This article focuses on the politics of memory and forgetting after Auschwitz and apartheid. In the first two sections Habermas' critical contribution to the German Historikerstreit is discussed. Important in this regard is the moral dimension of our relation to the past. In the next two sections the emphasis shifts to South Africa and more specifically the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The article ends with a general discussion of the dilemma of historical 'truth' and representation in (...) contemporary societies. Key Words: apartheid • Habermas • Historikerstreit • history • South Africa. (shrink)

In this important new study, Pieter Duvenage shows that Habermas’s work on aesthetics, far from being marginal to his core concerns, is central to understanding and evaluating Habermas's entire theoretical enterprise. This important new study shows that Habermas's work on aesthetics is central to understanding and evaluating his entire theoretical enterprise. Duvenage demonstrates that, in the first phase of his intellectual career, Habermas emphasizes the communicative and societal relevance of art; in the second phase, the idea of (...) a communicative aesthetics is worked out in terms of a theory of rationality. Reveals that Habermas’s later work offers a third, albeit undeveloped, alternative that suggests a convergence of the two. Offers a critical perspective on the role of aesthetics in Habermas's work and proposes possible alternatives. (shrink)

This contribution has two motives. In the first place an unorthodox reading of Gadamer's work is provided. This unorthodox reading differs from an orthodox reading that normally places Gadamer's thinking in a certain etimological and historical constellation. It is unorthodox in the sense that Gadamer's hermeneutics is interpreted as a creative contemporary answer to the Kantian project. It is argued that Gadamer interprets Kant's project of the three Critiques from the third to the first (in reverse gear). In this process (...) he starts (in contrast with Kant) with an aesthetical critique of the subjectivist cul de sac of Kant's concept of aesthetical consciousness and then broadens this critique (with the help of the aesthetical concept of play) to the spheres of history and language. In this process Gadamer also addresses ethical and epistemological issues. It is important to notice, though, that Gadamer reads aesthetical, ethical and epistemological issues as interdependent on one an other – with a remarkable emphasis on aesthetics. In the final section (the second motive) it is argued that this reading of Gadamer's aesthetical reconstruction of the Kantian project has interesting implications for other contexts – for instance the possibility for an authentic philosophy in South Africa, and more specifically in the Afrikaans world. (shrink)

Although Jürgen Habermas has a strong argument to link reason and philosophy, he also thinks that religion has a legitimate place in the (rational) public sphere. The question, though, is: what does this legitimate place entail? Is the power of religious language due to the fact that modern culture is not sufficiently secularized, that is, not yet sufficiently philosophic? Or is the power of religious language due to the fact that it successfully articulates certain widely shared moral (and substantive) intuitions? (...) In addressing these questions, this contribution has four parts. In the first section the issue of Critical Theory and religion will be briefly examined. The point here is that where religion (like aesthetics) plays a more central role amongst the thinkers of the first movement of Critical Theory (theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin), this is not the case with Habermas (the leading exponent of the second movement). In the second section, this aspect is further explored by reconstructing Habermas’s intellectual project (with its religious implications) in six steps. Finally (in the third and fourth sections) some critical remarks (inter-paradigmatic and extra-paradigmatic) will be made on Habermas’s view of religion. (shrink)

The phenomenon of Afrikaans philosophy is the result of social and cultural circumstances that have played themselves out in the last three centuries in South Africa. Since the 19th century Afrikaans and South African philosophy has been influenced by British Idealism, continental thinking logical positivism, and a variety of religious positions such as reformational philosophy and neo-Thomism. It is also the case that South African philosophers who work in fields such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism and analytical philosophy, do so mostly (...) under the influence of contexts beyond South Africa’s borders. It is thus possible to argue that there does not really exist a distinctly South African philosophical tradition. Against this background one could ask if Afrikaans philosophy is a kind of phenomenon that can continue or disappear. To answer this question, this article starts with a reconstruction of the institutionalisation of philosophy in South Africa. After the initial Dutch influence in South Africa a British colonial educational system emerged during the 19th century. From the first institutions of higher education during the 19th century the first tertiary institutions emerged in the early part of the 20th century at Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Witwatersrand , and Pretoria. Although other universities were subsequently instituted, these four can be considered as the four founding residential universities in South Africa. It is also at these universities that British Idealism had a major influence on the early stages of South African philosophy . Against this background figures such as Fremantle , Walker , Hoernlé , Lord and Macfadyen were instrumental. From the 1930s the hegemony of British Idealism was challenged by analytical philosophy and continental traditions . Since the political transformation of South Africa African philosophy has also emerged as a major philosophical tradition. The challenge for Afrikaans philosophy in contemporary South Africa is to explore those intellectual traditions that have shaped philosophy in South Africa, to know where they are coming from and to understand how they were transformed under colonial conditions. Such a perspective is worthwhile by providing a historical and material corrective to arguments that might otherwise strive to reconcile cultural values and ideas in an apolitical and ahistorical manner. (shrink)

Describes the characteristics and behavior of the camel.

This article has two general aims. It first of all critically reconsiders the empirical turn’s dismissal of transcendentalism in the philosophy of technology, in particular through the work of Ihde and Verbeek, and defends the continuing relevance of the notion of the transcencental in thinking about technology today, illustrating this mainly through a reading of Stiegler’s understanding of the human condition as a technical condition and his view of human (noetic) evolution as proceeding from a process of technical exteriorization. The (...) crucial issue that is missed by postphenomenology and the empirical turn is that technology itself in its empiricity occupies the (periodically changing) place of the transcendental. It thus fails to consider the transcendental operativity of technical artifacts within its own empiricist stance. Secondly, it argues for the continuing importance and usefulness of the idea of Technology with a capital T, equally discarded by the representatives of the empirical turn, in particular against the emerging backdrop of the Anthropocene as the age of decisive anthropogenic forcing of the planet and the growing dominance of what has recently been called the technosphere in Earth system science. With Stiegler I show that a proper, inherent dynamic of technology must be acknowledged historically, anthropologically, techno-evolutionarily as well as (techno)phenomenologically. I conclude by demonstrating that our time of planetary crisis summons us to redirect our attention to technology from the empirical to the transcendental, and from the micro-level to the macro-level again. (shrink)

Vladimir Putin’s legitimation of Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine raises questions about traditional understandings of nation and empire. Should we contrast the two in terms of values and practices? In this case, Putin uses both nationalist and Imperialist rhetoric to justify his actions. My essay questions how we understand nation and empire using the example of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. How did this empire develop laws, institutions and administrative practices to manage conflicts and claims around language use and nationalism? (...) How did Austria’s governments rule a multi-lingual, multi-confessional society effectively, without resorting to brutal policies of nationalization? When nationalist conflicts arose in different settings, how and why did they originate? I conclude that in European terms, Imperial Austria and even nationalist Hungary apparently managed daily-life issues around diverse language use and religious practice far more humanely and effectively than did the successor nation states after 1918. (shrink)

Cowan makes an intriguing case for a fundamental limit in the number of chunks that can be stored in short term memory. Chunks are collections of concepts that have strong associations to one another and much weaker associations to other chunks. A translation of this definition for the visual domain would be that a visual chunk is a collection of features that belong to the same perceptual group. Here, we will first address the neuronal mechanisms that may demarcate visual chunks. (...) Then we critically evaluate to what extent these mechanisms might be responsible for the limit on the number of chunks that can be held in STM. We conclude that the clarity with which the psychophysical data point to the number four is not matched by a similarly clear limit imposed by physiological mechanisms. (shrink)

Phillips & Silverstein argue that schizophrenia is a result of a deficit of the contextual coordination of neuronal responses. The authors propose that NMDA-receptors control these modulatory effects. However, hallucinations, which are among the principle symptoms of schizophrenia, imply a flaw in the interactions between neurons that is more fundamental than just a general weakness of contextual modulation.

Aristotle's Meteorology is - after the theoretical works Physics and De Generatione et Corruptione - the first practical application on the evidence of the elements and their properties. The texts of the Arabic and Latin versions, the last of which is printed here for the first time, are presented together with an Introduction and Index.

Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.

In this reply I try to show that, contrary to Milberry’s apparent assertion, the general intellect of the multitude does not have the explanatory robustness she accredits to it. Digital network technologies are currently overwhelmingly effective in proletarianizing and disempowering the cognitariat and only an active technopolitics of deproletarianization could reverse this hegemonic situation. In my response to Verbeek, I attempt to correct his misinterpretation of the Stieglerian approach as being dialectical in nature and show that, far from reinstating the (...) humanist dichotomy between human beings and technologies, my analysis assumes their original, albeit fundamentally ambiguous and even ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich] interconnection. I conclude with pointing out some implications of this view for a ‘really realistic’ political theory of technology. (shrink)

In the past two decades, individual explanations of scientific misconduct have increasingly given way to systemic explanations. Where did this interest in systemic factors come from? Given that research ethicists often present their interventions as responses to scientific misconduct, this article tests the hypothesis that these systemic explanations were triggered by high-visibility cases of scientific norm violation. It does so by examining why Dutch scientists in 2011 explained Diederik Stapel’s grand-scale data fabrication largely in systemic terms, whereas only fifteen years (...) earlier, in the René Diekstra affair, such explanations had been close to absent. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, the article suggests that cases like Stapel’s as such do not explain why early 21st-century commentators exchanged individual explanations for systemic ones. Only against the background of an existing discourse of criticism of the science system, developed in the 1990s and 2000s in response to rapidly increasing competition for research funding, could the Stapel affair achieve notoriety as an example of how systemic factors provoke bad conduct. (shrink)

Not only trauma, mourning and disease, but also disability has been recognised in the Book of Job in which the body plays an exceptional role. The protagonist is suffering physically, psychically and spiritually. Although the word, •–• [be sick, ill], never occurs in the book, his body is portrayed negatively being afflicted by some unknown illness, which would probably exclude him from the community described in Leviticus 13-14. While •’—’—“ [be silent] occurs several times in the book, it never has (...) the alternative meaning of deaf. Yet, his explicit empathy and sacrificial charity –’–’•’’— [for the blind] and –’–’’–’’•’ [for the lame] in 29:15 resonate with his own plight and undermine the possible discriminatory restrictions of like disabled in Leviticus 21:18. In this way, the Book of Job has a transgressive and yet liberating subtext, subverting the idealised body of his status quo. This subtle and veiled critique by the protagonist and therefore the book can be interpreted from a psychoanalytic perspective on physical disability and illness, where the symptoms and alleged imperfections of the body quietly cry out against social and cultural injustice of which they are the projections and mirrors when the context has silenced a concern for the body because of a lack of compassion as it is in the situation of Job. CONTRIBUTION: The intersection and cross-fertilisation of Biblical Studies, Disability Studies and psychoanalytic theory as interdisciplinary approach widens the horizons and deepens the insight of all three research fields, hopefully for the benefit of those who suffer from their bodies, their psyches and their societies. (shrink)

This book argues that Protestant theological ethics not only reveals basic virtue ethical characteristics, but also contributes significantly to a viable contemporary virtue ethics. Pieter Vos demonstrates that post-Reformation theological ethics still understands the good in terms of the good life, takes virtues as necessary for living the good life and considers human nature as a source of moral knowledge. Vos approaches Protestant theology as an important bridge between pre-modern virtue ethics, shaped by Aristotle and transformed by Augustine of (...) Hippo, and late modern understandings of morality. The volume covers a range of topics, going from eudaimonism and Calvinist ethics to Reformed scholastic virtue ethics and character formation in the work of Søren Kierkegaard. The author shows how Protestantism has articulated other-centered virtues from a theology of grace, affirmed ordinary life and emphasized the need of transformation of this life and its orders. Engaging with philosophy of the art of living, Neo-Aristotelianism and exemplarist ethics, he develops constructive contributions to a contemporary virtue ethics. (shrink)

In this dialogue with Yuk Hui, Pieter Lemmens explains the discipline called philosophy of technology and gives a concise overview of the most important contemporary approaches within this field. He also offers a critical evaluation of what are probably the two most salient characteristics of contemporary philosophy of technology, the so-called “empirical turn” and the “ethical turn,” which are deeply related and partly reflect the discipline’s on-going alignment with the global neoliberal agenda of exclusively profit-driven technological innovation. He also (...) critically reflects on recent developments in the molecular and informational life sciences such as genomics, metabolomics, bioinformatics and synthetic biology. (shrink)

One of the older questions in the debate about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is whether it is worthwhile for organizations to pay attention to societal demands. This debate was emotionally, normatively, and ideologically loaded. Up to the present, this question has been an important trigger for empirical research in CSR. However, the answer to the question has apparently not been found yet, at least that is what many researchers state. This apparent ambivalence in CSR consequences invites a literature study that (...) can clarify the debate and allow for the drawing of conclusions. The results of the literature study performed here reveal that there is indeed clear empirical evidence for a positive correlation between corporate social and financial performance. Voices that state the opposite refer to out-dated material. Since the beginnings of the CSR debate, societies have changed. We can therefore clearly state that, for the present Western society, “Good Ethics is Good Business.”. (shrink)

In various publications over the past years, Floridi has developed a theory of semantic information as well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data. This theory is more or less orthogonal to the standard entropy-based notions of information known from physics, information theory, and computer science that all define the amount of information in a certain system as a scalar value without any direct semantic implication. In this context the question rises what the exact relation between these various conceptions of information is and (...) whether there is a real need to enrich these mathematically more or less rigid definitions with a less formal notion of semantic information. I investigate various philosophical aspects of the more formal definitions of information in the light of Floridi’s theory. The position I defend is that the formal treatment of the notion of information as a general theory of entropy is one of the fundamental achievements of modern science that in itself is a rich source for new philosophical reflection. This makes information theory a competitor of classical epistemology rather than a servant. In this light Floridi’s philosophy of information is more a reprise of classical epistemology that only pays lip service to information theory but fails to address the important central questions of philosophy of information. Specifically, I will defend the view that notions that are associated with truth, knowledge, and meaning all can adequately be reconstructed in the context of modern information theory and that consequently there is no need to introduce a concept of semantic information. (shrink)

n various publications over the past years, Floridi has developed a theory of semantic information as well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data. This theory is more or less orthogonal to the standard entropy-based notions of information known from physics, information theory, and computer science that all define the amount of information in a certain system as a scalar value without any direct semantic implication. In this context the question rises what the exact relation between these various conceptions of information is and (...) whether there is a real need to enrich these mathematically more or less rigid definitions with a less formal notion of semantic information. I investigate various philosophical aspects of the more formal definitions of information in the light of Floridi’s theory. The position I defend is that the formal treatment of the notion of information as a general theory of entropy is one of the fundamental achievements of modern science that in itself is a rich source for new philosophical reflection. This makes information theory a competitor of classical epistemology rather than a servant. In this light Floridi’s philosophy of information is more a reprise of classical epistemology that only pays lip service to information theory but fails to address the important central questions of philosophy of information. Specifically, I will defend the view that notions that are associated with truth, knowledge, and meaning all can adequately be reconstructed in the context of modern information theory and that consequently there is no need to introduce a concept of semantic information. (shrink)

‘The art of living with ICTs ’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes (...) and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective. (shrink)

Human freedom is in tension with nomological determinism and with statistical determinism. The goal of this paper is to answer both challenges. Four contributions are made to the free-will debate. First, we propose a classification of scientific theories based on how much freedom they allow. We take into account that indeterminism comes in different degrees and that both the laws and the auxiliary conditions can place constraints. A scientific worldview pulls towards one end of this classification, while libertarianism pulls towards (...) the other end of the spectrum. Second, inspired by Hoefer, we argue that an interval of auxiliary conditions corresponds to a region in phase space, and to a bundle of possible block universes. We thus make room for a form of non-nomological indeterminism. Third, we combine crucial elements from the works of Hoefer and List; we attempt to give a libertarian reading of this combination. On our proposal, throughout spacetime, there is a certain amount of freedom that can be interpreted as the result of agential choices. Fourth, we focus on the principle of alternative possibilities throughout and propose three ways of strengthening it. (shrink)

In the South African debate about the role of the media in the new South African society, the African moral philosophy ubuntuism is from time to time raised as a framework for African normative media theory. Up till now, the possibility of using ubuntuism as a normative framework can, however, not yet be described as a focused effort to develop a comprehensive theory on the basis of which media performance could be measured from ‘an African perspective’. Rather, the topic of (...) ubuntuism as normative media theory should be seen in the context of the African Renaissance as part of an intellectual quest to rediscover and re-establish idealized values of traditional African culture and communities and to apply it to contemporary phenomena such as the media. However, given South Africa's history of apartheid in which Christian nationalism was misused as a moral philosophy to mobilize a patriotic media in the service of volk and vaderland, it is not too early to ask critical questions about ubuntuism as a possible framework for normative media theory. Such questioning is the purpose of this article. Against the background of a postmodern and a postcolonial perspective on normative theory, questions related to the following are raised: the expediency of ubuntuism in the context of changed African cultural values, the distinctiveness of ubuntuism as an African moral philosophy, the vulnerability of moral philosophy to political misuse, ubuntuism in the context of the future of normative theory in a globalized world and changed media environment, and, the implications of ubuntuism for journalism practice. It is concluded that ubuntuism may pose a threat to freedom of expression. Given the nature of contemporary South African society and its media system, a postmodern emphasis on diversity and pluralism as the cornerstone of future normative theory is supported. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. The settling of a language -- 2. The Whorf hypothesis -- 3. Relativism or a universal theory? -- 4. What does language have to do with logic and mathematics? -- 5. A test bed for grammatical theories -- 6. The Chomsky hierarchy in perpsective -- 7. Reflexivity and identity in language and cognition -- 8. The generalized logic hierarchy and its cognitive implications -- 9. The intensionalization of extensions.