Chapter One: Constructions. Entities, constructions, and functions When one travels from Los Angeles to New York, going, say, by way of St. Louis, Chicago, ...

We argue that the most‐promising area of clinical application of microarrays in the foreseeable future is the diagnostics and monitoring of infectious diseases. Microarrays for the detection and characterization of human pathogens have already found their way into clinical practice in some countries. After discussing the persistent, yet often underestimated, importance of infectious diseases for public health, we consider the technologies that are best suited for the detection and clinical investigation of pathogens. Clinical application of microarray technologies for the detection (...) of mycobacteria, Bacillus anthracis, HIV, hepatitis and influenza viruses, and other major pathogens, as well as the analysis of their drug‐resistance patterns, illustrate our main thesis. BioEssays 30:673–682, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

It is widely held that oblique contexts and indexical terms present difficulties to Frege's theory of sense. The aim of the present paper is to show that a simple device involving no revision of Frege's semantic doctrine resolves all the alleged difficulties. A simple extension of Frege's notation is proposed which makes it possible to translate oblique contexts into the concept script.

Of two false theories, One can be, Intuitively, Closer to the truth than the other. The purpose of the article is to propose a rigorous explication of this intuitive notion.

As the foundation of our rationality, logic has traditionally been considered fixed, stable and constant. This conception of the discipline has been challenged recently by the plurality of logics and in this book, Pavel Arazim extends the debate to offer a new view of logic as dynamic and without a definite, specific shape. The Problem of Plurality of Logics examines the origins of our standard view of logic alongside Kant's theories, the holistic view, the issue of logic's pragmatic significance (...) and Robert Brandom's logical expressivism. Arazim then draws on proof-theoretical approaches to present a convincing argument for a dynamic version of logical inferentialism, which opens space for a new freedom to modify our own logic. He explores the scope, possibilities and limits of this freedom in order to highlight the future paths logic could take, as a motivation for further research. Marking a departure from logical monism and also from the recent doctrine of logical pluralism in its various forms, this book addresses current debates concerning the expressive role of logic and contributes to a lively area of discussion in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This article provides an ethical analysis of the moral conflict over access to premium audio-visual online content, which is currently regulated by geo-blocking in the domain of digital film distri...

In my comment on Katerina Ierodiakonou’s paper, I outline my understanding of the programme of De anima and how it bears on Aristotle’s discussion of the transparent in De anima 2.7, in contrast with his discussion of the transparent in De sensu 3. I then explore Aristotle’s notion of transparency and sketch an alternative to Ierodiakonou’s interpretation of Aristotle’s views as to how colours are generated in physical objects. At the end, I raise two objections to Alexander’s interpretation of the (...) transparent as discussed by Ierodiakonou. (shrink)

If concepts are explicated as abstract procedures, then we can easily show that each empirical concept is a not an effective procedure. Some, but not all empirical concepts are shown to be of a special kind: they cannot in principle guarantee that the object they identify satisfies the intended conditions.

There is probably only one information system in living nature — the macromolecular system including DNA, RNA and protein. Its unity for the genetic and nervous activity can be followed in the storage of information (heredity, memory) and in its processing (recombination and selection of both genetic and mental information). According to the hypothesis of the code of nerve impulses, nucleotide triplets of the nucleus, or more likely amino acids of the surface protein of the impulse generating area of a (...) neuron, generate a limited variety of interspike intervals so that each amino acid corresponds to a certain interspike interval and this particular interval initiates by means of a specific neurotransmitter, the synthesis of the same amino acid (or nucleotide triplet) in the postsynaptic neuron. Thus, a series of impulses produces in the postsynaptic neuron a sequence of amino acids in a form of a polypeptide identical to the polypeptide of the presynaptic neuron. (shrink)

Motivated by the problem of finding finite versions of classical incompleteness theorems, we present some conjectures that go beyond NP ≠ coNP. These conjectures formally connect computational complexity with the difficulty of proving some sentences, which means that high computational complexity of a problem associated with a sentence implies that the sentence is not provable in a weak theory, or requires a long proof. Another reason for putting forward these conjectures is that some results in proof complexity seem to be (...) special cases of such general statements and we want to formalize and fully understand these statements. Roughly speaking, we are trying to connect syntactic complexity, by which we mean the complexity of sentences and strengths of the theories in which they are provable, with the semantic concept of complexity of the computational problems represented by these sentences. -/- We have introduced the most fundamental conjectures in our earlier works. Our aim in this article is to present them in a more systematic way, along with several new conjectures, and prove new connections between them and some other statements studied before. (shrink)

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RUSSELLS ARGUMENT AGAINST FREGE'S SENSE-REFERENCE DISTINCTION PAWEL TURNAu Philosophy I Jagiellonian University Cracow, Poland I n "On Denoting"l Russell argued that Frege's theory of sense and reference was an "inextricable tangle", but, ironically, many readers found the argument even more knotry. In an effort to make sense of it, commentators were often driven to attribute to Russell quite obvious and simple fallacies. A different approach was taken by Peter (...) Geach, who suggested that Russell's argument could be given a consistent reading if it were construed as arguing, not against Frege's theory, but against Russell's own earlier theory, which he put forward in The Principles of Mathematics. It is not an implausible hypothesis, considering how prone Russell was to misrepresent' other philosophers' views and read his own powerful ideas into their writings. In order to justifY Geach's hypothesis properly, one would have to show the crucial difference between Russell's and Frege's theories that made only one of them susceptible to the attack in "On Denoting ". Russell explicitly considered the two theories to be "very nearly the same"; this self-interpretation would have to be questioned. Geach's hypothesis would be further strengthened by providing an actual exegesis of the "On Denoting" argument as directed against The Principles ofMathematics theory. In this paper 1 will try to accomplish both of these tasks. Russell is often accused of confusing use and mention. The accusation is not fair, however. It is true that he does not insist on this distinction; he does not employ it extensively. But he is certainly Russell's Argument against Frege's Distinction 53 aware of it; he simply does not think that it is an important logical distinction. Today this view may seem almost incomprehensible, but that only shows the strength of Frege's influence on our ideas. There are two striking symptoms of Russell's lack of concern for the use-mention distinction: firstly, he does not observe the convention which says that putting an expression in quotation marks produces a name of that expression; secondly, he does not feel any need to employ the pair of terms "sentence" and "proposition", but contents himself with the latter only. The claim about Russell's use of inverted commas needs to be proved; I will come to that later. Russell's assertions are often ambiguous between use and mention of expressions. For example, he asserts that "propositions do not contain words" (PaM, p. 47). However, a few pages later, he speaks of propositions that contain the phrase "any number" (p. 53). If this is not to be self-contradictory, then either the term "proposition" must sometimes signifY a linguistic expression, or the term "phrase" must sometimes be understood without implying that a phrase consists of words. This ambiguity is openly admitted in a later article, where he writes: [we shall be concerned with] the distinction between verbs and substantives, or, more correctly, between the objects denoted by verbs and the objects denoted by substantives. Since this more correct expression is long and cumbrous, I shall generally use the shorter expression to mean the same thing. Thus, when I speak of verbs, I mean the object denoted by verbs, and similarly for substantives.2. Russell's attitude towards the distinction between use and mention is not unjustified. It has its reason in his view oflanguage and the subject -matter of logic. In Russell's view, the subject-matter of logic has nothing to do with language. Words, both spoken and written, are entirely outside its realm. Logic, just as other sciences (except linguistics ), is concerned with the entities indicated by words, and not with words themselves. Even the relation of indicating, which holds between words and things in the world, is of no interest to it: "mean1 In Lf(, pp. 39-56. russ.lI: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives McMaster Univecsity Library Press n.s. 11 (summer 1991): 51- 66 ISSN 0036-o16~ 2 B. Russell, "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 12 (r9II-12): 1-24; in Lf(, pp. 103-24 (at 107-8). 54 PAWEL TURNAU Russell's Argument... (shrink)

The essays assembled here are all very early and differ in a number of ways from Bakhtin's previously published work.

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference (...) between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse--all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

The article studies knowledge in multiagent systems where data available to the agents may have small errors. To reason about such uncertain knowledge, a formal semantics is introduced in which indistinguishability relations, commonly used in the semantics for epistemic logic S5, are replaced with metrics to capture how much two epistemic worlds are different from an agent’s point of view. The main result is a logical system sound and complete with respect to the proposed semantics.

Jan Patočka’s philosophical development was varied. Over the course of fifty years of philosophizing, he gradually, and to varying degrees, developed close to a dozen systematic projects, whose ambition was, at least initially, to present what he called a “unified philosophy.” However, the dynamism with which he changed his philosophical plans and incessantly embarked on new projects invites the question of how to approach the various and often mutually “contradictory” transformations of his philosophical thinking, if neither the continuity and integrity (...) of Patočka’s thought nor the essential specificity of any of these positions is to be lost. Through the notion of the “personal a priori” found in one of Jan Patočka’s early texts, and in a critical, “overcoming-preserving” reference to two antagonistic conceptions of Patočka’s philosophical development, the article attempts to sketch a solution to this general interpretative problem. In the context of the search for Patočka’s “basic position of seeing” as the integrating framework of his diverse philosophical attempts, it simultaneously reconstructs the early question about the meaning of philosophy in general, which Patočka developed in a series of texts from the 1930s, some of which are still available only in the Czech language. (shrink)

I. The framework. 1, Aristotle's project and methods. 2, The perceptual capacity of the soul. 3, The sensory apparatus. 4, The common sense and the related capacities -- II. The terminology. 1, Overlooked occurrences of the phrase 'common sense'. 2, De anima III.1 425a27. 3, De partibus animalium IV.10 686a31. 4, De memoria et reminiscentia 1 450a10. 5, De anima III.7 431b5. 6, Conclusions on the terminology -- III. Functions of the common sense. 1, Simultaneous perception and cross-modal binding. 2, (...) Perceptual discrimination. 3, Waking, sleep, and control of the senses. 4, Perceiving that what we see and hear, and monitoring of the senses. 5, Other roles of the common sense -- Conclusion. (shrink)

There are no moral entitlements with respect to pollution prior to legal conventions that establish them, or so I will argue. While some moral entitlements precede legal conventions, pollution is part of a category of harms against interests that stands apart in this regard. More specifically, pollution is a problematic type of harm that creates liability only under certain conditions. Human interactions lead to harm and to the invasion of others’ space regularly, and therefore we need an account of undue (...) harm as a basis of assigning legal protections and obligations to different agents, which creates standards for holding those agents responsible for harm. Absent such positive standards with respect to pollution at the domestic or international level, it does not make sense to hold agents responsible. This fact has two fundamental implications. First, contrary to what some defenders of environmental justice argue, we cannot hold people responsible for polluting without a system of legal rights in place that assigns entitlements, protections, and obligations, and second, contrary to what opponents of environmental regulation claim, the lack of moral entitlements to pollute creates room for quite extensive legal restrictions on people’s ability to pollute for the sake of the environment and human health. Indeed the scope of those restrictions is wide and open-ended. (shrink)

2 Popper's Logical Definition of Verisimilitude. 3 Popper's Probabilistic Definition of Verisimilitude. 4 Conclusion.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Problems are defined as abstract procedures. An explication of procedures as used in Transparent Intensional Logic and called constructions is presented and the subclass of constructions called concepts is defined. Concepts as closed constructions modulo α- and η-conversion can be associated with meaningful expressions of a natural or professional language in harmony with Church’s conception. Thus every meaningful expression expresses a concept. Since every problem can be unambiguously determined by a concept we can state that every problem is a concept (...) and every concept can be viewed as a problem.Kolmogorov’s idea of a connection between problems and Heyting’s calculus is examined and the non-classical features of the latter are shown to be compatible with realistic logic using partial functions. (shrink)

En este artículo revisamos la relación entre filosofía y literatura como elemento central del trabajo del pensador colombiano Nodier Botero Jiménez, con la intención de exponer de forma práctica las correspondencias entre ambas disciplinas. Para esto, hablaremos de los puntos de encuentro entre filosofía y literatura desde la crítica y teoría literaria, la lectura filosófica del discurso literario como instrumento de desocultamiento y profundización de las causas finales, además, nos preguntaremos si la filosofía es equivalente a la literatura, extendiendo la (...) discusión sobre los difusos límites estilísticos, sin desconocer que sus intenciones son expresiones de saberes diferentes. Para el desarrollo de lo anteriormente descrito, se contrastarán diversas aproximaciones conceptuales como la Kakania de Musil con la dialéctica del momento positivo-racional, la erótica de Roth con la crítica estética de Kant, la ficción borgeana con el mundo hiperconectado de hoy, entre otras. (shrink)

Pár slov úvodem k dopisu, který poslal Pavel Tichý z University of Otago Pavlu Maternovi (který v té době ´pracoval´ na brněnské univerzitě bez možnosti učení a publikování). K dataci dopisu: Shoduji se s odhadem Dr. Raclavského, že jde patrně o r. 1975. Ti, kdo neprožili normalizaci, si těžko představí situaci. To nebylo tak, že můj přítel Tichý momentálně působí na Novém Zélandě a píše mi z momentálního zahraničního pobytu. Tichý byl emigrant, což mj. znamenalo, že žádnou z jeho (...) odborných statí nebylo možno u nás citovat, dále že dík faktu, o kterém každý věděl, že dopisy emigrantů jsou u nás na příslušných institucích otvírány, znamenala korespondence s emigrantem kádrovou skvrnu. O tom jsem tehdy nepřemýšlel, už proto, že četba Tichého dopisů byla nesmírně zajímavá. Byl jsem na shromažďování korespondence lajdák. Moje krátkozrakost zavinila, že se z této korespondence zachoval nepatrný zlomek. Dopis, který následuje, je ovšem obzvlášť zajímavý, a to z následujícího důvodu: Tichý měl už od šedesátých let – ještě v Československu – v hlavě zárodky svého přístupu k logice a logické analýze přirozeného jazyka (svědčí o tom jeho stati v tehdejším Filosofickém časopise, zejména stať „Smysl a procedura“ z r. 1968). Dopis, který zde uveřejňujeme, má však hodnotu historického dokumentu. Jde o první ´neformální´ formulaci jeho pojetí tzv. konstrukcí a jeho postoje k logice, což se postupně promítlo do systému Transparentní intenzionální logiky (TIL), vyloženého souvisle v monografii The Foundations of Frege´s Logic, vydané asi 13 let po tomto dopisu. Ze vzhledu dopisu je patrné, že byl psán na psacím stroji, což v těch letech bylo standardní. Musíme omluvit překlepy (ostatně to byl osobní dopis), pokud jde o nespisovnosti, vím, že Tichý ovládal češtinu velmi dobře, ale dával přednost psát přirozeně, blízko k hovorové češtině. Jistě připustíte, že jeho jazyk je zde velmi živý a že úpravy směrem ke spisovnému jazyku by narušily kouzlo bezprostřednosti a jistého emocionálního zaujetí, které z dopisu vyzařuje. Tichý posílal mně a Pavlovi Cmorejovi i nadále jednak osobní dopisy, jednak rukopisy svých statí, takže jsme měli výhodu být účastni procesu budování TIL, kterou oba (a dnes už nejenom my) pokládáme za podstatný přínos ke světové logice. --Pavel Materna. (shrink)

The article offers a rigorous truth condition for subjunctively conditional statements. The theory is framed in the system of transparent intensional logic and takes connections (especially the cause-Effect relation) as basic. Counterexamples are given to rival theories based on the notion of world similarity.

Based primarily on original sources in Tamil as well as interviews, the article seeks to portray the attitude of Tamil Dalit intellectuals and political leaders towards the question of religion. It seeks to discover the role of religion in their discourse and how they utilise religious matters to mobilise their fellow caste members. It maps their efforts to distance themselves from Hinduism and to propagate the particularity of Dalit deities and Dalit religion as a part of their newly constructed identity. (...) Their opinions on the possibility of conversion are also briefly noted. These attitudes are examined from the viewpoint of the differing emancipation strategies of the three major Tamil Dalit castes. The Paraiyar as well as the Arunthaiyar leaders try to reject the Hindu identity, though the common folk consider themselves to be Hindus. The Devendrars on the contrary associate themselves with the Hindu gods and Hindu temples, they claim direct connection with some of them. Even they, however, tend to emphasise particularity of their deities as a part of their identity building. (shrink)

Buzaglo (as well as Manders (J Philos LXXXVI(10):553–562, 1989)) shows the way in which it is rational even for a realist to consider ‘development of concepts’, and documents the theory by numerous examples from the area of mathematics. A natural question arises: in which way can the phenomenon of expanding mathematical concepts influence empirical concepts? But at the same time a more general question can be formulated: in which way do the mathematical concepts influence empirical concepts? What I want to (...) show in the present paper can be described as follows. The problem articulated by Buzaglo deserves some semantic refinements. Following explications are needed: What is meaning? (In particular: What are concepts?) What are questions? (Or, equivalently: Semantics of interrogative sentences.) -/- Further, a useful notion will be the notion of problem. Taking over the notion of conceptual system from Materna (Conceptual Systems. Logos, Berlin, 2004) and using Tichý’s Transparent intensional logic (TIL) I can try to solve the problem of the relation between mathematical and empirical concepts (not only for the case of expanding some mathematical concepts). (shrink)

Attempting to steer moral philosophy away from abstract theorizing, Moral Disquiet and Human Life argues that moral philosophy should be a practical, rational, and argumentative engagement with reality, and that moral reflection should have direct effects on our lives and the world in which we live. Illustrating her discussion with vivid examples from literature, music, drama, and current events, the noted French philosopher Monique Canto-Sperber resumes the most ancient pursuit of philosophy: the examination of human life itself. What did Socrates (...) mean when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living? How can reflecting on one's existence incorporate human singularity, the contingency of events, the certainty of death, the presence of the past, or the irreversibility of time? Carefully analyzing and proposing answers to such questions, Moral Disquiet and Human Life eloquently calls for a redefinition of the task of moral philosophy and of its limits. (shrink)

The paper deals with the etymology of the personal names Qunï Säŋün and Toŋra Simä appearing in the ninth line of the Old Turkic Tonyukuk inscription. These names are borne by the envoys sent by the kagan of the Tokuz Oghuz to the Chinese and Khitan, respectively, to conclude a military alliance against the Turks. Both names have the same structure, a combination of an ethnonym vs. toŋra), referring to a tribal unit within the Tiele 鐵勒 confederation, and a title (...) of Chinese origin. Based on a thorough analysis of historical and philological data, the authors try to establish possible ethnolinguistic grounds for the Tokuz Oghuz mission, which have so far eluded researchers of the inscription and can be fully restored only in the light of the latest discoveries in the history and philology of Inner Asia of the Old Turkic period, e.g., the decipherment of the famous Khüis Tolgoi inscription from Mongolia. (shrink)

A review of Jozef Kovalčik´s and Max Ryynänen´s Aesthetics of Popular Culture.

We give an exponential lower bound on number of proof-lines in the proof system K of modal logic, i.e., we give an example of K-tautologies ψ₁, ψ₂,... s.t. every K-proof of ψi must have a number of proof-lines exponential in terms of the size of ψi. The result extends, for the same sequence of K-tautologies, to the systems K4, Gödel—Löb's logic, S and S4. We also determine some speed-up relations between different systems of modal logic on formulas of modal-depth one.