Philosophies, Volume 6, Issue 4

The authors would like to make the following corrections to the published paper [...]

Inductive thinking is a universal human habit; we generalise from our experiences the best we can. The induction problem is to identify which observed regularities provide reasonable justification for inductive conclusions. In the natural sciences, w...

Despite their centrality to the scientific enterprise, both the nature of scientific variables and their relation to inductive inference remain obscure. I suggest that scientific variables should be viewed as equivalence classes of sets of physical s...

This article argues for a neural basis behind Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’ and Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ to create a more robust cross-disciplinary aesthetic model. Brian Boyd and Ellen Dissanayake...

Continuing growth, insofar as it increases human environmental impact, is in conflict with the environment. ‘Green growth’, if it increases the absolute size of the economy, is an oxymoron. Environmental limits are discountenanced, a pret...

Douglas Harding developed a unique first-person experimental approach for investigating consciousness that is still relatively unknown in academia. In this paper, I present a critical dialogue between Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the phenomen...

This contribution presents an outline of the current scholarly discussion of reconstruction with wh-movement, focussing on the Lebeaux Effect (LE) and wider aspects of reconstruction with wh-movement. It presents empirical problems for both the propo...

This article reviews and attempts to evaluate the various proposals for a strong minimalist thesis that have been at the core of the minimalist program for linguistic theory since its inception almost three decades ago. These proposals have involved...

Literacy is, literally, a question not of education but of the letter. More than that, it is the question of the letter in the two senses the word has in English: as a symbol of the alphabet and a piece of correspondence. It is my hypothesis that eco...

In this article, I interpret Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle presents a geometrical problem to explain which is the Best Criterion for the Distribution of Political and Economic Rights and Duties among Citizens, starting from the...

In the first section, five major attempts to solve the problem of induction and their failures are discussed. In the second section, an account of meta-induction is introduced. It offers a novel solution to the problem of induction, based on mathemat...

David Lewis aimed to give an account of causation, and in particular, a semantics for the counterfactuals to which his account appeals, that is compatible with backwards causation and time travel. I will argue that he failed, but not for the reasons...

International direct-to-participant (DTP) genomics research involves the use of mobile technology to recruit, consent, and study participants remotely. This model can facilitate research across broad geographies and many countries, but must also comp...

The question of meaning in life has enjoyed renewed attention in analytic discourse over the last few decades. Despite the apparently “existential” quality of this topic, existential philosophy has had little impact on this re-energized conversation....

Many activities towards plants are directly related to environmental crisis issues. However, our actions towards plants are little theorized in philosophy and ethics. After a brief presentation of the history, state of the art, and current issues of...

In this article I discuss the problem of how we can change our world into a wiser world that is driven by a culture of wisdom inquiry (CWI), i.e., a world that frees humanity from a looming totalitarian catastrophe. How best can we interrogate the tr...

This paper discusses the main minimalist theory within the Minimalist Program, something I dub the (Weak) Merge Hypothesis (MH). (1) The (Weak) Merge Hypothesis (MH): Merge is a central G operation. I suggest that we extend (1) by adding to it a gene...

We propose a new event ontology of the world, which is part of a general approach to philosophy based on combining ideas from science, ontology, and the philosophy of nature. While the position advocated here is grounded in science and philosophy, it...

David Lewis’s attempt to defuse grandfather paradoxes consistently without special restrictions on the ability of time travelers to act in the past is controversial. Kadri Vihvelin uses the case of possible autoinfanticide—killing one’s infant self—t...

This article argues for a Freudian theory of internal emotion, which is best characterised as key “safety valves of the psyche”. After briefly clarifying some of Freud’s metapsychology, I present an account regarding the origin of (self-)censorship a...

This paper investigates ‘exterminous hypertime’, a model of time travel in which time travellers can change the past in virtue of there being two dimensions of time. This paper has three parts. Part one discusses the laws which might govern the conne...

The quest to understand the natural and the mathematical as well as philosophical principles of dynamics of life forms are ancient in the human history of science. In ancient times, Pythagoras and Plato, and later, Copernicus and Galileo, correctly o...

Methods are currently lacking to prove artificial general intelligence (AGI) safety. An AGI ‘hard takeoff’ is possible, in which first generation AGI¹ rapidly triggers a succession of more powerful AGIⁿ that differ dramatically in their computational...

Many in higher education seek to define how to respond to our environmental crisis. Our 20th and early 21st century failures to resolve the crisis have revealed that a focus on “sustainability” is inadequate in its goals, methods, and public appeal....

This article will examine the unnamed and potentially devastating constraining effect of software on human autonomy. I call this concept residual causality, where software design decisions made long ago in different circumstances for different reason...

Blame for climate change inaction is rarely directed at a fundamental cause, the excessive complexity of society. It has given rise to post-truth, which has been largely reduced to unflattering stereotypes of the public, and post-trust, by which the...

The question why natural processes tend to flow along a preferred direction has always been considered from within the perspective of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, especially its statistical formulation due to Maxwell and Boltzmann. In this artic...