Conceptual analyses can be subdivided into two classes, good and evil. Empirical analysis is the good kind, routinely practiced in the sciences. Orthodox analysis is the malevolent version that plagues philosophical discourse. In this paper, I will clarify the difference between them, provide some reasons to prefer good over evil, and illustrate their consequences for the metaphysics of causati...

F or me, the word " evil " is somewhat of an abstraction. Having led a protected life, one of only a few occasions on which I have seen something resembling evil was when the Twin Towers fell on September 11th. Evil is the intent of harm and deliberate violation of basic moral and ethical codes. Evil is now woven into our culture, something that, in recent times, probably became more apparent (...

In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles stated, 'Blood is a juice of very special kind.' As illustrated in this famous German folklore, blood is the essence of life but it can also lead to the destruction of life if improperly used. The human heart constantly pumps on average between 5 and 6 l of blood throughout the body to maintain the supply of nutrients and oxygen to organs and cells, which is es...

This paper investigates ways to reduce redundancy in forbidding sets for language forbidding-enforcing systems. A language forbidding set disallows combinations of subwords in a word, while permitting the presence of some parts of these combinations. Since a forbidding set is a potentially infinite set of finite sets of words, finding normal forms for forbidding sets is interesting from a combi...