Abstract Populism has lately become a matter of concern in both popular and academic circles. Yet contemporary writers have had difficulty parsing populism's relationship to democracy, partly because they are universally committed the latter. It is worth turning thinker like Aristotle, who—despite not explicitly addressing populism itself—is able reflect clearly on various democratic phenomena ...

An Aristotelian conception of practical ethics can be derived from the account of practical reasoning that Aristotle articulates in his Rhetoric and this has important implications for the way we understand the nature and limits of practical ethics. An important feature of this conception of practical ethics is its responsiveness to the complex ways in which agents form and maintain moral commi...

Syllogism is a type of deductive reasoning involving quantified statements. The syllogistic reasoning scheme in the classical Aristotelian framework involves three crisp term sets and four linguistic quantifiers, for which the main support is the linguistic properties of the quantifiers. A number of fuzzy approaches for defining an approximate syllogism have been proposed for which the main sup...

An Aristotelian conception of practical ethics can be derived from the account of practical reasoning that Aristotle articulates in is Rhetoric and this has important implications for the way we understand the nature and limits of practical ethics. an important feature of this conception of practical ethics is its responsiveness to the complex ways in which agents form and maintain moral commit...

It is an honor to be part of this book symposium on YU Jiyuan’s splendid book. The best way of repaying the honor, I believe, is to engage actively and critically with the issues Yu has raised. However, in this essay I will only be able to discuss selected aspects of this extremely rich, ambitious, erudite, and inspiring book. I shall focus on three of its most impressive achievements. The book...

A common misunderstanding is that there is something logically amiss with the classical square of opposition, and that the problem is related to Aristotle’s and medieval philosophers’ rejection of empty terms. But [Parsons 2004] convincingly shows that most of these philosophers did not in fact reject empty terms, and that, when properly understood, there are no logical problems with the classi...

There is an underlying tension between the notion of cognitive enhancement and the idea that knowledge presupposes creditable agency. By drawing on an Aristotelian theory of action, it becomes clear that cognition is routinely considered as a human activity susceptible to kinds of appraisal, to which mere physiological processes, such as digestion, are not. In essence, we appreciate knowledge a...

Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new form of AI-based interactive entertainment (Laurel 1986, Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall and Reilly 1992, Blumberg 1996, HayesRoth, van Gent and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been comple...

This paper begins by summarizing and distilling MacIntyre’s sweeping critique of modern busi­ ness. It identifies the crux of MacIntyre’s critique as centering on the fundamental Aristotelian concepts of internal goods and practices. MacIntyre essentially follows Aristotle in arguing that by privileging external goods over internal goods, business activity – and certainly modern capitalistic bu...