I attempt an explication of what it means for an operation across domains to be the same on all domains, an issue that ) took to be central for a successful delimitation of the logical operations. Some properties that seem strongly related to sameness are examined, notably isomorphism invariance, and sameness under extensions of the domain. The conclusion is that although no precise criterion can satisfy all intuitions about sameness, combining the two properties just mentioned yields a reasonably robust and (...) useful explication of sameness across domains. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to study and analyse the Charlie Hebdo attacks from a methodological and an ethical perspective, concentrating generally, though in some cases indirectly, on the consequences of our actions and the motives behind them. The analysis examines the issues of liberties, freedoms and responsibilities in general and further applies these values to the phenomenon of terrorism in contemporary society. The primary goal of this study is to use the Thomas Aquinas doctrine of double effect and (...) Michael Ignatieff’s lesser evil theory to appraise specific acts of terrorism. The article suggests that certain freedoms should be limited in democratic societies and thus ensure safety. (shrink)

The article deals with the newly discussed set of principles that focus on various issues concerning the end of a war and the establishment of peaceful conditions for the society after a war ends. It also reveals some drawbacks of the jus post bellum principles and searches for its possible modifications into a more complex and applicable set of rules that should govern any post-war activities on both sides of the conflict. The aim is to reach its plausibility in a (...) dynamic global society and thus argue that global peace is an attainable goal only when it becomes the goal of the global community. (shrink)

The issue of human nature is very complex and elusive, and mankind has been trying to unveil its elements since the beginnings of any philosophical reasoning. Whether they were questions of ontology, gnoseology, or ethics, it has been an uneasy task to uncover the complexity of the term. This article concentrates on finding ideas that support the existence of human nature and consequently searches for its possible ethical implications. I focused on the traditional issues of good vs evil, especially in (...) terms of dichotomy between committing violent acts and waging wars in contradiction to creation of conditions for peaceful and just societies. In the article, I compare various ideas on human nature and analyse their potential in unveiling its ethical implications. I also comment on the possibility of war and peace being consequences of human nature and its connection to our disposition of being moral subjects. (shrink)

The article deals with ethics of social consequences as a modern ethical theory and proposes some critical remarks based on various elaborations of the theory presented in the newly published edited volume Ethics of social consequences: Philosophical, applied and professional challenges. It confronts and challenges several of the presented concepts and ideas and tries to find a solution for the theory to become even more elaborated but still remain within the boundaries of its ontological framework.

Ethics in business and economics is often attacked for being too superficial. By elaborating the conclusions of two such critics of business ethics and welfare economics respectively, this article will draw the attention to the ethics behind these apparently well-intended, but not always convincing constructions, by help of the fundamental ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. To Levinas, responsibility is more basic than language, and thus also more basic than all social constructions. Co-operation relations in organizations, markets and value networks are generated (...) from personal relations and personal responsibilities. It is not sufficient to integrate ethics in an impersonal, rational system, neither in business organizations nor in the world economy. Ethics has its source not in rationality, but in the personal. (shrink)

Levinas did not present any new ethical theories; he did not even give any normative recommendations. But his phenomenological investigations help us to understand how the idea of ethics emerges and how we try to cope with it. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some implications from a reading of Levinas on how ethical challenges are handled within a management perspective. The paper claims that management, both in theory and in practice, is necessarily egocentric and thus ethically biased. (...) Therefore, ethics, defined as the idea that it is possible to do otherwise than pursue one's own interest, must have its source outside the scope of management. Levinas identifies this source as the call for responsibility from the Other, beyond the reach of managerial control. He also suggests how this idea of ethics is put into practice, especially in economic life: the existence of money makes it both possible and necessary to compare unique and incomparable others. Management tools may be used in the service of always more justice, as it also may be used for the opposite purpose. Instead of trying to draw a normative conclusion from Levinas, we may distinguish between two ways of experiencing reality: one through language and knowledge, covering both descriptive and normative knowledge, including business ethics, and the other through the particular events of encounters, from where this knowledge is continuously questioned through the call for responsibility, and thereby may provide possibilities for continuous improvements towards always more justice. (shrink)

Levinas did not present any new ethical theories; he did not even give any normative recommendations. But his phenomenological investigations help us to understand how the idea of ethics emerges and how we try to cope with it. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some implications from a reading of Levinas on how ethical challenges are handled within a management perspective. The paper claims that management, both in theory and in practice, is necessarily egocentric and thus ethically biased. (...) Therefore, ethics, defined as the idea that it is possible to do otherwise than pursue one's own interest, must have its source outside the scope of management. Levinas identifies this source as the call for responsibility from the Other, beyond the reach of managerial control. He also suggests how this idea of ethics is put into practice, especially in economic life: the existence of money makes it both possible and necessary to compare unique and incomparable others. Management tools may be used in the service of always more justice, as it also may be used for the opposite purpose. Instead of trying to draw a normative conclusion from Levinas, we may distinguish between two ways of experiencing reality: one through language and knowledge, covering both descriptive and normative knowledge, including ‘business ethics’, and the other through the particular events of encounters, from where this knowledge is continuously questioned through the call for responsibility, and thereby may provide possibilities for continuous improvements towards always more justice. (shrink)

This volume examines the notion of an analytic proof as a natural deduction, suggesting that the proof's value may be understood as its normal form--a concept with significant implications to proof-theoretic semantics.

How should the policies of search engines and other information intermediaries be ethically evaluated? It is argued that Kant’s principles for the public use of reason are useful starting points for the formulation of criteria for such an evaluation. The suggestion is, furthermore, that a search engine can be seen to provide a testimony to the user concerning what information that is most relevant to her query. This suggestion is used as the basis for the development of a broadly Kantian (...) account of a rational searcher. It is argued that the search engine companies are morally required to publish their information policies and act in accordance with them but given the threat of search engine spam they can have no obligation to publish the details of their algorithms. (shrink)

In the analysis of the ethicalproblems of online research, there is much tobe learned from the work that has already beendone on research ethics in the socialsciences and the humanities. I discuss thestructure of norms in the Norwegian ethicalguidelines for research in the social scienceswith respect to their relevance for the ethicalissues of Internet research. A four-stepprocedure for the ethical evaluation ofresearch is suggested. I argue that eventhough, at one level, the problems of onlineresearch are very similar to those we (...) find intraditional areas of social scientificresearch, there still are some issues that areunique to research online. A general model forthe analysis of privacy and data protection issuggested. This model is then used tocharacterize the special problems pertaining tothe protection of privacy in online contexts,and to argue that one cannot assume a simpledistinction between the private and the publicwhen researching in such contexts. (shrink)

There are two main routes to a concept of (generalized) quantifier. The first starts from first‐order logic, FO, and generalizes from the familiar ∀ and ∃ occurring there. The second route begins with real languages, and notes that many so‐called noun phrases, a kind of phrase which occurs abundantly in most languages, can be interpreted in a natural and uniform way using quantifiers.

This article explains and discusses the relationship between traditional legislative processes and the development of automated government decision-making systems. The juridical aspects of systems development should be regarded as invisible quasi-legislation. The author investigates and discusses possible ways of changing the legislative process with a view to increasing and improving political involvement in processes today often regarded as mere implementation, and thereby safeguard that important parts of the law of our computerised society is situated in the public domain.

This paper focuses on how revolts against caste-based oppression in India have been made invisible due to conceptual legacies in European social and political theory. Weber’s and Arendt’s conceptualization of Pariah agency is a case in point. Arendt’s main understanding of Pariah agency is individualized and inadequate to study freedom struggles among untouchable castes. This article argues that one not only needs to move away from analyzing individual to collective action, but it is also crucial to foreground how collective mobilization (...) among excluded groups has focused on contingencies that embed a system of domination. Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar’s critique of caste-based domination in India is noteworthy in this regard; he foregrounds how the distinction between “Touchables” and “Untouchables” in the caste system is both embedded and contingent. Focusing on untouchability in India, Ambedkar offers insights into hegemonic analyses of social exclusion, human rights articulations before the Universal Declaratio... (shrink)

Bu makale genel olarak karşılaştırmalı teoloji alanını Türkçe okuyucuya tanıtmayı amaçlamaktadır. Karşılaştırmalı teoloji, son yıllarda Batıda yeniden yorumlanmış ve ötekinden öğrenme düsturuyla yola çıkan akademik bir disiplin alanıdır. Bu makale karşılaştırmalı teolojiyi tanıtmakla beraber Hristiyan teolojisi içindeki yerini de sorgulayacaktır. Bu bağlamda, karşılaştırmalı teolojinin dinler teolojisine bir alternatif olup olmadığı, karşılaştırmalı teolojinin dinler teolojisinden bağımsız bir alan olarak değerlendirilip değerlendirilemeyeceği, dinler teolojisi içerisinde bir tipoloji olarak görülüp görülmediği gibi sorunlara da cevap arayacaktır. Nihayetinde bu makalede karşılaştırmalı teolojinin dinler teolojisine alternatif (...) olarak görülemeyeceği, aynı zamanda dinler teolojisi içerisinde üç veya dört yönlü tipolojilerden biri olarak da değerlendirilemeyeceği sonucuna varılmıştır. Sonuçta karşılaştırmalı teoloji ve dinler teolojisinin birbirinden bağımsız ama birbirlerini tamamlayan iki alan olduğu iddia edilecektir. (shrink)

According to a main idea of Gentzen the meanings of the logical constants are reflected by the introduction rules in his system of natural deduction. This idea is here understood as saying roughly that a closed argument ending with an introduction is valid provided that its immediate subarguments are valid and that other closed arguments are justified to the extent that they can be brought to introduction form. One main part of the paper is devoted to the exact development of (...) this notion. Another main part of the paper is concerned with a modification of this notion as it occurs in Michael Dummett’s book The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. The two notions are compared and there is a discussion of how they fare as a foundation for a theory of meaning. It is noted that Dummett’s notion has a simpler structure, but it is argued that it is less appropriate for the foundation of a theory of meaning, because the possession of a valid argument for a sentence in Dummett’s sense is not enough to be warranted to assert the sentence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to make a critical assessment of Krister Segerberg''s theory of action. The first part gives a critical presentation of the key concepts in Segerberg''s informal theory of action. These are the ideas that motivate the formal models he develops. In the second part it is argued that if one takes all of Segerberg''s motivating ideas seriously, problems are forthcoming. The main problem is that on this theory the agents seem to be bound to realize (...) all of their intentions, a problem that stems from Segerberg''s attempt to individuate actions in terms of the agent''s intentions. On the ground that this unfortunate result is forthcoming in both of Segerberg''s approaches to the logic of action it is concluded that the conceptual basis of the theory is problematic. (shrink)

Reviewed Works:Gaisi Takeuti, Proof Theory.Georg Kreisel, Proof Theory: Some Personal Recollections.Wolfram Pohlers, Contributions of the Schutte School in Munich to Proof Theory.Stephen G. Simpson, Subsystems of $\mathbf{Z}_2$ and Reverse Mathematics.Solomon Feferman, Proof Theory: A Personal Report.

We study the logical and computational properties of basic theorems of uncountable mathematics, including the Cousin and Lindelöf lemma published in 1895 and 1903. Historically, these lemmas were among the first formulations of open-cover compactness and the Lindelöf property, respectively. These notions are of great conceptual importance: the former is commonly viewed as a way of treating uncountable sets like e.g. [Formula: see text] as “almost finite”, while the latter allows one to treat uncountable sets like e.g. [Formula: see text] (...) as “almost countable”. This reduction of the uncountable to the finite/countable turns out to have a considerable logical and computational cost: we show that the aforementioned lemmas, and many related theorems, are extremely hard to prove, while the associated sub-covers are extremely hard to compute. Indeed, in terms of the standard scale (based on comprehension axioms), a proof of these lemmas requires at least the full extent of second-order arithmetic, a system originating from Hilbert–Bernays’ Grundlagen der Mathematik. This observation has far-reaching implications for the Grundlagen’s spiritual successor, the program of Reverse Mathematics, and the associated Gödel hierarchy. We also show that the Cousin lemma is essential for the development of the gauge integral, a generalization of the Lebesgue and improper Riemann integrals that also uniquely provides a direct formalization of Feynman’s path integral. (shrink)

The paper elaborates two points: i) There is no principal opposition between predicate logic and adherence to subject-predicate form, ii) Aristotle's treatment of quantifiers fits well into a modern study of generalized quantifiers.

We investigate the connections between computability theory and Nonstandard Analysis. In particular, we investigate the two following topics and show that they are intimately related. A basic property of Cantor space$2^ $ is Heine–Borel compactness: for any open covering of $2^ $, there is a finite subcovering. A natural question is: How hard is it to compute such a finite subcovering? We make this precise by analysing the complexity of so-called fan functionals that given any $G:2^ \to $, output a (...) finite sequence $\langle f_0, \ldots,f_n \rangle $ in $2^ $ such that the neighbourhoods defined from $\overline {f_i } G\left$ for $i \le n$ form a covering of $2^ $. A basic property of Cantor space in Nonstandard Analysis is Abraham Robinson’s nonstandard compactness, i.e., that every binary sequence is “infinitely close” to a standard binary sequence. We analyse the strength of this nonstandard compactness property of Cantor space, compared to the other axioms of Nonstandard Analysis and usual mathematics.Our study of yields exotic objects in computability theory, while leads to surprising results in Reverse Mathematics. We stress that and are highly intertwined, i.e., our study is holistic in nature in that results in computability theory yield results in Nonstandard Analysis and vice versa. (shrink)

Ibn al-'Arabī (d. 1240) was one of the towering figures of Islamic intellectual history, and among Sufis still bears the title of al-shaykh al-akbar, or "the greatest master." Ibn al-'Arabī and Islamic Intellectual Culturetraces the history of the concept of "oneness of being" (wahdat al-wujūd) in the school of Ibn al- 'Arabī, in order to explore the relationship between mysticism and philosophy in Islamic intellectual life. It examines how the conceptual language used by early mystical writers became increasingly engaged over (...) time with the broader Islamic intellectual culture, eventually becoming integrated with the latter's common philosophical and theological vocabulary. It focuses on four successive generations of thinkers (Sadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, Mu'ayyad al-Dīn al-Jandī, 'Abd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī, and Dāwūd al-Qaysarī), and examines how these "philosopher-mystics" refined and developed the ideas of Ibn al-'Arabī. Through a close analysis of texts, the book clearly traces the crystallization of an influential school of thought in Islamic history and its place in the broader intellectual culture. Offering an exploration of the development of Sufi expression and thought, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Islamic thought, philosophy, and mysticism. (shrink)

Bu makalede, Heiddeger felsefesinde teknoloji kritiği ve bir sorun olarak insanın yersiz ve yurtsuzlaşması arasındaki ilişki incelenmiştir. Teknoloji ve insanın yersiz yurtsuzlaşması tüm Batı felsefesine hâkim olan bir düşünme biçimi olarak metafizik düşünce bağlamında ele alınmıştır. Metafizik düşünme biçiminin terk edilmesi ve böylece Varlık sorusunun tekrar sorulması, düşünmenin Varlık üzerine düşünme olması gibi temel Heideggerci kavramlar bağlamında hem teknoloji, hem de insanın yersiz ve yurtsuzluğu problemi en iyi şekilde anlaşılabilir.