The work of Thomas White represents a systematic attempt to combine the best of the new science of the seventeenth century with the best of Aristotelian tradition. This attempt earned him the criticism of Hobbes and the praise of Leibniz, but today, most of his attempts to navigate between traditions remain to be explored in detail. This paper does so for his ontology of accidents. It argues that his criticism of accidents in the category of location as entities over (...) and above substances was likely aimed at Francisco Suárez, and shows how White’s worries about the analysis of location were linked with his broader cosmological views. White rejects real qualities, but holds that the quantity of a substance is somehow distinct from its bearer. This reveals a common ground with some of his scholastic interlocutors, but lays bare a deep disagreement with thinkers like Descartes on the nature of matter. (shrink)

This document presents the Bonn PRINTEGER Consensus Statement: Working with Research Integrity—Guidance for research performing organisations. The aim of the statement is to complement existing instruments by focusing specifically on institutional responsibilities for strengthening integrity. It takes into account the daily challenges and organisational contexts of most researchers. The statement intends to make research integrity challenges recognisable from the work-floor perspective, providing concrete advice on organisational measures to strengthen integrity. The statement, which was concluded February 7th 2018, provides guidance on (...) the following key issues: § 1.Providing information about research integrity § 2.Providing education, training and mentoring § 3.Strengthening a research integrity culture § 4.Facilitating open dialogue § 5.Wise incentive management § 6.Implementing quality assurance procedures § 7.Improving the work environment and work satisfaction § 8.Increasing transparency of misconduct cases § 9.Opening up research § 10.Implementing safe and effective whistle-blowing channels § 11.Protecting the alleged perpetrators § 12.Establishing a research integrity committee and appointing an ombudsperson § 13.Making explicit the applicable standards for research integrity. (shrink)

I present a new argument that we are much more likely to be living in a computer simulation than in the ground-level of reality. (Similar arguments can be marshalled for the view that we are more likely to be Boltzmann brains than ordinary people, but I focus on the case of simulations.) I explain how this argument overcomes some objections to Bostrom’s classic argument for the same conclusion. I also consider to what extent the argument depends upon an internalist conception (...) of evidence, and I refute the common line of thought that finding many simulations being run—or running them ourselves—must increase the odds that we are in a simulation. GPI Working Paper No. 16-2021. (shrink)

Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psychological research on the experiences (...) relevant to the philosophical debates and then describe some pilot studies of our own with the aim of encouraging further research. The data seem to support compatibilist descriptions of the phenomenology more than libertarian descriptions. We conclude that the burden is on libertarians to find empirical support for their more demanding metaphysical theories with their more controversial phenomenological claims. (shrink)

Disrespect for the truth, the rise of conspiracy thinking, and a pervasive distrust in experts are widespread features of the post-truth condition in current politics and public opinion. Among the many good explanations of these phenomena there is one that is only rarely discussed: that something is wrong with our deeply entrenched intellectual standards of (i) using our own critical thinking without any restriction and (ii) respecting the judgment of every rational agent as epistemically relevant. In this paper, I will (...) argue that these two enlightenment principles—the Principle of Unrestricted Critical Thinking and the Principle of Democratic Reason—not only conflict with what is rationally required from a purely epistemic point of view, but also have bad cognitive consequences in furthering the spread of conspiracy theories and undermining trust in experts. I will then explain in more detail why we should typically defer to experts without using any of our own reasons regarding the subject matter. Moreover, I will show what place this leaves for critical thinking and why it does not have the crazy consequences that the critics expect. (shrink)

Tradução do verbete "Democracy", publicado por Thomas Christiano na Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, acrescida de um apêndice.

Products made from animal fur and skin have been a major part of human civilization. However, in modern society, the unsustainable consumption of these products – often considered luxury goods – has many negative environmental impacts. This study explores how people’s perceptions of biodiversity affect their attitudes and behaviors toward consumption. To investigate the information process deeper, we add the moderation of beliefs about biodiversity loss. Following the Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF) analytics, we use mindsponge-based reasoning for constructing conceptual models (...) and employ Bayesian analysis aided by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms on a dataset of 535 Vietnamese urban residents. The results show that people’s preference for using products made from animal skin/fur is negatively associated with perceived consequences of biodiversity loss when they believe biodiversity loss is real and a major problem. In contrast, if urban residents believe biodiversity loss is unreal or not a significant issue, the association between perceived consequences of biodiversity loss and personal preference happens in the opposite direction. The same effects of biodiversity loss perception on people’s possession of skin/fur products was not found, indicating a more complex information process on behaviors compared to attitudes. Nevertheless, in the scenario that people believe biodiversity loss is not a significant issue, the higher the perceived consequences of biodiversity loss are, the greater number of animal-based products they likely own. Our results suggest that policymakers should not neglect the factor of personal belief besides knowledge and awareness in environmental campaigns. (shrink)

This text was prompted by a forum discussing the legacy of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, twenty-five years after its publication. In this short essay, I explore the book’s influence on the fields of Marxism, post-Marxism, and beyond. With the problematic of heritage and legacy in mind, I raise the questions of sexual difference and dissemination as that which comes to interrupt the genealogical logic of inheritance understood as filiation and reproduction. I show that Derrida’s book, besides questioning reception and (...) influence, yet remains to be read, especially in light of ongoing archival research on Derrida’s numerous engagements with Marx and Marxist thought in a series of unpublished seminars from the 1970s. This is done more specifically through a reading of an unpublished seminar from 1974-1975, dealing with the Marxian concepts of ideology and division of labor – which Derrida interrogates more particularly in relation to sex, sexuality, and sexual differences. This text was published in the section "Ambivalent Promises—Reproductions of the Subject: A Forum on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx after 25 Years, Part IV", Contexto Internacional, 42 (1), pp. 125-148. (shrink)

Crime-preventing neurointerventions (CPNs) are increasingly being used or advocated for crime prevention. There is increasing use of testosterone-lowering agents to prevent recidivism in sexual offenders, and strong political and scientific interest in developing pharmaceutical treatments for psychopathy and anti-social behaviour. Recent developments suggest that we may ultimately have at our disposal a range of drugs capable of suppressing violent aggression, and it is not difficult to imagine possible applications of such drugs in crime prevention. But should neurointerventions be used in (...) crime prevention, and may the state ever permissibly impose CPNs as part of the criminal justice process? It is widely thought that preventing recidivism is one of the aims of criminal justice, yet existing means of pursuing this aim are often poorly effective, restrictive of basic freedoms, and harmful. Incarceration, for example, tends to be disruptive of personal relationships and careers, detrimental to physical and mental health, highly restrictive of freedom of movement and association, and rarely more than modestly effective at preventing recidivism. Neurointerventions hold the promise of preventing recidivism in ways that are more effective and more humane, but the use of CPNs in criminal justice raises several ethical concerns. CPNs could be highly intrusive and may threaten fundamental human values, such as bodily integrity and freedom of thought, and humanity has a track record of misguided, harmful, and unwarrantedly coercive use of neurotechnological ‘solutions’ to criminality. This collection brings together original contributions from emerging scholars and internationally renowned moral and political philosophers to address these issues. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a solution to the problem of singular propositions and non-present objects within the view of presentism- that is, how can we refer to past objects if presentism claims only objects in the present exist and that objects outside of the present do not exist, if an object does not exist, how can we refer to it? I will propose that past objects which once did exist have had a lasting effect on the present which allows (...) us, in the present, to refer to those objects indirectly. These effects, which exist in the present and cannot come to be without a cause, allow us to refer to the past object as the cause of those effects. The effect of the past object on the present means that the cause (the past object) has not entirely gone out of existence allowing us to refer to the cause or the past object in the present. (shrink)

Microscopy allows us to observe objects we cannot see with our eyes alone. With a light microscope, we can distinguish objects at the scale of the wavelengths of visible light just under a micrometer. Around 1870 Ernst Abbe, who laid the foundation of modern optics, suggested that the resolution of a microscope would improve by using some yet-unknown radiation with shorter wavelengths than visible light, that is, below 390 nanometers (1 nm = 10−9 m). Electrons can have wavelengths near 1 (...) picometer (1 pm = 10−12 m) and should therefore allow atoms to be distinguished since they are typically at least a few hundred pm apart. In this oversimplified view, further decreasing the wavelength of the radiation should allow us to increase the resolution of electron microscopy even more. However, this can only be done by increasing the energy of the radiation, which would ultimately destroy the samples. Other factors also affect the resolution of electron microscopes, among them non-ideal imaging properties of electromagnetic lenses, which result in false images. It took more than half a century to understand and control these aberrations and separate objects less than 1 Ångstrom (1 Å = 10−10 m) apart. (shrink)

Author: Thomas Sören Hoffmann. Translated by Pedro Sepúlveda Zambrano.

The question “What is an organism?”, formerly considered as essential in biology, has now been increasingly replaced by a larger question, “What is a biological individual?”. On the grounds that i) individuation is theory-dependent, and ii) physiology does not offer a theory, biologists and philosophers of biology have claimed that it is the theory of evolution by natural selection which tells us what counts as a biological individual. Here I show that one physiological field, immunology, offers a theory, which makes (...) possible a biological individuation based on physiological grounds. I give a new answer to the question of the individuation of an organism by linking together the evolutionary and the immunological approaches to biological individuation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that (elementary) topology may be useful for dealing with problems of epistemology and metaphysics. More precisely, I want to show that the introduction of topological structures may elucidate the role of the spatial structures (in a broad sense) that underly logic and cognition. In some detail I’ll deal with “Cassirer’s problem” that may be characterized as an early forrunner of Goodman’s “grue-bleen” problem. On a larger scale, topology turns out to be useful (...) in elaborating the approach of conceptual spaces that in the last twenty years or so has found quite a few applications in cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics. In particular, topology may help distinguish “natural” from “not-so-natural” concepts. This classical problem that up to now has withstood all efforts to solve (or dissolve) it by purely logical methods. Finally, in order to show that a topological perspective may also offer a fresh look on classical metaphysical problems, it is shown that Leibniz’s famous principle of the identity of indiscernibles is closely related to some well-known topological separation axioms. More precisely, the topological perspective gives rise in a natural way to some novel variations of Leibniz’s principle. (shrink)

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to show that the topological interpretation of knowledge as an interior kernel operator K of a topological space (X, OX) comes along with a partially ordered family of belief modalities B that fit K in the sense that the pairs (K, B) satisfy all axioms of Stalnaker’s KB logic of knowledge and belief with the exception of the contentious axiom of negative introspection (NI). The new belief modalities B introduced in this paper are (...) defined with the help of the (dense) nuclei of the Heyting algebra OX of open subsets on the topological space (X, OX). In this way, the natural context for the belief operators B related to topological knowledge operator K is shown to be the Heyting algebra NUC(OX) of the nuclei of the Heyting algebra OX.1 More precisely, the dense nuclei of NUC(OX) can be used to define a variety of bimodal logics of knowledge operators K and belief operators B. The operators K and B are compatible with each other in the sense that the pairs (K, B) satisfy all axioms of Stalnaker’s KB system with the exception of the axiom (NI). Therefore, for (X, OX), one obtains a bounded, partially ordered family of belief operators B defined by the elements of NUC(OX). (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to explain how Wittgenstein's philosophy may be helpful for understanding and addressing challenges to cross-cultural communication in educational contexts. In particular, the notions of “hinge,” “intellectual distance,” and “grounds” from On Certainty will be helpful for identifying cultural differences. Wittgenstein's dialogical conception of philosophy in Philosophical Investigations will be helpful for addressing that cultural difference in conversation. While here can be no panacea to address all potential sources of confusion, Wittgenstein's philosophy has strong resources (...) that are helpful for curbing some of our human tendencies to misunderstand other people. (shrink)

In “The Possibility of Epistemic Nudging” (2021), I address a phenomenon that is widely neglected in the current literature on nudges: intentional doxastic nudging, i.e. people’s intentional influence over other people’s beliefs, rather than over their choices. I argue that, at least in brute cases, nudging is not giving reasons, but rather bypasses reasoning altogether. More specifically, nudging utilizes psychological heuristics and the nudged person’s biases in smart ways. The goal of my paper is to defend the claim that nudging, (...) even when it bypasses reasoning, can result in justified beliefs and knowledge. As I argue, it takes two things to accomplish this goal: suitable meta-epistemological views and appropriate circumstances. If a broadly reliabilist account of justified beliefs and knowledge is correct, and if the relevant belief-forming methods are externally individuated in the right way, then nudging to knowledge is possible. If, in addition, the nudger is knowledgeable, epistemically benevolent and systematically effective, then nudging to knowledge will become reality. In their replies Neil Levy (2021) and Jonathan Matheson and Valerie Joly Chock (2021), put pressure on my argument from different angles. Levy thinks that a better case can be made for his view that nudging is giving testimonial reasons, and finds my objections to this view unconvincing. Matheson and Joly Chock, on the other hand, point out that acquiring knowledge through nudging (i.e. epistemic nudging) is compatible with evidentialism, even if nudging is not giving reasons. On their view, evidentialism provides an explanation of epistemic nudging that is superior to my own account, which, according to them, also suffers from a number of counterintuitive consequences. I am grateful to my critics for raising these concerns, because considering them deepens our perspective on the target phenomenon, and has made me think harder about the relevant epistemological issues. Nevertheless, I am convinced that my core claims can be defended against these criticisms. (shrink)

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subaltern forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a demarcationist focus obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary (...) philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. (shrink)

What motivates to follow moral rules? In general either internal or external rea- sons make a person follow rules. For moral considerations only internal reasons seem sufficient. Acknowledging a person as a fellow human being is internally motivating and turns out to be the main motivational force.

Existing ethical guidelines that aim to guide the development of mental health apps tend to overemphasize the role of Western conceptual frameworks. While such frameworks have proved to be a useful first step in introducing ethics to a previously unregulated industry, the rapid global uptake of mental health apps requires thinking more deeply about the diverse populations these apps seek to serve. One way to do this is to introduce more intercultural ethical perspectives into app design and the guidelines that (...) aim to encourage best practices. In addition to this, existing ethical guidelines can also benefit from the ethical scholarship from the feminist and disability traditions, both of which highlight specific ethical considerations for vulnerable users. Rethinking the ethical responsibilities of mental health app designers through the prisms of feminism, disability studies, and intercultural philosophy leads us to a more global and inclusive set of ethical considerations in app design. This white paper explores what existing guidelines for the regulation of mental health apps are missing. It also explores how these guidelines could be improved for users who inhabit an increasingly diverse and globalized world. (shrink)

We respond to a Letter to the Editor regarding "Principlism and contemporary ethical considerations for providers of transgender health care." We address criticisms by Castle & Klein (2024) of blatant fatphobia related to the ethical elements concerning BMI restrictions for gender-affirming surgery. Our response corrects several mischaracterizations of the article and clarifies our position. My co-authors and I remain focused on advocating for patient-centered, ethically sound, evidence-based, and equitable healthcare policies.

Whether or not capitalism is compatible with ethics is a long standing dispute. We take up an approach to virtue ethics inspired by Adam Smith and consider how market competition influences the virtues most associated with modern commercial society. Up to a point, competition nurtures and supports such virtues as prudence, temperance, civility, industriousness and honesty. But there are also various mechanisms by which competition can have deleterious effects on the institutions and incentives necessary for sustaining even these most commercially (...) friendly of virtues. It is often supposed that if competitive markets are good, more competition must always be better. However, in the long run competition enhancing policies that neglect the nurturing and support of the bourgeois virtues may undermine the continued flourishing of modern commercial society. (shrink)

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, USA, conducted a species status assessment for a petition to list the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) under the Endangered Species Act in 2020-2022. This federal undertaking could not be adequately prepared without including the knowledge of Indigenous People who have a deep cultural connection with the subspecies. Our objective is to communicate the authoritative expertise and voice of the Indigenous People who partnered on the project by demonstrating how their (...) knowledge contributed to the species status assessment. The Indigenous knowledge applied in the assessment is the cultural and intellectual property of those who have shared it. We employed rapid appraisal research to expeditiously develop a preliminary and qualitative understanding of Indigenous People's cultural and ecological knowledge of Alexander Archipelago wolves. We used semi-directed interviewing and inductive coding from grounded theory for text analysis. Indigenous knowledge contributed to the agency's understanding of the Alexander Archipelago wolf in Southeast Alaska and helped the agency with their classification decision. Indigenous research partners explained the rich cultural significance and position of wolves in Tlingit society and described human–wolf relationships and ecological interactions. The agency used a single-species assessment approach based in species ecology and conservation biology, whereas the Indigenous wolf experts applied a multi-species, community ecology approach based in a sociocultural context of balance and respect. The Indigenous wolf experts successfully addressed knowledge gaps identified by the agency. The partners were challenged by a short regulatory timeframe that did not allow for comprehensive study of Indigenous knowledge and constrained review and feedback by Indigenous experts. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service learned that its assessment framework was not designed to account for an Indigenous worldview. To level the playing field, the agency and Indigenous experts should discuss how to co-develop an assessment framework that equitably applies both perspectives. (shrink)

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in (...) other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. (shrink)

Many tasks in statistical and causal inference can be construed as problems of entailment in a suitable formal language. We ask whether those problems are more difficult, from a computational perspective, for causal probabilistic languages than for pure probabilistic (or “associational”) languages. Despite several senses in which causal reasoning is indeed more complex—both expressively and inferentially—we show that causal entailment (or satisfiability) problems can be systematically and robustly reduced to purely probabilistic problems. Thus there is no jump in computational complexity. (...) Along the way we answer several open problems concerning the complexity of well-known probability logics, in particular demonstrating the ${\exists \mathbb {R}}$ -completeness of a polynomial probability calculus, as well as a seemingly much simpler system, the logic of comparative conditional probability. (shrink)

Discussions of the relation between pragmatism and logical empiricism tend to focus on the period when the logical empiricists found themselves in exile, mostly in the United States, and then attempt to gauge the actual extent of their convergence. My concern lies with the period before that and the question whether pragmatism had an earlier influence on the development of logical empiricism, especially on the thought of the former members of the “first” Vienna Circle. I argue for a substantially qualified (...) affirmative answer. (shrink)

I consider a new, non-disjunctive strategy for ‘relational’ or ‘naïve realist’ theories to respond to arguments from ‘perfect’ (causally matching) hallucinations. The strategy, in a nutshell, is to treat such hypothetical cases as instances of perception rather than hallucination. After clarifying the form and dialectic of such arguments, I consider three objections to the strategy. I provide answers to the first two objections but concede that the third — based on the possibility of ‘chaotic’ (uncaused) perfect hallucinations — cannot obviously (...) be dealt with by the proposed strategy. However, such ‘chaotic’ scenarios are also problematic for standard representational accounts of experience. Thus I conclude that perfect hallucinations pose no more of a threat to the relational theory than to its main representational rival. (shrink)

Drugs used to provide improvement of cognitive functioning have been shown to be effective in healthy individuals. It is sometimes assumed that the use of these drugs constitutes cheating in an academic context. We examine whether this assumption is ethically sound. Beyond providing the most up-to-date discussion of modafinil use in an academic context, this contribution includes an overview of the safety of modafinil use in greater depth than previous studies addressing the issue of cheating. Secondly, we emphasize two crucial, (...) but hitherto nearly overlooked, nuances to the issues: the potential for modafinil to decrease inequality and disadvantage in academic settings, and the fact that how modafinil is used dramatically impacts its effects on health, coercion, fairness, authenticity and effort. Finally, we explicitly defend the position that there are no qualitatively morally relevant differences between modafinil use and other enhancement modalities; any such differences are in degree,... (shrink)

After introducing the concept of compressed sensing as a complementary measurement mode to the classical Shannon-Nyquist approach, I discuss some of the drivers, potential challenges and obstacles to its implementation. I end with a speculative attempt to embed compressed sensing as an enabling methodology within the emergence of data-driven discovery. As a consequence I predict the growth of non-nomological sciences where heuristic correlations will find applications but often bypass conventional pure basic and use-inspired basic research stages due to the lack (...) of verifiable hypotheses. (shrink)

Much of the literature from political psychology has focused on the negative traits that are positively associated with affective polarization—e.g., animus, arrogance, distrust, hostility, and outrage. Not as much attention has been focused on the positive traits that might be negatively associated with polarization. For instance, given that people who are intellectually humble display greater openness and less hostility towards conflicting viewpoints (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Hopkin et al., 2014; Porter & Schumann, 2018), one might reasonably expect them to be (...) less polarized. -/- We ran two studies designed to explore the relationship between various forms of humility and polarization. Our chief finding is that people who value humility are prone to what we are calling epistemic polarization—that is, judging the epistemic traits of contrapartisans negatively—which in turn plays a role in polarization more generally. Not only are contrapartisans deemed to have the wrong moral and political beliefs, they are also viewed as less humble and more arrogant, close-minded, and irrational. This makes matters even worse when it comes to the growing partisan divide. In light of our findings, we believe that the novel concept of epistemic polarization that we introduce is a promising target for further investigation. (shrink)

Adam Smith is respected as the father of contemporary economics for his work on systemizing classical economics as an independent field of study in The Wealth of Nations. But he was also a significant moral philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, with its characteristic concern for integrating sentiments and rationality. This article considers Adam Smith as a key moral philosopher of commercial society whose critical reflection upon the particular ethical challenges posed by the new pressures and possibilities of commercial society remains (...) relevant today. The discussion has three parts. First I address the artificial separation between self-interest and morality often attributed to Smith, in which his work on economics is stripped of its ethical context. Second I outline Smith’s ethical approach to economics, focusing on his vigorous but qualified defence of commercial society for its contributions to prosperity, justice, and freedom. Third I outline Smith’s moral philosophy proper as combining a naturalistic account of moral psychology with a virtue ethics based on propriety in commercial society. (shrink)

The theory of granular partitions is designed to capture in a formal framework important aspects of the selective character of common-sense views of reality. It comprehends not merely the ways in which we can view reality by conceiving its objects as gathered together not merely into sets, but also into wholes of various kinds, partitioned into parts at various levels of granularity. We here represent granular partitions as triples consisting of a rooted tree structure as first component, a domain satisfying (...) the axioms of Extensional Mereology as second component, and a mapping (called ’projection’) of the first into the second as a third component. We define ordering relations among granular partitions the resulting structures are called partition frames. We then introduce an axiomatic theory which sentences are interpreted in partition frames. (shrink)

Ever since its inception, the theory of evolution has been reified into an “-ism”: Darwinism. While biologists today tend to shy away from the term in their research, the term is still actively used in the broader academic and societal contexts. What exactly is Darwinism, and how precisely are its various uses and abuses related to the scientific theory of evolution? Some call for limiting the meaning of the term “Darwinism” to its scientific context; others call for its abolition; yet (...) others claim the term refers to a myth-like story. In this paper we propose a conceptually grounded overview of the term. We show how the scientific dimension of Darwinism feeds into, and is influenced by, guises of Darwinism as a methodology and as an ethically and politically charged “worldview”. The full meaning of Darwinism, as well as how this meaning has changed over time, can only be understood through the complex interaction between these three dimensions. (shrink)

This paper walks through four different approaches to Hegel's notion of Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Through taking four different approaches our aim is to explore the multifaceted nature of the phenomenological movement of consciousness. The first part provides an overview of the three chapters of the section on Consciousness, namely Sense-Certainty, Perception and Force and the Understanding, attempting to unearth the implicit logic that undergirds Consciousness’ experience. The second part focuses specifically on the shape of Sense-Certainty, providing an (...) analysis of the movement from Sense-Certainty to Perception from a neuroscientific view. Thirdly, we consider an inferentialist reading of the chapters on Consciousness which has been made popular by Robert Brandom. We think that while this view elucidates the connection that Hegel draws between meaning and use, it fails to account for the vital place of immediacy in each of the shapes. Finally, the fourth part suggests that Hegel’s notion of Consciousness improves the reading of tragedy he develops in chapters 5 and 7 of the Phenomenology. While many critics have noted that Hegel fails to do justice to tragic experience, Consciousness contains an epistemology that develops analogously to the heroes of ancient tragedy. Each approach in this paper comes at Hegel’s description of the journey of Consciousness from a different angle, and together they paint a multi-layered picture of a highly important part of Hegel’s corpus. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical (...) for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

Einführung in die Philosophie Rudolf Carnaps.

The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as on diseases, in particular on diseases of kidney (...) and skin. (shrink)

This contribution develops two objections to Hans Lindahl’s legal philosophy, as exhibited in his Authority and the Globalization of Inclusion and Exclusion. First, his conception of constituent power overstates the necessity of violence in initiating collective action. Second, his rejection of the distinction between participatory and representative democracy on the grounds that participation is representation is misleading, and compromises our ability to differentiate qualitatively among various forms of (purportedly) democratic involvement. Both problems stem from the same root. They result from (...) conflating two distinct senses of ‘representation’: acting-for-someone (or representative agency) and portraying-something-as-something (or representation-as). (shrink)

Quine’s classical classic interpretation succinctly characterized characterizes Carnap’s Aufbau as an attempt “to account for the external world as a logical construct of sense-data....” Consequently, “Russell” was characterized as the most important influence on the Aufbau. Those times have passed. Formulating a comprehensive and balanced interpretation of the Aufbau has turned out to be a difficult task and one that must take into account several disjointed sources. My thesis is that the core of the Aufbau rested on a problem that (...) had haunted German philosophy since the end of the 19th century. In terms fashionable at the time, this problem may be expressed as the polarity between Leben and Geist that characterized German philosophy during the years of the Weimar Republic. At that time, many philosophers, including Cassirer, Rickert and Vaihinger, were engaged in overcoming this polarity. As I will show, Carnap’s Aufbau joined the ranks of these projects. This suggests that Lebensphilosophie and Rickert’s System der Philosophie exerted a strong influence on Carnap’s projects, an influence that is particularly conspicuous in his unpublished manuscript Vom Chaos zur Wirklichkeit. Carnap himself asserted that this manuscript could be considered “the germ of the constitution theory” of the Aufbau. Reading Chaos also reveals another strong but neglected influence on the Aufbau, namely a specific version of neutral monism put forward by the philosopher and psychologist Theodor Ziehen before World War I. Ziehen’s work contributed much to the invention of the constitutional method of quasi-analysis. -/-. (shrink)

In this paper, by suggesting a formal representation of science based on recent advances in logic-based Artificial Intelligence (AI), we show how three serious concerns around the realisation of traditional scientific realism (the theory/observation distinction, over-determination of theories by data, and theory revision) can be overcome such that traditional realism is given a new guise as ‘naturalised’. We contend that such issues can be dealt with (in the context of scientific realism) by developing a formal representation of science based on (...) the application of the following tools from Knowledge Representation: the family of Description Logics, an enrichment of classical logics via defeasible statements, and an application of the preferential interpretation of the approach to Belief Revision. (shrink)