Abstract In this paper I discuss Polycarp Ikuenobe's view that it is rational to believe, in an African context, in the existence of witches and witchcraft. First, I attempt to show that it is not possible to prove empirically that witches and witchcraft are real, as Ikuenobe assumes. I argue that even though witches and witchcraft are part of the social reality in which many Africans live, they do not have the same ontological status as theoretical entities in scientific research. (...) Second, I try to show that Ikuenobe's attempt to demonstrate that the belief in witches and witchcraft has a rational foundation is not convincing. Admittedly, Africans, who live in magic-ridden cultures, have reasons that locally justify their belief in witches and witchcraft. However, when the justification offered for this belief is assessed by external standards, employed within scientific discourse, it turns out to be insufficient. (shrink)

R. G. Collingwood's re-enactment doctrine has been widely discussed in recent years by his commentators. However, most philosophers who discuss the re-enactment doctrine touch only briefly on his view of the identity of thoughts. This is surprising because Collingwood claims that the historian's successful re-enactment of the thought behind the historical agent's action involves re-thinking the same thought as the agent and not merely a copy of his thought.

In this article I discuss Wittgenstein's view of what is involved in understanding other cultures. I show that he is not committed to cultural relativism, as some of his critics argue. As he sees it, the real differences between cultures do not involve any fundamental conceptual, epistemic or other barriers that would make it impossible for us to understand and criticise other cultures. Shared forms of life and man's natural history provide a foothold for us when we attempt to understand (...) other cultures. (shrink)

A substantial article length introduction to a collection on social ontology and mutual recognition.

Thomas Hobbes’s radical tendency to view natural law as a means of individual self-preservation sparked critical responses among natural law theorists in England and continental Europe. This chapter compares how two of Hobbes’s immediate successors and critics – Richard Cumberland and Samuel Pufendorf – dealt with the potential conflict between self-interest and the requirements of natural law. The chapter shows how both intended to reply to Hobbes in their own distinctive ways by attempting to show that the ultimate aim of (...) natural law, imposed by God, obligated people to promote the common good of humankind as a whole rather than mainly function as the means for individual and social utility. They did not, however, consider self-interest to be merely destructive for social cooperation and natural law. Both argued in their distinct ways that self-interest is the most effective motivation for people to consider the advantage of others and it leads them to promote the common good. This chapter also points out notable differences between Cumberland’s and Pufendorf’s treatment of the relation between the private good and the common good. (shrink)

This open access volume provides an in-depth analysis of philosophical discussions concerning the common good and its relation to self-interest in the history of Western philosophy. The thirteen chapters explore both renowned and lesser-known thinkers from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, covering also the relevant ancient background. By bridging the gap between the medieval and early modern periods, they provide fresh insights into how moral and political philosophers understood the concepts of the common good and self-interest, along with (...) their ethical and political implications. The concept of the common good occupies a central role in philosophical reflections on the public and private dimensions of moral and social life in contemporary debates. By exploring the rich and diverse ways in which the relationship between the common good and self-interest has been understood, this volume has the potential to contribute to our ongoing efforts to critically discern the possibilities and limitations of these concepts in the present. Thus, the volume will be useful for scholars interested in the multi-layered role of the notion of the common good both in the history of philosophy and in contemporary moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts. The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for (...) developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences. -/- Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research. (shrink)

Research on nursing ideology and the ethics of child and adolescent psychiatric nursing care is limited. The aim of this study was to describe and explore the ideological approaches guiding psychiatric nursing in child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient wards in Finland, and discuss the ethical, theoretical and practical concerns related to nursing ideologies. Data were collected by means of a national questionnaire survey, which included one open-ended question seeking managers' opinions on the nursing ideology used in their area of practice. (...) Questionnaires were sent to all child and adolescent psychiatric inpatient wards (n = 69) in Finland; 61 ward mangers responded. Data were analysed by qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Six categories - family centred care, individual care, milieu centred care, integrated care, educational care and psychodynamic care - were formed to specify ideological approaches used in inpatient nursing. The majority of the wards were guided by two or more approaches. Nursing models, theories and codes of ethics were almost totally ignored in the ward managers' ideological descriptions. (shrink)

There is today a wide consensus that ‘recognition’ is something that we need a clear grasp of in order to understand the dynamics of political struggles, and, perhaps the constitution and dynamics of social reality more generally. Yet, the discussions on ‘recognition’ have so far often been conceptually rather inexplicit, in the sense that the very key concepts have remained largely unexplicated or undefined. Since the English word ‘recognition’ is far from unambiguous, it is possible, and to our mind also (...) actually the case, that different authors have meant partly different things with this word. In what follows, we will make a number of conceptual distinctions and clarificatory proposals that are meant to bring to sharper focus the field of phenomena that are being discussed under the catchword ‘recognition’. This is meant to serve a dual purpose: to suggest a number of distinctions which are of help in formulating rival views, and to propose what strikes us as the best overall position formulated in terms of those distinctions. (shrink)

The presence of various mechanisms of non-genetic inheritance is one of the main problems for current evolutionary theory according to several critics. Sufficient empirical and conceptual reasons exist to take this claim seriously, but there is little consensus on the implications of multiple inheritance systems for evolutionary processes. Here we use the Price Equation as a starting point for a discussion of the differences between four recently proposed categories of inheritance systems; genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic. Specifically, we address how (...) the components of the Price Equation encompass different non-genetic systems of inheritance in an attempt to clarify how the different systems are conceptually related. We conclude that the four classes of inheritance systems do not form distinct clusters with respect to their effect on the rate and direction of phenotypic change from one generation to the next in the absence or presence of selection. Instead, our analyses suggest that different inheritance systems can share features that are conceptually very similar, but that their implications for adaptive evolution nevertheless differ substantially as a result of differences in their ability to couple selection and inheritance. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that the seventeenth-century natural lawyers constructed the minimal requirement for social coordination between self-seeking individuals animated by the desire for self-preservation. On most interpretations, Grotius and his successors focused on the “perfect” duties and had little to say about the “imperfect” duties of love and civility. This essay provides an alternative reading of post-Grotian natural law by reconstructing Pufendorf’s and Locke’s understanding of how the duties of civility and love might be realised in civil society. The (...) essay argues that, for Pufendorf and Locke, the desire for esteem offers an explanation of how people recognize the content of the reciprocal duties of social morality and motivate themselves to act accordingly. The reconstruction of their views on the beneficial effects of esteem-seeking points towards a new interpretation of how, and why, philosophical interest in an economy of esteem and the social nature of the self emerged, prior to their treatment by eighteenth-century authors such as Hume and Smith. (shrink)

Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics (Global Political Economy) at the University of Helsinki.1 In Part 1 of this interview (Patomäki and Morgan 2023) he discussed his work and career up...

In Part 1 of this wide-ranging interview Heikki Patomäki discusses his early work and career up to the Global Financial Crisis. He provides comment on his role as a public intellectual and activist, his diverse academic interests and influences, and the many and varied ways he has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced his work. In Part 2 he discusses his later work, the predicament of humanity and the role of futures studies.

In this paper, we argue that Samuel Pufendorf's works on natural law contain a sentimentalist theory of morality that is Smithian in its moral psychology. Pufendorf's account of how ordinary people make moral judgements and come to act sociably is surprisingly similar to Smith's. Both thinkers maintain that the human desire for esteem, manifested by resentment and gratitude, informs people of the content of central moral norms and can motivate them to act accordingly. Finally, we suggest that given Pufendorf's theory (...) of socially imposed moral entities, he has all the resources for a sentimentalist theory of morality. (shrink)

This book centres on Samuel Pufendorf’s moral and political philosophy, a subject of recently renewed interest among intellectual historians, philosophers and legal scholars in the English-speaking world. Pufendorf’s significance in conceptualizing sociability in a way that ties moral philosophy, the theory of the state, political economy, and moral psychology together has already been acknowledged, but this book is the first systematic investigation of the moral psychological underpinnings of Pufendorf’s theory of sociability in their own right. Readers will discover how Pufendorf’s (...) psychological and social explanation of sociability plays a crucial role in his natural law theory. By drawing attention to Pufendorf’s scattered remarks and observations on human psychology, a new interpretation of the importance of moral psychology is presented. The author maintains that Pufendorf’s reflection on the psychological and physical capacities of human nature also matters for his description of how people adopt sociability as their moral standard in practice. We see how, since Pufendorf’s interest in human nature is mainly political, moral psychological formulations are important for Pufendorf’s theorizing of social and political order. This work is particularly useful for scholars investigating the multifaceted role of passions and emotions in the history of moral and political philosophy. It also affords a better understanding of what later philosophers, such as Smith, Hume or Rousseau, might have find appealing in Pufendorf’s writings. As such, this book will also interest researchers of the enlightenment, natural law and early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Self-cultivation—taking pedagogical action to educate oneself—is an integral part of non-formal adult education. Ever since Greek antiquity, it has been a central ingredient in the western philosophical and educational tradition. However, we argue that the global challenges that have emerged in the present era of the ecological crisis call for a new kind of understanding of this basic educational phenomenon. Based in particular on recent work in dark ecology and its central concept of the ‘uncanny’, we outline a few key (...) features of our time in relation to the contemporary challenge of self-cultivation. We then review extant literature on self-cultivation to ascertain whether the theoretical resources that have been used to conceptualise it in the past are capable of addressing these new aspects of self-cultivation. We conclude that each of the theoretical resources analysed here offer valuable insights into the novel challenges facing self-cultivation, though not all important questions can be answered. By specifying the contributions and limitations of these theoretical resources, we pave the way for future work on conceptualising self-cultivation for our times. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to be frustrated by the outcome of an election or a decision in voting, law, economics, engineering, and other fields. Does this 'bad' result reflect poor data or poorly informed voters? Or does the disturbing conclusion reflect the choice of the decision/election procedure? Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow's famed theorem has been interpreted to mean 'no decision procedure is without flaws'. Similarly, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen dashes hope for individual liberties by showing their incompatibility with societal needs. (...) This highly accessible book offers a new, different interpretation and resolution of Arrow's and Sen's theorems. Using simple mathematics, it shows that these negative conclusions arise because, in each case, some of their assumptions negate other crucial assumptions. Once this is understood, not only do the conclusions become expected, but a wide class of other phenomena can also be anticipated. (shrink)

This first volume of Wittgenstein's Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology was written between October 1948 and March 1949, when the philosopher had moved to Dublin and was having one of his most fruitful working periods. He then finished work which he had begun in 1946 and which in its entirety constitutes the source material for Part II of the "Philosophical Investigations". When, later in 1949, Wittgenstein composed the manuscript for Part II he selected more than half the remarks (...) for it from the Dublin manuscript. Although this material is a direct continuation of the writings which make up the two volumes of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology it deserves more than they to be regarded as a "preliminary study" for the second part of Wittgenstein's "chef-d'oeuvre". (shrink)

The authors study how an aerosol technology research group constructed a research agenda for itself and how its activity was changed in the process. The group's research agenda was heterogeneous, comprising several research areas in which the knowledge of aerosols was applied in different industrial contexts. The authors analyze the development of one of these areas, the research on the production of ultrafine particles from 1992 to 1997, employing the concept of mediated activity that has been developed in the cultural-historical (...) theory of activity. In the analysis, the activity is seen as the coevolution of the subject, the means, and the research object and the networks of collaboration with other activities. The applications developed in the collaborative networks significantly influence the identity and learning of the researchers, the construction of tools and instruments, and the selection of the phenomena to be studied. (shrink)

This unique collection examines the connections between two complementary approaches to philosophical social theory: Hegel-inspired theories of recognition, and analytical social ontology.

We study game formulas the truth of which is determined by a semantical game of uncountable length. The main theme is the study of principles stating reflection of these formulas in various admissible sets. This investigation leads to two weak forms of strict-II11 reflection . We show that admissible sets such as H and Lω2 which fail to have strict-II11 reflection, may or may not, depending on set-theoretic hypotheses satisfy one or both of these weaker forms.

Mundus istum M. Enius in the manuscripts of Att. 15.26.5 is surely corrupt, as has been unanimously acknowledged . Also the modern Vulgate Mundus iste cum M. Ennio, introduced by Wesenberg in his Teubner text, is an improbable guess. Shackleton Bailey has recently proposed Maenius or Menius as the gentile name of Mundus. Mennius, however, is a very rare name and does not occur in Republican documents, while Maenius, although attested in Republican inscriptions, diverges unnecessarily from the manuscript tradition. Moreover, (...) Shackleton Bailey must forcibly change istum to iste . But it is possible to avoid practically any infringement of the transmitted text if we simply read Mundus Istummenius. The name istumenius, istimenius , written in a wide variety of ways, does occur some 20 times in urban inscriptions, mostly of the early Imperial period. It is attested also outside Rome: at Velitrae , and even as far away as Gallia . This gens must therefore have been somehow present among the Roman population of the Julio-Claudian age. In particular, attention should be paid to an Instumennius on a tessera nummularia of 60 B.C. . No major figures occur in this gens, the name remaining restricted to the lower strata of the Roman population. That suits Mundus down to the ground. He clearly belongs to the grey mob of Rome. If he is, as it seems, identical with that Mundus mentioned in 15.29.1, then Cicero gives his family name in the first instance. The transmitted form with -mm- could represent a transposition of the double consonant of the common form Istumennius. (shrink)

The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike’s educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike’s positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault’s history of the human sciences reveals that there (...) are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike’s educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements. (shrink)