Blockchain Papers

STEFANO CAROTI

Orazio Ricasoli Rucellai is one of the leading eruditi of the second half of 17th-century Florence; he tried to keep alive Galileo’s contribution to science. Most of his Dialoghi filosofici have been published at the end of 19th century; among the unpublished dialogues dedicated to Timaeus we find a partial defence of Descartes’ metaphysics, which is edited in the Appendix. In particular, the topics at stake are the demonstration of God’s existence and of the immateriality of the soul in Descartes’s Meditationes. The opponent of Descartes’s doctrine relies on Gassendi’s Obiectiones. Descartes’s doctrine of ideas completely detached from sense perception is dismissed as useless on a cognitive basis, and only a generic innatism is maintained, only as far as it can provide a proof of God’s imprint on human soul.

Jean-Luc Marion, Christina M. Gschwandtner

It is often thought that the Sixth Meditation serves to prove the distinction of soul from body and the existence of material things, but the matter is actually more complicated. The “material things” do not necessarily include the human body, but “my body” has a special and ambiguous status. My mind is so closely joined to my body that they form a unity. Kant misunderstands Descartes by accusing him of the scandalous attempt to prove the existence of his body, assuming that this is subsumed under the proof for the existence of material things. Yet such a proof suffers from several weaknesses. Although most of Descartes’ successors assume that this is what is at stake in the Sixth Meditation, Descartes actually separates external sensation from the ego’s experience. The existence of material things need not be demonstrated to refute skepticism, because the existence of body and mind and their union are assured. Descartes’ commentators and critics are asking the wrong question.

Carlos Fraenkel

Maimonides, Averroes, and Samuel Ibn Tibbon on a Skandalon of Medieval Science Carlos Fraenkel (bio) Joel Kraemer has recently made an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate about Maimonides’ stance in Guide 2:24 on what has been called a skandalon of medieval science:1 the incompatibility of Ptolemy’s astronomy with Aristotle’s celestial physics.2 As I understand it, the main thesis for which Prof. Kraemer argues is twofold: (1) He proposes that it is possible that the emendation suggested by Ibn Tibbon to the crucial passage in 2:24 reflects the correct Arabic original. The absence of textual evidence does not disprove this possibility, because only a fraction of the Arabic manuscripts have been examined. In addition, even if no extant Arabic manuscript contains Ibn Tibbon’s [End Page 195] version, this would not be conclusive proof that his emendation does not reflect the correct Arabic text, since it may depend on a lost branch of the Arabic manuscript tradition. (2) Considerations of content, as well as the interpretative tradition of the Guide, make it likely that Ibn Tibbon’s version is the correct one despite contrary evidence of all known Arabic manuscripts.3 In his paper Prof. Kraemer also discusses a number of alternative interpretations, including the interpretation set forth by Zev Harvey and taken up by myself. In what follows I will defend the interpretation proposed by Harvey and myself. I will first address the philological argument in support of the possibility of Ibn Tibbon’s reading. Then I will briefly discuss the value of the interpretative tradition. Finally, I will turn to the substantive issues at stake. Concerning the substantive issues, let me note from the outset that there may not actually be a fundamental disagreement between us. If I am not mistaken, Prof. Kraemer agrees that Maimonides did not consider Aristotle’s physical proof of God a demonstrative proof according to the conditions stipulated by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics.4 Harvey and I think that this is the conclusion of Maimonides’ argument in 2:24: because of the incompatibility of Ptolemy’s astronomy with Aristotle’s celestial physics, the crucial premise of the eternal motion of the celestial spheres cannot be taken to be necessarily true. As a consequence, the physical proof of God is not a demonstrative proof. Prof. Kraemer, on the other hand, thinks that the “general proof [al-istidlāl al-ʿāmm]” mentioned in the controversial passage means “dialectical proof.”5 Without Ibn Tibbon’s emendation, Maimonides would thus be denying that the heavens provide a dialectical proof of God. If this were the case Prof. Kraemer would be right: the argument of 2:24 does not support such a conclusion. Hence Ibn Tibbon’s emendation would be plausible, since for a dialectical proof the premise of the eternal motion of the celestial spheres does not need to be necessarily true. It is sufficient for it to be likely true. And there are [End Page 196] good reasons to think that according to Maimonides’ esoteric position Aristotle’s view is more likely than the view that the world was created in time, i.e., the view for which he argues exoterically. If Maimonides had written what Ibn Tibbon and Prof. Kraemer—albeit for different reasons—think he should have, I would be happy to accept Prof. Kraemer’s interpretation that in the controversial passage Maimonides is referring to a dialectical proof. Indeed, in my view this would be the only philosophically tenable interpretation. I will argue, however, that Maimonides does not deny that the heavens provide a dialectical proof of God and that this is not what Ibn Tibbon took him to be denying. According to the interpretation maintained by Harvey and myself, in the controversial passage Maimonides denies that the physical proof is a demonstrative proof, thus implicitly acknowledging that it has only dialectical status. While the conclusion—that for Maimonides the proof is not demonstrative but dialectical—does not seem to conflict with Prof. Kraemer’s view, the interpretation itself has the advantage of not depending on an unnecessary emendation of the text. 1. Ibn Tibbon’s Reading and the Interpretative Tradition I agree with Prof. Kraemer...

Mark Wynn, The Society of Christian Philosophers

In this collection of essays (old and new), Kai Nielsen offers a characteristically clear and forthright formulation of a perspective for which he is already well known.There is not much in the book that engages in detail with recent developments in analytic philosophy of religion; indeed, Nielsen comments that because of its habitual neglect of certain questions, philosophy of religion in this style fails to make any serious demand upon our attention: "I suppose we could analytically reconstruct and conceptually clarify Mary Baker Eddy's metaphysical tract too, but that would hardly enhance interest in it or further our understanding of the significance of religion.These analytical philosopher-theologians need first, against the antimetaphysical arguments of Wittgenstein, Davidson, Rorty, and Putnam, to give us some reason to think that there is in the sorts of things they are doing something significant" (p.20).A second, related difficulty for mainstream analytic philosophy of religion is that it is "very rationalistic"; rather than worrying about new versions of the traditional proofs, "what is crucial to face instead is whether we need a belief, however overwhelmed with intellectual impediments, in a Jewish, Christian or Islamic God to make sense of our lives and to live really human lives" (p.21).In these remarks, Nielsen sets two kinds of challenge for contemporary philosophical theology: to confront the difficulties inherent in any kind of metaphysical claim, and to consider whether religious commitment can be understood, and perhaps justified in some degree, by reference to its contribution to human flourishing.Let's take these challenges in tum.Nielsen evidently thinks it rather obvious that a metaphysically committed kind of religious belief is intellectually defective.Indeed, thinking in particular of the metaphysical dimension of religious belief, he comments: "I remain utterly flabbergasted that reflective, intelligent, and informed people ... can be believers" (p.393).Naturally Nielsen wonders whether his inability to understand the commitments of 'intelligent and informed' people raises a question about whether he has fully understood what is at stake here.Even so, the very obviousness of the case for atheism, from his point of view, seems at times to get in the way of a detailed presentation of

Usman Khalil, Owais Ahmed Malik, Wee-Hong Ong, Mueen Uddin

The concept of smart city architecture requires a comprehensive solution that can combine real-time response applications for cyber-physical systems. However, the architecture faces challenges that can obstruct the operations in terms of systems, processes, and data flow as far as the breach risk is concerned. Though the field has been researched with the existence of centralized and distributed architectures to support smart cities. Research gaps regarding security concerns, platform assistance, and resource management continue to persist. This research article presents a novel blockchain-based architecture that proposes expansion in the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to cater to the expansion of IoT-enabled smart assets. It enables NFTs to employ fog computing for all users and smart devices connected to a fog node in a cyber-physical system. The proposed expansion suggested in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for IoT assets representation in a cyber-physical system, provides devices and user identification and authentication functionality. The proposed NFT architecture has been designed to provide a smart city solution for cyber-physical systems that ensures robust security features (such as CIA) by introducing new attributes and functions for Owner, User, Fog, and IoT device/s authentication. The validation and rigor of the security services, efficiency, and latency have been achieved by deployments on private and public ledgers. The efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of the suggested functions and components have been evaluated in terms of evaluation cost and time complexity which resulted in promising results, obtained and validated on a testnet. The evaluation cost for the devised mint component was approximately 81%, and devised approve() was approximately 23% more efficient than other solutions.

Jacob Neusner

Sifra's Theology of Revelation The reader may now wonder whether I have entered a circular argument. When I accounted for Sifra's authorship's critique of the Mishnah's utilization of taxonomic logic for the proof of propositions, I claimed that at stake was not merely omission of proof texts but a (to our authorship) flawed use of a valid logic. Yet I further stressed that the correct utilization of that logic can be shown to occur not only in Sifra but, by Sifra's authorship's own standard, in the Mishnah. I further stipulated that Scripture can have been, and probably was, the source of that appearance in the Mishnah of the kind of polythetic classification of which Sifra's authorship will have approved, if not explicitly, then at least implicitly in the Mishnah's introduction of the same polythetic taxonomy. Therefore, does it not all come down to the presence, or absence, of citations of verses of Scripture? And if all that separates Sifra from Tosefta and the two Talmuds is that the latter suffice with the inclusion of proof texts while the former insists upon rewriting the whole of Scripture in line with the Mishnah, then does not the effort invested in Sifra seem a bit excessive. The result, after all, can have been, and was, accomplished in a much simpler way by the authorships of the successor documents to the Mishnah. Why then the reversion to Scripture in Sifra's rewriting of Scripture, that is, its writing with Scripture?