No normative free lunch: relevance and the autonomy of the normative domain

The autonomy thesis is the claim that one cannot get a normative statement from purely descriptive statements. But despite its intuitive appeal a precise formulation of the thesis has remained elusive. In a recent paper, Maguire (2015) makes the promising suggestion that the thesis should be understood in terms of ground. But Maguire’s formulation, I argue, is based on controversial taxonomic assumptions that make the autonomy thesis into a non-substantive claim. I develop an alternative ground-based formulation of the autonomy thesis that appeals to the notion of normative relevance, which is in turn understood using the tools of truthmaker semantics. This formulation of the autonomy thesis avoids well-known counterexamples to other formulations and has significant advantages over Maguire’s formulation.

On the Greek reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European labiovelars

The present article investigates the problem of the reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European labiovelars in Ancient Greek. There have been numerous discussions of the issue, both concerning the origin of such a set of changes and also about the precise formulation of its outcomes and possible analogical changes. The data is drawn from a variety of Greek dialects which reflect the different outcomes of the prehistoric labiovelars. It is discussed at length whether the hypothesis proposed in 1881 that the outcome of the voiced labiovelar */gw/ in Greek was /d/ before the front vowels (both /i/ and /e/ ) is supported by the attested data. It is concluded that such a view would require too many analogical changes and, therefore, that it is better to assume different outcomes before /i/ and /e/ respectively. Furthermore, it is pointed out that the overall picture of the development of labiovelars in Greek requires a new and thorough investigation of the complete material presented in the particular dialects.

Capital and Marx’s Epistemological Revolution from Neue Marx-Lektüre to Political Marxism

The paper discusses the thesis about Marx’s “epistemological revolution” by elaborating two issues that incorporate two entirely different contemporary Marxist traditions. To give this undertaking a more precise formulation, in its first part, the study examines the relationship between theory and history within the critique of political economy, proposed by Michael Heinrich under the tradition known as Neue Marx-Lektü re. It then turns to introducing the second part of the discussion related to the “commercialization model” of capitalist development, outlined by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood within the context of the so-called Political Marxism. A special emphasis is thereby put on the latter, since it deals with the contemporary nature of a few distinct epistemological and methodological novelties of the Capital, as well as some posited in the Grundrisse.

Is it possible to give a more precise formulation of the criterion of maximal accretivity for one extension of nonnegative operator?

The conditions being necessary and sufficient for maximal accretivity and maximal nonnegativity of some closed linear operators in Hilbert space are announced. The following problem is proposed: write down these conditions in more convenient form (one of the admissible variants is indicated).

Splitting Lemma for Biholomorphic Mappings with Smooth Dependence on Parameters

We prove that the mappings obtained in Forstnerič splitting lemma vary in a $$\mathcal {C}^{\lfloor {\frac{l-1}{2}}\rfloor }$$ C ⌊ l - 1 2 ⌋ -continuous way if only the input family of biholomorphic mappings close to Id (and their domains) is $$\mathcal {C}^l$$ C l -continuous (see Theorem 1.3 for a precise formulation).

Behaviourism in Disguise: The Triviality of Ramsey Sentence Functionalism

Functionalism has become one of the predominant theories in the philosophy of mind, with its many merits supposedly including its capacity for precise formulation. The most common method to express this precise formulation is by means of the modified Ramsey sentence. In this article, I will apply work from the field of the philosophy of science to functionalism for the first time, examining how Newman’s objection undermines the Ramsey sentence as a means of formalising functionalism. I will also present a formal variation on Newman’s objection through mathematical induction. Together, these proofs suggest that functionalism formalised by the Ramsey sentence trivially reduces to a kind of behaviourism plus a cardinality constraint on the number of relations holding between mental-relevant behaviours. As most functionalists see functionalism as a distinct theory of mind from behaviourism, this suggests that the modified Ramsey sentence cannot form a satisfactory formalism for functionalism.

The Politics of Human Rights Diplomacy

The issue of Human Rights features as a prominent agenda of the United Nations and its related international organizations. However, when it comes to precise formulation of a country’s foreign policy in bilateral or multilateral forums, the issues of trade and national security find priority over pressing human rights violations occurring within the countries engaged in the diplomatic dialogue. An often-employed reason behind such an approach is the need to respect sovereignty and non-interference of a country in diplomacy. This article aims at analysing the potential which diplomacy holds to pressurize recalcitrant regimes to respect human rights. In doing so, the article tries to explore the ambit of Human Rights Diplomacy and the relationship between agenda of politics and human rights.

Aristotelian Explanation and Homology in Biology

In his account of epistēmē, the highest level of understanding attainable in philosophical inquiry, Aristotle articulates standards for the ideal explanations that confer this level of understanding. I argue that Aristotle's key standard for epistēmē is of central importance for the biological homology concept. The explanatory shortcoming that results from violating this standard has been vaguely articulated in recent literature on homology; Aristotle's account offers a more neutral and precise formulation of the shortcoming and its antidote. Further, the risk for this shortcoming has heightened with recent accounts of homology grounded in genetics, increasing the contemporary relevance of Aristotelian epistēmē.

An arithmetic interpretation of intuitionistic verification

Intuitionistic epistemic logic introduces an epistemic operator to intuitionistic logic, which reflects the intended Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov (BHK) semantics of intuitionism. The fundamental assumption concerning intuitionistic knowledge and belief is that it is the product of verification. The BHK interpretation of intuitionistic logic has a precise formulation in the logic of proofs and its arithmetical semantics. We show here that this interpretation can be extended to the notion of verification upon which intuitionistic knowledge is based, providing the systems of intuitionistic epistemic logic based on verification with an arithmetical semantics too. This confirms that the conception of verification incorporated in these systems reflects the BHK interpretation.

Equilibrium Theory: A Simple Production Model

This is the first of several chapters dealing with the dynamic equilibrium theory. As an instructive first example we study a simple Cox–Ingersoll–Ross type of production model. The equilibrium concept is given a precise formulation and we derive the equilibrium short rate as well as the equilibrium stochastic discount factor. We also study the associated optimization problem for a central planner and prove that this is equivalent to the equilibrium problem.