This paper offers a new angle on the common idea that the process of science does not support epistemic diversity. Under minimal assumptions on the nature of journal editing, we prove that editorial procedures, even when impartial in themselves, disadvantage less prominent research programs. This purely statistical bias in article selection further skews existing differences in the success rate and hence attractiveness of research programs, and exacerbates the reputation difference between the programs. After a discussion of the modeling assumptions, the (...) paper ends with a number of recommendations that may help promote scientific diversity through editorial decision making. (shrink)

This note contains a corrective and a generalization of results by Borsboom et al. (2008), based on Heesen and Romeijn (2019). It highlights the relevance of insights from psychometrics beyond the context of psychological testing.

This paper presents a uniform general account of regress problems in the form of a pentalemma—i.e., a set of five mutually inconsistent claims. Specific regress problems can be analyzed as instances of such a general schema, and this Regress Pentalemma Schema can be employed to generate deductively valid arguments from the truth of a subset of four claims to the falsity of the fifth. Thus, a uniform account of the nature of regress problems allows for an improved understanding of specific (...) regress objections or arguments, and, correspondingly, of the general logical geography of the debate about infinite regresses. This uniform approach is illustrated by a treatment of the classical epistemological problem of justification, but it encompasses a whole variety of cases including explanation and ontological grounding. Furthermore, this general account is compared and contrasted with the existing literature discussing argument schemata for regress objections, particularly with the work of Jan Willem Wieland. It is shown how such other schemata can be incorporated and superseded by the general Regress Pentalemma Schema. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that blameworthiness is epistemically constrained. If one lacks sufficient epistemic access to the fact that some action harms another, then one cannot be blamed for harming. Acceptance of an epistemic condition for blameworthiness can give rise to a worry, however: could agents ever successfully evade blameworthiness by deliberately stunting their epistemic position? I discuss a particularly worrisome version of such epistemic shirking, in which agents pre-emptively seek to avoid access to potentially morally relevant facts. As Roy (...) Sorensen and Jan Willem Wieland have argued, we seem to be faced with a potentially troubling regress when trying to explain what goes wrong in such situations. I argue that the solution to this so-called Shirker Problem is not to be found in complicated and demanding anti-shirking-principles with universal scope and potentially self-reflexive content. Instead, careful consideration of the necessary motivational make-up of genuine shirkers reveals their ignorance to lack the necessary depth to be exculpatory. Since shirkers by definition react to the possibility of the revelation of morally relevant facts with acts of epistemic self-limitation, they necessarily prove guilty of a form of culpable moral recklessness. Epistemic shirking thus does not pose a worrisome problem for ethical theory. (shrink)

Seeing how the idea of the ‘ruler cult’ and the necessary ‘myth-making’ to establish it exists to this day, as seen with the regime of a 21st century dictator like Kim Jong-il, it would be most interesting to see what parallels exist between cases of divine leadership and what we might learn about our contemporary cult rulers when looking at the dynamics of the two-millennia-old cult of the deified Emperor Augustus. As such, I have formulated a central question that focuses (...) on the reign of Divus Augustus, and in doing so provides opportunity to extrapolate from it new insights in similar but contemporary figures of leadership. A clear case of 'to understand motives in the present, one must look at actions in the past.'. (shrink)

If Jewish Bolsheviks could put an end to the imperial rule of the Romanovs, could they pose a threat to the vision of a Third Reigh? A question the German National Socialists are likely to have asked themselves before and on the eve of plotting the rise of the Nazi regime. After all, Europe had had a long-standing relationship with blaming the Jews for the world’s miseries. A relationship Germany was ready to refuel, as indicated by German Field Marshal Walter (...) von Reichenau, when he stated that ‘the most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture.’ But the German fears of Jewish interference with their great scheme for Europe’s future, must surely have been inspired by more than just the age-old conspiratorial allegation that Jews were the main forces behind world politics. As such, this essay will seek to inspect the apparent rise of antisemitic fears at the time, and put a case forward to show how religion played into all this. (shrink)

Robert Brandom makes several mistakes in his discussion of Sellars's "Two-Ply" account of observation. Brandom does not recognize the difference in "level" between observation reports concerning physical objects and 'looks'-statements. He also denies that 'looks'-statements are reports or even make claims. They then demonstrate a more correct reading of Sellars on 'looks'-statements.

The most discussed of architectural marvels tend to be the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus or the Parthenon at Athens, supposedly because they are the ones we happen to have nominated ‘world wonders’; but that doesn’t mean all the rest of temple-type sites to be found across the greater Mediterranean area have less wonder about them. On the contrary; when wanting to explore and explain the role temples played in the lives of their ‘subscribers’ and a (...) temple site’s place as often the nucleus of a community, the Serapeum at Alexandria is as excellent a piece of architecture to examine as any. (shrink)

Dit werkstuk betrekt zich op de vraag of de de facto legitimiteit van Knoet de Grote als koning van Angelsaksisch Engeland, te verklaren is aan de hand van de theorieën over legitimiteit zoals gepostuleerd door Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (1864—1920). Bestaande literatuur over Knoet de Grote zijn troonsbestijging, zoals dat van vooraanstaand 19e-eeuws historicus Edward Augustus Freeman, zou een ‘geromantiseerd’ beeld hebben geschetst van de kwestie. Dit werkstuk zal kijken of dit beeld, aan de hand van Webers theorie over waar (...) legitimiteit in gegrond kan zijn, ten eerste terecht te noemen is en, ten tweede, of het Knoets status als legitiem vorst van het ‘Angelsaksische’ volk goed kan verklaren. (shrink)

An interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit showing its continued relevance to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do ‘‘hang together.’’ Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but (...) so are the resonances. (shrink)

Marx’s vision of unalienated production is often thought to be subject to decisive objections. This article argues that these objections rely on a misinterpretation of Marx’s position. It provides a new interpretation of Marx’s vision of unalienated production. Unlike another well-known account, it suggests that unalienated production involves realizing oneself through providing others with the goods and services they need for their self-realization. It argues that this view is appealing and that it offers a more successful response to objections than (...) previous interpretations. In doing so, it hopes to put Marx’s concern with alienation and nonalienation back on the table. (shrink)

Recent work in the metaphysics of gender mostly focuses on trying to solve the exclusion problem - roughly, the problem of giving a metaphysical account of gender that doesn’t exclude anyone from their appropriate gender category. It is acknowledged that no completely satisfactory answer to the exclusion problem has yet been given in the literature; typically such theories fail to account for the diverse experiences and characteristics of trans people. One response is to adopt an anti-realism about gender properties, such (...) as Heather Logue’s gender fictionalism. I rebut the move to an anti-realism, showing that it relies on assuming a representationalism about gender vocabulary that we need not hold. I put forward a non-representationalist theory of gender properties that analyses gender vocabulary in terms of its inferential profile, rather than its representational features. This theory constitutes a deflationary realism about gender properties; it solves the inclusion problem, and guarantees the first-person epistemic authority of an individual regarding their own gender identity. (shrink)

According to a standard representationalist view cognitive capacities depend on internal content-carrying states. Recent alternatives to this view have been met with the reaction that they have, at best, limited scope, because a large range of cognitive phenomena—those involving absent and abstract features—require representational explanations. Here we challenge the idea that the consideration of cognition regarding the absent and the abstract can move the debate about representationalism along. Whether or not cognition involving the absent and the abstract requires the positing (...) of representations depends upon whether more basic forms of cognition require the positing of representations. (shrink)

Pragmatism has ties to Idealism; it has even been accused of being a form of idealism. I tell a story about the changing nature of idealism that makes sense of its relationship to pragmatism without threatening to collapse the two. My story is a genealogy that begins well before pragmatism shows up. Pragmatism has very little in common with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism (...) underwent an evolution transforming it into something primed to influence and maybe bleed into pragmatism. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in Germany between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought. (shrink)

In a recent paper Horsten embarked on a journey along the limits of the domain of the unknowable. Rather than knowability simpliciter, he considered a priori knowability, and by the latter he meant absolute provability, i.e. provability that is not relativized to a formal system. He presented an argument for the conclusion that it is not absolutely provable that there is a natural number of which it is true but absolutely unprovable that it has a certain property. The argument depends (...) on a description principle. I will argue that the latter principle implies the knowability of all arithmetical truths. Therefore, Horsten's argument is either sound but its conclusion is trivial, or his argument is unsound. (shrink)

A many-faceted beast, the metaphysics of relations can be approached from many angles. One could begin with the various ways in which relational states are expressed in natural language. If a more historical treatment is wanted, one could begin with Plato, Aristotle, or Leibniz. In the following, I will approach the topic by first drawing on Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1903) (still a natural-enough starting point), and then turn to a discussion mainly of positionalism. The closing section contains an overview (...) of the six contributions to this Special Issue. (shrink)

The philosophical literature on scientific explanation in neuroscience has been dominated by the idea of mechanisms. The mechanist philosophers often claim that neuroscience is in the business of finding mechanisms. This view has been challenged in numerous ways by showing that there are other successful and widespread explanatory strategies in neuroscience. However, the empirical evidence for all these claims was hitherto lacking. Empirical evidence about the pervasiveness and uses of various explanatory strategies in neuroscience is particularly needed because examples and (...) case studies that are used to illustrate philosophical claims so far tend to be hand-picked. The risk of confirmation bias is therefore considerable: when looking for white swans, all one finds is that swans are white. The more systematic quantitative and qualitative bibliometric study of a large body of relevant literature that we present in this paper can put such claims into perspective. Using bibliometric tools, we identify the typical linguistic patterns used in the alleged mechanistic, dynamical, and topological explanations in the literature, their preponderance and how they change over time. Our findings show abundant use of mechanistic language, but also the presence of a significant neuroscience literature using topological and dynamical explanatory language, which grows over time and increasingly differentiates from each other and from mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

In a number of recent philosophical debates, it has become common to distinguish between two kinds of normative reasons, often called the right kind of reasons (henceforth: RKR) and the wrong kind of reasons (henceforth: WKR). The distinction was first introduced in discussions of the so-called buck-passing account of value, which aims to analyze value properties in terms of reasons for pro-attitudes and has been argued to face the wrong kind of reasons problem. But nowadays it also gets applied in (...) other philosophical contexts and to reasons for other responses than pro-attitudes, for example in recent debates about evidentialism and pragmatism about reasons for belief. While there seems to be wide agreement that there is a general and uniform distinction that applies to reasons for different responses, there is little agreement about the scope, relevance and nature of this distinction. Our aim in this article is to shed some light on this issue by surveying the RKR/WKR distinction as it has been drawn with respect to different responses, and by examining how it can be understood as a uniform distinction across different contexts. We start by considering reasons for pro-attitudes and emotions in the context of the buck-passing account of value (§1). Subsequently we address the distinction that philosophers have drawn with respect to reasons for other attitudes, such as beliefs and intentions (§2), as well as with respect to reasons for action (§3). We discuss the similarities and differences between the ways in which philosophers have drawn the RKR/WKR distinction in these areas and offer different interpretations of the idea of a general, uniform distinction. The major upshot is that there is at least one interesting way of substantiating a general RKR/WKR distinction with respect to a broad range of attitudes as well as actions. We argue that this has important implications for the proper scope of buck-passing accounts and the status of the wrong kind of reasons problem (§4). (shrink)

This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain how (...) they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

In a previous work we introduced the algorithm \SQEMA\ for computing first-order equivalents and proving canonicity of modal formulae, and thus established a very general correspondence and canonical completeness result. \SQEMA\ is based on transformation rules, the most important of which employs a modal version of a result by Ackermann that enables elimination of an existentially quantified predicate variable in a formula, provided a certain negative polarity condition on that variable is satisfied. In this paper we develop several extensions of (...) \SQEMA\ where that syntactic condition is replaced by a semantic one, viz. downward monotonicity. For the first, and most general, extension \SSQEMA\ we prove correctness for a large class of modal formulae containing an extension of the Sahlqvist formulae, defined by replacing polarity with monotonicity. By employing a special modal version of Lyndon's monotonicity theorem and imposing additional requirements on the Ackermann rule we obtain restricted versions of \SSQEMA\ which guarantee canonicity, too. (shrink)

In recent years the idea that perceptual content is tensed in the sense that we can perceive objects as present or as past has come under attack. In this paper the notion of tensed content is to the contrary defended. The paper argues that assuming that something like an intentionalistic theory of perception is correct, it is very reasonable to suppose that perceptual content is tensed, and that a denial of this notion requires a denial of some intuitively very plausible (...) principles. The paper discusses some common objections against the notion of tensed content and concludes that none of them succeeds in showing that perceptual content cannot be tensed. (shrink)

In view of the philosophical problems that vex the debate on situated affectivity, it can seem wise to focus on simple cases. Accordingly, theorists often single out scenarios in which an individual employs a device in order to enhance their emotional experience, or to achieve new kinds of experience altogether, such as playing an instrument, going to the movies or sporting a fancy handbag. I argue that this narrow focus on cases that fit a ‘user/resource model’ tends to channel attention (...) away from more complex and also more problematic instances of situated affectivity. Among these are scenarios in which a social domain draws individuals into certain modes of affective interaction, often by way of attunement and habituation to affective styles and interaction patterns that are normative in the domain in question. This can lead to a phenomenon that is not so much ‘mind extension’ than ‘mind invasion’: affectivity is dynamically framed and modulated from without, often contrary to the prior orientations of the individuals in question. As an example, I discuss affective patterns prevalent in today’s corporate workplace. I claim that workplace affect sometimes contributes to what is effectively a ‘hack’ of employees’ subjectivity. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Patrick Reider’s essay “Sellars on Perception, Science and Realism: A Critical Response.” Reider is correct that Sellars’s realism is in tension with his generally Kantian approach to issues of knowledge and mind, but I do not think Reider’s analysis correctly locates the sources of that tension or how Sellars himself hoped to be able to resolve it. Reider’s own account of idealism and the reasons supporting it are rooted in the epistemological tradition that informed (...) the British empiricists, rather than in the metaphysical reasons that ruled within the German tradition from Leibniz through Hegel that has much more in common with Sellars’s position. Thus, Reider takes Sellars’s notion of picturing to be just another version of the representationalism that has dominated the Anglo-American tradition since Locke, whereas, in my view, because picturing is a non-semantical relation, it is an important ingredient in naturalizing the coherentist theories of the idealists. (shrink)

A summary of the "Rylean myth" (aka "the myth of Jones") from Wilfrid Sellars' classic article "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." He uses this "myth" to motivate the idea that our concepts of mental states are like theoretical concepts, developed to fulfill an explanatory role, and not at all somehow 'given' to us by direct acquaintance with instances of mental states.

Many philosophical discussions hinge on the concept of knowability. For example, there is a blooming literature on the so-called paradox of knowability. How to understand this notion, however? In this paper, we examine several approaches to the notion: the naive approach to take knowability as the possibility to know, the counterfactual approach endorsed by Edgington (1985) and Schlöder (2019) , approaches based on the notion of a capacity or ability to know (Fara 2010, Humphreys 2011), and finally, approaches that make (...) use of the resources of dynamic epistemic logic (van Benthem 2004, Holliday 2017). (shrink)

In the Critique of Gotha Programme, Karl Marx famously argues that a communist society will be characterised by the principle, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!’ I take up a question about this principle that was originally posed by G.A. Cohen, namely: what makes communism (so conceived) possible for Marx? In reply to this question, Cohen interprets Marx as saying that communism is possible because of limitless abundance, a view that Cohen takes to be (...) implausible for ecological reasons. I develop a new interpretation of Marx's position. On this interpretation, people in communist society achieve self-realisation through providing others with the goods and services required for their self-realisation. Coupled with a reasonably high (but not immense) development of productive power, self-realisation generates conditions in which people can produce according to their abilities and receive according to their needs. I defend this view as an interpretation of Marx and I argue that it represents a more plausible account of what makes communism possible than Cohen's interpretation in which technological advance and limitless abundance play the predominant role. (shrink)

The catuṣkoṭi or tetralemma is an argumentative figure familiar to any reader of Buddhist philosophical literature. Roughly speaking it consists of the enumeration of four alternatives: that some propositions holds, that it fails to hold, that it both holds and fails to hold, that it neither holds nor fails to hold. The tetralemma also constitutes one of the more puzzling features of Buddhist philosophy as the use to which it is put in arguments is not immediately obvious and certainly not (...) uniform: sometimes one of the four possibilities is selected as ‘the right one’, sometimes all four are rejected, sometimes all four are affirmed. It seems that this confusion is only exacerbated by the plethora of treatments we find in the modern commentarial literature, many of which try to analyze the tetralemma by recourse to notions of modern logic. Despite some important work done during the last decades a comprehensive study of the origin and development of the catuṣkoṭi from its use in the earliest Buddhist literature up to its later employment in the Buddhist philosophical works of Tibet, China, and Japan remains yet to be written. The present paper is obviously not intended to fill this gap, but has the specific objective of giving an interpretation of Nāgārrjuna’s employment of the tetralemma which makes both logical sense and is in accordance with his general philosophical position. (shrink)

We introduce the working concept of “affective arrangement.” This concept is the centerpiece of a perspective on situated affectivity that emphasizes relationality, dynamics, and performativity. Our proposal relates to work in cultural studies and continental philosophy in the Spinoza–Deleuze lineage, yet it is equally geared to the terms of recent work in the philosophy of emotion. Our aim is to devise a framework that can help flesh out how affectivity unfolds dynamically in a relational setting by which it is at (...) the same time modulated in recurring ways. With this orientation, this article contributes to the interdisciplinary study of situated affectivity and to the theoretical and conceptual unification of distinct strands of research from several disciplines. (shrink)

Higher-order logic, with its type-theoretic apparatus known as the simple theory of types (STT), has increasingly come to be employed in theorizing about properties, relations, and states of affairs—or ‘intensional entities’ for short. This paper argues against this employment of STT and offers an alternative: ordinal type theory (OTT). Very roughly, STT and OTT can be regarded as complementary simplifications of the ‘ramified theory of types’ outlined in the Introduction to Principia Mathematica (on a realist reading). While STT, understood as (...) a theory of intensional entities, retains the Fregean division of properties and relations into a multiplicity of categories according to their adicities and ‘input types’ and discards the division of intensional entities into different ‘orders’, OTT takes the opposite approach: it retains the hierarchy of orders (though with some modifications) and discards the categorisation of properties and relations according to their adicities and input types. In contrast to STT, this latter approach avoids intensional counterparts of the Epimenides and related paradoxes. Fundamental intensional entities lie at the base of the proposed hierarchy and are also given a prominent part to play in the individuation of non-fundamental intensional entities. (shrink)

Antirealists who hold the knowability thesis, namely that all truths are knowable, have been put on the defensive by the Church-Fitch paradox of knowability. Rejecting the non-factivity of the concept of knowability used in that paradox, Edgington has adopted a factive notion of knowability, according to which only actual truths are knowable. She has used this new notion to reformulate the knowability thesis. The result has been argued to be immune against the Church-Fitch paradox, but it has encountered several other (...) triviality objections. Schlöder in a forthcoming paper defends the general approach taken by Edgington, but amends it to save it in turn from the triviality objections. In this paper I will argue, first, that Schlöder's justification for the factivity of his version of the concept of knowability is vulnerable to criticism, but I will also offer an improved justification that is in the same spirit as his. To the extent that some philosophers are right about our intuitive concept of knowability being a factive one, it is important to explore factive concepts of knowability that are made formally precise. I will subsequently argue that Schlöder's version of the knowability thesis overgenerates knowledge or, in other words, it leads to attributions of knowledge where there is ignorance. This fits a general pattern for the research programme initiated by Edgington. This paper also contains preliminary investigations into the internal and logical structure of lines of inquiries, which raise interesting research questions. (shrink)

The sensorimotor theory of perceptual consciousness offers a form of enactivism in that it stresses patterns of interaction instead of any alleged internal representations of the environment. But how does it relate to forms of enactivism stressing the continuity between life and mind? We shall distinguish sensorimotor enactivism, which stresses perceptual capacities themselves, from autopoietic enactivism, which claims an essential connection between experience and autopoietic processes or associated background capacities. We show how autopoiesis, autonomous agency, and affective dimensions of experience (...) may fit into sensorimotor enactivism, and we identify differences between this interpretation and autopoietic enactivism. By taking artificial consciousness as a case in point, we further sharpen the distinction between sensorimotor enactivism and autopoietic enactivism. We argue that sensorimotor enactivism forms a strong default position for an enactive account of perceptual consciousness. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with two concepts of qualitativeness that apply to intensional entities. I propose an account of pure qualitativeness that largely follows the traditional understanding established by Carnap, and try to shed light on its ontological presuppositions. On this account, an intensional entity is purely qualitative iff it does not ‘involve’ any particular. An alternative notion of qualitativeness—which I propose to refer to as a concept of strict qualitativeness—has recently been introduced by Chad Carmichael. However, Carmichael’s definition presupposes (...) a highly fine-grained conception of properties and relations. To eliminate this presupposition, I tentatively suggest a different definition that rests on a concept of perspicuous denotation. In the penultimate section, both concepts of qualitativeness are put to work in distinguishing between different ‘grades’ of qualitative discriminability. (shrink)

I defend the proposal that certain forms of work—specifically forms that are socially necessary but involve the imposition of considerable burdens—be shared between citizens. I argue that sharing burdensome work would achieve several goals, including a more equal distribution of the benefits and burdens of work, a greater appreciation of each other's labour contributions, and an amelioration of problematic inequalities of status. I conclude by considering three objections: that sharing burdensome work would (1) involve morally unacceptable constraints on freedom, (2) (...) be prohibitively inefficient, and (3) forbid mutually advantageous trades. I argue that none of these objections succeed. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the role the Dutch gymnasium continues to play in the institutional maintenance of educational inequality. To that end we examine the relational and spatial features of state-sponsored elite education in the Dutch system: the unique identity the gymnasium seeks to cultivate; its value to its consumers; its geographic significance; and its market position amidst a growing array of other selective forms of schooling. We argue that there is a strong correlation between a higher social class (...) background and the concern to transmit one’s cultural habitus. We further speculate on the moral implications of state-sponsored elite education, both as it concerns the specific role of the gymnasium in the reproduction of social inequality as well as the curious tendency among its supporters to rationalise the necessity of its existence. (shrink)

The focus of this article is the question whether the notion of being in a position to know is closed under modus ponens. The question is answered negatively.

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s original account of “higher-order” cognition as fundamentally embodied and enacted. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy inspired theories that deemphasize overlaps between conceptual knowledge and motor intentionality or, on the contrary, focus exclusively on abstract thought. In contrast, this paper explores the link between Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor intentionality and his interpretations of our capacity to understand and interact productively with cultural symbolic systems. I develop my interpretation based on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of two neuropathological modifications of motor intentionality, the case (...) of the brain-injured war veteran Schneider, and a neurological disorder known as Gerstmann’s syndrome. Building on my analysis of Schneider’s sensorimotor compensatory performances in relation to his limitations in the domains of algebra, geometry, and language usage, I demonstrate a strong continuity between the sense of embodiment and enaction at all these levels. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations, I argue that “higher-order” cognition is impaired in Schneider insofar as his injury limits his sensorimotor capacity to dynamically produce comparatively more complex differentiations of any given phenomenal structure. I then show how Merleau-Ponty develops and specifies his interpretation of Schneider’s intellectual difficulties in relation to the ambiguous role of the body, and in particular the hand, in Gerstmann’s syndrome. I explain how Merleau-Ponty defends the idea that sensorimotor and quasi-representational cognition are mutually irreducible, while maintaining that symbol-based cognition is a fundamentally enactive and embodied process. (shrink)

Why are conditional degrees of belief in an observation E, given a statistical hypothesis H, aligned with the objective probabilities expressed by H? After showing that standard replies are not satisfactory, I develop a suppositional analysis of conditional degree of belief, transferring Ramsey’s classical proposal to statistical inference. The analysis saves the alignment, explains the role of chance-credence coordination, and rebuts the charge of arbitrary assessment of evidence in Bayesian inference. Finally, I explore the implications of this analysis for Bayesian (...) reasoning with idealized models in science. (shrink)

The paper addresses a question concerning George Ellis’s theory of top-down causation by considering a challenge to the “level-picture of nature” which he employs as a foundational element in his theory. According to the level-picture, nature is ordered by distinct and finitely many levels, each characterised by its own types of entities, relations, laws and principles of behavior, and causal relations to their respective neighbouring top- and bottom-level. The branching hierarchy that results from this picture enables Ellis to build his (...) model of modular hierarchical structure for complexity, his account of same-level, bottom-up and top-down causation, of emergence, equivalence-classes and multiple realisability. The three main arguments for the level-picture in Ellis’s works are reconstructed and shown to face serious problems. Finally, the paper presents a possible solution to this challenge by introducing a reformulation of certain fundamental points of Ellis’s theory that does without the level-picture of nature. This allows us to preserve all of his central claims about the model of complexity, the three types of causation, emergence, equivalence-classes and multiple realisability. Any problems pertaining to the level-picture can be remedied in the context of Ellis’s theory of top-down causation. (shrink)

In the novel A Burnout-Out Case, Graham Greene argues for an intimate relationship between burnout and happiness. The novel claims that a life worth living is a continuous balancing between something painful, e.g. burnout and something desirable, e.g. happiness. In this essay, I try to make a case for the happiness of burnout. By examining the case story of a young artist, who suffered from burnout, I describe how such suffering might open up for a necessary reevaluation of the values (...) that actually make sense. Such creation of new values is what eventually leads to more happy moments, not happiness per se. This essay provides a philosophical reflection regarding the relationship between happiness and burnout in order to say something regarding which life is worth living. (shrink)

According to metaphysical coherentism, grounding relations form an interconnected system in which things ground each other and nothing is ungrounded. This potentially viable view’s logical territory remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I describe that territory by articulating four varieties of metaphysical coherentism. I do not argue for any variety in particular. Rather, I aim to show that not all issues which might be raised against coherentism will be equally problematic for all the versions of that view, which features far (...) more nuance and diversity than is typically ascribed to it. (shrink)

This text addresses a problem that is not sufficiently dealt with in most of the recent literature on emotion and feeling. The problem is a general underestimation of the extent to which affective intentionality is essentially bodily. Affective intentionality is the sui generis type of world-directedness that most affective states – most clearly the emotions – display. Many theorists of emotion overlook the extent to which intentional feelings are essentially bodily feelings. The important but quite often overlooked fact is that (...) the bodily feelings in question are not the regularly treated, non-intentional bodily sensations (known from Jamesian accounts of emotion), but rather crucial carriers of world-directed intentionality. Consequently, most theories of human emotions and feelings recently advocated are deficient in terms of phenomenological adequacy. This text tries to make up for this deficit and develops a catalogue of five central features of intentional bodily feelings. In addition, Jesse Prinz’s embodied appraisal theory is criticized as an exemplary case of the misconstrual of the bodily nature of affective experience in naturalistic philosophy of mind. (shrink)

It can be tempting to think of affect as a matter of the present moment – a reaction, a feeling, an experience or engagement that unfolds right now. This paper will make the case that affect is better thought of as not only temporally extended but as saturated with temporality, especially with the past. In and through affectivity, concrete, ongoing history continues to weigh on present comportment. In order to spell this out, I sketch a Heidegger-inspired perspective. It revolves around (...) two claims. The first is that we should understand what Heidegger calls 'Befindlichkeit' (findingness) as radical situatedness. Affectivity is a matter of 'finding oneself' constellated – thrown – into the world in ways that outrun what an individual or collective might grasp and process. The second claim is that the temporal dimension, as a relatedness to the past, takes precedence in affect's situatedness. Key to affect is the way in which the past continues to hold sway over present comportment, collectively and individually. In order to articulate this perspective, it is important to overcome the idea that affect must be understood mainly in terms of feeling or experiential states of other kinds. Better suited to grasp the idea of findingness is the concept of 'disclosive posture', as proposed by Katherine Withy. I suggest that this notion should be put at the fore of a phenomenological approach to situated affectivity. (shrink)

This study clarifies the need for a renewed account of the body in physiotherapy to fill sizable gaps between physiotherapeutical theory and practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach bodily functioning from an objectivist perspective; however, their therapeutic interactions with patients are not limited to the provision of natural-scientific explanations. Physiotherapists’ practice corresponds well to theorisation of the body as the bearer of original bodily intentionality, as outlined by Merleau-Ponty and elaborated upon by enactivists. We clarify how physiotherapeutical practice corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s (...) critical arguments against objectivist interpretations of the body; particularly, his analyses demonstrate that norms of optimal corporeal functioning are highly individual and variable in time and thus do not directly depend on generic physiological structures. In practice, objectively measurable physical deviations rarely correspond to specific subjective difficulties and, similarly, patients’ reflective insights into their own motor deficiencies do not necessarily produce meaningful motor improvements. Physiotherapeutical procedures can be understood neither as mechanical manipulations of patients’ machine-like bodies by experts nor as a process of such manipulation by way of instructing patients’ explicit conscious awareness. Rather, physiotherapeutical practice and theory can benefit from the philosophical interpretation of motor disorders as modifications of bodily intentionality. Consequently, motor performances addressed in physiotherapy are interpreted as relational features of a living organism coupled with its environment, and motor disorders are approached as failures to optimally manage the motor requirements of a given situation owing to a relative loss of the capacity to structure one’s relation with their environment through motor action. Building on this, we argue that the process of physiotherapy is most effective when understood as a bodily interaction to guide patients towards discovering better ways of grasping a situation as meaningful through bodily postures and movements. (shrink)

By and large, the conditional connective in three-valued logic has two different functions. First, by means of a deduction theorem, it can express a specific relation of logical consequence in the logical language itself. Second, it can represent natural language structures such as "if/then'' or "implies''. This chapter surveys both approaches, shows why none of them will typically end up with a three-valued material conditional, and elaborates on connections to probabilistic reasoning.

The topic of this article is the closure of a priori knowability under a priori knowable material implication: if a material conditional is a priori knowable and if the antecedent is a priori knowable, then the consequent is a priori knowable as well. This principle is arguably correct under certain conditions, but there is at least one counterexample when completely unrestricted. To deal with this, Anderson proposes to restrict the closure principle to necessary truths and Horsten suggests to restrict it (...) to formulas that belong to less expressive languages. In this article it is argued that Horsten’s restriction strategy fails, because one can deduce that knowable ignorance entails necessary ignorance from the closure principle and some modest background assumptions, even if the expressive resources do not go beyond those needed to formulate the closure principle itself. It is also argued that it is hard to find a justification for Anderson’s restricted closure principle, because one cannot deduce it even if one assumes very strong modal and epistemic background principles. In addition, there is an independently plausible alternative closure principle that avoids all the problems without the need for restriction. (shrink)

As a painfully outdated institution the school is accused of: being alienating, closing itself off to society and to the needs of young people; reproducing social inequality and consolidating existing power relations; demotivating youth; showing a lack of effectiveness and having great difficulty with employability. And last but not least, the school is considered redundant: the school, where learning is bound to time and place, is no longer needed in the digital era of virtual learning environments. The ultimate charge: the (...) school is a product of outdated ways of distributing knowledge and expertise, determined by primitive technologies of the past. Adieu school. This book advocates the acquittal of the school. It argues that many of the allegations against the school are motivated by an age-old fear and even hatred toward one of its radical but essential characteristics: that the school provides ‘free time' and transforms knowledge and skills into 'common goods', and therefore has the potential to give everyone, regardless of background, natural talent or aptitude, the time and space to leave their known environment, rise above themselves and renew (and thus change in unpredictable ways) the world. This defence of the school starts from an investigation of what makes a school a school and pinpoints why the school has value in and of itself. It reveals the various attempts to rob the school of its scholastic character, that is, to tame the school. The ultimate aim is to elaborate a touchstone that helps to defend as well as to re-invent school. -/- Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons are members of the Laboratory for Education and Society, KU Leuven. They share an interest in research on the public dimensions of education and are currently elaborating a philosophy of schooling. (shrink)

Should Marxists support universal basic income (UBI), i.e., a regular cash income paid to all without a means test or work requirement? This paper considers one important argument that they should, namely that UBI would be instrumentally effective in helping to bring about communism. It argues that previous answers to this question have paid insufficient attention to a logically prior question: what is Marx’s account of communism? In reply, it distinguishes two different accounts: a left-libertarian version that associates communism with (...) the freedom to live and work how one wants, and a perfectionist version that associates communism with the overcoming of alienated labour and self-realisation in work. It argues that UBI would make steps towards the left-libertarian account but not the perfectionist account. Ultimately, then, the question “should Marxists support basic income?” is shown to partly depend on which account of communism Marxists want to bring about. (shrink)

The last decade has seen an increasing number of references to quantum mechanics in the humanities and social sciences. This development has in particular been driven by Karen Barad’s agential realism: a theoretical framework that, based on Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, aims to inform social theorizing. In dealing with notions such as agency, power, and embodiment as well as the relation between the material and the discursive level, the influence of agential realism in fields such as feminist science (...) studies and posthumanism has been profound. However, no one has hitherto paused to assess agential realism’s proclaimed quantum mechanical origin including its relation to the writings of Niels Bohr. This is the task taken up here. We find that many of the implications that agential realism allegedly derives from a Bohrian interpretation of quantum mechanics dissent from Bohr’s own views and are in conflict with those of other interpretations of quantum mechanics. Agential realism is at best consistent with quantum mechanics and consequently, it does not capture what quantum mechanics in any strict sense implies for social science or any other domain of inquiry. Agential realism may be interesting and thought provoking from the perspective of social theorizing, but it is neither sanctioned by quantum mechanics nor by Bohr’s authority. This conclusion not only holds for agential realism in particular, it also serves as a general warning against the other attempts to use quantum mechanics in social theorizing. (shrink)