We examine corruption across three Central and Eastern Europe countries through a social psychology framework which integrates social identity theory, social cognitive theory and moral disengagement mechanisms. We illustrate how various social identities influence individual and collective action in terms of ethical behavior and corruption, thereby creating, maintaining and perpetuating petty, grand and systemic public/private corruption through triadic co-determination via cognition, behavior and the environment. Despite growing research on corruption normalization, less is known about the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms in (...) ethical decision making, the cognitive workings of how individuals reconcile unethical behavior and the social psychological processes behind corruption in society and organizations. Expert interviews reveal internally conflicted multi-layered social identities perpetuating corruption, some embedded in nationalistic history and others tied to the European Union, which supports the divergent paths of CEE countries since the fall of communism. Some moral disengagement mechanisms are common across all three countries, while others are linked to specific circumstances. Social identity mechanisms feed into moral disengagement, which individuals draw upon to reconcile the conflict between unethical behavior and moral codes. Patterns of moral disengagement aggregate to the country level and explain normalization of corruption in CEE society and organizations. (shrink)

In a recent reply to Takacs and Bourrat’s article (Biol Philos 37:12, 2022), Autzen and Okasha (Biol Philos 37:37, 2022) question our characterization of the relationship between the geometric mean and arithmetic mean measures of fitness. We here take issue with the claim that our characterization falls prey to the mistakes they highlight. Briefly revisiting what Takacs and Bourrat (Biol Philos 37:12, 2022) accomplished reveals that the key issue of difference concerns cases of deterministic but nonconstant growth. Restricting (...) focus to such cases shows that there is in fact no reason for disagreement. (shrink)

"At places distant from where you are, but also uncomfortably close," writes David Takacs, "a holocaust is under way. People are slashing, hacking, bulldozing, burning, poisoning, and otherwise destroying huge swaths of life on Earth at a furious pace." And a cadre of ecologists and conservation biologists has responded, vigorously promoting a new definition of nature: biodiversity --advocating it in Congress and on the Tonight Show; whispering it into the ears of foreign leaders redefining the boundaries of science and (...) politics, ethics and religion, nature and our ideas of nature. These scientists have infused the environmental movement with new focus and direction, but by engaging in such activities, they jeopardize the societal trust that allows them to be public spokespersons for nature in the first place. The Idea of Biodiversity analyzes what biodiversity represents to the biologists who operate in broader society on its behalf, drawing on in-depth interviews with the scientists most active today in the mission to preserve biodiversity, including Peter Raven, Thomas Lovejoy, Jane Lubchenco, and Paul Ehrlich. Takacs explores how and why these biologists shaped the concept of biodiversity and promoted it to society at large--examining their definitions of biodiversity their opinions about spirituality and its role in scientific work the notion of biodiversity as something of intrinsic value and their views on biophilia, E. O. Wilson's idea that humans are genetically predisposed to love nature. Takacs also looks at the work of twentieth-century forerunners of today's conservation biologists--Aldo Leopold, Charles S. Elton, Rachel Carson, David Ehrenfeld--and points out their contributions to the current debates. He takes readers to Costa Rica, where a group of scientists is using biodiversity to remake nature and society. And in an extended section, he profiles the thoughts and work of E. O. Wilson. "When I'm asked, 'should we save this species orthat species, or this place or that place?' the answer is always 'Yes!' with an exclamation point. Because it's obvious. And if you ask me to justify it, then I switch into a more cognitive consciousness and can start giving you reasons, economic reasons, aesthetic reasons. They're all dualistic, in a sense. But the feeling that underlies it is that 'yes!' And that 'yes!' comes out of the affirmation of being part of it all, being part of this whole evolutionary process. And agreeing with Arne Naess that each species, each entity, should be allowed to continue its evolution and to live out its destiny... just do its thing, as we say. Why not? And the 'why not?' is there's too many people."--Michael E. Soule, from an interview in The Idea of Biodiversity "An important contribution, a first distanced examination of a critical, modern topic by a scholarly, honest broker."--E. O. Wilson, Harvard University. (shrink)

It is an integral part of the phenomenology of mature perceptual experience that it seems to present to us an experience-independent world. I shall call this feature 'perceptual intentionality'. In this paper, I argue that perceptual intentionality is constructed by the structure of more basic sensory features, features that are not intentional themselves. This theory can explain why the same sensory feature can figure both in presentational and non-presentational experiences. There is a fundamental difference between the intentionality of sensory experiences (...) and the intentionality of thoughts: unlike the former, the latter is not constructed. (shrink)

Sequent calculi constitute an interesting and important category of proof systems. They are much less known than axiomatic systems or natural deduction systems are, and they are much less known than they should be. Sequent calculi were designed as a theoretical framework for investigations of logical consequence, and they live up to the expectations completely as an abundant source of meta-logical results. The goal of this book is to provide a fairly comprehensive view of sequent calculi -- including a wide (...) range of variations. The focus is on sequent calculi for various non-classical logics, from intuitionistic logic to relevance logic, through linear and modal logics. A particular version of sequent calculi, the so-called consecution calculi, have seen important new developments in the last decade or so. The invention of new consecution calculi for various relevance logics allowed the last major open problem in the area of relevance logic to be solved positively: pure ticket entailment is decidable. An exposition of this result is included in chapter 9 together with further new decidability results (for less famous systems). A series of other results that were obtained by J. M. Dunn and me, or by me in the last decade or so, are also presented in various places in the book. Some of these results are slightly improved in their current presentation. Obviously, many calculi and several important theorems are not new. They are included here to ensure the completeness of the picture; their original formulations may be found in the referenced publications. This book contains very little about semantics, in general, and about the semantics of non-classical logic in particular. (shrink)

Two consecution calculi are introduced: one for the implicational fragment of the logic of entailment with truth and another one for the disjunction free logic of nondistributive relevant implication. The proof technique—attributable to Gentzen—that uses a double induction on the degree and on the rank of the cut formula is shown to be insufficient to prove admissible various forms of cut and mix in these calculi. The elimination theorem is proven, however, by augmenting the earlier double inductive proof with additional (...) inductions. We also give a new purely inductive proof of the cut theorem for the original single cut rule in Gentzen’s sequent calculus $ LK $ without any use of mix. (shrink)

Know -wh ascriptions are ubiquitous in many languages. One standard analysis of know -wh is this: someone knows-wh just in case she knows that p, where p is an answer to the question included in the wh-clause. Additional conditions have also been proposed, but virtually all analyses assume that propositional knowledge of an answer is at least a necessary condition for knowledge-wh. This paper challenges this assumption, by arguing that there are cases where we have knowledge-wh without knowledge- that of (...) an answer, for example in the cases familiar from arguments for the Extended Mind hypothesis. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither ‘objective’ nor ‘merely subjective’. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean and whether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kant's denials of ‘objectivity’ to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty. I suggest that Kant's thought is not to be understood in these terms—that it does not properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of ‘reality’—motivating (...) the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on the question of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative to realism about beauty at all. (shrink)

Showing that the arithmetic mean number of offspring for a trait type often fails to be a predictive measure of fitness was a welcome correction to the philosophical literature on fitness. While the higher mathematical moments of a probability-weighted offspring distribution can influence fitness measurement in distinct ways, the geometric mean number of offspring is commonly singled out as the most appropriate measure. For it is well-suited to a compounding process and is sensitive to variance in offspring number. The geometric (...) mean thus proves to be a predictively efficacious measure of fitness in examples featuring discrete generations and within- or between-generation variance in offspring output. Unfortunately, this advance has subsequently led some to conclude that the arithmetic mean is never a good measure of fitness and that the geometric mean should accordingly be the default measure of fitness. We show not only that the arithmetic mean is a perfectly reasonable measure of fitness so long as one is clear about what it refers to, but also that it functions as a more general measure when properly interpreted. It must suffice as a measure of fitness in any case where the geometric mean has been effectively deployed as a measure. We conclude with a discussion about why the mathematical equivalence we highlight cannot be dismissed as merely of mathematical interest. (shrink)

The study explores the future of AI-driven media and info-communication as envisioned by experts from all world regions, defining relevant terminology and expectations for 2050. Participants engaged in a 4-week series of surveys, questioning their definitions and projections about AI for the field of media and communication. Their expectations predict universal access to democratically available, automated, personalized and unbiased information determined by trusted narratives, recolonization of information technology and the demystification of the media process. These experts, as technology ambassadors, advocate (...) AI-to-AI solutions to mitigate technology-driven misuse and misinformation. The optimistic scenarios shift responsibility to future generations, relying on AI-driven solutions and finding inspiration in nature. Their present-based forecasts could be construed as being indicative of professional near-sightedness and cognitive dissonance. Visualizing our findings into a Glasses Model of AI Trust, the study contributes to key debates regarding AI policy, developmental trajectories, and academic research in media and info-communication fields. (shrink)

Four-valued semantics proved useful in many contexts from relevance logics to reasoning about computers. We extend this approach further. A sequent calculus is defined with logical connectives conjunction and disjunction that do not distribute over each other. We give a sound and complete semantics for this system and formulate the same logic as a tableaux system. Intensional conjunction and its residuals can be added to the sequent calculus straightforwardly. We extend a simplified version of the earlier semantics for this system (...) and prove soundness and completeness. Then, with some modifications to this semantics, we arrive at a mathematically elegant yet powerful semantics that we call generalized Kripke semantics. (shrink)

The purpose of our study was to measure the relationship between performance on various attentional tasks and hypnotic susceptibility. Healthy volunteers participated in a study, where they had to perform several tasks measuring various attention components in a waking state: sustained attention, selective or focused attention, divided attention and executive attention in task switching. Hypnotic susceptibility was measured in a separate setting by the Waterloo-Stanford Groups Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C .We found no significant correlation between any of the (...) attentional measures and hypnotic susceptibility. Highly hypnotizables did not prove to be superior to or worse than the other individuals in any of the tests.These results do not support the neuropsychophysiological model of hypnosis, as they show no consistent relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and waking attentional performance. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

Reader-friendly without compromising the precision of exposition, the book includes many new research results not found in the available literature.

The most consistent definition of fitness makes it a static property of organisms. However, this is not how fitness is used in many evolutionary models. In those models, fitness is permitted to vary with an organism’s circumstances. According to this second conception, fitness is dynamic. There is consequently tension between these two conceptions of fitness. One recently proposed solution suggests resorting to conditional properties. We argue, however, that this solution is unsatisfactory. Using a very simple model, we show that it (...) can lead to incompatible fitness values and indecision about whether selection actually occurs. (shrink)

In this paper I begin to develop an account of the acquaintance that each of us has with our own conscious states and processes. The account is a speculative proposal about human mental architecture and specifically about the nature of the concepts via which we think in first personish ways about our qualia. In a certain sense my account is neutral between physicalist and dualist accounts of consciousness. As will be clear, a dualist could adopt the account I will offer (...) while maintaining that qualia themselves are non-physical properties. In this case the non-physical nature of qualia may play no role in accounting for the features of acquaintance. But although the account could be used by a dualist, its existence provides support for physicalism. (shrink)

The implicational fragment of the logic of relevant implication, $R_\to$ is known to be decidable. We show that the implicational fragment of the logic of ticket entailment, $T_\to$ is decidable. Our proof is based on the consecution calculus that we introduced specifically to solve this 50-year old open problem. We reduce the decidability problem of $T_\to$ to the decidability problem of $R_\to$. The decidability of $T_\to$ is equivalent to the decidability of the inhabitation problem of implicational types by combinators over (...) the base $\{\textsf{B},\textsf{B}',\textsf{I},\textsf{W}\}$. (shrink)

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?—Marilynne RobinsonMarilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago Press, 2004), p. 280.Preamble: Going the Bloody Hard WayThe writings of Pamela Sue Anderson and Gillian Howie have been, and continue to be, important in helping to shape the development of my own philosophical vision. Yet my commitment to (a fairly (...) traditional) theism marks a point of departure between my work and theirs. Given their quite reasonable disinclination to persist with traditional theism, especially its concept of divine transcendence,Not only does an uncritical approach to the theistic conception of divine transcendence serve to sacralise hierarchical relationship between men and women, such that the latter is subordinate to the former, it also, as Anderson reminds us, sustains epistemic and practical norms that quietly yet pot. (shrink)

There is a tradition, going back at least to Descartes, of arguing against physicalism on the basis of claims about conceivability. Philosophers in this tradition claim that we can conceive of any physical facts obtaining without there being any phenomenal experience. From this conceptual claim it is further argued that it is metaphysically possible for any physical fact to obtain without the occurrence of any phenomenal experience. If this is correct, then physicalism as it is usually construed is false. In (...) this paper I examine and refute the new conceivability arguments due to Frank Jackson and David Chalmers. I will argue, namely, that the crucial premiss of the arguments, the one that links conceivability with metaphysical possibility, is self-undermining. I proceed in two steps. First, I lay out the two arguments, and show that the crucial premiss in Jackson's argument, and so Chalmers' corresponding premiss as well, is self-undermining, and so that the alleged link between conceivability and metaphysical possibility does not exist. This does not amount to an argument for physicalism, except indirectly; what I show is that the argument on which non-physicalists most rely is ineffective. (shrink)

Western theology struggles with the rise of secularism and postmodernism. The Radical Orthodoxy sensibility asserts that the ancient principles of methexis (participation) and theosis (deification) presents an alternative metaphysical narrative to the narrative of secularism and the onto-theological tradition. This article addresses the problems of the onto-theological metaphysical tradition in Western theology by analyzing Radical Orthodoxy's rediscovery of the philosophical and theological principles of participation and theosis as articulated in the patristic tradition and in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Using (...) historical and analytical methods, this article will survey the biblical and patristic literature on theosis, as well as John Milbank's understanding of methexis and theosis in Thomas Aquinas. The result of this study will be to offer theosis, rooted in participation in God, as not only a soteriological model to reclaim for the West, but also a core metaphysical principle for Christian ethics that contravenes both onto-theology and the materialistic reduction of ontology in secularism. (shrink)

Serious threats to global order are said to emanate from Al Qaeda, exemplified by bombings and multiple deaths in, inter alia, Bali, Dar es Salaam, Istanbul, Nairobi, New York and Madrid. These outrages raise the question about the ideological assumptions and goals of Al Qaeda ? given that the majority of the dead were not Jews or Christians, but Muslims. What were the bombers trying to achieve? What were their ideological assumptions and goals? This article argues that Al Qaeda first (...) emerged in the late 1980s to challenge the incumbency and authority of rulers in various Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, with the objective of replacing them with more plausibly Islamic leaders. Due to a lack of success in this regard, Al Qaeda's attention shifted from the domestic to the global: a war against ?the West? utilising the weapons of terror to achieve ideological goals relating to both specific religious concerns, as well as a wider concern with a global balance of power between the West and the world of Islam. (shrink)

Symmetic combinatory logic with the symmetric analogue of a combinatorially complete base (in the form of symmetric λ-calculus) is known to lack the Church-Rosser property. We prove a much stronger theorem that no symmetric combinatory logic that contains at least two proper symmetric combinators has the Church-Rosser property. Although the statement of the result looks similar to an earlier one concerning dual combinatory logic, the proof is different because symmetric combinators may form redexes in both left and right associated terms. (...) Perhaps surprisingly, we are also able to show that certain symmetric combinatory logics that include just one particular constant are not confluent. This result (beyond other differences) clearly sets apart symmetric combinatory logic from dual combinatory logic, since all dual combinatory systems with a single combinator or a single dual combinator are Church-Rosser. Lastly, we prove that a symmetric combinatory logic that contains the fixed point and the one-place identity combinator has the Church-Rosser property. (shrink)

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system (...) within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure iselucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee. (shrink)

Memoir of Hungary 1944–1948. By Sándor Márai. Translated with an introduction and notes by Albert Tezla 427 pp. £11.99 paper.

The aim of our study was to analyze the behavioural responses of horses to familiar humans and to find factors that may affect these responses in three tests: approach to, standing beside, and following the familiar person. We investigated the impacts of horse-related factors and human-related factors. Horses with one handler needed less time to approach the human than horses with more handlers. Standing beside the human correlated positively with following. Following was mainly affected by training. According to our results, (...) the number of handlers has an important effect on horses' responses to familiar humans, especially regarding approach and follow behaviour. However, following behaviour is fundamentally determined by training. (shrink)

The business corporation is at the centre of the modern global economy but does it act in the general interest? This paper explores Joel Bakan's film and book critique of the corporation which suggests that it is characterised by a 'pathological pursuit of power and profit'. It seeks to extend Bakan's argument by reconsidering the ethical position of those who run corporations; the question of how far competition constrains their actions; and the extent to which the modern state can control (...) corporations or is itself subject to similar pressures. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of (...) the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism--which is not adopted--but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception. (shrink)

The implicational fragment of the logic of relevant implication, $R_{\to}$ is one of the oldest relevance logics and in 1959 was shown by Kripke to be decidable. The proof is based on $LR_{\to}$ , a Gentzen-style calculus. In this paper, we add the truth constant $\mathbf{t}$ to $LR_{\to}$ , but more importantly we show how to reshape the sequent calculus as a consecution calculus containing a binary structural connective, in which permutation is replaced by two structural rules that involve $\mathbf{t}$ (...) . This calculus, $LT_\to^{\text{\textcircled{$\mathbf{t}$}}}$ , extends the consecution calculus $LT_{\to}^{\mathbf{t}}$ formalizing the implicational fragment of ticket entailment . We introduce two other new calculi as alternative formulations of $R_{\to}^{\mathbf{t}}$ . For each new calculus, we prove the cut theorem as well as the equivalence to the original Hilbert-style axiomatization of $R_{\to}^{\mathbf{t}}$ . These results serve as a basis for our positive solution to the long open problem of the decidability of $T_{\to}$ , which we present in another paper. (shrink)