Responding to Chalmers’ The Singularity (2010), I argue that progress towards self-improving AIs is already substantially beyond what many futurists and philosophers are aware of. Instead of rehashing well-trodden topics of the previous millennium, let us start focusing on relevant new millennium results. All indented paragraphs of this paper are quotes taken from Chalmers’ paper of 2010, who m...

I shall refer to all theories according to which time passes (including dynamic versions of presentism, ‘growing block’ theories, ‘shrinking tree’ theories, and so on) under the umbrella term ‘A-theory’, and I shall use the term ‘B-theory’ in the standard way to refer to the theory according to which time does not pass, and although events are ordered in time there is no objective present time....

though plato and sohravardi appearantly have the same view on the essence of human soul and the way in which it belongs to body, there are fundam ental differences in their point of view and their style as well. this paper deals with soul which is believed by both philosophers to be the origin of the human’s soul at first and, then, expresses their idea and reasonings about the occurance and an...

In this article, after reviewing the difference between fundamentalist and anti-fundamentalist philosophy, the features of the rationality will be explained from the perspective of five anti-fundamentalist philosophers (Habermas, Richard Rorty, MacIntyre, Michel Foucault and Hayek). The common point stated by all these philosophers is that they all criticize metaphysics and doubt about the basi...

According to a view widely held among philosophers of science, the notion of cause has no legitimate role to play in mature theories of physics. In this paper I investigate the role of what physicists themselves identify as causal principles in the derivation of dispersion relations. I argue that this case study constitutes a counterexample to the popular view and that causal principles can fun...

ion and Model Construction in Systems and Synthetic Biology Tarja Knuuttila and Andrea Loettgers The prevalent view on abstraction among philosophers of science is that of omission. Whereas idealizations are thought to introduce distortions to a scientific representation, abstraction is understood in terms of abstracting away from the details of a system. According to this tradition a model is ...

Philosophical inquiries into morality are as old as philosophy, but it may turn out that morality itself is much, much older than that. At least, that is the main thesis of primatologist Frans De Waal, who in this short book based on his Tanner Lectures at Princeton, elaborates on what biologists have been hinting at since Darwin’s (1871) book The Descent of Man and Hamilton’s (1963) studies on...