How happy it is to recall Imre Lakatos. Now, fifteen years after his death, his intelligence, wit, generosity are vivid. In the Preface to the book of Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, the editors wrote:... Lakatos was a man in search of rationality in all of its forms. He thought he had found it in the historical development of scientific knowledge, yet he also saw rationality endangered everywhere. To honor Lakatos is to honor his sharp and aggressive criticism as (...) well as his humane warmth and his quick wit. He was a person to love and to struggle with. The book before us carries old and new friends of that Lakatosian spirit further into the issues which he wanted to investigate. That the new friends include a dozen scientific, historical and philosophical scholars from Greece would have pleased Lakatos very much, and with an essay from China, he would have smiled all the more. But the key lies in the quality of these papers, and in the imaginative organization of the conference at Thessaloniki in summer 1986 which worked so well. (shrink)

Suppose COVID-19 is the runaway tram in the famous moral thought experiment, known as the “Bystander at the Switch.” Consider the two differentiated responses of governments around the world to this new threat, namely the option of quarantine/lockdown and herd immunity. Can we contrast the hypothetical with the real scenario? What do the institutional decisions and strategies for dealing with the virus, in the beginning of 2020, signify in a normative moral framework? This paper investigates these possibilities in order to (...) highlight the similarities and, more importantly, the differences that exist between utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Analysis shows that the hypothetical scenario can never be fully compared to the complex multifactorial nature of the real world. But if a comparison is attempted, the most obvious difference between the two governmental strategies is the concept of duty within the Kantian perspective. Ultimately, it is a matter of comparing freedom and life. Attributing a moral “priority ticket” to one or the other can be analysed through interpersonal aggregation. (shrink)

Background: Individuals with psychopathic traits demonstrate an attenuated emotional response to aversive stimuli. However, recent evidence suggests heterogeneity in emotional reactivity among individuals with psychopathic or callous-unemotional (CU) traits, the emotional detachment dimension of psychopathy. We hypothesize that primary variants of psychopathy will respond with blunted affect to negatively valenced stimuli, whereas individuals marked with histories of childhood trauma/maltreatment exposure, known as secondary variants, will display heightened emotional reactivity. To test this hypothesis, the present study examined fear-potentiated startle between psychopathy (...) variants while viewing aversive, pleasant, and neutral scenes. Method: 238 incarcerated adolescent (M age = 16.8, SD = 1.11 years) boys completed a picture-startle paradigm and self-report questionnaires assessing CU traits, antisocial-aggressive behavior, and maltreatment. Results: Latent profile analyses identified four classes; primary variants (high CU traits, high aggression, low maltreatment; n = 46), secondary variants (high CU traits, high aggression, high maltreatment; n = 42), and two nonpsychopathic groups differentiated on maltreatment experience (n = 148). Findings from an ANOVA comparing identified groups on startle amplitude difference scores (i.e., aversive-neutral) suggested a main effect for group, F(3,196)=8.91, p<.001, η2 = .12. Primary variants of juvenile psychopathy displayed reduced startle potentiation to aversive images (threat and victim scenes), whereas secondary variants distinguished by high levels of childhood maltreatment did not. Conclusions: Findings add to a rapidly growing body of literature supporting the possibility of multiple developmental pathways to psychopathy (i.e., equifinality), and extend it by finding support for divergent potential biomarkers between primary and secondary psychopathy variants. (shrink)

John Bintliff et alii Le Tanagra Project : recherches dans une cité antique de Béotie et son territoire (2000-2002) p.541-606 Cet article présente les résultats préliminaires du Leiden-Ljubljana Field Project dans la cité antique de Tanagra, en Béotie orientale, et dans ses environs immédiats. Les travaux ont débuté en 1999, avec une vaste équipe de chercheurs et d'étudiants des Pays-Bas, de Belgique, de Slovénie et de Grèce, sous la direction de John Bintliff et Bozidar Slapsak et la sous-direction de Kostas (...) Sbonias. Les différents spécialistes présentent ici leur travail en détail, développant les rapports des deux premières campagnes publiés dans Pharos, le périodique annuel de l'Institut néerlandais d'Athènes. (shrink)

Lefebvre, H. Au delà du savoir.--Fougeyrollas, P. Au delà du nihilisme.

Kosta Došen argued in his papers Inferential Semantics (in Wansing, H. (ed.) Dag Prawitz on Proofs and Meaning, pp. 147–162. Springer, Berlin 2015) and On the Paths of Categories (in Piecha, T., Schroeder-Heister, P. (eds.) Advances in Proof-Theoretic Semantics, pp. 65–77. Springer, Cham 2016) that the propositions-as-types paradigm is less suited for general proof theory because—unlike proof theory based on category theory—it emphasizes categorical proofs over hypothetical inferences. One specific instance of this, Došen points out, is that the Curry–Howard isomorphism (...) makes the associativity of deduction composition invisible. We will show that this is not necessarily the case. (shrink)

We formalize what it means to have permission to say something. We adapt the dynamic logic of permission by van der Meyden (J Log Comput 6(3):465–479, 1996 ) to the case where atomic actions are public truthful announcements. We also add a notion of obligation. Our logic is an extension of the logic of public announcements introduced by Plaza ( 1989 ) with dynamic modal operators for permission and for obligation. We axiomatize the logic and show that it is decidable.

This paper explores the philosophical aspects of the "Great Introduction" of Abū Ma'šar, one of the great figures of Arabic astrology and an associate of al-Kindī, the great 9th century philosopher. I argue that the following points of philosophical interest may be found in this text: 1. Astrology is described as a "master science" along the lines proposed by Aristotle, i.e. it provides principles for lower sciences. Also he supplies arguments to ground astrology on methodological grounds, such as the use (...) of empirical evidence and testimony. 2. Abū Ma'šar broadly follows al-Kindī's explanation of how the stars influence the sublunary world, by heating the elements. This agrees with al-Kindī's work "On the Proximate Agent Cause of Generation and Corruption," and I identify some parallels between the two works. 3. Finally, Abū Ma'šarr considers whether human freedom is compatible with this causal account. He holds that human actions do fall under the class of the "possible" and not the "necessary," but only because for him the "possible" is what happens sometimes, not always. Thus he seems tacitly to hold that genuine choice is compatible with causal necessitation. (shrink)

Jewish law takes an approach to self-defense that differs dramatically from the conventional assumptions of Western secular legal systems. The central theme of Talmudic jurisprudence is that self-defense rests on a duty not to stand idly by while one's neighbor suffers. “Do not stand on the blood of one's neighbor,” as the point is cryptically put in Leviticus 19:16. This way of thinking about self-defense departs in two significant ways from common Western assumptions. First, it stresses that the roots of (...) self-defense are a duty rather than a right to act; second, it treats the case of third-party defense as logically prior to the first-party case of self -defense. (shrink)

The Nuremberg Trials of leading National Socialists established the principle that individuals may be legally punished, even by death, for obeying the laws of their country. Is there then a higher law by which enacted valid positive laws may be judged, so that persons subject to such laws would be duty-bound to defy them? In recent years the theory of natural law has been revived by a number of philosophers and jurists, who however often disagree sharply among themselves about the (...) proper methods for defining and deriving natural law. Howard Kainz surveys the history of natural law from its foreshadowing in ancient Greece down to the most recent controversies. Natural Law both introduces the subject to newcomers and sheds fresh light on such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Veatch, McInerny, Grisez, and Finnis. (shrink)

The author clarifies the existential philosophy that is implicit in Kurt Goldstein's philosophy of organism (Goldstein, 1963; 1995). Situated in response to the growing trend that psychological phenomena are reducible to the nervous system, the author argues for the reverse: that the significance of nervous system activity can only be understood by viewing it as background to foreground performances. Like the organization of perception into meaningful figure-- ground Gestalts, the existential modes of embodiment, sociality, temporality, spatiality, and attunement are organized (...) together to accomplish foreground performances. It is only within this context that the activity of the nervous system may be understood as significant or insignificant. Speech is given as an example. The article concludes with a commentary on how the trend of reducing psychological phenomena to neurological phenomena has impaired our understanding of brain disorders and psychological disorders. (shrink)

This discussion paper is drawn from a qualitative research project comparing the effect of special and ordinary schools on the lives of children, young people and their families. Special schools are recommended by health professionals who seldom know how ineffective these schools are. We question the beneficence and justice of health professionals' advice on education for children with disabilities and other difficulties. Cooperation with local education authorities (LEAs) plays a considerable part in the work of community paediatricians, clinical medical officers, (...) therapists and other health professionals encountering children with "special needs". The "needs" range from physical disability and sensory impairment to learning difficulties and emotional or behavioural difficulties. This cooperation involves routine administrative problems, but it raises broad ethical issues too, particularly in respect of current tendencies in state schooling towards the integration or inclusion of these children in mainstream schools and classes. (shrink)

Even for persons who hold to the ethical acceptance of abortion practices in general, questions of detail often arise. If you assume the distinction between the physical human organism alone and the person that is associated with that organism, then you must face the question of whether it is permissible to abort a fetus if the corresponding person has come into being. We take the position that the abortion of a fetus that has achieved this level of development should be (...) declared unethical except in special circumstances. Our purpose here is to identify the point in the development of the fetus that serves as the marker for this level. (shrink)

L'Exil est la patrie de la pensée regroupe un ensemble de textes inédits ou introuvables de Kostas Axelos. Prolongeant ses derniers livres (Réponses énigmatiques, Minuit, 2005 ; En quête de l'impensé, Encre marine, 2012, posthume), il questionne la philosophie du XXe siècle et relit sous le signe de l'exil la vie et l'oeuvre du philosophe, éclairant d'un jour nouveau une pensée singulière. On trouvera également dans ce recueil des contributions philosophiques majeures sur Axelos (P. Fougeyrollas, F. Dastur, S. Jollivet, L. (...) Couloubaritsis), ainsi que de nombreux témoignages, dessins et photographies. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that EinstcinRi7;s general theory of relativity is an satisfactory description of gravity 0nly in the macroscopic limit, where quantum eiTcc1;s may be neglected. Presumably this theory is inapplicable at the Planck length, but recently much attention has been devoted to gravitational theory at intermediate length scales where quantum affects 0f matter are inescapable, but where there is an general assumption that the gravitational Held may bc treated as a classical background, augmented if necessary by quamtizcd linearized (...) pertur-. (shrink)

The clinical decision is supposed to be based on evidence. In fact, what counts as evidence is far from being established. Some definition of "proof" is needed to distinguish between scientific medicine and charlatanism. My thesis is that unfortunately a clear-cut boundary between evidence and lack of evidence cannot be found, for several reasons that I summarise in the paper. Evidence in medicine very often has fuzzy boundaries, and dichotomising fuzziness and uncertainty can have serious consequences. Physicians and patients should (...) accept the irreducible fuzziness of many of the concepts they use when dealing with health and disease. (shrink)