Isidor von Sevilla sammelte in seinen Etymologien um 600 vorhandenes Wissen aus historischen und zeitgenössischen Quellen. Rund 300 Wörter aus dem Arbeitsbereich Textil werden mit Kurzkommentaren erläutert. Ca. 1050 findet sich dieses Wissen überarbeitet im Summarium Heinrici 1. Am Beispiel des Komplexes "Kleidung" liefert der Band neben den Quellen und hervorragenden Übersetzungen zum ersten Mal auch ausführlicheKommentare und Überblicksdarstellungen, die eine Fülle von Informationen bringen. Dazu gehören u. a. neue Erkenntnisse über Herstellung der griechischen, bombycina genannten, Seide oder die Beschreibung (...) der Vielzahl der Purpurfarben von Gelb und Himmelblau bis zum exklusiven Schwarz. (shrink)

Solov'ev (1853-1900) gilt als "der erste christliche Denker, der den individuellen und nicht nur den Gattungssinn der Liebe zwischen Mann und Frau anerkannte" (Berdjajev). Der bedeutendste russische Philosoph des 19. Jahrhunderts sieht in der Unbedingtheit des leidenschaftlichen Verlangens der sinnlichen Liebe ein Geschehen der unbedingten Anerkennung des geliebten Menschen - das Fundament der Ethik.

Do the virtues, as is often said, conflict with each other? The history of philosophy knows various attempts to conceive of them so as to exclude such conflict. Nicolai Hartmann ("Ethik", 1925) is the most prominent representative "and" critic of this tradition in our century. Each Aristotelian "mean", for him, represents a "synthesis" of "conflicting values"; but only the "one and only virtue" synthesizing "all" values would exclude all tragic conflict. In contrast, the Aristotelian and medieval conception of "connexio virtutum" (...) by "prudence" allows the virtues to "limit each other" and thus be "compatible" without merging into one super-virtue. (shrink)

Summary According to the Redundance Theory of Truth, the utterance it is true thatp means nothing more than simply ‘p’. So the utterance is true would be meaningless, redundant. The Redundance Theory overlooks that the the predicate true can be used in two applications: (a) as anassertion of the justness of a proposition, (b) as ajudgement of the justness of a proposition. (The word justness in this context means the correspondance of a proposition with reality according to the Theory of (...) Correspondence.) The explicitassertion of the justness is indeed superfluous as it is implicitly included in the proposition. Thejudgement of the justness of a proposition, however, cannot be included in the proposition analytically. In this way, the utterance it is true thatp does not only mean ‘p’ but the assertion that is implicitly included in the proposition ‘p’ (= ‘p’ is true ) is true . Analogous: the utterance it is false that ‘p’ means the assertion that is implicitly included in the proposition ‘p’ (= ‘p’ is true ) is false . A judgement like this exceeds the content of a proposition and so cannot be redundant. Although in some context the words true and false may be used in their application an an assertion because of stylistic reasons, they are relevant for any theory of truth only in their application as a judgment, which cannot be contested by the reproach of redundance. The claim of the Redundance Theory that the concept of truth is meaningless and superfluous must be refused. (shrink)

Le site de Delphes est replacé dans le cadre de ses contacts avec les sites contemporains du flanc Sud du Parnasse et de ses liens avec le monde mycénien. La région délimitée se définit par des particularités dans les coutumes funéraires et dans la production céramique, mais appartient sans conteste à la sphère culturelle du monde mycénien. Delphes existe dès l'HR I et est occupée sans interruption jusqu'à l'HR III G récent. L'extension du site et la qualité de sa céramique (...) en font un site important dès la fin de l'HR III Β ou le début de l'HR III C. Des fragments de statuettes en terre cuite permettent de postuler l'existence d'un lieu de culte dans l'établissement mycénien, alors que le lieu de culte mycénien de Marmaria est remis en question. Les données archéologiques ne permettent pas pour le moment de conclure à une continuité du culte dans le sanctuaire d'Apollon. (shrink)

This paper follows Part I of our essay on case-intensional first-order logic (CIFOL; Belnap and Müller (2013)). We introduce a framework of branching histories to take account of indeterminism. Our system BH-CIFOL adds structure to the cases, which in Part I formed just a set: a case in BH-CIFOL is a moment/history pair, specifying both an element of a partial ordering of moments and one of the total courses of events (extending all the way into the future) that that moment (...) is part of. This framework allows us to define the familiar Ockhamist temporal/modal connectives, most notably for past, future, and settledness. The novelty of our framework becomes visible in our discussion of substances in branching histories, i.e., in its first-order part. That discussion shows how the basic idea of tracing an individual thing from case to case via an absolute property is applicable in a branching histories framework. We stress the importance of keeping apart extensionality and moment-definiteness, and give a formal account of how the specification of natural sortals and natural qualities turns out to be a coordination task in BH-CIFOL. We also provide a detailed answer to Lewis’s well-known argument against branching histories, exposing the fallacy in that argument. (shrink)

One of metaepistemology’s most central debates revolves around the question of what the source of epistemic normativity is. Epistemic instrumentalism claims that epistemic normativity is a species of means-ends normativity. One of the most prominent objections against epistemic instrumentalism features cases of epistemic indifference: Cases where there’s evidence that p yet believing that p wouldn’t promote any of the agent’s aims, wants, or needs. Still, there’s an epistemic reason for the agent to believe that p and thus epistemic instrumentalism is (...) false. In response, instrumentalists have modified their views in various ways, with new contributions still forthcoming. Here, we investigate a neglected aspect of this debate: Laypeople’s judgments on cases of epistemic indifference. In two studies, we investigated whether laypeople agree with the verdict in cases of epistemic indifference as well as the key ideas behind the more recent instrumentalist replies. Our findings indicate that a significant amount of participants found it hard to “buy into” the cases of epistemic indifference as Kelly has constructed them. Participants did generally share Kelly’s judgment in cases of epistemic indifference. Lastly, some instrumentalist replies are well suited to explain participants’ judgments that agents ought to believe in cases of epistemic indifference. (shrink)

Reichenbach’s ‘principle of the common cause’ is a foundational assumption of some important recent contributions to quantitative social science methodology but no similar principle appears in econometrics. Angrist et al. has argued that the principle is necessary for instrumental variables methods in econometrics, and Angrist Krueger builds a framework using it that he proposes as a means of resolving an important methodological dispute among econometricians. Through analysis of instrumental variables methods and the issue of multicollinearity, we aim to show that (...) the relationship of the principle to econometric methods is more nuanced than implied by previous work but nevertheless may make a valuable contribution to the coherence and validity of existing methods. (shrink)

Branching space-times (BST; Belnap, Synthese 92:385–434, 1992 ) is the most advanced formal framework for representing indeterminism. BST is however based on continuous partial orderings, while our natural way of describing indeterministic scenarios may be called discrete. This paper establishes a theorem providing a discrete data format for BST: it is proved that a discrete representation of indeterministic scenarios leading to BST models is possible in an important subclass of cases. This result enables the representation of limited indeterminism in BST (...) and hopefully paves the way for the representation of substances with capacities in that framework. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to establish that free agency, which is a capacity of many animals including human beings, is compatible with indeterminism: an indeterministic world allows for the existence of free agency. The question of the compatibility of free agency and indeterminism is less discussed than its mirror image, the question of the compatibility of free agency and determinism. It is, however, of great importance for our self-conception as free agents in our (arguably) indeterministic world. We begin (...) by explicating the notions of indeterminism and free agency and by clarifying the interrelation of free agency and the human-specific notion of free will. We then situate our claim of the compatibility of free agency and indeterminism precisely in the landscape of the current debate on freedom and determinism, exposing an unhappy asymmetry in that debate. Then we proceed to make our case by describing the mathematically precise, physically motivated model of projective simulation, which employs indeterminism as a central resource for agency modeling. We argue that an indeterministic process of deliberation modeled by the dynamics of projective simulation can exemplify free agency under indeterminism, thereby establishing our compatibility claim: Free agency can develop and thrive in an indeterministic world. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is often framed as crucial for addressing the complex problems of contemporary society and for achieving new levels of innovation. But while science policy and institutions have provided a variety of incentives for stimulating interdisciplinary work throughout Europe, there is also growing evidence that some aspects of the academic system do not necessarily reward interdisciplinary work. In this study, we explore how mid-career researchers in an environmental science research center in Sweden relate to and handle the distinct forms of (...) uncertainty that arise from conflicting institutional and policy impulses. Our material suggests that interdisciplinary academics are often confronted with and at times themselves operate with a surprisingly dichotomous, value-laden view of their research practice. Disciplinarity is primarily associated with the ideals of scientific rigor, while interdisciplinarity becomes conflated with application-oriented work and a lack of ‘theory.’ We also draw attention to the underlying practical dynamics that reproduce this tension and entangle it with the very process of academic socialization. Specifically, we analyze the ambivalent consequences of the various work-arounds that researchers rely on to carve out opportunities for ongoing interdisciplinary research within heterogeneous funding landscapes. These tactics turn out to be undermined by the overriding normative power of formal career incentives at universities, which continue to emphasize the ideals of the individual high-performing academic who publishes in disciplinary journals and attracts the most selective grants. Under such circumstances, the work-arounds themselves become an insidious mechanism that allows researchers to stay in academia but systematically marginalizes their voices and epistemic ambitions in the process. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda críticamente 1) los aspectos especificamente tecnocientíficos de la biología sintética, 2) la función de las promesas biotécnicas y biopolíticas de perfectibilidad de la «vida en sí»1, y 3) el problemático concepto de «biología digital». La biología sintética rechaza la idea de una naturaleza dada: la «vida en sí» se define como un ámbito de potencialidades, con materiales adaptables y estructuras flexibles que pueden utilizarse para rediseñar y «perfeccionar» la naturaleza. Los bioingenieros dicen crear organismos vivos desde cero, (...) utilizando componentes genéticamente estandarizados y diseños informáticos: estas «máquinas vivas», que no existen en la naturaleza, están supuestamente al servicio de fines humanos. Yendo más allá del actual estado de las investigaciones, algunas voces dentro de la biología sintética hacen declaraciones osadas sobre escenarios socio-técnicos, objetos imaginarios y experimentos biotecnológicos para el futuro. Éstos no se desarrollarían tras las puertas de los laboratorios, sino más bien en el seno de la sociedad. Con sus visiones, los biólogos sintéticos se están transformando en los ingenieros de las sociedades del futuro. La biología sintética, por tanto, promueve una «biotecnologización del futuro colectivo», además de formar parte de una «economía de la promesa» tecnocientífica que aspira a colonizar el futuro -lo que nos obliga a repensar la cuestión foucaultiana de la biopolítica. Para la promesa de una «biología digital», lanzada por la biología sintética, es vital la existencia de imaginarios centrados en el código, biocibernéticos e incluso transhumanistas. Éstos impulsan perspectivas que entienden la «vida y la naturaleza» como un ámbito de riquezas potenciales, incluso ilimitadas, que pueden programarse y producirse mediante procedimientos informáticos: «escribir» el código de la vida. (shrink)

This paper presents the main topics, arguments, and positions in the philosophy of AI at present (excluding ethics). Apart from the basic concepts of intelligence and computation, the main topics of artificial cognition are perception, action, meaning, rational choice, free will, consciousness, and normativity. Through a better understanding of these topics, the philosophy of AI contributes to our understanding of the nature, prospects, and value of AI. Furthermore, these topics can be understood more deeply through the discussion of AI; so (...) we suggest that “AI Philosophy” provides a new method for philosophy. (shrink)

Our examination of the controversy surrounding the intentionalist conception of textual interpretation shows that the critics of this approach to questions of meaning and interpretation have so far failed to prove their case. The standard objections to intentionalism, on grounds of logical or empirical fallacy, cannot be maintained. We reconstruct the objections which have been raised in the literature against the intentional conception and discuss them as criticism of a conception hold to be inadequate with respect to the problem of (...) literary interpretation. In our evaluation of the intentional conception we conclude that it represents a perfectly ‘normal’ conception of meaning and interpretation, of a kind by no means inferior to other approaches adopted by the various disciplines concerned with interpreting texts. (shrink)

A shared narrative in the literature on the evolution of cooperation maintains that social _learning_ evolves early to allow for the transmission of cumulative culture. Social _norms_, whilst present at the outset, only rise to prominence later on, mainly to stabilise cooperation against the threat of defection. In contrast, I argue that once we consider insights from social epistemology, an expansion of this narrative presents itself: An interesting kind of social norm — an epistemic coordination norm — was operative in (...) early and important instances of specialised social learning. I show how there’s a need for such norms in two key social learning strategies and explain how this need is constituted. In assessor-teaching (e.g. Castro et al., 2019b, 2021), epistemic coordination norms allow agents to coordinate around the _content_ of social learning, i.e., what is to be known and how this is to be done. These norms also allow agents to coordinate around the form of cultural learning in what’s sometimes called strategic social learning (Laland, 2004; Hoppitt & Laland, 2013; Heyes, 2018, Chap. 5) and elsewhere. Broadly speaking, this concerns how cultural learning is organised within the social group. The upshot is that the evolution of social learning and social norms are intertwined in important and underappreciated ways from early on. The above matters as it informs our views about the evolution of social norms more generally. Truly _social_ norms emerged to coordinate a plurality of complex behaviours and interactions, amongst them specialised social learning. I substantiate this view by contrasting it with Jonathan Birch’s views on the evolution of norms. What results is a general but cohesive narrative on the early evolution of social norms. (shrink)

Essay Review of two books of A.N. Maxwell, last of the Neo-Popperians: The Comprehensibility of the Universe (1998) and The Human World in the Physical Universe (2001).

Among the many questions raised by Nāgārjuna’s catuṣkoṭi, the most fundamental concerns the type of objects to which its negative statements apply. These statements deny the reality of conditioned Being, which can be understood in two ways: as a negation of our concept or knowledge of conditioned Being, or as a negation of conditioned Being as such. The first interpretation can be called “epistemological” and the second “metaphysical.” Scholarship has almost unanimously accepted the epistemological approach. In this paper I object (...) to this approach and propose to reinterpret the catuṣkoṭi metaphysically, as a description of Being and its inherent principles. I ground my objection in Hegel’s “Doctrine of Being” and argue that the catuṣkoṭi exhibits similar features to the Hegelian concept of substantial negativity. In the end, I draw some conclusions for the study of Nāgārjuna in general and highlight the limits of the parallelism. (shrink)

One of the metaepistemology’s most central debates revolves around the question of what the source of epistemic normativity is. Epistemic instrumentalism claims that epistemic normativity is a species of means-ends normativity. One of the most prominent objections against epistemic instrumentalism features cases of epistemic indifference: Cases where there’s evidence that p yet believing that p wouldn’t promote any of the agent’s aims, wants, or needs. Still, there’s an epistemic reason for the agent to believe that p and thus epistemic instrumentalism (...) is false. In response, instrumentalists have modified their views in various ways, with new contributions still forthcoming. Here, we investigate a neglected aspect of this debate: Laypeople’s judgements on cases of epistemic indifference. In two studies, we investigated whether laypeople agree with the verdict in cases of epistemic indifference as well as the key ideas behind the more recent instrumentalist replies. Our findings indicate that a significant amount of participants found it hard to buy into the cases of epistemic indifference as Kelly has constructed them. Participants did generally share Kelly’s judgement in cases of epistemic indifference. Lastly, some instrumentalist replies are well suited to explain participants’ judgements that agents ought to believe in cases of epistemic indifference. (shrink)

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in general, and political (...) ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an ‘ideology of transition’ which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy. (shrink)

Bioethics needs an elaborated concept of autonomy based on empirical knowledge about the prerequisites of the capacity of autonomy. Whereas Beauchamp and Childress, and many other bioethicists have discussed social influences on the capacity of autonomy in depth, neurobiological influences have received less attention. A comprehensive concept of autonomy should consider both social and biological factors that can diminish the capacity of autonomy. This article focuses on neurobiological influences that can reduce the capacity of autonomy. The thesis of this article (...) is that the integration of neuropsychiatric knowledge into the concept of autonomy is essential for evaluating demands for harmful medical treatments which might be caused by a brain disease, and deciding on involuntary treatments of patients who suffer from substantial lack of autonomy due to neuropsychiatric disorders. Diametrically opposed to such a comprehensive concept of the capacity of autonomy is the concept of ‘liberty of illness’. In Germany, this concept is supported not only by anti-psychiatric groups but also by the Federal Constitutional Court. Several real cases demonstrate how the brain can be ‘hijacked’ by parasites, antibodies or technical devices. Applying the concept of ‘liberty of illness’ to persons whose decision-making capacity is severely affected by neuropsychiatric disorders is cynical. These patients neither chose their disease nor would refuse effective treatment if their will was not disturbed by the disease. Respect for autonomy should be understood as the positive obligation to save, support or restore the biological prerequisites of the capacity for autonomous decision-making. (shrink)

The general context of this paper is the locality problem in quantum theory. In a recent issue of this journal, Redei (1991) offered a proof of the proposition that algebraic Lorentz-covariant quantum field theory is past stochastic Einstein local. We show that Redei's proof is either spurious or circular, and that it contains two deductive fallacies. Furthermore, we prove that the mentioned theory meets the stronger condition of stochastic Haag locality.

The concept of metapolitics, originally seen as a novelty of the New Right in the 1970s, was developed in the 1950s and 1960s to expand the radical right’s influence post-National Socialism. Key figures like Hans Grimm, Arthur Ehrhardt and Herbert Böhme, along with organizations and magazines, created a radical right-wing cultural network to shape an alternative cultural canon in post-war Germany.

In this paper we describe a novel approach to defining an ontologically fundamental notion of co-presentness that does not go against the tenets of relativity theory. We survey the possible reactions to the problem of the present in relativity theory, introducing a terminological distinction between a static role of the present, which is served by the relation of simultaneity, and a dynamic role of the present, with the corresponding relation of co-presentness. We argue that both of these relations need to (...) be equivalence relations, but they need not coincide. Simultaneity, the sharing of a temporal coordinate, need not have fundamental ontological import, so that a relativizing strategy with respect to simultaneity seems promising. The notion of co-presentness, on the other hand, does have ontological import, and can therefore not be relativized to an observer or to an arbitrarily chosen frame. We argue that a formal representation of indeterminism can provide the structure needed to anchor the relation of co-presentness, and that this addition is in fact congenial to the notion of dynamic time as requiring real change. The resulting picture is one of an extended dynamic present, implying a formal distinction between static simultaneity and dynamic co-presentness. After working out the basics of our approach in the simpler framework of branching time, we provide our full analysis in the framework of branching space-times, which allows for a formal definition of modal correlations. The spatial extension of the dynamic present can reach as far as the modal correlations do. In the limit, the dynamic present could extend across a maximal space-like hypersurface. (shrink)