Temporality and Spatiality have been extensively addressed in philosophy, and their disturbances have been extensively studied in psychopathology (e.g. Wyllie 2005). Mental health patients: (1) describe pathological experiences of Time and Space (Gallagher and Varela 2003); (2) show disturbed timing (Tysk 1984); (3) experience psychopathological phenomena that could be the cause of changes in temporality and spatiality. These topics will be discussed in the case of mood disorders, in particular euphoric and dysphoric mania episodes. Any phenomenological study in mood disorders (...) is delicate as affective disorders are in themselves phenomenologically diverse, because they have obscure meaning, multitude of criteria and inconsistent reference norms. Also, psychoanalytical, colloquial and cognitive psychologies keep instilling comprehensive and epistemological structures onto both mood and time/space notions. Nevertheless, bridging philosophical phenomenology and epistemology on time and temporality with mood psychopathology and taxonomy constitutes an on-going project. Theories by Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as well as by Minkowsky, Binswanger, Fuchs, Parnas, and Sass could help to describe this relation deepened into many other Twentieth-Century philosophical papers. A similar account of space and spatiality will be brought about. We will reason about the concept that they provide evidence to address current conceptualization of “bipolar” disorder and the hierarchical grouping of dysphoric and euphoria mania. (shrink)

El Foro Global de Bioética en Investigación (GFBR por sus siglas en inglés) se reunió el 3 y 4 de noviembre en Buenos Aires, Argentina, con el objetivo de discutir la ética de la investigación con mujeres embarazadas. El GFBR es una plataforma mundial que congrega a actores clave con el objetivo de promover la investigación realizada de manera ética, fortalecer la ética de la investigación en salud, particularmente en países de ingresos bajos y medios, y promover colaboración entre países (...) del norte y del sur.a Los participantes en el GFBR provenientes de Latinoamérica incluyeron a eticistas, investigadores, miembros de comités de ética y representantes de autoridades sanitarias provenientes de Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panamá, Perú, Nicaragua y la República Dominicana. Una legítima preocupación por la protección de las mujeres embarazadas y sus embriones o fetos ha llevado a la mayoría de los países de la Región de las Américas a limitar la realización de estudios con mujeres embarazadas exclusivamente a aquellos estudios específicos sobre el embarazo, y a requerir la exclusión sistemática de las mujeres embarazadas o de las mujeres que quedan embarazadas en el curso del estudio. Ciertamente, a lo largo de la historia de la ética de la investigación, se ha creído erróneamente que proteger a una población es sinónimo de excluirla de los estudios. Se sabe ahora que proceder así implica exponer a riesgos mucho mayores a la población que se busca proteger. El embarazo implica cambios fisiológicos sustantivos e impacta profundamente la manera como el cuerpo metaboliza los medicamentos. Sin embargo, por evitar hacer investigación con mujeres embarazadas, no se ha producido la evidencia científica necesaria para tomar decisiones sobre tratamientos e intervenciones preventivas con dosis eficaces y seguras para ellas y sus embriones o fetos. A manera de ilustración, en el 2001 había en los Estados Unidos apenas más de una docena de medicamentos aprobados para uso en el embarazo (1) y en el 2011 la Food and Drug Administration (FDA) aprobó por primera vez en 15 años un medicamento para su uso en el embarazo (2). Como consecuencia de no haber producido la evidencia necesaria, se pone en riesgo la salud de las mujeres embarazadas cada vez que se les da atención médica. Las mujeres embarazadas se enferman y las mujeres enfermas se embarazan, y no se sabe si los medicamentos que se les da son eficaces o siquiera seguros para ellas y sus embriones o fetos. (shrink)

A review of Maria Luisa Ardizzone's Reading as the Angels Read: Speculation and Politics in Dante’s Banquet. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. xii 1 454 pp. $95.

Esta entrevista retoma la experiencia de enseñanza de la profesora María Luisa Roel en función de la producción literaria de España. El objetivo es interiorizar sobre cómo esta se ha transferido en el ámbito de educación universitaria. A partir de la trayectoria de la docente, se brinda un panorama de cómo los estudiantes de la carrera profesional de Literatura acatan el conocimiento y la lectura de autores españoles, como Miguel de Cervantes. De igual forma, se mencionan dos momentos (...) históricos en los que se vería la presencia o la ausencia de esta producción: en la Literatura del Virreinato y la creación literaria contemporánea. (shrink)

El trabajo explora críticamente la idea de una justificación débil o pen última de la moral enmarcándola en el conjunto de la filosofía de Tugendhat, reordenan do sus escritos éticos y discriminando los diversos aspectos que incluye dicha idea. Entre ellos, revisa el concepto formal de moral, ligado a los sentimientos, antes de centrarse en el punto crucial: la fundamentación de la ética moderna. Aquí se distingue, por un lado, la justificación comparativa de un contractualismo igualitario frente a otras alternativas (...) teóricas y, por otro, los motivos que pueden llevar a un individuo autónomo a entenderse en términos morales. (shrink)

Abstract: In the past fifteen years Tugendhat has tentatively proposed to recover the role of anthropology as the core philosophical discipline or first philosophy. This peculiar return to the German thinking of the ‘20s is, on the one hand, a projection of the author’s whole intellectual evolution. On the other hand, it allows us to focus on classic epistemological problems of philosophical anthropology such as its object and contents, its method, and its place among other philosophical studies. The present paper (...) criticizes Tugendhat’s position, yet considers this sort of return to Kant as valuable, a return that sees anthropology as the core and ultimate self-reflective telos of philosophy. -/- Key Words: Ends of reason. Human vulnerability. Kant. Metaphilosophy. Self-reflection. (shrink)

The “language-communication-society” triangle defies traditional scientific approaches. Rather, it is a phenomenon that calls for an integration of complex, transdisciplinary perspectives, if we are to make any progress in understanding how it works. The highly diverse agents in play are not merely cognitive and/or cultural, but also emotional and behavioural in their specificity. Indeed, the effort may require building a theoretical and methodological body of knowledge that can effectively convey the characteristic properties of phenomena in human terms. New complexity approaches (...) allow us to rethink our limited and mechanistic images of human societies and create more appropriate emo-cognitive dynamic and holistic models. We have to enter into dialogue with the complexity views coming out of other more ‘material’ sciences, but we also need to take steps in the linguistic and psycho-sociological fields towards creating perspectives and concepts better fitted to human characteristics. Our understanding of complexity is different – but not opposed – to the one that is more commonly found in texts written by people working in physics or computer science, for example. The goal of this book is to extend the knowledge of these other more ‘human’ or socially oriented perspectives on complexity, taking account of the language and communication singularities of human agents in society. (shrink)

Mindset plays a vital role in tackling the barriers to improving the preservice mathematics teachers’ (PMTs) conceptual understanding of problem-solving. As the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to pose a challenge, online learning has been adopted. This led this study to determining the PMTs’ mindset and level of conceptual understanding in problem-solving in an online learning environment utilising Google Classroom and the Khan Academy. A quantitative research design was employed specifically utilising a descriptive, comparative, and correlational design. Forty-five PMTs were chosen (...) through simple random sampling and willingly took part in this study. The data was gathered using validated and reliable questionnaires and problem-solving tests. The data gathered was analysed using descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and simple linear regression. The results revealed that the college admission test, specifically numerical proficiency, influences a strong mindset and a higher level of conceptual understanding in problem-solving. Additionally, this study shows that mindset predicts the levels of conceptual understanding in problem-solving in an online environment where PMTs with a growth mindset have the potential to solve math problems. The use of Google Classroom and the Khan Academy to aid online instruction is useful in the preparation of PMTs as future mathematics teachers and problem-solvers. Further studies may be conducted to validate these reports and to address the limitations of this study. (shrink)

Interview with the author of "why We are in Need of Tails." Iguana Books, Toronto, Canada.

Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social (...) misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development results from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether. (shrink)

Readers are awaiting a new encounter with stories united under the common title Why We Are in Need of Tales. Let me remind you that these deep philosophical books were written by Maria daVenza Tillmanns, a professional philosopher dedicated to the study of philosophizing with children, who has gained valuable experience in this field. Maria’s books are inspired by her work with her students at El Toyon Elementary School in National City (California), with whom Maria held philosophy with children classes (...) for three years before COVID-19. With parental permission, the children provided their drawings, which are used as illustrations for the books. I read Why We Are in Need of Tales, Part III with great pleasure. The focus of this book is on making decisions, sometimes very hard decisions. In Part II, the focus is on dreams — hopes and wishes we have for life. This book looks at how we may best decide how to make those hopes and wishes come true. And the answer Huk and Tuk suggest is deceptively easy: by making decisions “with your eyes wide open.” (5, p. ix). The author of this excellent book managed to describe how to make decisions with your eyes wide open through the playful dialogue between Huk and Tuk. The books are written in dialogue so the reader immediately plunges into the context of a lively conversation. Dialogue not only sharpens attention, but also invites the reader to participate in the conversation. In this way, the reader becomes a listener at the same time. (shrink)

This paper focuses on negative exemplarity-related emotions (NEREs) and on their educational implications. In this paper, we will first argue for the nonexpendability of negative emotions broadly conceived (section 2) by defending their instrumental and intrinsic role in a good and flourishing life. In section 3, we will make the claim more specific by focusing on the narrower domain of NEREs and argue for their moral and educational significance by evaluating whether they fit the arguments provided in the previous section. (...) In section 4, we will propose three educational strategies to foster NEREs’ positive moral role. In conclusion, we will point out that an exemplarist approach to character education would greatly benefit from a more fine-grained account of the emotions involved in the educational process and from a broader perspective on which of these emotions should be taken as valuable for educational purposes. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza la técnica del fracking como una solución a la problemática que en materia hidrocarburos se había dado en las últimas dos décadas, y los impactos negativos que conlleva para la salud y el ambiente. Se plantea como solución la aplicación del principio de precaución que le permite al Estado actuar ante una situación de riesgo e incertidumbre. La metodología escogida fue de corte analítico-deductivo a partir de la normatividad vigente y de los postulados teóricos de algunos (...) autores que son referentes en la materia. Como resultados se presentan algunas reflexiones que invitan a considerar la aplicación de este principio, hasta tanto no se tengan estudios suficientes que garanticen que esta práctica preservará el ambiente y no afectará la salud humana. (shrink)

Escribir hoy en día un libro sobre hermenéutica, que tal hermenéutica se refiera a la desarrollada por G. Gadamer en su conocido Verdad y método y que se pretenda añadir algo nuevo a lo mucho escrito sobre el tema parecería, a primera vista, empresa irrealizable. Que ambas pretensiones inspiren la sólida monografía de María G. Navarro —titulada Interpretar y argumentar— constituye empresa audaz y arriesgada, plena de coraje innovador, que provoca admiración, curiosidad e interés. Contra lo que pudiera parecer (...) a primera vista, el libro contiene un alto componente de originalidad y creatividad, debido a la estratagema metodoló-gica de que se sirve la autora. A saber, una hermenéutica in obliquo, estrategia consistente en interpretar a la hermenéutica gadameriana a través del prisma de la lógica de la argumentación. (shrink)

This paper argues that the so-called ‘paradox’ of dehumanization is a mirage arising from misplaced abstraction. The alleged ‘paradox’ is taken as a challenge that arises from a skeptical stance. After reviewing the history of that skeptical stance, it is reconstructed as an argument with two premises. With the help of an epistemologically structured but pluralistic frame it is then shown how the two premises of the Skeptic’s argument can both be debunked. As part of that it emerges that there (...) are a couple of ways how dehumanization can be realized, and one such realization can be sufficient for affirming the reality of dehumanization for a specific case. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner connects (...) historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

Data involving epistemic modals suggest that some classically valid argument forms, such as _reductio_, are invalid in natural language reasoning as they lead to modal collapses. We adduce further data showing that the classical argument forms governing the existential quantifier are similarly defective, as they lead to a _de re–de dicto_ collapse. We observe a similar problem for disjunction. But if the classical argument forms for negation, disjunction and existential quantification are invalid, what are the correct forms that govern the (...) use of these items? Our diagnosis is that epistemic modals interfere with hypothetical reasoning. We present a modal first-order logic and model theory that characterizes hypothetical reasoning with epistemic modals in a principled manner. One upshot is a sound and complete natural deduction system for reasoning with epistemic modals in first-order logic. (shrink)

In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' ('a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise'). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. I present an objection to these cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many of those debates. Such cases (...) all require a counterfactual mechanism that could cause an agent to perform an action that he cannot avoid performing. I argue that, given our concept of what it is for someone to act, this requirement is inconsistent. Frankfurt-style alleged counterexamples are cases where an agent is morally responsible for an action he performs even though, the claim goes, he could not have avoided performing that action. However, it has recently been argued, e.g. by John Fischer, that a counterexample to the Principle could be a 'Fischer-style case', i.e. a case where the agent can either perform the action or do nothing else. I argue that, although Fischer-style cases do not share the conceptual flaw common to all Frankfurt-style cases, they also fail as counterexamples to the Principle. The paper finishes with a brief discussion of the significance of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities. (shrink)

In Francesco Berto’s words, the term “Serious Actualism” is used for the position “that any object must exist in every circumstance in which it has any property – the thesis that predication, or the having of properties as such, entails existence.” (“Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: The Best of Three Worlds”, Philosophical Studies 152, 2011, 324f.) Berto agrees with Nathan Salmon that Serious Actualism is “a confused and misguided prejudice” (Salmon, “Nonexistence”, Noûs 32, 1998, 290). The aim of this paper is (...) to defend the doctrine of Serious Actualism against this verdict. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that a proper understanding of what Leibniz meant by “hypercategorematic infinite” sheds light on some fundamental aspects of his conceptions of God and of the relationship between God and created simple substances or monads. After revisiting Leibniz’s distinction between (i) syncategorematic infinite, (ii) categorematic infinite, and (iii) actual infinite, I examine his claim that the hypercategorematic infinite is “God himself” in conjunction with other key statements about God. I then discuss the issue of whether the (...) hypercategorematic infinite is a “whole”, comparing the four kinds of infinite outlined by Leibniz in 1706 with the three degrees of infinity outlined in 1676. In the last section, I discuss the relationship between the hypercategorematic infinite and created simple substances. I conclude that, for Leibniz, only a being beyond all determinations but eminently embracing all determinations can enjoy the pure positivity of what is truly infinite while constituting the ontological grounding of all things. (shrink)

This article presents an explanatory hypothesis regarding an anomalous fact: the omission of complete information but also of the necessary interpretation about the identity traits and specific characteristics of civil society observed in many theoretical and practical contributions in studies on deliberative democracy. The difference between liberal democracy and the deliberative model is blurred when the task of interpreting deliberative practices is relegated or when the approach of critical theory is not applied in the analysis of the material political culture (...) of which deliberative agents are both the architects and the recipients. The hypothesis presented emphasizes the difficulties and systematic rejection generated by the main emancipatory achievements of modern citizens. The resistance aroused by these achievements among prestigious interlocutors of civil society has fueled a sophisticated reactionary rhetoric, which was reported by social science researcher Albert O. Hirschman. At the same time, the explanatory hypothesis used here has a key assumption: the existence of a striking correlation between certain argumentative imperatives and the meager cultural attention that the valuable pluralism observable in deliberative behavior receives today. (shrink)

Embodied self-reflection goes beyond strictly rational thinking – we are thinking beings after all, for it includes our tacit concrete knowledge, as Michael Polanyi and David Bohm would describe the thinking that is implicit in our abilities to know how to do things such as knowing how to ride a bicycle. Polanyi describes this knowledge as: “[knowing] more than we can tell.” To become aware of the thinking below the surface of rational thinking is very challenging. Yet that is exactly (...) what is required for any kind of self-awareness and self-transformation to take place. To become aware of our own thinking essentially means becoming aware of oneself as a witness to our own thinking in the process of thinking. Bohm understands thinking as a movement and similarly to becoming aware of our physical movements through proprioception, so too can we become aware of our thinking as a movement. Proprioception of thinking implies proprioception of embodied thinking. -/- (Self-)reflection is (self-)examination or (self-)scrutiny is a process that requires the courage to question one’s self and with it the touchstones underlying our identity. This process is a form of parrhesia, for parrhesia is essentially also a form of infinite questioning, and which can also be applied to questioning the self. (shrink)

This is the last of three lectures on anaphoric parallels between individuals and possibilities across languages (IMS, Stuttgart, 2000).

Day 4 of advanced course on "Crosslinguistic compositional semantics" at 2009 LSA Summer Institute at UC Berkeley. Plan to today: (a) Introduction (syn-sem traits of English vs. Kalaallisut, scope corollary), (b) UC1 + event (re)centering = UC2, (c) English and Kalaallisut in CCG+UC2, (d) Analysis of Kalaallisut BA.TO.L (review) vs. English SA.SU.S (new).

Reasons can play a variety of roles in a variety of contexts. For instance, reasons can motivate and guide us in our actions (and omissions), in the sense that we often act in the light of reasons. And reasons can be grounds for beliefs, desires and emotions and can be used to evaluate, and sometimes to justify, all these. In addition, reasons are used in explanations: both in explanations of human actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., and in explanations of a (...) wide range of phenomena involving all sorts of animate and inanimate substances. This diversity has encouraged the thought that the term 'reason' is ambiguous or has different senses in different contexts. Moreover, this view often goes hand in hand with the claim that reasons of these different kinds belong to different ontological categories: to facts (or something similar) in the case of normative/justifying reasons, and to mental states in the case of motivating/explanatory reasons. In this paper I shall explore some of the main roles that reasons play and, on that basis, I shall offer a classification of kinds of reasons. As will become clear, my classification of reasons is at odds with much of the literature in several respects: first, because of my views about how we should understand the claim that reasons are classified into different kinds; second, because of the kinds into which I think reasons should be classified; and, finally, because of the consequences I think this view has for the ontology of reasons. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a way of characterizing human agency in terms of the concept of a two‐way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections, and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise‐ and blameworthiness.

Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...) view, should they be excused for failing to meet their moral obligations? It is not obvious that they should. In this paper we argue that the best non-skeptical accounts of moral responsibility acknowledge that factual ignorance and mistake will diminish moral responsibility in a way that moral ignorance and mistake will not. That is because factual ignorance is often non-culpable so long as it meets certain merely procedural epistemic standards but the same is not true of moral ignorance. Our argument is that the assumption that it is gets the standards of culpability for moral ignorance wrong, and that the mistake is encouraged by the thought that culpability in general requires an instance of known wrongdoing: that acting wrongly requires de dicto unresponsiveness to one’s obligations at some stage. We deny this and conclude that, therefore, ignorance and mistaken belief are indeed often perfectly good excuses – but far less often than some philosophers claim. (shrink)

Quadruple Helix Collaborations (QHCs) is a cooperation model in which industry, government, academia, and the public interact to innovate. This paper analyses the impact of a training intervention to provide specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes to deal with barriers commonly found in the progress of QHCs. We designed, implemented, and evaluated three training programs in Austrian, Colombian, Danish, and Spanish institutions. We analysed trainees’ (n = 66) and trainers’ (n = 9) perceptions to identify the competencies acquired with the intervention (...) and the approach’s limitations. We used online questionnaires (35 trainees; 9 trainers), semi-structured interviews (10 trainees), and a focus group (6 trainers). Trainees answered positively regarding their self-perception about the impact of the course and highlighted the acquisition of inspiration for their practice (score 4.1 out of 5.0) and knowledge (3.7). In contrast, they perceived that a deeper interaction with other participants (2.7) was challenging. After the courses, 74% of respondents indicated that they know more about how QHCs work in practice, and 86% about collaboration or engagement methods. Moreover, participants plan to be more sensitive towards setting common goals (71%) and power imbalances (63%). Trainers’ perceptions align with those expressed by participants, except that they considered that the interaction amongst participants during the course was higher. Qualitative analysis of interviews with participants and the focus group with trainers provides more detail about the strengths and weaknesses of the intervention. Our study shows that the collaborative design and implementation of training impact the participant’s learning competencies, with potential implications in their medium- to long-term practice. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, and (...) consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

Статья посвящена обоснованию смены парадиг- мы в философии для детей, а именно тому, что философия для детей сама может привнести в академическую философию, а не наоборот. Сме- на парадигмы связана с раскрытием категории «отношение» (М. Бубер, Д. Бом). Это априорное отношение к миру формирует основу для инту- итивного знания о нем, поскольку интуитивное мышление исходит из полного участия человека в «переживаемом отношении» с бытием. Вместо акцентирования внимания на том, как можно развить у детей навыки критического мышления посредством абстрактного мышления, необхо- (...) димо сосредоточиться на неявном, конкретном мыслительном процессе, поскольку именно он лежит в основе мышления. (shrink)

Geschlecht und Gewalt, das Thema dieses Bandes, betrifft nicht nur die Frage nach den Charakteristika und Ursachen sexueller Aggression, sondern auch die Frage nach angeblichen geschlechtsspezifischen Formen der Aggression. Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit beidem und diskutiert sie als Teil von begrifflichen Ausweitungen der Kampfzone, d.h. der Erweiterungen des Aggressionsbegriffs im Verlauf der wissenschaftlichen Aggressionsforschung der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Der Beitrag zeigt unter Anderem: was als Aggression wahrgenommen wird und in der Wissenschaft als solche gezählt wird, verändert (...) sich mit der Gesellschaft. Dabei wird aus epistemologischer bzw. wissenschaftsphilosophischer Perspektive gezeigt, wie sich rassistische, Status-, und Geschlechtsstereotype auf begriffliche Entscheidungen in wissenschaftlicher Forschung auswirken und somit die wissenschaftliche Arbeit am Begriff beeinflussen können. (shrink)

Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with (...) explanation. I will close with some remarks on the status and differences in some explanations available in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ and who is (...) ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc. (shrink)

How and when do we learn to understand other people’s perspectives and possibly divergent beliefs? This question has elicited much theoretical and empirical research. A puzzling finding has been that toddlers perform well on so-called implicit false belief (FB) tasks but do not show such capacities on traditional explicit FB tasks. I propose a navigational approach, which offers a hitherto ignored way of making sense of the seemingly contradictory results. The proposal involves a distinction between how we navigate FBs as (...) they relate to (1) our current affordances (here & now navigation) as opposed to (2) presently non-actual relations, where we need to leave our concrete embodied/situated viewpoint (counterfactual navigation). It is proposed that whereas toddlers seem able to understand FBs in their current affordance space, they do not yet possess the resources to navigate in abstraction from such concrete affordances, which explicit FB tests seem to require. It is hypothesized that counterfactual navigation depends on the development of “sensorimotor priors,” i.e., statistical expectations of own kinesthetic re-afference, which evidence now suggests matures around age four, consistent with core findings of explicit FB performance. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the topics of trust and expertise from the perspective of political epistemology. In particular, it addresses four main questions: (§1) How should we characterise experts and their expertise? (§2) How can non-experts recognize a reliable expert? (§3) What does it take for non-experts to trust experts? (§4) What problems impede trust in experts?

It is tempting to think that multi premise closure creates a special class of paradoxes having to do with the accumulation of risks, and that these paradoxes could be escaped by rejecting the principle, while still retaining single premise closure. I argue that single premise deduction is also susceptible to risks. I show that what I take to be the strongest argument for rejecting multi premise closure is also an argument for rejecting single premise closure. Because of the symmetry between (...) the principles, they come as a package: either both will have to be rejected or both will have to be revised. (shrink)

Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...) rather than blind, integrating developments from contemporary research on creativity. On that basis, I discuss three compatibility arguments that have been used to answer the critique. These arguments do not deny guided variation but insist that an important analogy exists nonetheless. These compatibility arguments all fail, even though they do so for different reasons: trivialisation, conceptual confusion, and lack of evidence respectively. Revisiting the debate in this manner not only allows us to see where exactly a ‘Darwinian’ account of creative hypothesis formation goes wrong, but also to see that the debate is not about factual issues, but about the interpretation of these factual issues in Darwinian terms. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that for blame to be appropriate the wrongdoer must be blameworthy. However, blameworthiness is not sufficient for appropriate blame. It has been argued that for blame to be appropriate the blamer must have standing to blame. Philosophers writing on the topic have distinguished several considerations that might defeat someone’s standing to blame. This paper examines the underexplored consideration of how personal relationships can influence who has the standing to express blame. We seem to assume that if (...) we do not stand in the right relation to the wrongdoer, it is not our business to blame them. I identify three challenges to this view. First, we do not know what is wrong with meddling (whether it is morally or prudentially wrong). Second, there are cases where we have no close relation to the wrongdoer, but where we seem to have standing nonetheless – murder and other serious moral offences are examples of this. Third, we don’t seem to have a clear conception of what ‘standing’ means, and this makes it hard to see how discussion on standing can help us determine the propriety of blame. This paper defends the notion of standing as a propriety condition on blame in cases of meddling. I argue that personal relationships influence who has the standing to blame through constitution of relationship-specific norms; and that the role these norms play in developing and regulating our relationships can explain why meddlesome blame is morally wrong. (shrink)

This paper introduces a framework for direct surface composition by online update. The surface string is interpreted as is, with each morpheme in turn updating the input state of information and attention. A formal representation language, Logic of Centering, is defined and some crosslinguistic constraints on lexical meanings and compositional operations are formulated.

This article illustrates in which sense genetic determinism is still part of the contemporary interactionist consensus in medicine. Three dimensions of this consensus are discussed: kinds of causes, a continuum of traits ranging from monogenetic diseases to car accidents, and different kinds of determination due to different norms of reaction. On this basis, this article explicates in which sense the interactionist consensus presupposes the innate?acquired distinction. After a descriptive Part 1, Part 2 reviews why the innate?acquired distinction is under attack (...) in contemporary philosophy of biology. Three arguments are then presented to provide a limited and pragmatic defense of the distinction: an epistemic, a conceptual, and a historical argument. If interpreted in a certain manner, and if the pragmatic goals of prevention and treatment are taken into account, then the innate?acquired distinction can be a useful epistemic tool. It can help, first, to understand that genetic determination does not mean fatalism, and, second, to maintain a system of checks and balances in the continuing nature?nurture debates. (shrink)

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...) various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on the concept of human nature disagrees on how to respond to the Darwinian challenge, according to which biological species do not have traditional essences. Three broad kinds of reactions can be distinguished: conservative intrinsic essentialism, which defends essences in the traditional sense, eliminativism, which suggests dropping the concept of human nature altogether, and constructive approaches, which argue that revisions can generate sensible concepts of human nature beyond traditional essences. The different constructive approaches pick out one or (...) two of the three epistemic roles that are fused in traditional essentialist conceptions of human nature: descriptive, explanatory, definitional, or explanatory and definitional. These turns towards diverging epistemic roles are best interpreted pluralistically: there is a plurality of concepts of human nature that have to be clearly distinguished, each with a legitimate role in respective scientific contexts. (shrink)

The article deals with some textual issues related with Aristotle’s treatise “On Youth and Old Age, Life and Death. This text is conventionally included in the so-called “small scientific works”. In the article I considers the title variants testified in the sources as well as the place the treatise occupies within the set of Aristotle’s scientific works. I trace the parallels of this treatise with another Aristotle’s works, such as “De longitudine et brevitate vitae” and “De anima”. The treatise is (...) further compared with Aristotle’s works on physics and biology, esp. “De partibus animalium”, “De motu animalium”, “De generatione animalium”. I discuss the concept of life, functions of the vegetative soul, its “medial” location, and Aristotle’s definition of the soul’s and body’s «midpoint» in respect to the «upward» and «downward» directions. For understanding the meaning of the term «innate natural heat» it is proposed to compare it with the terminology of such Aristotelian works as “De motu animalium” and “De generatione animalium”. (shrink)

Continuing Franz Boas' work to establish anthropology as an academic discipline in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred L. Kroeber re-defined culture as a phenomenon sui generis. To achieve this he asked geneticists to enter into a coalition against hereditarian thoughts prevalent at that time in the US. The goal was to create space for anthropology as a separate discipline within academia, distinct from other disciplines. To this end he crossed the boundary separating anthropology from biology (...) in order to secure the boundary. His notion of culture, closely bound to the concept of heredity, saw it as independent of biological heredity (culture as superorganic) but at the same time as a heredity of another sort. The paper intends to summarise the shifting boundaries of anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to present Kroeber?s ideas on culture, with a focus on how the changing landscape of concepts of heredity influenced his views. The historical case serves to illustrate two general conclusions: that the concept of culture played and plays different roles in explaining human existence; that genetics and the concept of Weismannian hard inheritance did not have an unambiguous unidirectional historical effect on the vogue for hereditarianism at that time; on the contrary, it helped to establish culture in Kroeber's sense, culture as independent of heredity. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on the aspectual distinction between events and states. For example, temporal location as well as temporal update depends on the aspectual type. This paper presents a general theory of aspect-based temporal anaphora, which extends from languages with grammatical tenses (like French and English) to tenseless languages (e.g. Kalaallisut). This theory also extends to additional aspect-dependent phenomena and to non-atomic aspectual types, processes and habits, which license anaphora to (...) proper atomic parts (cf. nominal pluralities and kinds). (shrink)

: This study describes a new field method, suited for investigating scope relations — and other aspects of truth conditional meaning — with native speaker consultants who may speak no other language and have no background in linguistics or logic. This method revealed a surprising scope contrast between the antipassive and the ergative construction in Greenlandic Eskimo. The results of this field work are described in detail and a crosslinguistic scope generalization is proposed based on Greenlandic Eskimo, Basque, Polish, Russian, (...) Finnish and English. (shrink)