This paper analyses the phenomenology and epistemology of chatbots such as ChatGPT and Bard. The computational architecture underpinning these chatbots are large language models (LLMs), which are generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained on a massive dataset of text extracted from the Web. We conceptualise these LLMs as multifunctional computational cognitive artifacts, used for various cognitive tasks such as translating, summarizing, answering questions, information-seeking, and much more. Phenomenologically, LLMs can be experienced as a “quasi-other”; when that happens, users anthropomorphise them. (...) For most users, current LLMs are black boxes, i.e., for the most part, they lack data transparency and algorithmic transparency. They can, however, be phenomenologically and informationally transparent, in which case there is an interactional flow. Anthropomorphising and interactional flow can, in some users, create an attitude of (unwarranted) trust towards the output LLMs generate. We conclude this paper by drawing on the epistemology of trust and testimony to examine the epistemic implications of these dimensions. Whilst LLMs generally generate accurate responses, we observe two epistemic pitfalls. Ideally, users should be able to match the level of trust that they place in LLMs to the degree that LLMs are trustworthy. However, both their data and algorithmic opacity and their phenomenological and informational transparency can make it difficult for users to calibrate their trust correctly. The effects of these limitations are twofold: users may adopt unwarranted attitudes of trust towards the outputs of LLMs (which is particularly problematic when LLMs hallucinate), and the trustworthiness of LLMs may be undermined. (shrink)

Parto de uma conceitualização geral de como o problema do mal fora abordado ao longo da tradição filosófica e religiosa, enquanto problema ontológico e relativo, no mais das vezes, a uma teodiceia que busca explicar a existência do mal no mundo. Em seguida, abordo uma nova forma de se pensar o problema do mal através do pensamento idealista de Immanuel Kant, que movimentou a problemática em uma direção outra àquela anterior, ou seja, afirmando que o mal não era um problema (...) localizado na realidade, mas no sujeito enquanto ser dotado de moralidade, residindo na dimensão mais radical da natureza humana. Em Arendt, o mal deixa o plano do sujeito singular e passa a ser compreendido enquanto um fenômeno político. Para a autora, o mal não deve ser um fenômeno político, todavia com a ascensão dos movimentos totalitários e outros fenômenos de ruptura com o fio da tradição, esse problema passa a ocupar a dimensão da vida pública. Desta forma, o objetivo da autora é tentar compreender as condições para se pensar o mal enquanto fenômeno político, assim como aquilo que lhe fundamenta e garante legitimidade. O fio condutor deste artigo são as obras Origens do Totalitarismo (ARENDT, 2018) e o conjunto de ensaios publicados no período de 1930-54 (ARENDT, 2008). O produto da presente análise refere-se à experiência humana da solidão enquanto fundamento do mal na esfera política. (shrink)

In these eloquent essays, articles and lectures, Rorty gives a stimulating summary of his central philosophical beliefs and how they relate to his political ...

Explains the difference between pictorial and linguistic meaning, examines the works of Titian, Poussin, Ingres, Manet, Picasso, and de Kooning, and discusses art's psychological impact.

1. bd. Von der Vernunftkritik zur Naturphilosophie.--2. bd. Von der Naturphilosophie zur Philosophie der Geistes.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Wahrheit, Referenz und Realismus" verfügbar.

Aristotle did not view perception as a rudimentary reaction with little content as suggested by Plato, nor as the work of reason and thought as claimed by Strato. Perception is a half-way house between the two. This essay explores Aristotle’s redrawing of the map in which perception is located, and the formal and material causes of perception.

The ArgumentFocusing on the celebrations of Newton and his work, this article investigates the use of the concept of genius and its connection with debates on the methodology of science and the morality of great discoverers. During the period studied, two areas of tension developed. Firstly, eighteenth-century ideas about the relationship between genius and method were challenged by the notion of scientific genius as transcending specifiable rules of method. Secondly, assumptions about the nexus between intellectual and moral virtue were threatened (...) by the emerging conception of genius as marked by an extraordinary personality – on the one hand capable of breaking with established methods to achieve great discoveries, on the other, likely to transgress moral and social conventions. The assesments of Newton by nineteenth-century scientists such as Brewster, Whewell, and De Morgan were informed by these tensions. (shrink)

The problems of the meaning and function of negation are disentangled from ontological issues with which they have been long entangled. The question of the function of negation is the crucial issue separating relevant and paraconsistent logics from classical theories. The function is illuminated by considering the inferential role of contradictions, contradiction being parasitic on negation. Three basic modelings emerge: a cancellation model, which leads towards connexivism, an explosion model, appropriate to classical and intuitionistic theories, and a constraint model, which (...) includes relevant theories. These three modelings have been seriously confused in the modern literature: untangling them helps motivate the main themes advanced concerning traditional negation and natural negation. Firstly, the dominant traditional view, except around scholastic times when the explosion view was in ascendency, has been the cancellation view, so that the mainstream negation of much of traditional logic is distinctively nonclassical. Secondly, the primary negation determinable of natural negation is ·relevant negation. In order to picture relevant negation the traditional idea of negation as otherthanness is progressive) refined, to nonexclusive restricted otherthanness. Several pictures result, a reversal picture, a debate model, a record cabinet (or files of the universe) model which help explain relevant negation. Two appendices are attached, one on negation in Hegel and the Marxist tradition, the other on Wittgenstein's treatment of negation and contradiction. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 189-199, June 2022.

The political philosophy originates from the reflections of crisis, risks and threats which society faces to. The author understands environmentalism as a tendency of current political philosophy which starts from the reflections of causes and possible effects of global environmental crisis as one of the most serious threats to the existential preconditions of current political system and global civilization at all. Considering the changes in social, technological and environmental starting conditions of the existence of economic-political system – that are consequences (...) of the transition from stable geologic-climate era of Holocene to unstable era of anthropocene – it is necessary to reconsider once more the basic premises, imperatives and conceptual frames of current economic-political system. The outlines of current economic-political system in philosophical frame were laid out by founders of modern political thinking while we can identify some of basic premises of environmentalism and also concepts relevant to the reflection of current threats and risks in some of their works. Author considers the concept of civil and human rights, the concept of natural state and the concept of social contract to be suitable for the reflection of the crisis of current economic-political system regarding environmentalism. Afterwards, the author formulates in what meanings are these concepts actual also for anthropocene. In conclusion, the author´s hypothesis is that the political philosophy of 21st century must reflect the environmental preconditions and limits of existence and forms of economic-political system and, at the same time, it must take into account that any economic and social activities have influence on the quality and sustainability of environment. (shrink)

Die Reihe Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) setzt seit mehreren Jahrzehnten die Agenda in der sich stetig Nietzsche-Forschung. Die Bände sind interdisziplinär und international ausgerichtet und spiegeln das gesamte Spektrum der Nietzsche-Forschung wider, von der Philosophie über die Literaturwissenschaft bis zur politischen Theorie. Die Monographien und Sammelbände unterliegen jeweils einem strengen Peer-Review.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.3 (2001) 425-444 [Access article in PDF] The Passions and Animal Language, 1540-1700 R. W. Serjeantson "Do not think, kind and benevolent readers, that I am proposing a useless subject to you by choosing to discuss the language [loquela] of beasts. For this is nothing other than philosophy, which investigates the natures of animals." 1 The Italian medical professor Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente (...) began his 1603 treatise On the language of beasts with this captatio benevolentiae with good cause. For early modern natural philosophers almost universally insisted that only humans were capable of language and speech. In this they followed, sometimes explicitly, their ancient authorities. "Man," Aristotle had said in the Politics, "is the only animal that has the gift of speech." "Men," wrote Cicero in the De inventione, "most excel the beasts in this, that they can speak." 2 They were sentiments echoed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. "There is no true language among beastes," said Sir Kenelm Digby. "Language" (loquela), concurred G. J. Vossius, "is unique to man." And according to John Ray in The Wisdom of God (1691), speech was "a quality so peculiar to Man, that no Beast could ever attain to it." 3Language was a subject of absorbing interest to numerous early modern philosophers. They investigated its origin, its production, its signification, and its use. But behind almost all of these investigations lay one of the most profound suppositions in early modern anthropology: the uniqueness of the human [End Page 425] capacity for language, and the brutishness of the brute beasts. Harsh judgments were passed on those who thought that animals might be able to speak. Lawyers held that belief in animal language was sufficient evidence of idiocy. According to Kenelm Digby it was only vanity, ignorance, and a specious desire for reputation that had led some authors to argue that animals used "compleate languages as Men haue to discourse with one another in." And the seventeenth-century English writer on the passions, Edward Reynolds, thought that only "melancholy men" believed "that Elephants and Birds, and other Creatures have a language whereby they discourse with one another." 4Yet despite this pervasive assumption that humans spoke and animals did not, the question of animal language kept arising in early modern culture. Readers met speaking animals in beast fablesand on Lucianic voyages. There was a popular belief in early modern England that "in the olde tymes" animals could speak. 5 Theodore Zwinger, Claude Duret, and G. J. Vossius all recorded many accounts of human communication with birds, with the ancient claim that Apollonius of Tyana could understand birdsong being particularly notorious. 6 In the Old Testament Balaam's ass asks his owner what he has done to deserve being beaten. 7 And St. Basil had even suggested that before the Fall Adam and Eve had been able to talk to the animals as well as to name them--a suggestion that both Thomas Browne and Joseph Glanvill gave short shrift. 8 But my purpose in this paper is not to follow speaking animals through early modern fables, popular beliefs, or even Biblical commentary. Instead, I propose to explore the serious investigations of zoosemiotics and animal communication that were undertaken by numerous philosophers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 9For then as now, the question of animal language, broadly interpreted, was a serious one for the sciences. It was a question that was addressed across a wide range of disciplines, from logic to natural history. As such it was an important component of the many discussions of the nature of animal reason--discussions that provided a means for skeptical moral philosophers to humble human pretensions [End Page 426] to rationality and wisdom. 10 Natural philosophers, too, undertook detailed inquiries into the question of animal expression, exploring issues of articulacy, anatomy, and function. Almost all early modern authors agreed that animals could not speak and did not possess language in the same way that humans did. But this still left a great deal of scope for considering the extent... (shrink)

After tracing some of the different interpretations of the Körper/Leib distinction in German phenomenology and philosophical anthropology, this paper compares these philosophical accounts of embodiment to the pragmatist approach of somaesthetics and its core concept of soma. Helmuth Plessner′s theory of embodiment gets particular attention because of its similarities to somaesthetics in terms of their shared emphasis on 1) the value of functional phasing between immanent spontaneity of simply living one′s body and more critically distanced somatic reflection, 2) the way (...) somatic consciousness is essentially shaped by the roles one plays in a social world, and thus 3) on the variety of culturally styled bodies and forms of consciousness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the soma′s ontological status. (shrink)