【Philosophy】African philosophy cannot be a thing
This essay unpacks several arguments about the metaphilosophic nature of African philosophy and charts a way through the problems these arguments enco... [more]
【Philosophy】Fusion Philosophy and Epistemic Injustice
I use the concept of epistemic injustice to think through the practice and methodology of comparative, or fusion, philosophy. I make two related claim... [more]
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Orthologic and quantum logic: Models and computational elements
Motivated by a growing need to understand the computational potential of quantum devices we suggest an approach to the relevant issues via quantum logic and its model theory. By isolating such notions as quantum parallelism and interference within a model
A refutation of Penrose's Godelian case against artificial intelligence
Having, as it is generally agreed, failed to destroy the computational conception of mind with the Godelian attack he articulated in his The Emperor's New Mind, Penrose has returned, armed with a more elaborate and more fastidious Godelian case, expresse
Prolegomena to any future artificial moral agent
As artificial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an artificial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things
Subject and substratum: On Japanese imperial nationalism
This paper addresses the theoretical and philosophical questions concerning how an individual identified his/herself as a member of an ethnic, racial, or national community in the context of Japanese Imperialist discourse during the 1930's. The central f
Vajray(a)over-barna art and iconography
Iconographic imagery in the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist. Tantric (i.e., Vajrayana) tradition is replete with polymorphic symbolic forms. Tantric texts themselves are multivalent, addressing astronomy, astrology, cosmology, history embryology, physiology, pharma
Why do theologians need to be scientists?
The postmodern situation has given rise to a quest for new understandings of the relationship between theology and science. Drawing illustrative material from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, I look at three paradigmatic answers to the question posed in
Naturalizing ethics: The biology and psychology of moral agency
Moral agency is a central feature of both religious and secular conceptions of human beings. In this paper I outline a scientific naturalistic model of moral agency making use of current findings and theories in sociobiology, developmental psychology, and
Can a Darwinian be a Christian? Sociobiological issues
This essay looks at the Darwinian sociobiological account of morality, arguing that in major respects this philosophy should prove congenial to the Christian. It is shown how modern-day Darwinism, starting from a selfish gene perspective, nevertheless arg
Whose evolution? Which theology?
The importance of scientific conflicts for theology and philosophy is difficult ro judge. In many disputes of significance, prominent scientists can be found on both sides. Profound philosophical and religious implications are sometimes said to be implied
Topology change and the unity of space
Must space be a unity? This question, which exercised Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, is a specific instance of a more general one; namely, can the topology of physical space change with time? In this paper we show how the discussion of the unity of space
The coordinate-independent 2-component spinor formalism and the conventionality of simultaneity
In recent articles, Zangari (1994) and Karakostas (1997) observe that while an E-extended version of the proper orthochronous Lorentz group O-+(up arrow) (1,3) exists for values of epsilon not equal to zero, no similar E-extended version of its double cov
Energy conservation in GTR
The topics of gravitational field energy and energy-momentum conservation in General Relativity theory have been unjustly neglected by philosophers. If the gravitational held in space free of ordinary matter, as represented by the metric g(ab) itself, can
Spacetime models for the world
In this paper I take a sceptical view of the standard cosmological model and its variants, mainly on the following grounds: (i) The method of mathematical modelling that characterises modern natural philosophy-as opposed to Aristotle's-goes well with the
'Nature is the realisation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas': Einstein and t
Einstein proclaimed that we could discover true laws of nature by seeking those with the simplest mathematical formulation. He came to this viewpoint later in his life. In his early years and work he was quite hostile to this idea. Einstein did not develo
On feature spreading and the representation of place of articulation
Since Clements (1985) introduced feature geometry, four major innovations have been proposed: Unified Feature Theory, Vowel-Place Theory, Strict Locality, and Partial Spreading. We set out the problems that each innovation encounters and propose a new mod