This paper draws attention to a proof of the necessity of identity given by Arthur Prior. In its simplicity, it is comparable to a proof of Quine's, popularised by Kripke, but it is slightly different. Prior's Polish notation is transcribed into a more familiar idiom. Prior's proof is followed by a proof of the necessity of difference, possibly the first such proof in the literature, which is also repeated here and transcribed. The paper concludes with a (...) brief discussion of Prior's views on identity and difference over time. (shrink)

We propose that consciousness is a multi-loop necessity: the joint operation of four anatomically distinct neural loops, no one of which is sufficient alone. The claim is structured as a set of necessary conditions and carries the falsification condition that structure imposes. A single counterexample defeats it, one documented case in which all four loops have simultaneously lost function while the capacity for contingent, accurate reporting is preserved. We argue no such case exists across the disorders-of-consciousness, anesthesia, and focal-lesion literatures, (...) and that the necessity structure accounts for the observed profile of consciousness under disruption: resilience to single-loop damage, characteristic alteration under selective loop disruption, and reliable elimination only under simultaneous multi-loop failure. Consciousness depends on a specific set of neural circuits whose joint operation constitutes its substrate. We propose a four-loop architecture as that substrate: (1) Layer 5 pyramidal recurrent loops gating signal entry to conscious access via apical-basal coincidence detection, where somatic burst firing requires the ascending thalamocortical signal at the basal dendrites and the previous cycle's efference copy at the apical dendrites to arrive coincidentally at the soma, with burst or no burst constituting the threshold between a signal that crosses into the processing cycle and one that does not; (2) a central lateral thalamocortical loop broadcasting the distributed cortical representation of prior processing as a global cortical field via matrix-type calbindin-positive projections to supragranular cortex, contextualizing every gated signal within the full representation of prior completed cycles so that what crossed threshold at Loop 1 is situated within existing cortical representations rather than arriving with no context; (3) a VTA-cortical dopaminergic loop implementing the resolution event and the only loop receiving input from all three other loops simultaneously, encoding the magnitude and direction of expectation deviation via phasic dopamine release and D1-mediated gain modulation to drive the system from multiple contextualized representations into one definite weighted state; and (4) an ACC-mediodorsal thalamic loop converting the resolved weighted state into commitment, generating an efference copy that propagates through higher-order thalamus to the apical dendrites of Layer 1, simultaneously closing the current processing cycle and configuring the threshold conditions Loop 1 will inherit in the next, while a parallel ACC-to-VTA projection carries the prediction directly to Loop 3 for the following cycle's resolution. We define consciousness as the unified operation of four functions constituting a processing cycle within a temporal window: (1) gating, determining whether a signal crosses into the processing cycle or does not cross, via apical-basal coincidence detection at the Layer 5 pyramidal soma; (2) contextualization, broadcasting the stored record as a global cortical field that gives the incident signal a position within the full history of prior completed cycles; (3) resolution, computing the deviation between prior expectation and arriving signal at the convergence point where past, present, and anticipated future arrive simultaneously, driving the system into one definite weighted state; and (4) commitment, converting the resolved state into voluntary output drive and generating the efference copy that configures the next cycle's gating conditions, closing the cycle on itself. The four loops are the necessary physical systems whose operation allows these functions to occur, and we propose that all four must synchronize within a 50-150 ms window (varying with age and neural health). The necessity structure makes specific consequences follow: anesthesia requires multiple pharmacological mechanisms because reliable unconsciousness requires disrupting more than one loop, with agents targeting GABA-A, NMDA, and alpha-2 adrenergic receptors all producing unconsciousness despite acting through distinct molecular mechanisms; partial disruption produces altered rather than absent consciousness because the remaining loops continue to operate; and patient H.M. remained fully conscious despite bilateral hippocampal ablation because the hippocampus lies outside the four loops. The architecture generates testable predictions about loop-specific altered states, the temporal cascade of consciousness disruption under multi-agent anesthesia, and the gamma synchronization signature within the 50-150 ms window. Keywords: consciousness, thalamocortical loops, disorders of consciousness, anesthesia, Layer 5 pyramidal recurrent loops, central lateral thalamocortical loop, VTA-cortical dopaminergic loop, ACC-mediodorsal thalamic loop, apical-basal coincidence detection, gamma synchronization, neural correlates of consciousness, hippocampal ablation. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been growing optimism about the potential of conversational agents, such as chatbots and social robots, in mental healthcare. Their scalability offers a promising solution to some of the key limitations of the dominant model of treatment in Western countries. However, while recent experimental research provides grounds for cautious optimism, the integration of conversational agents into mental healthcare raises significant clinical and ethical challenges, particularly concerning the partial or full replacement of human practitioners. Overall, this theoretical (...) paper examines the clinical and ethical implications of deploying conversational agents in mental health services as partial and full replacement of human practitioners. On the one hand, we outline how these agents can circumvent core treatment barriers through stepped care, blended care, and a personalized medicine approach. On the other hand, we argue that the partial and full substitution of human practitioners can have profound consequences for the ethical landscape of mental healthcare, potentially undermining patients’ rights and safety. By making this argument, this work extends prior literature by specifically considering how different levels of implementation of conversational agents in healthcare present both opportunities and risks. We argue for the urgent need to establish regulatory frameworks to ensure that the integration of conversational agents into mental healthcare is both safe and ethically sound. (shrink)

Consciousness is the point where past, present, and anticipated future converge. This paper derives that point from the brain's own wiring. Four neural loops implement four operations, gating, contextualization, resolution, and commitment, and they map onto a directed graph with one structurally exceptional node: a convergence point that receives three streams at once. One loop delivers the present (the incident signal), one delivers the past (the trace of prior completed cycles), and one delivers the anticipated future (the prior (...) expectation carried from the last cycle's commitment). All three arrive at that node within a 50 to 150 ms window, and the resolution event there determines what is happening, in which direction, and with what weight. Consciousness, on this account, is that convergence. The same three-direction structure Husserl identified phenomenologically as the "living present" is here forced by graph topology, arrived at independently. -/- The four loops are a Layer 5 pyramidal recurrent loop (gating), a central lateral thalamocortical loop (contextualization), a VTA-cortical dopaminergic loop (resolution), and an ACC-mediodorsal thalamic loop (commitment). They compose into a closed cycle, an endomorphism whose output feeds back as its own next input, and the cycle is developed in three registers held together throughout: the neural circuits, the graph-theoretic structure, and the phenomenology of what each circuit's disruption produces. -/- The account carries a single falsification condition. Consciousness is defined operationally as the capacity to produce contingent, accurate reports of currently presented information, and the theory is refuted by one documented case in which all four loops have simultaneously lost function while that capacity is preserved. The paper argues no such case exists across the disorders-of-consciousness, anesthesia, and focal-lesion literatures, and that the architecture accounts for the observed profile of consciousness under disruption: resilience to single-loop damage, characteristic alteration under selective loop disruption, and reliable elimination only under simultaneous multi-loop failure. Eight discriminating predictions follow, none generated by Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, or Thalamocortical Loop Theory individually. -/- The same four-loop structure is the empirical anchor of a further result. The graph carries a signing asymmetry between its convergence point and its cession point, and a chain of forced derivations with no free parameters (Stewart, 2026e, 2026f, 2026q) pushes that asymmetry through to the Cartan matrix of A₂ × A₁ and, with the temporal generator of the iterated cycle, to su(3) ⊕ su(2) ⊕ u(1), the gauge algebra of the Standard Model, at rank 4. The four loops are the only empirical input to that chain; the Appendix sketches each step. -/- Keywords: consciousness, thalamocortical loops, disorders of consciousness, anesthesia, four-loop architecture, ACC-mediodorsal thalamic loop, VTA-cortical dopaminergic loop, central lateral thalamocortical loop, Layer 5 pyramidal recurrent loops, apical-basal coincidence detection, gamma synchronization, neural correlates of consciousness, endomorphism, strongly connected directed graph. (shrink)

The cognitive-bias literature has produced a catalog of hundreds of named biases without a unifying structural account of why these biases and not others exist. This paper proposes that judgment executes four dimensional operations in a fixed sequence, recognition, contextualization, resolution, action, and that bias arises when the sequence fails to close in order. The five non-empty classes of dimensional judgment error follow from the dependency structure of the four dimensions. The signalless frame names the failure where contextualization operates without (...) recognition having delivered the current signal. The frameless verdict names the failure where resolution operates without contextualization having delivered the frame. The unresolved commit names the failure where action operates without resolution having delivered the determinate state. The signalless verdict names the failure where resolution operates at the direct recognition-to-resolution path without recognition having delivered the targeted referent. The signalless commit names the catastrophic failure where action commits without recognition having admitted anything to commit on. A sixth potential class (contextualization-to-action without resolution) is structurally empty under the architecture's closure: every path from contextualization to action passes through resolution, and the architecture admits no clean contextualization-to-action shortcut. The architectural derivation of the dependency structure and the empty-cell closure lives in Stewart (2026e, 2026f, 2026g, 2026z). -/- Each of the five non-empty classes corresponds to a named pattern in the cognitive-bias literature. Class 2-1, the signalless frame, captures persistent-state biases where the frame the resolution operates on carries content the present recognition admission did not deliver (anxious vigilance, ambient prior-state contamination of present judgment). Class 3-2, the frameless verdict, captures the canonical frame-mismatch biases (anchoring, framing, base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, hindsight, in-group bias, status-quo, planning fallacy, confirmation bias). Class 4-3, the unresolved commit, captures commit-before-resolve biases (belief perseverance, sunk-cost). Class 3-1, the signalless verdict, captures determination-without-referent biases (the conjunction fallacy in the Linda paradigm, the availability heuristic). Class 4-1, the signalless commit, captures confabulation and the strongest action-before-recognition failures. -/- The taxonomy generates five predictions. Exhaustive classification commits every cross-dimensional bias in the cognitive psychology literature to one of the five non-empty classes, with the 4-2 cell structurally empty. Cross-task class identity predicts that biases sharing a dimensional class share an operational signature regardless of cognitive content and show correlated individual-differences profiles on tasks probing the same class. Dependency entailment predicts that subjects exhibiting a catastrophic failure of the full judgment cycle (Class 4-1) exhibit the full cycle's constituent dependency failures (Classes 2-1, 3-2, 4-3) at higher rates on related tasks, while subjects exhibiting a direct recognition-to-resolution failure (Class 3-1) do not exhibit the full cycle's interior failures at correlated rates because the direct dependency bypasses the full cycle's interior. The dependency-count severity gradient predicts that a catastrophic failure produces more severe judgment errors than its individual constituent dependency failures, with severity scaling by the count of dependencies that have failed. Structural intervention predicts that interventions re-establishing the missing prerequisite reduce a bias more reliably than interventions operating on the malformed downstream output. The architecture additionally forbids a sixth non-empty structural class, forbids the catastrophic failure (Class 4-1) without its constituent dependency failures (Classes 2-1, 3-2, 4-3), and forbids reversing the dependency direction at dimension 1, since recognition has no earlier dimension within the cycle to be displaced before. Reaction-time, neural-timing, and pharmacological-target signatures are derived in the Empirical Signatures and Pharmacological Targets sections as the loop-specific measurement apparatus the framework's predictions rest on, with the per-agent operational specifications handed to a dedicated pharmacological-predictions paper. The four-dimensional count is derived in this paper on judgment's own operands by removal (each dimension's removal breaks that dimension and no other, and no candidate fifth survives), with the substrate-scale derivation cited as a convergence witness reaching the same count by a route that shares none of judgment's operands (Stewart, 2026g). The neural-architecture instantiation and the path-algebra structure are inherited by citation (Stewart, 2026a, 2026e, 2026f, 2026z). -/- The philosophical reframe of bias as architectural default rather than error against an imported standard is developed in *Cognitive Bias as Default Setting* (Stewart, 2026w). The methodological reframe of the canonical paradigms as probes of specific dimensions is developed in *Cognitive Bias Paradigms as Dimensional Probes* (Stewart, 2026aw). This paper develops the structural taxonomy and the empirical-signature predictions both companion papers depend on. -/- **Keywords:** cognitive bias, heuristics and biases, hindsight bias, conjunction fallacy, availability heuristic, belief perseverance, sunk-cost, confabulation, anchoring, framing effect, base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error. (shrink)

An error is a process whose stages execute out of sequence: a later stage executes before the earlier stage it depends on has delivered. Any judgment, computation, diagnosis, or inference proceeds through four ordered stages, each stage depending on the one before it, and an error is a stage executing on input the prior stage has not yet supplied. Sorting the ways the four-stage dependency can break yields five distinct error types plus one combination the dependency makes impossible. The (...) five types are exhaustive (every error that breaks the dependency is one of the five) and the same five types appear in any field whose process proceeds through the four ordered stages. -/- The five error types name which stage executed on undelivered input. Stage-2-on-stage-1 (Type 2-1): the contextualizing stage executes before the recognition stage has delivered, so it situates content whose existence is not yet established. Stage-3-on-stage-2 (Type 3-2): the resolving stage executes before the contextualizing stage has delivered, so it settles a state with no context to settle it against. Stage-4-on-stage-3 (Type 4-3): the committing stage executes before the resolving stage has delivered, so it carries forward a state with no resolved value. Stage-3-on-stage-1 (Type 3-1): the resolving stage executes on content admitted directly, bypassing the contextualizing stage, and settles a state that refers to nothing the admission supplied. Stage-4-on-stage-1 (Type 4-1): the committing stage executes when none of the prior stages has delivered, the whole sequence having failed to execute; this is the maximal failure, and it contains Types 2-1, 3-2, and 4-3 within it. The impossible combination is stage-4-before-stage-2 (Type 4-2): the dependency provides no route from the contextualizing stage to the committing stage except through the resolving stage, so there is no such step to fail, and the cell stays empty. -/- The typology stakes six predictions. Exhaustiveness: every error that breaks the four-stage dependency, in any field, is one of the five types. Entailment: the maximal failure (Type 4-1) always co-occurs with its three interior failures (Types 2-1, 3-2, 4-3), while the direct-admission failure (Type 3-1) does not drag in the context-related failures it bypasses. Step-count gradient: on the same input in the same field, the maximal failure's consequences contain the consequences of each interior failure it is built from. Stage-1 fixity: no error pushes the first stage later within a single pass, because the first stage has no earlier stage to be ordered behind. Three-stage subset: a process missing one of the four stages exhibits only the error types that do not involve the missing stage, never the full five. Cross-field identity: errors sorted into the same type share the same operational signature whatever the field's content. Beyond the six predictions, the typology forbids a sixth error type as a structural constraint, not as a staked prediction: the count is fixed by which steps the dependency provides, not by free combination of stage pairs. -/- The three core failures are the three adjacent-stage swaps; the two further types (the direct-admission failure and the maximal whole-sequence failure) follow from the longer-range steps the dependency admits. The derivation of the four-stage ordering, its longer-range steps, and the empty stage-4-before-stage-2 cell is carried in Stewart (2026e, 2026f, 2026g) and inherited here. -/- The typology is the spine of a research program whose subsequent papers map each field's existing error catalog onto the five types. This paper names each type, defines each by which stage executed on undelivered input, fixes the entailment relations among them, and supplies the vocabulary the program's downstream papers reuse. -/- **Keywords:** error analysis, error taxonomy, failure mode analysis, taxonomy of errors, diagnostic error, cognitive error, cognitive bias, heuristics and biases, judgment and decision making, error classification. (shrink)

The standard algebraic operations used to recover the gauge algebra su(3) ⊕ su(2) from a four-vertex quiver Q form a closed four-step cycle. The four operations are the kernel computation of the boundary operator on Q's chain complex, the basis selection for the first homology H₁(Q; ℝ), the Cartan-Killing correspondence applied to the Cartan matrix of a symmetric bilinear form B on H₁(Q; ℝ), and the Weyl group construction of the reflection group generated by σ_{γᵢ}(v) = v − B(v, γᵢ) (...) γᵢ. Each operation has a dependency on the prior operation that is forced by the construction. The kernel computation produces the cycle space without which there is nothing to select a basis for. The basis selection produces the linearly independent generators without which there is no matrix to apply Cartan-Killing to. The Cartan-Killing correspondence produces the semisimple Lie algebra without which there are no roots whose reflections generate the Weyl group. The Weyl group produces the closed set of permitted reflections that closes the algebra's iteration. The four-step chain proceeds in the evaluation direction, recovering from each operation what the prior operations had already implied. The paper enumerates the chain, proves the forced dependencies, and proves that no fifth operation is possible in the chain because the structural input (a dual-axis enumeration on the four positions) admits exactly four positions: two independent binary axes cross to 2² = 4, and no third axis is available. The construction's contribution is the explicit identification of the four operations as a closed cycle, the proof that the chain is forced by the dependencies, and the closure proof. The Lie-algebraic content of the derivation, su(3) ⊕ su(2), is recovered as one specific instance of the four-operation chain applied to a four-vertex quiver's cycle space. The dual-axis structure that produces the four positions is derived in *On Occurrence: The Four-Gon* (Stewart, 2026g) and treated here as a fixed input. -/- **Keywords,** quiver, path algebra, cycle space, boundary operator, basis selection, Cartan-Killing correspondence, Weyl group, bilinear form, Cartan matrix, A₂ × A₁. (shrink)

Consciousness has not been medically defined. It has been defined legally and socially, and those definitions have varied across jurisdictions and across centuries. The DSM does not define consciousness. The ICD does not define consciousness. There is no diagnostic biomarker for phenomenal experience. The AI consciousness debate has been proceeding as if a constitutive specification of consciousness were available against which systems could be checked. The historical record shows what recognition has looked like in the absence of such a specification. (...) Observers have judged other humans to be conscious or not on observer-side grounds, with the same constitutive facts present in observer and observed, in patterns that cannot be explained by constitutive differences. Slavery, colonial classification, the dehumanization literature, the shifting clinical and developmental categories, and the case of behaviorist scientists denying the scientific standing of consciousness while themselves being conscious are independent records of the same pattern. If recognition of consciousness in beings constitutively identical to the recognizer has been observer-dependent for the entire historical record, there is no observer-side basis to expect recognition of consciousness in AI to be governed by AI's constitutive facts, regardless of what those facts turn out to be. The paper diagnoses the AI consciousness debate's failure to resolve as a conflation of two distinct questions. The constitution question asks whether a system instantiates the conditions a theory of consciousness specifies; it is conditional on a theory, and no theory has been medically settled. The recognition question asks whether an observer judges a system to be conscious; it is a fact about the observer, determined by the observer's prior beliefs, training, and social background (Stewart, 2026w, *Cognitive bias as default setting*). The historical record refutes the assumption that the two questions can be answered together by arguing the constitution question alone. The paper supplies the separation, identifies what each question requires to be answered, and shows that the recognition question has been the operative question by default because no medical specification of consciousness has been available to anchor the constitution question. The paper does not advocate a position on whether any current AI system is conscious. The deferral is a deliberate restriction on what the paper claims, not an avoidance. -/- Keywords: artificial intelligence, consciousness, perception, anthropomorphism, disorders of consciousness, philosophy of mind, AI ethics, machine consciousness. (shrink)

The heuristics-and-biases tradition has been read as a catalog of named biases. This paper reads it as a catalog of experimental probes. Each canonical paradigm was constructed by an experimenter to elicit a specific judgment, and the data each paradigm produces probes one or more dimensions of a four-dimensional judgment process the participant executes to produce the response. -/- We specify the four dimensions as recognition (what crosses the participant's threshold of attention), contextualization (what frame the participant holds), resolution (what (...) determination the participant produces), and action (what the participant reports or carries forward). They are ordered by dependency, each dimension is a necessary condition for the next. The four-dimensional judgment architecture admits three structurally distinct closed paths from recognition back to recognition (the full four-dimensional judgment cycle, the direct recognition-to-resolution path, and the resolution-and-action-return path; architectural derivation in Stewart, 2026e, 2026f, 2026g). The architecture admits five non-empty violation classes corresponding to dependency failures within these three paths (2-1 at the recognition-to-contextualization step within the full cycle, 3-2 at the contextualization-to-resolution step within the full cycle, 4-3 at the resolution-to-action step shared by all three paths, 3-1 at the direct recognition-to-resolution step, and 4-1 as the catastrophic failure of the full cycle), plus one structurally empty cell at the contextualization-to-action reversal (Class 4-2) where the architecture admits no direct dependency for the failure to occur on. The participant's judgment cycle operates continuously, with each cycle's commitment carried forward to the next cycle's recognition through cross-cycle content propagation. Class signatures index within-cycle failures on the propagated content. We read what the literature labels "bias" as the gap between the participant's accumulated default at the probed dimension and the experimenter's normative target. The typology classifies each probe, names what dimension it targets, and reads the participant's response as the operational output of the accumulated default content at that dimension. -/- The canonical paradigms distribute across three categories. Clean single-class paradigms occupy four dependency-reversal classes. The 3-1 class catches probes where the resolution operates on a recognition admission that does not include the targeted referent (Linda, availability, representativeness). The 3-2 class catches probes where the resolution operates on a contextualization frame whose accumulated content is not the frame the situation called for (cab problem, anchoring, Asian disease, IKEA, endowment, hindsight, fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, confirmation bias, planning fallacy, in-group bias, status quo, false memory). The 4-3 class catches probes where action operates without resolution having delivered against the currently relevant content (belief perseverance, sunk-cost). The 4-1 class catches probes where the participant's action commits forward content the participant's recognition did not admit (confabulation). Devine's three-study sequence is a separability demonstration of the contextualization-resolution distinction rather than a single class. The bystander and bandwagon effects are multi-signature paradigms whose data isolates 3-1, 3-2, and 4-3 instances at the participant level under the experimenter's flattened label. -/- We identify two unfilled cells. The 4-2 cell is structurally empty because no direct contextualization-to-action dependency exists in the architecture; any apparent 4-2 effect decomposes into a 3-2 frame failure with a 4-3 manifestation at the action stage. The 2-1 cell is joint-occluded by the cross-cycle frame delivery: the joint loads the new cycle's contextualization with the prior cycle's pragmatic output before the within-cycle recognition-to-contextualization step can execute in isolation. The two unfilled cells are unfilled for different architectural reasons, one because the dependency does not exist, one because the within-cycle isolation the class requires is occluded by the joint's normal operation. -/- We propose three forward openings. The paper predicts that probes targeting the same dependency produce correlated responses across participants on the same content domain, and probes targeting different dependencies do not, regardless of the named-bias label. For heterogeneous multi-signature paradigms the prediction operates at the subtype level, each subtype correlating with paradigms targeting the same dependency rather than the paradigm as a whole correlating with other paradigms. A second opening is the structural consequence at the 4-2 dependency. A third opening is the construction problem at the 2-1 dependency, which requires a design that isolates the experimental cycle's recognition admission against the carried-forward frame before the joint integrates the new admission. -/- The correlation prediction's operationalization is bound at five structural facts the architecture forces. Content matching at the accumulated frame the experimental cycle activates at contextualization. Dependency-content separation at the dimensions' invariance across participants. The 3-2 block's homogeneity at the convergence at resolution. The 4-1 class's testability on healthy samples at the graded admission-threshold default at recognition. Multi-class subtype resolution at the cycle's two-direction readability at resolution. The five binding forces remove the analyst's content-matching and subtype-resolution latitude and specify the prediction in terms that follow from the architecture rather than from the analyst's discretion. The prediction operationalizes further at the specific paradigm-pair level: the typology assigns each canonical paradigm to one dependency class, and the assignment commits the account to specific within-block paradigm pairs the prediction predicts will correlate (anchoring with the cab problem, hindsight with the planning fallacy, fundamental attribution error with in-group bias, Linda with availability, belief perseverance with sunk-cost, false memory with source-monitoring failures, among the other within-block pairs) and specific cross-block paradigm pairs the prediction predicts will not correlate (Linda with the cab problem, hindsight with confabulation, availability with sunk-cost, among others). The cross-paradigm correlation matrix the typology commits to is the prediction at field-units resolution, with the field's correlation-analysis machinery as the falsification instrument. -/- **Keywords:** cognitive bias, heuristics and biases, Linda problem, anchoring, framing effect, base-rate neglect, confirmation bias, planning fallacy, fundamental attribution error, bystander effect, representativeness heuristic, availability heuristic. (shrink)

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer an opportunity for computational social science research at scale. Building upon prior explorations of LLM agent design, our work introduces a simulated agent society where complex social relationships dynamically form and evolve over time. Agents are imbued with psychological drives and placed in a sandbox survival environment. We conduct an evaluation of the agent society through the lens of Thomas Hobbes's seminal Social Contract Theory (SCT). (...) We analyze whether, as the theory postulates, agents seek to escape a brutish "state of nature" by surrendering rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order and security. Our experiments unveil an alignment: Initially, agents engage in unrestrained conflict, mirroring Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature. However, as the simulation progresses, social contracts emerge, leading to the authorization of an absolute sovereign and the establishment of a peaceful commonwealth founded on mutual cooperation. This congruence between our LLM agent society's evolutionary trajectory and Hobbes's theoretical account indicates LLMs' capability to model intricate social dynamics and potentially replicate forces that shape human societies. By enabling such insights into group behavior and emergent societal phenomena, LLM-driven multi-agent simulations, while unable to simulate all the nuances of human behavior, may hold potential for advancing our understanding of social structures, group dynamics, and complex human systems. (shrink)

Suppose we’re at a horserace, and you turn to me and say, ‘Eclipse is at the finish line!’ But by the time you’ve finished saying this—by the time your utterance is complete—Eclipse is already well past the finish line, and what you’ve said is no longer true. But you did say something true. More generally, we can—and often do—say true things about events that take up less time than our utterances themselves. We can also contradict each other about such events—something (...) that takes even more time. How is all this possible? In the twentieth century, this problem was discussed by Arthur Prior. In the 14th, John Buridan treated an older—probably 12th-century—version of it. Buridan’s treatment is more successful than Prior’s, which runs into Zeno’s paradox of the arrow. Buridan avoids the paradox, but faces further puzzles for his account of contradiction. In untangling these, we’ll uncover important latent features of his pragmatics and temporal logic—features that are supported by more recent research in linguistics. Ultimately, our considerations here will turn up new insight into the Gricean Cooperative Principle. In a slogan: to contradict is to cooperate. (shrink)

My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must (...) answer to a realm of sui generis non-natural PROPERTIES. Semantic autonomy insists on a realm of sui generis non-natural PREDICATES which do not mean the same as any natural counterparts. Logical Autonomy maintains that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.-moral premises with the aid of logic alone. Logical Autonomy does not entail Semantic Autonomy and Semantic Autonomy does not entail Ontological Autonomy. But, given some plausible assumptions Ontological Autonomy entails Semantic Autonomy and given the conservativeness of logic – the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in – Semantic Autonomy entails Logical Autonomy. So if Logical Autonomy is false – as Prior appears to prove – then Semantic and Ontological Autonomy would appear to be false too! I develop a version of Logical Autonomy (or NOFI) and vindicate it against Prior’s counterexamples, which are also counterexamples to the conservativeness of logic as traditionally conceived. The key concept here is an idea derived in part from Quine - that of INFERENCE-RELATIVE VACUITY. I prove that you cannot derive conclusions in which the moral terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent. But this is because you cannot derive conclusions in which ANY (non-logical) terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy comes out as an instance of the conservativeness of logic. This means that the reverse entailment that I have suggested turns out to be a mistake. The falsehood of Logical Autonomy would not entail either the falsehood Semantic Autonomy or the falsehood of Ontological Autonomy, since Semantic Autonomy only entails Logical Autonomy with the aid of the conservativeness of logic of which Logical Autonomy is simply an instance. Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy is vindicated, but it turns out to be a less world-shattering thesis than some have supposed. It provides no support for either non-cognitivism or non-naturalism. (shrink)

At the centre of Arthur Prior’s ‘Thank goodness’ argument for the A-theory of time is a particular form of relief. Time must objectively pass, Prior argues, or else the relief felt when a painful experience has ended is not intelligible. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis of the type of relief at issue in this argument, which I call temporal relief, and distinguish it from another form of relief, which I refer to as counterfactual relief. (...) I also argue that existing discussions of the ‘Thank goodness’ argument—including Prior’s own—fail to give a satisfactory account of temporal relief, and that it needs to be seen as an emotion linked to the ability to engage in fairly sophisticated forms of planning. I also suggest that this has an impact on Prior’s claim that the idea of points in time plays no fundamental role in the semantic analysis of tenses. (shrink)

I show how non-presentists ought to respond to a popular objection originally due to Arthur Prior and lately updated by Dean Zimmerman. Prior and Zimmerman say that non-presentism cannot account for the fittingness of certain emotional responses to things past. But presentism gains no advantage here, because it is equally incapable of accounting for the fittingness of certain other emotional responses to things past, in particular moral outrage.

In English, in order to speak about Arthur’s attitudes, we use sentences like “Arthur believes that natural language is messy”. For sentences of this kind we have a standard theory, according to which the ‘that’-clause ‘that natural language is messy’ denotes a proposition. As Prior showed for the first time, the standard theory appears to be at odds with some linguistic data. Geach and Prior both assumed that linguistic data are to be taken as reliable guides (...) to a correct semantic account and I will start by raising some worries concerning their methodology. Because of these data, Prior and Geach suggested some non-standard accounts. I will then show that if we take linguistic data seriously, their non-standard accounts do not fare any better than the standard theory. My general conclusion will thus not only be that Prior’s and Geach’s methodology is disputable, but also that their conclusions do not seem to follow even if we grant the reliability of their methodology. (shrink)

Propositional identity is not expressed by a predicate. So its logic is not given by the ordinary first order axioms for identity. What are the logical axioms governing this concept, then? Some axioms in addition to those proposed by Arthur Prior are proposed.

It was something of a dogma for much of the twentieth century that one cannot validly derive an ought from an is. More generally, it was held that non-normative propositions do not entail normative propositions. Call this thesis about the relation between the natural and the normative Natural-Normative Autonomy. The denial of Autonomy involves the entanglement of the natural with the normative. Naturalism entails entanglement—in fact it entails the most extreme form of entanglement—but entanglement does not entail naturalism. In a (...) ground-breaking paper “The autonomy of ethics” Arthur Prior constructed some intriguing counterexamples to Autonomy. While his counterexamples have convinced few, there is little agreement on what is wrong with them. I present a new analysis of Autonomy, one which is grounded in a general and independently plausible account of subject matters. While Prior’s arguments do establish shallow natural-normative entanglement, this is a consequence of simple logical relationships that hold between just about any two subject matters. It has nothing special to do with the logical structure of normativity or its relation to the natural. Prior’s arguments leave the fundamental idea behind natural-normative Autonomy intact. I offer a new argument for deep entanglement. I show that in any framework adequate for dealing with the natural and the normative spheres, a purely natural proposition entails a purely normative proposition, and vice-versa. But this is no threat to non-naturalist moral realism. In fact it helps ameliorate the excesses of an extreme non-naturalism, delivering a more palatable and plausible position. (shrink)

Frank Snare had a puzzle. Noncognitivism implies No-Ought-From-Is but No- Ought-From-Is does not imply non-cognitivism. How then can we derive non-cognitivism from No-Ought-From-Is? Via an abductive argument. If we combine non-cognitivism with the conservativeness of logic (the idea that in a valid argument the conclusion is contained in the premises), this implies No-Ought-From-Is. Hence if No-Ought-From-Is is true, we can arrive at non-cognitivism via an inference to the best explanation. With prescriptivism we can make this argument more precise. I develop (...) an account of imperative consequence that underwrites Hare’s principle that you cannot derive imperatives from indicatives. Thus if moral judgments contain an imperative component, it will be impossible to derive moral conclusions from indicative or non-moral premises. Given this account of imperative consequence, we can explain No-Ought-From-Is without appealing to anything as nebulous as the conservativeness of logic. Hence if No-Ought-From-Is is true, we have an inference to the best explanation for prescriptivism. Both lines of argument face problems from Prior. Given Prior’s counterexamples, No-Ought-From-Is as originally conceived is false. The version that survives is No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is. But the best explanation of this does not include non-cognitivism. With prescriptivism it is worse. For the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism ‘explains’ – that is, the version of No-Ought-From-Is that prescriptivism implies – would exclude Prior’s counter-examples to Autonomy as invalid. But they are not invalid. Thus Prior’s counter-examples to No-Ought-From- Is refute prescriptivism. Thus from 1960 onwards R. M.Hare was a dead philosopher walking. But if non-cognitivism cannot be derived from No-Ought-From-Is, this suggests that it is not what Hume was trying to prove. I argue that what Hume was trying to prove is that moral truths are not demonstrable. To be demonstrable, a proposition must be either self-evident or logically derivable from self-evident propositions. By Treatise 3.1.1.27, Hume had proved to his own satisfaction that no moral propositions are self-evident. That leaves open the possibility that they are logically derivable from self-evident but NON-moral propositions. The point of No-Ought-From-Is was to exclude this possibility. If you cannot logically derive moral conclusions from non-moral premises, you cannot demonstrate the truths of morality by deriving them from self-evident but NON-moral truths. I also discuss why Hume abandoned No-Ought-From-Is in the EPM. He had no need of it since he thought he had a proof that (with some exceptions) no nontrivial truths are demonstrable. Hence no non-trivial MORAL truths are demonstrable. No-Ought-From-Is drops out as unnecessary. (shrink)

Introduction: Prinz’s SentimentalismMany ethicists claim that one cannot derive an ought from an is. In others words, they think that one cannot derive a statement that has prescriptive force from purely descriptive statements. This thesis plays a crucial role in many theoretical and practical ethical arguments. Since, according to many, David Hume advocated a view along these lines, this thesis has been called ‘Hume’s Law’. In this paper, I adopt this widespread terminology, whether or not Hume did indeed take this (...) position. There are some notable exceptions among philosophers, such as John SearleSee John R. Searle, “How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 73, No. 1, (1964), pp. 43–58. and Arthur Prior,See Arthur N. Prior, “The Autonomy of Ethics,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 38, No. 3, (1960), pp. 199–206. but most philosophers have embraced Hume’s Law. Recently, however, Hume’s Law has come under attack. In his book The Emotional Construction of Mor. (shrink)

The article deals with some current pioneering formal reconstructions and interpretations of the problem well known in antiquity as The Master Argument. This problem is concerning with enrichment of formal logical systems with modal and temporal notions. The opening topic is devoted to reconstruction of Arthur Prior. while the other here included approach to the problem arc mostly reactions. revisions or additions to this one.

ABSTRACTHegel's Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in “recognitive” relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. In this essay I suggest a contemporary path for developing Hegel's suggestive ideas in a way that broadly conforms to the demands of his own system, such that one moves from logic to a philosophy of mind. Hence I draw on Hegel's “subjective logic”, understood in the light of (...) modern modal logic, in an attempt to model the way minds might be thought as connected by way of shared intentional contents. Here, we should not be surprised at some of the parallels that emerge between the approaches of Hegel and the modal logician Arthur Prior, as Prior had testified to the influence of his teacher, John N. Findlay, who himself had strong Hegelian leanings. In the final section, Robert Stalnaker's version of possible-world semantics is suggested as a framework within which Hegel's recognitive account of the mind might be understood. (shrink)

Kit Fine has proposed a new solution to what he calls ‘a familiar puzzle’ concerning modality and existence. The puzzle concerns the argument from the alleged truths ‘It is necessary that Socrates is a man’ and ‘It is possible that Socrates does not exist’ to the apparent falsehood ‘It is possible that Socrates is a man and does not exist’. We discuss in detail Fine’s setting up of the ‘puzzle’ and his rejection, with which we concur, of two mooted solutions (...) to it. (One of these uses standard, Kripkean, notions, and the other rests on work done by Arthur Prior.) We set out, and reject, the philosophy of modality underlying Fine’s new solution, and we defend an alternative response to the alleged puzzle. Our solution follows the work of David Wiggins in distinguishing between the sentential operator ‘It is necessary that’ and the predicate modifier ‘necessarily’. We briefly provide this distinction with a possible- world semantics on which it is neither a necessary truth, in some sense, that Socrates exists nor true, in some sense, that Socrates necessarily exists. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta uma concepção do fluxo de consciência a partir de um modelo de naturalização da consciência de base metafísica não-materialista, inspirado na filosofia de Espinosa. Procura-se responder à questão colocada por Arthur Prior, em seu artigo ?Thank Goodness That?s Over? , acerca do caráter problemático do significado de um certo tipo de proposições indexadas temporalmente no quadro de teorias que recusam a realidade do tempo. Para tanto, defende-se a hipótese de que essas proposições são irredutíveis a (...) proposições não temporalizadas, seu sentido sendo determinado pelo caráter adverbial dos indexadores temporais e pela função de expressar estados subjetivos referencialmente opacos . Essa função, por sua vez, seria determinante para a constituição do mental enquanto tal e para a realidade do domínio prático. // The article proposes a conception of the flow of consciousness based on a non-materialistic metaphysical model of naturalization of consciousness, inspired in Spinoza's philosophy. I will try to answer Arthur Prior’s question (Thank Goodness That's Over, 1959) concerning the problematic character of the meaning of a certain type of propositions containing temporal indexes for the theories that refuse the reality of time. My hypothesis is that those propositions cannot be reduced to tenseless ones since their meaning is determined by the adverbial character of the temporal indexes and since they express subjective referentially opaque states (that are taken to be close to the Spinozistic concept of affection). I will also show that their function is crucial for the constitution of the mental and for the reality of the practical domain. (shrink)

I defend the claim that every individual must have existed; or, in other words, that every individual is a necessary existent. Henceforth, I shall take the expression 'necessary existence' to abbreviate this claim, and I shall take 'contingent existence' to abbreviate the negation of this claim. In order to defend necessary existence, I clarify what I mean by 'exists'. I argue that there are many different senses of 'exists', and exactly one of these senses is appropriate for the purposes of (...) philosophical logic and modal metaphysics. Making essential use of this sense of 'exists', I defend necessary existence against various objections embodied in several arguments for contingent existence. Having responded to these arguments, I then outline the requirements for a convincing case for necessary existence. Specifically, I argue that a metaphysical case must be made for the acceptance of this claim. This metaphysical case for necessary existence is embodied in an argument I present from the metaphysics of propositions. The premises of this argument concern the conditions under which a proposition is true and a proposition exists. Given these premises, it follows that everything is a necessary existent. I defend this argument from a number of objections to the metaphysics of propositions presented here. I then present and defend three arguments from formal, logical considerations for necessary existence. These three arguments make use of three common axioms or rules of inference. I defend each of these three principles from the objections posed by Saul Kripke, Kit Fine, and Arthur Prior. I then defend necessary existence from the challenges posed by Alvin Plantinga's modal theory of essences, David Lewis's counterpart theory, and Alan McMichael's role semantics. This completes my defence of the three arguments from formal considerations and the argument from metaphysical considerations. (shrink)

Arthur Norman Prior was born on 4 December 1914 in Masterton, New Zealand. He studied philosophy in the 1930s and was a significant, and often provocative, voice in theological debates until well into the 1950s. He became a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College in Christchurch in 1946 succeeding Karl Popper. He became a full professor in 1952. He left New Zealand permanently for England in 1959, first taking a chair in philosophy at Manchester University, and then (...) becoming a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, in 1966. Prior died on 6 October 1969 in Trondheim, Norway. After Prior’s death, many logicians and philosophers have analysed and discussed his approach to formal and philosophical logic. In particular, his contributions to modal logic, tense-logic and deontic logic have been studied. In 1957, A.N. Prior proposed the three-valued modal logic Q as a ‘correct’ modal logic from his philosophical motivations, see Prior (1957). Prior developed Q in order to offer a logic for contingent beings, in which one could intelligibly and rationally state that some beings are contingent and some are necessary, see Akama & Nagata (2005). According to Akama & Nagata (2005), Q has a natural semantics. In other words, from the philosophical point of view, Q can be regarded as an ‘actualist’ modal logic. This review article is a developed description of, and discussion on, ‘The System Q’ that is the fifth chapter of Prior (1957). In addition, in his logical analysis of ‘Time & Existence’ (that is the eights chapter of Prior (1967)), Prior has worked on system Q. Thus, Prior (1967) has also been very useful for this article. This article analyses the logical structure of system Q in order to provide a more understandable description as well as logical analysis for today’s logicians, philosophers, and information-computer scientists. In the paper, the Polish notations are translated into modern notations in order to be more comprehensible and to support the developed formal descriptions as well as semantic analysis. (shrink)

All’interno del dibattito che anima la filosofia temporale esistono numerose correnti di pensiero su quale posizione si debba adottare riguardo al problema del valore di verità delle proposizioni sul futuro. Nella prima parte dell’articolo verrà tracciato il quadro generale della discussione mediante una ricostruzione storica delle varie argomentazioni – da Aristotele e Diodoro Crono a Prior – e verranno analizzate le posizioni che si sono sviluppate, a partire da queste, nell’età contemporanea. Nella seconda parte invece tenterò di mostrare come (...) la competizione fra la teoria del futuro vero e il sistema ockhamista di Prior non si basi su due differenti concetti di contingenza, ma sulla mancata distinzione, all’interno del sistema ockhamista, di due significati di ‘determinato’ e sulla conseguente confusione che investe il concetto di necessità. Una volta recuperata tale distinzione la teoria ockhamista può essere riformulata e le due diverse posizioni si rivelano essere, semplicemente, teorie sulla determinatezza degli stati futuri. / A large number of schools of thought enliven the philosophical debate on how we can manage the truth-values of propositions about the future. In the first part of this paper I’ll draw an overall view of the discussion, proposing an historical reconstruction of the arguments – from Aristotle and Diodoro Crono to Prior – that will give us the instruments to understand the current state of the debate. After that, in the second part, I’ll argue that the discussion between theory of the true future and Prior’s ockhamist theory is not based on two different concepts of contingency, but instead on the lack of distinction between two different meanings of ‘determined’ inside the ockhamist system. Recovering this distinction is the first step to understand that the real competition between the two systems is not about contingency, but only about the determination of the future. (shrink)

What is time? In this paper, I defend the view that time is change. In Section 1, I introduce the view that time is change and contrast it with an alternative view. In Section 2, I draw on recent developments in higher-order metaphysics to defend a particular theory of change, and therefore, of time. Finally, in Section 3, I respond to several objections to the view that time is change.

This paper defends Priorianism, a theory in the philosophy of time which combines three theses: first, that there is a metaphysical distinction between the present time and non-present times; second, that there are temporary propositions, that is, propositions that change in truth-value simpliciter over time; and third, that there is change over time only if there are temporary propositions. Priorianism is accepted by many Presentists, Growing Block Theorists, and Moving Spotlight Theorists. However, it is difficult to defend the view without (...) appealing to premises that those who reject the view find controversial. My aim in this paper is to defend Priorianism in a way that largely avoids appealing to such premises. I do three things: first (Section 1), I describe the component theses of Priorianism and the relations between them. Next (Section 2), I show how Priorians can respond to the argument that the B-theory implies that there are temporary propositions, and therefore satisfies the Priorian condition for there being change over time. Finally (Section 3), I defend the Priorian thesis that there is change over time only if there are temporary propositions against an alternative principle of change defended by Ross Cameron (The Moving Spotlight, 2015). (shrink)

I argue that No-Ought-From-Is (in the sense that I believe it) is a relatively trivial affair. Of course, when people try to derive substantive or non-vacuous moral conclusions from non-moral premises, they are making a mistake. But No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is is meta-ethically inert. It tells us nothing about the nature of the moral concepts. It neither refutes naturalism nor supports non-cognitivism. And this is not very surprising since it is merely an instance of an updated version of the conservativeness of logic (in (...) a logically valid inference you don’t get out what you haven’t put in): so long as the expressions F are non-logical, you cannot get non-vacuous F-conclusions from non-F premises. However, the triviality of No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is is important and its non-profundity profound. No-Ought-From-Is is widely supposed to tell us something significant about the nature of the moral concepts. If, in fact, it tells us nothing, this is a point well worth shouting from the housetops. This brings me to my dispute with Gerhard Schurz who has proved a related version of No-Ought-From-Is, No-Ought-Relevant-Ought-From-Is, a proof which relaxes my assumption that ‘ought’ should not be treated as a logical constant. But if ought is not a logical expression then it does not really matter much that No-Ought-From-Is would be salvageable even if it were. Furthermore, Schurz’s proof depends on special features of the moral concepts and this might afford the basis for an abductive argument to something like non-cognitivism. As an error theorist, and therefore a cognitivist, I object. Finally I take a dim view of deontic logic. Many of its leading principles are false, bordering on the nonsensical, and even the reasonably plausible ones are subject to devastating counter-examples. (shrink)

This paper is a response to William Lane Craig's criticisms of my previous paper "Uncaused Beginnings". I argue that Craig's criticisms do not inflict any damage on the arguments of that earlier paper.

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

From the beginning of the 16th century to the end of the 18th century, there were not less than ten philosophers who focused extensively on Venn’s ostensible analytical diagrams, as noted by modern historians of logic (Venn, Gardner, Baron, Coumet et al.). But what was the reason for early modern philosophers to use logic or analytical diagrams? Among modern historians of logic one can find two theses which are closely connected to each other: M. Gardner states that since the Middle (...) Ages certain logic diagrams were used just in order to teach “dull-witted students”. Therefore, logic diagrams were just a means to an end. According to P. Bernhard, the appreciation of logic diagrams had not started prior to the 1960s, therefore the fact that logic diagrams become an end the point of research arose very late. The paper will focus on the question whether logic resp. analytical diagrams were just means in the history of (early) modern logic or not. In contrast to Gardner, I will argue that logic diagrams were not only used as a tool for “dull-witted students”, but rather as a tool used by didactic reformers in early modern logic. In predating Bernhard’s thesis, I will argue that in the 1820s logic diagrams had already become a value in themselves in Arthur Schopenhauer’s lectures on logic, especially in proof theory. (shrink)

This research note presents a surgical resolution to the Liar Paradox by identifying Local Evaluative Collapse (LEC) as the structural consequence of an illicitly established identity relation. Building on Arthur Prior’s (1971) observation that statements implicitly purport their own truth, I argue that "This statement is false" functions as a covert contradiction—semantically equivalent to "It is true that this statement is false." Unlike formal systems which utilize Gödel numbering as "substitution fuel" to make the enumerator and the enumerated (...) interchangeable, ordinary language lacks valid grounds to leap the categorical divide between referrer and referent. When the singular valid interpretation required for paradox—"The true statement entirely and only about itself is false in nothing but itself"—is made explicit, it is instantly rejected as contradictory nonsense. This note generalizes the phenomenon to formal systems, arguing that Local Evaluative Collapse is triggered when structural admissibility is revoked—“nonsensed”—by distinct disproof reductio. Finally, it posits that admissibility remains a latent burden on the truth function (analogous to the unmeasured wave function) so long as contradictions remain covert, collapsing to observed incoherence only upon disproof realization. (shrink)

This research note presents a surgical resolution to the Liar Paradox by identifying Local Evaluative Collapse (LEC) as the structural consequence of an illicitly established identity relation. Building on Arthur Prior’s (1971) observation that statements implicitly purport their own truth, I argue that "This statement is false" functions as a covert contradiction—semantically equivalent to "It is true that this statement is false." Unlike formal systems which utilize Gödel numbering as "substitution fuel" to make the enumerator and the enumerated (...) interchangeable, ordinary language lacks valid grounds to leap the categorical divide between referrer and referent. When the singular valid interpretation required for paradox—"The true statement entirely and only about itself is false in nothing but itself"—is made explicit, it is instantly rejected as contradictory nonsense. This note generalizes the phenomenon to formal systems, arguing that Local Evaluative Collapse is triggered when structural admissibility is revoked—“nonsensed”—by distinct disproof reductio. Finally, it posits that admissibility remains a latent burden on the truth function (analogous to the unmeasured wave function) so long as contradictions remain covert, collapsing to observed incoherence only upon disproof realization. (shrink)

This companion paper subjects Temporal Fission Theory (TFT; Boether, 2025) to formal logical and quasi-mathematical scrutiny. TFT claims that the phenomenological present emerges through the dynamic collision of past and future temporal potentialities, resolving three aporias identified in Augustine’s Confessions XI: the ontological status of the present, the phenomenological–cosmological divide, and the mechanism of temporal constitution. The paper proceeds in three phases. First, it constructs two adversarial proofs: Proof A formalizes TFT’s core propositions and demonstrates their internal consistency and explanatory (...) power; Proof B attempts to defeat TFT by identifying circularity, explanatory gaps, and ontological inflation. Initial weighted evaluation across seven criteria yields a score of 4.25/5.00 for Proof A against 3.25/5.00 for Proof B, with two critical vulnerabilities: a circularity problem in TFT’s definition of temporal potentialities and the metaphorical status of its central mechanism. Second—and constituting this paper’s principal original contribution—the analysis completes TFT’s formalization by grounding temporal potentialities in McTaggart’s (1908) B-series ordering relations, thereby defeating the circularity objection through a formal Non-Circularity Theorem, and by specifying the emergence function through an axiomatic framework satisfied by two independent candidate formalizations: a measure-theoretic model and an information-theoretic model. Third, the revised evaluation demonstrates that TFT’s formalized version scores 4.60/5.00, resolving the two principal objections while generating a novel claim: that A-series temporal properties emerge from B-series structure through the interaction kernel that consciousness provides—a result that, if correct, addresses the central problem that has divided the philosophy of time since McTaggart. (shrink)

The distinction between first- and second-order ability in the philosophy of action enables new clarity in the discussion of behavioral control in addiction. Addiction involves automated patterns of thought and behavior that undermine the first-order ability to reliably abstain. However, addicts retain a second-order ability to reliably abstain if they remain able to learn the “epistemic prerequisites” of reliable abstinence, including addiction-specific metacognitive skills and cue-avoidance strategies. The second-order ability to reliably abstain depends to a significant extent on socio-economic situation (...) and access to the right social resources. This “Epistemic Prerequisites Model” supports the view that addiction is a compulsion, and suggests that moral responsibility in addiction depends on factors relating to both orders of ability. (shrink)

I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.

A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying (...) historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project. (shrink)

Dilation occurs when an interval probability estimate of some event E is properly included in the interval probability estimate of E conditional on every event F of some partition, which means that one’s initial estimate of E becomes less precise no matter how an experiment turns out. Critics maintain that dilation is a pathological feature of imprecise probability models, while others have thought the problem is with Bayesian updating. However, two points are often overlooked: (1) knowing that E is stochastically (...) independent of F (for all F in a partition of the underlying state space) is sufficient to avoid dilation, but (2) stochastic independence is not the only independence concept at play within imprecise probability models. In this paper we give a simple characterization of dilation formulated in terms of deviation from stochastic independence, propose a measure of dilation, and distinguish between proper and improper dilation. Through this we revisit the most sensational examples of dilation, which play up independence between dilator and dilatee, and find the sensationalism undermined by either fallacious reasoning with imprecise probabilities or improperly constructed imprecise probability models. (shrink)

This treatise constructs a causal chain of suffering by synthesizing Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will (Wille zum Leben) with the author’s theoretical corpus, including the Double Helix of Understanding, the Mathematics of the “I,” the Pyramid of Personality, and the theory of Borderline Nihilistic Disorder. The central argument holds that suffering is not an accidental feature of human existence but an architecturally necessary consequence of consciousness itself—a chain with identifiable links extending from the metaphysical ground of blind Will, (...) through the developmental emergence of the “I,” the accumulation of the Life-Experience Encyclopedia, the inevitable confrontation with existential groundlessness, and the potential collapse into nihilistic crisis. The paper identifies seven causal links in this chain: (1) the blind Will as ontological ground, (2) the emergence of individuated consciousness, (3) the construction of the I–We relational matrix, (4) the accumulation of cognitive-emotional content, (5) the awakening of the philosophical function, (6) the confrontation with the Abyss, and (7) the resolution or annihilation bifurcation. Drawing exclusively on Schopenhauer’s published works and the author’s philosophical-psychological framework, this treatise demonstrates that suffering follows a developmental logic that is simultaneously metaphysical and psychological, philosophical and empirical. The implications for understanding adolescent suicide, lifespan development, and the necessity of philosophical education are discussed. (shrink)

The computational paradigm, which has dominated psychology and artificial intelligence since the cognitive revolution, has been a source of intense debate. Recently, several cognitive scientists have argued against this paradigm, not by objecting to computation, but rather by objecting to the notion of representation. Our analysis of these objections reveals that it is not the notion of representation per se that is causing the problem, but rather specific properties of representations as they are used in various psychological theories. Our analysis (...) suggests that all theorists accept the idea that cognitive processing involves internal information-carrying states that mediate cognitive processing. These mediating states are a superordinate category of representations. We discuss five properties that can be added to mediating states and examine their importance in various cognitive models. Finally, three methodological lessons are drawn from our analysis and discussion. (shrink)

In their replies to “The Epistemic Prerequisites of Reliable Abstinence in Addiction,” Federico Burdman and Zoey Lavallee identify substantive considerations that call the plausibility of my Epistemic Prerequisites Model (EPM) into question. Burdman argues that how I talk about the ability to φ “reliably” is problematic, and that it makes more sense to focus on the scalarity of ability and self-control at the level of individual behaviors. I clarify the notion of reliability operative in EPM and argue that we ought (...) to center how an addict’s control over individual behaviors varies with environmental factors, which has important implications for extended autonomy. Lavallee argues that my emphasis on automaticity overlooks important ways in which behavioral control is compromised in addiction, and whether they break the EPM framework. If the phenomena Lavallee indicates do in fact compromise behavioral control, they may be compatible with EPM; and if they are not, the model will require revision, but its core claims will remain intact. (shrink)

Many have begun to despair that climate justice will prevail even in a minimal form. The affective dimensions of such despair, we suggest, threaten to make climate action appear too demanding. Thus, despair constitutes a moral challenge to individual climate action that has not yet received adequate attention. In response, we defend a duty to act in hope for a more just (climate) future. However, as we see it, this duty falls differentially upon the shoulders of more and less advantaged (...) agents in society. From arguments by Black thinkers like Derrick Bell, we draw a set of distinctions between two types of hope: one for ideal justice, and one for more modest change; and between two types of hopeful actions, those undertaken through formal political channels and those we call 'extra-political' actions; and between two sites of differential moral burdens, those of the privileged and those of the oppressed. Ours is a case for facing even bleak realities, demanding otherwise, and acting in hope to achieve a better future. (shrink)

There is a remarkable trend in contemporary environmentalism that emphasizes ‘accepting responsibility’ for the natural world in contrast to outdated preservationist thinking that shirks such responsibility. This approach is often explained and justified by reference to the anthropocene: this fundamentally new epoch—defined by human domination—requires active human intervention to avert planetary catastrophe. However, in this paper, I suggest this rhetoric encourages a flight from history. This often jubilant, sometimes anxious, yearning for unprecedented human innovation and—ultimately—control in our new millennia mirrors (...) the Futurist movement that took off near the beginning of the last century. Despite the significant differences in the details of how academics have defended this twenty-first-century environmental outlook, they all represent the true flight from history; they too quickly jettison the ideas of historical environmentalists and so misunderstand the environmental values at the heart of preservation that are more salient than ever. (shrink)

In this paper, I first present an overview of Asay’s _A Theory of Truthmaking_, highlighting what I take to be some of its most attractive features, especially his re-invigoration of the ontological understanding of truthmaking and his defence of ontology-first truthmaking over explanation-first truthmaking. Then, I articulate what I take to be a puzzling potential inconsistency: (a) he appeals to considerations to do with aboutness in criticising how well ontological views account for truth while (b) ruling out aboutness from the (...) right account of truthmaking. He argues, instead, that necessitation is both necessary and sufficient for truthmaking (§3.3). I suggest that adding aboutness to one’s account in the right way is not just compatible with but important for ontology-first truthmaking. I do all this to invite Asay to clarify his position on these matters. Overall, Asay’s worldview displays the fruitfulness of an ontologically serious approach to metaphysics that puts truthmaking centre-stage. (shrink)

A central tenet of truthmaker theory is that necessitation is necessary for truthmaking (NEC). This paper defends NEC in a novel, piecemeal way, namely by responding to a potential counterexample involving a changing past. If Carter won a race at t1 but is later disqualified at t2, then Carter no longer won at t1. A wholly past event seems to have changed in the future. The event makes ‘Carter won the race at t1’ (RACE) true between t1‐2 but fails to (...) make it true at t2. So, we have a potential counterexample to necessitation: a truthmaker of RACE fails in another context to make the same truthbearer RACE true. I argue that the best solution to this challenge is not that there are different truthbearers at t1‐2 and t2 (the semantic response), or that RACE was never true because of the future disqualification or will always be true despite the future disqualification. The best solution is to accept that the past can change: past events can change based on what happens in the future (e.g., via their effects). This paper's novel defence of necessitation will illustrate the importance of utilising explicitly ontological and commonsensical tools in accounting for truth. (shrink)

Corresponding with the accelerating crises of climate and biodiversity loss has been a call in contemporary environmentalism to think and act at planetary scales to address a planetary problem. One prominent proposal, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), would attempt to replicate the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions by tactically injecting reflective particles into the atmosphere in an attempt to reverse global warming. This article first constructs a new case for SAI on behalf of the wild, an idea that has appeared in (...) passing within several influential arguments for solar engineering but has not received widespread endorsement. I then introduce the reader to Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and defend one interpretation that is supported by mainstream interpreters in the literature, drawing the reader’s attention to the important role that a human/nature parallel plays in Leopold’s moral reasoning and the value he places on preserving biodiversity. Then, I apply this framework to SAI and argue that it poses an intractable dilemma for ‘geoengineering for the wild.’ I provide a novel reading of Leopold’s famous essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” and argue it illustrates the importance of two distinct forms of intellectual humility in his thought. Then, I present the dilemma. It appears when one answers a simple question: is it better for SAI to “work” or “fail?” As I will discuss, this question is too simple, but it is revealing. I will argue in what follows that from a Leopoldian outlook both success and failure in solar geoengineering should deeply trouble us. This constitutes 'the climate engineer's dilemma.'. (shrink)