No abstract

Emergence is typically discussed in the context of mental properties or the properties of the natural sciences, and accounts of emergence within these contexts tend to look a certain way. The emergent property is taken to emerge instantaneously out of, or to be proximately caused by, complex interaction of colocated entities. Here, I focus on the properties instantiated by the elements of certain systems discussed in social ontology, such as being a five-dollar bill or a pawn-movement, and I suggest that these properties emerge in a distinctive way. They emerge in part because of a system that is far beyond and typically before the object that instantiates them. I characterize how emergence occurs in these cases, juxtaposing it with how emergence is typically discussed. I then consider whether their emergence is best framed as weak or strong as these notions are characterized in the literature, and I reveal what debates are central to answering this question. Though I will not resolve these debates, I do show a collection of views that would vindicate these properties as strongly emergent and downwardly causing.

ABSTRACT:The present paper concentrates on the use of remote sensing by satellite imagery for detecting ancient tracks and roads in the area between Palmyra and the Euphrates in Syria. The Syrian desert was traversed by caravans already in the Bronze Age, and during the Greco-Roman period the traffic increased with the Silk Road and trade as well as with military missions annexing the areas into empires. SYGIS -the Finnish archaeological survey and mapping project traced, recorded and documented ancient sites and roads in the region of Jebel Bishri in Central Syria in 2000-2010 before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. Captured data of ancient roads and bridge points bring new light to the study of ancient communication framework in the area. Archaeological research carried out by the project on the ground confirmed the authenticity of many road alignments, new military and water harvesting sites as well as civilian settlements, showing that the desert-steppe area was actively used and developed probably from the second century AD. The studies further demonstrated that the area between Palmyra and the Euphrates was militarily more organised already in the second and third centuries AD than earlier believed. Chronologically, the start of this coincided with the "golden age" of the Palmyrene caravans in the second century AD. Topography and landscape were integral parts of the construction of graves/tumuli as sign-posts guiding in the desert, as well as roads and all kinds of settlements whether military or civilian.

Groups behave in a variety of ways. To show that this behavior amounts to action, it would be best to fit it into a general account of action. However, nearly every account from the philosophy of action requires the agent to have mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Unfortunately, theorists are divided over whether groups can instantiate these states-typically depending on whether or not they are willing to accept functionalism about the mind. But we can avoid this debate. I show how a more general view of action captures what is central to action without mentioning mental states, and I argue that a group's members can fulfill the role in group action that mental states play in our actions. Group behavior is explicable in terms of reasons, regardless of whether the group itself cognizes those reasons. After discussing the kind of reasons at issue and arguing that groups can act in light of them without minds, I assess how this account bears on the question of group responsibility.We frequently speak as if there are groups and as if those groups can do things. A basketball team can win the championship; the Supreme Court can strike down the decision of a lower court; Amazon can acquire Whole Foods. One set of questions concerns whether there really are such groups and how best to understand their existence (as well as the differences between groups, collectives, corporations, etc.). Another kind of question, however, concerns whether the behavior of groups can appropriately be construed as actions. Here, I focus on the latter question.Let's take it for granted that groups exist. 1 Given this, there is a strong intuition that certain groups act. The acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon is something done by Amazon that seems intelligible. It may follow from an overall market strategy, and management will point to this as the reason for the acquisition in answer to shareholder scrutiny. Even in cases of small groups, we readily ascribe actions. We would say, for example, that the tenure committee recommended tenure and had reasons for doing so.To make good on this intuition, we need to see how the behavior of groups can be captured by a theory of action. There are many views of action that have been developed, so we would ideally need only to pick a good one and show how groups can satisfy its conditions. 2 When trying to do this, though, what becomes apparent is that most of the prominent views of action in the literature involve 1 We need only accept that some groups exist. This is not uncontroversial, but I take it for granted here and focus instead on whether what groups do can be construed as actions. See Ritchie (2013) for a discussion of a number of proposals of how groups exist, including her own. I remain agnostic here as to the nature of group existence. Though I am partial to an account on which groups are sui generis entities constituted by members in virtue of the group structure and certain social facts (bearing the most similarities to Uzquiano [2004]), the account of group action g...

We take ourselves to be able to omit to perform certain actions and to be at times responsible for these omissions. Moreover, omissions seem to have effects and to be manifestations of our agency. So, it is natural to think that omissions must be events. However, very few people writing on this topic have been willing to argue that omissions are events. Such a view is taken to face three significant challenges: (i) omissions are thought to be somehow problematically negative, (ii) it is unclear where the event of an omission would be located, and (iii) if we accept any omissions as events, it seems like there would be far too much causation involving them. In this paper, I develop a novel view of omissions as events and as actions that provides answers to these challenges.