Jonathan takes us through his experiences of being a mentor for UTOP (University Teaching Opportunities Programme), particularly how it enabled him to collaborate with his UTOP student mentees to design a learning activity in which students could think critically about AI-generated output.

Pausing to reflect feels like stagnant inactivity, but it’s crucial for our youths as increasingly more students come to higher education without having truly engaged in self-reflection.

How often have you heard someone refer to complaining as a “national pastime” in Singapore? Why do we complain and what do we get out of it? While the Oxford Dictionary defines "complain" as an expression of dissatisfaction or annoyance about something, the philosopher, Julian Baggini, defines the term in his book Complaint as “a refusal or inability to accept that things are not as they ought to be”. This suggests that complaining is not intrinsically harmful - its impact really (...) depends on how we use it. So, is Singapore’s complaint culture helping us or hurting us? (shrink)

Trust is the foundation for learning, and we must not allow ignorance of this new technologies, like Generative AI, to disrupt the relationship between students and educators. As a first step, we need to actively engage with AI tools to better understand how they can help us in our work.

We are pleased to feature a video interview with Jonathan Sim, where he shares his ongoing journey of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) in his teaching, the challenges encountered along the way, and what educators can do to get their students to meaningfully engage with AI tools like ChatGPT to enhance their learning.

The recent news of a 13-year-old Singaporean prodigy graduating from an Australian university has sparked discussion about Singapore’s approach to nurturing exceptional young talents, especially after it was revealed that the boy had been previously rejected by a local university because of his young age. Some have called for an increased flexibility to allow such young people to skip levels in Singapore - parents of intellectually advanced children often cite concerns that their children are disengaged and bored at school. The (...) fear is real - keeping these students at the same level as their peers could potentially squander their potential and impede their growth. Yet, on the flip side, accelerating their academic journey could potentially jeopardise their social and emotional development, which could negatively impact their ability to connect and work well with their peers in their adulthood. Nonetheless, this debate brings to light the need for more effective strategies to meaningfully engage students with diverse abilities and learning paces. (shrink)

As educators, we often ask if our students are ready for the future, but how often do we ask ourselves if we educators are ready for the future?

The drive for human connection and to discover one’s identity is not limited to the online world: It is a universal human need that we all share. It is crucial to understand that problems we typically attribute to gaming platforms (like self-radicalisation) are not special tech problems or gaming problems. They can and do happen offline as well. What we are dealing with is essentially a human problem that so happens to occur on technological platforms.

Jonathan discusses the learning issues he observed which prompted him to adopt this platform in his teaching, the implementation process, and his observations of his students’ response to this approach.

Teaching interdisciplinary modules online can be an uphill battle but it offers important lessons in the art of motivating students to learn.

The flipped-classroom format is a type of blended learning where students are required to do preparatory work – such as watching lecture videos or completing assignments – before coming to a face-to-face class to work on more challenging problems with the facilitation of an instructor. However, one challenge of teaching flipped-classroom modules is that a big proportion of students often come to class unprepared. Either they do not watch the lecture videos or they skim through them before the tutorials. Thus, (...) they lack a proper understanding of the content and many are unable to participate in class activities. The tutorial ends up becoming a lecture where we go over the basic content instead of challenging the students to take their learning further. In this article, I explain explains how I designed learning activities to ensure students complete the preparation work necessary to get the most out of the flipped-classroom model. (shrink)

When I ask students how they feel about group projects, the response is often negative. This is usually a result of bad experiences with problematic group members, such as free riders who do not contribute or members who bulldoze their ideas through while disregarding their peers. After many semesters mediating disputes within such groups, I have found that issues often stem from concerns about “saving face”. This leads to a lack of much-needed communication. In this article, I offer three methods (...) to facilitate effective group work by improving participation and communication between student peers. (shrink)

A problematic trend I notice when conversing with students is how many of them struggle to remember what they did in modules from previous semesters. These discussions got me thinking about how to design learning activities that are unforgettable. Albert Einstein, among other figures credited with the quote, famously said that “education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school”. I want to ensure my students remember what they have learned from me, especially after all (...) the hard work they put into the course. In this article, I share teaching techniques designed to pique the emotions as a way to lodge key lessons more firmly in students’ memories. (shrink)

We may all be living on the same planet, but the personalised experience of online platforms creates numerous parallel worlds that fragments our communicative cultures - this problem quietly escapes our attention, and it is dividing us to such extent that it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to respectfully converse and collaborate with others. Seeing how these personalised bubbles are making our youths struggle to understand and work with others, my worry is that this problem will worsen with children (...) raised by AI. If we are not careful, we risk raising a generation of children with severely skewed perceptions of the world due to the personalised bubble AI creates around them. To have such skewed perceptions at such a critical stage of development, we may not be able to break them out of their bubbles when they are older. (shrink)

As a teacher in Singapore, I regularly encounter a classroom full of quiet students, reluctant to participate in class, to engage with the teacher when questioned, or even to volunteer for any project or initiative. Many teachers here are quick to conclude that Singapore students are passive or conformists. This observation is, in fact, not unique to students in Singapore, but also to the broader Asian region. Scholars like Cortazzi and Jin (1996) attributed such behaviour to the specific cultural values, (...) such as the importance of deference to the authority of a teacher, as reasons for such passivity and reticence. Liu and Littlewood (1997), on the other hand, argue that people from certain cultures prefer not to speak up so as to avoid entering into situations of uncertainty. I have found that as a teacher busily pre-occupied with preparing for classes, it is easy to forget how students perceive their learning experience, and I have been quite inclined to agree with the observations above. Fortunately, I have had the opportunity to be both a post-graduate student and a teacher. And this privileged position allows me to question some of my own assumptions as a teacher, thereby gaining deeper insights into the underlying reasons for the lack of participation here in Singapore. There is a lot more going on in the minds of Singapore students. Here, I would like to offer a new perspective on this matter. (shrink)

Humanities and social science majors are frequently misunderstood, in Singapore as in many other parts of the world. The value of their education is regularly questioned, and many employers are unaware of the value such majors can bring to the table. They prefer to hire graduates with more explicitly “practical” degrees for jobs that humanities and social sciences students could excel in. As a result, humanities and social sciences students are not typically considered for many organisations and roles, despite offering (...) relevant and useful skills. In this article, I describe how I engaged with local employers to open internship opportunities to humanities and social sciences students who would not previously have been considered. (shrink)

In my discussion with students, I found that many of them have high levels of anxiety when it comes to learning something outside their intended major. In this article, I explain how I supported my class remotely using the Telegram messaging app to keep a regular flow of communication and reassure students they were not alone in having queries.

Assignment feedback is key to helping students improve and correct their understanding so they can build upon solid foundations of knowledge as their course progresses. Yet, I found that about 30% of students review their feedback. It is not because students are lazy but because they struggle to find the time and often have little immediate incentive to review feedback for something that has already been graded when they have other assignments to work on. Feedback is most effective when it (...) is shared with students while they are still working on the assignment. In this article, I share how regular quizzes as a tool to ensure students review their assignment feedback and address gaps in their understanding. (shrink)

The late Clark Kerr, one of the great leaders and thinkers of American higher education in the 20th century, shaped the landscape of higher education in the United States, starting with California, where he lived and worked. When he was the President of the University of California (UC) (1958–1967), he formulated and led the implementation of the California Master Plan of Higher Education (California State Department of Education, 1960) in response to an urgent need for higher education reforms in the (...) 1960s. The Plan aimed at providing universal access to higher education and diversity in the choices of institutions available to all Californians. This was achieved by defining the methods for allocating funding and missions to colleges and universities. He moved on to head the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (1967–1973) and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education (1973–1979). There, he was fundamental in developing sophisticated new tools and concepts for the study of higher education policy, which made a great impact on higher education and education policy in the United States and beyond. (shrink)

John Venn has the “uneasy suspicion” that the stagnation in mathematical logic between J. H. Lambert and George Boole was due to Kant’s “disastrous effect on logical method,” namely the “strictest preservation [of logic] from mathematical encroachment.” Kant’s actual position is more nuanced, however. In this chapter, I tease out the nuances by examining his use of Leonhard Euler’s circles and comparing it with Euler’s own use. I do so in light of the developments in logical calculus from G. W. (...) Leibniz to Lambert and Gottfried Ploucquet. While Kant is evidently open to using mathematical tools in logic, his main concern is to clarify what mathematical tools can be used to achieve. For without such clarification, all efforts at introducing mathematical tools into logic would be blind if not complete waste of time. In the end, Kant would stress, the means provided by formal logic at best help us to express and order what we already know in some sense. No matter how much mathematical notations may enhance the precision of this function of formal logic, it does not change the fact that no truths can, strictly speaking, be revealed or established by means of those notations. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, certain types of visual experiences have self-locating and so first-person, spatial contents. Such self-locating contents are typically specified in relational egocentric terms. So understood, visual experiences provide support for the claim that there is a kind of self-consciousness found in experiential states. This paper critically examines the Self-Location Thesis with respect to dynamic-reflexive visual experiences, which involve the movement of an object toward the location of the perceiving subject. The main aim of this paper is (...) to offer an alternative interpretation of these cases which resists attributing them self-locating content, arguing for a replacement of the de se component with a non-conceptual equivalent of the indexical ‘here’. In its final section, the paper also considers an extension of the h-replacement account to cases of visual kinesthesis. (shrink)

Contemporary analytic theological discussions of atonement do not attend extensively to questions of how narrative might relate to the atoning work of Christ. Liberation theologians, on the other hand, utilize narrative in their scholarly method regularly and often employ it when discussing atonement or reconciliation. This essay argues that analytic theologians should consider the notion of narrative (and narrative identity) as a mechanism of atonement in the broad sense of the term introduced when William Tyndale coined ‘atonement’ to translate 2 (...) Corinthians 5. I then offer some psychological grounds for thinking that reframing one’s self-narrative in terms of a transcendent narrative is often conducive to human flourishing, and I consider the work of James H. Cone as an instance of such transcendent narrative reframing at work. (shrink)

Non-Relational Realism is a popular solution to the Bradleyan regress of facts or truths. It denies that there is a relational universal of exemplification; for an object a to exemplify a universal F-ness, on this view, is not for a relation to subsist between a and F-ness. An influential objection to Non-Relational Realism is that it is unacceptably obscure. The author argues that Non-Relational Realism can be understood as a selective application of satisfaction semantics to predicates like ‘exemplify’, and that (...) so understood, it is not obscure. This kind of selective use of satisfaction semantics may be feasible in other contexts as a means of making theories more parsimonious. (shrink)

For Berkeley, minds are not Cartesian spiritual substances because they cannot be said to exist (even if only conceptually) abstracted from their activities. Similarly, Berkeley's notion of mind differs from Locke's in that, for Berkeley, minds are not abstract substrata in which ideas inhere. Instead, Berkeley redefines what it means for the mind to be a substance in a way consistent with the Stoic logic of 17th century Ramists on which Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards draw. This view of mind, (...) I conclude, is definitely not the bundle theory that some critics have portrayed it as being. (shrink)

Berkeley's immaterialism has more in common with views developed by Henry More, the mathematician Joseph Raphson, John Toland, and Jonathan Edwards than those of thinkers with whom he is commonly associated (e.g., Malebranche and Locke). The key for recognizing their similarities lies in appreciating how they understand St. Paul's remark that in God "we live and move and have our being" as an invitation to think to God as the space of discourse in which minds and ideas are identified. (...) This way of speaking about God, adapted by Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, opens up new ways to think about the relation between God and finite minds. (shrink)

Instead of focusing on the Malebranche-Edwards connection regarding occasionalism as if minds are distinct from the ideas they have, I focus on how finite minds are particular expressions of God's will that there be the distinctions by which ideas are identified and differentiated. This avoids problems, created in the accounts of Fiering, Lee, and especially Crisp, about the inherently idealist character of Edwards' occasionalism.

After a long search, Jonathan has finally found someone willing to donate a kidney to him and thereby free him from dialysis. Meredith is Jonathan's second cousin, and she considers herself a generous person, so although she barely knows Jonathan, she is willing to help. However, as Meredith learns more about the donation process, she begins to ask questions about Jonathan: “Is he HIV positive? I heard he got it using drugs. Has he been in jail? (...) He's already had one live donor, so what happened to the first kidney? Did he forget to take his drugs or something?” The transplant center must, then, decide if Meredith is, in fact, entitled to answers to these kinds of questions. According to the Consensus Statement on the Live Organ Donor, “It is incumbent on the transplant center to provide full and accurate disclosure to potential donors of all pertinent information regarding risk and benefit to the donor and recipient.” But whether answers to the Meredith's questions count as “pertinent information regarding the risk and benefit” is the issue at hand. (shrink)

Is there a place in scientific inquiry for guessing? Jonathan Cohen has recently argued that resorting to guesswork entails a loss of objectivity and regard for evidence which are essential to proper scientific investigation. I assess the merits of Cohen’s view first by taking as a test case Aristotle’s positive view of the role of guesswork (anchinoia) and conjecture (eustochia) in the search for the connections essential to the construction of scientific demonstrations. I then argue contra Cohen that one (...) can usefully employ guesswork while also employing reason; that it is possible to guess either intelligently or mindlessly; and consequently, that the use of guesswork need not represent a diminution in respect for the objectivity essential to scientific investigation. Although I would not claim that guesswork has a role to play in all scientific inquiry, there appear to be some datable instances of the useful and respectable scientific guess. (shrink)

Creationists who object to evolution in the science curriculum of public schools often cite Jonathan Well’s book Icons of Evolution in their support (Wells 2000). In the third chapter of his book Wells claims that neither paleontological nor molecular evidence supports the thesis that the history of life is an evolutionary process of descent from preexisting ancestors. We argue that Wells inappropriately relies upon ambiguities inherent in the term ‘Darwinian’ and the phrase ‘Darwin’s theory’. Furthermore, he does not accurately (...) distinguish between the overwhelming evidence that supports the thesis of common descent and controversies that pertain to causal mechanisms such as natural selection. We also argue that Wells’ attempts to undermine the evidence in support of common descent are flawed and his characterization of the relevant data is misleading. In particular, his assessment of the ‘Cambrian explosion’ does not do justice to the fossil record. Nor do his selective references to debate about molecular and paleontological phylogenies constitute a case against common descent. We conclude that the fossil and molecular evidence is more than sufficient to warrant science educators to present common descent as a well-established scientific fact. We also argue that diagrams depicting the ‘tree of life’ can be pedagogically useful as simplified representations of the history of life. (shrink)

Reasoning es una obra monumental de más de mil páginas editada en estrecha colaboración por el filósofo Jonathan E. Adler y el psicólogo Lance J. Rips para esclarecer el intrincado campo de investigación relacionado con los fundamentos de la inferencia y, en general, del razonamiento humano. En la actualidad, en pocos casos va unido el trabajo de compilar y editar textos científicos con el afán enciclopédico: un proyecto editorial que sobrepasa con razón los objetivos de la mayor parte (...) de los libros editados para la recopilación de artículos en torno a un mismo tema de investigación. Reasoning supone un empeño de características enciclopédicas: ha conseguido convertirse en una referencia obligada desde que saliera a la luz en 2008 para ofrecer al lector especialista artículos científicos de las más reputadas y consolidadas voces en aquellos campos de conocimiento presentes ya en los proyectos enciclopédicos europeos del siglo de las luces, a saber: el significado del racionalismo, los límites imputables a la naturaleza del conocimiento humano, las paradojas presentes en la inducción, etc. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the view that reasons are premises of good reasoning – that reasons to φ are premises of good reasoning towards φ-ing. However, while this reasoning view is indeed attractive, it faces a problem accommodating outweighed reasons. In this article, I argue that the standard solution to this problem is unsuccessful and propose an alternative, which draws on the idea that good patterns of reasoning can be defeasible. I conclude by drawing out implications for the (...) debate over pragmatic reasons for belief and other attitudes and for one influential form of reductionism about the normative. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the (...) DSM's diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis that all reasons to believe p are evidence for p. Pragmatists hold that pragmatic considerations – incentives for believing – can also be reasons to believe. Nishi Shah, Thomas Kelly and others have argued for evidentialism on the grounds that incentives for belief fail a ‘reasoning constraint’ on reasons: roughly, reasons must be considerations we can reason from, but we cannot reason from incentives to belief. In the first half of the paper, I show that this (...) argument fails: the claim that we cannot reason from incentives is either false or does not combine with the reasoning constraint to support evidentialism. However, the failure of this argument suggests an alternative route to evidentialism. Roughly, reasons must be premises of good reasoning, but it is not good reasoning to reason from incentives to belief. The second half of the paper develops and defends this argument for evidentialism. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how (...) Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and “Toward Perpetual Peace”. On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery or at best suggest that Kant mentioned it as a (...) cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. Overall, Kant never explicitly considered chattel slavery as a moral problem to be addressed on its own. Rather, he treated it primarily in terms of its function in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about its practices, it was likely because they threatened to deepen intra-European conflicts and undermine the prospect of perpetual peace. The humanity of the enslaved “Negroes” was never part of the reasoning. This was not a casual oversight on Kant’s part. It reflects the complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about chattel slavery begins to make sense once we connect his philosophy of history and his depiction of “Negroes” as natural slaves. (shrink)

What role does the wild duck play in Ibsen's famous drama? I argue that, besides mirroring the fate of the human cast members, the duck is acting as animal subject in a quasi-experiment, conducted in a private setting. Analysed from this perspective, the play allows us to discern the epistemological and ethical dimensions of the new scientific animal practice (systematic observation of animal behaviour under artificial conditions) emerging precesely at that time. Ibsen's play stages the clash between a scientific and (...) a romantic understanding of animals that still constitutes the backdrop of most contemporary debates over animals in research. Whereas the scientific understanding reduces the animal's behaviour, as well as its environment, to discrete and modifiable elements, the romantic view regards animals as being at one with (or violently disconnected from) their natural surroundings. (shrink)

Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the road to perfection must be paved (...) through industry, a condition that Kant denies to the “savages” by racializing their alleged laziness. This case will shed new light on the debated relation between Kant’s moral universalism and his racism. (shrink)

A testimony is somebody else’s reported experience of what has happened. It is an indispensable source of knowledge. It only gives us historical cognition, however, which stands in a complex relation to rational or philosophical cognition: while the latter presupposes historical cognition as its matter, one needs the architectonic “eye of a philosopher” to select, interpret, and organize historical cognition. Kant develops this rationalist theory of testimony. He also practices it in his own work, especially while theorizing about race as (...) a subject of natural philosophy. In three dedicated essays on this subject, he treats race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature (Naturforscher), who (as Kant puts it in the first Critique) learns from nature “like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.” This view underwrites Kant’s use of travel reports (a type of testimony) in developing and defending his theory of race. (shrink)

Leibniz, and many following him, saw the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) as pivotal to a scientific (demonstrated) metaphysics. Against this backdrop, Kant is expected to pay close attention to PSR in his reflections on the possibility of metaphysics, which is his chief concern in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is far from clear, however, what has become of PSR in the Critique. On one reading, Kant has simply turned it into the causal principle of the Second Analogy. On (...) a different reading, PSR is but the supreme principle of reason, which roughly states that, if the conditioned is given, so is the unconditioned. On my reading, PSR appears in the guises of both the causal principle and the supreme principle. This twofold specification, I argue, is key to understanding (i) Kant’s allegations that past metaphysicians failed to prove PSR, (ii) his own Critical account of the possibility of metaphysics in both of its parts (ontology and metaphysics proper), and (iii) his nuanced answer to the contentious question about the relation between physical inquiry and metaphysical reasoning about nature (both being quests for reasons). (shrink)

In the 1780s through the end of 1790s, Kant made various references to slavery (in its different forms) and the transatlantic slave trade in the context of his political philosophy or philosophy of right; he thereby had opportunities to speak in favor of abolitionism, which was gaining momentum in parts of Europe, or at least to articulate a normative critique of the race-based chattel slavery or Atlantic slavery and the associated slave trade qua (legalized) INSTITUTIONS; but he did neither. Why? (...) In raising and seeking an answer to this question, I am not interested in what Kant’s normative silence about the institutions of Atlantic slavery and slave trade may tell us about him as a person (for example, whether he was blinded by his own racist prejudices or whether he was affected by some kind of cognitive dissonance). Rather, I will focus on what it may tell us about certain limitations of his political philosophy, limitations that might have made it THEORETICALLY DIFFICULT for him to figure out exactly what to DO about those institutions as entrenched political realities. (shrink)

Friedrich Engels’ dialectical assessment of modern science resulted from his fascination with the natural sciences in combination with his resurging interest in the work of “old Hegel.” Engels became especially interested in what he saw as the molecular essence of life, namely proteins or, more specifically, albumin, seeing life as the mode of existence of these enigmatic substances. Hegelian dialectics is crucial for a dialectical materialist understanding of contemporary technoscience. The dialectical materialist understanding of technoscience as a research practice builds (...) on Engels, but also on later authors who were inspired by his writings, e.g., life scientists such as Haldane and Bernal. Considering the criticism raised against Engels’ dialectics by 20th-century Marxists, a dialectical diagnostic of contemporary technoscience can be achieved, which shifts the focus from artificial albumin as “living matter” to contemporary research on synthetic cells. (shrink)

How does the critical Kant view ontology? There is no shared scholarly answer to this question. Norbert Hinske sees in the Critique of Pure Reason a “farewell to ontology,” albeit one that took Kant long to bid (Hinske 2009). Karl Ameriks has found evidence in Kant’s metaphysics lectures from the critical period that he “was unwilling to break away fully from traditional ontology” (Ameriks 1992: 272). Gualtiero Lorini argues that a decisive break with the tradition of ontology is essential to (...) Kant’s critical reform of metaphysics, as is reflected in his shift from “ontology” to “transcendental philosophy,” two notions that Lorini takes to be related by mere “analogy” (Lorini 2015). I agree with Lorini that a thorough reform of ontology is a pivotal part of Kant’s critical plan for metaphysics and that ontology somehow “survives within the critical philosophy” (Lorini 2015: 76). To make this case, however, I deem it important to identify “ontology” and “transcendental philosophy” in the sense of extensional equivalence. While we can detect this identification in Kant’s writings, only from his metaphysics lectures can we get a full sense of its historical and philosophical significance. In this chapter I focus on how it represents a definitive turn from as well as notable continuity with traditional treatments of ontology, particularly the Wolffian one. (shrink)

This paper subjects Dan Brown’s most recent novel Origin to a philosophical reading. Origin is regarded as a literary window into contemporary technoscience, inviting us to explore its transformative momentum and disruptive impact, focusing on the cultural significance of artificial intelligence and computer science: on the way in which established world-views are challenged by the incessant wave of scientific discoveries made possible by super-computation. While initially focusing on the tension between science and religion, the novel’s attention gradually shifts to the (...) increased dependence of human beings on smart technologies and artificial intelligence. Origin’s message, I will argue, reverberates with Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, which aims to outline a morphology of world civilizations. Although the novel starts with a series of oppositions, most notably between religion and science, the eventual tendency is towards convergence, synthesis and sublation, exemplified by Sagrada Família as a monumental symptom of this transition. Three instances of convergence will be highlighted, namely the convergence between science and religion, between humanity and technology and between the natural sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

At A71/B96–7 Kant explains that singular judgements are ‘special’ because they stand to the general ones as Einheit to Unendlichkeit. The reference to Einheit brings to mind the category of unity and hence raises a spectre of circularity in Kant’s explanation. I aim to remove this spectre by interpreting the Einheit-Unendlichkeit contrast in light of the logical distinctions among universal, particular and singular judgments shared by Kant and his logician predecessors. This interpretation has a further implication for resolving a controversy (...) over the correlation between the logical moments of quantity (universal, particular, singular) and the categorial ones (unity, plurality, totality). (shrink)

The origin of languages was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. This paper reconstructs a distinctively Kantian account according to which the origination, progression, and diversification of languages is at bottom reason’s self-development under certain a priori constraints and external environments. The reconstruction builds on three sets of materials. The first is Herder’s famous prize essay on the origin of languages. The second includes Kant’s explicit remarks about language – especially his notion of “transcendental grammar,” his argument that (...) language cannot be innate, his contrast of “Oriental” symbolic (intuitive) and “Occidental” discursive languages, and his treatment of the latter as a sine qua non of humanity’s cultural and moral progress. The third includes the concepts that we need to make sense of those remarks, such as Kant’s epigenetic theory of biological formation and his account of categories as originally acquired. (shrink)

In this paper, I will reread the history of molecular genetics from a psychoanalytical angle, analysing it as a case history. Building on the developmental theories of Freud and his followers, I will distinguish four stages, namely: (1) oedipal childhood, notably the epoch of model building (1943–1953); (2) the latency period, with a focus on the development of basic skills (1953–1989); (3) adolescence, exemplified by the Human Genome Project, with its fierce conflicts, great expectations and grandiose claims (1989–2003) and (4) (...) adulthood (2003–present) during which revolutionary research areas such as molecular biology and genomics have achieved a certain level of normalcy—have evolved into a normal science. I will indicate how a psychoanalytical assessment conducted in this manner may help us to interpret and address some of the key normative issues that have been raised with regard to molecular genetics over the years, such as ‘relevance’, ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘promise management’. (shrink)