Some Spanners in the Works of Grounding Mechanisms Removed

In this paper I address two concerns with Kelly Trogdon’s grounding mechanism view, i.e. the idea that metaphysical explanation can be modeled on causal-mechanical explanation. The first concern threatens to undermine the unity that grounding-mechanical explanations imposes on metaphysical explanation; and the second concern requires the grounding mechanic to put forth a formal condition on grounding-mechanical models. After having discussed both of these, I provide a solution to the first and argue that the second concern is unwarranted.

Commentary on the Decision of the Supreme Administrative Court of 13 November 2013, II OZ 974/13 (LEX no. 1398284)

The thesis of the commented judgement concerns issues which are significant in the practice of examining an application in the course of administrative court proceedings regarding a request for reinstatement of the deadline. The first is a need to settle the beginning of the term for submitting such a request, the second – the method of examining the application for reinstatement of the deadline in the event of the impossibility to determine whether the deadline for its submission has been met. In the jurisprudence, it is consonantly assumed that the formal condition of an application for the reinstatement of the deadline is that the circumstances justifying the admissibility of the application are plausible due to the observance of the one-week deadline for its submission from the date of expiration of the cause of the deadline failure. According to Art. 49 § 1 of the Act of 30 August 2002 – Law on proceedings before administrative courts, if the letter of a party cannot receive the correct course due to failure to observe formal conditions, the chairman shall request the party to supplement or correct it within seven days under pain of leaving the letter unprocessed. The Supreme Administrative Court reasonably decided that if the content of the application cannot infer an exact moment in which the cause of the deadline failure ceased to exist, it should be examined on the merits. Equally, there are no grounds for rejecting the application as belated, based on Art. 88 of the Law on proceedings before administrative courts, because the fact of submitting the application after the deadline cannot be presumed.

The sustainability of fiscal policy in southern African countries–a comparative empirical perspective

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to assess the fiscal sustainability of nine southern African countries that belong to the Southern African Development Community.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the author performs a novel time-varying analysis of fiscal sustainability in southern African countries.FindingsThe authors found that in Zimbabwe and Namibia, the formal condition of solvency was not fulfilled, resulting in the explosive growth of debt during the recent slowdown. In contrast, Angola, Botswana and Malawi prove to run sustainable fiscal policies, and they were also fiscally invulnerable to the recent unfavourable economic developments in Africa. For the rest of the countries in the sample (Eswatini, Lesotho, South Africa and Zambia), the results are mixed.Originality/valueIn the existing literature, there is abundance of empirical evidence concerning fiscal sustainability in European and American countries. In contrast, there is strikingly little knowledge concerning this phenomenon in African countries. The authors tried to fill this gap using a novel, time-varying approach.

Reduplication and the structure of nouns in Xining Chinese

In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not independently satisfied, as in a compound or derived noun, reduplication is how the condition is met. Reduplication also occurs optionally in compounds or derived nouns. In conjunction with a minimalist theory of word formation, this will be shown to predict the distribution of reduplication in various contexts. For instance, the head of a compound can be reduplicated, but not the modifier, some affixes but not others permit reduplication of the base, non-compositional compounds do not allow reduplication, and so-called ‘bound roots’ (really, bound words) are not reduplicated. The phenomenon provides very strong evidence that simple content words are made up of an acategorial root and a categorizer which is often null, but can be overt in some languages, including Xining Chinese, where it is overt in nouns by virtue of reduplication.

L’inscription de l’hypothèque en droit des sûretés OHADA

L’inscription peut-elle être perçue comme une condition de validité de l’hypothèque ? L’acte uniforme donne une réponse imprécise. Aux termes de l’article 206 de l’AUS, « Tant que l’inscription n’est pas faite, l’acte d’hypothèque est inopposable aux tiers et constitue, entre les parties, une promesse synallagmatique qui les oblige à procéder à la publicité ». L’examen de cette disposition laisse voir qu’au-delà du rôle de publicité assigné à l’inscription hypothécaire, le législateur OHADA tend à faire aussi de l’inscription une condition implicite de validité de l’hypothèque en considérant l’hypothèse comme étant une promesse synallagmatique en l’absence de l’inscription, ce d’autant qu’en l’absence d’inscription de l’hypothèque consentie, le créancier reste chirographaire. Une telle ambivalence de l’article 206 de l’AUS pourrait être, non seulement sujette à de nombreux contentieux, mais aussi à l’origine du détournement de l’objet de l’inscription. Pour se prémunir de tout ceci, la meilleure approche pour le législateur OHADA pourrait consister en la réécriture de l’article 206 de l’AUS afin de lever toute équivoque sur la nature de l’inscription qui demeure avant tout une exigence de publicité et non une condition de formation de la convention d’hypothèque en l’absence de laquelle la convention d’hypothèque est nulle entre le créancier bénéficiaire d’hypothèque et le constituant. Mots-clés: Inscription, hypothèque, garantie immobilière, sûreté, droit OHADA Can registration be seen as a condition of validity of the mortgage? The uniform act gives an imprecise answer. According to Article 206 of the AUS, “As long as the mortgage deed is not registered, it shall not be binding on third parties and shall constitute to the parties thereto an exchange of promises which shall impose on them the obligation to have the deed registered” The review of this provision shows that beyond the advertising role assigned to mortgage registration, the OHADA legislator also tends to make the registration an implied term of validity of the mortgage by considering the hypothesis as being a synallagmatic promise in the absence of registration, especially since in the absence of registration of the hypothec granted, the creditor remains unsecured. Such an equivalence of Article 206 of the UAS could be not only subject to many litigations, but also to the misappropriation of the object of registration. To guard against all this, the best approach for the OHADA legislator could be to rewrite Article 206 of the UAS to remove any ambiguity about the nature of the listing, which remains primarily a requirement for publicity, not a formal condition of the mortgage agreement in the absence of which the mortgage agreement is void between the mortgage beneficiary and the grantor.

‘True dignity’ and ‘respect-worthiness’

In the Groundwork, Kant seems to make two paradoxical claims about the source of human dignity. First, he claims that if “rational nature exists as an end in itself” (Kant, 1998, p. 36), it is because “humanity is… dignity, insofar it is capable of morality” (Kant, 1998, p. 42). Second, he claims that although “autonomy is the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature” (Kant, 1998, p. 43), the human being can only have “dignity… insofar he fulfils all his duties” (Kant, 1998, p. 46). This paper argues that neither claim is repugnant because Kant seeks to advance two kinds of dignity. Kant intends to elucidate that the human being possesses a basic ‘entitled dignity’ in virtue of his capacity for morality, but that he needs to become a moral being in order for him to realise his ‘true dignity’. This paper claims that the formal condition under which a person can be worthy of respect is identical with the condition of realising his ‘true dignity’.

Coleridge on Beauty

Chapter 3 examines Coleridge’s analysis of beauty in the ‘Principles of Genial Criticism’ (1814), which aimed to establish a religious dimension to aesthetic experience. Coleridge’s argument is traced through his Kantian account of aesthetic judgement, and his assertion of unity-in-multiplicity as the formal condition of beauty, to his grounding beauty in that which is ‘pre-configured’ to our faculties. Coleridge’s depends on eighteenth-century aesthetic axioms, despite deliberately avoiding explicit reference to such accounts, electing Plotinus instead as a precursor. It is suggested that Coleridge is therefore reluctant to explain aesthetic experience in purely psychological and, potentially, exclusively naturalistic terms. The appeal to Plotinus’s traditional notion of beauty as the soul’s recognition of its divine origin grounds aesthetic experience in religion. Concomitantly, in Coleridge’s reassertion of the claims of religion in the wake of the Enlightenment, aesthetic experience as contemplation of the world as it is becomes proof of the existence of the divine.

Idempotency in Optimality Theory

Anidempotentphonological grammar maps phonotactically licit forms faithfully to themselves. This paper establishes tight sufficient conditions for idempotency in (classical) Optimality Theory. Building on Tesar (2013), these conditions are derived in two steps. First, idempotency is shown to follow from a general formal condition on the faithfulness constraints. Second, this condition is shown to hold for a variety of faithfulness constraints which naturally arise within McCarthy & Prince’s (1995) Correspondence Theory of faithfulness. This formal analysis provides an exhaustive toolkit for modelingchain shifts, which have proven recalcitrant to a constraint-based treatment.

A Relative Improvement

The Mode of Relativity in Agrippa’s Five Modes does not fit with the other four modes, and disrupts an otherwise elegant system. We argue that it is not the familiar argument from epistemic relativism, but a formal condition on the structure of justifications: the principle that epistemic grounding relations cannot be reflexive. This understanding of Agrippan Relativity leads to a better understanding of the Modes of Hypothesis and Reciprocity, a clearer outline of the structure of Agrippa’s system as a whole, and a new insight into the Two Modes that follow the Five.