The debate on how an individual human life can be understood as being more or less meaningful has been pursued for a considerable time now. Despite extensive discussion some important aspects remain under-explored, namely the relation between meaningfulness and morality – even though many authors implicitly assume a connection between these two value dimensions. But how does morality contribute to a meaningful life? Is it a necessary condition? Or is it not necessary but sufficient or contributive? Or is there, when (...) explored further, no connection at all? This article discusses the relation between morality and meaning by outlining the central positions in the debate, explains the main arguments for and against, and offers some indications for future work in the field. (shrink)

I present a game-theoretical multi-agent system to simulate the evolutionary process responsible for the pragmatic phenomenon division of pragmatic labour (DOPL), a linguistic convention emerging from evolutionary forces. Each agent is positioned on a toroid lattice and communicates via signaling games , where the choice of an interlocutor depends on the Manhattan distance between them. In this framework I compare two learning dynamics: reinforcement learning (RL) and belief learning (BL). An agent’s experiences from previous plays influence his communication behaviour, and (...) RL agents act in a non-rational way whereas BL agents display a small degree of rationality by using best response dynamics . The complete system simulates an evolutionary process of communication strategies, which agents can learn in a structured spatial society. The significant questions are: what circumstances could lead to an evolutionary process that doesn’t result in the expected DOPL convention; and to what extent is interlocutor rationality necessary for the emergence of a society-wide convention à la DOPL? (shrink)

Amalgamating evidence from heterogeneous sources and across levels of inquiry is becoming increasingly important in many pure and applied sciences. This special issue provides a forum for researchers from diverse scientific and philosophical perspectives to discuss evidence amalgamation, its methodologies, its history, its pitfalls, and its potential. We situate the contributions therein within six themes from the broad literature on this subject: the variety-of-evidence thesis, the philosophy of meta-analysis, the role of robustness/sensitivity analysis for evidence amalgamation, its bearing on questions (...) of extrapolation and external validity of experiments, its connection with theory development, and its interface with causal inference, especially regarding causal theories of cancer. (shrink)

Nothing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no copy in the… nervous system which corresponds to a particular thought, or a particular idea, or, memory.WittgensteinIn a recent essay it was emphasized that brain and mind appear to the mind as complementary and reciprocally recursive domains of a hermeneutic circle (Fischer, 1987). An outstanding and not yet recognized feature of this hermeneutic circle is that interpretation within this circle (...) is not rule-governed and hence appears self-organized: individual features of the world (or the brain) become intelligible in terms of the whole context (of the mind)… while the entire context becomes intelligible through individual features (or brain functions). How, or from where then is significance arising? (shrink)

This is a survey of some possible extensions of ZF to a larger universe, closer to the “naive set theory” (the universes discussed here concern, roughly speaking : stratified sets, partial sets, positive sets, paradoxical sets and double sets).

Edward P Thompson’s disapproval of Methodism (which was his own background) is well known, especially in The Making of the English Working Class. There he describes it as religious terrorism with a destructive moral machinery and all too reactionary. However, through a close reading of the sections on Methodism, this article reveals an ambivalence within Thompson’s own text. Again and again, he notes in passing that radicals emerged from the Methodist ranks, so much so that the Methodist Conference worked hard (...) to deal with the problem. It would seem that Thompson has stumbled across a political tension within theology, one that he was to explore in much greater detail in his study of Blake. (shrink)

Qu’en est-il du doute qui porte sur l’existence même de Dieu, l’objet de la foi? Doit-on l’assumer sans jamais prétendre l’éliminer? On le doit, dit Tillich, dans un écrit de 1919 intitulé «Justification et doute», où, de façon paradoxale, il confronte un tel doute à l’idée paulino-luthérienne de la justification. Étant nous-mêmes porteurs, en tant que personnes, d’un sens imprégné de mystère, nous sommes à la fois conscients de la distance infinie qui nous sépare de l’absolu et de la singulière (...) parenté qui nous en approche. (shrink)

La religion serait, aux yeux de la psychanalyse, une névrose obsessionnelle. Les écrits de Freud touchant à la religion, de Totem et tabou à L’Avenir d’une illusion, alimentent cette vulgate. On peut néanmoins s’interroger sur le sort que Freud réserve, dans Moïse et le monothéisme, à ses coreligionnaires juifs persécutés par les nazis : le « testament » du fondateur de la psychanalyse à l’égard du judaïsme est plus ouvert qu’on ne croit. De plus, on ne s’est guère avisé du (...) fait que la qualification de névrose ne constitue en rien une définition. Quand Freud cherche à donner quelque chose de tel, il s’appuie volontiers sur l’étymologie et sur les significations souvent contradictoires que celle-ci livre. La même démarche peut être tentée à propos de la religion, qui n’est pas seulement rassemblement sous un principe mais aussi œuvre de lecture, comme l’illustre la promesse faite à Abraham, le père des religions du Livre. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider an argument for the claim that any satisfactory epistemology of mathematics will violate core tenets of naturalism, i.e. that mathematics cannot be naturalized. I find little reason for optimism that the argument can be effectively answered.

Dieser Quick Guide gibt einen Überblick über Compliance, ESG und Investigations in Emerging Markets im Kontext wachsender Anforderungen wie des deutschen Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetzes und EU-Verordnungen. Deutsche Unternehmen sind durch neue Regelungen, besonders in Emerging Markets, mit verstärkten Sorgfalts-, Dokumentations- und Berichterstattungspflichten konfrontiert. Dieser Leitfaden beleuchtet diese Herausforderungen und zeigt, wie On-Site Audits effizient durchgeführt werden können. Der Inhalt: Einführung Anknüpfungspunkte: Due Diligence, Supply Chain Compliance, Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung, Korruptionsvermeidung Betroffene Kreise: Unternehmen, Tochtergesellschaften, Zulieferer, Dritte Organisation von On-Site Audits Zusammenfassung und Ausblick Die Zielgruppen (...) CEOs, CFOs, Rechtsabteilungsleiter, Compliance-Beauftragte, Beschaffungsmitarbeiter, Rechtsanwälte Die Autoren: RA Dr. Constantin Frank-Fahle, LL.M., Gründungspartner (emltc), spezialisiert auf rechtliche und steuerliche Strukturierung von Auslandsinvestitionen. RA Roland Falder, Counsel (emltc), spezialisiert auf Arbeitsrecht und Compliance Untersuchungen. RA'in Dr. Anna-Luisa Lemmerz, Counsel (emltc), spezialisiert auf Handels- und Gesellschaftsrecht sowie Compliance. (shrink)

Philosophers of religion divide neatly into two camps on the problem of evil: those who think it fatal to the concept of a loving God and those who do not. The latter have established a wide array of defensive positions down through the centuries, but none that has proved impregnable to sceptical attack. In his new book Mr Hick wisely abandons these older fortifications and falls back on highly mobile reserves. Not for him the ‘Fall of Man’ thesis, with its (...) unexplained choice to give up finite perfection; nor the Plotinian principle of plenitude, evil being an inevitable petering out of God's goodness; nor the ‘aesthetic’ gambit where the horrors of life constitute mere ‘shadows’ designed to highlight the beauty of creation; nor the ‘cosmic Toryism’, as someone called it, of Leibniz's ‘best of all possible worlds’; nor even, one might say gratefully, the gaseous obscurantism of Karl Barth's ‘das Nichtige’. All of these defences, and others besides, Mr Hick lumps together under what he calls ‘the majority report’ in Christian theodicy: the Augustinian tradition or type. In place of these venerable ramparts Hick elects the more fluid defence afforded, he thinks, by Irenaeus, Eastern Christianity and, in modern times, by Schleiermacher and a few contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

Brain functions are stochastic processes without intentionality whereas mind emerges from brain functions as a Hegelian “change from quantity”, that is, on the order of 1012 profusely interconnected neurons, “into a new quality”: the collective phenomenon of the brain's self-experience. This self-referential and self-observing quality we have in mind is capable of (recursively) observing its self-observations, i.e., interpreting change that is meaningful in relation to itself. The notion of self-interpretation embodies the idea of a “hermeneutic circle”, that is, (in interpretation (...) theory) the treatment of the whole in relation to its parts. (shrink)

[We understand by ‘person’] a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself, as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places….There has been a tendency among philosophers ever since Locke to conflate the problem of the self with the problem of personal identity, and since memory is clearly essential to a sense of one's identity through time, it is easy to suppose that having a concept of self requires memory too.

Concrete Causation centers about theories of causation, their interpretation, and their embedding in metaphysical-ontological questions, as well as the application of such theories in the context of science and decision theory. The dissertation is divided into four chapters, that firstly undertake the historical-systematic localization of central problems (chapter 1) to then give a rendition of the concepts and the formalisms underlying David Lewis' and Judea Pearl's theories (chapter 2). After philosophically motivated conceptual deliberations Pearl's mathematical-technical framework is drawn on for (...) an epistemic interpretation and for emphasizing the knowledge-organizing aspect of causality in an extension of the interventionist Bayes net account of causation (chapter 3). Integrating causal and non-causal knowledge in unified structures ultimately leads to an approach towards solving problems of (causal) decision theory and at the same time facilitates the representation of logical-mathematical, synonymical, as well as reductive relationships in efficiently structured, operational nets of belief propagation (chapter 4). (shrink)

How does meaningfulness relate to morality? Despite several works on this topic, the relationship remains not only controversial but also strangely undefined within the field of objectivist theories of meaning in life. Moreover, some authors define the relationship contradictorily: on one hand, moral action is understood as a branch of a meaningful life, and on the other, meaningfulness is understood as a distinct dimension of value that stands alongside morality. In this paper, I examine this contradiction to redefine the relationship (...) between meaningfulness and morality. I resolve the contradiction by rejecting the distinctness claim and developing an understanding of meaningfulness as a comprehensive value that includes morality. The paper will also present the advantages that this approach offers and its defences against various possible objections. (shrink)

We would like to conduct a phenomenological analysis of illness beyond the characteristics which define it scientifically, in order to consider the suffering experience of the sick person which, in reality, constitute its authentic truth. Following Michel Henry’s philosophy which defines life as pathetic self-affection, we will understand that illness may and must first of all be considered as an intense form of this unsurmountable link to one’s self which concerns the very essence of everyone of us as a living (...) ipseity. Then, if “One does not feel”, if suffering is always a founding individual experience, the principle that medicine should be attentive to the subjective experience of patients is consequently established. Then we can also begin to understand the enigma of a patient’s attachment to his illness, to the point of refusing to be cured, as an inappropriate existential expression of an ontological fear of losing oneself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:86. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1977 In my recently-published book, Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship: A Bibliographical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 1978; ^ 5.50), the reader will find a thorough coverage of the Hume literature from 1925 to 1976, with lists of the main earlier writings on Hume, all indexed by author, language, and subject. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of 1977.· Readers (...) are invited to inform me of any omissions. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year, with addenda consisting of items omitted through ignorance in previous years. The following abbreviations of journal titles are used here: APQ American Philosophical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PBA Proceedings of the British Academy PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious enough, and mainly follow the British Standard. ÄRDAL, P. S. 'Convention and Value',in G. P. Morice, David Hume, Bicentenary Papers,51-68. Edinburgh. ÁRDAL, P. S. 'Another Look at Hume'sAccount of Moral Evaluation', JHP 15, 405-21. 87. BERK, E.? Note on Hume's Treatise I. iv. 1', Mind 86, 118-19. BERLIN, I. 'Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism', in Morice, op. cit., 95-116. BERRY, C. J. 'From Hume to Hegel: The Case of the Social Contract', JHI 38, 691-703. BOTWINICK, A.? Case for Hume's Nonutilitarianism', JHP 15, 423-35. BRADLEY, M. C. 'Stove on Hume', Australas. J. Phil. 55, 69-73. BRANDT, R. 'The Beginnings of Hume's Philosophy', in Morice, op. cit., 117-27. BRICKE, J. 'Hume on Self-Identity, Memory and Causality', in Morice, op. cit., 167-74. BRITTON, K. 'Hume on some Non-Natural Distinctions', in Morice, op. cit., 205-9. BURKS, A. W. Chance, Cause, Reason, esp. 128-42 ('Hume's thesis on the justification of induction'). Chicago. CASSIDY, J. 'The Nature of Hume's Inductive Scepticism: A Critical Notice', Ratio 19, 47-54. (on Stove 1973) COHEN, E. D. 'Hume's Fork', Sth. J. Phil. 15, 443-55. CONNON, R. W. 'The Textual and Philosophical Significance of Hume's MS Alterations to Treatise III ', in Morice, op. cit., 186-204. [PQ 28 (1978), 265-8] CONNON, R. W. & POLLARD, M. On the Authorship of "Hume's" Abstract', PQ 27, 60-6. CORSANO, A. 'Vico et Hume face au problème religieux', Archives de Phil. 40, 241-50. DAVIE, G. E. 'Edmund Husserl and "the as yet, in its most important respect, unrecognised greatness of Hume",' in Morice, op. cit., 69-76. DAVIS, J. W. 'Hume on Qualitative Content', in Morice, op. cit., 175-80. DELEULE, D. Hume, Lettre d'un Gentilhomme à son ami d'Edimbourg, présentation, traduction et notes. Paris. (French translation, with facing original, of A Letter from a Gentleman, Edinburgh, 1745) 88. DÉME", N. 'La Méthode Newtonienne et les Lois Empiriques de l'Anthropologie dans Traité II', in Morice, op. cit., 139-45. FORBES, D. 'Hume's Science of Polities', in Morice, op. cit., 39-50. FORCE, J. E. 'Hume in the Dialogues, the Dictates of Convention, and the Millennial Future State of Biblical Prophecy', S. -west. J. Phil. 8, 131-41. GAWLICK, G. 'Hume and the Deists: a Reconsideration', in Morice, op. cit., 128-38. GLOSSOP, R. J. 'In defence of David Hume', Australas. J. Phil. 55, 59-63. GLOUEERMAN, M. 'Hume on Modes', Hume Studies 3, 32-50. GUPTA, B. 'Buddha and Hume: A Popular Comparison Revisited ', Int. Phil. Q. 17 (1977), 135-46. HALL, R. 'The Hume Literature for 1976', Hume Studies 3, 94-102. HEALY,. M. 'Substance and Spiritual Substance - A criticism of David Hume', Alethe ia (Irving, Texas) 1 (1977), 159-83. HEDENIUS, I. Filosofien i ett föränderligt samhälle, 37-59 ( ' Värdeteorierna hos Hume': the value-theories in Hume). Stockholm. HINCKFUSS, I. 'Stove, Induction and the Irish', Australas. J. Phil. 55, 64-8. HISKES... (shrink)

Differences in socioeconomic and infrastructural elements among nations, differing conceptions about childhood, and the failure to distinguish between child work and child labor render a simple ban on child labor abroad idealistic and impractical.

Comme Descartes, Malebranche réduit le concept de la stupidité à celui de l’erreur. Mais il y introduit une notion qui déborde le cadre cartésien, celle de ténèbres. L’âme ou le cogito n’est pas une idée claire et distincte, mais un « sentiment intérieur ». C’est de ces ténèbres que remontent les confusions qui caractérisent la bêtise : notre âme n’est que pure modification de soi qui dans sa dynamique auto-affective emporte avec elle les distinctions fondamentales autour desquelles s’établissent aussi bien (...) la connaissance que l’expérience que nous acquérons des choses hors de nous. Cette âme de ténèbres et de confusion est ainsi la source des erreurs répandues par ces philosophes stupides qui confondent corps et âme, objets et extériorité, matière et étendue. (shrink)

Background: In 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended three changes to HIV testing methods in US healthcare settings: (1) an opt-out approach, (2) removal of separate signed consent, and (3) optional HIV prevention counseling. These recommendations led to a public debate about their moral acceptability. Methods: We interviewed 25 members from the fields of US HIV advocacy, care, policy, and research about the ethical merits and demerits of the three changes to HIV testing methods. We performed (...) a qualitative analysis of the participant responses in the interviews and summarized the major themes. Results: In general, arguments in favor of the methods were based upon their ultimate contribution to increasing HIV testing and permitting the consequent benefits of identifying those who are HIV infected and linking them to further care. Conclusions: The prevailing theme of ethical concern focused on suspicions that the methods might not be properly implemented, and that further safeguards might be needed. (shrink)

The word “real” (from the Latin “res” = thing) was coined in the 13th century to signify “having Properties” (Pierce. 1958, p. 358), whereas a “model” refers to an analogical representation, the structure of which should correspond to the structure or properties of that which it represents. For Scudder the mind is a system of models and each mind develops different models. We all have a different reality in mind and so we each live in a slightly different world (Scudder, (...) 1975). Hence the real nature of the model and the model nature of reality are often indistinguishable. A snail, for example, when exposed to four tactile stimuli per second (with a rod on his belly) will be compelled to crawl upon that non-existing coherent spatial surface (Brecher, 1966). For the snail four tactile stimuli per second correspond to, or are isomorphic with, the structure of a spatial surface, but it is impossible for the snail to “know” which of the two structures is real. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

La búsqueda de la inmortalidad es probablemente tan antigua como la propia humanidad. En las últimas décadas, un grupo de científicos y futuristas que se describen a sí mismos como transhumanistas, han explorado la posibilidad de cargar la mente humana en un ordenador como una posible forma de alcanzar la “inmortalidad”. Este artículo analiza la idea de cargar la mente desde el punto de vista de la antropología teológica y la escatología. Examina las implicaciones de la transferencia mental en nuestra (...) comprensión de la relación entre el cuerpo, la mente y la identidad personal, comparándola con la concepción cristiana de la resurrección. (shrink)