A fascinating exploration of the very essence of life itself sheds new light on the order and evolution in complex life systems and defines and explains autonomous agents and work within the contexts of thermodynamics and information theory, setting the stage for a dramatic technological revolution. 50,000 first printing.

In _The Politics of Decolonial Investigations_ Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, (...) globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living. (shrink)

We examine some extensions of the constructive propositional logic with strong negation in the setting of varieties of $\mathcal{N}$ -lattices. The main aim of the paper is to give a description of all pretabular, primitive and preprimitive varieties of $\mathcal{N}$ -lattices.

One of the striking features of Logical Investigations is its metaphysical neutrality. What are the implications of this neutrality? Should it be counted among the many virtues of the work, or rather mourned as a fateful shortcoming? In an article published in the beginning of the nineties, I answered this question rather unequivocally. At that time I considered the neutrality in question to be highly problematic. In the meantime, however, I have had the pleasure of reading Jocelyn Benoist’s recent (...) work Phénoménologie, sémantique, ontologie, where he argues for the opposite conclusion, criticizing my own interpretation in the process. In the light of this criticism, I would like to use this occasion to reconsider the question anew. (shrink)

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article surveys some of the philosophical issues raised by recent experimental work in economics on so-called social preferences. This work raises a number of fascinating methodological and interpretive issues that are of central importance both to economics and to social and political philosophy.

ONTOLOGY This book is a book about the world. I am concerned with ontology, not merely with language. Many ontological treatises concentrate largely on the ...

In this new introduction to a classic philosophical text, David Stern examines Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He gives particular attention to both the arguments of the Investigations and the way in which the work is written, and especially to the role of dialogue in the book. While he concentrates on helping the reader to arrive at his or her own interpretation of the primary text, he also provides guidance to the unusually wide range of existing interpretations, and to the (...) reasons why the Investigations have inspired such a diversity of readings. Following closely the text of the Investigations and meant to be read alongside it, this survey is accessible to readers with no previous background in philosophy. It is well-suited to university-level courses on Wittgenstein, but can also be read with profit by students in other disciplines. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic (...) expressivity to existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

This book draws connections between recent advances in analytic philosophy of mind and insights from the rich phenomenological tradition concerning the nature of thinking. By combining both analytic and continental approaches, the volume arrives at a more comprehensive understanding of the mental process of "thinking" and the experience and manipulation of objects of thought. Contributors scrutinize aspects of thinking that have a common grounding in both the phenomenological and analytic tradition: perception, language, logic, embodiment and situatedness due to individual history (...) or current experience. This collection serves to broaden and enrich the current debate over "cognitive phenomenology," and lays the foundations for further dialogue between analytic and continental approaches to the phenomenal character of thinking. (shrink)

From the point of view of non-classical logics, Heyting's implication is the smallest implication for which the deduction theorem holds. This book studies properties of logical systems having some of the classical connectives and implication in the neighbourhood of Heyt ing's implication. I have not included anything on entailment, al though it belongs to this neighbourhood, mainly because of the appearance of the Anderson-Belnap book on entailment. In the later chapters of this book, I have included material that might be (...) of interest to the intuitionist mathematician. Originally, I intended to include more material in that spirit but I decided against it. There is no coherent body of material to include that builds naturally on the present book. There are some serious results on topological models, second order Beth and Kripke models, theories of types, etc., but it would require further research to be able to present a general theory, possibly using sheaves. That would have postponed pUblication for too long. I would like to dedicate this book to my colleagues, Professors G. Kreisel, M.O. Rabin and D. Scott. I have benefited greatly from Professor Kreisel's criticism and suggestions. Professor Rabin's fun damental results on decidability and undecidability provided the powerful tools used in obtaining the majority of the results reported in this book. Professor Scott's approach to non-classical logics and especially his analysis of the Scott consequence relation makes it possible to present Heyting's logic as a beautiful, integral part of non-classical logics. (shrink)

We argue that the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and mathematics, substantially focused on rule-following, is relevant to understand and improve on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) alignment problem: his discussions on the categories that influence alignment between humans can inform about the categories that should be controlled to improve on the alignment problem when creating large data sets to be used by supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms, as well as when introducing hard coded guardrails for AI models. We cast these (...) considerations in a model of human–human and human–machine alignment and sketch basic alignment strategies based on these categories and further reflections on rule-following like the notion of meaning as use. To sustain the validity of these considerations, we also show that successful techniques employed by AI safety researchers to better align new AI systems with our human goals are congruent with the stipulations that we derive from the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy. However, their application may benefit from the added specificities and stipulations of our framework: it extends on the current efforts and provides further, specific AI alignment techniques. Thus, we argue that the categories of the model and the core alignment strategies presented in this work can inform further AI alignment techniques. (shrink)

In this highly innovative book Robert Fine compares three great studies of modern political life: Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Marx's Capital and Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, and argues that they are all profoundly radical texts, which jointly contribute to our understanding of the modern world. Fine maintains that these works are far more revealing when read together than in opposition, and draws a direct parallel between Hegel's critique of social forms of right and Marx's critique of (...) social forms of value. Fine shows how fruitfully their work can and should be combined. Hannah Arendt was in turn critical of what she saw as the historicism of both Hegel and Marx, but Fine argues that her study of the origins of totalitarianism directly picks up on their insights into the modern potential for fanaticism and destructiveness. Arendt never disavowed any of the nineteenth century thinkers who prefigured the catastrophes to come, but Fine shows her indebtedness to Hegel and Marx. This fascinating book offers a re-reading of these texts as three pivotal moments in the construction of a critical humanist tradition. (shrink)

Euphemistically named “pull-ups” are a visually engaging and increasingly engineeredsanitaryproduct designed to capture a market that less than one generation ago was toilet trained at the age of the girl pictured on the packaging.

At the turn of 1960s and 1970s, Stanisław Lem devoted some of his non-fiction writing to a discussion and considerations of semiotics. Most of them were expressions of a critical approach mainly directed against structuralism. However, Lem also formulated some positive statements although they were not developed systematically. The article offers an analysis of Lem’s semiotic ideas from the perspective of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc, mainly considering its two main components: contextualism and typological approach. Special attention is paid to (...) the latter because both Pelc and Lem proposed some original solutions in this respect. What is meant here is the multidimensional typology of symbolic uses of signs developed by Pelc and Lem’s multidimensional typology of the situations of the reception of texts. Although they are independent form each other, these proposals show some convergence both in their ways of construction and roles they are supposed to perform. Henceforth, one can say that Lem was a crypto-functionalist. (shrink)

According to a widespread interpretation, in the Investigations Wittgenstein adopted a deflationary or redundancy theory of truth. On this view, Wittgenstein’s pronouncements about truth should be understood in the light of his invocation of the equivalences ‘p’ is true = p and ‘p’ is false = not p. This paper shows that this interpretation does not do justice to Wittgenstein’s thoughts. I will be claiming that, in fact, in his second book Wittgenstein is returning to the pre-Tractarian notion of (...) bipolarity, and that his new development of this notion in the Investigations excludes the redundancy-deflationary reading. Wittgenstein’s thoughts about truth are instead compatible with another interpretative option: Wittgenstein remains faithful to his methodological pronouncements, and he merely presents us with platitudes about the notions of “true” and “false”. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Brendan Wilson leads the reader through Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, revealing a new clarity, singleness of purpose and contemporary relevance in this acknowledged masterpiece.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-83).

This paper examines the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy of nonintuitive intentions. The analysis has two stages. First, I expose a mistake in Husserl’s account of non-intuitive acts from his 1901 Logical Investigations. I demonstrate that Husserl employs the term “signitive” too broadly, as he concludes that all non-intuitive acts are signitive. He states that not only meaning acts, but also the contiguity intentions of perception are signitive acts. Second, I show how Husserl, in his 1913/14 Revisions to the Sixth (...) Logical Investigation, amends his 1901 theory of non-intuitive acts, which he now calls “empty” intentions. He there accurately distinguishes empty meaning acts from the empty intentions of perception. In the conclusion, I reveal how Husserl’s alterations to his theory of non-intuitive intentions can inform our understanding of a larger shift in his philosophy. (shrink)

This volume provides an articulate restatement of many of the themes of Husserlian phenomenology.

Published in 1953, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations had a deeply unsettling effect upon our most basic philosophical ideas concerning thought, sensation and language. Its claim that philosophical questions of meaning necessitate a close analysis of the way we use language continues to influence Anglo-American philosophy today. However, its compressed and dialogic prose is not always easy to follow. This collection of essays deepens but also challenges our understanding of the work's major themes, such as the connection between meaning and use, (...) the nature of concepts, thought and intentionality, and language games. Bringing together leading philosophers and Wittgenstein scholars, it offers a genuinely critical approach and demonstrating Wittgenstein's relevance for contemporary philosophy. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the later Wittgenstein, in addition to those interested in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

In this volume, phenomenologists from the West join hands with specialists from mainland China and Hong Kong to discuss the heritage of Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Readers will learn of the early reception of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in China and understand how Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality of consciousness has paved the way to a novel phenomenological explication of religious experience.

The main objective of this study is to eliminate the obstacles that the stylistic, structural, and methodological aspects of the text place in the way of reading and understanding Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work. The characteristic features of these elements are developed and discussed in the context of a close reading of the short section on reading in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein's aim in this section is the negative one of completely undermining explanatory accounts of the meaning of reading in (...) terms of mental states, experiences, or neurophysiological functions of the brain. In this respect the section on reading forms a clearing ground and a propaedeutic to Wittgenstein's conception of understanding as a rule-following activity. ;The signature of Wittgenstein's style is characterized by a dialogic terseness, an economy of expressions manifest in the brevity of numbered remarks, and a number of strategically indirect rhetorical devices. The structure of the text is shown to be discontinuous and multidirectional. The textual organization forms an overlapping and complex network that mirrors the complexity and multifaceted structure of language. The discontinuity easily inhibits following Wittgenstein's thought, and results in a judgment and dismissal of the text as being fragmented, frayed, and thus lacking structure. ;Wittgenstein's method is contrasted to the application of the scientific method to solving philosophical problems and to the phenomenological method of examining experiences. The argument for the existence of a method at all consists in focussing on and developing three methodological principles: recalling the course of philosophical nonsense; reminding ourselves of what we already know; and arranging and rearranging what already lies open to view. ;Bringing philosophical problems to an end by exposing them as pseudo-problems that often are caused by the forms of our expressions, is reached by an Ubersicht, an overview, of the multiple facets of language. Such an overview is gained by an application of Wittingenstein's method. An analysis of the section on reading in terms of its philosophical purpose and point illuminates the complex interplay of the methodological aspects, the unconventional structure of the text, and the profile of Wittgenstein's unique philosophical style. (shrink)

This paper presents a case for the decriminalisation of abortion in Britain in light of the increasing investigations into people experiencing pregnancy loss and prosecutions of those suspected of illegal abortion. This growing enforcement of the criminal abortion offences has coincided with the legal change to allow the home use of abortion pills through telemedicine, and comes in the context of global backlash against abortion rights. Framing abortion as a necessary healthcare service and human right, this paper demonstrates the (...) harms caused by criminalisation and highlights how the law exacerbates socio-economic and other vulnerabilities. It is later illegal abortions that tend to be prosecuted, and while there are complex reasons as to why someone might require an abortion, the law prohibits abortion beyond 24 weeks except for narrow medical reasons, creating crisis situations for those that find themselves without legal access. Decriminalisation is necessary to move away from this culture of suspicion, hostility, and stigma that has been built around abortion. (shrink)

This is the first monograph to develop a hermeneutic approach to the digital--as both a technological milieu and a cultural phenomenon. While philosophical in its orientation, the book covers a wide body of literature across science and technology studies, media studies, digital humanities, digital sociology, cognitive science, and the study of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the book, the author formulates an epistemological thesis according to which the "virtual never ended." Although the frontiers between the real and the (...) virtual are certainly more porous today, they still exist and endure. In the book's second part, the author offers an ontological reflection on emerging digital technologies as "imaginative machines." He introduces the concept of emagination, arguing that human schematizations are always externalized into technologies, and that human imagination has its analog in the digital dynamics of articulation between databases and algorithms. The author takes an ethical and political stance in the concluding chapter. He resorts to the notion of "digital habitus" for claiming that within the digital we are repeatedly being reconducted to an oversimplified image and understanding of ourselves. Digital Hermeneutics will be of interest to scholars across a wide range of disciplines, including those working on philosophy of technology, hermeneutics, science and technology studies, media studies, and the digital humanities. (shrink)