. For example, the following statements (i)–(iii) are equivalent: $$cf({\omega }_1)={\omega }_1$$ c f ( ω 1 ) = ω 1, $${\omega }_1\rightarrow ({\omega }_1,{\omega }+1)^2$$ ω 1 → ( ω 1, ω + 1 ) 2, any family $$\mathcal {A}\subset [{On}]^{<{\omega }}$$ A ⊂ [ On ] < ω of size $${\omega }_1$$ ω 1 contains a $$\Delta (...) $$ Δ -system of size $${\omega }_1$$ ω 1. Some classical results cannot be proven in ZF alone; however, we can establish weaker versions of these statements within the framework of ZF, such as $${{\omega }_2}\rightarrow ({\omega }_1,{\omega }+1)$$ ω 2 → ( ω 1, ω + 1 ), any family $$\mathcal {A}\subset [{On}]^{<{\omega }}$$ A ⊂ [ On ] < ω of size $${\omega }_2$$ ω 2 contains a $$\Delta $$ Δ -system of size $${\omega }_1$$ ω 1. Some statements can be proven in ZF using purely combinatorial arguments, such as: given a set mapping $$F:{\omega }_1\rightarrow {[{\omega }_1]}^{<{\omega }}$$ F : ω 1 → [ ω 1 ] < ω, the set $${\omega }_1$$ ω 1 has a partition into $${\omega }$$ ω -many F-free sets. Other statements can be proven in ZF by employing certain methods of absoluteness, for example: given a set mapping $$F:{\omega }_1\rightarrow {[{\omega }_1]}^{<{\omega }}$$ F : ω 1 → [ ω 1 ] < ω, there is an F-free set of size $${\omega }_1$$ ω 1, for each $$n\in {\omega }$$ n ∈ ω, every family $$\mathcal {A}\subset {[{\omega }_1]}^{{\omega }}$$ A ⊂ [ ω 1 ] ω with $$|A\cap B|\le n$$ | A ∩ B | ≤ n for $$\{A,B\}\in {[\mathcal {A}]}^{2}$$ { A, B } ∈ [ A ] 2 has property B. In contrast to statement (5), we show that the following ZFC theorem of Komjáth is not provable from ZF + $$cf({\omega }_1)={\omega }_1$$ c f ( ω 1 ) = ω 1 : (6$$ ^*$$ ∗ ) every family $$\mathcal {A}\subset {[{\omega }_1]}^{{\omega }}$$ A ⊂ [ ω 1 ] ω with $$|A\cap B|\le 1$$ | A ∩ B | ≤ 1 for $$\{A,B\}\in {[\mathcal {A}]}^{2}$$ { A, B } ∈ [ A ] 2 is essentially disjoint. A function f is a uniform denumeration on$${\omega }_1$$ ω 1 iff $${\text {dom}}(f)={\omega }_1$$ dom ( f ) = ω 1, and for every $$1\le {\alpha }<{\omega }_1$$ 1 ≤ α < ω 1, $$f({\alpha })$$ f ( α ) is a function from $${\omega }$$ ω onto $${\alpha }$$ α. It is easy to see that the existence of a uniform denumeration of $${\omega }_1$$ ω 1 implies $$cf({\omega }_1)={\omega }_1$$ c f ( ω 1 ) = ω 1. We prove that the failure of the reverse implication is equiconsistent with the existence of an inaccessible cardinal. (shrink)

The input data to grammar learning algorithms often consist of overt forms that do not contain full structural descriptions. This lack of information may contribute to the failure of learning. Past work on Optimality Theory introduced Robust Interpretive Parsing (RIP) as a partial solution to this problem. We generalize RIP and suggest replacing the winner candidate with a weighted mean violation of the potential winner candidates. A Boltzmann distribution is introduced on the winner set, and the distribution’s parameter $T$ is (...) gradually decreased. Finally, we show that GRIP, the Generalized Robust Interpretive Parsing Algorithm significantly improves the learning success rate in a model with standard constraints for metrical stress assignment. (shrink)

(1996). The emergence of the global culture and the global moral system: The global bio‐social system as the reference system of the human rights. World Futures: Vol. 46, No. 1, pp. 47-51.

In the present paper I sketch three genres of sociology of knowledge and trace their roots to Marx and Marxist literature while reconstructing two causal and one hermeneutic strand in this context. While so doing the main focus is set on György Lukács and György Márkus and their interpretation of Marx’s contribution to sociologically minded theories of knowledge. As a conclusion I point out that Marx-inspired sociologies of knowledge are more sensitive to the relation of larger-scale social and historical processes (...) than to the actual practices of knowledge production, and that recent developments in science studies tend to integrate larger- and smaller-scale sociological sensitivities. (shrink)