ENTREVISTA COM PROFISSIONAIS DA FILOSOFIA QUE ATUAM EM PROJETOS – BLOCO ICom: Lucas Dilacerda, Paulo Jorge Leandro, Paulo W. Lima, Raquel R. RochaPor: Antônio Alex Pereira de Sousa, Paulo Willame Araújo de Lima.

Cet article analyse la relation entre les concepts de clairvoyance et de sublime à partir de la lecture par Deleuze de la Critique de la faculté de juger de Kant, soulignant le sublime comme une expérience limitante qui brise l’harmonie entre les facultés et les forces censées créer. Contrairement à Kant, pour qui le sublime réaffirme les limites de la raison, Deleuze le comprend comme un catalyseur d’un nouveau régime sensible et cognitif, lié au devenir-voyant et à l’affirmation de la (...) différence. (shrink)

I discuss Aristotle's anomalous terminology in Physics A.1 (involving "universals" and "particulars") and its coherence with Aristotle's notion of scientific demonstration.

It would be improper for a President to play safe. After two years of curbing my tongue and not making all sorts of observations that have sprung to my mind, in order to let you have an opportunity of having your say, I am now off the leash. And whereas mostly in academic life it is appropriate to adopt a prudential strategy, and not say anything that might be wrong, I owe it to you on this occasion to play a (...) maximax strategy, to speak out and say what I really think, being willing to run the risk of being wrong in order not to forgo the chance of actually being right in an area of the philosophy of science which must, I think for ever, be largely a matter of metaphysical speculation. (shrink)

David Lewis criticizes an argument I put forward against mechansim on the grounds that I fail to distinguish between OL, Lucas's ordinary potential arithmetic output, and OML, Lucas's arithmetical output when accused of being some particular machine M; and correspondingly, between OM the ordinary potential arithmetic output of the machine M, and ONM, the arithmetic output of the machine M when accused of being a particular machine N. For any given machine, M, N, O, P, Q, R,... etc., (...) I can in principle calculate a Godel sentence for that machine - indeed infinitely many, depending on the Godel numbering scheme adopted. The Godel sentence of a particular machine can, I claim, be seen to be true, if that machine is adequate for Elementary Peano Arithmetic. Hence, if I were accused of being M, I can on that supposition see that the Godel sentence of M is true, since I am capable of Elementary Peano Arithmetic and the machine M is said to be an adequate characterization of me. (shrink)

The legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established. Almost every scientist knows, and every viewer of the BBC's recent programme on Darwin was shown,* how Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, attempted to pour scorn on Darwin's Origin of Species at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and had the tables turned on him by T. H. Huxley. In this memorable encounter Huxley's simple scientific sincerity humbled the prelatical insolence and clerical (...) obscurantism of Soapy Sam; the pretension of the Church to dictate to scientists the conclusions they were allowed to reach were, for good and all, decisively defeated; the autonomy of science was established in Britain and the Western world; the claim of plain unvarnished truth on men's allegiance was vindicated, however unwelcome its implications for human vanity might be; and the flood tide of Victorian faith in all its fulsomeness was turned to an ebb, which has continued to our present day and will only end when religion and superstition have been finally eliminated from the minds of all enlightened men. Even churchmen concede that it was a disastrous defeat.1 Only Owen Chadwick strikes a note of caution, observing that the account given of the incident in Wilberforce's biography seems hardly consistent with an overwhelming defeat, and maintaining that the received account must be a largely legendary creation of a later date. (shrink)

What licenses the use of a definite description? The formal and philosophical literature has approached this question in two ways. The uniqueness approach (Frege, 1892; Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950) holds that we may use a definite determiner only if the property denoted by its complement holds of exactly one individual in some domain: Sentence (1) and (2) can only be true if there is exactly one king of France, and exactly one American governor, respectively. Since this is not the case (...) in the actual world, the sentences are either false or (on most modern accounts) fall prey to a presupposition failure. (shrink)

Sets are central to mathematics and its foundations, but what are they? In this book Luca Incurvati provides a detailed examination of all the major conceptions of set and discusses their virtues and shortcomings, as well as introducing the fundamentals of the alternative set theories with which these conceptions are associated. He shows that the conceptual landscape includes not only the naïve and iterative conceptions but also the limitation of size conception, the definite conception, the stratified conception and the graph (...) conception. In addition, he presents a novel, minimalist account of the iterative conception which does not require the existence of a relation of metaphysical dependence between a set and its members. His book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is twofold. First, we aim to identify the source of distributivity in natural language. Our hypothesis is that throughout the grammar, distributivity can be tracked down to a single operator. Two converging lines of reasoning help us identify this operator. One line emerges as a result of generalizing and unifying previously disparate treatments of distributivity in the domain of nominal quantifiers. The other line comes from analyzing the meaning of durative adverbials, with special attention to (...) their interaction with cumulative readings. Second, we aim to provide a unified formal semantic framework for the treatment of interactions between verbs and their arguments, most importantly aspect, plurality, and quantification, and to shed light on the way in which thematic arguments are associated with the verb in the lexicon and in the compositional process. Although existing frameworks deal with parts of this picture, no such unified framework exists to date. The theoretical results presented in this proposal include a novel argument in favor of a quantificational analysis of durative adverbials (Dowty, 1979; Moltmann, 1991); a novel account of cumulativity and distributivity that covers both the two-quantifier and three-quantifier case in the nominal domain, including readings prominently discussed by Schein (1993); a reason for severing not only the external, but also the internal argument from the semantics of the verb, in response to Kratzer (1996); and the first event-based semantics for Tree-adjoining grammar (TAG, Joshi et al., 1975). (shrink)

In this talk, I first systematize the analogies and complete the picture in some corners. Then, I formally relate the three constructions, and I derive their properties from a single operator. Previous analyses were not designed to account for all three constructions at the same time. Accordingly, I not only assess how well they generalize beyond their intended purpose, but I also evaluate them in their own right. Even so, this analysis improves on previous accounts in several ways. Although I (...) will not focus on this in the talk, the analysis of distributive quantification is compatible with more general analyses of cumulative and collective quantification such as Landman (2000). (shrink)

The traditional answer is: they must be atelic. But as we will see, this notion is imprecise. We will improve on it, without rejecting it. (Basically we’ll end up with temporally vs. spatially telic.).

We introduce LTAG-spinal, a novel variant of traditional Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with desirable linguistic, computational and statistical properties. Unlike in traditional LTAG, subcategorization frames and the argument-adjunct distinction are left underspecified in LTAG-spinal. LTAG-spinal with adjunction constraints is weakly equivalent to LTAG. The LTAG-spinal formalism is used to extract an LTAG-spinal Treebank from the Penn Treebank with Propbank annotation. Based on Propbank annotation, predicate coordination and LTAG adjunction structures are successfully extracted. The LTAG-spinal Treebank makes explicit semantic relations (...) that are implicit or absent from the original PTB. LTAG-spinal provides a very desirable resource for statistical LTAG parsing, incremental parsing, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing. This treebank has been successfully used to train an incremental LTAG-spinal parser and a bidirectional LTAG dependency parser. (shrink)

An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1st International Workshop on Tree Adjoining Grammers 1992 ), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (in J Comput Syst Sci 33:456–472, 1986 ), is extended to some linguistically relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance links: (...) every tree set contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree, indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al. (Proceedings of the 5th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1991 ) to account for German long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate. (shrink)

• Beaver and Condoravdi (2007): NO “In Davidsonian Event Semantics the analysis of quantification is problematic: either quantifiers are treated externally to the event system and quantified in (cf. Landman, 2000), or else the definitions of the quantifiers must be greatly (and non-uniformly) complicated (cf. Krifka, 1989)”.

Principle 2 of the 2005 Mental Capacity Act (MCA) requires that decision-making capacity should be assumed, unless there is conclusive evidence, on a balance of probabilities, to the contrary (Department of Constitutional Affairs 2005). In his article “The Paradox of the Assessment of Capacity Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005,” Ajit Shah (2011) raises the concern that the new Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DOLS), introduced through the Mental Health Act (Department of Health 2007), conflict with this principle (henceforth, the principle (...) of presumed capacity) because, in practice, they will encourage the routine assessment of capacity even in the absence of any positive evidence of diminished capacity .. (shrink)

I must start with an apologia. My original paper, ``Minds, Machines and Gödel'', was written in the wake of Turing's 1950 paper in Mind, and was intended to show that minds were not Turing machines. Why, then, didn't I couch the argument in terms of Turing's theorem, which is easyish to prove and applies directly to Turing machines, instead of Gödel's theorem, which is horrendously difficult to prove, and doesn't so naturally or obviously apply to machines? The reason was that (...) Gödel's theorem gave me something more: it raises questions of truth which evidently bear on the nature of mind, whereas Turing's theorem does not; it shows not only that the Gödelian well-formed formula is unprovable-in-the-system, but that it is true. It shows something about reasoning, that it is not completely rule-bound, so that we, who are rational, can transcend the rules of any particular logistic system, and construe the Gödelian well-formed formula not just as a string of symbols but as a proposition which is true. Turing's theorem might well be applied to a computer which someone claimed to represent a human mind, but it is not so obvious that what the computer could not do, the mind could. But it is very obvious that we have a concept of truth. Even if, as was claimed in a previous paper, it is not the summum bonum, it is a bonum, and one it is characteristic of minds to value. A representation of the human mind which could take no account of truth would be inherently implausible. Turing's theorem, though making the same negative point as Gödel's theorem, that some things cannot be done by even idealised computers, does not make the further positive point that we, in as much as we are rational agents, can do that very thing that the computer cannot. I have however, sometimes wondered whether I could not construct a parallel argument based on Turing's theorem, and have toyed with the idea of a von Neumann machine. A von Neumann machine was a black box, inside which was housed John von Neumann.. (shrink)

It is meet and right that pride and humility should be the two human characteristics on which University sermons have to be preached. Left to myself, although I might have picked on my modesty as something I should share with you, I should have given the preeminence to other among my sins than pride. My greed, my sloth, my avarice or, in this salacious age my lust, are subjects on which I could tell you much that might interest you. Pride (...) lacks immediate appeal. We are not sure what it is, or whether it is a bad thing, when we think of it in purely individual terms. But when we consider it collectively, we can see that it is, together with humility, something Oxford is peculiarly well qualified to preach on. We all of us are proud of our university. We were proud, and our schoolmasters were proud, when we first got our places here. We are, dons and undergraduates alike, proud of our colleges, each grateful that good fortune has brought him to the best college in Oxford, and anxious that everyone else should secretly acknowledge it to be the best. Our parents were proud when we took our degrees, and although we profess to be unconcerned with classes, we are deeply content to record our firsts when occasion requires us to do so, or have our contemporaries allude to them as opportunity offers. We are studious, as dons, not to pull rank, safe in the knowledge that others will do it for us, and that we shall receive the deference due to a fellow of an Oxford college. In an age that is egalitarian in theory but elitist at heart, Oxford men have benefited greatly, as other forms of social eminence have been eroded, leaving a clear field for our own claims to public esteem, which are, if not entirely unchallenged, still generally allowed. Oxford is, as we like to be told by outsiders, a centre of excellence, and a lot of the resplendence rubs off on us, not altogether undeservedly. It is, as we corporately admit on Commemoration Sunday, largely due to our having entered into other men's labours.. (shrink)

Equality is one of the great issues of our age, but few people stop to wonder at its being an issue in politics at all. Yet it is surprising that a concept which has its natural habitat in the mathematical sciences should have taken root in our thinking about how we should be governed. We do not naturally think of society in terms of group theory, or rings or fields, and have long been aware of the difficulties in establishing any (...) over-arching social or political order. But we unthinkingly assume that we can meaningfully ask, and reliably tell, whether people are, or ought to be, equal to one another even while admitting how difficult it would be to say whether they were more or less than one another. Formal logic can help. Equality is an equivalence relation, that is to say one that is transitive, symmetric and reflexive. Equivalence classes pick out classes of people or things that are the same, or similar , in some respect or other. There are many such, and we need to specify in respect of what two things are or are not equivalent before we are saying, or asking, anything definite. I can be equivalent to you in respect of age, or height, or weight, and many equivalence classes— contemporaries, co-religionists, comrades—may be of great importance socially or politically. But equality is, in its original context, more than just an expression of sameness. It suggests also a possibility of being either more than or less than. I can be the same age as you, but if I were not, I should be either older than you, or younger. This is always the case in mathematics. The law of trichotomy holds, that if two things are not equal, then one is greater, in the relevant respect, than the other, and the difference can itself be measured. With human beings, however, there are rather few respects in which we can be properly measured. Age, height and weight apart, the ascription of most numerical measures is a dubious affair. At one time psychologists were confident that they could measure intelligence, and economists still purport to measure wealth, but the ascriptions they actually make do not seem to deserve the confidence called for.. (shrink)

These are the working notes of the workshop on Model-based and Qualitative Reasoning in Biomedicine, which was held during the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, AIME’03, on 19th October, 2003, in Protaras, Cyprus. The workshop brought together various researchers involved in the development and use of model-based and qualitative reasoning methods in tackling biomedical problems. Much of the biomedical knowledge is essentially model-based, as it is the understanding of the structure and function of biomedical systems that researchers wish (...) to achieve, and this is best done by developing models of these systems. In situations where it may not be appropriate or possible to use quantitative methods, researchers use qualitative approaches. Depending on the biomedical problem concerned, such descriptions may involve causal, temporal and spatial knowledge, possibly of an uncertain nature. Also in the medical management of disorders in patients, qualitative and model-based approaches are being used. For example, systems used for diagnosing disease rely on explicit models of normal or abnormal structure and behaviour (often referred to as ’first-principles models’) of the underlying disease process. Qualitative knowledge plays a role in the modelling of disease and treatment processes, including the handling of the uncertainty involved in these processes. Hence, there is little doubt that model-based and qualitative methods fit the biomedical domain really well. However, one of the problems with research in the biomedical field is that researchers applying model-based and qualitative-reasoning methods are often closely linked to their application field, such as, for example, cell biology or clinical medicine, and find it difficult to keep in contact with colleagues doing similar research, but working in a different biomedical application field. This is even more difficult if the techniques used are also different. For example, researchers involved in Bayesian network research and researchers using qualitative simulation methods hardly exchange views and ideas, despite the fact that their methods have in common that they emphasise representing qualitative biomedical knowledge. It was the aim of this workshop to bring together researchers along the entire spectrum of the biomedical field, from health-care research and clinical medicine to human biology, using a variety of methods and techniques, from (qualitative) Bayesian networks and symbolic machine learning, to qualitative simulation.. (shrink)

Plato began it. After thinking about the nature of argument he concluded that the correct way of reasoning was the axiomatic way, and formulated the programme of axiomatization that Eudoxus and Euclid subsequently carried out. Since then the axiomatic method has been firmly established, not only as the method for mathematics, but as a paradigm to which all other disciplines should strive to be assimilated; and in this present century not only has axiomatization been carried through as completely as it (...) can be, but the most determined efforts have been made to wish hypotheticodeductive schemata on to biology, economics, and even history. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to illustrate how Ebrahim Moosa's method of “contrapuntal reading” can be applied fruitfully to the Sunni hadith literature. My case study is the set of penalties (hudud) for illicit sex, which include flogging, stoning, and banishment. I propose a fresh reading of these sacred texts that brings to the fore the ethical dimension of Prophet Muhammad's conduct, especially his strong reluctance to apply these measures. I conclude by identifying four ethical problems that the stoning (...) penalty raises and suggest how the hadith literature can be read to argue against the validity of this specific punishment. (shrink)

In Epiphany Term, 1942, C.S. Lewis delivered the Riddell Memorial Lectures in the Physics Lecture Theatre, King's College, Newcastle, which was then a constituent college of the University of Durham. The Riddell Memorial Lectures were founded in 1928 in memory of Sir John Buchanan Riddell of Hepple, onetime High Sheriff of Northumberland, who had died in 1924. His son, Sir Walter, was, like his father, a devout Christian, active throughout his life in public affairs. He was Fellow, and subsequently Principal, (...) of Hertford College, Oxford, and Secretary, and subsequently Chairman, of the University Grants Committee---at a time when the interventions of the UGC in academic affairs were entirely benign. I myself have a special personal interest in the founder of the Riddell Lectures. Sir Walter and my father were contemporaries at Oxford and close friends. Owing to his untimely death I never knew him, though I am credibly assured that he must have viewed me when I was taken to Hepple in a Moses' basket at the age of six months. In being invited to give this lecture on the Riddell Lectures, I am not only honoured but enabled to discharge a debt of family.. (shrink)