The Christian philosopher Muto Kazuo contributed substantially to the predominantly Buddhist “Kyoto School of Philosophy.” Through critical exchange with its representatives, he opened up new perceptions of Christian faith, enabled mutual understanding between Buddhism and Christianity, and challenged the Western dialectical method.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Memoriam: Jan Van Bragt (1928–2007)James W. HeisigEarly on the morning of Easter Thursday, April 12, 2007, Jan Van Bragt passed away quietly at the age of seventy-eight.1 During the previous year his health had begun to deteriorate, until in the final days of 2006 he was obliged to leave Kyoto and take up residence with his religious congregation in Himeji. On February 21, he was hospitalized (...) with lung cancer and was operated on some weeks later. After a brief period in a semi-comatose state, he regained consciousness but was never to speak again.Jan was born in Flemish Belgium and entered the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at age eighteen. Six years later, he was ordained a priest. After receiving his master’s degree in philosophy, he entered the doctoral program and at the same time lectured at the congregation’s seminary. Five years later he received his doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Leuven with a thesis on Hegel and immediately set sail for Japan, landing in December 1961.Jan undertook eighteen months of training in the language and then spent another eighteen months working as an assistant pastor at the Sakai Catholic Church near Osaka. In 1965, he was accepted as a research student at Kyoto University, where he spent the next six years studying with Takeuchi Yoshinori and Nishitani Keiji. In 1971, he was named provincial superior of the congregation in Japan, a post he held for five years until he was unexpectedly requested to serve as the first acting director of the newly established Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.For the next fifteen years Jan brought the fledgling institute to maturity, galvanizing the young and inexperienced staff into a community of scholars devoted to exploring the largely unknown and uncharted waters of interreligious dialogue in Japan. Among his first projects was the intermonastic exchange that brought leading Buddhist monks and nuns from Japan to European monasteries and vice versa. At a concluding symposium in Japan he served as chair, juggling Japanese, Flemish, German, French, and English with the skill and poise for which we all remember him. After a flurry of publications on the project, he left the project to others to carry on—as it has to this day, having reached a second generation, most of whom no longer know the inaugural role that he played.Jan was also a key figure in the Japan Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, founded in 1982. In addition to bringing the central office of the society to the [End Page 141] Nanzan Institute, he served as president from 1989 to 1997. During his years at the Nanzan Institute, he was in demand around Japan as a lecturer or partner in dialogue. For many years he traveled around the world in the same capacity and was invited to teach in Canada, Belgium, the United States, and the Philippines. From 1985 to 1990, he served as a member of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. In his thinking and writing, his study and reading, as well as in his moral concerns, Jan straddled any number of civilizations, histories, literatures, and cultures. In the end, however, it was in Japan that he felt most at home, where he found a loom on which to weave the things of life into a single view of the world.At his funeral, Jan Swyngedouw, a fellow Flemish missionary and longtime colleague at the Nanzan Institute, delivered a thoughtful and touching tribute to a man who had always shied away from honors and recognition, preferring to let others stand on his shoulders and even accept the credit that was rightly his. Swyngedouw told of going through Jan’s library (the philosophical portion of which he graciously donated to the Centro Studi Asiatico in Osaka) and being struck by the number of volumes on mysticism. Like all of us, he knew of Jan’s academic interest in the Christian mystics as a bridge between religions, but as he read through comments in the margins he came to realize what most of us had never noticed: how deeply Jan’s own spirituality was rooted in... (shrink)

Mysticism Buddhist and Christian. Encounters with Jan van Ruusbroec. Paul Mommaers and Jan Van Bragt. Crossroad, New York 1995. 302 pp. $29.95. ISBN 0-8245-1455-6.

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We implement the extension of the logical consequence relation to a partial order ≤ on arbitary types built from e (entities) and t (Booleans) that was given in [1], and the definition of monotonicity preserving and monotonicity reversing functions in terms of ≤. Next, we present a new algorithm for polarity marking, and implement this for a particular fragment of syntax. Finally, we list the reseach agenda that these definitions and this algorithm suggest. The implementations use Haskell [8], and are (...) given in ‘literate programming’ style [9]. (shrink)

When is an argument to be called one-sided? When is putting forward such an argument fallacious? How can we develop a model for critical discussion, such that a fallaciously one-sided argument corresponds to a violation of a discussion rule? These issues are dealt with within ‘the limits of the dialogue model of argument’ by specifying a type of persuasion dialogue in which an arguer can offer complex arguments to anticipate particular responses by a critic.

Negotiation is not only used to settle differences of interest but also to settle differences of opinion. Discussants who are unable to resolve their difference about the objective worth of a policy or action proposal may be willing to abandon their attempts to convince the other and search instead for a compromise that would, for each of them, though only a second choice yet be preferable to a lasting conflict. Our questions are: First, when is it sensible to enter into (...) negotiations and when would this be unwarranted or even fallacious? Second, what is the nature of a compromise? What does it mean to settle instead of resolve a difference of opinion, and what might be the dialectical consequences of mistaking a compromise for a substantial resolution? Our main aim is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation and to show how arguing disputants can shift to negotiation in a dialectically virtuous way. (shrink)

Logical frameworks for analysing the dynamics of information processing abound [4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 20, 22]. Some of these frameworks focus on the dynamics of the interpretation process, some on the dynamics of the process of drawing inferences, and some do both of these. Formalisms galore, so it is felt that some conceptual streamlining would pay off.This paper is part of a larger scale enterprise to pursue the obvious parallel between information processing and imperative programming. We demonstrate that (...) logical tools from theoretical computer science are relevant for the logic of information flow. More specifically, we show that the perspective of Hoare logic [13, 18] can fruitfully be applied to the conceptual simplification of information flow logics. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show the pervasive, though often implicit, role of arguments in negotiation dialogue. This holds even for negotiations that start from a difference of interest such as mere bargaining through offers and counteroffers. But it certainly holds for negotiations that try to settle a difference of opinion on policy issues. It will be demonstrated how a series of offers and counteroffers in a negotiation dialogue contains a reconstructible series of implicit persuasion dialogues. The paper (...) is a sequel to van Laar and Krabbe, in which we showed that for some differences of opinion it may be reasonable to shift from persuasion dialogue, aimed at a resolution of the difference on the merits, to negotiation dialogue, aimed at compromise, whereas in the present paper we show that such a shift need not amount to the abandonment of argumentation. Our main aim in this paper as well as in the previous one is to contribute to the theory of argumentation within the context of negotiation and compromise formation. (shrink)

In [11] it is shown how propositional dynamic logic (PDL) can be interpreted as a logic of belief revision that extends the logic of communication and change (LCC) given in [7]. This new version of epistemic/doxastic PDL does not impose any constraints on the basic relations and because of this it does not suffer from the drawback of LCC that these constraints may get lost under updates that are admitted by the system. Here, we will impose one constraint, namely that (...) the agent’s plausibility relations are linked. Linkedness is a natural extension of local connectedness to the multi-agent case and it assures that we know the agent’s preferences between all relevant alternatives. Since the belief updates that are used in [11] may not preserve linkedness, we limit ourselves to a particular kind of belief change that does preserve it. Our framework has obvious connections to coalition logic [17] and social choice theory [19]. We show how we can use it to model consensus seeking in plenary Dutch meetings. In Dutch meetings, a belief update is done for all agents in the meeting if a majority beliefs the proposition that is under discussion. A special case of these meetings is judgement aggregation, and we apply our framework to the discursive dilemma in this field [15]. (shrink)

When can exerting pressure in a public controversy promote reasonable outcomes, and when is it rather a hindrance? We show how negotiation and persuasion dialogue can be intertwined. Then, we examine in what ways one can in a public controversy exert pressure on others through sanctions or rewards. Finally, we discuss from the viewpoints of persuasion and negotiation whether and, if so, how pressure hinders the achievement of a reasonable outcome.

Discourse Representation Theory is a specific name for the work of Hans Kamp in the area of dynamic interpretation of natural language. Also, it has gradually become a generic term for proposals for dynamic interpretation of natural language in the same spirit. These proposals have in common that each new sentence is interpreted in terms of the contribution it makes to an existing piece of interpreted discourse. The interpretation conditions for sentences are given as instructions for updating the representation of (...) the discourse. (shrink)

Contemporary theory of argumentation offers many insights about the ways in which, in the context of a public controversy, arguers should ideally present their arguments and criticize those of their opponents. We also know that in practice not all works out according to the ideal patterns: numerous kinds of derailments are an object of study for argumentation theorists. But how about the use of unfairstrategiesvis-à-vis one’s opponents? What if it is not a matter of occasional derailments but of one party’s (...) systematic refusal to take other parties seriously? What if one party continually forgoes any form of critical testing and instead resorts to threats or blackmail? Can this be countered by the tools of reason? Or should one pay one’s opponent back in the same coin? To gain some grasp of these issues, we describe a number of strategies used in the public controversy about induced earthquakes in Groningen. We check whether these strategies arefair,i.e.balanced, transparent,andtolerant.We also investigate the effects of the choice for a particular kind of strategy. It appears that, in circumstances, choosing a fair strategy may be detrimental for resolving the controversy and choosing an unfair one beneficial. Following up ideas from social psychology and political science, we formulate some guidelines for the choice of strategies. At the end, we stress the importance — especially for those whose opinions carry little weight — of having a society in which the knowledge and skills needed for assessing the fairness of strategies are widespread. (shrink)

Punishment of offenders is one of the most universal features of human behavior. Across time and cultures it has been common for people to punish offenders, and one can easily find examples of punishment among ancient hunter-gatherers, in holy scriptures, in popular culture, and in contemporary courts of law. Punishment is not restricted to criminal offenders, but emerges within all spheres of our social life, including corporations, public institutions, traffic, sports matches, schools, parenting, and more. Punishment strongly influences what we (...) think, how we feel, and what we do. The Moral Punishment Instinct asserts that people possess a hard-wired tendency to aggress against those who violate the norms of their group. We have evolved this instinct because of its power to control behavior by curbing selfishness and free-riding, thereby providing incentives to stimulate the mutual cooperation that ancient hunter-gatherers needed in order to survive in challenging natural environments. In this book, Jan-Willem van Prooijen methodically describes how punishment originates from moral emotions, stimulates cooperation, and shapes the social life of human beings. Guided by a host of recognizable and relatable examples, this book illuminates how the moral punishment instinct manifests itself among a variety of modern human cultures, children, tribes of hunter-gatherers, and even non-human animals-all while accounting for the role of this instinct in religion, war, racial bias, restorative justice, gossip, torture, and radical terrorism. (shrink)

The effects of public announcements, private communications, deceptive messages to groups, and so on, can all be captured by a general mechanism of updating multi-agent models with update action models, now in widespread use. There is a natural extension of the definition of a bisimulation to action models. Surely enough, updating with bisimilar action models gives the same result. But the converse turns out to be false: update models may have the same update effects without being bisimilar. We propose action (...) emulation as a notion of equivalence more appropriate for action models, and generalizing standard bisimulation. It is proved that action emulation provides a full characterization of update effect. We first concentrate on the general case, and next focus on the important case of action models with propositional preconditions. Our notion of action emulation yields a simplification procedure for action models, and it gives designers of multi-agent systems a useful tool for comparing different ways of representing a particular communicative action. (shrink)

Guarded actions are changes with preconditions acting as a guard. Guarded action models are multimodal Kripke models with the valuations replaced by guarded actions. Call guarded action logic the result of adding product updates with guarded action models to PDL (propositional dynamic logic). We show that guarded action logic reduces to PDL.

No index information on NPs, except for pronouns. Otherwise, virtually the same as a datatype declaration for a fragment of dynamic Montague grammar. The module Cat imports the standard List module. Lists will be employed to implement a simple feature agreement mechanism.

We explore some logics of change, focusing on commands to change the world in such a way that certain elementary propositions become true or false. This investigation starts out from the following two simplifying assumptions: (1) the world is a collection of facts (Wittgenstein), and (2), the world can be changed by changing elementary facts (Marx). These assumptions allow us to study the logic of imperatives in the simplest possible setting.

ion is arguably one of the most important methods in modern science in analysing and understanding complex phenomena. In his book The Philosophy of Information, Floridi (The philosophy of information. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) presents the method of levels of abstraction as the main method of the Philosophy of Information. His discussion of abstraction as a method seems inspired by the formal methods and frameworks of computer science, in which abstraction is operationalised extensively in programming languages and design methodologies. (...) Is it really clear what we should understand by levels of abstraction? How should they be specified? We will argue that levels of abstraction should be augmented with annotations, in order to express semantic information for them and reconcile the method of level of abstraction (LoA’s) with other approaches. We discuss the extended method when applied e.g. to the analysis of abstract machines. This will lead to an example in which the number of LoA’s is unbounded. (shrink)

Overview • Alloy peculiarity • Alloy utilities • Assignments and pre- and postconditions in Alloy • Alloy for automated logical reasoning • Alloy specifications of algorithms • On your to do list: – Look through the example code in these slides, – make sure you understand what is happening. Note: Alloy Peculiarity..

Functions of type n are characteristic functions on n-ary relations. In Beyond the Frege Boundary [6], Keenan established their importance for natural language semantics, by showing that natural language has many examples of irreducible type n functions, where he called a function of type n reducible if it can be represented as a composition of functions of type 1 . We will give a normal form theorem for functions of type n , and use this to show that natural language (...) has many examples of irreducible type n functions in a much stronger sense, where we take a function to be reducible if it can be represented as a composition of functions of lower types. (shrink)

Non-determined game logic is the logic of two player board games where the game may end in a draw: unlike the case with determined games, a loss of one player does not necessarily constitute of a win of the other player. A calculus for non-determined game logic is given in [4] and shown to be complete. The calculus adds a new rule for the treatment of greatest fixpoints, and a new unfolding axiom for iterations of the universal player. The technique (...) of the completeness proof is inspired by the canonical model construction for propositional dynamic logic (PDL). In this paper, this is extended to the logic of determined games. It is proved that the calculus for nondetermined game logic, together with the axiom of determinacy, is complete for determined game logic. Next, it is shown that the axioms and rules of the new calculus can all be derived from the calculus proposed by Parikh in [5], for which the completeness was still open. This proves Parikh’s conjecture that his calculus is complete for determined games. (shrink)

This paper defines the grammar class of sequentially indexed grammars. Sequentially indexed grammars are the result of a change in the index stack handling mechanism of indexed grammars [Aho68, Aho69]. Sequentially indexed grammars are different from linear indexed grammars [Gaz88]. Like indexed languages, sequentially indexed languages are a fully abstract language class. Unlike indexed languages, sequentially indexed languages allow polynomial parsing algorithms. We give a polynomial algorithm for parsing with sequentially indexed gramamrs that is an extension of the Earley algorithm (...) for parsing with context free grammars. (shrink)

A new system of dynamic logic is introduced and motivated, witha novel approach to variable binding for incremental interpretation. Thesystem is shown to be equivalent to first order logic and complete.The new logic combines the dynamic binding idea from DynamicPredicate Logic with De Bruijn style variable free indexing. Quantifiersbind the next available variable register; the indexing mechanismguarantees that active registers are never overwritten by newquantifiers actions. Apart from its interest in its own right, theresulting system has certain advantages over Dynamic (...) Predicate Logic orDiscourse Representation Theory. It comes with a more well behaved(i.e., transitive) consequence relation, it gives a more explicitaccount of how anaphoric context grows as text gets processed, and ityields new insight into the dynamics of anaphoric linking in reasoning.Incremental dynamics also points to a new way of handling contextdynamically in Montague grammar. (shrink)

"Die Blockchain ist den Weg aus der technischen Obskuranz über eine weitgehend abgeklungene Phase der utopisch-mystifizierenden Begeisterung hin zu etablierten Branchenlösungen gegangen. Blockchain basierte Kryptowährungen sind längst anerkannte und langsam auch institutionell genutzte Zahlungsmittel. Trotzdem scheinen sich Blockchain-Lösungen immer noch eher über ein Versprechen zu verkaufen, das ein soziales Bedürfnis – das des Vertrauens innerhalb von Systemen – befriedigen will. Ein Blick auf die Technizitäten der Blockchain jedoch erlaubt Einsichten in die Möglichkeit solcher technosozialer Versprechen und ihrer (Nicht-) Einlösbarkeit. Blockchain (...) has found its way out of technical obscurity via a largely faded phase of utopian-mystifying enthusiasm to established industry solutions. Blockchain-based crypto currencies have long been accepted as a means of payment and are tentatively being used institutionally as well. Nevertheless, Block- chain solutions still seem to sell a promise that seeks to satisfy a social need—that of trust within systems. A glance at the technicalities of Blockchain, however, allows insights into the possibility of such techno-social promises and their (non-)redeemability.". (shrink)

We contrast Bonanno’s ‘Belief Revision in a Temporal Framework’ [15] with preference change and belief revision from the perspective of dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). For that, we extend the logic of communication and change of [11] with relational substitutions [8] for preference change, and show that this does not alter its properties. Next we move to a more constrained context where belief and knowledge can be defined from preferences [29; 14; 5; 7], prove completeness of a very expressive logic of (...) belief revision, and define a mechanism for updating belief revision models using a combination of action priority update [7] and preference substitution [8]. (shrink)

Current dynamic epistemic logics for analyzing effects of informational events often become cumbersome and opaque when common knowledge is added for groups of agents. Still, postconditions involving common knowledge are essential to successful multi-agent communication. We propose new systems that extend the epistemic base language with a new notion of ‘relativized common knowledge’, in such a way that the resulting full dynamic logic of information flow allows for a compositional analysis of all epistemic postconditions via perspicuous ‘reduction axioms’. We also (...) show how such systems can deal with factual alteration, rather than just information change, making them cover a much wider range of realistic events. After a warm-up stage of analyzing logics for public announcements, our main technical results are expressivity and completeness theorems for a much richer logic that we call LCC. This is a dynamic epistemic logic whose static base is propositional dynamic logic (PDL), interpreted epistemically. This system is capable of expressing all model-shifting operations with finite action models, while providing a compositional analysis for a wide range of informational events. This makes LCC a serious candidate for a standard in dynamic epistemic logic, as we illustrate by analyzing some complex communication scenarios, including sending successive emails with both ‘cc’ and ‘bcc’ lines, and other private announcements to subgroups. Our proofs involve standard modal techniques, combined with a new application of Kleene’s theorem on finite automata, as well as new Ehrenfeucht games of model comparison. (shrink)

How to understand and assess arguments in which the popularity of an opinion is put forward as a reason to accept that opinion? There exist widely diverging views on how to analyse and evaluate such arguments from popularity. First, I define the concept of an argument from popularity, and show that typical appeals to the popularity of a policy are not genuine arguments from popularity. Second, I acknowledge the importance of some recent probability-based accounts according to which some arguments from (...) popularity are epistemically strong arguments, but also contend that despite these strengths such arguments have at most limited value in argumentative discussions. Finally, I show that there are at least five different ways that arguments from popularity can be fallacious, and examine what this means for an account of the Fallacy of Popularity. (shrink)

Adam Smith's religion drove his prescriptions for a virtuous humanity and a free and flourishing society. Jan Van Vliet examines how the practical implications of these strike a common chord with Scripture.

We will study game trees as representations of rational choice and as representations of player preferences, and promises as public announcements of genuine intentions. Promises in a game change what players know about the preferences of other players. They can be modelled as operations that change a given game into a different game where players know more about the effects of their strategies.

This paper sketches an approach to pronoun reference resolution in context based on a dynamic incremental semantics for NL in polymorphic type theory. Our set-up provides full incrementality of processing, and can handle salience and pronoun resolution in context. An implementation of the system in Haskell, in ‘literate programming’ style, exists. The full literate source code can be found at http://www.cwi.nl/ jve/papers/02/rric.

Presuppositions of utterances are the pieces of information you convey with an utterance no matter whether your utterance is true or not We rst study presupposition in a very simple framework of updating propo sitional information with examples of how presuppositions of complex propositional updates can be calculated Next we move on to presupposi tions and quanti cation in the context of a dynamic version of predicate logic suitably modi ed to allow for presupposition failure In both the propositional and (...) the quanti cational case presupposition failure can be viewed as error abortion of procedures Thus a dynamic assertion logic which describes the preconditions for error abortion is the suitable tool for analysing presupposition.. (shrink)

Destructive assignment is the main weakness of Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL, [GS91], but see also [Bar87]) as a basis for a compositional semantics of natural language: in DPL, the semantic effect of a quantifier action ∃x is that the previous value of x gets lost forever.