Risto Hilpinen; X*—Authors and Artifacts, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 155–178, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study outlines the first intellectual history of religious recognition, stretching from the New Testament to present day. Risto Saarinen connects the history of religion with philosophical approaches, arguing that philosophers owe a considerable historical and conceptual debt to the religious processes of recognition. At the same time, religious recognition has a distinctive profile that differs from philosophy in some important respects. Saarinen undertakes a systematic elaboration of the insights provided by the tradition (...) of religious recognition. He proposes that theology and philosophy can make creative use of the long history of religious recognition. (shrink)

A distributed neural network model called SPEC for processing sentences with recursive relative clauses is described. The model is based on separating the tasks of segmenting the input word sequence into clauses, forming the case‐role representations, and keeping track of the recursive embeddings into different modules. The system needs to be trained only with the basic sentence constructs, and it generalizes not only to new instances of familiar relative clause structures but to novel structures as well. SPEC exhibits plausible memory (...) degradation as the depth of the center embeddings increases, its memory is primed by earlier constituents, and its performance is aided by semantic constraints between the constituents. The ability to process structure is largely due to a central executive network that monitors and controls the execution of the entire system. This way, in contrast to earlier subsymbolic systems, parsing is modeled as a controlled high‐level process rather than one based on automatic reflex responses. (shrink)

Phenomenological sociology was founded at the beginning of 1930s by Alfred Schutz. His mundane phenomenology sought to combine impulses drawn from Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Weber's action theory. It was made famous at the turn of 1960s and 1970s by Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Berger & Luckmann's social constructionism. This paper deals with the notable accomplishments of Schutz and his followers and then proceeds to a shared shortcoming, which is that the phenomenological approach is unable to understand meaning in any other (...) way but as actors's knowledge. Therefore, phenomenological sociologists are forced to describe the actor's interpretations of meaning as transparent to the actor him/herself, even if they sometimes make heroic attempts to escape the limitations of the phenomenological conception. The limitation is apparent in Husserl's and Schutz's definition of meaning as a “reflective intentional act”, Garfinkel's use of the term “accounting” to refer to a signifying effect, and the way Berger and Luckmann describe their social theory as “sociology of knowledge”. Today, similar confusions are present in Michael Polanyi's “tacit knowledge”and in Giddens' structuration theory. (shrink)

In addition to considering the work of a broad range of Renaissance authors (including Petrarch, Donato Acciaiuoli, John Mair, and Francesco Piccolomini), Risto ...

This volume examines the medieval understanding of Aristotle's "weakness of the will". The medieval views are outlined on the basis of five major commentaries on Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_ between 1250 and 1350.

The present volume is a sequel to Deontic Logic: Introductory and Systematic Readings : its purpose is to offer a view of some of the main directions of research in contemporary deontic logic. Most of the articles included in Introductory and Systematic Readings represent what may be called the standard modal approach to deontic logic, in which de on tic logic is treated as a branch of modal logic, and the normative concepts of obligation, permission and prohibition are regarded as (...) analogous to the "alethic" modalities necessity, possibility and impossibility. As Simo Knuuttila shows in his contribution to the present volume, this approach goes back to late medieval philosophy. Several 14th century philosophers observed the analogies between deontic and alethic modalities and discussed the deontic interpretations of various laws of modal logic. In contemporary deontic logic the modal approach was revived by G. H. von Wright's classic paper 'Deontic Logic'. Certain analogies between deontic and alethic modalities are obvious and uncontroversial, but the standard approach has often been criticized on the ground that it exaggerates the analogies and tends to ignore those features of normative concepts which distinguish them from other modalities. (shrink)

We prove convergence laws for logics of the form equation image, where equation image is a properly chosen collection of generalized quantifiers, on very sparse finite random structures. We also study probabilistic collapsing of the logics equation image, where equation image is a collection of generalized quantifiers and k ∈ ℕ+, under arbitrary probability measures of finite structures.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates Friedrich Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) use of recognition (Anerkennung) terminology, focusing on the early On Religion (1799) and the late Glaubenslehre (1830). While the term occurs only rarely in On Religion, Schleiermacher speaks of the “recognition of otherness” (Anerkennen des Fremden) in a distinctive fashion in this work. In Glaubenslehre, recognition terminology is frequently used. Here, Schleiermacher considers that the doctrine of justification should be considered as an event in which God recognizes human beings. Recognition is compared with (...) the adoption terminology of the Roman law (agnitio filii). Schleiermacher’s use of the term is to some extent indebted to Johann Joachim Spalding and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. As Schleiermacher highlights the role of feeling, he also participates in the sentimentalist current of the Enlightenment. In theological contexts, however, his view is highly original, replacing the older upward model of a servant recognizing the Lord frequently with downward and horizontal models of religious recognition. Philosophically, Schleiermacher does not embrace Hegelian recognition but moves within the pre-Hegelian models of Fichte and sentimentalism. (shrink)

In this paper practical reasoning is understood in the Aristotelian sense as reasoning leading to action or to an intention to do something. Georg Henrik von Wright and a number of other philosophers have tried to assimilate certain forms of such reasoning to deductive reasoning. Many examples of practical reasoning, including some examples given by Aristotle, do not fit a deductive or quasi‐deductive model. It is argued that instances of good practical reasoning often resemble abductive rather than deductive or inductive (...) reasoning, and that the principles governing abduction, including the Principle of Economy, are applicable to practical reasoning. (shrink)

This paper discusses the probabilities of inductive generalizations in languages containing two-place predicates. The depth of the sentences considered here is restricted to two, that is, they contain at most two layers of quantifiers. The analysis of relational hypotheses presented below is based on the theory of distributive normal forms in first-order logic. The main purpose of this paper is not to present methods of calculating unique probability-values for various generalizations, but rather to clarify the general conceptual situation and concentrate (...) on issues of philosophical interest. (shrink)

Peirce discusses the nature and structure of propositions in several manuscripts written in the 1890’s and during the first decade of this century. In this paper I shall outline the main features of Peirce’s theory of the proposition, especially his account of what may be called indeterminate indices in propositions.

This paper outlines the main features of the conception of empirical knowledge presented by Moritz Schlick in his paper 'Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis', and contains a detaüed analysis of Schlick's concept of "Konstatierung". It is argued that in spite of its basically foundationalist appearance, Schlick's theory resembles in important respects contemporary coherence theories of knowledge.

The paper argues that something is art only if (i) it belongs to a special kind of internal history and (ii) needs to be understood and appreciated in the light of such history. This goes against both the traditional view that art has a timeless, ahistorical essence and the historicist view that there can be no ahistorical perspective for understanding art. The paper draws on Hegel’s view that art needs to be understood through its history, but rejects the idea that (...) the history of art has an end in the double sense of a goal and an end point. It also rejects Arthur Danto’s Hegel-inspired claim that the ahistorical essence of art is revealed at the end of its history and opens the door to a natural alliance between philosophers of art and art historians. (shrink)

The character of Finnish political culture stems from the country’s specific position as a polity which emerged in the interface between Sweden and Russia. Western, or Scandinavian, by institutions and structures and Eastern by dependence on a multinational empire in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, this minority region in the Russian empire underwent a bloody civil war in 1918, in the wake of two revolutions in Russia in 1917. The resulting ambiguity between ‘national’ and ‘not national’, between (...) what was Finland’s ‘own’ and what was ‘alien’, remained a central dimension defining Finnish political culture, due to the strength of the communists in Finland and their close relation to the Soviet Union. What remains today, in the conditions of Finland’s membership in the European Union, is a deep-seated attitude stressing the need to adapt to perceived necessities and constraints induced from outside. (shrink)

RésuméCet article traite de la théorie de l'action du début du XIVesiècle, en particulier de l'émergence et de la cohérence des jugements suscitant l'action. Pour Thomas d'Aquin, les trois «parties de la prudence» sont: 1) l'eubulia(la «bonne délibération»); 2) lasynesis(le «bon jugement»); 3) le commandement d'agir qui en résulte. Le vocabulaire de Thomas d'Aquin, emprunté à l'Éthique à Nicomaqued'Aristote, livre VI, se raffine substantiellement dans les écrits de Gérard Odon et Jean Buridan. Entre autres, leur discussion de la circonspection et (...) de la prudence lors du processus de délibération jette un éclairage nouveau sur la conception que le Moyen Âge sefaisait de la «faiblesse de la volonté». (shrink)

One of the characteristic features of contemporary logic is that it incorporates the Frege‐Russell thesis according to which verbs for being are multiply ambiguous. This thesis was not accepted before the nineteenth century. In Aristotle existence could not serve alone as a predicate term. However, it could be a part of the force of the predicate term, depending on the context. For Kant existence could not even be a part of the force of the predicate term. Hence, after Kant, existence (...) was left homeless. It found a home in the algebra of logic in which the operators corresponding to universal and particular judgments were treated as duals, and universal judgments were taken to be relative to some universe of discourse. Because of the duality, existential quantifier expressions came to express existence. The orphaned notion of existence thus found a new home in the existential quantifier. (shrink)

Many philosophers have used the concept of belief system or some related notion as a basic tool of epistemological discussion and analysis. A belief system is a set of propositions or statements which represents a person’s doxastic state or credal state in a certain situation; it consists of the propositions which the person either explicitly or implicitly accepts in the situation. One of the many concerns of epistemologists is to attempt to formulate general “conditions of rationality” for belief systems. I (...) want to suggest in the present paper that in this endeavour philosophers usually treat belief systems as if they were artifacts or tools made for various epistemic purposes: for providing satisfactory answers to interesting questions, for helping to find answers to new questions, and for providing resources for argumentation and research. Insofar as epistemology and philosophy of science can legitimately be viewed in this way, they may be regarded as “sciences of the artificial” in Herbert Simon’s sense, and not as sciences of the “natural world” or parts of natural science, as some proponents of “naturalised epistemology” have recently suggested. (shrink)