An analysis of the issues of the Journal of the History of Philosophy shows that the journal has effectively recorded the changing image of Hobbes over the course of the 20th century, shifting from a strictly political perspective and a marked focus on the internal coherence of Hobbesian thought (with particular reference to the moral/political nexus and the examination of the “naturalistic fallacy”), to an increasing emphasis on the theme of theology and civil religion. Three examples are examined in this (...) article: the theme of moral obligation as the foundation of political obligation as discussed in the 1970s issues of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, the centrality of the contract and the concept of authorisation brought into focus in the 1980s, and the theme of Hobbes’ religious sincerity or atheism at the centre of discussion in the 1990s. (shrink)

When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences, and at the same time, these psychometric instruments were considered a means to create a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics - due to its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research - has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop (...) a contrasting characterization of contemporary psychometrics as a value-laden discipline. We expose four such values: that individual differences are quantitative (rather than qualitative), that measurement should be objective in a specific sense, that test items should be fair, and that utility of a model is more important than its truth. Our goal is not to criticize psychometrics for employing these values, but rather to bring them into the open and to show that these values are not inevitable and are in need of systematic evaluation. (shrink)

Philosophy has long either dismissed or paid only minimal attention to creativity, and even with the rise of research on imagination, the creative imagination has largely been ignored as well. The aim of this volume is to correct this neglect. By bringing together existing research in various sub-disciplines, we also aim to open up new avenues of research. The chapters in Part I provide some framing and history on the philosophical study of imagination and creativity, along with an overview of (...) the empirical literature. Part II explores imagination and creativity as they manifest in, and in turn shape, the individual. Part III surveys the role of imagination and creativity across a wide variety of artistic domains, and the chapters of Part IV turn to societal domains. Part V focuses on the interplay of imagination and creativity with regard to particular features of creative subjects and different kinds of creative subjects. *** -/- Part I: Theories and Approaches 1. Theories of Imagination (Peter Kung) 2. Theories of Creativity (Julia Langkau) 3. Historical Treatments of Imagination in the Western Tradition (Lucia Oliveri) 4. Historical Treatments of Creativity in the Western Tradition (Elliot Paul) 5. Non-Western Treatments of Imagination (Reza Hadisi and Jing Iris Hu) 6. Non-Western Treatments of Creativity (Nicolas B. Verger and Vlad Glăveanu) 7. Empirical Treatments of Imagination and Creativity (Dustin Stokes) 8. Experimental Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (Michael T. Stuart) 9. The Relationship between Imagination and Creativity (Margherita Arcangeli) -/- Part II: Imagination and Creativity in Mind and Action 10. Imagination, Creativity, and Skill (Amy Kind) 11. Imagination, Creativity, and Attention (Bence Nanay) 12. Imagination, Creativity, and Agency (Caterina Moruzzi) 13. Imagination, Creativity, and Emotion (Julien Deonna and Fabrice Teroni) 14. Imagination, Creativity, and Embodiment (Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and María Jimena Clavel Vázquez) 15. Imagination, Creativity, and Gender (Luke Roelofs) 16. Imagination, Creativity, and Race (Nicholas Whittaker) 17. Imagination, Creativity, and Child Development (Thalia Goldstein, Anna Sofia Caruso, Darian Stapleton, and Lamin Fatty) -/- Part III: Imagination and Creativity in the Arts 18. Imagination, Creativity, and the Visual Arts (Claire Anscomb) 19. Imagination, Creativity, and Music (Matteo Ravasio) 20. Imagination, Creativity, and Fiction (Hannah H. Kim) 21. Imagination, Creativity, and Dance (David Davies and Anna Pakes) 22. Imagination, Creativity, and the Culinary Arts (Patrik Engisch) 23. Imagination, Creativity, and Film (Murray Smith) 24. Imagination, Creativity, and Acting (Tzachi Zamir) 25. Imagination, creativity, and fashion (Laura T. Di Summa) -/- Part IV: Imagination and Creativity in Society 26. Imagination and Creativity in the Scientific Realm (Alice Murphy) 27. Imagination and Creativity in the Moral Realm (Tim Mulgan) 28. Imagination and Creativity in the Political Realm (Avshalom Schwartz) 29. Imagination and Creativity in the Law (Maksymilian Del Mar) 30. Imagination and Creativity in the Religious Realm (Neil Van Leeuwen) 31. Imagination and Creativity in Business (Eric Peterson) 32. Imagination and Creativity in Times of Crisis (Jennifer Fraser and Noah Stemeroff) Part V: Emerging Issues in Imagination and Creativity Research 33. Imagination, Creativity, and Aphantasia (Andrea Blomkvist) 34. Imagination, Creativity, and Neurodivergence (Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa) 35. Imagination, Creativity, and Non-Human Animals (Henry Shevlin) 36. Imagination, Creativity, and Artificial Intelligence (Peter Langland-Hassan) 37. Collective Imagination and Collective Creativity (Nick Wiltsher) . (shrink)

This paper considers three modes of captivity with an eye to examining the effects of captivity on free agency and whether these modes depend on or constitute coercion. These modes are: physical captivity, psychological captivity, and social/legal captivity. All these modes of captivity may severely impact capacities a person relies on for free agency in different ways. They may also undermine or destroy a person’s identity-constituting cares and values. On a Nozick-style view of coercion, coercion amounts to conditional threats and (...) so many of the processes creating captivity are not coercive. However, this view overlooks the role that barriers to action play in making threats effective. Thus, an enforcement view of coercion is better to understand the coercion that takes place in captivity but the effects of the use of power on a captive’s psychology remains an important area of investigation. (shrink)

Dispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the (...) aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties, takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far—Ann Whittle’s Causal Nominalism—and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view. (shrink)

How can we understand and move beyond a persistent tendency to think, write and organize about food and agriculture as if it were possible to separate a theorist’s views on gender and race from their views on farm animals? Considerable scholarship already addresses this question. This paper suggests that philosophy can contribute to the discussion by focusing a particular kind of attention on patterns of thinking. In particular, dichotomous thinking has traditionally provided grounds for separating production from consumption, and continues (...) to present an obstacle to efforts at connecting “farm issues” to “fork issues.” Three characteristics of dichotomous thinking present particular obstacles to scholarship that would deeply integrate food studies with agriculture studies. (1) Dichotomies tend to set up not just a contrast but an antagonism between their two poles, such that to be this means to be not that. (2) Dichotomous thinking tends to erase nuance, to eliminate anything between the two dichotomous options, and to purify or “clean up” the ambiguous case or extraneous material, by shoehorning it into one option or the other; and (3) Particular groups of dichotomies operate together, such that they mutually reinforce each other to create a way of understanding the world that is more plausible because of its cohesiveness. These snarls of mutuallysupportive dichotomies that are nevertheless purist and puritanical in their impact, present a real (i.e. ideological, theoretical, conceptual) challenge to creating scholarly and activist movements that integrate the best of agrarian thinking and the best of critical food studies scholarship attentive to race, class and gender oppression. Keywords Dichotomy Production Consumption Alternative agriculture Agrarianism Local food. (shrink)

Cognitive science can help literary scholars formulate specific questions to be answered by archival research. This essay takes, as its starting point, embedded mental states (that is, mental states about mental states) and their role in generating literary subjectivity. It then follows the transformation of embedded mental states throughout several manuscripts of Christa Wolf’s autobiographical novel, Patterns of Childhood (Kindheitsmuster, 1976), available at the Berlin Academy of Arts. The author shows that later versions of Patterns of Childhood have more complex (...) embedments in the chapter describing the adolescent protagonist’s relationship with her schoolteacher. This textual development is integral to the process whereby the presumably authentic memories of the past are constructed to fit the present needs of the person who is doing the remembering. Accompanying the three case studies of the manuscript revision is a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of this “cognitive-archival” approach to literature. (shrink)

In his article ‘Making semantics for essence’ (Inquiry, 2019), Justin Zylstra proposed a truthmaker semantics for essence and used it to evaluate principles regarding the explanatory role of essence. The aim of this article is to show that Zylstra's semantics has implausible implications and thus cannot adequately capture essence.

The rich connections between metaphysics and natural philosophy in the early modern period have been widely acknowledged and productively mined, thanks in no small part to the work of Margaret Wilson, whose book, Descartes, served as an inspirational example for a generation of scholars. The task of this paper is to investigate one particular such connection, namely, the relation between occasionalist metaphysics and strict mechanism. My focus will be on the work of Nicholas Malebranche, the most influential Cartesian philosopher after (...) Descartes himself. I begin with two crucial facts about Malebranche’s philosophy: (1) Malebranche was an occasionalist, that is, he held that God was the only true cause, that all modifications of bodies and of minds can be produced by God alone. (2) Malebranche adhered firmly to strict mechanism. By strict mechanism, I mean the view, found most prominently in Descartes and in Boyle’s more ideological writings, that the qualities of bodies are exhausted by a very short list (size, shape, motion, and perhaps solidity) and that, most importantly, bodies interact only at contact by impact. Another way of describing this “contact action” requirement is as the thesis that the only fundamental laws of physics are laws of inertial motion and laws of the communication of motion at impact. In.. (shrink)

Section 1 provides a brief summary of the pair-list literature singling out some points that are particularly relevant for the coming discussion. -/- Section 2 shows that the dilemma of quantifi cation versus domain restriction arises only in extensional complement interrogatives. In matrix questions and in intensional complements only universals support pairlist readings, whence the simplest domain restriction treatment suffices. Related data including conjunction, disjunction, and cumulative readings are discussed -/- Section 3 argues that in the case of extensional complements (...) the domain restriction treatment is inadequate for at least two independent reasons. One has to do with the fact that not only upward monotonic quantifi ers support pairlist readings, and the other with the derivation of apparent scope out readings. The reasoning is supplemented with some discussion of the semantic properties of layered quantifi ers.  The above will establish the need for quantifi cation, so the question arises how the objections explicitly enlisted in the literature against quantifi cation can be answered. Section 4 considers the de dicto reading of the quantifi er s restriction, quanti cational variability, and the absence of pairlist readings with whether questions, and argues that they need not militate against the quanti ficational analysis. -/- Section 5 summarizes the emergent proposal -/- Finally, section 6 discusses the signifi cance of the above findings for the behavior of weak islands. (shrink)

When organizations solve collective action problems or realize values, they do so by means of institutions. These are commonly regarded as self-stabilizing. Yet, they can also be subject to endogenous processes of decay, or so we argue. We explain this in terms of psychological and cultural processes, which can change even if the formal structures remain unchanged. One key implication is that the extent to which norms, values, and ideals motivate individuals to comply with institutions is limited.

The scalar approach to negative polarity item (NPI) licensing assumes that NPIs are allowable in contexts in which the introduction of the NPI leads to proposition strengthening (e.g., Kadmon & Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1997, Chierchia 2006). A straightforward processing prediction from such a theory is that NPI’s facilitate inference verification from sets to subsets. Three experiments are reported that test this proposal. In each experiment, participants evaluated whether inferences from sets to subsets were valid. Crucially, we manipulated whether (...) the premises contained an NPI. In Experiment 1, participants completed a metalinguistic reasoning task, and Experiments 2 and 3 tested reading times using a self-paced reading task. Contrary to expectations, no facilitation was observed when the NPI was present in the premise compared to when it was absent. In fact, the NPI significantly slowed down reading times in the inference region. Our results therefore favor those scalar theories that predict that the NPI is costly to process (Chierchia 2006), or other, nonscalar theories (Giannakidou 1998, Ladusaw 1992, Postal 2005, Szabolcsi 2004) that likewise predict NPI processing cost but, unlike Chierchia (2006), expect the magnitude of the processing cost to vary with the actual pragmatics of the NPI. (shrink)

The thesis of Weak Unrestricted Composition says that every pair of objects has a fusion. This thesis has been argued by Contessa and Smith to be compatible with the world being junky and hence to evade an argument against the necessity of Strong Unrestricted Composition proposed by Bohn. However, neither Weak Unrestricted Composition alone nor the different variants of it that have been proposed in the literature can provide us with a satisfying answer to the special composition question, or so (...) we will argue. We will then go on to explore an alternative family of purely mereological rules in the vicinity of Weak Unrestricted Composition, Cardinal Composition: A plurality of pairwise non-overlapping objects composes an object iff the objects in the plurality are of cardinality smaller than $$\kappa $$ κ. As we will show, all the instances for infinite $$\kappa $$ κ s determine fusion and are compatible with junk, and every instance for a $$\kappa > \aleph _0$$ κ > ℵ 0 is furthermore compatible with gunk and dense chains of parthood. (shrink)

Ways of Scope Taking is concerned with syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of scope. Its starting point is the well-known but often neglected fact that different types of quantifiers interact differently with each other and other operators. The theoretical examination of significant bodies of data, both old and novel, leads to two central claims. (1) Scope is a by-product of a set of distinct Logical Form processes; each quantifier participates in those that suit its particular features. (2) Scope interaction is (...) further constrained by the semantics of the interacting operators. The arguments are developed using Minimalist syntax, Generalized Quantify theory, Discourse Representation Theory, and algebraic semantics. The contributors (Beghelli, Ben-Shalom, Doetjes, Farkas, Gutiérrez Rexach, Honcoop, Stabler, Stowell, Szabolcsi and Zwarts) make tightly related theoretical assumptions and focus on related empirical phenomena, which include the direct and inverse scope of quantifiers, distributivity, negation, modal and intensional contexts, weak islands, event-related readings, interrogatives, wh/quantifier interactions, and Hungarian syntax. An introduction to the formal semantics background is provided. Audience: Linguists, philosophers, computational and psycholinguists; advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in these fields. (shrink)

New technological developments have fundamentally transformed human life. Throughout this process, fundamental questions about human beings have once again been posed. The paper examines how technological change affects understandings of human beings and their bodies, thereby requiring new approaches to anthropology. First, Section 2 illustrates how the use of technology has changed the understanding of human beings and their bodies. A new connection between the human being or the body and technology has emerged. Section 3 then moves onto considering the (...) increasing blurring of the boundaries between organisms and machines, showing how the understanding of humans and bodies is constantly being renegotiated in relation to machines. Based on this, Section 4 explores how the understanding of the human being and the body can be redesigned in the context of modern technology. To this end, approaches for a contemporary anthropology can be derived from critical posthumanism. Section 5 addresses concrete practice and examines the construction of identity in social media platforms such as Instagram. The paper argues that technological processes and social media are places where theology is constructed and appeals for a responsible theological co-creation of these places. It advocates that technology offers the opportunity to question traditional anthropological concepts and to renegotiate understandings of the human being and the body. -- Puzio, Anna: Digital and Technological Identities – In Whose Image? A philosophical-theological approach to identity construction in social media and technology. In: Cursor (2021). (shrink)

Metaethical constructivism aims to explain morality’s authority and relevance by basing it in agency, in a capacity of the creatures who are in fact morally bound. But constructivists have struggled to wring anything recognizably moral from an appropriately minimal conception of agency. Even if they could, basing our reasons in our individual agency seems to make other people reason-giving for us only indirectly. This paper argues for a constructivism based on a social conception of agency, on which our capacity to (...) recognize ourselves as having reasons ties us inescapably to others. It argues that mutual recognition is a pervasive feature of linguistic concepts, and builds this into a view called transformative expressivism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 215-232 [Access article in PDF] Eighteenth-Century Print Culture and the "Truth" of Fictional Narrative Lisa Zunshine As a session entitled "Truth" at a recent Modern Language Association of America annual convention has demonstrated, the obsession with the epistemologies of truth is alive and well. Our "familiar ways of thinking and talking about truth," as one of the speakers, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, observed, remain (...) "theoretically elusive, discursively slippery, and hard or perhaps impossible to articulate clearly in relation to other current concepts and ideas" 1 --an irresistible invitation to further thinking and talking on the subject. My essay enters this conversation by attempting to contemplate truth not as a stable attribute but as a ongoing attribution, that is, not as an inherent property but rather as a dynamic process predicated upon functional idiosyncrasies of our evolved cognitive architecture. The broad question posed here is this: What if our never-ending quest for truth is itself cognitively constructed and the various forms that this quest takes manifest the (not necessarily harmonious) interaction between our evolved cognitive capacities and the ever-changing specifics of our cultural environment?Consider just one of the forms of such an interaction, namely, our age-long preoccupation with the "truth" of literary narrative. In many respects, this preoccupation is counterproductive: the most "fantastic" story contains a number of contingently useful "truths" about the world, whereas the most "factual" narrative manipulates facts by virtue of being a narrative or a subjective arrangementof information. Still, we persevere in wanting to put the label "fiction" or "nonfiction" onto any story that comes our way. As I will argue, the bookstore's organization of its sections satisfies this species of "cognitive" craving as well as [End Page 215] reinforces it, making it seem culturally inevitable. Viewed from this perspective, our culture appears to be a multifaceted feedback mechanism engaged in the process of satisfying, reinforcing, struggling with, and manipulating our cognitive predispositions.The cultural manipulation of our cognitive predispositions is the topic of the present essay, which discusses several examples of such manipulation that respond to our desire to assign a certain "truth-value" to a given narrative, i.e., to attach a label to it announcing its "factuality" or "fictionality." "Truth-value" is a loaded term, resisting definition, and liable to lead me into trouble. Imperfect as it is, however, I need it in order to shuffle between two scholarly discourses that do not (yet) have much vocabulary in common: literary criticism and cognitive science. The reason for turning to cognitive science in my discussion of literary narrative is that cognitive anthropologists and psychologists frequently engage the same problems that we do when we ask, What is "Fiction"? How is it different from "History"? How do we decide whether what we are reading is "true?" The key difference between the two approaches is, however, that whereas the literary critic focuses on specific texts produced and read in specific cultural circumstances, the cognitive anthropologist pays attention to the cross-cultural insistence with which people wish to and often claim to distinguish "truth" from "fiction" and inquires into the possible evolutionary history of the cognitive architecture implicated in our never-ending quest for "truth." The latter perspective can thus be useful for literary studies because, by suggesting that our evolved cognitive architecture often "encourages" us to construe the world as a negotiation of "truths" and "nontruths," this perspective begins to account--at least on some level--for the fact that people may approach a complex cultural artifact, such as a novel, with a "truth"/"non-truth" binary in mind that is ultimately not very productive. 2 Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists frequently point to disjunctions between the tasks that our brain evolved to solve and the tasks that we have to deal with in the modern environment; our vexed insistence on determining the truth-value of the 500-page printed narrative--not an object one would come across in the Pleistocene--can be seen as yet another instance of such a disjunction.Thus, I suggest that, on the... (shrink)

In this paper I consider some issues concerning cognitive enhancements and the ethics of enhancing in reproduction and parenting. I argue that there are moral reasons to enhance the cognitive capacities of the children one has, or of the children one is going to have, and that these enhancements should not be seen as an alternative to pursuing important changes in society that might also improve one’s own and one’s children’s life. It has been argued that an emphasis on enhancing (...) cognitive capacities might encourage the commodification of children. But this objection seems misplaced. The reasons why one decides to reproduce can be subject to moral approbation or condemnation, as such rea-sons might be indicators of the quality of one’s parenting and the happiness of the future persons one is committed to bringing to life. However, once the decision to reproduce is made, no further harm comes from taking as few risks as possible on behalf of the persons to whom one is giving life with their health, character and cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Joan McGregor argues that “colleges and universities should adopt as part of their core mission the development of skills of civil discourse” rather than engaging in the practice of restricting controversial speakers from making presentations on campuses. I agree with McGregor concerning the need for increased civil discourse. However, this does not mean universities should welcome speakers to publicly present any material they wish without restriction or oversight. In this paper, I make three main arguments: (i) Colleges and universities have (...) a duty to protect members of the campus community from the harm and exclusion resulting from hateful or harmful speech, in the same way that they must protect them from sexual assaults and concussions. (ii) In the vast majority of cases, this duty can be fulfilled by holding speakers to standards of discourse that prevail in academic debate, and insisting on a number of procedural requirements. (iii) We should be wary of conservative arguments framed in terms of free speech, because they can be deployed to undermine important functions of the university in a democratic society, namely, to teach students how to be discerning citizens, and to protect thinkers willing to be critical of the government and the ruling classes. (shrink)

Combinatory logic (Curry and Feys 1958) is a “variable-free” alternative to the lambda calculus. The two have the same expressive power but build their expressions differently. “Variable-free” semantics is, more precisely, “free of variable binding”: it has no operation like abstraction that turns a free variable into a bound one; it uses combinators—operations on functions—instead. For the general linguistic motivation of this approach, see the works of Steedman, Szabolcsi, and Jacobson, among others. The standard view in linguistics is that reflexive (...) and personal pronouns are free variables that get bound by an antecedent through some coindexing mechanism. In variable free semantics the same task is performed by some combinator that identifies two arguments of the function it operates on (a duplicator). This combinator may be built into the lexical semantics of the pronoun, into that of the antecedent, or it may be a free-floating operation applicable to predicates or larger chunks of texts, i.e. a typeshifter. This note is concerned with the case of cross-sentential anaphora. It adopts Hepple’s and Jacobson’s interpretation of pronouns as identity maps and asks how this can be extended to the cross-sentential case, assuming the dynamic semantic view of anaphora. It first outlines the possibility of interpreting indefinites that antecede non-ccommanded pronouns as existential quantifiers enriched with a duplicator. Then it argues that it is preferable to use the duplicator as a type-shifter that applies “on the fly”. The proposal has consequences for two central ingredients of the classical dynamic semantic treatment: it does away with abstraction over assignments and with treating indefinites as inherently existentially quantified. However, cross-sentential anaphora remains a matter of binding, and the idea of propositions as context change potentials is retained. (shrink)

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argues that free speech possesses value because listening is valuable: it can advance one’s own thinking and action. However, listening becomes difficult when one finds the views of a speaker to be wrong, repellant, or even simply naïve. Everyday wisdom would have it that such cases present the greatest opportunities for growth. Is there substance to this claim? In particular, is there radical political value to be found in listening to others at the very (...) times one is most disinclined to do so? I contend that there is. This paper explores the political potential of what I call “radical listening.” What characterizes radical listening? How can it serve politically transformative purposes? To what extent are the powers of radical listening strategic, and to what extent is it valuablefor more conceptual reasons? Under what circumstances is it appropriate? What are the limits to, and dangers of, radical listening? (shrink)

Standard theories of scope are semantically blind. They employ a single logico-syntactic rule of scope assignment quantifying in Quantifier Raising, storage, or type change etc which roughly speaking prefixes an expression \aplha.

Both Immanuel Kant and Paul Guyer have raised important concerns about the limitations of Lockean thought. Following Guyer, I will focus my attention on questions about the proper ambitions and likely achievements of inquiry into the natural/physical world. I will argue that there are at least two important respects, not discussed by Guyer, in which Locke’s account of natural philosophy is much more flexible and accommodating than may be immediately apparent. On my interpretation, however, one crucial source of a too-limited (...) vision of natural philosophy remains in Locke, where he is appropriately criticized by both Kant and Guyer. My method will be to begin with a distinction that Locke draws in the very first draft of the Essay, between what he calls “the sensible object” and, on the other hand, “the uncertain philosophical cause.” I believe that Locke’s notion of “sensible object,” as opposed to uncertain philosophical cause, retains a central place in his thought in the published Essay, despite the fact thateven though this contrast is never made explicitly there. Tracing the evolution of these two concepts in his thought will allow us to track and better understand his developing views about the relation between the project of the. (shrink)

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content‐sensitive first‐personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over‐intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles to providing a satisfactory account. We explain why they should (...) be rejected anyway, and then offer a new, knowledge‐first virtue epistemological theory of the basing relation that shows how we can substantially theorize about mental processes without these commitments. The resulting view plausibly captures the way in which basing is an inherently mental and content‐sensitive process. (shrink)

This very short paper highlights some of my recent and forthcoming work on “good epistemic practices” in the financial services industry. It identifies some epistemic dimensions of risk management in banking and illustrates how managing for good epistemic practices might be helpful.

This paper proposes a novel account of the contents of memory. By drawing on insights from the philosophy of perception, I propose a hybrid account of the contents of memory designed to preserve important aspects of representationalist and relationalist views. The hybrid view I propose also contributes to two ongoing debates in philosophy of memory. First, I argue that, in opposition to eternalist views, the hybrid view offers a less metaphysically-charged solution to the co-temporality problem. Second, I show how the (...) hybrid view conceives of the relationship between episodic memory and other forms of episodic thinking. I conclude by considering some disanalogies between perception and memory and by replying to objections. I argue that, despite there being important differences between memory and perception, those differences do not harm my project. (shrink)

In the Gorgias, Plato contrasts pastry cooking unfavorably with medicine, in order to illustrate the difference he believes exists between a mere knack and a genuine art. I attempt to show that Plato’s treatment of cooking distorts or misconceives that activity, and does so in order to shore up his arguments about the distinction between arts and knacks, and about the separation and hierarchy between minds and bodies. Plato’s treatment of cookery seems to be informed not by the activity of (...) cookery itself, but by medicine, the activity against which it is set. In contrast, I shall suggest that attending to foodmaking directly can challenge Plato’s art/knack and soul/body dichotomies in several important ways. My method combines close examination of the passage with more speculative reflections on the significance and consequences of Plato’s ideas about cooking. (shrink)

Mit den Fortschritten in Generativer Künstlicher Intelligenz, Large Language Models, Brain-Computer Interfaces und genetischen Eingriffen gewinnt auch der Transhumanismus an Relevanz. Der Transhumanismus ist ein beliebtes Thema der Medien und wird in Tages- und Wochenzeitungen sowie im Fernsehen gerne aufgegriffen. Außerdem gibt es inzwischen viele Filme, die den Transhumanismus thematisieren, z. B. die Dokumentation „Endlich unendlich“ (2021, Regie: Stephan Bergmann). Der Transhumanismus wurde in Österreich auch Gegenstand einer Verschwörungserzählung, über die der Bayrische Rundfunk aufgeklärt hat. Auf den Wahlplakaten der „Partei (...) für Gesundheitsforschung“ ist der Transhumanist Aubrey de Grey abgebildet, der ein in Cambridge lebender Brite ist, aber auf Plakaten in Deutschland dargestellt wird. Diese und weitere Entwicklungen machen es notwendig, sich mit dem Transhumanismus aus wissenschaftlicher Perspektive auseinanderzusetzen. Was ist der Transhumanismus? Alle sprechen von Transhumanismus, aber was der Transhumanismus letztlich ist, bleibt häufig unklar. Der Transhumanismus (TH) ist eine philosophisch-technologische Bewegung des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, die es sich zum Ziel setzt, mittels neuer Technologien den Menschen grundlegend zu transformieren. Wichtig ist dabei, dass sich der TH nicht mit den Optimierungsbestrebungen in der Gesellschaft oder technologischem Fortschritt gleichsetzen lässt. Vielmehr verstehe ich unter TH die Gruppe, die sich um die Organisation Humanity+ in Kalifornien versammelt und die Personen, die sich explizit alsVertreter*innen des TH verstehen. Der TH hat eine ganz eigene Agenda, eigene Institutionen, Organisationen und Publikationsorgane.4 Zu den Themen und Visionen gehören die Lebensverlängerung von mehreren Hundert Jahren bis zur Unsterblichkeit, Kryonik (das Einfrieren des Körpers, der wieder aufgetaut werden soll, wenn nach transhumanistischer Vorstellung Unsterblichkeit ermöglicht werden kann), umfassendes Enhancement und die Verschmelzung von Körper und Technik sowie Beseitigung allen Leids, aller Krankheiten und Aufhebung des Alterns. Der TH strebt danach, mittels Technik neue Sinnesfähigkeiten zu erlangen und neue (virtuelle) Erfahrungswelten zu erschließen. Außerdem wird von vielen Transhumanist*innen auch die hochspekulative Vision des Mind Uploading vertreten, die streng genommen dem Posthumanismus zugeordnet werden muss Gemäß dieser Vision soll durch das maschinelle Lesen des Gehirns der ganze Mensch auf ein externes Medium hochgeladen werden können. Die Vision des Mind Uploadings ist aus naturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive hochumstritten, ist aber ein sehr beliebtes Motiv, das auch außerhalb des TH Wirkung zeigt und in viele Science-Fiction- Filme Eingang gefunden hat (z.B. die Amazon Serie „Upload“, 2020, Regie: Greg Daniels). Das Bestreben des TH, den Menschen grundlegend zu transformieren, wirft zunächst die Frage auf, wie der TH den Menschen überhaupt versteht. Dieser Frage nach dem Menschenverständnis des TH habe ich mich in meinem Buch „Über-Menschen. Philosophische Auseinandersetzung mit der Anthropologie des Transhumanismus“ gewidmet. Philosophische Anthropologie bezeichnet die wissenschaftlichen, philosophischen Reflexionen auf den Menschen. Welches Menschenverständnis vertritt der TH und lässt sich unsere Anthropologie auf dieser Grundlage weiterentwickeln? Das Buch gliedert sich in drei Teile: Teil 1 führt zuerst in die Bewegung des TH ein, worauf Teil II aufbaut, der sich mit dem Menschenverständnis des TH beschäftigt. Teil III betrachtet schließlich heutige Optimierungsbestrebungen in der Gesellschaft sowie neue Ansätze für die Technikanthropologie (z. B. Kritischer Posthumanismus und Neuer Materialismus). Die nachfolgenden Kapitel dieses Aufsatzes sind ein Ausschnitt aus Teil II, der Untersuchung des transhumanistischen Menschenverständnisses. Dieser Aufsatz widmet sich dem „genetisch codierten Menschen“ im TH, also der transhumanistischen Sicht auf den Menschen als jemanden, die*der vollständig von ihren*seinen Genen bestimmt ist. Der genetische Diskurs ist nur einer von fünf im TH dominanten Diskursen, die das transhumanistische Menschenverständnis ausmachen. Zu den anderen Diskursen bzw. transhumanistischen Bestimmungen des Menschen gehören: der Diskurs um die „Natur des Menschen“, der Maschinendiskurs – die Bestimmung des Menschen als Maschine –, der neurowissenschaftliche Diskurs – die Gleichsetzung des Menschen mit dem Gehirn bzw. Neuronalem und zuletzt die metaphysischen Verhältnisbestimmungen von Geist und Körper (PUZIO, Über-Menschen, Kap. 4). Diese transhumanistischen Bestimmungen des Menschen werden am Ende ausgewertet. Ohne die Ergebnisse dieses Kapitels im Detail vorwegnehmen zu wollen, kann für die Gesamtuntersuchung des TH gesagt werden, dass das transhumanistische Menschenverständnis sich als hochproblematisch erweist. Die transhumanistischen Argumentationsstrukturen sind nicht tragfähig und der TH behauptet sich auf die Naturwissenschaften zu berufen, widerspricht allerdings den aktuellen Ergebnissen der Naturwissenschaften. Dies wird in den nachfolgenden Kapiteln gut deutlich werden. Der TH hat ein reduktionistisches Menschenverständnis und reduziert den Menschen beispielsweise auf „Information“. Viele Ausführungen sind diskriminierend z. B. gegenüber Kranken, Alternden und Menschen mit Behinderungen und letztendlich wird sogar jeder Mensch, auch der gesunde junge Mensch, gegenüber der Maschine abgewertet, die aus transhumanistischer Sicht den Menschen weit übertrifft. Im weiteren Verlauf der Arbeit werden sogar „ideologische Elemente“ im TH identifiziert. Daher wird in der Arbeit abgelehnt, den TH als Grundlage für die Weiterentwicklung der Anthropologie zu verwenden und stattdessen werden im letzten Teil der Arbeit alternative Ansätze für die Technikanthropologie präsentiert. Wie bereits erwähnt, richtet sich die Kritik am TH jedoch nicht gegen die heutige Optimierung in der Gesellschaft, die ebenfalls im letzten Teil der Arbeit diskutiert wird. Optimierungsbestrebungen hat es schon immer gegeben und sie werden nun durch neue Technologien weiter verändert, sie sind aber nicht mit der Bewegung des TH gleichzusetzen. Das Kapitel ist eingebettet zwischen dem Maschinendiskurs (Mensch als Maschine) mit seinen Ausführungen zu Information und Kybernetik und dem neurowissenschaftlichen Diskurs („Der Mensch ist ihr*sein Gehirn“). Es wird im Folgenden der genetische Diskurs im TH untersucht, also wie der TH den Menschen vollständig auf Gene zurückführt, und dies schließlich kritisch geprüft. Sind „gute Gene“ alles? Kann der Mensch vollständig über ihre*seine Gene bestimmt werden? Und was hat es mit der trügerischen „genetischen Information“ auf sich? Zunächst wird der genetische Diskurs im TH dargestellt, also die genetischen Ausführungen des TH präsentiert (Kap. 2), danach wird der Blick auf den Gebrauch der genetischen Metaphern im TH gerichtet (Kap. 3) und zuletzt werden die genetischen Vorstellungen des TH kritisiert (Kap. 4). Der Aufsatz schließt in Kap. 5mit einer (vorläufigen) Zusammenführung der Ergebnisse und einem Ausblick. (shrink)

I will make the following two main claims: (4) a. Under syntactically specifiable conditions superlatives take sentential scope. b. Sentential scope superlatives are necessarily indefinite.

In Sect. 2, I will introduce what religious robots are and present examples of such robots. Then, in Sect. 3, I will discuss my project with a NAO robot at the Katholikentag. In Sect. 4, I will discuss anthropological and ethical questions related to religious robots. Thus, I will outline the direction in which research on religious robots can go, where the challenges lie, and highlight two key advantages. Finally, in Sect. 5, I conclude with an outlook for future research (...) on religious robots. - Puzio, Anna: A NAO Robot Performing Religious Practices. In: ET-Studies 15/1 (2024), pp. 129-140. DOI: 10.2143/ETS.15.1.3293070. (shrink)

In this paper, we identify some key features of what makes something a disease, and consider whether these apply to pregnancy. We argue that there are some compelling grounds for regarding pregnancy as a disease. Like a disease, pregnancy affects the health of the pregnant person, causing a range of symptoms from discomfort to death. Like a disease, pregnancy can be treated medically. Like a disease, pregnancy is caused by a pathogen, an external organism invading the host’s body. Like a (...) disease, the risk of getting pregnant can be reduced by using prophylactic measures. We address the question of whether the ‘normality’ of pregnancy, its current necessity for human survival, or the value often attached to it are reasons to reject the view that pregnancy is a disease. We point out that applying theories of disease to the case of pregnancy, can in many cases illuminate inconsistencies and problems within these theories. Finally, we show that it is difficult to find one theory of disease that captures all paradigm cases of diseases, while convincingly excluding pregnancy. We conclude that there are both normative and pragmatic reasons to consider pregnancy a disease. (shrink)

Semantics plays a role in grammar in at least three guises. (A) Linguists seek to account for speakers‘ knowledge of what linguistic expressions mean. This goal is typically achieved by assigning a model theoretic interpretation in a compositional fashion. For example, *No whale flies* is true if and only if the intersection of the sets of whales and fliers is empty in the model. (B) Linguists seek to account for the ability of speakers to make various inferences based on semantic (...) knowledge. For example, *No whale flies* entails *No blue whale flies* and *No whale flies high*. (C) The wellformedness of a variety of syntactic constructions depends on morpho-syntactic features with a semantic flavor. For example, *Under no circumstances would a whale fly* is grammatical, whereas *Under some circumstances would a whale fly* is not, corresponding to the downward vs. upward monotonic features of the preposed phrases. It is usually assumed that once a compositional model theoretic interpretation is assigned to all expressions, its fruits can be freely enjoyed by inferencing and syntax. What place might proof theory have in this picture? (shrink)

Quantification over individuals, times, and worlds can in principle be made explicit in the syntax of the object language, or left to the semantics and spelled out in the meta-language. The traditional view is that quantification over individuals is syntactically explicit, whereas quantification over times and worlds is not. But a growing body of literature proposes a uniform treatment. This paper examines the scopal interaction of aspectual raising verbs (begin), modals (can), and intensional raising verbs (threaten) with quantificational subjects in (...) Shupamem, Dutch, and English. It appears that aspectual raising verbs and at least modals may undergo the same kind of overt or covert scope-changing operations as nominal quantifiers; the case of intensional raising verbs is less clear. Scope interaction is thus shown to be a new potential diagnostic of object-linguistic quantification, and the similarity in the scope behavior of nominal and verbal quantifiers supports the grammatical plausibility of ontological symmetry, explored in Schlenker (2006). (shrink)

[...] I will only investigate [Austin's] claims as challenges to present-day model theoretic semantics. My main point will be to draw a sharp line between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of performatives and thereby discover a gap in Austin’s treatment. This will in my view naturally lead to the proposal in Section 2, that is, to treating performatives as denoting changes in intensional models. The rest of Section 2 will be concerned with the status of felicity conditions and a tentative (...) extension of Montague’s PTQ. (shrink)

This chapter makes the following main claims about Hungarian: A. There is a detailed parallelism between the structures of noun phrases (DPs) and clauses (CPs), involving inflection, possessor extraction, and articles as complementizers. B. "HAVE sentences" are existential sentences involving possessor extraction. C. The argument frame of complex event nominals is identical to that of the underlying verb. D. The deverbal affix in nominals may have either a plain verb or a complex verb in its scope.

In this paper we investigate composition models of incarnation, according to which Christ is a compound of qualitatively and numerically different constituents. We focus on three-part models, according to which Christ is composed of a divine mind, a human mind, and a human body. We consider four possible relational structures that the three components could form. We argue that a ‘hierarchy of natures’ model, in which the human mind and body are united to each other in the normal way, and (...) in which they are jointly related to the divine mind by the relation of co-action, is the most metaphysically plausible model. Finally, we consider the problem of how Christ can be a single person even when his components may be considered persons. We argue that an Aristotelian metaphysics, according to which identity is a matter of function, offers a plausible solution: Christ's components may acquire a radically new identity through being parts of the whole, which enables them to be reidentified as parts, not persons. (shrink)

Die folgende Untersuchung nimmt eine informationsethische und anthropologische Perspektive ein und legt einen Schwerpunkt auf die Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (IKT) im Gesundheitsbereich. Zunächst beschreiben und problematisieren wir das Feld der Informationsethik, das im Wesentlichen heute als Ethik von umfassenden, digitalen Computersystemen als informationsprozessierenden Maschinen verstanden wird (Kap. 2). Im zweiten, anthropologischen Schritt untersuchen wir, wie informationelle Gesundheitstechnologien das menschliche Selbstverständnis beeinflussen (Kap. 3). Dies leitet über zur ethischen Fragestellung, die Überwachung, Kontrolle und Autonomie als Brennpunkte des Gesundheitsbereichs fokussiert (Kap. 4). (...) Zuletzt geben wir als Ausblick einige Hinweise, wie eine dezidiert theologische Perspektive auf die Herausforderungen aussehen kann (Kap. 5). -- Puzio, Anna/Filipovic, Alexander: Personen als Informationsbündel? Informationsethische Perspektiven auf den Gesundheitsbereich. In: Fritz, Alexis/Mandry, Christof/Proft, Ingo/Schuster, Josef (Hg.): Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion. Anthropologische und ethische Herausforderungen neuer Entwicklungen im Gesundheitsbereich (Jahrbuch für Moraltheologie, 5). Freiburg: Herder 2021, S. 89–114. (shrink)

Felix Maschewski und Anna-Verena Nosthoff untersuchen Facebook als Beispiel einer besonders eindringlichen Form „kybernetischer Gouvernementalität“ und nehmen das „soziale“ Netzwerk dazu als psychopolitisches System von Affekten und Aktivierungen in den Blick. Dabei analysieren sie v.a. die zugrundeliegende »Sozialphysik des Anstoßes« und ihre implizite kybernetische Logik, um den so forcierten (behavioristischen) Subjektbegriff zu beleuchten. In diesem Konnex wird nicht nur dargestellt, wie das gouvernementale Unternehmen qua feedbacklogischer Programmatik die Entscheidungen, das Verhalten oder gar die Wünsche seiner Nutzer_innen antizipiert und auf (...) diese Weise indirekt ‚regiert‘, sondern auch, welche Konsequenzen die konsumtive Plattformlogik für das Politische selbst zeitigt. Letztlich zeigt sich, dass digitale Apparaturen entgegen dem insb. im Silicon Valley populären Narrativ von einer technologischen Neutralität keineswegs bloße Mittel, sondern zuallererst Machtinstrumente sind. (shrink)

Current theories of grammar handle both extraction and anaphorization by introducing variables into syntactic representations. Combinatory categorial grammar eliminates variables corresponding to gaps. Using the combinator W, the paper extends this approach to anaphors, which appear to act as overt bound variables. [Slightly extended version in Bartsch et al 1989.].

In this commentary on Nuno Venturinha’s Description of Situations, after highlighting what in my view are the most significant and innovative features of his work, I focus on Venturinha’s infallibilist approach to knowledge. This topic allows for a wider discussion concerning the pragmatist aspects of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I discuss this in three steps: first, by describing the general similarity between Wittgenstein and the pragmatists with respect to the emphasis on contexts; second, by focusing on the kind of fallibilism (...) endorsed by the pragmatists and its compatibility with Charles S. Peirce’s concept of the “indubitables,” which I take as a precursor of Wittgenstein’s concept of hinges; and, finally, by advancing the hypothesis that it is possible to find a form of fallibilism in the later Wittgenstein too, notwithstanding his insistence on the impossibility of mistakes. My conclusion is that while Venturinha’s contextualism finds support in the later Wittgenstein’s writings, his infallibilism does not. (shrink)