This paper develops a new argument against free will, understood as the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). This principle has been central in debates around free will and moral responsibility; however, it is almost always stated in terms of bodily rather than mental action, and it is therefore mainly understood as the possibility to physically act differently, rather than to think differently. The argument presented here is aimed at the latter, which is termed the possibility of alternative thought (PAT). It (...) argues on psychological grounds that it is impossible for a subject to think differently than it does in a given situation. First, I make the possibility of alternative thought explicit, explain what it means for a self to entertain a thought (or conscious content), and I define a notion of conscious control that is required for the argument. I then offer a taxonomy of content types, based on how they are being controlled. In the third section, I analyse the scenarios of content generation for each type of content, to determine whether they can satisfy the PAT. It will be shown that this cannot be the case. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of Nicolas Malebranche's Treatise on Nature and Grace by Patrick Riley. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Etablie sur les dernieres editions revues par Malebranche, la presente edition des Conversations chretiennes et des Meditations sur l'humilite et la penitence reunit, selon les intentions de l'auteur, les textes disjoints par les editeurs modernes. Nous tenons compte d'une edition des petites meditations de 1701 jusqu'ici perdue. Par leur date de publication et par les enrichissements qu'ils apportent a la Recherche de la verite ces textes annoncent les Eclaircissements de 1678 et les oeuvres de la maturite. L'orthographe et la ponctuation (...) sont modernisees, et les citations retraduites. (shrink)

Ouvrage majeur de la philosophie de Malebranche, De la recherche de la verite constitue un moment cle dans la reflexion philosophique a l'age classique. Si son inspiration est cartesienne, Malebranche y soutient d'emblee une theorie originale de la connaissance, de la verite et de la causalite: notamment la these de la vision en Dieu des idees et l'analyse des causes de l'erreur. Plus qu'une theorie de la connaissance, c'est donc une theorie complete de l'esprit humain et de ses multiples fonctions (...) que nous livre l'ouvrage. Cette nouvelle edition de la Recherche de la verite donne a lire pour la premiere fois dans un format accessible a tous, un texte majeur de la pensee moderne, heritier de l'age classique et annonciateur des Lumieres: les textes sont etablis a partir des deux dernieres editions de 1700 et 1712 revues par Malebranche lui-meme, et des trois premiers volumes des oeuvres Completes publiees sous la direction d'Andre Robinet; l'orthographe a ete modernisee. La ponctuation a fait l'objet d'une revision systematique; les textes cites en langue etrangere ont ete traduits ou retraduits, et leurs references mises a jour afin de tenir compte des editions les plus recentes. Enfin, le lecteur trouvera, dans ce premier volume, une presentation eclairante de cette oeuvre par Jean-Christophe Bardout, offrant ainsi des grilles de lecture et de comprehension de cet ouvrage majeur du XVIIe siecle, qui n'avait jusqu'alors fait l'objet d'aucune etude specifique. (shrink)

Eines der zentralen Anliegen des "Wiener Kreises" ist heute aktueller denn je. Es bestand darin sichtbar zu machen, wie ganz unterschiedliche, weit auseinanderliegende Bereiche wissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung miteinander in Zusammenhang gebracht werden können. Genannt sei hier Otto Neurath, als Motor der ganzen Sache. Die "Encyclopedia of United Science" sollte eine Vorstellung davon vermitteln, wie moderne Wissenschaften ihre Erkenntnisansprüche formulieren und überprüfen. Sie knüpfte ausdrücklich an die Enzyklopädisten der französischen Aufklärung an. Die in diesem Band zusammengefassten Beiträge durchleuchten das Aufklärungskonzept, das der (...) Enzyklopädie der Logischen Empiristen zugrunde liegt. (shrink)

Je crois devoir avertir que ceux qui savent bien les principes que j'ai prouves dans la Recherche de la verite et ailleurs, n'ont pas besoin de lire les additions qui suivent, ni meme les eclaircessements qui sont a la fin de ce traite, dans lesquels on peut fort bien entendre ma pensee. Mais ils seront peut-etre utiles a ceux que je n'avais pas en vue, lorsque j'ecrivais le traite De la nature et de la Grace, et que je souhaiterais extremement (...) de pouvoir contenter aussi bien que les autres. Dans ces oeuvres completes de Malebranche, nous presentons le texte de la meilleure edition designee par Malebranche. (shrink)

Many natural languages include plural terms, i.e., terms which denote many individuals at once. Are there also superplural terms, i.e., terms which denote many pluralities of individuals at once? Some philosophers say ‘Yes’, citing a range of sentence-types which apparently can’t be analyzed in a first-order plural logic, but which can be analyzed in a superplural one. We argue that all the data presented in favor of the superplural can, in fact, be analyzed using only first-order resources. The key is (...) to add to ordinary plural logic a new notion of a generalized cover. A generalized cover reflects how interlocutors in a conversation may divide a salient plurality into many subpluralities, which can then be involved in reference and predication. With generalized covers in place, all the apparently troublesome sentences can be easily handled. Our approach can also be extended to account, not only for linguistic data which seem to favor the superplural, but also for other phenomena involving plurals. The result is a unified approach to natural language plurals on which superplurals are analyzed away. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...) recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

This paper offers a framework for consciousness of internal reality. Recent PET experiments are reviewed, showing partial overlap of cortical activation during self-produced actions and actions observed from other people. This overlap suggests that representations for actions may be shared by several individuals, a situation which creates a potential problem for correctly attributing an action to its agent. The neural conditions for correct agency judgments are thus assigned a key role in self/other distinction and self-consciousness. A series of behavioral experiments (...) that demonstrate, in normal subjects, the poor monitoring of action-related signals and the difficulty in recognizing self-produced actions are described. In patients presenting delusions, this difficulty dramatically increases and actions become systematically misattributed. These results point to schizophrenia and related disorders as a paradigmatic alteration of a ''Who?'' system for self-consciousness. (shrink)

"In June 2015, Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt resigned from the Faculty of Life Sciences at University College London after making a dismissive remark about female scientists. The incident is just the tip of the iceberg, argues Nicola Gaston, President of the New Zealand Association of Scientists. She scrutinises the sexism afflicting the discipline of science, from the under-representation of women to the 'scientific' argument that mental capabilities are gendered. Ultimately, she asks what can be done to combat unconscious bias in (...) science - and to ensure that the future of scientific inquiry is both balanced and objective."--Publisher information. (shrink)

It is usual to identify initial conditions of classical dynamical systems with mathematical real numbers. However, almost all real numbers contain an infinite amount of information. I argue that a finite volume of space can’t contain more than a finite amount of information, hence that the mathematical real numbers are not physically relevant. Moreover, a better terminology for the so-called real numbers is “random numbers”, as their series of bits are truly random. I propose an alternative classical mechanics, which is (...) empirically equivalent to classical mechanics, but uses only finite-information numbers. This alternative classical mechanics is non-deterministic, despite the use of deterministic equations, in a way similar to quantum theory. Interestingly, both alternative classical mechanics and quantum theories can be supplemented by additional variables in such a way that the supplemented theory is deterministic. Most physicists straightforwardly supplement classical theory with real numbers to which they attribute physical existence, while most physicists reject Bohmian mechanics as supplemented quantum theory, arguing that Bohmian positions have no physical reality. (shrink)

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to “speak” of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary (...) to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We suggest that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms. (shrink)

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

The development of a biological notion of “population” over the first century of the theory of evolution has been commented upon by a number of historians and philosophers of biology. Somewhat less commonly discussed, however, is the parallel development of the statistical concept of a population over precisely the same period, in some cases driven by the same historical actors (such as Francis Galton and R. A. Fisher). We explore here these parallel developments, first from the perspective of a reconstruction (...) of the historical development of each concept, then with the aid of a digital analysis of a corpus of literature drawn from the journals Biometrika and Journal of Genetics, between 1900 and 1960. These twin analyses show both points of interesting overlap between these two historical trends as well as points of important divergence. The biological and statistical notions of “population” seem to be relatively clearly distinguishable over these six decades, in spite of the fact that a number of authors contributed clearly to both traditions. The complex interplay of continuity and discontinuity across these two notions of “population” makes them a particularly interesting case study of scientific conceptual change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Seven Poems NICOLAS CALAS (Translated by Avi Sharon) hellenizing surrealism: a greek door to europe Nicolas calas (Kalamares) may be considered merely a minor Greek poet, but he had a major global persona and influence. In the middle of the last century he played a catalyzing role in the international avant garde: He was a Zelig-like polemicist in three languages (Greek, French, and English) and across (...) three cultural capitals (Athens, Paris, and New York). But he always fought on a singular front: surrealism. Born in Lausanne in 1907, he grew up in Athens and by the later 1920s began to stand out in literary circles (he was over 6' 4") for his modernist if not revolutionary views. Starting from an interest in Freud and Marx, the subconscious and the revolutionary, Calas soon arrived at their natural synthesis—surrealism. Around the time when a distinctly Greek form of surrealist poetry emerged, with the 1935 publication of “Blast Furnace” by Andreas Embiricos, Calas was on his way to becoming its unofficial spokesman. He moved to the epicenter of the movement in Paris and with the 1938 publication of Foyers d’Incendie became the “most lucid and audacious” of founder André Breton’s acolytes, both prophet and demagogue of the group. Carried along in the current of European artists and thinkers leaving Europe for New York, he would continue the fight on the western wing of the faction (literally, coming to blows at a cocktail party with Clement Greenberg, representing the opposing Abstract Expressionist side). In 1942 he published another clarion pamphlet, Confound the Wise, giving the movement voice in English and befriending its most visible local supporters and practitioners, from Peggy Guggenheim to Marcel Duchamp. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 The Wyndham Lewis of the operation, Calas was a cross-border catalyst, evangelizing the role of surrealism as a liberating and generative force in modern literature and art. For him and other writers and poets, the weapon that would most effectively derange the reader’s habitual conformism into revelatory and revolutionary perception was the surrealist image, poetry’s lingua franca. For Greek practitioners it was completely natural for that magical representation to arise out of their god-infested, sun-filled landscape. Here they had a force that was both blinding and enlightening, penetrating and transformative, local and universal. For Calas, the primary echo or reflection of that essential image was the island of Santorini, referenced in several of the translations here (and reminiscent of his fellow national Nikos Gatsos’s use of the island of Amorgos in a similar context). It stood as the very symbol of fiery transformation, an image monstrous enough to shock the reader into a super-rational embrace of its own form of logic. This Hellenization of surrealism, like the Hellenization of modernism itself, was to become an important, transformative power in its own right. For many, the origin (and likewise, for many, the enclosing border ) of surrealism was France. “But it is French. It is their invention,” was how William Carlos Williams saw it, to his chagrin. Williams was convinced that the objective concentration on the image itself (“no ideas but in things”) could offer a salutary corrective to American poetry of his time. “It is the surrealists who have invented the living defense of literature,” he wrote in a 1929 essay. But for a poet so at one with the American Grain to be reconciled with surrealism’s ‘Francite’ he needed some way to cross the divide. His admiration for Calas’s work in clarifying and promoting the group’s ideas enabled the Greek poet to serve as a mediator, to allow the creative transference of its rebellious wisdom into Williams’s poetry. To borrow the title of one of his early American essays, Calas provided Williams a “Greek door to Europe.” In translating four of Calas’s French poems into English, published in 1941 with a frontispiece by the surrealist painter and magician Kurt Seligman, Williams leveraged Calas as the vehicle through which the “enabling foreignness” of surrealism could be grafted into the grain of his American modernist work, just as he set out on his magnum opus, Paterson. In a similar way... (shrink)

Despite Fisher's (1930) psychological intuitions of and the formal treatment given by Yaari (1965, Review of Economic Studies 32, 137), the intertemporal model of choice is mainly a model with certain lifetime. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider this assumption, starting from a very simple two-period model of choice with lifetime uncertainty. We examine the comparative statics of the model at the first two orders and replace the concept of `pure time preference' by taking into account the subjective (...) treatment of the probability of survival. (shrink)

Claudian’s Easter hymn “De Salvatore” (carm. min. 32) is not simply an imitation of the “Versus paschales” of Ausonius, but sets itself in a fundamentally different literary tradition through the manner of its description of God: its focus on paradoxical aspects of the Christian account of salvation and the use of key terms like mirabile/arcanum/stupor show that it has combined the genre of a Christian hymn with the presentational techniques of paradoxography. Against this background the citation of Claudian at Aug. (...) civ. 5,25 and the statement miracula terrae nulla putem in Aus. eph. 3,71f. appear in a new light. (shrink)

A growing literature argues that animals can act for moral reasons without being responsible. I argue that the literature often fails to maintain a clear distinction between moral behavior and moral agency, and I formulate a dilemma: either animals are less moral or they are more responsible than the literature suggests. If animals can respond to moral reasons, they are responsible according to an influential view of moral responsibility—Quality of Will. But if they are responsible, as some argue, costly implications (...) must be acknowledged. If, however, they should not be considered responsible, then we may have to reassess the meaning of animal morality. I discuss ways to eschew responsibility or to tailor it to animals and argue that each requires a revised conception of animal morality. (shrink)

Theoreticians of civilization have defined a series of anomalies of the European culture as cultural maladies. But this notion was used from author to author with very different meanings, being vaguely defined or used as a simple metaphor. In the ideological discourse of the Third Reich the references to the maladies of the European culture are frequently correlated to the references to the savior Reich. The present study suggests the concept of axiological malady in order to designate more precisely a (...) series of unhealthy phenomenon of the European culture, for instance the puerilism. (shrink)

This research aim to investigate the effects of motor imagery, focused on the trajectory of the ball and the target area, and self-talk before the actual strike on the performance of the service in skilled tennis players. Thirty-three participants, competing in regional to national competitions, were randomly divided into three groups: Control, MI, and MI + self-talk. They performed a pre-test, 20 acquisition sessions, and a post-test similar to the pre-test, in match situations. The percentage of the first service, their (...) speed, and the efficiency scores, evaluated by experts, were use as dependent variables and indicators of performance. While there was no difference in service speed, this study showed an improvement in the first service percentage and efficiency in the participants of the MI and MI + self-talk groups. Additionally, analyses revealed greater efficiency when MI was combined with self-talk compared to other conditions. It, therefore, seems advantageous for skilled tennis players to use MI and motivational self-talk before performing the first service balls. (shrink)

This study addresses the growing interest in the social impact assessment of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Using the benefit (value) transfer approach, this study seeks to demonstrate how the social return on investment (SROI) of a CSR inclusion initiative promoting disability sport participation can be assessed. Literature on CSR inclusion initiatives, social impact measurement, disability sport participation and disability interventions/organizations was reviewed and compared. This helped identify the stakeholders and social outcomes to include, and the assumptions for the financial (...) proxies and beneficiary percentages. Based on data provided by the Rugby Football League in England, an application to Inclusion Rugby League— a CSR inclusion initiative promoting disability sport participation—was then conducted. The SROI of Inclusion Rugby League is 3.39:1—a social return of £3.39 for £1 invested. Our research quantifies the positive social impact of a CSR inclusion initiative in monetary terms, providing insights for assessing SROI. This study informs future research on the social impact assessment of CSR initiatives, offering valuable guidance for organizations and their managers in making a case for further investments in CSR. Moreover, it encourages potential funders to engage in CSR initiatives. (shrink)