Philosophies, Volume 7, Issue 1 (February 2022) – 22 articles

In this paper, I will argue that with the emergence of digital virtual worlds (in video games, animation movies, etc.) by the animation industry, we need to rethink the role and authority of mathematics, also from an ontological point of view. First I will demonstrate that the application of mathematics to the creation and description of the digital, virtual worlds behaves in many respects analogously to the application of mathematics to the description of real-world phenomena from the viewpoint of the history of science. However, from other aspects, the application of mathematics significantly differs in this virtual world from the application to real-world fields. The main thesis of my paper is that the role of mathematics in the digital animation industry can be ontologically different from its usual role. In the application of mathematics to digital virtual worlds, mathematical concepts are no longer just modelling tools, forming a subordinated, computational basis, but they can direct and organise, and even create non-mathematical theory, something that we can call, for example, digital physics and biology. I will study this new, creative role of mathematics through some concrete phenomena, specifically through gravity. Our conclusion is that the animation industry opens an entirely new chapter in the relationship between (digital) sciences and mathematics. Full article

In this paper, I suggest an aesthetic model that is consistent with anti-foundational scientific knowledge. How has an aesthetics without foundation to be configured? In contrast to the conventional subject/object model, with idealistic and subjective aesthetics, but also with object-oriented assumptions, I suggest that aesthetics has to be characterized as relational aesthetics in terms of process-oriented perception and that this leads to an Aesthetics Without Objects (AWO) approach. The relational nature of processes means that they do not happen inter-, that is, between ontologically delimited and stable entities, but rather they correspond between relations. I will try to show that AWO matches well with the onto-phenomenological-epistemic and relational models proposed by recent theories in different fields of science, especially in the relational interpretation of quantum physics. The field of aesthetics, then, does not indicate perceptual fixed contents—either subjective or objectual properties—rather it emerges from a correspondence occurring in an engaged and situated perceptual movement, an agencing that is prior to any sharp distinction between a perceiver and a perceived. I propose to call haptic this perceptual agencing. In the first section, I describe the reasons according to which the adoption of AWO seems more correct and advisable, both with respect to contemporary scientific models and to the current ecological changes on the planet. In the second section, I portray some characteristics of AWO. In the third section, I argue that AWO calls for haptic perception. In the fourth section, I briefly draw some meta-aesthetics consequences concerning, on the one side, socio-political issues of AWO and, on the other side, the possibility for a theory in an anti-foundational model. I conclude with a proposal: a process-oriented aesthetics approach has to be understood mainly as an art of thinking. This means rethinking and re-evaluating the idea of aesthetics as an artisan thought. Full article

Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship between the notations acceptable for computation, the usual idealizations involved in theories of computability, flowing from Alan Turing’s monumental work, and de re propositional attitudes toward numbers and other mathematical objects. Full article

Voice syncretism is widely attested crosslinguistically. In this paper, we discuss three different types of Voice syncretism, under which the same morpheme participates in different configurations. We provide an approach under which the same Voice head can convey different interpretations depending on the environment it appears in, thus building on the notion of allosemy. We show that, in all cases under investigation, allosemy is closely associated with the existence of idiosyncratic patterns. By contrast, we notice that allosemy and idiosyncrasy are not present in analytic passive and causative constructions across different languages. We argue that the distinguishing feature between the two types of constructions is whether the passive and the causative interpretation comes from the Voice head, thus forming a single domain with the vP or whether passive and causative semantics are realized by distinct heads above the Voice layer, thus forming two distinct domains. Full article

Here, we argue for a mathematical equation that captures desert. Our procedure consists of setting out principles that a correct equation must satisfy and then arguing that our set of equations satisfies them. We then consider two objections to the equation. First, an objector might argue that desert and well-being separately contribute to intrinsic goodness, and they do not separately contribute. The concern here is that our equations treat them as separate contributors. Second, our set of desert-equations are unlike equations in science because our equations involve multiple desert-equations with the applicable equation depending on how the variables are filled out. Neither objection succeeds. Full article

The reality of the aesthetic seems to manifest itself more and more in relational and immersive ways that defy analyses that follow the trail of the modern tradition of philosophy, based on the dual gnoseological relationship between subject and object. Even some areas of the new cognitive sciences seem to converge towards a conception of experience as a complex horizon in which variously related vectors operate. From this point of view, it is worth exploring the notion of “field” as a conceptual tool to describe the aesthetic. In this paper we will consider two possible uses of this notion in reference to the aesthetic: to describe experiential modes (following Arnold Berleant), and to describe social dynamics (following Pierre Bourdieu). Yet, the starting point will be some considerations provided by Peter Abbs. We will thus try to show how the notion of “aesthetic field” can be consonant with scientific settings that advocate models of mind that stress its being extended and situated. A particular test bed will be the psychology of art as a discipline spanning philosophical knowledge and empirical investigation. In this key will also be considered the so-called “experiential revolution” in psychology, which indicates an extra-cognitive horizon variously coinciding with the perspective of an aesthetic research focused on the conception of aisthesis as a system of practices of perception, emotion, and expression. According to this conception, the dynamics within the aesthetic field, such as those related to the nexus between perceptual contents and aesthetic properties, or between emotional content and the practices of sensing could prove to be dynamics of “intervenience,” rather than of supervenience. Full article

Locked and unlocked strategies are illustrated in this article as concepts that deal with important cognitive aspects of deep learning systems. They indicate different inference routines that refer to poor (locked) to rich (unlocked) cases of creative production of creative cognition. I maintain that these differences lead to important consequences when we analyze computational deep learning programs, such as AlphaGo/AlphaZero, which are able to realize various types of abductive hypothetical reasoning. These programs embed what I call locked abductive strategies, so, even if they present spectacular performances for example in games, they are characterized by poor types of hypothetical creative cognition insofar as they are constrained in what I call eco-cognitive openness. This openness instead characterizes unlocked human cognition that pertains to higher kinds of abductive reasoning, in both the creative and diagnostic cases, in which cognitive strategies are instead unlocked. This special kind of “openness” is physically rooted in the fundamental character of the human brain as an open system constantly coupled with the environment (that is, an “open” or “dissipative” system): its activity is the uninterrupted attempt to achieve the equilibrium with the environment in which it is embedded, and this interplay can never be switched off without producing severe damage to the brain. The brain cannot be conceived as deprived of its physical quintessence that is its openness. In the brain, contrary to the computational case, ordering is not derived from the outside thanks to what I have called in a recent book “computational domestication of ignorant entities”, but it is the direct product of an “internal” open dynamical process of the system. Full article

Based on today’s compromises with human rights and the numerous violations of them, which for several countries seems to be the rule rather than an exception, this article discusses the cause of the delusions that in today’s politics are attached to human rights. An analysis is made of the nature of human rights understood as something common and universal for all people. On this basis, a division of human rights is proposed, which at the same time means limiting them to perfect, imperfect and adventitious rights. Central to the discussion is the question of how the normative element of human rights should be understood. This article distinguishes between two approaches to the question, where one is identified as a source of current misconceptions about human rights, while the other is highlighted as a possible answer to key challenges facing democracy. Full article

“Latin America”, for the ecopolitical approach, could be appropriate as the proper name of the ecological disaster, even as its first person: the environmental catastrophe, by means of “Latin America”, would say “I”. Genealogically, and as part of the so-called “Third World”, it would delimit the frontiers where the disastrous takes place “naturally”. But “Latin America”, from the philosophical perspective, has also been the locus par excellence to think about the vegetal and the indigenous. This article, driven by the current relevance of these two concepts, rereads the work of Rodolfo Kusch, one of the key figures of the so-called Pensamiento latinoamericano, and unveils not only one of the most original reflections on “plant metaphysics” and the “indigenous thought” but also the contours of a new or alternative philosophical subject: a thinking “we”. Drawing on Kusch’s indications, this text traces “an-other us” on the discursive level and develops the fundamental Kuschean intuition according to which such “we” has a synesthetic nature. From there, this article points to the conceptual reconfigurations of the vegetal and the indigenous by M. Marder and E. Viveiros de Castro to indicate in them the need to experiment, before and in the face of disaster, an-other “us” by/in thinking. Full article

What I propose is that, by delving into the world of mythologies, there we might find some indications, helpful for understanding what is happening with the environment today. To do so, I will revisit a particular mythology from the South of Europe, an archaic (probably, a pre-Indo-European one), namely Basque mythology. Here, earth (lurra) appears as a maternal character (Ama-lur) and becomes, in a sense, divine in the figure of the goddess Mari, who occupied a central and predominant position in this cosmovision. Full article

Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time t is causally dependent on fact F, then the agent cannot perform an action (at t) that would require F to have not obtained. Second, if an agent’s behavior at time t is causally dependent on fact F, then the agent cannot perform an action (at t) that would prevent F from obtaining. These two explanations have distinct upshots for more traditional debates over freedom. The first implies that causal determinism is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise and also raises questions about the traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and the ability to do otherwise; the second does neither. However, both explanations imply that the Molinist account of divine providence renders agents unable to do otherwise, at least in certain circumstances. Full article

The paper examines distributed extraction coordinations, in which different elements move out of conjuncts of a single coordination, as in Which book and which magazine did Mary buy and Amy read respectively, from a crosslinguistic perspective. A number of properties of such coordinations are discussed, which includes showing that they are also subject to the ATB requirement, which will shed light on the nature of the ATB phenomenon itself. It is also shown that there is a rather strong restriction on distributed extractions which confines such extractions to one context and completely excludes one type of movement, in particular head-movement, from participating in them. The higher coordination is shown to be formed during the derivation and to be semantically expletive. Distributed extraction constructions are also shown to have consequences for the proper analysis of a number of phenomena, including subject-oriented anaphors, right node raising, tough-constructions, agreement, and clausal structure. Regarding subject-oriented anaphors, the paper teases apart different approaches to subject-oriented anaphors based on constructions where different elements fill SpecvP and SpecTP (the latter undergoes agreement with T and the former binds subject-oriented anaphors). Full article

This essay considers and reflects upon the principle of causality and its relation to the global environmental crisis. Parting from some of Immanuel Kant’s views on causality and freedom as well as from Heidegger’s reading of causality in Kant, it asks some questions about the role of human activity in the principle of causality, the relation between causality and freedom, and in what possible different way we could interpret causality and environment. The essay proposes that instead of trying to decide on the subject of who causes the environmental crisis, and on the subject capable to solve it, one must turn the intention of inquiry to the very principle of causality and consider the need to rethink this notion today. Full article

Although the nature of moral desert has sometimes been examined in axiological terms—focusing on the thought that it is a good thing if people get what they deserve—deontologists typically think desert is more appropriately treated in terms of duties and obligations. They may, for example, prefer to talk in terms of there being a moral duty to give people what they deserve. This essay distinguishes a number of forms such a duty might take, and examines four of them more closely. (In particular, it looks at positive and negative duties with regard to both comparative and noncomparative desert). Questions about the contents of each of these duties are raised, making clearer just how much work would be involved in spelling out the relevant duties more completely. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of the possible implications of such desert-based duties for population ethics. Full article

In this essay, I suggest that we are currently witnessing a mutation, which disrupts the mythical imaginary that had confined viruses, climate change, and atmospheric turbulences to an immutable background in the all-too-human narrative of the struggle against nature. I argue that the incapacity of translating this mutation in cultural and social terms, and the repression of this traumatic experience, are the cause of the perturbation that haunts our time. Disorientation pervades philosophy when the entire imaginary to which it had anchored its power to change the world seems to dissolve in the air, when what was silent and distant turns out to be vibrant, more familiar to us than any known proximity. Precisely for this reason, philosophy must rediscover its ability to inhabit times and spaces different from those oriented by the hegemony of capitalist progress, with its correlate of regular catastrophic emergencies and calculated risk. In this essay, I aim to present a perspective in which, instead of coming back straightforwardly ‘down to earth’, philosophy accepts inhabiting the fluctuating disorientation of its own time, itself populated by intermittent and uncertain opportunities of experiencing differently the past and the future—to encounter different relationships with the times that change. Full article

Most comparisons of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza focus on the difference in understanding of natural right. We argue that Hobbes also places more weight on a rudimentary and exclusive education of the public by the state. We show that the difference is related to deeper disagreements over the prospect of Enlightenment. Hobbes is more sanguine than Spinoza about using the state to make people rational. Spinoza considers misguided an overemphasis on publicly educating everyone out of superstition—public education is important, but modes of superstition may remain and must be offset by institutions and a civil religion. The differences are confirmed by Spinoza’s interest in the philosopher who stands apart and whose flourishing may be protected, but not simply brought about, by rudimentary public education. Spinoza’s openness to a wisdom-loving elite in a democracy also sets up an interesting parallel with Thomas Jefferson’s own commitment to the natural aristocracy needed to sustain republicanism. In demonstrating the 17th century philosopher’s skepticism toward using the state exclusively to promote rationality, even as he recognizes the importance of a sovereign pedagogical role and the protection of philosophy, we move to suggest that Spinoza is relevant to contemporary debates about public education and may reinvigorate moral and political discourse in a liberal democracy. Full article

Despite Grewendorf’s well-known German binding data with the double-object verb zeigen ‘show’, where one object reflexively binds the other and which suggests that the direct object (DO) is generated higher than the indirect object (IO), this paper argues for the canonical surface order of IO > DO as base order. We highlight the exceptional status of Grewendorf’s examples, build on scope facts as well as a quantitative acceptability rating study, and exploit the fact that zeigen can also be used as inherently reflexive with idiomatic meaning. Appealing to the base configuration of the pieces of idiomatic expressions and considering different Spell-Out possibilities of coreferential objects in German, we show that the case, number, and gender underspecification of the anaphor sich poses a previously unnoticed problem for derivational approaches to binding. Full article

This article examines ethical implications of the growing AI carbon footprint, focusing on the fair distribution of prospective responsibilities among groups of involved actors. First, major groups of involved actors are identified, including AI scientists, AI industry, and AI infrastructure providers, from datacenters to electrical energy suppliers. Second, responsibilities of AI scientists concerning climate warming mitigation actions are disentangled from responsibilities of other involved actors. Third, to implement these responsibilities nudging interventions are suggested, leveraging on AI competitive games which would prize research combining better system accuracy with greater computational and energy efficiency. Finally, in addition to the AI carbon footprint, it is argued that another ethical issue with a genuinely global dimension is now emerging in the AI ethics agenda. This issue concerns the threats that AI-powered cyberweapons pose to the digital command, control, and communication infrastructure of nuclear weapons systems. Full article

Within Minimalism, traces are often taken to be transparent for agreement and movement across them, which raises the question of how this could be properly accounted for within the copy theory of movement. This paper examines wh-traces in multiple wh-questions and argues that traces (lower copies) may or may not induce intervention effects depending on whether or not they are fully specified. Full article

Perhaps the most familiar understanding of “naturalism” derives from Quine, understanding it as a continuity of empirical theories of the world as described through the scientific method. So, it might be surprising that one of the most important naturalistic moral realists, Philippa Foot, rejects standard evolutionary biology in her justly lauded Natural Goodness. One of her main reasons for this is the true claim that humans can flourish (eudaimonia) without reproducing, which she claims cannot be squared with evolutionary theory and biology more generally. The present argument concludes that Foot was wrong to reject evolutionary theory as the empirical foundation of naturalized eudaimonist moral realism. This is based on contemporary discussion of biological function and evolutionary fitness, from which a definition of “eudaimonia” is constructed. This gives eudaimonist moral realism an empirically respectable foundation. Full article