The debate on personal identity in philosophy is about what makes a person at one point intime the same person as a person at another point in time. Animalism is a point of view whichhas it that being the same human animal is what makes a person at one point in time the sameperson as a person at another point in time. Animalism makes the claim that a person isnumerically identical to a human animal. The two most prominent arguments in favor ofanimalism is the thinking animal argument and the animal ancestry argument. Thinkinganimal argument says that there is a thinking human animal where you are, but you are theonly thinking being where you are. therefore you are a human animal. Animal ancestryargument says that you are a product of evolution and that only living organisms are productsof evolution. Therefore you are a living organism, a human animal. In this thesis these twoarguments, as well as multiple objections against them, were evaluated. It was argued thatarguments about persons being numerically identical to thinking parts and to organs mightpose a threat to the thinking animal argument and the animal ancestry argument, but that thearguments supporting animalism should not be discarded.Abstrakt / Debatten om personlig identitet inom filosofin handlar om vad som gör att en person vid entidpunkt är densamma som en person vid en annan tidpunkt. Animalism är en ståndpunkt somsäger att vad som gör att en person vid en tidpunkt är densamma som en person vid en annantidpunkt, är att de är samma mänskliga djur. Animalism säger alltså att en person är numerisktidentisk med ett mänskligt djur. De två mest framstående argumenten för animalism ärthinking animal argument och animal ancestry argument. Thinking animal argument säger attdet finns ett tänkande mänskligt djur där du är men att du är den enda tänkande varelsen därdu är, alltså är du ett mänskligt djur. Animal ancestry argument säger att du är en produkt avevolutionen och att endast levande organismer är produkter av evolutionen. Alltså är du enlevande organism, ett mänskligt djur. I denna uppsats granskades dessa argument samt ettantal argument mot dessa två argument. Utredningen visade att argument om att personer kanvara numeriskt identiska med tänkande delar och med organ kan vara ett problem för thinkinganimal argument och animal ancestry argument men den slutgiltiga bedömningen är attargumenten för animalism inte bör förkastas.

Bakgrund: Rökning är idag en av de största riskfaktorerna för kroniska sjukdomar så som cancer, KOL och hjärt- kärlsjukdomar. I Sverige röker ca 20% av befolkningen. Syftet med studien var att undersöka vad som motiverar rökare att fortsätta röka samt undersöka deras kunskaper kring de hälsoeffekter rökningen ger. Ökad medvetenhet medför ett bättre bemötande i vården samt en mer individualiserad rökavvänjningsplan. Metod: Kvalitativ deskriptiv intervjustudie. 12 intervjuer utfördes med rökande personer i Uppsala, intervjuerna baserades på en frågeguide. Data analyserades med hjälp av kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultat: Resultatet delades in i fyra teman: 1) Motiv till fortsatt rökning, 2) Motiv mot fortsatt rökning, 3) Rökdebuten, och 4) Rökarens tankar om att röka. Huvudresultatet var att deltagarnas movation till forsatt rökning fanns i de pauser, lugn och belöning deltagarna fick ut av sin rökning. Rökningen var en del av vardagen med vanor och rutiner. Slutsats: Pauser, lugn, belöning och vanor motiverade deltagarna till fortsatt rökning. Vanorna försvårade möjligheten att sluta röka. För att vårdpersonal ska kunna skapa en individualiserad rökavvänjningsplan måste kunskap om rökarnas motivation för fortsatt rökning fördjupas. / Background: Smoking is today on of the biggest factors for chronic diseases like cancer, COPD and cardiovascular diseases. In Sweden 20% of the population smokes. The purpose of this study was to investigate motivations for smokers towards further smoking and investigate their knowledge about health risks from smoking. A elevated awareness about the topic may lead to a better treatment and a more individualized smoke cessation plan. Methods: Qualitative descriptive interviews. 12 interviews where done with smoking people in Uppsala, the interviews were based on a questionnaire. The data were analyzed with a qualitative content analysis. Results: The results were divided into four themes: 1) Motives towards continued smoking, 2) Motives against continued smoking, 3) Smoke initiation, and 4) Smokers thoughts about smoking. The main results were the motivations towards smoking were found in the pauses, the peace and the reward the smokers got out of their smoking. Smoking is a part of each day because habits and routines. Conclusions: Pauses, tranquility and habits were motivations towards continued smoking. The habits made it hard to quit smoking. To be able to offer a more individualized smoke cessation plan the smokers motivation towards continued smoking and earlier knowledge about health risks have to be illustrate and processed.

Eco-blanchiment, verrouillage du marché, publicité mensongère sont autant de défis suscités par l’essor d’une argumentation environnementale aujourd’hui omniprésente sur le marché.Tantôt révélée dans des messages institutionnels liés à la mise en place de politique de développement durable au sein des entreprises, tantôt présentée sous la forme de message commercial directement adressé aux consommateurs, cette forme d’argumentation a pour principale vocation d’offrir une image responsable aux entreprises et aux biens et services qu’elles proposent sur le marché.Cet essor n’est donc pas sans risque et tout l’intérêt de ce travail de recherche fut d’analyser les réponses offertes par le Droit et d’identifier les évolutions qu’un tel phénomène a pu entraîner sur le corpus juridique. Ainsi, ce travail nous a donc conduit à voyager au cœur de la matière du Droit du marché, passant du Droit de la concurrence au Droit de la consommation sans oublier le Droit des contrats dont l’importance en la matière est fondamentale. / Green-washing, market locking, false advertising, are some challenge kindled by the rise of an environnemental argument, today omnipresent on the market. sometimes revealed in institutional communication linked with the positioning of politics of sustainable development in companies, sometimes showed in the form of commercial’s messages directly addressed to the consumers, this form of argumentation has to main clause to offer a responsible image of the firm and the products and services she offers on the market.This rise isn’t free of risks and all the interest of this research has been to analyse answers which are offer by the Law and to identify evolutions bring by this phenomenon on the legal corpus.In this way, this work take us to travel at the heart of the market’s law, pass from competition law to consumption law, not forgetting agreement law which is of prime importance.

In this work I develop an argument which shows that rule-following is impossible, and investigate its impact on the philosophy of language. By way of orientation, I start with a critical evaluation of existing ‘rule-following considerations’, arguments derived from Wittgenstein which purportedly put rule-following under pressure. Having shown that its predecessors are unsound, and with the explicit aim of avoiding their flaws, I then formulate the new ‘indexical’ argument. The conclusion that rule-following is impossible is difficult to accept because we think that the ability to folldiw rules is constitutive of language-mastery. If this is correct, then to show that rule-following is impossible is to show that language is impossible. Such ‘meaning nihilism’ is not a tenable position, and some way of avoiding this conclusion has to be found. Various proposals in the literature have the potential to do this: principally (a) the irrealism suggested by Kripke; and (b) subjective on-gong determination advocated by Wright. I argue that neither strategy is successful. The correct response to the indexical argument is to accept that rule-following is not constitutive of language-mastery. In this case, clearly, the impossibility of rule-following does not entail the impossibility meaning, and the conclusion that rule-following is impossible becomes unproblematic. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how language could survive without rules. The remainder of this work shows that rule-elimination does permit a respectable notion of linguistic content. The result is distinctively Wittgensteinian: a communitarian, ‘use’-based account of language.

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between the semantics of a verb and its selectional restrictions, which determine how many and what kind of arguments it must occur with in a clause. For most verbs, these restrictions are predictable from the semantics of the verb, but there are pairs of verbs with very similar semantics that differ in their argument restrictions. For example, both ask and wonder can take questions as their complements (John asked/wondered what time it was), but of the two, only ask can take a noun phrase complement with a question-like interpretation (John asked/*wondered the time). Similarly, while both eat and devour are verbs of consumption, the object can be omitted with eat but not devour (John ate/*devoured yesterday). Due to these and similar examples, many linguists have claimed that selectional restrictions are to some extent arbitrary and unpredictable from the semantics, and therefore must be learned as part of our knowledge of the relevant verbs. In this thesis I argue that these differences are not arbitrary; they recur across languages, and they can be predicted on the basis of lexical semantics, meaning they do not need to be learned on a word-by-word basis. In order for selectional features to be eliminated from the grammar, and replaced with semantic generalizations, two things must be shown. First, it must be demonstrated that the elements being selected for can be defined in terms of their semantics, rather than their syntactic properties. If not, the selectional properties could not be considered to be fully predictable based on the semantics of the selecting and selected items. Second, it must be shown that the selectional restrictions of a predicate are predictable from components of the selecting predicate’s meaning. In other words, the semantics of both the selected and the selecting elements must be accounted for. I focus mainly on the semantics of selected elements in Chapter 2, and on selecting elements in Chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 2 provides a brief review of the literature on selectional features, and argues that the elements being selected need not be defined in terms of their syntactic category and features. Instead, what are selected for are the semantic properties of the selected items. While the relationship between syntactic and semantic categories and properties is often systematic, it is not always, which can make it difficult in certain cases to determine the semantic basis for predicting what elements will be selected. Specifically, I argue that what appears to be selection for clausal categories (CPs or TPs) is in fact selection for propositional entities (including questions, assertions, facts, and so on); apparent selection for bare verb phrases (vPs) is selection for eventualities (events or states); and apparent selection for nominals (DPs) is selection for objects or things. Only properties of the nearest semantic entity (i.e., excluding elements embedded therein) can be selected for. In this way, I account for the selectional asymmetries between clausal and nominal complements noted by Bruening (2009) and Bruening et al. (2018): predicates selecting clausal complements can only select for (semantic) properties of the upper portion of the clause (in the CP domain), not for the lower portion (the vP domain), while predicates taking nominal complements can select for any properties of the nominal rather than being restricted to the upper portion. Since all syntactic properties of items are encoded as features, on a syntactic account it is expected that all features should be involved in selectional restrictions, contrary to fact; the semantic approach taken here allows for a principled explanation of what can and cannot be selected for. In Chapters 3 and 4 I turn to the lexical semantics of selecting elements, showing that these too are involved in determining selectional restrictions. I start in Chapter 3 by looking at c-selection (i.e., syntactic selection), specifically the case of eat versus devour. As mentioned above, their selectional properties of these two verbs differ in that the complement of eat is optional, while that of devour is obligatory, despite the two verbs having similar meanings. I show that this is due to the aspectual properties of these verbs: devour denotes an event where the complement necessarily undergoes a complete scalar change (i.e., it must be fully devoured by the end of the event), which means that the complement must be syntactically realized (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2001; Rappaport Hovav 2008). Eat, on the other hand, does not entail a complete change of state in its complement, and so the complement is optional. I show that the correlation between scalar change entailments and obligatory argument realization holds for a wider group of verbs as well. Thus, the c-selectional properties of eat, devour, and similar verbs need not be stipulated in their lexical entries. In Chapter 4 I turn to the selection of complements headed by a particular lexical item, as with rely, which requires a PP complement headed by on, a phenomenon commonly referred to as l-selection. I show that the sets of verbs and prepositions involved in l-selection, and the observed verb-preposition combinations, are not fully random but can instead be (partially) predicted based on the thematic properties of the items in question. Furthermore, I show that there are different kinds of l-selecting predicates, and one kind is systematically present in satellite-framed languages (like English) and absent in verb-framed languages (like French), based on the Framing Typology of Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000). I account for this difference by analyzing l-selection as an instance of complex predicate formation, and showing that a certain kind of complex predicate (exemplified by rely on) is possible in satellite-framed languages but not in verb-framed languages. Thus, I show that the features that get selected for are semantic features, and that the problematic cases of eat versus devour and l-selection have semantic correlates, and need not be stipulated in the lexicon. While this leaves many instances of selectional features unaccounted for, it provides proposals for some components of lexical semantics that are relevant to selection, and demonstrates that a research program directed toward eliminating the remaining cases is plausibly viable.

Sprutbyte har varit ett kontroversiellt ämne för debatt och forskning sedan 1980-talet. Denna studie syftar till att belysa fyra ideella organisationers - Convictus, Svenska Brukarföreningen (SBF), IOGT-NTO och Riksförbundet Narkotikafritt Samhälle (RNS) - arbete i sprutbytesdebatten i Stockholm och på så sätt utvidga förståelsen för både debatten och hur den ideella sektorn möjligen kan vara en del av större social förändring. Vilken inställning organisationerna haft till sprutbyte och hur den inställningen är nära kopplad till organisationernas syn på narkotika i allmänt, hur organisationerna argumenterat för respektive mot sprutbyte och hur argumenten legitimerats samt hur organisationerna ser på sin roll i sprutbytesdebatten är frågor som behandlas i studien. Eftersom organisationerna anses agera utifrån olika verklighetsuppfattningar analyseras organisationernas argument och inställningar utifrån ett socialkonstruktivistiskt perspektiv. Empirin består av fyra intervjuer med organisationsrepresentanter och hemsidematerial. Den verklighet som IOGT-NTO och RNS representerar kan uppfattas som vad Berger och Luckmann kallar en dominerande kärnverklighet. Dessa organisationer är emot sprutbyte, förespråkar narkotikafrihet samt restriktiv narkotikapolitik och lagstiftning. Convictus och SBF däremot är förespråkare för sprutbyte. De har underordnade verklighetsuppfattningar och arbetar för avstigmatisering, smittskydd och bättre vård och hälsa för narkotikaanvändare. Dessa organisationer är representanter för vad Berger och Luckmann kallar för subuniversum. Subuniversum kan uppmana kärnverkligheten och möjliggöra social förändring. Sprutbyte kan uppfattas som en signal för en samhällsförändring mot ett mer liberalt, skadebegränsande sätt att se narkotikaanvändning på. Studien visar att sprutbytesdebatten i Stockholm, när det gäller de studerade ideella organisationerna, handlat om mer än enbart själva sprutbytet: rättigheter för en marginell grupp, samhällets ansvar för sina medlemmar, vad i narkotikaanvändningen anses vara problematiskt och hur dessa problem ska åtgärdas.

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In his 2003 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation” Nick Bostrom argues that it is reasonable to believe that we are currently living in a computer simulation run by another civilisation. To argue this, Bostrom derives a mathematical formula that helps him calculate the probability that our universe is indeed simulated. The paper has gained widespread popularity, and is every bit as intriguing today as when it was written nearly 20 years ago. In this essay I will critically analyze Bostrom’s simulation argument and its implications. I will start off by focusing on the arguments that Bostrom presents in his 2003 article. I will then proceed by arguing why an incredibly advanced civilization may run a huge number of simulations in an attempt at finding out where their civilization comes from, or how it has developed. I will do this because Bostrommerely assumes that it is reasonable to assume that this is the course of action a highly developed civilisation will take. I will also take other works he’s written on the subject into consideration, namely his answer from 2011 to a mistake found in the original paper.

Constructing and understanding arguments is often difficult but key to both philosophyand other parts of the everyday life. Some methods to ease this task has been developed.One of the methods developed within informal reasoning is argument diagramming, amethod to structure and visualize arguments. This essay takes a complicated argumentabout the fate of the universe, put forward by futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book TheSingularity is Near, as well as some critique published against said argument, as a casestudy for the application of argument diagramming on unstructured arguments fromoutside the field of philosophy. To arrive at a diagram that can be easily grasped andread but still contains all information of the original argument, this essay developsa method of splitting sub-diagrams off of a main diagram. Analysing the resultingdiagrams shows that the plausibility of Kurzweil’s argument is heavily dependent on afew, critical premises at the lower levels of the diagram.

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