Niettegenstaande de tendens van het failliet van het multiculturalisme is multiculturele dialoog niet weg te denken in een zich globaliserende wereld. Taylor, Gadamer, Honneth en Kymlicka hebben een bijdrage geleverd op het vlak van de erkenning van identiteit, respect en waardering van verschil. Wij voeren het argument aan dat bovenstaande auteurs niet ontsnappen aan het postmodernistisch dilemma van zelfautonomie en slachtofferschap. Dit komt doordat zij in hun rationale vertrekken van het afzonderlijke subject en deze situeren in een ruimte-tijd waarin de (...) tijd slechts een historische rol heeft en de ruimte geen actieve rol speelt. Tegenover deze uitvloeisels van het postmodern denken stellen wij het eco-communau-tarisme. Vanuit de vaststelling dat het individu denkt, spreek en handelt in de context van zijn taal en cultuur en dus vanuit zijn gemeenschap, situeren wij dit subject en de gemeenschap tevens in een particulier territorium of het ecotoop. Door middel van Hacking’s sociaal constructivisme, het Leibniziaanse meerwereldenbeeld en het biologische paradigma als nieuw denkkader, structureren wij de gemeenschap volgens een cyclisch en een lineair tijdverloop. Het cyclische waarborgt de traditie van een gemeenschap, het lineaire doet de gemeenschap evolueren naar een moreel betere toekomst en heeft een transcendent statuut. Het eco-communautarisme biedt het kader voor een kwalitatieve evolutie van individuen en gemeenschappen. Het normerend aspect hiervan is de pluriforme en multiculturele dialoog. (shrink)

Anne TIHON, Théorie et réalité : l’exemple de l’astronomie an­cienne (pp. 7-23) ; Isabelle DRAELANTS, Les encyclopédies com­me sommes des connaissances, d’Isidore de Séville au XIIIe siè­cle, avec les fondements antiques (pp. 25-50) ; Andrée COLINET, Alchimie antique et médiévale avant 1300 : mystères et réalités (pp. 51-70) ; Baudouin VAN DEN ABEELE, Quelques pas de grue à travers l’histoire naturelle médiévale : un regard diversifié sur le réel (pp. 71-98) ; Régine LEURQUIN, L’astrolabe plan (pp. 99- 117) ; Patricia (...) RADELET-DE GRAVE, Copernic, Stevin, Galilée et la réalité des orbites célestes (pp. 119-151) ; Brigitte VAN TIGGELEN, Étiqueter ou définir : le réalisme dans la nomen­cla­ture chimique aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (pp. 153-183) ; Michel GHINS, L’existence de l’espace et du temps selon Leon­hard Euler (pp. 185-193) ; Chantal TILMANS-CABIAUX, Le rap­port de l’idée théorique à l’expérimentation chez Hahnemann : le système homéo­pathique naissant et le réalisme (pp. 195-214) ; Jean MAWHIN, La Terre tourne-t-elle ? À propos de la philosophie scientifique de Poincaré (pp. 215-252) ; Michel WILLEM, Paul Lévy et les fondements du calcul des probabilités (pp. 253-263). (shrink)

For years, the European world saw millions of swans, and all of them without exception were white. If inductive reasoning is valid, one may conclude that all swans are white. However, this would be incorrect: in 1667 Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh observed black swans in Australia, falsifying the hypothesis that all swans are white. While often used as a cautionary tale for the use of induction, such as with Popper’s falsification principle, I want to explore a slightly different (...) idea: does the existence of fabricated or otherwise failed accounts of Black swans give me a reason to ignore future arguments or doubt their existence? I argue that while faulty or fabricated reports do not give us a logical reason to reject a claim, they can give us a practical one for refusing to consider future arguments. This practical vs logical distinction gives an inductive reason for believing that future arguments will be invalid, but keeps one from being able to necessarily deny the claim in question without further argumentation. (shrink)

The present study defines the function of the foundation of science in early modern Dutch philosophy, from the first introduction of Cartesian philosophy in Utrecht University by Henricus Regius to the acceptance of Newtonian physics by Willem Jacob ‘s Gravesande. My main claim is that a foundation of science was required because the conceptual premises of new ways in thinking had to be justified not only as alternatives to the established philosophical paradigms or as an answer to the “sceptical (...) crisis” signalled by Richard Popkin, but also in order to be introduced in the academia. This being my general thesis, different kinds of foundation of scientific knowledge are analysed in the light of the specific problems philosophers had to face. To this end, foundational theories are analysed in the light of 1) the overall aim of their philosophy, 2) the relations of disciplines they thought out, 3) what they regarded as scientific knowledge. Through this analysis, I assess that the foundation of science was carried out by metaphysical, logical and theological arguments, which fitted the needs of answering the didactical and introductory requirements of new paradigms, assessed the reliability of new methodology in leading us to grasp the truth, and provided philosophy with its conceptual apparatus. Finally, I demonstrate that a philosophy of science as a reflection on the principles, methods, concepts and application of modern science emerged in the Dutch Republic. (shrink)

This sixth volume of Collected Papers includes 74 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2015-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 121 co-authors from 19 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel Nasser H. Zaied, Abduallah Gamal, Amir Abdullah, Firoz Ahmad, Nadeem Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed Aboelfetouh, Ahmed Mostafa Khalil, Shariful Alam, W. Alharbi, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Amira S. Ashour, Asmaa Atef, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, A. A. Azzam, Willem K.M. Brauers, (...) Bui Cong Cuong, Fausto Cavallaro, Ahmet Çevik, Robby I. Chandra, Kalaivani Chandran, Victor Chang, Chang Su Kim, Jyotir Moy Chatterjee, Victor Christianto, Chunxin Bo, Mihaela Colhon, Shyamal Dalapati, Arindam Dey, Dunqian Cao, Fahad Alsharari, Faruk Karaaslan, Aleksandra Fedajev, Daniela Gîfu, Hina Gulzar, Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Hewayda El-Ghawalby, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, F. Nirmala Irudayam, Branislav Ivanov, S. Jafari, Jeong Gon Lee, Milena Jevtić, Sudan Jha, Junhui Kim, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Songül Karabatak, Abdullah Kargın, M. Karthika, Ieva Meidute-Kavaliauskiene, Madad Khan, Majid Khan, Manju Khari, Kifayat Ullah, K. Kishore, Kul Hur, Santanu Kumar Patro, Prem Kumar Singh, Raghvendra Kumar, Tapan Kumar Roy, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luu Quoc Dat, T. Madhumathi, Tahir Mahmood, Mladjan Maksimovic, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Nivetha Martin, M. Kasi Mayan, Mai Mohamed, Mohamed Talea, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Raja Muhammad Hashim, Muhammad Riaz, Muhammad Saeed, Rana Muhammad Zulqarnain, Nada A. Nabeeh, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Xenia Negrea, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Jagan M. Obbineni, Angelo de Oliveira, M. Parimala, Gabrijela Popovic, Ishaani Priyadarshini, Yaser Saber, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, A. A. Salama, M. Saleh, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Dönüș Șengür, Shio Gai Quek, Songtao Shao, Dragiša Stanujkić, Surapati Pramanik, Swathi Sundari Sundaramoorthy, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Muhammed Turhan, Alptekin Ulutaș, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Ştefan Vlăduţescu, Dan Valeriu Voinea, Volkan Duran, Navneet Yadav, Yanhui Guo, Naveed Yaqoob, Yongquan Zhou, Young Bae Jun, Xiaohong Zhang, Xiao Long Xin, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

An interpretation of Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit showing its continued relevance to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind.

Robert Brandom makes several mistakes in his discussion of Sellars's "Two-Ply" account of observation. Brandom does not recognize the difference in "level" between observation reports concerning physical objects and 'looks'-statements. He also denies that 'looks'-statements are reports or even make claims. They then demonstrate a more correct reading of Sellars on 'looks'-statements.

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do ‘‘hang together.’’ Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but (...) so are the resonances. (shrink)

Void is at the heart of Stoic metaphysics. As the incorporeal par excellence, being defined purely in terms of lacking body, it brings into sharp focus the Stoic commitment to non-existent Somethings. This article argues that Stoic void, far from rendering the Stoic system incoherent or merely ad hoc, in fact reflects a principled and coherent physicalism that sets the Stoics apart from their materialist predecessors and atomist neighbors.

This paper comments on Gallagher’s recently published direct perception proposal about social cognition [Gallagher, S.. Direct perception in the intersubjective context. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 535–543]. I show that direct perception is in danger of being appropriated by the very cognitivist accounts criticised by Gallagher. Then I argue that the experiential directness of perception in social situations can be understood only in the context of the role of the interaction process in social cognition. I elaborate on the role of social (...) interaction with a discussion of participatory sense-making to show that direct perception, rather than being a perception enriched by mainly individual capacities, can be best understood as an interactional phenomenon. (shrink)

Pragmatism has ties to Idealism; it has even been accused of being a form of idealism. I tell a story about the changing nature of idealism that makes sense of its relationship to pragmatism without threatening to collapse the two. My story is a genealogy that begins well before pragmatism shows up. Pragmatism has very little in common with the subjective idealism of Berkeley or the problematic idealism of Descartes; the differences between idealism and pragmatism get blurred only because idealism (...) underwent an evolution transforming it into something primed to influence and maybe bleed into pragmatism. It was, according to my story, the evolved idealism developed in Germany between 1781 and 1831 that contributed to the formation and development of pragmatism. Yet pragmatism is a large evolutionary step away from idealism, however much it retains and utilizes some of the strengths of late idealistic thought. (shrink)

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan De (...) Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is a relatively new, experimental treatment for patients suffering from treatment-refractory Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The effects of treatment are typically assessed with psychopathological scales that measure the amount of symptoms. However, clinical experience indicates that the effects of DBS are not limited to symptoms only: patients for instance report changes in perception, feeling stronger and more confident, and doing things unreflectively. Our aim is to get a better overview of the whole variety of changes that (...) OCD patients experience during DBS treatment. For that purpose we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 18 OCD patients. In this paper, we present the results from this qualitative study.We list the changes grouped in four domains: with regard to (a) person, (b) (social) world, (c)characteristics of person-world interactions, and (d) existential stance. We subsequently provide an interpretation of these results. In particular, we suggest that many of these changes can be seen as different expressions of the same process; namely that the experience of anxiety and tension gives way to an increased basic trust and increased reliance on one’s abilities. We then discuss the clinical implications of our findings, especially with regard to properly informing patients of what they can expect from treatment, the usefulness of including CBT in treatment, and the limitations of current measures of treatment success. We end by making several concrete suggestions for further research. (shrink)

At the heart of the Stoic theory of modality is a strict commitment to bivalence, even for future contingents. A commitment to both future truth and contingency has often been thought paradoxical. This paper argues that the Stoic retreat from necessity is successful. it maintains that the Stoics recognized three distinct senses of necessity and possibility: logical, metaphysical and providential. Logical necessity consists of truths that are knowable a priori. Metaphysical necessity consists of truths that are knowable a posteriori, a (...) world order according to certain metaphysical principles and natures that god crafts within the constraints of matter. Finally, what is providentially necessary is what occurs according to the chain of fate, but only once it is in process or past. -/- The method of the paper is a close reading of Diogenes Laertius 7.75, adducing broad textual evidence along the way, to show that the Stoic theory of modality embraces Philonian possibility, both that which is capable of being true as a matter of logical consistency, and that which is possible according to the bare fitness of the entity. What differentiates the Stoics from Philo is their additional commitment to possibility as opportunity, resisting the collapse of determinism into necessity. (shrink)

This paper seeks to elucidate the distinctive nature of the rational impression on its own terms, asking precisely what it means for the Stoics to define logikē phantasia as an impression whose content is expressible in language. I argue first that impression, generically, is direct and reflexive awareness of the world, the way animals get information about their surroundings. Then, that the rational impression, specifically, is inherently conceptual, inferential, and linguistic, i.e. thick with propositional content, the way humans receive incoming (...) information from the world. When we suspend certain contemporary assumptions about propositional content, the textual evidence can be taken at face value to reveal why, for the Stoics, rational impressions are called thoughts (noēseis) and how the Stoics’ novel semantic entities called lekta (roughly, the meanings of our words) depend on rational impressions for their subsistence. (shrink)

In ‘‘Why brains matter: an integrational perspective on The Symbolic Species’’ Cowley (2002) [Language Sciences 24, 73–95] suggests that Deacon pictures brains as being able to process words qua tokens, which he identifies as the theory’s Achilles’ heel. He goes on to argue that Deacon’s thesis on the co-evolution of language and mind would benefit from an integrational approach. This paper argues that Cowley’s criticism relies on an invalid understanding of Deacon’s use the concept of ‘‘symbolic reference’’, which he appropriates (...) from Peirce’s semiotic. Peirce’s analysis as well as Deacon’s appropriation will be examined in detail. Consequently it will be argued that an integrationist reading would add very little to Deacon’s core thesis. (shrink)

Religious disagreement is an emerging topic of interest in social epistemology. Little is known about how philosophers react to religious disagreements in a professional context, or how they think one should respond to disagreement. This paper presents results of an empirical study on religious disagreement among philosophers. Results indicate that personal religious beliefs, philosophical training, and recent changes in religious outlook have a significant impact on philosophers' assessments of religious disagreement. They regard peer disagreement about religion as common, and most (...) surveyed participants assume one should accord weight to the other's opinion. Theists and agnostics are less likely to assume they are in a better epistemic position than their interlocutors about religious questions compared with atheists, but this pattern only holds for participants who are not philosophers of religion. Continental philosophers think religious beliefs are more like preferences than analytic philosophers, who regard religious beliefs as fact-like. (shrink)

Este artigo busca adentrar pelas questões relacionadas à biopolítica do corpo, sobretudo, daquelas ligadas à estatização do biológico e do racismo do Estado, que aparecem nos trabalhos de Michel Foucault e que aqui evocamos para analisar o corpo enquanto objeto discursivo analisável dessa biopolítica em duas produções francesas de horror, - Frontière(s) e em À l’interieur – que exibem imagens dos tumultos de Outubro de 2005, acontecimento marcado pelos protestos contra a política de perseguição aos sans-papiers que vitimou três jovens (...) de origem africana. É a partir daí que retomaremos a discussão do “quem somos nós”, em Foucault, para refletir sobre o sujeito, a menoridade e a liberdade na estatização do corpo, um lugar da memória nacional. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Patrick Reider’s essay “Sellars on Perception, Science and Realism: A Critical Response.” Reider is correct that Sellars’s realism is in tension with his generally Kantian approach to issues of knowledge and mind, but I do not think Reider’s analysis correctly locates the sources of that tension or how Sellars himself hoped to be able to resolve it. Reider’s own account of idealism and the reasons supporting it are rooted in the epistemological tradition that informed (...) the British empiricists, rather than in the metaphysical reasons that ruled within the German tradition from Leibniz through Hegel that has much more in common with Sellars’s position. Thus, Reider takes Sellars’s notion of picturing to be just another version of the representationalism that has dominated the Anglo-American tradition since Locke, whereas, in my view, because picturing is a non-semantical relation, it is an important ingredient in naturalizing the coherentist theories of the idealists. (shrink)

Speculative fiction, such as science fiction and fantasy, has a unique epistemic value. We examine similarities and differences between speculative fiction and philosophical thought experiments in terms of how they are cognitively processed. They are similar in their reliance on mental prospection, but dissimilar in that fiction is better able to draw in readers (transportation) and elicit emotional responses. By its use of longer, emotionally poignant narratives and seemingly irrelevant details, speculative fiction allows for a better appraisal of the consequences (...) of philosophical ideas than thought experiments. (shrink)

In a situation of peer disagreement, peers are usually assumed to share the same evidence. However they might not share the same evidence for the epistemic system used to process the evidence. This synchronic complication of the peer disagreement debate suggested by Goldman (In Feldman R, Warfield T (eds) (2010) Disagreement. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 187–215) is elaborated diachronically by use of a simulation. The Hegselmann–Krause model is extended to multiple epistemic systems and used to investigate the role of (...) consensus and difference splitting in peer disagreement. I find that the very possibility of multiple epistemic systems downgrades the epistemic value of consensus and makes difference splitting a suboptimal strategy. (shrink)

A summary of the "Rylean myth" (aka "the myth of Jones") from Wilfrid Sellars' classic article "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." He uses this "myth" to motivate the idea that our concepts of mental states are like theoretical concepts, developed to fulfill an explanatory role, and not at all somehow 'given' to us by direct acquaintance with instances of mental states.

This paper offers a new angle on the common idea that the process of science does not support epistemic diversity. Under minimal assumptions on the nature of journal editing, we prove that editorial procedures, even when impartial in themselves, disadvantage less prominent research programs. This purely statistical bias in article selection further skews existing differences in the success rate and hence attractiveness of research programs, and exacerbates the reputation difference between the programs. After a discussion of the modeling assumptions, the (...) paper ends with a number of recommendations that may help promote scientific diversity through editorial decision making. (shrink)

In this paper, we draw on Alfred Schutz’s theoretical framework to better understand how oppression is enacted through discriminatory acts. By closely examining the role of typifications and relevances in our experience of others, and by supplementing this analysis with contemporary social scientific resources, we argue that a Schutzian perspective on oppression yields important phenomenological insights. We do this in three key steps. Firstly, we contextualise Equality and the Meaning Structure of the Social World within Schutz’s broader body of work, (...) elucidating his central conditions of discrimination. Secondly, we highlight the limitations of Schutz’s account, in how it fails to capture more peripheral, subtle, and implicit oppressive practices. Finally, we introduce two underexplored insights derived from Schutz’s framework: the role of relevances in understanding the motivational underpinnings of implicit biases, and the connection between self-typification and stereotype threat. With this multidimensional approach, we hope to enhance our understanding of oppression whilst bridging gaps in Schutz’s original conceptualization. (shrink)

O presente trabalho busca refletir, no sentido derridiano, sobre o ensino do Português Língua Estrangeira (PLE) à luz do Quadro Europeu Comum de Referência para a aprendizagem, ensino e avaliação de línguas (QECR). Tal documento, juntamente com o Portfólio Europeu das Línguas, se apresenta como um instrumento essencialmente linguístico para a harmonização do ensino de línguas vivas europeias e com uma perspectiva intercultural. Dessa forma, o QECR advoga que o ensino de língua deve promover o desenvolvimento do aprendiz, da sua (...) identidade em resposta à experiência enriquecedora da diferença na língua e na cultura. Exige-se do aluno muito mais do que simplesmente imitar ou memorizar. O QECR busca descrever exaustivamente aquilo que o aprendiz de uma língua, no nosso caso o PLE, tem que aprender para ser capaz de comunicar, interagir e quais os conhecimentos e habilidades ele tem de desenvolver para serem eficazes na sua atuação. A descrição abrange também o contexto cultural dessa língua. Sendo assim, o QECR é mais uma alternativa para aqueles que trabalham com o português na modalidade de língua 2 (PLE) no sentido da compreensão das alteridades, da cidadania e da democracia num mundo sem fronteiras em que “Navegar é preciso”, i.e., interagir, dialogar. (shrink)

This collection addresses two different audiences: 1) historians and philosophers of the life sciences reflecting on collaborations across disciplines, especially as regards defining and addressing Grand Challenges; 2) researchers and other stakeholders involved in cross-disciplinary collaborations aimed at tackling Grand Challenges in the life and medical sciences. The essays collected here offer ideas and resources both for the study and for the practice of goal-driven cross-disciplinary research in the life and medical sciences. We organise this introduction in three sections. The (...) first section provides some background and context. The second motivates our take on this topic and then outlines the central ideas of each paper. The third section highlights the specificity and significance of this approach by considering: a) how this collection departs from existing literature on inter- and trans-disciplinarity, b) what is characteristic about this approach, and c) what role this suggests for the history and philosophy of the life sciences in addressing Grand Challenges. (shrink)

Casgevy, the world’s first approved CRISPR-based cell therapy, has been priced at $2.2 million per patient. Although this hefty price tag was widely anticipated, the extremely high cost of this and other cell and gene therapies poses a major ethical issue in terms of equitable access and global health. In this Perspective, we argue that lowering the prices of future CRISPR therapies is an urgent ethical imperative. Although we focus on Casgevy as a case study, much of our analysis can (...) be extrapolated to the controversies over affordable access to other gene and cell therapies. First, we explain why this first-of-its-kind CRISPR therapy might be so expensive. We then analyze the ethical issues of equity and global health of early CRISPR treatments. Next, we discuss potential solutions to lower the prices of CRISPR gene therapies. We conclude that the approval of CRISPR transforms our obligations of justice and compels us to bring future gene therapies to the maximum possible number of patients with serious genetic diseases at affordable prices. (shrink)

This paper presents REAL, a Real-Valued Attribute Classification Tree Learning Algorithm. Several of the algorithm's unique features are explained by úe users' demands for a decision support tool to be used for evaluating financial operations strategies. Compared to competing algorithms, in our applications, REAL presents maj or advantages : (1) The REAL classification trees usually have smaller error rates. (2) A single conviction (or trust) measure at each leaf is more convenient than the traditional (probability, confidence-level) pair. (3) No need (...) for an external pruning criterion. (shrink)

In a previous work we introduced the algorithm \SQEMA\ for computing first-order equivalents and proving canonicity of modal formulae, and thus established a very general correspondence and canonical completeness result. \SQEMA\ is based on transformation rules, the most important of which employs a modal version of a result by Ackermann that enables elimination of an existentially quantified predicate variable in a formula, provided a certain negative polarity condition on that variable is satisfied. In this paper we develop several extensions of (...) \SQEMA\ where that syntactic condition is replaced by a semantic one, viz. downward monotonicity. For the first, and most general, extension \SSQEMA\ we prove correctness for a large class of modal formulae containing an extension of the Sahlqvist formulae, defined by replacing polarity with monotonicity. By employing a special modal version of Lyndon's monotonicity theorem and imposing additional requirements on the Ackermann rule we obtain restricted versions of \SSQEMA\ which guarantee canonicity, too. (shrink)

This note contains a corrective and a generalization of results by Borsboom et al. (2008), based on Heesen and Romeijn (2019). It highlights the relevance of insights from psychometrics beyond the context of psychological testing.

The philosophical literature on scientific explanation in neuroscience has been dominated by the idea of mechanisms. The mechanist philosophers often claim that neuroscience is in the business of finding mechanisms. This view has been challenged in numerous ways by showing that there are other successful and widespread explanatory strategies in neuroscience. However, the empirical evidence for all these claims was hitherto lacking. Empirical evidence about the pervasiveness and uses of various explanatory strategies in neuroscience is particularly needed because examples and (...) case studies that are used to illustrate philosophical claims so far tend to be hand-picked. The risk of confirmation bias is therefore considerable: when looking for white swans, all one finds is that swans are white. The more systematic quantitative and qualitative bibliometric study of a large body of relevant literature that we present in this paper can put such claims into perspective. Using bibliometric tools, we identify the typical linguistic patterns used in the alleged mechanistic, dynamical, and topological explanations in the literature, their preponderance and how they change over time. Our findings show abundant use of mechanistic language, but also the presence of a significant neuroscience literature using topological and dynamical explanatory language, which grows over time and increasingly differentiates from each other and from mechanistic explanations. (shrink)

Defenders of moral perception have famously argued that seeing value is relevantly similar to seeing color. Some critics think, however, that the analogy between color-seeing and value-seeing breaks down in several crucial respects. Defenders of moral perception, these critics say, have not succeeded in providing examples of non-moral perception that are relevantly analogous to cases of moral perception. Therefore, it can be doubted whether there is such a thing as moral perception at all. I argue that, although the analogy between (...) color perception and moral perception does indeed break down in several crucial respects, that conclusion does not weaken the case of defenders of moral perception, because better analogies are available. If defenders of moral perception seek to draw support from an analogy, then seeing emotion will protect them better against criticisms than will seeing color. (shrink)

The relationship between topological explanation and mechanistic explanation is unclear. Most philosophers agree that at least some topological explanations are mechanistic explanations. The crucial question is how to make sense of this claim. Zednik (Philos Psychol 32(1):23–51, 2019) argues that topological explanations are mechanistic if they (i) describe mechanism sketches that (ii) pick out organizational properties of mechanisms. While we agree with Zednik’s conclusion, we critically discuss Zednik’s account and show that it fails as a general account of how and (...) when topological explanations are mechanistic. First, if topological explanations were just mechanism sketches, this implies that they could be enriched by replacing topological terms with mechanistic detail. This, however, conflicts how topological explanations are used in scientific practice. Second, Zednik’s account fails to show how topological properties can be organizational properties of mechanisms that have a place in mechanistic explanation. The core issue is that Zednik’s account ignores that topological properties often are _global_ properties while mechanistic explanantia refer to _local_ properties. We demonstrate how these problems can be solved by a recent account of mechanistic completeness (Craver and Kaplan in Br J Philos Sci 71(1):287–319, 2020; Kohár and Krickel in Calzavarini and Viola (eds) Neural mechanisms—new challenges in the philosophy of neuroscience, Springer, New York, 2021) and use a multilayer network model of Alzheimer’s Disease to illustrate this. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the role the Dutch gymnasium continues to play in the institutional maintenance of educational inequality. To that end we examine the relational and spatial features of state-sponsored elite education in the Dutch system: the unique identity the gymnasium seeks to cultivate; its value to its consumers; its geographic significance; and its market position amidst a growing array of other selective forms of schooling. We argue that there is a strong correlation between a higher social class (...) background and the concern to transmit one’s cultural habitus. We further speculate on the moral implications of state-sponsored elite education, both as it concerns the specific role of the gymnasium in the reproduction of social inequality as well as the curious tendency among its supporters to rationalise the necessity of its existence. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between the formation of the self and the worldly horizon within which this self achieves its meaning. Our inquiry takes place from two perspectives: the first derived from the Nietzschean analysis of how one becomes what one is; the other from current developments in complexity theory. This two-angled approach opens up different, yet related dimensions of a non-essentialist understanding of the self that is none the less neither arbitrary nor deterministic. (...) Indeed, at the meeting point of these two perspectives on the self lies a conception of a dynamic, worldly self, whose identity is bound up with its appearance in a world shared with others. After examining this argument from the respective view points offered by Nietzsche and complexity theory, the article concludes with a consideration of some of the political and ethical implications of representing our situatedness within a shared human domain as a condition for self-formation. (shrink)

The paper uses two historical examples, public health (1840-1880) and town planning (1945-1975) in Britain, to analyse the challenges faced by goal-driven research, an increasingly important trend in science policy, as exemplified by the prominence of calls for addressing Grand Challenges. Two key points are argued. (1) Given that the aim of research addressing social or global problems is to contribute to improving things, this research should include all the steps necessary to bring science and technology to fruition. This need (...) is captured by the idea of practical integration, which brings this type of research under the umbrella of collective practical reason rather than under the aegis of science. Achieving practical integration is difficult for many reasons: the complexity of social needs, the plurality of values at stake, the limitation of our knowledge, the elusive nature of the skills needed to deal with uncertainty, incomplete information and asymmetries of power. Nevertheless, drawing from the lessons of the case studies, it is argued that (2) practical integration needs a proper balance between values, institutions and knowledge: i.e. a combination of mutual support and mutual limitation. Pursuing such a balance provides a flexible strategy for approximating practical integration. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the relationship between misinformation and disagreement. We begin by arguing that one traditional bogeyman in this domain, ideological polarization, does not account for the many problems that have been documented. Instead, affective polarization seems to be the root cause of most of these problems. We then discuss the relationships between moral outrage, misinformation, and affective polarization. We next turn to the political implications of affective polarization and conclude by discussing some potential solutions to the problems that arise (...) in this area. (shrink)

The paper introduces Vailati’s life and works, investigating Vailati’s education, the relation to Peano and his school, and the interest for pragmatism and modernism. A detailed analysis of Vailati’s scientific and didactic activities, shows that he held, like Peano, a a strong interest for the history of science and a pluralist, anti-dogmatic and anti-foundationalist conception of definitions in mathematics, logic and philosophy of language. Vailati’s understanding of mathematical logic as a form of pragmatism is not a faithful interpretation of Peano’s (...) conception, but it is essential to understand the relations of Peano’s logic with other philosophical traditions and some epistemological aspects of Peano’s perspective, such as the search for a universal language. (shrink)

Daniel Whiting has argued, in this journal, that Mark Schroeder’s analysis of knowledge in terms of subjectively and objectively sufficient reasons for belief makes wrong predictions in fake barn cases. Schroeder has replied that this problem may be avoided if one adopts a suitable account of perceptual reasons. I argue that Schroeder’s reply fails to deal with the general worry underlying Whiting’s purported counterexample, because one can construct analogous potential counterexamples that do not involve perceptual reasons at all. Nevertheless, I (...) claim that it is possible to overcome Whiting’s objection, by showing that it rests on an inadequate characterization of how defeat works in the examples in question. (shrink)

Ethical concerns in e-social science are often raised with respect to privacy, confidentiality, anonymity and the ethical and legal requirements that govern research. In this article, the authors focus on ethical aspects of e-research that are not directly related to ethical regulatory framework or requirements. These frameworks are often couched in terms of benefits or harms that can be incurred by participants in the research. The authors shift the focus to the sources of value in terms of which benefits or (...) harms are understood in real social situations. A central claim of this paper is that the technologies that are used for research are not value neutral, but serve to reinforce some values at the expense of others. The authors discuss databases, modelling and simulation, network analysis as examples of technologies which affect the articulation of values. A view of e-social science as a techno-scientific constellation of researchers, technologies and society, in which values are always already embedded, is put forward as a basis for a view of ethics as reflexive and active engagement, conducted with awareness. Methodological pluralism and proactive openness are also proposed as responses to this view of the ethical dimensions of e-social science. (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold. First, I want to offer an introduction of and a comparison between three accounts of philistinism. Secondly, I show how the phenomenon of philistinism, a failure to speak for oneself, helps to develop an original perspective on Wittgenstein’s moral thought. It is often claimed that Wittgenstein’s personal ethics were quite unorthodox because he repeatedly seems to have supported destruction, war and slavery. I argue that, in the light of my discussion of philistinism, the (...) remarks upon which such conclusions are based should be read differently. (shrink)

O objetivo deste capítulo é analisar o conceito de informação como uma ação significativa em sistemas complexos adaptativos. A comunicação e a linguagem são vistas como sistemas complexos por Maturana & Varela (1994), cuja principal característica é a auto-organização. Para estes autores, a comunicação é literalmente o conjunto de ações comuns em um coletivo de agentes. Sob uma vertente enativa semiótica, decidimos então: 1. Replicar resultados de convergência léxica e ampliar os resultados obtidos por Loula et al. (2003) e Loula (...) (2004); 2. Para isso, foi concebido e implementado o SIMPS - Simulador de Processos Semióticos; e 3. Analisar o conceito de informação como ação significativa, isto é, como ações envolvidas em processos semióticos, cujos significados se encontram nos usos coletivos das palavras e expressões de jogos de linguagem. Apesar de entendermos que nem toda informação é adaptativa, buscamos gerar informações passíveis de trazer vantagens adaptativas para grupos de agentes. Nosso modelo de simulação aponta, dentre outros resultados, que informações falsas podem ser mais prejudiciais do que informação alguma. (shrink)

What is a moral argument? A straightforward answer is that a moral argument is an argument dealing with moral issues, such as the permissibility of killing in certain circumstances. I call this the thin sense of ‘moral argument’. Arguments that we find in normative and applied ethics are almost invariably moral in this sense. However, they often fail to be moral in other respects. In this article, I discuss four ways in which morality can be absent from moral arguments in (...) the thin sense. If these arguments suffer from an absence of morality in at least one of these ways, they are not moral arguments in what I will call the thick sense of ‘moral argument’. Because only moral arguments in the thick sense could possibly qualify as proper responses to moral problems, the absence of morality in thin arguments means that these arguments will fail to give us a reason to do whatever they claim that we ought to do, even if we see no independent reason to question the truth of the premises or the logical validity of the argument. (shrink)

This brief paper is devoted to criticizing the widespread reading of Kant’s first Critique, according to which reference to subject-independent objects is “constituted” by higher-order cognitive abilities (concepts). Let us call this the “constitutional view.” In this paper, I argue that the constitutional reading confuses the un-Kantian problem of how we come to represent objects (which I call the intentionality thesis), with the quite different problem of how we cognize (erkennen) (which I call the “cognition thesis”) that we do represent (...) objects, that is, things that exist independently of the subject. (shrink)

This paper presents a new cognitivist account for the old puzzle of self-consciousness or knowing self-reference. Knowing self-reference does not rely on reflection on some putative pre-existent pre-reflexive self-consciousness, nor is it the result of a process of identification of oneself as the employer of the relevant token of “I” according to the token-reflexive rule of the first-person pronoun. Rather, it relies on the architecture of the cognitive system. By exploiting the acquaintance relation that every brain has to one’s own (...) body, a “mental file” is opened in a subliminal way to house information about oneself gained through the appropriate proprioceptors. Knowing self-reference based on self-files dispenses with self-identification because the opening of the file in the same brain/body is not a deed of the cognitive system but rather something that takes place sub-personally. (shrink)