Causation, further themes

Author(s):  
Peter Menzies

The traditional focus of philosophical interest in causation has been token causation: the kind of causation that relates particular dated events. There has been controversy in recent times over the nature of such events. Donald Davidson proposed that events are concrete particulars: like objects, they have spatio-temporal locations, identity conditions, and can be described in many different ways. However, most philosophers espouse one or other property-based conception of events in order to capture the idea that causation relates events in virtue of properties associated with those events. More generally, philosophers have usually been concerned to provide a priori analyses of the concept of causation, though recently some have attempted to provide empirical analyses by investigating what physics says about the processes underlying causal relations. A recent much-discussed conceptual analysis of causation is David Lewis’s counterfactual theory. This theory ingeniously elaborates the idea that an event c causes an event e just when it is true that if c had not occurred e would not have occurred. However, the theory encounters difficulty explaining examples of pre-emption in which there are several possible causal pathways leading to some effect, only one of which goes through to completion. Such examples highlight the centrality of the idea of a process to the concept of causation. A recent functionalist theory attempts to capture this fact by defining causation as the intrinsic relation that typically accompanies a counterfactual dependence of one event on a distinct event. Such a theory takes the existence of a counterfactual dependence to be a defeasible marker of the presence of the structural feature of reality that is the causal relation. While it has some success explaining examples of pre-emption, this functionalist theory has been criticised on the grounds that causation is not a relation at all, as evidenced by causal statements involving absences and omissions as causes or effects. The question whether it is possible to give a full conceptual analysis of causation is the subject of a currently vigorous philosophical debate.

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-103
Author(s):  
Eric Marcus

The Taking Condition looms large in recent discussions of inference: in inferring q from p, one draws the conclusion in light of one’s representing p as supporting q. This condition highlights two elements of inference. First, a causal element: via the inference, the subject arrives at a belief. Second, this arrival transpires in virtue of the subject’s endorsing the thought: p supports q. Inference thus joins two elements: one causal, the other evaluative. I show in this chapter that extant accounts fail to properly join these two elements. They fail because the two elements are not, as is generally assumed, separable. Inference is the endorsement of a thought that the ground supports the grounded and this endorsement amounts to a causal connection between the corresponding beliefs. The difficulty is in seeing how a thought could not merely register the presence of, but actually constitute the causal relation between beliefs.


Author(s):  
Augustin Fragnière

It is now widely acknowledged that global environmental problems raise pressing social and political issues, but relatively little philosophical attention has been paid to their bearing on the concept of liberty. This must surprise us, because the question of whether environmental policies are at odds with individual liberty is bound to be controversial in the political arena. First, this article explains why a thorough philosophical debate about the relation between liberty and environmental constraints is needed. Second, based on Philip Pettit’s typology of liberty, it assesses how different conceptions of liberty fare in a context of stringent ecological limits. Indeed, a simple conceptual analysis shows that some conceptions of liberty are more compatible than others with such limits, and with the policies necessary to avoid overshooting them. The article concludes that Pettit’s conception of liberty as non-domination is more compatible with the existence of stringent ecological limits than the two alternatives considered.


Author(s):  
Vera V. Serdechnaia ◽  

The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of literary romanticism. The research aims at a refinement of the “romanticism” concept in relation to the history of the literary process. The main research methods include conceptual analysis, textual analysis, comparative historical research. The author analyzes the semantic genesis of the term “romanticism”, various interpretations of the concept, compares the definitions of different periods and cultures. The main results of the study are as follows. The history of the term “romanticism” shows a change in a number of definitions for the same concept in relation to the same literary phenomena. By the end of the 20th century, realizing the existence of significant contradictions in the content of the term “romanticism”, researchers often come to abandon it. At the same time, the steady use of the term “romanticism” testifies to the subject-conceptual component that exists in it, which does not lose its relevance, but just needs a theoretical refinement. Conclusion: one have to revise an approach to romanticism as a theoretical concept, based on the change in the concept of an individual in Europe at the end of the 18th century. It is the newly discovered freedom of an individual predetermines the rethinking for the image of the author as a creator and determines the artistic features of literary romanticism.


2014 ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Sabino de Juan López

RESUMEN En el artículo se ofrece una reflexión en torno a la educación y valores. Tras una referencia a los diferentes sentidos en que se puede plantear el problema en función de la forma como se puede entender la relación entre los dos sustantivos “educación” y “valores”, la reflexión se centra en algunos problemas relacionados con los valores en cuanto contenidos de la educación. Primeramente se refiere al problema del criterio en función del cual determinar los valores de la educación, concluyendo en que el criterio no podía ser ni de carácter a priori, ni empírico, sino “sintético”. A continuación, se afronta el problema del principio, de la fuente de los valores, o la concreción del criterio de los valores de la educación, entendiendo que éstos deberían ser determinados a partir del sujeto de la educación. Se concluye con la referencia a una exigencia de los valores de la educación, la configuración de una totalidad unitaria e interactiva. Palabras clave: educación, valores, fuente de valores, integración, cultura EDUCATION AND VALUES ABSTRACT The article offers a reflection on education and values. After a reference to the different senses in which one can pose the problem in terms of how you can understand the relationship between the two nouns “education” and “values”, reflection focuses on some problems related to the values in the contents of education. First, it concerns the problem of the criterion against which to determine the values of education, concluding that the criterion could be neither a priori in nature, not empirical, but “synthetic”. Herein, the problem of principle is faced, the source of values, or the realization of the criterion of the values of education, understanding that these should be determined from the subject of education. It concludes with the reference of a requirement of the values in education, setting up a unitary and interactive whole. Key Words: education, values , power values , integration, culture


Author(s):  
Aida Khakimova ◽  
Oleg Zolotarev ◽  
Lyudmila Sharapova ◽  
Daler Mirzoev ◽  
Aleksanra Belaya ◽  
...  

The image of the city is a spatio-temporal continuum in which everything is interconnected, it exists as a single monolith expressing itself in the general atmosphere. The visual image of the city may contain two planes of meanings: culturally ratified and universally valid, expressed by cultural codes, and also significant only to those who are viewing the image. Therefore, the content of the visual image depends on who the subject of perception is, what he pays attention to and in what situation the process of perception of the image occurs.


Author(s):  
Inger Solange Maitta Rosado ◽  
Jenmer Maricela Pinargote Ortega ◽  
Eva Alcivar Medranda ◽  
Elisa Ximena Coello Basurto

The objective of the research is to develop resilience in people with visual disabilities at the Technical University of Manabí. The work offers a conceptual analysis on visual disability in students. It deals with what is related to the conceptual understanding of resilience, where several authors who have studied the subject are analyzed. The resilient capacity of students with visual impairment and the importance of psychological support is analyzed. The importance of the intervention in resilience is exposed, where the content of the Manual of Intervention in Resilience of Eugenio Saavedra 2011 is analyzed. The results of the measurement of resilience are shown in the students of the Technical University of Manabí who suffer from a visual disability and the situation that could be verified after applying the work of training in resilience to said personnel. Finally, the conclusions of the work are exposed, where the relevance of the study is demonstrated and a group of recommendations is made based on the importance of the results obtained in the research.


Author(s):  
Ralph C.S. Walker

Kant is committed to the reality of a subject self, outside time but active in forming experience. Timeless activity is problematic, but that can be dealt with. But he holds that the subject of experience is not an object of experience, so nothing can be known about it; this raises a problem about the status of his own theory. But he ought to allow that we can know of its existence and activity, as preconditions of experience: the Critique allows that synthetic a priori truths can be known in this way. However, its identity conditions remain unknowable. Kant’s unity of apperception shares much with Locke’s continuity of consciousness, but does not determine the identity of a thing. Personal identity is bodily identity. Only Kant’s moral philosophy justifies recognizing other selves; it could warrant ascribing a similar status to animals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 171-202
Author(s):  
Brian Z. Tamanaha

A century ago the pragmatists called for reconstruction in philosophy. Philosophy at the time was occupied with conceptual analysis, abstractions, a priori analysis, and the pursuit of necessary, universal truths. Pragmatists argued that philosophy instead should center on the pressing problems of the day, which requires theorists to pay attention to social complexity, variation, change, power, consequences, and other concrete aspects of social life. The parallels between philosophy then and jurisprudence today are striking, as I show, calling for a pragmatism-informed theory of law within contemporary jurisprudence. In the wake of H.L.A. Hart’s mid-century turn to conceptual analysis, “during the course of the twentieth century, the boundaries of jurisprudential inquiry were progressively narrowed.”1 Jurisprudence today is dominated by legal philosophers engaged in conceptual analysis built on intuitions, seeking to identify essential features and timeless truths about law. In the pursuit of these objectives, they detach law from its social and historical moorings, they ignore variation and change, they drastically reduce law to a singular phenomenon—like a coercive planning system for difficult moral problems2—and they deny that coercive force is a universal feature of law, among other ways in which they depart from the reality of law; a few prominent jurisprudents even proffer arguments that invoke aliens or societies of angels.


2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Mittag

If one is to believe that p justifiably, then one must believe p for, or because of, one's evidence or reasons in support of p. The basing relation is exactly this relation that obtains between one's belief and one's reasons for believing. Keith Allen Korcz, in a recent article published in this Journal, has argued that two conditions are each sufficient and are jointly necessary to establish basing relations between beliefs and reasons. One condition is formulated to account for basing relations that can obtain in virtue of causal relations between one's belief and reasons, and the other condition is supposed to account for basing relations which can be established independently of the instantiation of any such causal relation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3391-3407 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zacharias Marinou Nikolaou ◽  
Jyh-Yuan Chen ◽  
Yiannis Proestos ◽  
Jos Lelieveld ◽  
Rolf Sander

Abstract. Chemical mechanism reduction is common practice in combustion research for accelerating numerical simulations; however, there have been limited applications of this practice in atmospheric chemistry. In this study, we employ a powerful reduction method in order to produce a skeletal mechanism of an atmospheric chemistry code that is commonly used in air quality and climate modelling. The skeletal mechanism is developed using input data from a model scenario. Its performance is then evaluated both a priori against the model scenario results and a posteriori by implementing the skeletal mechanism in a chemistry transport model, namely the Weather Research and Forecasting code with Chemistry. Preliminary results, indicate a substantial increase in computational speed-up for both cases, with a minimal loss of accuracy with regards to the simulated spatio-temporal mixing ratio of the target species, which was selected to be ozone.


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