john gardner’s grendel is a celebrated example of the ontological postmodernist fiction. along with a discovery of self with which grendel the narrator of the novel is concerned, grand narratives such as philosophy are questioned. grendel denies the external objective reality and generously allows the legitimacy of fantastic and non-realistic methods by using “life-affirming fabulous art” as it...

Kourken Michaelian describes his book Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and our Knowledge of the Personal Past as an act of applied epistemology. In Chapter 1 the author sets out the three core questions addressed by the book. For a psychological audience, the restatement of these core questions found in the final chapter is more relevant because it succinctly sets out the relationship betwee...

Patient Health Record (PHR) systems offer great promise but raise significant philosophical, cultural, legal, and technical challenges. In hopes of furthering debate on key issues, we explain some central questions about the role, purpose, and policies associated with these systems. We also propose a framework for addressing policy questions and candidate technology that we believe may sharpen ...

The reworking of the sequences of mitochondrial DNA transcripts is an intriguing genetic phenomenon that continues to create amazement even today, 9 years after the discovery of uridine (U) insertion/deletion editing in trypanosomatid mitochondria. Upon initial exposure to this phenomenon, the usual scientific questions of what and how were rapidly followed by the more philosophical question of...

This paper proposes a novel research direction for algorithmic probability theory, which now allows to formalize philosophical questions about concepts such as the simulation argument, personal identity, and the rationality of utilitarianism. Pushing progress in these directions might be of high relevance for future society and artificial general intelligence. We start to build up a set of form...

The philosophical problem of identity has a long history, dating back to ancient times of classical Greece. Quite early in the history of philosophy questions about the problem of identity arose in tandem with the recognition of change: If there is no change the problem of identity does not arise, since a static thing that undergoes no alterations is simply taken to be what it is—and can clearl...

Multi-agent systems involve agents interacting with each other and the environment and working to achieve individual and group goals. The achievement of group goals requires that agents work together within teams. In this paper we first introduce three philosophical approaches that result from different answers to two key questions. Secondly we consider three theoretical frameworks for modellin...

The topic of conditionals is an extremely important one. It lies at the bottom of so many philosophical issues (causation, dispositions, lawlikeness, etc.), and current theories of conditionals seem to fairly ground these issues. On the other hand, the topic has become ever messier. Philosophical opinions grossly diverge, not only about de tails, but also about such fundamental questions as to ...

Is there a philosopher's approach to the concepts of health and disease? Are there any particularly philosophical concepts concerning medical affairs? What point could there be in the existence of such concepts? These questions seem to be well motivated by the title of this paper. What use can a scholarly and humanistic discipline be to a rapidly expanding science such as medicine? Let us first...

An important contemporary debate (going back to (Gödel, 1964)) in the philosophy of mathematics is whether or not mathematics needs new axioms. This paper is an attempt to show how one might go about answering this question. I argue that the role of axioms is to allow mathematicians to stay away from philosophical debates, and thus focus on their primary goal of proving interesting theorems. I ...