Since the dawn of philosophy, the paradoxical interconnection between the continuous and the discrete plays a central rôle in attempts to understand the ontology of the world, while defying all attempts at consistent formulation. I investigate the relation between (classical) logic and concepts of “space” and “time” in physical and metaphysical theories, starting with the Greeks. An important part of my research consists in exploring the strong connections between paradoxes as they appear and are dealt with in ancient philosophy, and (...) their re-appearance in early modern natural philosophy, as well as in the foundations of contemporary science and mathematics. The way paradoxes are dealt with sheds light on a theory’s hidden metaphysical assumptions, especially with respect to matter, space, time and causation, it defines its ontological signature. This conclusion led me to the in-depth study of early modern natural philosophy, the origin of natural science, especially the influences ancient thinkers had on the new conceptions of space, time and causation developed by Newton, Huygens and Leibniz. (shrink)

In de hiernavolgende bijdrage zal het erom gaan te pogen een ander licht te werpen op de globalisering der wereldeconomie die onze planeet sinds enkele decennia teistert. In de theoretische aandacht die deze historische ontwikkeling te beurt viel gedurende de tweede helft van de voorbije eeuw, werd het verband met zowel de ‘economisering’ als de ‘technologisering’ van onze leefwereld zoals geduid in de marxistische en techniekphilosophische critiek centraal gesteld; zij werd tevens gesitueerd in de context van “de postmoderne conditie” in (...) den zin van Lyotard2. Ook de rationaliteitscrisis tout court die hiermee samenhangt beschouw ik als een uitgangspunt, hoewel men over haar aard en oorzaken van mening kan verschillen. De oorspronkelijkheid van deze bijdrage zal dan ook niet te vinden zijn in de bespreking van een der bovenvermelde punten, maar in een ander begrip van de betrekkingen tussen de totaliteit van dit proces en de in onze gewaarwordingen gegeven, ‘natuurlijke’ werkelijkheid. (shrink)

We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the theories concerned. These demands are often met by the introduction of a metalevel which encompasses the notions of 'system' and 'lawful behaviour'. In classical mechanics, the division between universal and particular leaves its traces in the separate treatment of cinematics and dynamics. This (...) analysis is applied to the mechanical theories of Newton and Leibniz, with some surprising results. (shrink)

It will be shown in this article that an ontological approach for some problems related to the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM) could emerge from a re-evaluation of the main paradox of early Greek thought: the paradox of Being and non-Being, and the solutions presented to it by Plato and Aristotle. More well known are the derivative paradoxes of Zeno: the paradox of motion and the paradox of the One and the Many. They stem from what was perceived by classical (...) philosophy to be the fundamental enigma for thinking about the world: the seemingly contradictory results that followed from the co-incidence of being and non-being in the world of change and motion as we experience it, and the experience of absolute existence here and now. The most clear expression of both stances can be found, again following classical thought, in the thinking of Heraclitus of Ephesus and Parmenides of Elea. The problem put forward by these paradoxes reduces for both Plato and Aristotle to the possibility of the existence of stable objects as a necessary condition for knowledge. Hence the primarily ontological nature of the solutions they proposed: Plato’s Theory of Forms and Aristotle’s metaphysics and logic. Plato’s and Aristotle’s systems are argued here to do on the ontological level essentially the same: to introduce stability in the world by introducing the notion of a separable, stable object, for which a ‘principle of contradiction’ is valid: an object cannot be and not-be at the same place at the same time. So it becomes possible to forbid contradiction on an epistemological level, and thus to guarantee the certainty of knowledge that seemed to be threatened before. After leaving Aristotelian metaphysics, early modern science had to cope with these problems: it did so by introducing “space” as the seat of stability, and “time” as the theater of motion. But the ontological structure present in this solution remained the same. Therefore the fundamental notion ‘separable system’, related to the notions observation and measurement, themselves related to the modern concepts of space and time, appears to be intrinsically problematic, because it is inextricably connected to classical logic on the ontological level. We see therefore the problems dealt with by quantum logic not as merely formal, and the problem of ‘non-locality’ as related to it, indicating the need to re-think the notions system, entity, as well as the implications of the operation ‘measurement’, which is seen here as an application of classical logic (including its ontological consequences) on the material world. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere, Kant uses the term ‘object’ in various ways and often without clearly signaling its different meanings. As a result, it is hard to gauge the extent to which Kant’s account of the object of cognition breaks new ground. In this article, I take the Critique to establish what is required to generate an object of cognition per se soleley by examining the various ways in which the human mind can objectify the content (...) of its representations. To clarify this endeavor, I distinguish four different ways in which the term ‘object’ is used in the Critique, namely, to refer to (1) material things, (2) the content of any type of thought, (3) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the broad sense of the term, and (4) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the strict sense of the term. On my reading, the fourth meaning of the term ‘object’ is key to the Transcendental Deduction and completes Kant’s unprecedented conception of the cognitive acts by means of which the human mind produces objects of cognition out of a manifold of representations. (shrink)

In dit artikel wordt de dominante metafysische oriëntatie in de hedendaagse meta-ethiek kritisch onder de loep genomen. Het hedendaagse debat, dat zich voornamelijk richt op de vraag hoe moraliteit metafysisch gezien 'in de werkelijkheid past', wordt gekenmerkt door een reeks complexe en soms esoterische discussies die, zo wordt betoogd, weinig bijdragen aan ons filosofische begrip van ethiek. Deze focus op metafysische grondslagen heeft geleid tot een tunnelvisie, waarin het debat gevangen zit tussen steeds ingewikkeldere vormen van non-cognitivisme, herconceptualisaties van 'objectiviteit' (...) en metafysische acrobatiek. Als alternatief wordt voorgesteld de aandacht in de meta-ethiek te verleggen naar het domein van praktisch redeneren. Door ons te concentreren op de patronen van geldige praktische argumentatie en het soort overwegingen dat mensen daadwerkelijk overtuigt, kunnen we wellicht een beter inzicht krijgen in de aard van ethische normativiteit en de rol ervan in ons leven. Het artikel pleit voor een meer pragmatische en minder metafysisch beladen benadering van de meta-ethiek, die zich richt op de daadwerkelijke praktijken van moreel redeneren en argumenteren. (shrink)

Isaac Newton, in popular imagination the Ur-scientist, was an outstanding humanist scholar. His researches on, among others, ancient philosophy, are thorough and appear to be connected to and fit within his larger philosophical and theological agenda. It is therefore relevant to take a closer look at Newton’s intellectual choices, at how and why precisely he would occupy himself with specific text-sources, and how this interest fits into the larger picture of his scientific and intellectual endeavours. In what follows, we shall (...) follow Newton into his study and look over his shoulder while reading compendia and original source-texts in his personal library at Cambridge, meticulously investigating and comparing fragments and commentaries, and carefully keeping track in private notes of how they support his own developing ideas. Indeed, Newton was convinced that precursors to his own insights and discoveries were present already in Antiquity, even before the Greeks, in ancient Egypt, and he puts a lot of time and effort into making the point, especially, and not incidentially, in the period between the first and the second edition of the Principia. A clear understanding of his reading of the classic sources therefore matters to our understanding of its content and gestation process. In what follows we will confine ourselves to the classical legacy, and investigate Newton’s intellectual intercourse with it. (shrink)

The article summarises in an accessible way the (lack of) debate in France between different economic schools — the hegemonic neoclassical school with its positivist pretenses versus more historical schools of a Marxist or Keynesian orientation.

Our concern in the following pages will be the ontology of the relation between living beings (especially, but not exclusively, humans) and the technological artefacts of our late-industrial society. The theme is not new, but important in the context of the emergence and globalisation of so called “post- modern” society. The eventual originality of the present contribution is to be situated in its interpretative framework, i.e., a specific conception of reality's deep ontology, overlooked in general exactly because of the “technological” (...) structure impressed since centuries upon our ways of perceiving of and reasoning about the world. I refer to this neglected but fundamental characteristic of reality as its ontological paradoxicality. (shrink)

Book review: Emmanuel Todd, "Où en sommes-nous? Une esquisse de l'histoire humaine" (Seuil, 2017).

In this essay I propose a new measure of social welfare. It captures the intuitive idea that quantity, quality, and equality of individual welfare all matter for social welfare. More precisely, it satisfies six conditions: Equivalence, Dominance, Quality, Strict Monotonicity, Equality and Asymmetry. These state that i) populations equivalent in individual welfare are equal in social welfare; ii) a population that dominates another in individual welfare is better; iii) a population that has a higher average welfare than another population is (...) better, other things being equal; iv) the addition of a well-faring individual makes a population better, whereas the addition of an ill-faring individual makes a population worse; v) a population that has a higher degree of equality than another population is better, other things being equal; and vi) individual illfare matters more for social welfare than individual welfare. By satisfying the six conditions, the measure improves on previously proposed measures, such as the utilitarian Total and Average measures, as well as different kinds of Prioritarian measures. (shrink)

In their recent work, L. Graham and J.-M. Kantor discuss a remarkable connection between diverging conceptions of the mathematical infinite in Russia and France at the beginning of the twentieth century and the religious convictions of their respective authors. They expand much more on the Russian side of the cultural equation they propose; I do believe, however, that the French (or rather ‘West European’) side is more complex than it seems, and that digging deeper into it is worthwhile. In this (...) paper I shall therefore broaden the path laid out in Graham and Kantor’s work, by connecting two different strands of research concerning the origin of what I loosely call ‘formal’ ideas: firstly, the rich but complex relation between logic and rhetoric throughout European cultural history, and secondly, the impact of religious convictions on the formation of certain mathematical and scientific ideas during Renaissance and Early Modernity, especially but not exclusively in France. (shrink)

An accessible overview of the (lack of) debate in France between the hegemonic neoclassical school in economics with its positivist pretenses and the more historical Marxist and Keynesian schools.

Because we tend to study fight books in isolation, we often forget how difficult it is to understand the precise place they occupy in the sociocultural and historical fabric of their time, and spill the many clues they inevitably contain on their owner, their local society, their precise purpose. In order to unlock that information, we need to study them in their broader sociocultural and historical context. This requires a background and research skills that are not always easily accessible to (...) everyone. To illustrate the point, in this paper I show in some detail what is required to make sense of the claim that Aristotelian philosophy and science influenced the medieval fight books in relevant ways, and that understanding this influence helps us to better understand the fight books per se. I give an outline of the general historical framework, and apply it to a testcase: Talhoffer’s Thott 290 2° Ms., with some interesting results. My hope is that this framework may be of some use to other researchers in HEMA Studies who want to dig deeper in sources of interest to them. (shrink)

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to “make kin” (...) with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces. (shrink)

"Thinking about thinking", the topic of this section of our volume, leads us into an Escherian web of self-referential interconnections — which nevertheless make sense, at least if we do not shy away at once in the face of paradox, for fear of inconsistency. How do our critical faculties enter the picture? Adding a few conceptual dimensions to the merely linearly causal one may help us to shed light on the issue, and may help us also to understand some of (...) the basic strategies "Western" thought has developed throughout its historical pathway in its conscious dealings with the 'real'. Of course, in a few pages it is impossible to do justice to this complicated subject. But I'll try to give the reader an as clear as possible description of the, in my view, crucial issues, pointing out the ways they resonate into the many fields of interest represented in the intended readership, and leave it to the reader to dig deeper through the given references. (shrink)

A concise introduction (in Dutch) to the work of Giorgio Agamben, from the perspective of the central question in his philosophy under what conditions community or society today are possible, not based on in the end always artbitrary principles of exclusion — be they historical, biological, ...

This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice (...) to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives. (shrink)

A speaker's use of a declarative sentence in a context has two effects: it expresses a proposition and represents the speaker as knowing that proposition. This essay is about how to explain the second effect. The standard explanation is act-based. A speaker is represented as knowing because their use of the declarative in a context tokens the act-type of assertion and assertions represent knowledge in what's asserted. I propose a semantic explanation on which declaratives covertly host a "know"-parenthetical. A speaker (...) is thereby represented as knowing the proposition expressed because that is the semantic contribution of the parenthetical. I call this view parentheticalism and defend that it better explains knowledge representation than alternatives. As a consequence of outperforming assertoric explanations, parentheticalism opens the door to eliminating the act-type of assertion from linguistic theorizing. (shrink)

In recent years, exposome research has been put forward as the next frontier for the study of human health and disease. Exposome research entails the analysis of the totality of environmental exposures and their corresponding biological responses within the human body. Increasingly, this is operationalized by big-data approaches to map the effects of internal as well as external exposures using smart sensors and multiomics technologies. However, the ethical implications of exposome research are still only rarely discussed in the literature. Therefore, (...) we conducted a systematic review of the academic literature regarding both the exposome and underlying research fields and approaches, to map the ethical aspects that are relevant to exposome research. We identify five ethical themes that are prominent in ethics discussions: the goals of exposome research, its standards, its tools, how it relates to study participants, and the consequences of its products. Furthermore, we provide a number of general principles for how future ethics research can best make use of our comprehensive overview of the ethical aspects of exposome research. Lastly, we highlight three aspects of exposome research that are most in need of ethical reflection: the actionability of its findings, the epidemiological or clinical norms applicable to exposome research, and the meaning and action–implications of bias. (shrink)

Inspired by Bas van Fraassen’s Stance Empiricism, Anjan Chakravartty has developed a pluralistic account of what he calls epistemic stances towards scientific ontology. In this paper, I examine whether Chakravartty’s stance pluralism can exclude epistemic stances that licence pseudo-scientific practices like those found in Scientology. I argue that it cannot. Chakravartty’s stance pluralism is therefore prone to a form of debilitating relativism. I consequently argue that we need (1) some ground or constraint in relation to which epistemic stances can be (...) ranked by degrees, and (2) some way to demarcate science from pseudo-science so that we know what epistemic stances are about. Regarding (1), I argue that empirical detectability can serve as the ground in relation to which epistemic stances are ranked by degrees. Regarding (2), I argue for ranking sciences on a continuum according to established institutional criteria, rather than attempting to draw a strict demarcation. (shrink)

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the (...) Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light. (shrink)

I identify two versions of the scientific anti-realist’s selectionist explanation for the success of science: Bas van Fraassen’s original and K. Brad Wray’s newer interpretation. In Wray’s version, psycho-social factors internal to the scientific community – viz. scientists’ interests, goals, and preferences – explain the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success. I argue that, if Wray’s version were correct, then science should resemble art. In art, the artwork-selection practices that explain artwork-success appear faddish. They are prone to radical change over time. (...) Theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science are however not faddish. They are mostly stable; that is, long-lived and consistent over time. This is because scientists (explicitly or implicitly) subscribe to what I will call the testability norm: scientific theories must make falsifiable claims about the external physical world. The testability norm and not psycho-sociology explains the theory-selection practices that explain theory-success in science. Contra Wray, scientific anti-realists can then maintain that the external physical world (as expressed in the testability norm) explains theory-success. (shrink)

Assertion is widely regarded as an act associated with an epistemic position. To assert is to represent oneself as occupying this position and/or to be required to occupy this position. Within this approach, the most common view is that assertion is strong: the associated position is knowledge or certainty. But recent challenges to this common view present new data that are argued to be better explained by assertion being weak. Old data widely taken to support assertion being strong has also (...) been challenged. This paper examines such challenges and finds them wanting. Far from diminishing the case for strong assertion, carefully considering new and old data reveals that assertion is as strong as ever. (shrink)

Psychological approaches to treating mental illness or improving psychological wellbeing are invariably based on the explicit or implicit understanding that there is an intrinsically existing ‘self’ or ‘I’ entity. In other words, regardless of whether a cognitive-behavioural, psychodynamic, or humanistic psychotherapy treatment model is employed, these approaches are ultimately concerned with changing how the ‘I’ relates to its thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and/or to its physical, social, and spiritual environment. Although each of these psychotherapeutic modalities have been shown to have (...) utility for improving psychological health, there are inevitably limitations to their effectiveness and there will always be those individuals for whom they are incompatible. Given such limitations, research continuously attempts to identify and empirically validate more effective, acceptable and/or diverse treatment approaches. One such approach gaining momentum is the use of techniques that derive from Buddhist contemplative practice. Although mindfulness is arguably the most popular and empirically researched example, there is also growing interest into the psychotherapeutic applications of Buddhism’s ‘non-self’ ontological standpoint (in which ontology is basically the philosophical study of the nature or essence of being, existence, or reality). (shrink)

Speakers offer testimony. They also hedge. This essay offers an account of how hedging makes a difference to testimony. Two components of testimony are considered: how testimony warrants a hearer's attitude, and how testimony changes a speaker's responsibilities. Starting with a norm-based approach to testimony where hearer's beliefs are prima facie warranted because of social norms and speakers acquire responsibility from these same norms, I argue that hedging alters both components simultaneously. It changes which attitudes a hearer is prima facie (...) warranted in forming in response to testimony, and reduces how much responsibility a speaker undertakes in testifying. A consequence of this account is that speakers who hedge for strategic purposes deprive their hearers of warrant for stronger doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...) types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

William Whewell’s 19th century philosophy of science is sometimes glossed over as a footnote to Kant. There is however a key feature of Whewell’s account worth noting. This is his appeal to Aristotle’s form/matter hylomorphism as a metaphor to explain how mind and world merge in successful scientific inquiry. Whewell’s hylomorphism suggests a middle way between rationalism and empiricism reminiscent of experience pragmatists like Steven Levine’s view that mind and world are entwined in experience. I argue however that Levine does (...) not adequately explain exactly how mind and world entwine. He could nonetheless do so if he appealed to Whewell’s hylomorphic metaphor. We may prefer a reductive metaphysical explanation, but I suggest that pragmatists only have recourse to metaphor in this case. Both reductive and metaphorical explanations can enjoy great explanatory power if they exhibit a suitable measure of what I will call sematic distance. Semantic distance measures how close or how far apart explanandum and explanans are from each other in meaning. Metaphorical explanation - as evident in Whewell’s hylomorphism and as detailed via the notion of semantic distance - presents a valuable new explanatory tool to those who hold that mind and world are entwined sans recourse to metaphysics. (shrink)

Were governments justified in imposing lockdowns to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic? We argue that a convincing answer to this question is to date wanting, by critically analyzing the factual basis of a recent paper, “How Government Leaders Violated Their Epistemic Duties During the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis” (Winsberg et al. 2020). In their paper, Winsberg et al. argue that government leaders did not, at the beginning of the pandemic, meet the epistemic requirements necessitated to impose lockdowns. We focus on (...) Winsberg et al.’s contentions that knowledge about COVID-19 resultant projections were inadequate; that epidemiologists were biased in their estimates of relevant figures; that there was insufficient evidence supporting the efficacy of lockdowns; and that lockdowns cause more harm than good. We argue that none of these claims are sufficiently supported by evidence, thus impairing their case against lockdowns, and leaving open the question of whether lockdowns were justified. (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)

Propositions are traditionally regarded as performing vital roles in theories of natural language, logic, and cognition. This chapter offers an opinionated survey of recent literature to assess whether they are still needed to perform three linguistic roles: be the meaning of a declarative sentence in a context, be what is designated by certain linguistic expressions, and be the content of illocutionary acts. After considering many of the relevant choice-points, I suggest that there remains a linguistic basis for propositions, but not (...) for some of the traditional reasons. (shrink)

In this article , I first engage in some conceptual clarification of what the words "imagine," "imagining," and "imagination" can mean. Each has a constructive sense, an attitudinal sense, and an imagistic sense. Keeping the senses straight in the course of cognitive theorizing is important for both psychology and philosophy. I then discuss the roles that perceptual memories, beliefs, and genre truth attitudes play in constructive imagination, or the capacity to generate novel representations that go well beyond what's prompted by (...) one's immediate environment. (shrink)

Are religious beliefs psychologically different from matter-of-fact beliefs? Many scholars say no: that religious people, in a matter-of-fact way, simply think their deities exist. Others say yes: that religious beliefs are more compartmentalized, less certain, and less responsive to evidence. Little research to date has explored whether lay people themselves recognize such a difference. We addressed this question in a series of sentence completion tasks, conducted in five settings that differed both in religious traditions and in language: the US, Ghana, (...) Thailand, China, and Vanuatu. Participants everywhere routinely used different verbs to describe religious versus matter-of-fact beliefs, and they did so even when the ascribed belief contents were held constant and only the surrounding context varied. These findings support the view that people from diverse cultures and language communities recognize a difference in attitude type between religious belief and everyday matter-of-fact belief. (shrink)

Models not only represent but may also influence their targets in important ways. While models’ abilities to influence outcomes has been studied in the context of economic models, often under the label ‘performativity’, we argue that this phenomenon also pertains to epidemiological models, such as those used for forecasting the trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic. After identifying three ways in which a model by the Covid-19 Response Team at Imperial College London may have influenced scientific advice, policy, and individual responses, (...) we consider the implications of epidemiological models’ performative capacities. We argue, first, that performativity may impair models’ ability to successfully predict the course of an epidemic; but second, that it may provide an additional sense in which these models can be successful, namely by changing the course of an epidemic. (shrink)

Als Plato de hedendaagse academie zou aanschouwen, zou hij niet alleen stomverbaasd zijn over de massificatie en de byzantijnse bureaucratie, maar gezien het ethische doel van de universiteit zou hij ook reden hebben om bezorgd te zijn.

Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain mundane instrumental actions (e.g., Neil believes the switch is connected to the light, so he flipped the switch to illuminate the room). Sometimes people posit "beliefs" to explain group affiliation or identity (e.g., in order to belong to the Christian Reformed Church Neil must believe that God is triune). If we set aside the commonality of the word "belief," we can pose a crucial question: Is the cognitive attitude typically involved in the first "light (...) switch" sort of case the same as the cognitive attitude typically involved in the second "Trinity" sort of case? Or: Is mundanely believing the same cognitive relation as groupishly believing? In this essay, I argue that the answer is no. Mundane Beliefs play their instrumental roles well if they are true, and their manner of processing is accordingly sensitive to evidence. Groupish Beliefs play their identity-constituting roles well if they are distinctive, and their manners of processing accordingly allow for and often support distortions of evidence and truth. The manners of processing are thus so different that--despite the common word "belief"--philosophy of mind and epistemology would do well to recognize distinct cognitive attitudes. (shrink)

Iconic photographs are visual arguments depicting an, often dramatic, particular situation showing victims of disasters. Spectators watching the photo of the particular situation, empathise with it, and project the feelings evoked onto the events that form the context for the scene in the picture. This mobilises them into political action. In the process, however, the depicted personal misery is perused to exemplify the larger events. The tragedy of iconic photographs is analysed not as the misery experienced by the depicted persons, (...) but as the breach of their right to shame which is required for the photo to acquire iconicity. Examples are addressed, as well as the contrast classes of the self-portrait and Byzantine icons. (shrink)

Imaginative representations are crucial to the generation of action--both pretense and plain action. But well-known theories of imagination on offer in the literature [1] fail to describe how perceptually-formatted imaginings (mental images) and motor imaginings function in the generation of action and [2] fail to recognize the important fact that spatially rich imagining can be integrated into one's perceptual manifold. In this paper, I present a theory of imagining that shows how spatially rich imagining functions in the generation of action. (...) I also describe the imaginative structures behind two under-explored forms of action: semi-pretense and pretense layering. In addition, I suggest that my theory of imagining meshes better than the competitors with current work in cognitive and affective neuroscience. (shrink)

Lying is standardly distinguished from misleading according to how a disbelieved proposition is conveyed. To lie, a speaker uses a sentence to say a proposition she does not believe. A speaker merely misleads by using a sentence to somehow convey but not say a disbelieved proposition. Front-and-center to the lying/misleading distinction is a conception of what-is-said by a sentence in a context. Stokke (2016, 2018) has recently argued that the standard account of lying/misleading is explanatorily inadequate unless paired with a (...) theory where what-is-said by a sentence is determined by the question under discussion or QUD. I present two objections to his theory, and conclude that no extant theory of what-is-said enables the standard account of the lying/misleading distinction to be explanatorily adequate. (shrink)

Objectives. The purpose of this study was to conduct the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of a second-generation mindfulness-based intervention (SG-MBI) for treating fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). Compared to first generation mindfulness-based interventions, SG-MBIs are more acknowledging of the spiritual aspect of mindfulness. Design. A RCT employing intent-to-treat analysis. Methods. Adults with FMS received an 8-week SG-MBI known as meditation awareness training (MAT; n = 74) or an active control intervention known as cognitive behaviour theory for groups (...) (n = 74). Assessments were performed at pre-, post-, and 6-month follow-up phases. Results. Meditation awareness training participants demonstrated significant and sustained improvements over control group participants in FMS symptomatology, pain perception, sleep quality, psychological distress, non-attachment (to self, symptoms, and environment), and civic engagement. A mediation analysis found that (1) civic engagement partially mediated treatment effects for all outcome variables, (2) non-attachment partially mediated treatment effects for psychological distress and sleep quality, and (3) non-attachment almost fully mediated treatment effects for FMS symptomatology and pain perception. Average daily time spent in meditation was found to be a significant predictor of changes in all outcome variables. Conclusions. Meditation awareness training may be a suitable treatment for adults with FMS and appears to ameliorate FMS symptomatology and pain perception by reducing attachment to self. (shrink)

Under which conditions are social relationships hierarchical, and under which conditions are they not? This article has three main aims. First, I will explain what this question amounts to by providing a more detailed description of the general phenomenon of social hierarchy. Second, I will provide an account of what social hierarchy is. Third, I will provide some considerations in favour of this account by discussing how it improves upon three alternative ways of thinking about social hierarchy that are sometimes (...) explicitly endorsed and sometimes suggested or presupposed in writings in philosophy and elsewhere. (shrink)

Bernard Williams argued that historical and philosophical inquiry were importantly linked in a number of ways. This introductory chapter distinguishes four different connections he identified between philosophy and history. (1) He believed that philosophy could not ignore its own history in the way that science can. (2) He thought that when engaging with philosophy’s history primarily to produce history, one still had to draw on philosophy. (3) Even doing history of philosophy philosophically, i.e. primarily to produce philosophy, required a keen (...) sense of how historically distant from us past philosophers were, on his view, because the point of reading them was to confront something different from the present. (4) He held that systematic philosophy itself needed to be done historically, engaging not necessarily with its own history, but with that of the concepts it sought to understand. The chapter closes with an overview of the volume’s structure and content. (shrink)

Is epistocracy epistemically superior to democracy? In this paper, I scrutinize some of the arguments for and against the epistemic superiority of epistocracy. Using empirical results from the literature on the epistemic benefits of diversity as well as the epistemic contributions of citizen science, I strengthen the case against epistocracy and for democracy. Disenfranchising, or otherwise discouraging anyone to participate in political life, on the basis of them not possessing a certain body of (social scientific) knowledge, is untenable also from (...) an epistemic point of view. Rather than focussing on individual competence, we should pay attention to the social constellation through which we produce knowledge to make sure we decrease epistemic loss (by ensuring diversity and inclusion) and increase epistemic productivity (by fostering a multiplicity of perspectives interacting fruitfully). Achieving those epistemic benefits requires a more democratic approach that differs significantly from epistocracy. (shrink)

This article considers two different ways of formulating a desire-satisfaction theory of prudential value. The first version of the theory (the object view) assigns basic prudential value to the state of affairs that is the object of a person’s desire. The second version (the combo view) assigns basic prudential value to the compound state of affairs in which (a) a person desires some state of affairs and (b) this state of affairs obtains. My aims in this article are twofold. First, (...) I aim to highlight that these are not mere notational variants, but in fact have quite different implications, so that this distinction is not one that the theorist of prudential value should ignore. More positively, I argue that the object view is better able to capture what is distinctive and appealing about subjective theories of prudential value, on any plausible account of what the central subjectivist insight is. (shrink)

Kant’s views on animals have received much attention in recent years. According to some, Kant attributed the capacity for objective perceptual awareness to non-human animals, even though he denied that they have concepts. This position is difficult to square with a conceptualist reading of Kant, according to which objective perceptual awareness requires concepts. Others take Kant’s views on animals to imply that the mental life of animals is a blooming, buzzing confusion. In this article I provide a historical reconstruction of (...) Kant’s views on animals, relating them to eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition. I reconstruct the views of Buffon and Reimarus and show that (i) both Buffon and Reimarus adopted a conceptualist position, according to which concepts structure the cognitive experience of adult humans, and (ii) that both described the mental life of animals as a blooming, buzzing confusion. Kant’s position, I argue, is virtually identical to that of Reimarus. Hence Kant’s views on animals support a conceptualist reading of Kant. The article further articulates the historical antecedents of the Kantian idea that concepts structure human cognitive experience and provides a novel account of how the ideas of similarity and difference were conceptualized in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition. (shrink)

The paper by Monteiro, Musten and Compson (2014) is to be commended for providing a comprehensive discussion of the compatibility issues arising from the integration of mindfulness – a 2,500-year-old Buddhist practice – into research and applied psychological domains. Consistent with the observations of various others (e.g., Dunne, 2011; Kang & Whittingham, 2010), Monteiro and colleagues have not only highlighted that there are differences in how Buddhism and contemporary mindfulness interventional approaches interpret and contextualize mindfulness, but there are also differing (...) interpretations of mindfulness within Buddhism. These apparent differences within Buddhism are arguably more noticeable when making comparisons across Buddhist vehicles (i.e., Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana), but to a lesser extent intra-vehicular differences can also be said to exist (i.e., differences between Buddhist traditions of the same vehicle). This commentary investigates the validity of some of these different Buddhist constructions of mindfulness, and then discusses how a better understanding of their scriptural and conceptual soundness (or lack thereof) may help to reconcile some of the actual and perceived incompatibility between Buddhist practice and contemporary secular mindfulness-based approaches. (shrink)

I criticize 5 arguments for the conclusion that religious belief is unreliably formed and hence epistemically tainted. The arguments draw on scientific evidence from Cognitive Science of Religion. They differ considerably as to why the evidence points to unreliability. Two arguments conclude to unreliability because religious belief is shaped by evolutionary pressures; another argument states that the mechanism responsible for religious belief produces many false god-beliefs; a similar argument claims that the mechanism produces incompatible god-beliefs; and a final argument states (...) that the mechanism is offtrack. I argue that the arguments fail to make the case for unreliability or that the unreliability can be overcome. (shrink)