Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

We argue that Lakatos’ work on the history and philosophy of mathematics is of key relevance to machine creativity as it suggests ways in which to explore and transform concept spaces, rerepresent knowledge and change evaluation criteria. We describe approaches to implementing methods which Lakatos identifies, including our own approach, which extends Colton’s HR and has enabled us to automatic...

“The fundamental question of political philosophy,” wrote Robert Nozick memorably, “is whether there should be any state at all.” A. John Simmons concurs. For him, the task of “justifying the state” must take the following form: we should assume anarchism as a theoretical baseline and demonstrate that there can be at least one state type that is neither immoral nor inadvisable. Justification is...

For the past two decades, the postmodern debates dominated the cultural and intellectual scene in many fields throughout the world. In aesthetic and cultural theory, polemics emerged over whether modernism in the arts was or was not dead and what sort of postmodern art was succeeding it. In philosophy, debates erupted concerning whether or not the tradition of modern philosophy had ended, and m...