CURRENT ISSUE:
Cuneiform Šumma Sentences: Conditionals or Implications?
author: Hany Moubarez,
For a long time, it was believed in Assyriology and related disciplines that šumma sentences, or grammatical conditionals, which appeared in cuneiform texts and tablets of astrology, exorcism, law, extispicy, oneiromancy, medicine, and divination, were linguistic expressions of logical conditionals. F. Rochberg (2010; 2016) extended this belief, suggesting that they are even material conditionals. Andrew Schumann (2017; 2020; 2021) followed this, claiming that, as a result, we can trace the origin of symbolic logic in cuneiform writings, through which it moved to Greece. In this paper, after presenting this approach, I will challenge it by showing that šumma/IF sentences and similar constructs in cuneiform literature are arguments or implications that suffer from the same confusion between conditional and implication that Quine (1953/1966) highlighted when criticizing C.I. Lewis. Keywords: logic, conditional, implication, cuneiform texts, argument, Babylonian science, šumma
Autonomy in Stratified Structures
author: Rafał Dzierwa,
This article proposes a minimalist concept of autonomy that is consistent with determinism, but negates fatalism. Drawing on Nicolai Hartmann's stratified ontology, it argues that autonomy is achieved not by suspending physical laws, but by introducing new, higher-level determinations unique to individual entities. The tension between general laws and individual autonomy is resolved by emphasizing the unique properties and individual laws that apply to each entity. The article also explains how this minimal autonomy makes sense of setting goals and attempting to achieve them, demonstrating that even within a deterministic framework, individuals can have meaningful influence over their
actions and outcomes.
Keywords: autonomy, stratified ontology, determinism, individuality, philosophy of mind
No Perils of Rejecting the Parity Argumen
author: Mustafa Khuramy, Erik Schulz,
Many moral realists have employed a strategy for arguing for moral realism by claiming that if epistemic normativity is categorical and that if this epistemic normativity exists, then categorical normativity exists. In this paper, we will discuss that argument, examine a way out, and respond to the objections people have recently raised in the literature. In the end, we conclude that the objections to our way out will do little in the way of motivating those who already do not believe in categorical normativity, thereby severing the power the aforementioned parity argument is designed to possess.
Keywords: Moral error theory, Meta-ethics, Companions in guilt, Nihilism.