Defense of an account of intrinsic properties in terms of (what is now called) grounding rather than naturalness.

Discussion of partial grounds that aren't parts of full grounds; definition of full grounding in terms of partial grounding.

Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

Review of Mary Mahowald, Genes, Women, Equality.

How the universe came to be what it is now is a key philosophical question. The hypothesis that it came from nothing or śūnya (as proposed by Stephen Hawking, among others) proves to be dissembling, since the quantum vacuum can hardly be considered a void (śūnya). In modern science, it is generally assumed that matter existed before the universe came to be. Modern science hypothesizes that the manifestation of life on earth is nothing but a mere increment in the complexity (...) of matter – and hence is an outcome of evolution of matter (chemical evolution) following the Big Bang. After the manifestation of life, modern science believed that chemical evolution transformed itself into biological evolution, which then had caused the entire biodiversity on our planet. In the framework of materialism, the major attention is to find general organizational laws stimulated by physical sciences, ignoring the uniqueness of life. The main goal of materialism is to reduce consciousness to natural processes, which in turn can be translated into the language of math, physics, and chemistry. Following this approach, scientists have made several attempts to deny the living organism of its veracity as an immortal soul, in favor of genes, molecules, atoms, and so on. However, advancement in various fields of biology has repeatedly given rise to questions against such a denial and has supplied more and more evidence against the completely misleading ideological imposition that living entities are particular states of matter. In the recent past, however, the realization has arisen that cognitive nature of life at all levels has begun presenting significant challenges to the views of materialism in biology and has created a more receptive environment for the soul hypothesis (Shanta BN. Commun Integr Biol 8(5):e1085138, 2015). Therefore, instead of adjudicating different aprioristic claims, the development of an authentic theory of origin of life and universe needs both proper scientific knowledge and the appropriate tools of philosophical analysis of life. This talk will highlight the uniqueness of biological systems that offers a considerable challenge to the mainstream materialism and proposes the Vedāntic philosophical view as a viable alternative for development of a theory worthy of origin of life and universe. (shrink)

The Plant Ontology (PO) (http://www.plantontology.org) (Jaiswal et al., 2005; Avraham et al., 2008) was designed to facilitate cross-database querying and to foster consistent use of plant-specific terminology in annotation. As new data are generated from the ever-expanding list of plant genome projects, the need for a consistent, cross-taxon vocabulary has grown. To meet this need, the PO is being expanded to represent all plants. This is the first ontology designed to encompass anatomical structures as well as growth and developmental stages (...) across such a broad taxonomic range. While other ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO) (The Gene Ontology Consortium, 2010) or Cell Type Ontology (CL) (Bard et al., 2005) cover all living organisms, they are confined to structures at the cellular level and below. The diversity of growth forms and life histories within plants presents a challenge, but also provides unique opportunities to study developmental and evolutionary homology across organisms. (shrink)

We present an account of the phenomenon of music based upon the hypothesis that there is a close parallel between the mechanics of life and the mechanics of mind, a key factor in the correspondence proposed being the existence of close parallels between the concepts of gene and musical idea. The hypothesis accounts for the specificity, complexity, functionality and apparent arbitrariness of musical structures. An implication of the model is that music should be seen as a phenomenon of transcendental (...) character, involving aspects of mind as yet unstudied by conventional science. (shrink)

The file on this site provides the slides for a lecture given in Hangzhou in May 2018, and the lecture itself is available at the URL beginning 'sms' in the set of links provided in connection with this item. -/- It is commonly assumed that regular physics underpins biology. Here it is proposed, in a synthesis of ideas by various authors, that in reality structures and mechanisms of a biological character underpin the world studied by physicists, in principle supplying detail (...) in the domain that according to regular physics is of an indeterminate character. In regular physics mathematical equations are primary, but this constraint leads to problems with reconciling theory and reality. Biology on the other hand typically does not characterise nature in quantitative terms, instead investigating in detail important complex interrelationships between parts, leading to an understanding of the systems concerned that is in some respects beyond that which prevails in regular physics. It makes contact with quantum physics in various ways, for example in that both involve interactions between observer and observed, an insight that explains what is special about processes involving observation, justifying in the quantum physics context the replacement of the unphysical many-worlds picture by one involving collapse. The link with biology furthermore clarifies Wheeler’s suggestion that a multiplicity of observations can lead to the ‘fabrication of form’, including the insight that this process depends on very specific ‘structures with power’ related to the 'semiotic scaffolding' of the application of sign theory to biology known as biosemiotics. -/- The observer-observed 'circle' of Wheeler and Yardley is a special case of a more general phenomenon, oppositional dynamics, related to the 'intra-action' of Barad's Agential Realism, involving cooperating systems such as mind and matter, abstract and concrete, observer and observed, that preserve their identities while interacting with one another in such a way as to act as a unit. A third system may also be involved, the mediating system of Peirce linking the two together. Such a situation of changing connections and separations may plausibly lead in the future to an understanding of how complex systems are able to evolve to produce 'life, the universe and everything'. -/- (Added 1 July 2018) The general structure proposed here as an alternative to a mathematics-based physics can be usefully characterised by relating it to different disciplines and the specialised concepts utilised therein. In theoretical physics, the test for the correctness of a theory typically involves numerical predictions, corresponding to which theories are expressed in terms of equations, that is to say assertions that two quantities have identical values. Equations have a lesser significance in biology which typically talks in terms of functional mechanisms, dependent for example on details of chemistry and concepts such as genes, natural selection, signals and geometrical or topologically motivated concepts such as the interconnections between systems and the unfolding of DNA. Biosemiotics adds to this the concept of signs and their interpretation, implying novel concepts such as semiotic scaffolding and the semiosphere, code duality, and appreciation of the different types of signs, including symbols and their capacity for abstraction and use in language systems. Circular Theory adds to this picture, as do the ideas of Barad, considerations such as the idea of oppositional dynamics. The proposals in this lecture can be regarded as the idea that concepts such as those deriving from biosemiotics have more general applicability than just conventional biology and may apply, in some circumstances, to nonlinear systems generally, including the domain new to science hypothesised to underlie the phenomena of present-day physics. -/- The task then has to be to restore the mathematical aspect presumed, in this picture, not to be fundamental as it is in conventional theory. Deacon has invoked a complex sequence of evolutionary steps to account for the emergence over time of human language systems, and correspondingly mathematical behaviour can be subsumed under the general evolutionary mechanisms of biosemiotics (cf. also the proposals of Davis and Hersh regarding the nature of mathematics), so that the mathematical behaviour of physical systems is consistent with the proposed scheme. In conclusion, it is suggested that theoretical physicists should cease expecting to find some universal mathematical ‘theory of everything’, and focus instead on understanding in more detail complex systems exhibiting behaviour of a biological character, extending existing understanding. This may in time provide a more fruitful understanding of the natural world than does the regular approach. The essential concepts have an observational basis from both biology and the little-known discipline of cymatics (a discipline concerned with the remarkable patterns that specific waveforms can give rise to), while again computer simulations also offer promise in providing insight into the complex behaviours involved in the above proposals. -/- References -/- Jesper Hoffmeyer, Semiotic Scaffolding of Living Systems. Commens, a Digital Companion to C. S. Peirce (on Commens web site). Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species, W.W. Norton & Co. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press. Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience, Penguin. Ilexa Yardley, Circular Theory. (shrink)

Significant associations have been found between specific human leukocyte antigen (HLA) alleles and organ transplant rejection, autoimmune disease development, and the response to infection. Traditional searches for disease associations have conventionally measured risk associated with the presence of individual HLA alleles. However, given the high level of HLA polymorphism, the pattern of amino acid variability, and the fact that most of the HLA variation occurs at functionally important sites, it may be that a combination of variable amino acid sites shared (...) by several alleles (shared epitopes) are better descriptors of the actual causative genetic variants. Here we describe a novel approach to genetic association analysis in which genes/proteins are broken down into smaller sequence features and then variant types defined for each feature, allowing for independent analysis of disease association with each sequence feature variant type. We have used this approach to analyze a cohort of systemic sclerosis patients and show that a sequence feature composed of specific amino acid residues in peptide binding pockets 4 and 7 of HLA-DRB1 explains much of the molecular determinant of risk for systemic sclerosis. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

Vaccine research, as well as the development, testing, clinical trials, and commercial uses of vaccines involve complex processes with various biological data that include gene and protein expression, analysis of molecular and cellular interactions, study of tissue and whole body responses, and extensive epidemiological modeling. Although many data resources are available to meet different aspects of vaccine needs, it remains a challenge how we are to standardize vaccine annotation, integrate data about varied vaccine types and resources, and support advanced (...) vaccine data analysis and inference. To address these problems, the community-based Vaccine Ontology (VO) has been developed through collaboration with vaccine researchers and many national and international centers and programs, including the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO), the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) Initiative, and the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI). VO utilizes the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as the top ontology and the Relation Ontology (RO) for definition of term relationships. VO is represented in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and edited using the Protégé-OWL. Currently VO contains more than 2000 terms and relationships. VO emphasizes on classification of vaccines and vaccine components, vaccine quality and phenotypes, and host immune response to vaccines. These reflect different aspects of vaccine composition and biology and can thus be used to model individual vaccines. More than 200 licensed vaccines and many vaccine candidates in research or clinical trials have been modeled in VO. VO is being used for vaccine literature mining through collaboration with the National Center for Integrative Biomedical Informatics (NCIBI). Multiple VO applications will be presented. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://proconsortium.org) formally defines protein entities and explicitly represents their major forms and interrelations. Protein entities represented in PRO corresponding to single amino acid chains are categorized by level of specificity into family, gene, sequence and modification metaclasses, and there is a separate metaclass for protein complexes. All metaclasses also have organism-specific derivatives. PRO complements established sequence databases such as UniProtKB, and interoperates with other biomedical and biological ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). PRO (...) relates to UniProtKB in that PRO’s organism-specific classes of proteins encoded by a specific gene correspond to entities documented in UniProtKB entries. PRO relates to the GO in that PRO’s representations of organism-specific protein complexes are subclasses of the organism-agnostic protein complex terms in the GO Cellular Component Ontology. The past few years have seen growth and changes to the PRO, as well as new points of access to the data and new applications of PRO in immunology and proteomics. Here we describe some of these developments. (shrink)

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically connected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and interventions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences — a high-level candidate OBO Foundry ontology that (...) provides a set of general classes that can be used to describe general aspects of medical science. ND is being built with classes utilizing both textual and axiomatized definitions that describe and formalize the relations between instances of other classes within the ontology itself as well as to external ontologies such as the Gene Ontology, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest. In addition, references to similar or associated terms in external ontologies, vocabularies and terminologies are included when possible. Initial work on ND is focused on the areas of Alzheimer’s and other diseases associated with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease. Extensions to additional groups of neurological diseases are planned. The second ontology, the Neuro-Psychological Testing Ontology (NPT), is intended to provide a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data. The intention of this ontology is to allow for the integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests that assay similar measures of cognitive functioning. Neuro-psychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical picture used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. NPT is being developed as an extension to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/pr) formally defines and describes taxon-specific and taxon-neutral protein-related entities in three major areas: proteins related by evolution; proteins produced from a given gene; and protein-containing complexes. PRO thus serves as a tool for referencing protein entities at any level of specificity. To enhance this ability, and to facilitate the comparison of such entities described in different resources, we developed a standardized representation of proteoforms using UniProtKB as a sequence reference and PSI-MOD as a post-translational (...) modification reference. We illustrate its use in facilitating an alignment between PRO and Reactome protein entities. We also address issues of scalability, describing our first steps into the use of text mining to identify protein-related entities, the large-scale import of proteoform information from expert curated resources, and our ability to dynamically generate PRO terms. Web views for individual terms are now more informative about closely-related terms, including for example an interactive multiple sequence alignment. Finally, we describe recent improvement in semantic utility, with PRO now represented in OWL and as a SPARQL endpoint. These developments will further support the anticipated growth of PRO and facilitate discoverability of and allow aggregation of data relating to protein entities. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

We perceive smells as perduring complex entities within a distal array that might be conceived of as smellscapes. However, the philosophical orthodoxy of Odor Theories has been to deny that smells are perceived as having a distal location. Recent challenges have been mounted to Odor Theories’ veracity in handling the timescale of olfactory perception, how it individuates odors as a distal entities, and their claim that olfactory perception is not spatial. The paper does not aim to dispute these criticisms. Rather, (...) what will be shown is that Molecular Structure Theory, a refinement of Odor Theory, can be further developed to handle these challenges. The theory is further refined by focusing on distal perception that requires considering the perceptual object as mereologically complex persisting odor against a background scene conceived of as a smellscape. What will be offered is an expansion of Molecular Structure Theory to account for distal smell perception within natural environments. (shrink)

When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences, and at the same time, these psychometric instruments were considered a means to create a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics - due to its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research - has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop (...) a contrasting characterization of contemporary psychometrics as a value-laden discipline. We expose four such values: that individual differences are quantitative (rather than qualitative), that measurement should be objective in a specific sense, that test items should be fair, and that utility of a model is more important than its truth. Our goal is not to criticize psychometrics for employing these values, but rather to bring them into the open and to show that these values are not inevitable and are in need of systematic evaluation. (shrink)

Citizen Satisfaction Index System (CSIS) was used to assess the delivery of support to education initiatives in the municipality of Banga, Aklan, Philippines. The samples were determined using multiple application of stratified random sampling approach. In accordance with the Philippine Statistical Authority's Data on Census Population and Housing for 2015, barangays having a bigger share of the population contributed more respondents to the 150 targeted participants. Following the inclusion criteria, the probability respondents were chosen using the Kish Grid. Pre-numbered questionnaires (...) were distributed, with odd numbers targeting male responders and even numbers targeting females. The following criteria were used to evaluate the respondents' assessments: awareness, availment of the program/service, satisfaction, and need for action. Furthermore, interviews were conducted to better understand and investigate the respondents' thoughts, behavior, and perspectives. The reasons for their reaction were also obtained. The data was provided in percentage as well as frequency distributions. The study inferred that awareness on alternative learning system and/or special education program should be improved since it is the only program that attained low rating for awareness. Most of the residents were not able to avail education programs because they have no household member who attends school. Majority of the respondents who availed the services were satisfied. However, scholarship and other assistance programs to students may be enhanced to improve service delivery. It is highly recommended by the citizens to improve accessibility to scholarship programs and other forms of financial assistance to students. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8, Aristotle defends a striking view about the good for human beings. According to Aristotle, the single happiest way of life is organized around philosophical contemplation. According to the narrowness worry, however, Aristotle's contemplative ideal is unduly Procrustean, restrictive, inflexible, and oblivious of human diversity. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has resources for responding to the narrowness worry, and that his contemplative ideal can take due account of human diversity.

In Plato’s Symposium, the mysterious Apollodorus recounts to an unnamed comrade, and to us, Aristodemus’ story of just what happened at Agathon’s drinking party. Since Apollodorus did not attend the party, however, it is unclear what relevance he could have to our understanding of Socrates’ speech, or to the Alcibiadean “satyr and silenic drama” (222d) that follows. The strangeness of Apollodorus is accentuated by his recession into the background after only two Stephanus pages. What difference—if any—does Apollodorus make to the (...) Symposium? Does his inclusion call the dramatic and philosophical unity of the work into question? I argue that despite initial appearances, Plato has important philosophical reasons for including Apollodorus as a character. Far from being an odd appendage to an otherwise complete narrative, the figure of Apollodorus is useful for our understanding of Socrates’s conception of eros later in the work. (shrink)

Peter Winch famously critiqued Michael Oakeshott's view of human conduct. He argued that Oakeshott had missed the fact that truly human conduct is conduct that 'follows a rule.' This paper argues that, as is sometimes the case with Oakeshott, what seems, on the surface, to be a disagreement with another, somewhat compatible thinker about a matter of detail in some social theory in fact turns out to point to a deeper philosophical divide. In particular, I contend, Winch, as typical of (...) those who only picked up on Oakeshott's work in the 1940s and 1950s, when Oakeshott became known for his critique of rationalism, failed to understand the idealist metaphysics underlying that critique. (shrink)

This reading of Plato's Ion shows that the philosophic action mimed and engendered by the dialogue thoroughly reverses its (and Plato's) often supposed philosophical point, revealing that poetry is just as defensible as philosophy, and only in the same way. It is by Plato's indirections we find true directions out: the war between philosophy and poetry is a hoax on Plato's part, and a mistake on the part of his literalist readers. The dilemma around which the dialogue moves is false, (...) and would have been recognized as such by Plato's contemporaries. Further, it is intrinsically related to a false, but popular, view of language. So the way out of the false dilemma of the dialogue is the way out of the war between philosophy and poetry, and also makes one see what is false about the view of language which makes such war plausible. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show the agreement of Camus and Aristotle on the cultural function of the art community, in particular their criticism of what should be called barbarian or nihilistic practices of art. Camus' art and criticism have been frequent targets of modern critics, but his point is and would be that such critics have the wrong idea of the purpose of art. His answer to such critics and the parallelism of his ideas with Aristotle's criticism (...) of barbarian culture, show that the real issue between Camus and his critics is cultural. (shrink)

As Shakespeare is closer in time and spirit to medieval psychology than to popular modern explanations of psyche, this article presents a fourfold analysis of ecstasy from Aquinas' Summa Theologiae to examine the characters of the play. I also suggest performance choices which make a variety of these ecstasies of soul more visible.

ABSTRACT Clinicians, researchers and the informed public have come to view addiction as a brain disease. However, in nature even extreme events often reflect normal processes, for instance the principles of plate tectonics explain earthquakes as well as the gradual changes in the face of the earth. In the same way, excessive drug use is predicted by general principles of choice. One of the implications of this result is that drugs do not turn addicts into compulsive drug users; they retain (...) the capacity to say ?no?. In support of the logical implications of the choice theory approach to addiction, research reveals that most addicts quit using drugs by about age 30, that most quit without professional help, that the correlates of quitting are the correlates of decision making, and, according to the most recent epidemiological evidence, the probability of quitting remains constant over time and independent of the onset of dependence. This last result implies that, after an initial period of heavy drug use, remission is independent of any further exposure to drugs. In short, there is much empirical support for the claim that addiction emerges as a function of the rules of everyday choice. (shrink)

In a very literarily complicated setting, Frater Taciturnus sets a remark about Hamlet not being a Christian tragedy. After unpeeling that literary setting and noting that Taciturnus' remark aims more at Jacob Börne than at Shakespeare, the paper shows how Frater Taciturnus' remark calls into question the religious project of a certain danish author. For, Taciturnus' primary concern is to show that religious drama is not possible, or at least "ought not be." This general law applies to Hamlet as well, (...) and if Shakespeare was attempting a religious drama he a) shouldn't have because such a thing is essentially undramatizable, and b) failed because he did not begin (which would be possible) by showing the hero's religious presuppositions. Frater Taciturnus himself has given considerable thought to the extent and the manner in which the religious can be represented; in fact the letter to the reader is his proof of how perfectly his own narrative, "Guilty/Not Guilty," was constructed with precisely these problems in mind. The play is not the thing that Taciturnus is really interested in, nor is he interested in the playwright's intentions, he considers that the play's the thing that catches out Börne's misunderstanding of the religious, and it is this field—in particular, that area where the religious life and literary art intersect, that is the brother's interest and forte. But if Taciturnus is correct in his criticism of Börne, it should be impossible for S. Kierkegaard to produce a religious authorship as well. (shrink)

The usual interpretation of Republic 10 takes it as Socrates’ multilevel philosophical demonstration of the untruth and dangerousness of mimesis and its required excision from a well ordered polity. Such readings miss the play of the Platonic mimesis which has within it precisely ordered antistrophes which turn its oft remarked strophes perfectly around. First, this argument, famously concluding to the unreliability of image-makers for producing knowledge begins with two images—the mirror (596e) and the painter. I will show both undercut the (...) argument they introduce. Secondly, Socrates repeats the “three removes” argument three times. Each has its own object and philosophical axis. The “bed” argument (596a-598d) concerns the ontological status of images vis-à-vis human makers and the divine idea. The bit and bridle,” 601b-601d) emphasizes the epistemological status of image-making as beneath the human maker of bridles (having correct opinion) and the human user, who knows. This second takes away the ontological distinction which was the point of the first. Thus, any human being could be in any of the three positions—user, maker, imitator. This dance might bring one to doubt the conclusion that the imitator has “neither knowledge nor right opinion” (602a). Plato leads into his concluding psychological and moral argument (602c-605c) after a third variation of the 3 removes. This last gives us the image of the flute player (601d-602) as the one who knows and so can order the flute maker. We will conclude by considering what it is this flutist could know, and given that his art is itself a mimesis, who the imitator of this imitative artist could be. Thus attention to the differences among these examples opens a defense of the arts, which reverses many of the claims made against the arts within the ostensible “Platonic” argument. (shrink)

The problem Plato sounds from the first lines of LAWS, his final dialogue, might be put in Jean-François Lyotard's term: it is the problem of the differend. Lyotard's position is briefly explained, shown to be applicable to the discussion in several ways (not the least of which is the three different gods appealed to as sources of the laws). We then see how Plato makes a chorus of the differend, resolving Lyotard's modern problem.

This paper aims at interpreting (primarily) the first six chapters of Aristotle’s Poetics in a way that dissolves many of the scholarly arguments conceming them. It shows that Aristotle frequently identifies the object of his inquiry by opposing it to what is other than it (in several different ways). As a result aporiai arise where there is only supposed to be illuminating exclusion of one sort or another. Two exemplary cases of this in chapters 1-6 are Aristotle’s account of mimesis (...) as other than enunciative speech (speech that makes truth claims, or representation) and his account of the final cause of tragedy in itself as plot, vis a vis its final cause as regards the audience, which is katharsis. Confusions arising from failure to see the otherness of representation and katharsis leads to an overly intellectualist understanding of the purpose of tragedy. (shrink)

A number of social theorists have contended that the essence of historical analysis is the employment of ideal types to comprehend past goings-on. But, while acknowledging that the study of history through ideal types can yield genuine insight, we may still ask if it represents the full emancipation of historical understanding from other modes of conceiving the past. This paper follows Michael Oakeshott's work on the philosophy of history in arguing that explaining the historical past by means of ideal types, (...) even though offering a coherent and fruitful enterprise, nevertheless falls short of fully embodying the characteristics that differentiate historical understanding. -/- This dispute involves fundamental issues regarding the nature of the social sciences. Furthermore, I suggest that it is of more than purely theoretical interest, in that social theorists who have accepted the Weberian view of historical inquiry will tend to be unaware of the defects inherent in all attempts to capture the nature of past events in a net of generalizations, and thus may be lead to ignore the inherent partiality of the understanding of historical happenings provided by ideal typification. (shrink)

The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within the concept of disruption and adjustments. Further, many important cycle theories are true endogenous social cycle theories in which the theory provides a reason why the cycle (...) should recur. We find that many social cycle theories fit with a two-population disruption and adjustment model similar to the well-known predator-prey model. This implies that a general modeling framework could be established for creating agent-based models of many social cycle theories. (shrink)

Kant admits that there are two kinds of human works that have something sublime about them, the work of the poet, e.g., tragedy, and the work of the politician, i.e., war. This paper will explore Kant's reasoning about the sublime element in these two human works.

In this book, author Gene Fendt shows how Plato's Republic provides a liturgical purification for the political and psychic delusions of democratic readers, even as Socrates provides the same for his interlocutors at the festival of Bendis. Each of the several characters is analyzed in accord with Book Eight's 6 geometrically possible kinds of character showing how their answers and failures in the dialogue exhibit the particular kind of movement and blindness predictable for the type.

Upshot: In our target article we claimed that, at least since Weber and Varela, enactivism has incorporated a theoretical commitment to one important aspect of Jonas’s philosophical biology, namely its anthropomorphism, which is at odds with the methodological commitments of modern science. In this general reply we want to clarify what we mean by anthropomorphism, and explain why we think it is incompatible with science. We do this by spelling out what we call the “Jonasian inference,” i.e., the idea that (...) we are entitled, based on our first-person experience of teleology, to take the appearance of teleology in other living beings at face value. (shrink)

Traditionally, Aristotle is held to believe that philosophical contemplation is valuable for its own sake, but ultimately useless. In this volume, Matthew D. Walker offers a fresh, systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good. The book situates Aristotle's views against the background of his wider philosophy, and examines the complete range of available textual evidence. On this basis, Walker argues that contemplation also benefits humans as perishable living organisms by actively guiding human life activity, including (...) human self-maintenance. Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good thus cohere with his broader thinking about how living organisms live well. A novel exploration of Aristotle's views on theory and practice, this volume will interest scholars and students of both ancient Greek ethics and natural philosophy. It will also appeal to those working in other disciplines including classics, ethics, and political theory. (shrink)

This chapter offers a complete account of Aristotle’s underexplored treatment of the virtue of wittiness (eutrapelia) in Nicomachean Ethics IV.8. It addresses the following questions: (1) What, according to Aristotle, is this virtue and what is its structure? (2) How do Aristotle’s moral psychological views inform Aristotle’s account, and how might Aristotle’s discussions of other, more familiar virtues, enable us to understand wittiness better? In particular, what passions does the virtue of wittiness concern, and how might the virtue (and its (...) attendant vices) be related to the virtue of temperance (and its attendant vices)? (3) How does wittiness, as an ethical virtue, benefit its possessor? (4) How can Aristotle resolve some key tensions that his introducing a virtue of wittiness apparently generates for his ethics? In addition to exploring these questions, this chapter challenges some commonly accepted accounts of Aristotle’s views on the nature of the laughable. (shrink)

Aristotle’s views on the choiceworthiness of friends might seem both internally inconsistent and objectionably instrumentalizing. On the one hand, Aristotle maintains that perfect friends or virtue friends are choiceworthy and lovable for their own sake, and not merely for the sake of further ends. On the other hand, in Nicomachean Ethics IX.9, Aristotle appears somehow to account for the choiceworthiness of such friends by reference to their utility as sources of a virtuous agent’s robust self-awareness. I examine Aristotle’s views on (...) the utility and choiceworthiness of friends, and offer a novel reading of Nicomachean Ethics IX.9. On this reading, Aristotle accepts a version of instrumental conditionalism about final value, that is, the thesis that goods (including friends) can be choiceworthy for their own sake (i.e., possess final or end value) at least partly on account of their instrumental properties. In articulating what sort of instrumental conditionalism it is reasonable to attribute to Aristotle, I argue that Aristotle appeals to the utility of perfect friends as part of a broadly material causal account of why such friends are choiceworthy for their own sake. On this reading, perfect friends are not choiceworthy for the sake of their utility in eliciting self-awareness; rather, their choiceworthiness for their own sake is (at least partly) realized in, or constituted by, their conduciveness to the virtuous agent’s self-awareness. This reading, I argue, frees Aristotle from the charge of inconsistency: Aristotle can appeal to the conduciveness of perfect friends to the virtuous agent’s self-awareness as a way of explaining why such friends are choiceworthy for their own sake. (shrink)

Motivated by the question of responsible AI and value alignment, I seek to offer a uniquely Foucauldian reconstruction of the problem as the emergence of an ethical subject in a disciplinary setting. This reconstruction contrasts with the strictly human-oriented programme typical to current scholarship that often views technology in instrumental terms. With this in mind, I problematise the concept of a technological subjectivity through an exploration of various aspects of ChatGPT in light of Foucault’s work, arguing that current systems lack (...) the reflexivity and self-formative characteristics inherent in the notion of the subject. By drawing upon a recent dialogue between Foucault and phenomenology, I suggest four techno-philosophical desiderata that would address the gaps in this search for a technological subjectivity: embodied self-care, embodied intentionality, imagination and reflexivity. Thus I propose that advanced AI be reconceptualised as a subject capable of “technical” self-crafting and reflexive self-conduct, opening new pathways to grasp the intertwinement of the human and the artificial. This reconceptualization holds the potential to render future AI technology more transparent and responsible in the circulation of knowledge, care and power. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept and role of ‘institutional racism’ in contemporary discussions of race should be reconsidered. It starts by distinguishing between ‘intrinsic institutional racism’, which holds that institutions are racist in virtue of their constitutive features, and ‘extrinsic institutional racism’, which holds that institutions are racist in virtue of their negative effects. It accepts intrinsic institutional racism, but argues that a ‘disparate impact’ conception of extrinsic conception faces a number of objections, the most serious being that it (...) has no plausible account of what it is that makes extrinsically racist institutions racist. It also argues that claims about the explanatory indispensability of institutional racism are overstated (individual racism is at least as important), critiques structural approaches to racial inequality, and suggests that there is reason to doubt whether institutional reform can provide us with all that morality may require in the racial domain. (shrink)

This chapter examines key Confucian worries about the Aristotelian sophos as a model of human flourishing. How strong are these worries? Do Aristotelians have good replies to them? Could the Aristotelian sophos, and this figure's distinguishing feature, sophia, be more appealing to the Confucian than they initially appear?

The paper looks at the semantics and ontology of dispositions in the light of recent work on the subject. Objections to the simple conditionals apparently entailed by disposition statements are met by replacing them with so-called 'reduction sentences' and some implications of this are explored. The usual distinction between categorical and dispositional properties is criticised and the relation between dispositions and their bases examined. Applying this discussion to two typical cases leads to the conclusion that fragility is not a real (...) property and that, while both temperature and its bases are, this does not generate any problem of overdetermination. (shrink)

In fragments of the lost Protrepticus, preserved in Iamblichus, Aristotle responds to Isocrates’ worries about the excessive demandingness of theoretical philosophy. Contrary to Isocrates, Aristotle holds that such philosophy is generally feasible for human beings. In defense of this claim, Aristotle offers the progress argument, which appeals to early Greek philosophers’ rapid success in attaining exact understanding. In this paper, I explore and evaluate this argument. After making clarificatory exegetical points, I examine the argument’s premises in light of pressing worries (...) that the argument reasonably faces in its immediate intellectual context, the dispute between Isocrates and Aristotle. I also relate the argument to modern concerns about philosophical progress. I contend that the argument withstands these worries, and thereby constitutes a reasonable Aristotelian response to the Isocratean challenge. (shrink)

I argue that nonresident aliens, in places that are clearly not U.S. territory, should benefit from constitutional rights. This is a matter of mutuality of obligation. The U.S. claims the authority to hold all people accountable for respecting certain laws, such as the law of war as defined in the Military Commissions Act. Accordingly, it must accord them basic legal rights in return. At the same time, I argue, contra Benjamin Wittes, that this would not lead to absurdly opening the (...) courthouse doors, nor does it require abandoning principle to keep the flood of litigation reasonably contained. Not all harms inflicted by the U.S. government can give rise to a lawsuit, and that the distinction between those who should have a right to sue and those who should not can be drawn in a principled way. (shrink)

Teachers encountered numerous challenges posed by the COVID-19 outbreak. Herewith, this study aimed to determine the challenges encountered by Filipino teachers in the new normal and their coping mechanisms. This study employed a qualitative inquiry to determine the challenges encountered and coping mechanisms employed by teachers amid modular instruction, involving 10 teachers from five secondary schools in the Philippines who participated voluntarily. Data were gathered through a written narrative from each participant and were analyzed thematically. Themed findings showed that these (...) teachers are greatly challenged in terms of learning quality transfer, module distribution and retrieval, students’ difficulties in following instruction, power disruption, internet connection, and health risks posed by the pandemic. Nevertheless, these teachers dealt with these difficulties by employing their own coping techniques. Teaching can be challenging and frustrating, especially in these difficult times, but as these teachers demonstrated, everything is possible. Hence, educators must be ready for any situation that may arise. This situation is unlikely to get better anytime soon; instead, teachers will need to adjust to and accept this reality. (shrink)

This is the first chapter to our edited collection of essays on the nature and ethics of blame. In this chapter we introduce the reader to contemporary discussions about blame and its relationship to other issues (e.g. free will and moral responsibility), and we situate the essays in this volume with respect to those discussions.

A study was carried out from October, 2020 to September, 2021to investigate the diversity of fishes and the conservation status of Chittaura Jheel (Bahraich), Uttar Pradesh. During the study period, 38 fish species belonging to 28 genera, 14 families and 7 orders have been identified. The order Cypriniformes was found the dominated order with 15 species(39.47%) followed by Siluriformes 10 species (26.31%), Perciformes 4 species (10.52%), Ophiocephaliformes 4 species (10.52%), Synbranchiformes2 species (5.26%), Osteoglossiformes 2 species (5.26%) and Clupiformes 1 species (...) (2.63 %), The present investigation showed that the wetland, Chittaura Jheel possesses rich fish biodiversity but proper conservation measures are required to maintain sustainability and richness of the fish species diversity of that wetland of U.P. According to IUCN, 30 were enlisted as Least Concern (LC), 2 species as near endangered (NE), 3 species as near threatened (NT), 2 listed as Endangered (EN) and 1 species was listed as Vulnerable (VU). There is a need of conservation of fish diversity of this natural wetland. The pressure is increasing day by day due to increasing population, leading to loss of fish diversity hence identifying the problem and making a better management plan is the way for conservation of the fish diversity of the Chittaura Jheel, a wetland of Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh. (shrink)

Anselm’s 'Proslogion' is, as he says in its Preface, 'unum argumentum', a single line of reasoning, that builds toward the following: “that God is truly,” “that he is the highest good who needs no other,” and that he is the one “whom all things need so that they may be and may be well.” This paper attempts to shed light on how Anselm carries out the threefold task that he sets for himself and way in which his procedure brings unity (...) to the work. Although I do not provide a full account of the unity of the 'Proslogion', I lay the groundwork for such an account by reflecting on the 'Proslogion' in light of the 'Symposium', with a view to bringing a pattern of thinking present in Plato’s work to bear on the 'Proslogion'—an intertextual approach that illuminates aspects of Anselm’s thinking and reveal the rich Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition within which he was working. In the 'Symposium', one discerns a pattern of thinking that consists of three “moments”: a comic moment, a tragic moment, and a philosophic moment. To follow this pattern in one’s inquiry is, as Socrates suggests, to practice 'ta erôtica', “erotics,” the art of erotic thinking. Familiarity with this pattern of erotic thinking helps make sense of Anselm’s thinking in the 'Proslogion', and in this paper I reveal how this is so. (shrink)

I explore Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics of how agents attain self-awareness through contemplation. I argue that Aristotle sets up an account of self-awareness through contemplating friends in Books VIII-IX that completes itself in Book X’s remarks on theoretical contemplation. I go on to provide an account of how contemplating the divine, on Aristotle’s view, elicits self-awareness.

Vendler’s :161–173, 1979) puzzle about imagination is that the sentences ‘Imagine swimming in that water’ and ‘Imagine yourself swimming in that water’ seem at once semantically different and semantically the same. They seem semantically different, since the first requires you to imagine ’from the inside’, while the second allows you to imagine ’from the outside.’ They seem semantically the same, since despite superficial dissimilarity, there is good reason to think that they are syntactically and lexically identical. This paper sets out (...) the puzzle and offers a novel solution. Our proposal is that, just as there is knowledge-wh, there is also imagining-wh and that the inside/outside distinction Vendler points to is properly understood as a distinction within imagining-wh. In particular, to imagine swimming from the inside is to imagine what it feels like to swim, while to imagine swimming from the outside is to imagine what it looks like to swim. We show that this proposal is well grounded in both the semantics and syntax of ‘imagine.’ We also argue it makes better sense than its rivals of the data Vendler found so puzzling. (shrink)

Ordinarily, we take moral responsibility to come in degrees. Despite this commonplace, theories of moral responsibility have focused on the minimum threshold conditions under which agents are morally responsible. But this cannot account for our practices of holding agents to be more or less responsible. In this paper we remedy this omission. More specifically, we extend an account of reasons-responsiveness due to John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza according to which an agent is morally responsible only if she is appropriately (...) receptive to and reactive to reasons for action. Building on this, we claim that the degree to which an agent is responsible will depend on the degree to which she is able to recognize and react to reasons. To analyze this, we appeal to relations of comparative similarity between possible worlds, arguing that the degree to which an agent is reasons-reactive depends on the nearest possible world in which given sufficient reason to do otherwise, she does so. Similarly, we argue that the degree to which an agent is reasons-receptive will depend on the intelligibility of her patterned recognition of reasons. By extending an account of reasons-responsiveness in these ways, we are able to rationalize our practice of judging people to be more or less responsible. (shrink)