The received wisdom on ability modals is that they differ from their epistemic and deontic cousins in what inferences they license and better receive a universal or conditional analysis instead of an existential one. The goal of this paper is to sharpen the empirical picture about the semantics of ability modals, and to propose an analysis that explains what makes the can of ability so special but that also preserves the crucial idea that all uses of can share a common (...) lexical semantics. The resulting framework combines tools and techniques from dynamic and inquisitive semantics with insights from the literature of the role of agency in deontic logic. It explains not only why the can of ability, while essentially being an existential modal operator, sometimes resists distribution over disjunction and interacts with its duals in particular and hitherto unnoticed ways, but also has a tendency to license free choice inferences. (shrink)

Mere capacity views hold that agents who can intervene in an unfolding movement are performing an agentially controlled action, regardless of whether they do intervene. I introduce a simple argument to show that the noncausal explanation offered by mere capacity views fails to explain both control and action. In cases where bodily subsystems, rather than the agent, generate control over a movement, agents can often intervene to override non-agential control. Yet, contrary to what capacity views suggest, in these cases, this (...) capacity to intervene does not amount to agential control or action. I illustrate this with a case study of how passive breathing, a mere behavior, is misclassified by mere capacity views. I end by revisiting the central alternative to mere capacity views: causal control views. Advances in our understanding of how agents exert control over unfolding movements indicate that the nature of control is characterized by ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions. (shrink)

Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. This essay demonstrates that a dynamic theory about might and must offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story offers a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding (...) the complexities of alternative theories. The second part of the story extends the basic framework to cover some complicated data about retraction and the interaction between epistemic modality and tense. A comparison between the suggestion made in this essay and current versions of the orthodoxy is provided. (shrink)

This article offers a new account of the moral substance of shame. Through careful reflection on the motives and intentional structure of shame, I defend the claim that shame is an egocentric and morally blind emotion. I argue that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our ability to sense how we appear to others. What makes shame egocentric is that in shame we are essentially concerned about our own social worth and pained by the (...) perception of our self as socially worthless. In itself, shame entails no morally pertinent concern about others or understanding of what is morally significant. I contrast shame with the possibility of relating to others—and to oneself—with love and care. Indeed, I propose that love is essential for moral understanding and motivation. The argument of the article unfolds through critical appraisals of the main strategies for defending the moral value of shame. First, against the claim that shame entails respect for others, I argue that shame's sensitivity to the opinions of others is motivated by egocentric self-concern. Second, against the view that shame over failures to live up to moral values is morally valuable, I argue that regardless of whether the values guiding our shame are moral or not, the perspective of shame is oblivious to their moral meaning. Third, against the claim that shame is crucial for self-understanding, I argue that the desire for affirmation that drives shame is a powerful source of self-deception. (shrink)

This article develops a new phenomenological account of the shame people typically tend to feel when seen naked by others. Although shame at nakedness is a paradigmatic and widespread form of shame, it has been under-explored in the literature on shame. The central thesis of the article is that shame at nakedness is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our capacity for social self-consciousness. I argue that our ability to sense how others see us and judge (...) us gives rise to a dynamic tension between our effort to control our public self-presentation and the experience of being exposed to others in an uncontrolled manner. What makes us prone to feel shame or shame anxiety at being seen naked is that we feel that we have revealed our naked and true self as potentially or actually shameful and that our public persona has been undermined. Furthermore, the vulnerability and lack of control that are part and parcel of naked exposure can be a source of shame. In my analysis, shame at nakedness encompasses both literal bodily nakedness and other kinds of uncontrolled and unguarded exposure. The article also offers an argument as to the roots of the more or less ubiquitous tendency to feel shame at exhibiting one’s genitals in public. I develop my account through critical engagements with the main contemporary attempts to account for shame at nakedness, critiquing their insufficiencies and reframing their insights. (shrink)

Every adequate semantics for conditionals and deontic ought must offer a solution to the miners paradox about conditional obligations. Kolodny and MacFarlane have recently argued that such a semantics must reject the validity of modus ponens. I demonstrate that rejecting the validity of modus ponens is inessential for an adequate solution to the paradox.

In this thesis the author focuses on the metaphysical implications of the realist interpretation of special relativity. The realist interpretation is found wanting in coherence as it utilizes metaphysical concepts (as causation) that are left unjustified if the theory is taken at face value. The author points at a possible re-interpretation of special relativity that allows for a coherent metaphysical basis while containing the mathematical structure of the theory.

A dynamic semantics for iffy oughts offers an attractive alternative to the folklore that Chisholm's paradox enforces an unhappy choice between the intuitive inference rules of factual and deontic detachment. The first part of the story told here shows how a dynamic theory about ifs and oughts gives rise to a nonmonotonic perspective on deontic discourse and reasoning that elegantly removes the air of paradox from Chisholm's puzzle without sacrificing any of the two detachment principles. The second part of the (...) story showcases two bonus applications of the framework suggested here: it offers a response to Forrester's gentle murder paradox and avoids Kolodny and MacFarlane's miners paradox about deontic reasoning under epistemic uncertainty. A comparison between the dynamic semantic proposal made in this paper and a more conservative approach combining a static semantics with a dynamic pragmatics is provided. (shrink)

Epistemic modals are a prominent topic in the literature on natural language semantics, with wide-ranging implications for issues in philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Considerations about the role that epistemic "might" and "must" play in discourse and reasoning have led to the development of several important alternatives to classical possible worlds semantics for natural language modal expressions. This is an opinionated overview of what I take to be some of the most exciting issues and developments in the field.

In contemporary discussions of the Ramsey Test for conditionals, it is commonly held that (i) supposing the antecedent of a conditional is adopting a potential state of full belief, and (ii) Modus Ponens is a valid rule of inference. I argue on the basis of Thomason Conditionals (such as ' If Sally is deceiving, I do not believe it') and Moore's Paradox that both claims are wrong. I then develop a double-indexed Update Semantics for conditionals which takes these two results (...) into account while doing justice to the key intuitions underlying the Ramsey Test. The semantics is extended to cover some further phenomena, including the recent observation that epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's Paradox. (shrink)

Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this article is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognitivism, including disjunctions. The resulting proposal preserves some of the key insights from (...) recent work on the semantics of expressivism while highlighting the widely neglected early noncognitivists' sympathies to the kind of dynamic story I intend to tell here. A comparison between the advertised dynamic semantic story and current proposals that treat expressivism as a pragmatic rather than semantic theory about moral language is provided. (shrink)

According to possibilism, or non-actualism, fictional characters are possible individuals. Possibilist accounts of fiction do not only assign the intuitively correct truth-conditions to sentences in a fiction, but has the potential to provide powerful explanatory models for a wide range of phenomena associated with fiction (though these two aspects of possibilism are, I argue, crucially distinct). Apart from the classic defense by David Lewis the idea of modeling fiction in terms of possible worlds have been widely criticized. In this article, (...) I provide a defense of a possibilist account against some lines of criticism. To do so, I assume that names for fictional characters are directly referential and a possible-worlds model that accommodates transworld identity. On this background, I argue, it is possible to construct an elegant model of fictional discourse using familiar models of information exchange in ordinary discourse, and I sketch how this model can be used to i) make a natural distinction between fictional and counterfactual discourse, ii) account for creativity, and iii) sustain a natural definition of truth-in-fiction that avoids certain familiar objections to possibilism. Though I set aside questions about the metaphysical commitments of a possible-world interpretation here, there is accordingly reason to think that the battle over possibilist treatments of fiction will have to be fought over metaphysical foundations rather than technical shortcomings. (shrink)

Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity examines the various ways in which Christian intellectuals engaged with Platonism both as a pagan competitor and as a source of philosophical material useful to the Christian faith. The chapters are united in their goal to explore transformations that took place in the reception and interaction process between Platonism and Christianity in this period. -/- The contributions in this volume explore the reception of Platonic material in Christian thought, showing that the transmission of (...) cultural content is always mediated, and ought to be studied as a transformative process by way of selection and interpretation. Some chapters also deal with various aspects of the wider discussion on how Platonic, and Hellenic, philosophy and early Christian thought related to each other, examining the differences and common ground between these traditions. -/- Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity offers an insightful and broad ranging study on the subject, which will be of interest to students of both philosophy and theology in the Late Antique period, as well as anyone working on the reception and history of Platonic thought, and the development of Christian thought. (shrink)

Mere capacity views hold that agents who can intervene in an unfolding movement are performing an agentially controlled action, regardless of whether they do intervene. I introduce a simple argument to show that the noncausal explanation offered by mere capacity views fails to explain both control and action. In cases where bodily subsystems, rather than the agent, generate control over a movement, agents can often intervene to override non-agential control. Yet, contrary to what capacity views suggest, in these cases, this (...) capacity to intervene does not amount to agential control or action. I illustrate this with a case study of how passive breathing, a mere behavior, is misclassified by mere capacity views. I end by revisiting the central alternative to mere capacity views: causal control views. Advances in our understanding of how agents exert control over unfolding movements indicate that the nature of control is characterized by ubiquitous, small-scale causal interventions. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine how a research institution’s social structure and academic opinion leaders’ presence shaped the early adoption of a scientific innovation. Our case considers the early engagement of mathematical economists at the Cowles Commission with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We argue that scholars with administrative leadership functions who were not only scientifically but also organizationally central – in our case the director of research Jacob Marschak – played a crucial (...) role in promoting the adoption of the Theory of Games. We support our argument with a scientometric analysis of all acknowledgments made in 488 papers published from 1944 to 1955 in the two main paper series at Cowles. We apply blockmodeling techniques to the acknowledgments network to reconstruct the formal and informal social structure at Cowles at the time. Our findings suggest that studies of the early adoption of scientific theories benefit from complementary perspectives on the role of academic leaders and scientists. Our study reveals the importance of formal and informal social structures and the agenda of administrative leaders in these structures to explain their adoption. (shrink)

Two questions often shape our view of the world. On the one hand, we ask what there is, on the other hand, we ask what there ought to be. Empirical research and normative theory, the methodological traditions concerned with these questions, entered a difficult relationship, from at least as early as around the time of the advent of modern sciences. To this day, there remains a strong separation between the two domains, with both tending to neglect discourses and results from (...) the other. Contrary to a verdict of strict segregation between »is« and »ought«, there are, nowadays, various attempts to integrate both theoretical approaches. This calls for a newly intensified discourse on the relation between empirical research and normative theory. In this volume, scholars from different disciplines – including psychology, sociology, economics, and philosophy – discuss possible desired or undesired influences on, and limits of, the integration of these two approaches. (shrink)

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, and Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by a) a conversational implicature, b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or c) a conventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses and the accumulating evidence from other studies as (...) well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content. (shrink)

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores, inter alia, the strategy employed by Augustine in using Plato as a pseudo-prophet against later Platonists and explores Eusebius’ reception of Porphyry’s daemonology. It examines Plotinus’ claim that matter is absolute badness and focuses on Maximus the Confessor’s doctrine of creation and asks whether one may detect any influence on Maximus from Philoponus. The book addresses Christian receptions of Platonic metaphysics (...) and also examines the philosophy of number in Augustine’s early works. It argues that the aspect of Augustine’s philosophy must be read in context with the intellectual problems that occupied him at the beginning of his career as a writer. It draws on a number of sources to investigate the development of the doctrine and the various intellectual issues it confronted, including Plato’s Timaeus, Philo of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Plotinus and, finally, Athanasius. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that several recent ‘wide’ perspectives on cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed) are only partially relevant to the study of cognition. While these wide accounts override traditional methodological individualism, the study of cognition has already progressed beyond these proposed perspectives towards building integrated explanations of the mechanisms involved, including not only internal submechanisms but also interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and their environment. The claim is substantiated with reference to recent developments in the (...) study of “mindreading” and debates on emotions. We claim that the current practice in cognitive (neuro)science has undergone, in effect, a silent mechanistic revolution, and has turned from initial binary oppositions and abstract proposals towards the integration of wide perspectives with the rest of the cognitive (neuro)sciences. (shrink)

In this chapter, we outline the range of argument forms involving causation that can be found in everyday discourse. We also survey empirical work concerned with the generation and evaluation of such arguments. This survey makes clear that there is presently no unified body of research concerned with causal argument. We highlight the benefits of a unified treatment both for those interested in causal cognition and those interested in argumentation, and identify the key challenges that must be met for a (...) full understanding of causal argumentation. (shrink)

Unter dem Dach der Philosophie gingen empirische Forschung und normative Theorie lange Zeit Hand in Hand, bis sie spätestens um die Zeit der Emanzipation der Einzelwissenschaften in eine schwierige, nicht immer eindeutig bestimmbare Beziehung zueinander traten; dieses unterbestimmte Verhältnis tritt uns vor dem Hintergrund aktueller Debatten wieder entgegen. Das zeigt sich zum Beispiel auch bei Fragen der Ethik: In den letzten Jahrzehnten zeigten verschiedene wissenschaftliche Disziplinen verstärktes Interesse an empirischen Bemühungen um ein deskriptives Verständnis von Moral. Hier gibt es nach (...) wie vor eine starke Trennung zwischen den Bereichen der normativen Theorie einerseits und der empirischen Forschung andererseits, wobei in beiden Bereichen dazu tendiert wird, die jeweils anderen Diskurse zu vernachlässigen, wobei Unklarheit über die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer fruchtbaren Integration herrscht. Auf der anderen Seite gibt es jüngst auch verschiedene Versuche einer Integration beider Domänen. – Dies macht einen Diskurs über die Bestimmung des Verhältnisses von empirischer Forschung und normativer Theorie nötig, was in diesem Band aus verschiedenen historischen sowie systematischen Perspektiven geleistet wird. (shrink)

Der Diskurs um den doxastischen Voluntarismus behandelt die Frage, ob es möglich ist, einen Glaubenszustand intentional und mehr oder minder spontan herbeizuführen. Dabei sind historisch verschiedenste Positionen verhandelt worden. Es soll nicht versucht werden, eine Antwort auf die Frage nach der Möglichkeit zu liefern; vielmehr sollen methodische Überlegungen zur Klärung der Frage in den Fokus gerückt werden. Es wird gezeigt, dass die eigentliche Frage präzisierungsbedürftig ist. Exemplarisch wird ein ausgewählter Präzisierungsversuch aus dem zeitgenössischen Diskurs kritisch beleuchtet und ihm wird ein (...) Verständnis der Frage entgegengesetzt, das die Diskussion um die Möglichkeit eines doxastischen Voluntarismus in einen neuen Rahmen einbetten kann. (shrink)

Background The health care sector is experiencing a drastic transition all over the world. This has an impact not only on the way hospitals, clinics, special-care homes etc. are organized, but also on patients, personnel and other stakeholders involved. The consequences of changes for both physicians and patients are investigated using a comprehensive health care reform in Ukraine as an example. -/- Methods The analysis is based on empirical data collected from general physicians in 2 Ukrainian cities. Based on the (...) Job Demands-Resources Model, we developed a set of hypotheses and tested them using the structural equation modelling technique. A total of 178 general physicians (81% of the approached population) participated in the study. -/- Results Our investigation reveals a clear relationship between the organizational job demands (additional tasks, structural changes, new processes) and their psychological effects (e. g., burnout). The latter have a negative impact on cooperation of physicians in hospitals leading to lower patient satisfaction. -/- Discussion and Conclusions Change in health care is inevitable. The example of Ukraine shows that openness of hospitals towards change reduces the probability of physicians’ burnout and, eventually, increases patient satisfaction. We strongly suggest applying the process management approach in order to increase openness to change, especially in turbulent times. (shrink)

Collaborative economies are business models whose activities have their origins in the use of digital platforms. There, shared consumption is practised in various forms of peers with either profit or non-for-profit outcomes. By means of several EU-wide studies, this report takes a closer look at the CE in Austria. Apart from the accommodation sector, Austria presents an EU-below average use of services offered on sharing platforms. Examples portray a field of tension from activities of low-threshold initiatives at the local level (...) to capital-oriented actors. Such global players have established themselves the sharing economy and now represent a lot of challenges impacting the state regulatory systems and domestic market participants nationally. Thus, Austria is currently dealing with questions of regulation and tax legislation of CE. Looking at national CE initiatives, the capital region of Vienna is at the forefront of consolidation while omitting the majority of Austrians living in rural regions. Further research is needed to raise questions about law challenges, to address the strong tendencies of precarisation of service work, evoked by sharing platforms, to face the current constraints in managing this vigorous dynamic of economic transformation processes. (shrink)

In the metaethical debate on moral internalism and externalism, appeal is constantly made to people’s intuitions about the connection between moral judgments and motivation. However, internalists and externalists disagree considerably about their content. In this paper, we present an empirical study of laymen’s intuitions about this connection. We found that they lend surprisingly little support to the most celebrated versions of internalism, which provide reasons to be skeptical of the evidential basis for these views.

Suppose that two competing norms, N1 and N2, can be identified such that a given person’s response can be interpreted as correct according to N1 but incorrect according to N2. Which of these two norms, if any, should one use to interpret such a response? In this paper we seek to address this fundamental problem by studying individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their case judgments and reflective attitudes. To investigate (...) the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task. As a case study, we identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals (N1) versus Inferentialism (N2) and investigate to what extent internally consistent competence models can be reconstructed for the participants on this basis. After extensive empirical investigations, an apparent reasoning error with and-to-if inferences was found in one of these two groups. The implications of this case study for debates on the proper role of normative considerations in psychology are discussed. (shrink)

Motivational internalism postulates a necessary connection between moral judgments and motivation. In arguing for and against internalism, metaethicists traditionally appeal to intuitions about cases, but crucial cases often yield conflicting intuitions. One way to try to make progress, possibly uncovering theoretical bias and revealing whether people have conceptions of moral judgments required for noncognitivist accounts of moral disagreement, is to investigate non-philosophers' willingness to attribute moral judgments. A pioneering study by Shaun Nichols seemed to undermine internalism, as a large majority (...) of subjects were willing to attribute moral understanding to an agent lacking moral motivation. However, our attempts to replicate this study yielded quite different results, and we identified a number of problems with Nichols' experimental paradigm. The results from a series of surveys designed to rule out these problems show that people are more willing to attribute moral understanding than mor.. (shrink)

Pluralistic ignorance is a socio-psychological phenomenon that involves a systematic discrepancy between people’s private beliefs and public behavior in certain social contexts. Recently, pluralistic ignorance has gained increased attention in formal and social epistemology. But to get clear on what precisely a formal and social epistemological account of pluralistic ignorance should look like, we need answers to at least the following two questions: What exactly is the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance? And can the phenomenon arise among perfectly rational agents? In (...) this paper, we propose answers to both these questions. First, we characterize different versions of pluralistic ignorance and define the version that we claim most adequately captures the examples cited as paradigmatic cases of pluralistic ignorance in the literature. In doing so, we will stress certain key epistemic and social interactive aspects of the phenomenon. Second, given our characterization of pluralistic ignorance, we argue that the phenomenon can indeed arise in groups of perfectly rational agents. This, in turn, ensures that the tools of formal epistemology can be fully utilized to reason about pluralistic ignorance. (shrink)

A large body of work has demonstrated the utility of the Bayesian framework for capturing inference in both specialist and everyday contexts. However, the central tool of the framework, conditionalization via Bayes’ rule, does not apply directly to a common type of learning: the acquisition of conditional information. How should an agent change her beliefs on learning that “If A, then C”? This issue, which is central to both reasoning and argumentation, has recently prompted considerable research interest. In this paper, (...) we critique a prominent proposal and provide a new, alternative, answer. -/- . (shrink)

In this manuscript we study individual variation in the interpretation of conditionals by establishing individual profiles of the participants based on their behavioral responses and reflective attitudes. To investigate the participants’ reflective attitudes we introduce a new experimental paradigm called the Scorekeeping Task, and a Bayesian mixture model tailored to analyze the data. The goal is thereby to identify the participants who follow the Suppositional Theory of conditionals and Inferentialism and to investigate their performance on the uncertain and-to-if inference task.

Book review of Fredrik Westerlund, Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

John Wilkins and Malte Ebach respond to the dismissal of classification as something we need not concern ourselves with because it is, as Ernest Rutherford suggested, mere ‘‘stamp collecting.’’ They contend that classification is neither derivative of explanation or of hypothesis-making but is necessarily prior and prerequisite to it. Classification comes first and causal explanations are dependent upon it. As such it is an important (but neglected) area of philosophical study. Wilkins and Ebach reject Norwood Russell Hanson’s thesis that classification (...) relies on observation that is theory-laden and deny the need for aetiological assumptions and historical reconstruction to justify its arrangement. What they offer instead is a significant (albeit controversial) contribution to the philosophical literature on classification, a pre-theoretic natural classification based on the observation of patterns in data of ready-made phenomena. Their notion of ready-made phenomena rests on a conception of tacit knowledge or know-how. This is evident in their distinction between strong Theory-dependence and na ̈ıve theory-dependence. Their small t-theory-dependence permits patterns of observation that facilitate know-how but does not rely on a domain-specific explanatory theory of their aetiology. Wilkins and Ebach suggest classification differs from theory building in that it is passive (whereas theory building is active). Classification is possible just because it does not require the sieve of theory to capture classes that are ‘‘handed to you by your cognitive dispositions and the data that you observe’’ (p. 18). Finding regularities sans-theory is just something we do and can do without any prior theory about the underlying causes or origins of the resultant regularities. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds serves as an exemplar of a passive, theory-free classification system and the periodic table and the DSM help to illustrate this type of non-aetiological patterning. A recurrent theme is the nature of naturalness. For Wilkins and Ebach, the conception of naturalness is not one that is based on the generation or discovery of natural kind categories popular in both the traditional metaphysics of Mill and Wittgenstein as well as updated notions within philosophy of biology such as Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster kinds. Instead, Wilkins and Ebach define the naturalness of classification as the falling into hierarchical patterns, aligning the search for natural arrangement with the aim of systematics, and as something that is grounded in a cognitive task or activity. However, they leave the question of realism v. antirealism open. ‘‘In natural classification...we must have real relations no matter how we might interpret ‘real’’’ (p. 70). There is tension with regard to their ontological commitments as they vacillate between constructive, operationalist, and realist approaches. Wilkins and Ebach initially define real as that which is causal and important (pp. 70–71), and later as that which ‘‘depends in no way upon a mind or observer’’ (p. 122). This makes their claim that there was ‘‘no real theory involved [in the pre-Darwinian classifications of Jussieu and Adanson]’’ (p. 64) difficult to interpret. Cont’d……. (shrink)

Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a volume of secondary literature that dispels common misconceptions about the relationship between Hegelian and Fanonian philosophy, and sheds new light on the connections and divergences between the two thinkers. By engaging in close textual analyses of both Hegel and Fanon, the chapters in this volume disambiguate the philosophical relation between Sartre and Fanon, scrutinize the conflation of Self-Consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and subjectivity in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy (...) of History in light of Hegel’s reception in decolonial thought, and flesh out the pivotal ontological role of violence in Fanon’s work. In particular, this volume underscores the necessity of Fanon scholars to pay heed to the distinction between Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and Kojève’s master-slave dialectic, as the latter—an anthropological interpretation of a Hegelian epistemological gestalt of consciousness—is what enables Fanon to engage with the former as a historical dialectic. This review emphasizes that Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon is a pedagogically significant text, and ultimately concludes that this volume is a vital resource for Continental Philosophical scholarship on Fanon and Hegel. (shrink)

With their “bottom-up” approach, Holk Cruse and Malte Schilling present a highly intriguing perspective on those mental phenomena that have fascinated humankind since ancient times. Among them are those aspects of our inner lives that are at the same time most salient and yet most elusive: we are conscious beings with complex emotions, thinking and acting in pursuit of various goals. Starting with, from a biological point of view, very basic abilities, such as the ability to move and navigate in (...) an unpredictable environment, Cruse & Schilling have developed, step-by-step, a robotic system with the ability to plan future actions and, to a limited extent, to verbally report on its own internal states. The authors then offer a compelling argument that their system exhibits aspects of various higher-level mental phenomena such as emotion, attention, intention, volition, and even consciousness. The scientific investigation of the mind is faced with intricate problems at a very fundamental, methodological level. Not only is there a good deal of conceptual vagueness and uncertainty as to what the explananda precisely are, but it is also unclear what the best strategy might be for addressing the phenomena of interest. Cruse & Schilling’s bio-robotic “bottom-up” approach is designed to provide answers to such questions. In this commentary, I begin, in the first section, by presenting the main ideas behind this approach as I understand them. In the second section, I turn to an examination of its scope and limits. Specifically, I will suggest a set of constraints on good explanations based on the bottom-up approach. What criteria do such explanations have to meet in order to be of real scientific value? I maintain that there are essentially three such criteria: biological plausibility, adequate matching criteria, and transparency. Finally, in the third section, I offer directions for future research, as Cruse & Schilling’s bottom-up approach is well suited to provide new insights in the domain of social cognition and to explain its relation to phenomena such as language, emotion, and self. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young’s classic paper on the phenomenology of pregnancy chronicles the alienating tendencies of technology-ridden maternal care, as the mother’s subjective knowledge of the pregnancy gets overridden by the objective knowledge provided by medical personnel and technological apparatuses. Following Fredrik Svenaeus, the authors argue that maternal care is not necessarily alienating by looking specifically at the proper attention paid by sonographers in maternal care when performing ultrasound examinations. Using Martin Heidegger’s philosophy as a theoretical lens, the authors argue (...) that sonographers who cultivate technical mastery, build patient rapport, explain the process and significance of the ultrasound, and understand the patient’s world are able to provide excellent patient care. The authors utilize Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics to show how sonographers can frame the ultrasound in a way that acknowledges both the subjective knowledge of the mother and the objective data obtained by the sonographer through the use of technology. Ultimately, the authors argue that the common practice of framing the ultrasound as the chance to “meet the baby” is inappropriate, as it exacerbates the tendency to regard objective knowledge as the only legitimate knowledge in medical contexts. They recommend a more balanced approach that elicits a fusion of horizons between the patient’s subjective knowledge and the objective data that is obtained by the sonographer via the ultrasound, thus respecting and bolstering patient autonomy. (shrink)

This dissertation re-examines the principal philosophical thrusts of the German Enlightenment period, from the perspective of their totalizing-mythological function, and investigates how this function is criticized by the non-totalizing function of myth found within the primary mythical images in the work of Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Walter Benjamin. ;Utilizing the revolutionary book by Hans Blumenberg on the function of myth in German Idealism and Romanticism, I instigate a discourse between Blumenberg's totalizing work on myth and the negative-dialectical work on myth (...) as proposed by Theodor Adorno. I locate the German origins of this negative-dialectical myth-making in the work of Goethe, specifically his non-totalizing image, Wilhelm Meister. I locate the development of this use of myth in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and, finally, trace a similar function at work in Rilke's Malte and Walter Benjamin's historical materialist. ;Contrary to Habermas, who argues that Nietzsche opened up two roads to postmodernity, one leading to the "ontologization of aesthetics" and the other to the "totalizing critique" of reason , I put forth the argument that the Nietzschean "two roads" metaphor is useful but needs to be re-shaped, configuring one road toward the mythological history and historical mythology of Rilke and Walter Benjamin, and another road the Theodor Adorno's "thorough critique" of reason. ;The need to revise Habermas's "two roads to post-modernity" theory mythographically, rests on the primary investigation of this dissertation: to trace by de-scription the practical incarnation of the word on German soil . I define this process of "practical incarnation" as that word which subversively desires to de-scribe and trans-figure the neurotic -psychotic structure that has defined the parameters of Western discourse, at least since neo-Platonic Christianity influenced cultural codifications of the West. Finally, I maintain that the primary image of criticism which emerges from the dialectical work of the writers herein, is the image of man-child, a classless, non-totalizing image implicit in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and developed in the Kind-Mensch constellation in the work of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

Rita Widmaier and Malte-Ludolf Babin have done a valuable scholarly service for studies of the early modern European reception of China in collecting letters from Leibniz's extensive correspondence concerning China and translating them from the original Latin and French into German. This multi-lingual and chronologically organized edition gathers letters to and from Leibniz as well as supplementary texts composed between the years 1694 and 1716. It incorporates helpful clarificatory notes as well as an informative and lucid introduction.This edition focuses on (...) the exchanges between Leibniz and the Jesuit theologian and philosopher Barthélemy Des Bosses S.J. and other Jesuits in Europe who were in... (shrink)

This is a book review of “Malte Hossenfelder: Die Philosophie der Antike 3, Stoa, Epikureismus und Skepsis”.

Mit Beiträgen von Heiner Hastedt, Peter Schefe, Michael Heidelberger, Wolfgang Coy, Peter Janich, Sybille Krämer, Heinz Zemanek, Rafael Capurro, Ekkehard Martens, Yvonne Dittrich, Holm Tetens, Geert Keil, John R. Searle, Margaret A. Boden, Godela Unseld, Ulrike Teubner, Rüdiger Weingarten, Florian Rötzer und Simone Dietz.

Das Problem, wie der Völkermord an den Juden in der Nazizeit in der SBZ/ DDR behandelt wurde, war Gegenstand zahlreicher wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen von Philologen und Historiken. In den Jahren 1990-2000 wurden die Arbeiten von u.a. Mario Kessler, Michael Wolffsohn, Angelika Timm, Thomas Jung und Ulrike Offenberg veröffentlicht. Die dort formulierten Thesen bilden die Grundlage für diesen Artikel. Er schildert die Lage der jüdischen DDR-Bewohner, die sich nach Kriegsende für das Leben in Deutschland entschieden haben. Es wurde versucht, die Kluft zu (...) veranschaulichen, die zwischen der von der Regierung betriebenen Propaganda und dem ostdeutschen Alltag bestand. Die im Artikel dargestellten politischen und ideologischen Grundlagen des ostdeutschen Staates, wie auch die Realität, in welcher die jüdischen DDR-Bürger gelebt haben, bilden wichtige Kontexte für das Schaffen von Jurek Becker. Die angedeuteten Probleme, die die jüdische Bevölkerung zu bewältigen hatte, wie etwa die Unmöglichkeit der Identitätsfindung in der scheinbar homogenen, in Wirklichkeit jedoch deutlich geteilten ostdeutschen Gesellschaft, kommen hier zur Sprache. Da Becker selbst von diesem Problem betroffen war, inspirierte ihn dies bei der Arbeit an seinen Romanen, Erzählungen und anderen literarischen Texten, die oft autobiographische Züge aufweisen. Dies wurde am Beispiel von Bronsteins Kinder dargestellt. Die existenziellen Probleme der jüdischen Bevölkerung wurden hier in Verbindung mit der Kritik der ostdeutschen Gesellschaft geschildert. (shrink)

This paper discusses two novels by contemporary writer Inga Iwasiów (b. 1963), Bambino (2008) and Ku słońcu [Towards the Sun] (2010), in the context of geopolitical, ideological, social and psycho-cultural transformations as they specifically affect different generations of inhabitants of the Polish city of Szczecin (pre-1945 German Stettin) from 1945 until the first decade of the 21st century. Bambino covers the years 1945–1981, but also contains flashbacks to pre-war memory of Stettin and to the suppressed experiences of the new post-war (...) inhabitants, as well as ‘flash-forwards’ to post-1989, post-communist reality; Ku słońcu covers 1981 to the first decade of 2000s. It shows how the novels portray these transformations through the experience primarily of women (but not only) — in Bambino, through the main protagonists: Ula (formerly Ulrike), Anna and Marysia, and through that of the hidden narrator Magda (Marysia’s daughter born in the same year as the author, Iwasiów, 1963); and in Ku słońcu, primarily through the experience of Magda herself, as well as through that of two generations of ‘feminist’ academics: Małgorzata and Sylwia (in which it is hard not to perceive the personal experience of the author, though she is at pains to emphasize elsewhere that her work is a collective biography of the city, not so much of herself). The analysis follows Katarzyna Chmielewska’s supposition that contemporary Polish fiction dealing with the past ‘constantly oscillates between memory and genealogy’, and that it raises raw issues not yet addressed by historians; it also derives inspiration from the new ‘postdependency’ studies proposed by Hanna Gosk and Ryszard Nycz. It also attempts to capture the specific nature of Iwasiów’s use of language, her style of feminism, her method of portraying place, and the connections in her prose between place and memory. (shrink)

This fascinating collection on artifacts brings together seven papers by philosophers with nine by psychologists, biologists, and an archaeologist. The psychological papers include two excellent discussions of empirical work on the mental representation of artifact concepts – an assessment by Malt and Sloman of a large variety of studies on the conflicting ways we classify artifacts and extend our applications of artifact categories to new cases, and a review by Mahon and Caramazza of data from semantically impaired patients and (...) from neuroimaging on concepts of living kinds versus artifact kinds. Following these are three papers on the development of artifact concepts in children, including a short but provocative piece by Keil, Greif, and Kerner arguing that there is a mismatch between the patterns of development for our concepts of artifacts and the patterns of representation we end up developing. The final part of the book includes authoritative papers on artifact use by insects, birds, and mammals, by primates, and by Australopithecines and Neanderthals. (shrink)