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For centuries, the problem regarding the origin of human morality and human values was considered to be a field reserved for philosophy, anthropology, religion and the other humanities. Three or four decades ago, neuroscience made certain discoveries that challenge normative moral theories. This article aims to present some of the best known examples of research indicating the empirical origin of morality and human values. I propose the idea that the basis of human morality and values can be traced successfully to their neurobiological origins. The evolution of morality and human values has a long history, and their nature is not easy to explain.They originated as primary emotions and developed into higher brain functions, ultimately resulting in our capacity for moral abstractions. The nature of morality and human values can be successfully investigated in the perspective of neuroscience without postulating a new normative ethics or relying on extreme reductionism.
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The leading idea in this essay concerns knowledge-seeking through questioning. Asking a question and receiving an answer (an interrogative move) is radically different from a logical deduction (a logical inference move). However, from a strategic viewpoint, the two steps are parallel, in the sense that the principles guiding the choice of the best questions to ask are analogous with the strategic principles guiding the choice of the best logical inferences that can be drawn from given premises. Another main insight that the interrogative approach yields is the possibility of a rational, and even logical, theory of discovery. In that case, the problem of justification becomes redundant; nevertheless, we can develop an interesting and rich theory of discovery, of which the centerpiece is the problem of optimal question selection.
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The present papers attempts to summarize Jaakko Hintikka's contributions to the development of logic, semantics and philosophy of mathematics.
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The article offers an overview of the 15th Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held on 3-8 August 2015 in Helsinki. It includes a brief outline of the history of these congresses, with special attention to its trends of development and comparisons between the last five of them. These trends are indicative of the changes taking place in the development of philosophy of science over the last 16 years. A special focus is put on the main topics of the congresses as well as on some of the most significant presentations. Finally, the paper provides information about the Bulgarian participation in the latest congress, which reveals a significant increase compared with the previous ones, which inspires hope that the ascending development of philosophy of science in Bulgaria will continue and its presence at international forums will become increasingly visible.
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The aim of this paper is to provide arguments for three claims. The first one refers to Einstein’s philosophical commitment to constructive realism. The second claim concerns the variety of the assessments of his theoretical results and methodology. And the third states that, if Einstein ever made a mistake with respect to his theoretical expectations, it was not his introducing the cosmological constant – which he is said to have confessed as his mistake, but his ontological belief expressed in his famous saying „God does not play dice“.
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The concept of the natural machine was introduced by Leibniz in 1695 in his Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances. It provides the real definition of the organic body, and gives a criterion for distinguishing between bodies that are organic and those that are not: the decomposition, to infinity, of the machine into other machines, without end, is not in itself a machine. This nested structure corresponds to what gives form to the materia secunda, as Leibniz calls it. It can also be regarded as an aggregate resulting from an infinity of monads, as well as an aggregate that contains corporeal substances situated each within the other, to infinity. Thus, the natural machine allows supporting the positivity that the concept of corporeal substance always retains in Leibniz’s view, even in the latest developments of the monadological ontology, which cannot be reduced to an idealistic thesis.
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This article discusses the specific distinction Leibniz drew between natural and artificial machines and aims to clarify the contextual and theoretical particularities associated with this theory, thus serving as a kind of introduction to highly specialized research, particularly that conducted by Michel Fichant. The modern debate on the ideality vs. the reality of the body is typical of this problem field; the aim being to define the place of the body in this debate and to evaluated the role this doctrine plays in resolving the question. For this purpose, the study sets itself the following main tasks: (1) to serve as an introduction to the problem of the relation between body and substance, presenting the specifics of the ontological scheme and the metaphysical proofs of substances; (2) to clarify the historical and philosophical context in which Leibniz’s concept of the organic machine appeared; (3) to analyze the categories of aggregate and organism, of natural and artificial machine; (4) to demonstrate in what sense it may be said the natural machine meets the necessary and sufficient conditions that define a substance – namely, to be united and active; and (5) to define the dividing line between the natural machine and artificial ones. The study concludes with a brief recapitulation of past achievements and, registering the interest provoked among other scholars, defines the significance of Fichant’s contribution to the solving the problems related to Leibniz’s metaphysical system that are of key importance for our times.
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This article presents a critique of Hillary Putnam’s influential argument against philosophical behaviourism, as expounded in his article “Brains and Behaviour”, dating from 1963. The author begins with a brief reconstruction of philosophical behaviourism as such, and his critique proceeds in parallel with the reconstruction of Putnam’s argument against it. The main problems the article identifies in this argument are: 1) that it is speculative and hence vague; 2) that it unfoundedly ascribes to philosophical behaviourism an ontological commitment, and attacks its empirical stance in a way suited for a critique of a metaphysical stance.
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The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Alfred North Whitehead. Series editors: George R. Lucas, Jr., Notre Dame University and Brian G. Henning, Gonzaga University. Vol. 1. The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924-1925. Philosophical Presuppositions of Science. Edited by Paul A. Bogaard and Jason Bell. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2017, ISBN 978 1 4744 0184 5 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 4744 0185 2 (webready PDF), ISBN 978 1 4744 0468 6 (epub).
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The paper reveals the changes which took place in Frege’s way of thinking in the years 1891-1895 with regard to some fundamental notions defended in his Begriffsschrift, 1879. The “judgeable content” was rethought in terms of its Sinn (meaning) and Bedeutung (sense or denotation). This change of mind helped Frege explain the epistemological and informative aspects of identity statements and prepared the ground for precise formulation of some of his important conclusions presented in the first volume of his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893. The paper traces the application of the notions of Sinn and Bedeutung to proper names of objects, concept words and sentences. The author emphasizes Frege’s arguments as to why the Bedeutung of the sentence should be its truth-value.
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The main objective of the article is to make a comprehensive study of the life and activity of Dr. Vasil Hadjistoyanov-Beron and highlight his contributions to the intellectual development of Bulgaria and the integration of Bulgaria into European science and culture, particularly to the development of Bulgarian science, education, enlightenment and culture. Vasil Hadjistoyanov-Beron was an encyclopedist; he was the compiler of the first Bulgarian textbook on natural history, the first textbook on logic, the first German and French grammar books (in Bulgarian), and the first scholar to make archaeological excavations in Bulgaria. Headmaster of the Bolgrad High School and a member of the Constituent National Assembly that adopted the Tarnovo Constitution (1879), he contributed to the institutional building of the Bulgarian state. The article deals consecutively with his youth years – when some of his views were formed, with the years of his medical practice in Romania, and with his activities in Turnovo and Bolgrad. Particular attention is devoted to his merits for the establishment of the Bulgarian national identity, the awakening of Bulgarian national consciousness, his struggle for an independent Bulgarian church and Bulgarian education. In a separate section, we analyze his book on logic. The text is mainly based on recollections of his youngest daughter, which she shared with her grandson (the author of this article).
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This paper features an overview of the foundations of transhumanism. The transhumanist movement has existed since the end of the 20th century and espouses the use of technology for enhancing the human condition. Due to a certain level of similarity to posthumanism, this overview of transhumanism begins with an analysis of basic terminology: transhumanism, posthumanism, the transhuman being and the posthuman being. After that, transhumanism is studied from the perspectives of different disciplines. These disciplines are: philosophy of science, metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion and political philosophy.
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This note describes Saunders Mac Lane as a philosopher, and indeed as a paragon naturalist philosopher. He approaches philosophy as a mathematician. But, more than that, he learned philosophy from David Hilbert’s lectures on it, and by discussing it with Hermann Weyl, as much as he did by studying it with the mathematically informed Göttingen Philosophy professor Moritz Geiger.
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In the paper we discuss the problem of limitations of freedom in mathematics and search for criteria which would differentiate the new concepts stemming from the historical ones from the new concepts that have opened unexpected ways of thinking and reasoning.We also investigate the emergence of category theory (CT) and its origins. In particular we explore the origins of the term functor and present the strong evidence that Eilenberg and Carnap could have learned the term from Kotarbiński and Tarski.
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Structuralism has recently moved center stage in philosophy of mathematics. One of the issues discussed is the underlying logic of mathematical structuralism. In this paper, I want to look at the dual question, namely the underlying structures of logic. Indeed, from a mathematical structuralist standpoint, it makes perfect sense to try to identify the abstract structures underlying logic. We claim that one answer to this question is provided by categorical logic. In fact, we claim that the latter can be seen—and probably should be seen—as being a structuralist approach to logic and it is from this angle that categorical logic is best understood.
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Starting from logical structures of classical and quantum mechanics we reconstruct the logic of so-called no-signaling theories, where the correlations among subsystems of a composite system are restricted only by a simplest form of causality forbidding an instantaneous communication. Although such theories are, as it seems, irrelevant for the description of physical reality, they are helpful in understanding the relevance of quantum mechanics. The logical structure of each theory has an epistemological flavor, as it is based on analysis of possible results of experiments. In this note we emphasize that not only logical structures of classical, quantum and no-signaling theory may be treated on the same ground but it is also possible to give to all of them a common ontological basis by constructing a “phase space” in all cases. In non-classical cases the phase space is not a set, as in classical theory, but a more general object obtained by means of category theory, but conceptually it plays the same role as the phase space in classical physics.
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Quantum geometry on a discrete set means a directed graph with a weight associated to each arrow defining the quantum metric. However, these ‘lattice spacing’ weights do not have to be independent of the direction of the arrow. We use this greater freedom to give a quantum geometric interpretation of discrete Markov processes with transition probabilities as arrow weights, namely taking the diffusion form ∂+f = (−Δθ + q − p)f for the graph Laplacian Δθ, potential functions q, p built from the probabilities, and finite difference ∂+ in the time direction. Motivated by this new point of view, we introduce a ‘discrete Schrödinger process’ as ∂+ψ = ı(−Δ + V )ψ for the Laplacian associated to a bimodule connection such that the discrete evolution is unitary. We solve this explicitly for the 2-state graph, finding a 1-parameter family of such connections and an induced ‘generalised Markov process’ for f = |ψ|2 in which there is an additional source current built from ψ. We also mention our recent work on the quantum geometry of logic in ‘digital’ form over the field F2 = {0, 1}, including de Morgan duality and its possible generalisations.
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“Is logic a physical variable?” This thought-provoking question was put forward by Michael Heller during the public lecture “Category Theory and Mathematical Structures of the Universe” delivered on 30th March 2017 at the National Quantum Information Center in Sopot. It touches upon the intimate relationship between the foundations of physics, mathematics and philosophy. To address this question one needs a conceptual framework, which is on the one hand rigorous and, on the other hand capacious enough to grasp the diversity of modern theoretical physics. Category theory is here a natural choice. It is not only an independent, well-developed and very advanced mathematical theory, but also a holistic, process-oriented way of thinking.
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