Since the 1930s, scientists studying the neurological disease scrapie had assumed that the infectious agent was a virus. By the mid 1960s, however, several unconventional properties had arisen that were difficult to reconcile with the standard viral model. Evidence for nucleic acid within the pathogen was lacking, and some researchers considered the possibility that the infectious agent consisted solely of protein. In 1982, Stanley Prusiner coined the term `prion' to emphasize the agent's proteinaceous nature. This infectious protein hypothesis was (...) denounced by many scientists as `heretical'.This two-part essay asks why the concept of an infectious protein was considered controversial. Some biologists justified their evaluation of this hypothesis on the grounds that an infectious protein contradicted the `central dogma of molecular biology'. Others referred to vague theoretical constraints such as molecular biology's `theoretical structure' or `framework'. Examination of the objections raised by researchers reveals exactly what generalizations were being challenged by a protein model of infection.This two-part survey of scrapie and prion research reaches several conclusions: A theoretical framework is present in molecular biology, exerting its influence in hypothesis formation and evaluation; This framework consists of several related, yet separable, generalizations or `elements', including Francis Crick's Central Dogma and Sequence Hypothesis, plus notions concerning infection, replication, protein synthesis, and protein folding; The term `central dogma' has stretched beyond Crick's original 1958 definition to encompass at least two other `framework elements': replication and protein synthesis; and From the study of scrapie and related diseases, biological information has been delineated into at least two classes: sequential and what I call `conformational'.In Part I of this essay, a brief review of the central dogma was given, and the developments in scrapie research from 1965 to 1972 were traced. This section summarized many of the puzzling, non-virus-like properties of the scrapie agent. Alternative hypotheses to the viral explanation were presented, including early versions of a protein-only hypothesis. Part II of this essay will follow the developments in scrapie and prion research from the mid-1970s through 1991. The growing prominence of a protein-only model of infection will be countered by continued objections from many researchers to a pathogen devoid of nucleic acid. These objections will help illuminate those generalizations in molecular biology that were indeed challenged by a protein-only model of infection. (shrink)

Absence of evidence arguments are indispensable to comparative neurobiology. The absence in a given species of a homologous neural architecture strongly correlated with a type of conscious experience in humans should be able to be taken as a prima facie reason for concluding that the species in question does not have the capacity for that conscious experience. Absence of evidence reasoning is, however, widely disparaged for being both logically illicit and unscientific. This paper argues that these concerns are unwarranted. There (...) is no logical barrier to formulating cogent absence of evidence arguments; indeed, accepting such arguments is part of what it is to be committed to falsifiability as a critical aspect of the scientific method. Absence of evidence arguments can always be blocked, however, by assuming that psychological properties are ‘multiply realizable’. While we take multiple realizability to be highly likely at some level of analysis, we argue that it is question-begging to assume that it exists at every level of analysis, and thus it should not automatically be thought to undermine absence of evidence reasoning in the animal consciousness debate. Using the example of pain and focusing on homologies at the level of information processing tasks, we show how, in the science of consciousness, an absence of evidence might well serve as evidence of absence. (shrink)

We lead increasingly electronic lives, in which a significant part of our existence takes place online. The concepts of eGovernment, eCommerce, eHealth and eLiving are an indication of this development. Against this background, there is an ever growing urgency of thinking through the problem of building trust in an online context. This paper examines the contextual conditions which affect building trust online. It will be argued that different combinations of the contextual conditions of trust building will result in different (...) views of the trust by the customer. Some of these combinations are better than others, and while a holistic approach would likely result in the best solution, it is not necessarily always within reach. Online trust building could be defined as a successful combination of four basic elements: reputation, technology, expertise and relationship. Unlike previous research, this study attempts to take all of these four key elements and the dynamics of their interconnections into account. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article addresses the doctrinal controversy over the various characterizations of irritability and sensibility. In the middle of the eighteenth century, this scientific debate involved some encyclopaedist physicians, Albrecht von Haller (1709–1777), Jean-Jacques Ménuret de Chambaud (1733–1815), and Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776). The doctor from Bern described irritability as an experimental property of the muscle fibers and made it the basis of a neo-mechanism in which organic reactions are related to the degree of irritation of the fibers. The (...) practitioners from Montpellier considered sensibility, a property of living matter, to be a spontaneous activity of the organ and developed around this notion an original conception of the organism as the sum of the specific lives of each part. Beyond conceptual divergences, two ways of thinking whose philosophical presuppositions (conception of living matter, mechanism, and organicism), were in opposition, while their epistemological principles (experience versus observation) and their medical practices (active medicine and expectant medicine) went on to evolve in different directions. The privileged place granted to experimentation and assessment enabled physiology to be articulated as an autonomous scientific discipline; the pre-eminence of observation and attention to the radical specificity of the living being constituted the bases of clinical medicine. (shrink)

The main idea of this article is to present various perspectives in order to analyze the recent crisis concerning the agriculture-based rural societies in the developed capitalist communities. In all of these countries there is a production crisis, resulting in too much food. But this is also an ideological crisis, because the consumer thinks that the food is produced at too high a price. And it is a political crisis as well because a major part of the voters think subsidies (...) and trade barriers are too high. The paper argues that beneath the present agricultural and rural policy crisis lies the failure of three great projects of our time: 1) The project of natural science; 2) The project of liberal capitalism; and 3) The project of scientific socialism. The failure of these three projects has to do with the breakdown of the positivist idea of modernization. Modernization theory was partly wrong because it overlooked the persistence of locally based life modes. Those life modes must be understood before a sustainable rural development is found. The article reviews some contemporary social science perspectives that have recently been developed to grasp the fundamental changes of today's rural societies. Based on those perspectives and primarily the life mode perspective, five key elements that are essential to analyze if we want to understand future development are isolated: food production, resources, space, social diversity, and culture. (shrink)

Reductionism--understanding complex processes by breaking them into simpler elements--dominates scientific thinking around the world and has certainly proved a powerful tool, leading to major discoveries in every field of science. But reductionism can be taken too far, especially in the life sciences, where sociobiological thinking has bordered on biological determinism. Thus popular science writers such as Richard Dawkins, author of the highly influential The Selfish Gene, can write that human beings are just "robot vehicles blindly programmed (...) to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes." Indeed, for many in science, genes have become the fundamental unit for understanding human existence: genes determine every aspect of our lives, from personal success to existential despair: genes for health and illness, genes for criminality, violence, and sexual orientation. Others would say that this is reductionism with a vengeance. In Lifelines, biologist Steven Rose offers a powerful alternative to the ultradarwinist claims of Dawkins, E.O. Wilson, Daniel Dennett and others. Rose argues against an extreme reductionist approach that would make the gene the key to understanding human nature, in favor of a more complex and richer vision of life. He urges instead that we focus on the organism and in particular on the organism's lifeline: the trajectory it takes through time and space. Our personal lifeline, Rose points out, is unique--even identical twins, with identical genes at birth, will differ over time. These differences are obviously not embedded in our genes, but come about through our developmental trajectory in which genes, as part of the biochemical orchestra of trillions of cells in each human body, have an important part--but only a part--to play. To illustrate this idea, Rose examines recent research in modern biology, and especially two disciplines--genetics (which looks at the impact of genes on form) and developmental biology (which examines the interaction between the organism and the environment)--and he explores new ideas on biological complexity proposed by scientists such as Stuart Kauffman. He shows how our lifelines are constructed through the interplay of physical forces--such as the intrinsic chemistry of lipids and proteins, and the self-organizing and stabilizing properties of complex metabolic webs--and he reaches a startling conclusion: that organisms are active players in their own fate, not simply the playthings of the gods, nature, or the inevitable workings out of gene-driven natural selection. The organism is both the weaver and the pattern it weaves. Lifelines will be a rallying point for all who seek an alternative to the currently fashionable, deeply determinist accounts which dominate popular science writing and, in fact, crowd the pages of some of the major scientific journals. Based on solid, state-of-the-art research, it not only makes important contributions to our understanding of Darwin and natural selection, but will swing the pendulum back to a richer, more complex view of human nature and of life. (shrink)

Experience in thesis and peer reviewing revealed that most authors have much difficulty in presenting the structural supports of their study. This becomes evident in both their oral and written scientific reports in which little congruency or lack of it is frequently observed between title of the study, general objective (aim), and the hypothesis. Likewise, confusion is usually present when distinguishing purpose from objective when presenting the research problem. In order to aid in approaching the mentioned difficulties an exercise (...) termed Trivium is proposed and explained. This term that designated the main subjects in scholar formation during medieval times, is used to designate the effective coupling of the above three structural elements (title, objective, hypothesis) that, properly used, confer epistemological basis to their scientific reports. Likewise, in order to reinforce this exercise a Quadrivium is recommended in which a fourth structural element is added, i.e., a premise, as the theoretical basis that precisely indicates the purpose of the study and provides immediate support to the hypothesis. Examples to illustrate these exercises are provided. Abiding by this logic may significantly aid science students and some open-minded researchers in adequately constructing their scientific reports, while avoiding frustrating experiences due to uncomfortable observations by peers on their manuscripts. (shrink)

Enhanced by many innovative exercises, examples, and pedagogical features, The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, Second Edition, explores the essentials of critical reasoning, argumentation, logic, and argumentative essay writing while also incorporating material on important topics that most other texts leave out. Author Lewis Vaughn offers comprehensive treatments of core topics, including an introduction to claims and arguments, discussions of propositional and categorical logic, and full coverage of the basics of inductive reasoning. Building (...) on this solid foundation, he also delves into areas neglected by other texts, adding extensive material on "inference to the best explanation" and on scientific reasoning; a thorough look at the evaluation of evidence and credibility; and a chapter on the psychological and social factors that can impede critical thinking. Additional notable elements are a chapter on moral reasoning, advice on how to evaluate Internet sources, and guidelines for evaluating occult, paranormal, or supernatural claims. The Power of Critical Thinking, Second Edition, integrates many pedagogical features including hundreds of diverse exercises, examples, and illustrations; progressive, stand-alone writing modules; numerous text boxes; step-by-step guidelines for evaluating claims, arguments, and explanations; a glossary of important terms; and many reminders, summaries, and review notes throughout. The text is supplemented by a companion website at www.oup.com/us/criticalthinking (offering a student study guide and more), and an Instructor's Manual with Test Questions (available both in print and on a CD). This unique text features a modular structure that allows instructors to teach the chapters in almost any order. Written in a student-friendly style and enhanced by humor where appropriate, it is ideal for courses in critical thinking, introduction to logic, informal logic, argumentative writing, and introduction to argumentation. New to the Second Edition * Full-color throughout and an expanded art program (37 more photos and illustrations) * A new writing module--an annotated sample student paper--and five additional essays for analysis * A new section on evaluating news reports and advertising * Timely discussions of intelligent design and population (nonintervention) studies * Expanded coverage of experts and authors and reasons to doubt their reliability * More "Field Problems" and exercise questions * Chapter objectives and key terms with definitions for each chapter. (shrink)

Our main aim is to discuss the topic of scientific controversies in the context of a recent issue that has been the centre of attention of many epistemologists though not of argumentation theorists or philosophers of science, namely the ethics of belief in face of rational disagreement. We think that the consideration of scientific examples may be of help in the epistemological debate on rational disagreement, making clear some of the deficiencies of the discussion as it has (...) been produced until now. Another central claim of our paper is that the common view according to which beliefs (and changes of beliefs) may exhibit and commonly exhibit a deontic status can be clarified in the light of Brandom’s approach to normative pragmatics and the pragmatic theories of argumentation that also have a normative character (here our example is van Eemeren’s pragma-dialectics). Our article highlights the similarities between both projects, similarities that to our knowledge were not noticed before. Finally, an important point of the article is that we need to take contextual elements into account in order to develop an adequate theory of disagreement. (shrink)

The past several decades have seen a renaissance in Christian philosophy, led by the work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Alston, Eleonore Stump, and others. In the spirit of Plantinga s famous manifesto, Advice to Christian Philosophers, James K. A. Smith here offers not only advice to Pentecostal philosophers but also some Pentecostal advice to Christian philosophers. In this inaugural Pentecostal Manifestos volume Smith begins from the conviction that implicit in Pentecostal and charismatic spirituality is a tacit worldview (...) or social imaginary. Thinking in Tongues unpacks and articulates the key elements of this Pentecostal worldview and then explores their implications for philosophical reflection on ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, language, science, and philosophy of religion. In each case, Smith demonstrates how the implicit wisdom of Pentecostal spirituality makes unique contributions to current conversations in Christian philosophy. (shrink)

1. Introduction : humanity's urge to understand -- 2. Elements of scientific thinking : skepticism, careful reasoning, and exhaustive evaluation are all vital. Science Is universal -- Maintaining a critical attitude. Reasonable skepticism -- Respect for the truth -- Reasoning. Deduction -- Induction -- Paradigm shifts -- Evaluating scientific hypotheses. Ockham's razor -- Quantitative evaluation -- Verification by others -- Statistics : correlation and causation -- Statistics : the indeterminacy of the small -- Careful definition -- (...) Science at the frontier. When good theories become ugly -- Stuff that just does not fit -- 3. Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the "Indies" : it can be disastrous to stubbornly refuse to recognize that you have falsified your own hypothesis -- 4. Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley both test the befuddling phlogiston theory : junking a confusing hypothesis may be necessary to clear the way for new and productive science -- 5. Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction but fails to unify electromagnetism and gravitation : it is usually productive to simplify and consolidate your hypotheses -- 6. Wilhelm Röntgen intended to study cathode rays but ended up discovering X-rays : listen carefully when Mother Nature whispers in your ear : she may be leading you to a Nobel Prize -- 7. Max Planck, the first superhero of quantum theory, saves the universe from the ultraviolet catastrophe : assemble two flawed hypotheses about a key phenomenon into a model that fits experiment exactly and people will listen to you even if you must revolutionize physics -- 8. Albert Einstein attacks the problem "Are atoms real?" from every angle : solving a centuries-old riddle in seven different ways can finally resolve it -- 9. Niels Bohr models the hydrogen atom as a quantized system with compelling exactness, but his later career proves that collaboration and developing new talent can become more significant than the groundbreaking research of any individual -- 10. Conclusions, status of science, and lessons for our time. Conclusions from our biographies -- What thought processes lead to innovation? -- Is the scientist an outsider? -- The status of the modern scientific enterprise -- Lessons for our time -- Can the scientific method be applied to public policy? -- Why so little interest in science? -- Knowledge is never complete. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I present a novel account of the components that have a peculiar epistemic role in our scientific inquiries, since they contribute to establishing a form of coordination. The issue of coordination is a classic epistemic problem concerning how we justify our use of abstract conceptual tools to represent concrete phenomena. For instance, how could we get to represent universal gravitation as a mathematical formula or temperature by means of a numerical scale? This problem is particularly pressing (...) when justification for using these abstract tools comes, in part or entirely, from knowledge which is not independent from them, thus leading to threats of circularity. Achieving coordination between some abstract conceptual tools and the concrete phenomena that they are supposed to represent is usually a complex process, which involves several epistemic components. Some of these components eventually provide stable conditions for applying those abstract representations to concrete phenomena. It is in this sense of providing certain conditions of applicability that different philosophical traditions, as well as some contemporary reappraisals, view these components as constitutive or a priori. In this work, I present a new gradualist, contextualist, and relational approach to understand these constitutive components of scientific inquiry. It is gradualist inasmuch as the degree to which some component is constitutive depends on three quantifiable features: quasi-axiomaticity, generative potential, and empirical shielding. Since the quantification of these three features impinges on the history and practice of using these components in a scientific context, my approach is a contextualist one. Finally, my approach is relational in a double sense: first, it identifies ordinal relationships among epistemic components with respect to their constitutive character; second, these relationships are relative to a scientific framework of inquiry. After introducing my account and a classic example of constitutively a priori principles, i.e., Friedman’s (2001) analysis of Newtonian mechanics, I turn to my own case studies to demonstrate the advantages of my approach. Firstly, I discuss Okasha’s (2018) view of endogenization as a pervasive theoretical strategy in evolutionary biology and suggest that the constitutive character of the core Darwinian principles progressively increases with endogenization. Secondly, I apply a conceptual distinction between two varieties or scopes of coordination – general coordination and coordination in measurement – to Ohm’s work on electrical conductivity. This distinction allows me to pinpoint to what extent components along different dimensions (e.g., instrumentation, measurement, theorising, etc.) were constitutive of the forms of coordination which Ohm relied on. Thirdly, I discuss the epistemic function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle in the history and practice of population genetics. I assess this principle in terms of my account and identify approximation and stability as two components that are highly constitutive, in that they contribute to justifying its use in population genetics. Finally, applying my account to these case studies enables me to identify at least three qualitatively different types of constitutive components: domain-specific theoretical principles, material components, and domain-independent assumptions underlying reasoning abilities. In the light of my results, I draw some general conclusions on epistemic justification and scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a noticeable yet largely unacknowledged ‘pragmatic turn’ in the scientific realism debate, inspired in part by van Fraassen’s work on ‘epistemic stances’. Features of this new approach include: an ascent to the meta-level (the focus is not so much on whether scientific realism is true, but on the prior questions of the nature of the positions in this debate, how to decide whether to be a scientific realist, etc.); a reinterpretation of (...) scientific realism and anti-realism as (or as closely associated with) stances or frameworks, rather than theories or beliefs; a move away from the previously dominant empirical-explanatory (i.e. quasi-scientific or naturalistic) conception of scientific realism, anti-realism, and their justification; and a stress on the pragmatic and values-based elements in the debate. The traditional scientific realism debate is concerned with determining which position is true, or most epistemically justified. The new approach by contrast is concerned with determining which position best serves certain values, e.g. is most useful, fruitful, or otherwise prudentially preferable. In this paper we try to bring together the various strands in this new orientation, summarise its key features, contrast it with superficially similar but opposing views, and explore the similarities and differences among some of its adherents. Given we are advocates of the turn, we also offer a defence of the value and fruitfulness of this reconceptualization of the debate. (shrink)

The many critical approaches to an ‘ethnicity framework’ have fallen short of a very possible conclusion—that the language of ethnicity provides, for the most part, a poor paradigm with which to work. In the present paper we seek not only to re-state some key weaknesses of this paradigm but also to suggest that these weaknesses are more general in an over-ethnicised sociology. There are numerous critiques of particular models or elements of ethnicity thinking, including critiques of primordialist (...) approaches , of multiculturalism , and of the over-objectification of groups . The major critiques constitute a strong case against ‘thinking with ethnicity’; the broader weaknesses are more general in contemporary ‘identitarian’ sociology. From this position we turn to the question of offering an alternative approach in a sociology which emphasizes agency, and is grounded in an analysis of actors in material situations. This is allied to the concept of ideational resources, social categories and identities upon which actors draw, and a middle-range view of causality and tendency in social change. Ideas of ancestral belonging are among those ideational resources, and these ideas and assumptions are played out in a context of material and political change. The subject of study is not ethnicity, but power, resources, social relations and institutions informed by cultural identities and ideas of ancestry. The strategy of the paper will be first to re-state the deficiencies of ‘ethnicity thinking’ and second to offer an alternative framework for thinking about social action and social structure. (shrink)

Purpose: Gordon Pask has left behind a voluminous scientific oeuvre in which he frequently uses technical language and a detail of argument that makes his work difficult to access except by the most dedicated of students. His ideas have also evolved over a long period. This paper provides introductions to three of Pask's key concepts: "conversations," "individuals," and "concepts." Method: Based on the author's close knowledge of Pask's work, as his collaborator for ten years and as someone who has (...) had access to and is familiar with almost all of his published work, the paper selects three of Pask's key concepts for elucidation in order to motivate the interested reader to explore Pask's work in the original. Results: Pask's key concepts, "conversations," "individuals," and "concepts," which are central in his conversation theory and his later elaborations in "interaction of actors theory," are shown to be grounded in fundamental principles from cybernetics. Furthermore, the form of Pask's theorising is that of second order (reflexive) metatheorising, developing theories of theorising that explain their own form and genesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scientific Method in PhilosophyAuthor's note: Thanks to Gregory Landini for helpful clarifications.Gregory Landini. Repairing Bertrand Russell's 1913 Theory of Knowledge. (History of Analytic Philosophy.) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. x, 397. isbn: 978-3-030-66355-1, us$139 (hb); 978-3-030-66356-8, us$109 (ebook).The title of this book might suggest a rather narrow study of a problem with Russell's Theory of Knowledge and a proposed solution. But as with Landini's first book, Russell's Hidden (...) Substitutional Theory, the title does not capture the full scope of the work. That work did not just point out the lingering substitution theory in Principia, but gave a sweeping view of Russell's overall development from Principles to Principia and one of the most detailed accounts of the formal system in Principia in any work. This work gives a sweeping overview of Russell's philosophy up to 1918, including not just Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment, but the whole project of what Russell called scientific method in philosophy, which was the subtitle to his 1914 Our Knowledge of the ExternalWorld. Landini thinks this is the height of Russell's philosophy and proposes a fix to the problems which led Russell to abandon the project.Landini does not just present Russell's views during this period, but vigorously defends them, and not just the multiple-relation theory of judgment mostly associated with Theory of Knowledge, but also the views that logic should be understood as synthetic a priori, Russell's doctrine of acquaintance, including the acquaintance with universals as the grounding of synthetic a priori knowledge, and Russell's view that logic is the essence of philosophy. The book contains a wide range of discussions, including issues in philosophy of mind, theories of representation, theories of universals, evolution in philosophy, and the metaphysics of time and space.The book opens with an overview of some main themes, including Landini's view of the three main phases of Russell's post-idealist philosophy and his discussion of what he calls the revolutions in logic and mathematics. The three phases Landini has in mind are the Principles phase, the Principia phase [End Page 81] (which includes The Problems of Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge) and the neutral monist phase, which Landini sees as a mistake Russell made when he didn't see how to repair his 1913 work. According to Landini, the Principles era ends with the failure of the substitution theory from the po /ao paradox, the Principia era ends by 1918 with the abandonment of the attempt to finish the project of the 1913 Theory of Knowledge, and the neutral monist era begins in 1919 and continues through 1948. Landini wants to concentrate on repairing the view in the Principia era. Any remarks of Russell's from later rejecting, for example, his view of the subject, of acquaintance, of neutral monism, and remarks concerning logic as consisting of tautologies are to be rejected. Landini firmly believes that after abandoning the 1913 project, Russell took a wrong turn. Landini's discussion of the multiple-relation theory of judgment is therefore quite different from the other discussion in the literature, in that most commentators have thought Russell was correct in abandoning the theory and most think there is something to Wittgenstein's criticism. Landini thinks Wittgenstein's criticism was based on his new vision of logic, and that Russell should have rejected it and proceeded with the project of Theory of Knowledge.Given the controversies involved in these claims, I think the best way forward is an explication of Landini's new emphasis on the revolutions in logic and mathematics and some of the key claims Landini makes concerning the Principia era. Then we can look at the details of Landini's repairing of the project.the two revolutionsWhat is striking about Landini's more recent work is his emphasis on these two revolutions. One is the revolution within logic, which originates with Frege; the other a revolution in mathematics which originates with Weierstrass, von Staudt, Pieri and Cantor. While most historians of this period are aware of the important shifts... (shrink)

In the following pages, our specific aim is to show how Hume’s analysis of justice provides the occasion for the gradual display of some key elements of a psychosocial action theory, which lay the foundations for later social thinking. -/- RESUMEN: En lo que sigue, nuestro objetivo específico es mostrar cómo el análisis que realiza Hume de la justicia proporciona la ocasión para introducir de manera gradual elementos clave para el desarrollo de una teoría psico-social de la (...) acción, presupuesta en buena parte del pensamiento social posterior. (shrink)

In late September 1838, Darwin read Malthus's Essay on Population, which left him with “a theory by which to work.”115 Yet he waited some twenty years to publish his discovery in the Origin of Species. Those interested in the fine grain of Darwin's development have been curious about this delay. One recent explanation has his hand stayed by fear of reaction to the materialist implications of linking man with animals. “Darwin sensed,” according to Howard Gruber, “that some would (...) object to seeing rudiments of human mentality in animals, while others would recoil at the idea of remnants of animality in man.”116 With this link closed, Darwin hung the materialist chain around his own neck, where it rested most uncomfortably. Stephen Gould, supporting Gruber's argument, finds evidence for this reconstruction in Darwin's M and N notebooks, whichinclude many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism-the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. No notion could be more upsetting to the deepest traditions of Western thought than the statement that mind-however complex and powerful-is simply a product of brain.117The proferred hypothesis suggests, then, that Darwin was acutely sensible of the social consequences of equating men with animals and therefore mind with brian, and that he thus shied from publically revealing his views until the intellectual climate became more tolerant.The history I have examined makes this hypothesis implausible. Even if Darwin warily explored the implications of his emerging theory in his notebooks, his subsequent study of Fleming, Wells, Brougham, and Kirby should have quieted any trepidation. If these natural theologians did not flinch at seeing human reason prefigured in the mind of a worm, should Darwin have? Moreover, he recognized in his M notebook that the thesis of evolutionary continuity between men and animals did not require an explicit avowal of his conviction that brain was the agent of thought.118 And in any case, his materialism was of a rather benign sort; at least he so expressed it in an annotation in Abercrombie's Inquiries concerning the Intellectual Powers (1838): “By materialism I mean, merely the intimate connection of thought with form of brain — like kind of attraction with nature of element.”119 This belief would have held little terror for British intellectuals, who were quite familiar — some even comfortable-with Locke's anti-Cartesian argument that there was nothing contradictory in supposing God could make matter to think.120 Finally, even if the intellectual atmosphere of early nineteenth-century Britain were inhospitable to Darwin's brand of materialism, there is little reason to believe he breathed a different air at mid-century while preparing his manuscript.That Darwin should not have feared suspicions of materialism, of course, does not mean that he did not. But I think there were other, more persistent sources of anxiety that kept him from rushing to publish: namely, the several conceptual obstacles he had to overcome if his theory of evolution by natural selection were to be made scientifically acceptable. Prominent among these were the problems surrounding his changing notions of instinct.The inertia of his older ideas about instinct at first made it hard for Darwin to gauge how far the theory of natural selection might be applied to behavior. By the early 1840s he finally felt ready to meet the challenge of the natural theologians by providing a naturalistic explanation for the wonderful instincts of animals. In his “Essays” of 1842 and 1844 one sort of instinct is, however, not considered-that of neuter insects. Yet Darwin seems to have appreciated the difficulties such instincts entailed at least by 1843, when he read Kirby and Spence. He simply required time to work out a solution to a problem he initially perceived as “fatal to my whole theory.” Even while writing the “Species Book” in the summer of 1857, he was still juggling several possible solutions compatible with natural selection. It was only a short time before he actually turned to work on the Origin of Species that he appears to have settled on a single explanation for the difficulties posed by the instincts of worker bees and ants. The force of his theory of community selection snapped the last critical support of the creationist hypothesis and, conveniently enough, also fractured the generalized Lamarckian account of the evolution of behavior. These results were worth waiting for. (shrink)

Phenomenon of transdisciplinarity was put into the fore of analysis rather recently. In the article an attempt is made to find out whether it is possible to attribute this phenomenon not only to a science of the 21st century, or we have here the case where some scientific realities come to the attention of researchers with certain delay and has its value for the culture in general? It is possible to judge even the emergence of a kind of (...) cognitive revolution affecting both science culture. We need to find out what is meant by a transdisciplinarity, and how it differs from the inter- or multiransdisciplinarity. In the study the method of historical reconstruction, combining elements of presentism and antiqurism, was implemented. This method allows us to interpret historical events in the context of a specific level of knowledge, and at the same time to evaluate them in terms of modern ideas related to transdisciplinarity, inter- and multidisciplinarity. System-structural method, focused on an integrated analysis of the dynamics of development of cognitive processes in culture was implied as well, and the method of comparative analysis, which is aimed at comparing different but conceptually similar processes in various areas of conceptual art practice. It is in the framework of paradigm adopted a tacit agreement among scientists about the validity and effectiveness of research methods and techniques of inquiry. Within the paradigm, which presupposes certain fundamental principles, goals, and certain values shared by the scientific community, the novel sprouts of radical ideas once emerge. The scientific revolution here means a radical revision of the admissibility of accepted and proven methods, goals and values that are common to the members of the scientific community. Typically, new theories and concepts proposed and already mastered new scientific community, which is gradually replacing its representatives on the key command altitudes. The kernel of scientific community in fact is a style of thinking that is emerged in the context of a particular discipline, and then experience expansion in the form of discursive practices at a wide space of science and culture due to the novel cognitive schemes open the way to synthesize various research domains into a certain integrity. There is no question of the scientific revolution in the sense of Kuhn, since any significant goals and values of the scientific communities are not affected. Nevertheless, in some sense cognitive revolution taking place, the revolution of transdisciplinary type. The adoption of a new style of scientific thinking often gives rise to new types of objects and directions of cognitive activity, a new type of explanation that require new types of research proposals and cultural activities. Thus, the main idea of this article is that along with the Kuhn type scientific revolutions, transdisciplinary type scientific revolutions are conceivable, and even transdisciplinary cognitive types. This revolutions manifests in a change in style of reasoning, and it results in the expansion of this style to wide space of science and culture through the cognitive schemes and techniques, which enables to synthesize research and art activity in some integrity. Adoption of a new way of reasoning and the transition to new discursive practices generates new types of research facilities, new mechanisms of explanation, new cultural blueprints and instruments. Cognitive activity, based on a new style of thinking, involves multidisciplinarity, formation of new scientific and cultural institutions, and, therefore, causes a noticeable social change. Based on an analysis of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary processes in modern science and culture the authors claim that it is namely transdisciplinarity would determine the face of science and culture in the medium term, and will form the basis for the convergence of science, technology, art, and consciousness studies in general. (shrink)

In scientific work we rightly attach great importance to the testing of predictions from theoretical ideas. We should also attach great importance to the generation of those ideas since these are necessary precursors to advancement in science. Insight plays a substantial role in the generation of ideas and is correspondingly important. It seems that insights are difficult to form and often delayed. We should study how constraints on insight can be reduced and whether the customary objectives in science give (...) enough weight to procedures that may generate insights. This paper offers some suggestions on how to achieve this :334–340, 2017). That way, there would be more to test. Subsequently, we thought that the paper could have spent more time on the circumstances underpinning insight and this paper is the outcome of that thinking). (shrink)

I explore the process of changes in the observability of entities and objects in science and how such changes impact two key issues in the scientific realism debate: the claim that predictively successful elements of past science are retained in current scientific theories, and the inductive defense of a specific version of inference to the best explanation with respect to unobservables. I provide a case-study of the discovery of radium by Marie Curie in order to show that (...) the observability of some entities can change and that such changes are relevant for arguments seeking to establish the reliability of success-to-truth inferences with respect to unobservables. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is simply to sketch some basic characteristics of the concepts of mature and immature science. In other words, my aim is to show the importance of these concepts for two purposes that every historian of science has sometime or other to deal with: firstly, the aforementioned concepts are useful for the understanding of great scientific changes or revolutions. (This is particularly true for the historian concerned with the transition from medieval science to the (...) new scientific universe of the 17th century); secondly, it seems possible to me that these concepts might give us the key to the understanding of the interaction between internal and external factors in science’s historical development. Furthermore, I think that we could define mature and immature science in a way that permits us to include external factors in our rational reconstructions without having to give up a criterial theory of scientific rationality. -/- . (shrink)

This Introduction to a Journal of Consciousness Studies Special Issue on Monist Alternatives to Physicalism summarises some of the basic problems of Physicalism and common fallacies in arguments for its defence that are found in the philosophical and scientific literature. It then introduces six monist alternatives: 1) a form of emergent panpsychism developed by William Seager; 2) a novel introduction to the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead by Anderson Weekes; 3) a review of current developments in Russellian Monism (...) by Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa; 4) an analysis of dual-aspect monism and its relation to quantum mechanics originally proposed developed by Pauli and Jung and given a modern interpretation by Harald Atmanspacher; 5) a form of processing monism that might help to resolve ontological differences in Indian philosophy and psychology between dualist Samkya Yoga and nondualist Advaita Vedanta by K. Ramakrisna Rao; and 6) an account of Reflexive Monism, which, viewed as a global system, can incorporate many of the seemingly opposed “isms” that currently populate Consciousness Studies by Max Velmans. Whatever the fundamental nature of Nature might be, it must have the power to give rise to its observable manifestations. Consequently, all the papers in this issue are concerned to give a “natural” account of the relationships among consciousness, mind, and the material world that is entirely consistent with the findings of science, and they all accept that for a unified understanding, mind, consciousness and the material world must have a common base. The aim of the Special Issue is to contribute to a deeper understanding of that base, and to stimulate novel thinking about its nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking by Stephen CritesLawrence S. StepelevichStephen Crites. Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii + 572. Cloth, $65.00Unlike either Wittgenstein or Heidegger, or his contemporary, Schelling, there is really no “Early” or “Later” Hegel. The fundamentals of his system were, if not always fully articulated, nevertheless present (...) from the very beginning of his career. There is, in Hegel, a remarkable consistency in the development of his thought, in which the elements that comprised his final system can be detected in his earliest efforts—and it is only in this sense that one can speak of an “Early” or a “Later” Hegel. That his final expression was indeed the result of an effort, a struggle to fuse and clarify seemingly disparate elements, is the thesis of Professor Crites. In this case, the specific disparate elements that are considered are those which confronted Hegel from his earliest days as a student of theology, those elements expressed in the “Christian Drama.” Crites sets out the eight revered acts of this drama: the creation, the fall, God’s covenant with Israel, the incarnation, the death and resurrection of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the mission of the Church, and the last judgment. It is his contention that Hegel “critically engaged the claims of this mythos and the social practices associated with it.” And so, the essence of Crites’s well-written and well-researched study is to set out how this drama served as a “template that affected the way he framed other topics in the ever-widening range of his philosophical inquiry.” It is to his credit that Crites does not consider his own explication of Hegel’s preoccupation with the gospels as some sort of a “secret” key that could unlock the full meaning of Hegel’s philosophy, but nevertheless, as he rightly stresses, this preoccupation cannot be ignored—for it ultimately exercised a crucial role in the formation of that which is now taken as Hegel’s mature thought.Unlike most studies of Hegel’s development—and there are more than a few—Crites avoids taking a retrospective posture, a concluding a priori stance which would allow him to point out where and why this or that particular element was rejected or retained by Hegel, His method is historical, intent upon following Hegel’s own sometimes tortured development, until, finally in this course, we reach a point where we suddenly see that Hegel “shows clear signs of becoming what we can only call a Hegelian—or better still, he shows signs of being Hegel!”The source of this inner development begins, and is traced from, Hegel’s initial appearance as “The Model Pupil of Stuttgart” to that moment in when he stands revealed as embodying that Absolute Knowledge which concludes the Phenomenology. This path from Stuttgart to Jena, which Hegel himself might have had in mind when he spoke of the philosophical “highway of despair” is detailed by Crites with a sure hand. Every stumbling block is noted, and every new resolution ıs marked, from those first essays composed during the bitter days as Hauslehrer, through the steady advances [End Page 540] of “the Jena ‘Philosophy’ ” until the passage completes itself in the Phenomenology and its termination in the “Recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit.”More than half of Crites’ extensive study is devoted to explicating how the subject of religion is dealtwith in the course of the Phenomenology. In this survey of Hegel’s most well-known work, its fundamental leitmotif emerges clearly into focus: the identification of the “portentous power of the negative” with the Death of God. This death, which is philosophically reflected in dialectical negativity, is the central moment of the gospel drama. In this act, Absolute Spirit must itself suffer and die, for “Not only the Christian God incarnate, but the absolute spirit suffers, suffers its Golgotha and dies.” It is only from this sacrifice that new life can arise—for out of it comes “the resurrection of a new human-divine totality.” What Hegel has retained of the gospel... (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new framework supporting the claim that some elements in science play a constitutive function, with the aim of overcoming some limitations of Friedman's (2001) account. More precisely, I focus on what I consider to be the gradualism implicit in Friedman's interpretation of the constitutive a priori, that is, the fact that it seems to allow for degrees of 'constitutivity'. I tease out such gradualism by showing that the constitutive character Friedman aims (...) to track can be captured by three features - namely, quasi-axiomaticity (QA), generative potential (GP), and empirical shielding (ES) - which are exhibited to a maximal degree by the examples Friedman deploys, particularly in his analysis of Newtonian mechanics. I argue that not all varieties of 'constitutivity' can be captured by the kind of gradualism implicit in Friedman's view, although developing the gradualism itself might provide useful insights. To show this, I analyse the function of the Hardy-Weinberg principle (HWP) in population genetics in terms of its QA, GP, and ES. Whereas the HWP does not count as constitutive in classical philosophical interpretations (Sober 1984), nor does it within Friedman's framework, it does nonetheless perform a minimally constitutive function. By means of historical details and considerations on the prospects of replacing the HWP, I show that the HWP is minimally constitutive by being a counterfactual instantiation of a paradigmatically constitutive stability principle, where the latter might itself be regarded as an enabling condition for a variety of modelling practices across the sciences. (shrink)

To begin, the so-called ‘selectivity of historical judgment’ is discussed. According to it, writing history requires a comparative criterion of historical relevance. This criterion contains philosophical elements. In Kuhn’s case, the criterion directs historical research and presentation away from Whiggish historiography by postulating a hermeneutic reading of historical sources. This postulate implies some sort of internalism, some sort of rationality of scientific development, and historical realism. To conclude, some consequences of Kuhn’s anti-Whiggism are discussed.

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, (...) which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology. (shrink)

In philosophy of science, the literature on abduction and the literature on styles of thinking have existed almost totally in parallel. Here, for the first time, we bring them together and explore their mutual relevance. What is the consequence of the existence of several styles of scientific thinking for abduction? Can abduction, as a general creative mode of inference, have distinct characteristic forms within each style? To investigate this, firstly, we present the concept of abduction; secondly we (...) analyze what is understood by styles of thinking; thirdly, we give some comments on abduction and styles of thinking by analyzing examples of scientific discovery or innovation within each style. We develop a case-based comparative investigation of creative aspects of abductive reasoning with examples drawn from different styles of scientific thinking and doing as understood by the Crombie/hacking tradition. We argue that abduction, as a general mode of reasoning, can have a variety of specific expressions enabled and constrained by the styles of scientific thinking. Finally, we draw some conclusions on the relationship between abduction and styles of thinking suggesting that scientific discovery is a dynamical goal-directed activity within the scientific community that benefits from distinct styles of thinking and doing research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“What Is Actually Being Measured?”: Causality and Underlying Scientific Thinking Process in the Assessment of DepressionGreta Kaluzeviciute-Moreton, PhD (bio)Depression is a complex mental health phenomenon due to its multifaceted nature. For one, depression is thought to have a significant genetic component, with studies suggesting that heritability is a significant factor in the development of the disorder (Sullivan, Neale, Kendler, 2000). In clinical psychology, environmental factors such as (...) childhood trauma, chronic stress, social isolation and negative life events (e.g., the loss of a loved one) have been documented as significant risk factors for the development of depression or as trigger events for depressive episodes (Fu & Parahoo, 2009; Kendler, Kuhn, & Prescott, 2004; Neitzke, 2016). Despite this, causal theories of mental health conditions are often tricky and/or scarcely reflected in both diagnostic and rating scales. For instance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies mental health disorders primarily based on observable symptoms and behaviors, rather than on the underlying psychological and neurobiological processes that may contribute to these symptoms (Kendler, 2006).Similarly, rating scales for depression are typically designed to assess the severity of symptoms, rather than their underlying causes, that is, most rating scales are used as screening tools to identify individuals who may require further evaluation and treatment. Some rating scales may include items related to causal factors, such as the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) includes an item that asks about “loss of interest in sex,” which could be related to either biological or psychological factors. Several rating scales include items assessing risk factors for depression, such as family history of depression or personal history of trauma. This may be indicative of both genetic and environmental risk factors, such as the Patient Health [End Page 255] Questionnaire-9, includes an item that asks about family history of depression. However, while risk and causal factors are related, they are distinct in the assessment of depression. Risk factors refer to factors that increase the likelihood of developing depression, while causal factors refer to factors that directly contribute to the development of the condition. The presence of a risk factor does not necessarily mean that an individual will develop depression (Peterson & Seligman, 1984). However, the two are frequently blurred and equated in psychotherapy research (Westen & Bradley, 2005).As such, the historical issues of rating and diagnostic scales, aptly depicted by the Le Moigne (2023) as full of “composite, if not contradictory, heritage, weaving together the classificatory and discontinuous tradition of psychiatry, on the one hand, and the psychometric and continuous tradition of psychology, on the other” (p. XX ), suffer from an epistemological oversight when it comes to the assessment of causal factors in complex mental health conditions, such as depression. In turn, this contributes to a wider psychometric issue: what is actually being measured? Le Moigne’s detailed overview predominantly focuses on “superficial” symptomatology of depression (which contributed to two distinct forms of evaluation: hetero- and self-evaluation), and its subsequent impact on the classification and taxonomy of depression throughout history. However, the overarching conceptualization of depression (including a more detailed consideration of causal factors and their assessment) and the usefulness of rating scales in applied research (such as psychotherapy) remain in the background.The question of “what is actually being measured” is obviously not new in psychometrics. However, it is important to continuously revisit this issue, given that rating scales (such as the BDI) are considered to be universally applicable “evidence-based” tools (Rogers, Adler, Bungay, & Wilson, 2005) as well as a common and well-accepted form of scientific thinking in psychotherapy research (Kaluzeviciute & Willemsen, 2020). From an epistemological point of view, a scientific thinking style entails not only cognitive operations common to methodology, but also practices of generating, sharing, assimilating and transforming knowledge(Hacking, 2012).Therefore, it is important to acknowledge that any scientific tool, including rating scales, encompasses not just what but also how researchers find out about their studied phenomena (i.e., a scientific thinking style conveys a performative quality) (Kaluzeviciute & Willemsen, 2020). As identified by Le Moigne (2023), taxonomy leads toward a category-based logic in that it considers the examined phenomenon to be shared by only a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 1-21 [Access article in PDF] Did Habermas Cede Nature to the Positivists? Gordon R. Mitchell Jürgen Habermas's "colonization of the lifeworld" thesis (1987, 332-73) posits that many of society's pathologies are due to the tendency of institutions to convert social issues that ought to be sorted out by a debating citizenry into technical problems ripe for resolution by expert bureaucracies, thus pre-empting important public (...) discussion. Habermas has attempted to lay bare the pernicious effects of this colonization process in his analysis of public opinion polling, welfare policy, education, German reunification, immigration, and other social issues (see Habermas 1997, 1994, and 1970; Holub 1992). In each of these contexts, Habermas has publicly challenged the encroachment of scientistic modes of decision-making into spheres where joint communicative action by deliberating citizens would yield more appropriate and legitimate judgments. This critical impulse is also evident in Habermas's methodological reflections on the proper role of academic scholarship, where he has argued vigorously against attempts to graft "objectivating" methods of natural scientific inquiry onto research projects in the social sciences (1971, 304-17).From all of this, one might gather that Habermas's commitment to rolling back the influence of technical forms of reasoning is connected to some intrinsic quarrel he has with the natural sciences. Yet such a sweeping generalization is hard to sustain in light of the fact that Habermas does not oppose technical reasoning per se; he recognizes that the daunting complexity of social life in late capitalism requiresthat certain "steering" tasks be delegated to systems that utilize largely instrumental logics to co-ordinate action. Likewise, he acknowledges that the disciplines of the natural sciences necessarily play important supporting roles in such steering projects.One normative presupposition of Habermas's colonization thesis is that there exists some proper boundary demarcating where the sphere of technical reasoning ends and the realm of communicative rationality begins. [End Page 1] On one side of this boundary, Habermas has provided many details on what he sees as the essential qualities of a properly functioning "public sphere," where "new social movements" continuously reweave the threads of communicative fabric holding society together (1996, 359-87), and where "historico-hermeneutic" academic study reflects on public life, sluicing insight back into the capillaries of democratic deliberations (1987, 374-403).What lies on the other side of the boundary is murkier. The proper role of natural scientific investigation has received relatively scant attention in Habermas's critical theory of society, and this has led to some confusion regarding his account of the natural sciences, as well as debate over whether this account has political purchase. One would think that sympathetic commentators, such as Helen Longino (who bases much of her own coherence theory of scientific truth on Habermas), would have reassuring things to say on this point. Yet her lukewarm assessment that, "in trying to clear a space for an autonomous social and critical theory, [Habermas] has ceded nature to the positivists" (1990, 202), raises questions about the flexibility and scope of Habermas's theory of communicative action as a basis for critique of scientific practice.One way to test Habermas's account of the natural sciences on this count is to put his views in conversation with science studies commentators who share a similar commitment to the idea that dialogue and argumentation are constitutive elements of scientific practice. Such an approach recasts the "ceding to positivism" question into a moment of controversy over the role of dialogue, not only as an essential motor driving the scientific enterprise, but also as a vehicle for democratic decision-making on issues related to the purpose and direction of scientific inquiry in society.Part one of this essay locates discursive norms embedded pragmatically in the notion of scientific objectivity. By bringing a modified version of Habermas's theory of communicative action into conversation with other approaches to science studies that foreground intersubjective dialogue as the key motor driving the scientific enterprise, I develop a foundation for robust criticism of systematically distorted scientific communication. Specific strategies of... (shrink)

The move from respecting science to scientism, i.e., the idealization of science and scientific method, is simple: We go from acknowledging the sciences as fruitful human activities to oversimplifying the ways they work, and accepting a fuzzy belief that Science and Scientific Method, will give us a direct pathway to the true making of the world, all included. The idealization of science is partly the reason why we feel we need to impose the so-called scientific terminologies and (...) methodologies to all aspects of our lives, education too. Under this rationale, educational policies today prioritize science, not only in curriculum design, but also as a method for educational practice. One might expect that, under the scientistic rationale, science education would thrive. Contrariwise, I will argue that scientism disallows science education to give an accurate image of the sciences. More importantly, I suggest that scientism prevents one of science education’s most crucial goals: help students think. Many of my arguments will borrow the findings and insights of science education research. In the last part of this paper, I will turn to some of the most influential science education research proposals and comment on their limits. If I am right, and science education today does not satisfy our most important reasons for teaching science, perhaps we should change not just our teaching strategies, but also our scientistic rationale. But that may be a difficult task. (shrink)

What place, if any, does love have in Kantian ethics? This chapter is divided into three parts. First, I discuss Kant’s own account of moral versus non-moral love as found throughout his various writings and show how this closely parallels his account of moral versus non-moral friendship. Second, I discuss contemporary Kantian accounts of both friendship and love, highlighting how they go beyond, and in some ways seem to significantly improve upon, Kant’s own views via their appeal to Kant’s (...) Formula of Humanity. Lastly, I discuss the overall merits of what I call ‘Kantian moral love’. I argue that while Kantian moral love might rightly identify, from the moral point of view, how we ought to act and think when loving other people, it fails to provide a complete account of love, crucially leaving out certain key elements from the wide range of loving relationships we find ourselves in, especially romantic love. That is, while Kantian moral love might successfully identify a morally ideal way to love other people, it falls short of capturing the full essence of love—mainly because love is not simply a moral affair but also a matter of the heart. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments PLATONIC ELEMENTS IN KAFKA'S "INVESTIGATIONS OF A DOG" by Lewis W. Leadbeater Few critics of Kafka, and certainly few German critics of Kafka, have been willing to allow for much of any classical influence on his works. There are exceptions, but for the most part these commentators can bring themselves to admit only the fact Kafka endured with distaste his lengthy involvement with the classical (...) languages and literature and that, if in any way, he was influenced only in terms of syntax or style.1 Yet it is certain that Kafka read classical literature with interest and that he was well acquainted with classical epic, tragedy, philosophy, and mythology. The wandering Odysseus, the sea god Poseidon, tortured Prometheus —all these and other classical figures are to be found in his works. Indeed, a recent interpretation of The Trial involves a discussion of it in comparison with the trial of Socrates.2 The fact is that Kafka knew Plato's Apology and counted as one of his prized possessions a copy of Plato's Phaedrus. He and Brod read Plato together in high school.3 Are we really to assume, then, that, given Kafka's philosophical bent, he saw no relationship between Plato and the later philosophers, like Kierkegaard for instance, with whom he was quite taken, and that given his fertile mind and penchant for metaphor, Kafka reflects only Platonic syntax?4 Quite the contrary; we must, I think, cede his classicism to Kafka, and in the discussion which follows I should like to point out that in one of the short stories, "Investigations of a Dog," parable and metaphor blend as well as they do because of Platonic influence, and especially that of the Apology and the Phaedrus. Kafka's animals pervade his works in both metaphor and simile. Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic beetle; Joseph K dies, at the end of his trial, like a dog, and it is a questioning canine which investigates the meaning of dog104 Lewis W. Leadbeater105 ness in "Forschungen eines Hundes." Generally the animalistic metaphor involves removal, alienation, and isolation— a loss of kinship with humanity to be sure, but more important a loss of communication, an inability to communicate, and hence an emphasis on all-encompassing, frustrating silence. The natural result for these people turned animal is an involvement in a process of severe introspection frequently linked with the pursuit of some idea or ideal which will provide a hitherto unknown, transcendent nourishment for a famished, alienated soul. Such is certainly the case with Gregor Samsa and quite possibly the case with Joseph K; it is in fact such pursuits which lie at the heart of the researches of our investigating Dog. Though any attempt to pinpoint the source of Kafka's penchant for animalistic metaphors is quite certainly futile, one might well posit as paradigmatic the alienation plays of Aristophanes involving animals, and certainly the notion of a psychological link between man and beast is present in Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue in which the soul metaphor itself involves horses, and one in which there is considerable discussion of the interchangeability of the souls of men and beasts.5 As noted above such interchangeability or transformation occurs regularly in Kafka; within the ugly form of beetle lay the psyche of Gregor Samsa. Perhaps within the not-so-ugly canine form of our investigating hound lies the soul of Socrates. Consider for a moment the character of our Dog in light of Plato's Socrates as he appears in the Apology. To begin with, the Dog, as he tells us, is a solitary creature, withdrawn and involved solely in his "investigations" (p. 278).6 In addition, he fully realizes that he is different from the rest of his species (p. 279) and that indeed at times he feels rejected by his kind, realizing as he does that his investigations run counter to the traditional values of his species, a species by which he had hoped at one time to be accepted with great honor (p. 308). What he has capitulated to is "questions" which, furthermore, have quite removed him from normal... (shrink)

Why do some epistemic objects persist despite undergoing serious changes, while others go extinct in similar situations? Scientists have often been careless in deciding which epistemic objects to retain and which ones to eliminate; historians and philosophers of science have been on the whole much too unreflective in accepting the scientists’ decisions in this regard. Through a re-examination of the history of oxygen and phlogiston, I will illustrate the benefits to be gained from challenging and disturbing the commonly accepted (...) continuities and discontinuities in the lives of epistemic objects. I will also outline two key consequences of such re-thinking. First, a fresh view on the (dis)continuities in key epistemic objects is apt to lead to informative revisions in recognized periods and trends in the history of science. Second, recognizing sources of continuity leads to a sympathetic view on extinct objects, which in turn problematizes the common monistic tendency in science and philosophy; this epistemological reorientation allows room for more pluralism in scientific practice itself. (shrink)

To begin, the so-called ‘selectivity of historical judgment’ is discussed. According to it, writing history requires a comparative criterion of historical relevance. This criterion contains philosophical elements. In Kuhn’s case, the criterion directs historical research and presentation away from Whiggish historiography by postulating a hermeneutic reading of historical sources. This postulate implies some sort of internalism, some sort of rationality of scientific development, and historical realism. To conclude, some consequences of Kuhn’s anti-Whiggism are discussed.Para empezar, (...) se discute la llamada “selectividad del juicio histórico”. De acuerdo con ello, escribir historia requiere un criterio comparativo de relevancia histórica. Este criterio contiene elementos filosóficos. En el caso de Kuhn, el criterio aleja la investigación y la presentación histórica de la historiografía Whig al postular una lectura hermenéutica de las fuentes históricas. Este postulado implica alguna clase de internismo, de racionalidad del desarrollo científico y realismo histórico. Para concluir, se discuten algunas consecuencias de la postura anti-Whig de Kuhn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Birth of the Psychoanalytic Hero:Freud's Platonic LeonardoJohn FarrellThough the intellectual force of Freudian psychoanalysis grows weaker and weaker with time, its importance for the understanding of twentieth-century intellectual culture only increases. Freud made psychology a key ingredient in the century's conception of its own uniqueness and modernity. He claimed to initiate a decisive break with the past, but he also claimed to recover the past, indeed all of (...) human behavior, on new, scientific grounds. What Freud proposed was not just a new way of thinking about psychology but a new psychology, one that would permit unprecedentedly intrepid investigation of the past and the unconscious sources of its ways of thinking. But whereas Freud hoped to give us a new psychology of knowledge, what he did was to reintroduce one of the oldest psychologies of knowledge in a moderately disguised form. I will attempt to show this and assess the implications through a close examination of Freud's treatment of Leonardo da Vinci, a man he considered one of the great forerunners of the modern intellect.Psychoanalysis is both a theory of the psyche and a scientific movement. Its dual nature makes it almost a unique element in the culture of modern science. Freud and his followers repudiated the separation between institutional affiliation and intellectual commitment that had been carried down from seventeenth-century England. The original form of the psychoanalytic movement was a throwback to that of the ancient philosophical academies.1 Almost from the beginning of psychoanalysis its founders had recourse to a canon of dogma with the primacy of the libido at its center. Adherence to this canon, and the rituals of initiation and training surrounding it, became the basis for [End Page 233] an exclusive intellectual and professional commitment that separated initiates from the professional community at large.It is well known that the founders of psychoanalysis made use of psychoanalytic theory to explain the movement's adversarial relationship with the outside world. The doctrine of resistance to the libido allowed Freudians to interpret the hidden motives of anyone who might disagree with them. The ire of critics could be cited as proof of the intensity of unconscious repression applied to sexuality, the incredulity of unbelievers as evidence of an unwillingness to endure the wounds to human narcissism exacted by the Freudian system, and even slips of the tongue could be turned against unwitting opponents. The fact that psychoanalysis was greeted with hostility in some quarters was taken to prove that the universal tendency of humankind was to resist its teachings, and the lapsing away of prominent disciples illustrated the difficulty of living with these hard truths. Heretics were pitied as weaklings unable to face up to the power of the unconscious, unable to keep themselves from disguising it with it some pale reflection of the ego. And so the embattled history of psychoanalysis became part of the empirical evidence of its validity in a way that could never have occurred with a theory generated in the normal research environment. The doctrine of resistance seemed to have been designed as much for polemical as for analytic purposes. Like the monster in Forbidden Planet, the fifties Freudian fairy tale, the more psychoanalysis was resisted, the more it grew. The self-confirming value that could be derived from the history of the movement as a cultural scandal even led Freud to exaggerate the hostility of his early reception and the intensity of his early isolation. With the doctrine of resistance, Freud had imported into science the style of the avant-garde, which feeds upon rejection, outrage, and the breach of bourgeois manners. The concept of "resistance to psychoanalysis" is still in use among psychoanalysts today.The argument from resistance, however useful it may have been as a defense mechanism of psychoanalytic rhetoric, leads to a troubling theoretical question: If the truths of psychoanalysis are naturally repugnant to humankind, so much so that we have a powerful constitutional tendency to hide them from ourselves, what could have liberated Freud and his followers to unearth these unwelcome secrets from the depths of their own psyches? If we take the "resistance to psychoanalysis" as a... (shrink)

In reviewing the contents of the first to five speakers, we back up to the United States in writing "real and reasonable method" when the issues faced in: scientific research methods than in the general concept Concept in humanities research methods; and people in the academic literature on the low-order. We first consider how the amount of Dilthey and Heidegger deal with these issues. Ⅰ. Natural sciences and humanities approach argue Dilthey tried to explain the expression of human literature, (...) there is a independent but equally effective method of theoretical foundation. In German, Geisteswissenschaften range widely from the arts and sociology. The rise of hermeneutics, Dilthey, in his famous thesis, the mean deep to begin with Homer to explain the hope臘who traveled through Roman times and hope臘. However, Dilthey still seek to achieve "universal and effective " results, which makes him turn to the scientific method. Heidegger's teacher, Hu stopper Seoul , rather than with the mathematical background of the humanities, to use phenomenology to philosophy as a "rigorous science ". Conversely, neural science and philosophy with Heidegger humanities background. This makes Heidegger's hermeneutics of Dilthey and his interest. Heidegger was a critic of scientific objectivity, and even have commentaries description: "Scientists do not think" . His search for the source of the problem of modernity to Descartes who, because of Cartesian subjectivity of the world as a projection. Ⅱ. Up to the U.S. desire to restore the respect for human studies of up to U.S. desire to restore respect for the human sciences, but he does not find the key steps in Dilthey, but in Heidegger's "Art works of origin >. Ⅲ. Up to the United States after the Western aesthetic of Kant's critique of Gadamer to use his real art of management for the new hole to criticize the police after Kant the aesthetic development. This is the "true management and methods" section of the important elements. Ⅳ. Heidegger in breakthrough in the art lecture on Heidegger, providing up to restore the emphasis on the United States who required breakthrough in the planning literature. Ⅴ. Methods exist regardless hermeneutics the implications of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics can be seen as a new understanding of the analysis, so that his exposure to critical science and humanities in the nature of the two methods. Ⅵ. The universality of hermeneutics Gadamer in the "real and reasonable method" after the publication of a thesis advocated, he analyzed the universality of understanding can be applied in science and humanities in the training. Regardless of this guide provide us some background to explore the "real management and methods" in the 14 key concepts, these concepts will be in the seventh, eight speakers presented. After reviewing the content of Lectures 1-5, we turn to the issue that Gadamer was confronting when he wrote Truth and Method: the general sense of the superiority of scientific methods of research over humanistic methods, and the lower status of the humanities in academe . We first consider this issue in Dilthey and Heidegger. Section Ⅰ: The Contest over Methods in the Natural and Human Sciences Dilthey attempted to articulate a separate but equally valid methodological basis for interpretation in the humanities. In Germany, the range of the Geisteswissenschaften was wide, from art to sociology. In his famous essay on the rise of hermeneutics, Dilthey started, significantly, with the Greek interpreters of Homer and moved up through Greek and Roman times. Nevertheless, Dilthey was still seeking to achieve "universally valid" results , which moved him in the direction of scientific methods. Heidegger's teacher, Husserl, had a background in mathematics rather than the humanities and wanted to use phenomenology to make philosophy into a "rigorous science." Heidegger, in contrast, had a humanistic background in theology and philosophy and especially Greek philosophy. This caused him to be interested in Dilthey and his hermeneutics. Heidegger was a critic of scientific objectivity and once even remarked, "The scientist does not think." He traced the problems of modernity back to Descartes, who saw the world as a projection of his subjectivity. Section Ⅱ. Gadamer's Desire to Restore Respect to the Human Studies Gadamer desired to restore re spect to the human sciences, but he found the decisive step for doing so not in Dilthey but in Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art. Section Ⅲ: Gadamer's critique of Western aesthetics since Kant Gadamer used his new insight into the truth of art to criticize the development of aesthetics since Kant. This is a major element in the first section of Truth and Method. Section Ⅳ: Heidegger's Breakthrough in "The Origin of the Artwork" Heidegger's lectures on art offered Gadamer the breakthrough he needed in his project of restoring respect to the humanities. Section Ⅴ: The Implications of an Ontological Hermeneutics for Method Gadamer's new philosophical hermeneutics as an analysis of understanding put him in a position to criticize method per se in both the sciences and humanities. Section Ⅵ: The Universality of Hermeneutics In an essay published after Truth and Method Gadamer moved toward asserting the universality of his analysis of understanding as applying both to scientific disciplines and to the humanities. Understanding here was understanding universally, in general, in all respects. With this introduction we have some background for exploring the fourteen key concepts in Truth and Method itself that will be presented in lectures 7 and 8. (shrink)

The article is an overview of the problems on the topic of figurativeness in scientific discourse. The analysis was carried out in three perspectives: “conceptual” - the key ideas about the role of figurativeness in the formation of scientific discourse (about metaphorical schemes that lie in the processes of thinking and scientific conceptualization, about the need to identify and analyze these schemes in science, about the role of comparison and analogy in the conceptual and semantic deployment (...) of scientific discourse); “narrative” - the ideas about the function of figurativeness in the development of the author’s ontology are considered (the problems of constructing a rhetorical “Self” in scientific discourse, “self-identifying narrative”, “scientific identity”); “communicative” - the specificity of figurativeness is revealed in connection with the problem of knowledge transfer and modern strategies for popularizing science. It is shown that in the context of the modern identification of the “rhetoric” of scientific communication and discussion of strategies for science popularizing, the research topic is characterized by particular relevance. The analysis of figurativeness in scientific discourse touches upon the problem of the dialogue between science and society, which is important for our time, and how scientific achievements fit into socio-cultural and educational contexts. It is shown that the scientific significance of the study of figurativeness in scientific discourse is manifested in the fact that it allows, firstly, to expand the concept of “scientific”, revising the ideals of academic scientificity, often translating a view of science as an “emotionally emasculated” “substrate” of objective and transparent truth, and thereby overcome the existing communicative “barrier” between society and the scientific community; secondly, to rethink ideas about the communicative specifics of scientific creativity and the role of language in constructing the semantic and logical-methodological space of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 13.1 (2005) 95-98 [Access article in PDF] Response to Frede V. Nielsen's "Didactology as a Field of Theory and Research in Music Education" Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon Northwestern University Let me begin by acknowledging what is about to become obvious: I am not a musicologist, music educator, or a philosopher of music education. I am, however, a philosopher of education and a devoted student of music, (...) so I found Frede Nielsen's paper both intriguing and rewarding. It is intriguing because it positions the theoretical study of music education—what he calls "didactology"—in relation to the practice of teaching music and exemplifies, if you will, the practice of didactology. As a philosopher, and one who has worked at philosophy of science as well as philosophy of education, I became intrigued by the conceptual ground-clearing and ground-construction that Nielsen undertakes in his paper.I found the paper rewarding for two reasons. First, it is about music—at least I think it is about music, and music is about my favorite topic. Like many good works on aesthetic subjects, it seems to offer another way into a beloved yet ultimately mystifying domain and, thus, another glimpse into the unfathomable. Second, the paper offers a complex and rigorous analysis. I had fun wading through its parts and beginning to view them in relation to one another. I think that I have begun to understand not only the difference between didactics and didactology but also something about the contribution the latter might make.So to begin these remarks, let me offer a brief overview of some key points in the paper. I will then go on to raise a question or two with the hope that these will prompt Nielsen to further elaborate his ideas.To begin, Nielsen separates the topic of music pedagogy into two parts—the [End Page 95] normative and the descriptive. He defends both the study of theory and the study of practice as useful for understanding the subject of music pedagogy. He then defines the term "didactology" as "the theory of didactics, especially the theory of the content, aim, and rationale of education," and he defines "didactics" as planning and decision-making related to the practice of teaching. He tells us that didactology, though theoretical, is related to practice, that while it is descriptive rather than prescriptive it assumes values, that it "implies a view of science and the subject—the subject of music and the music itself." A didactological statement is a scientific statement and its truth is judged according to criteria for scientific truth. In summary, according to Nielsen: It is the task of and the object area of didactology in relation to the subject of music to describe, analyze, problematize, and develop intended, actual, or possible issues concerning music education as well as its conditions with special regard to the content, aims, and rationale of the education. Can the didactology of music be an independent science? The answer seems to be yes. As an illustration of the claim, Neilsen presents us with four levels of didactological reflection. The four levels, from top to bottom, are, fourth, reality (natura)—the "inner" and "outer" aspects—which refers to the experiences of hearing/understanding and performing the music; third, the musical phenomena (ars)—the music itself (the musical phenomena include, it seems, the social and existential contexts in which the music occurs); second, the theory that offers a disciplined or systematic explanation of the musical phenomena (scientia), that is, musicology (the theory envisions the musicology—the explanation of the musical phenomena—in relation to, for example, the theory and practice of teaching the music itself); and first, the didactic practices and didactological principles (didactica) that serve as the basis for determining "the content, aim, and rationale of teaching and learning music."Now despite the elegance of the typology here, I find myself wondering about two things. First, what is the subject of Nielsen's analysis? He tells us that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:191 A PERSONAL ELEMENT IN MORALITY In his quest for the truth about moral life, Hume steers between the Scylla of Sentiment and the Charybdis of Reason. Sentiment operating alone, as a basis for morality, would threaten to engulf humanity with as many relativistic moral truths as there are individuals. Reason alone would produce objective, impersonal truths, but these would be powerless to move us. Hume's developed theory ingeniously (...) shows how Reason and Sentiment can operate together, to produce judgments based on feelings which are nonetheless impersonal and objective (T 581-584; E 227-229). Hume is acutely aware (as we shall see below) that there exists a considerable disparity between the impartiality required of us by moral theory and what in practice people think when it comes to moral matters. There would seem to be only two ways of accommodating this fact. One is to regard the disparity as a mark of the moral mediocrity of ordinary people; we are not as objective in our judgments as we could be. The other way is to treat the disparity as a token of failure and inadequacy in the theory; our best philosophical reasoning about morals fails to capture its subject matter without distortion. Our rational powers fall short, not only in Book I of the Treatise, where the task is to explain the foundation of our beliefs, but also in Book III, where Hume attempts to elucidate moral life. Certainly the first way would reduce the gap to some extent; some people, perhaps many, are moral truly low achievers. I want to show that Hume also suggests the second way; he is willing to deflate the 192 pretensions of philosophy, even when it comes to his own state-of-the-art efforts. I. The Objectivity of Certain Feeling-Based Judgments In the moral arena of life we make judgments which are based on feelings, on 'certain sentiments of pleasure or disgust' (T 581). "To have the sense of virtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character" (T 471). Of course not just any feeling will do; it must be of a peculiar kind, which we can experience only under specific conditions. At first Hume characterizes the necessary condition as follows: 'Tis only when a character is considered in general, without reference to our particular interest, that it causes such a feeling or sentiment, as denominates it morally good or evil (T 472). Later on Hume provides a fuller account. Characteristically he elaborates in response to an anticipated objection. The objection is that our sympathetic feelings of pleasure and pain fluctuate wildly, depending mainly upon our distance, so to speak, from the character we assess, in space, time, and kind of relationship. Our moral judgments do not vary in this way; we give the same approbation to the same moral qualities in China as in England (T 581). So (it is concluded) our moral judgments do not rest upon sympathy. Hume's response is that, as a necessary condition for moral judgment and communication, we must "fix on some steady and general points of view" (T 581-2). He proceeds to employ an analogy with our situation regarding perception of (and communication about) the things which make up our common world. 193 Here a man obviously cannot consider things 'only as they appear from his peculiar point of view' (T 581). For instance I cannot describe my desk to a friend by reporting on how I perceive it at this moment — because at this moment the light is dim and I am standing across the room from the desk. If I were to do a painting of the scene before me, the desk would be black, its top a trapezoid shape on the canvas. What I say, however, is that I have a walnut desk of a medium brown color and it has a rectangular top. I say, in effect, how the desk would look under standard conditions of light and perspective. In the Enquiry version Hume spells out his analogy more fully. Again he addresses the case in which our sentiments, e.g., about two men, one distant and... (shrink)

Disjunctivism, as a theory of visual experience, claims that the mental states involved in a “good case” experience of veridical perception and a “bad case” experience of hallucination differ, even in those cases in which the two experiences are indistinguishable for their subject. Consider the veridical perception of a bar stool and an indistinguishable hallucination; both of these experiences might be classed together as experiences (as) of a bar stool or experiences of seeming to see a bar stool. This might (...) lead us to think that the experiences we undergo in the two cases must be of the same kind, the difference being that the former, but not the latter, is connected to the world in the right kind of way. Such a conjecture has been called a “highest common factor” or “common kind” assumption. At heart, disjunctivism consists in the rejection of this assumption. According the disjunctivist, veridical experiences and hallucinations do not share a common component. There are a host of interesting questions surrounding disjunctivism including: What is involved in the claims that good case and bad case experiences differ? Why might one might want to be a disjunctivist? What kinds of claims can the disjunctivist make about hallucination and illusion? These questions, and problems for the thesis, will be discussed as we proceed. (shrink)

How can the psychotherapist think about not knowing? Is psychoanalysis a contemplative practice? This book explores the possibility that there are resources in philosophy and theology which can help psychoanalysts and psychotherapists think more clearly about the unknown and the unknowable. The book applies the lens of apophasis to psychoanalysis, providing a detailed reading of apophasis in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius and exploring C.G. Jung's engagement with apophatic discourse. Pseudo-Dionysius brought together Greek and biblical currents of negative theology and the (...) via negativa, and the psychology of Jung can be read as a continuation and extension of the apophatic tradition. Henderson discusses the concept of the transcendent function as an apophatic dynamic at the heart of Jung's thought, and suggests that apophasis can provide the key to understanding the family resemblance among the disparate schools of psychoanalysis. Chapters consider: -Jung's discussion of opposites, including his reception of Nicholas of Cusa's concept of the coincidence of opposites -Jung's engagement with Neoplatonism and Pseudo-Dionysius -the work of Jung in relation to Deleuze, Derrida and other writers -how motifs in Pseudo-Dionysius' Ecclesiastical Hierarchy resonate with contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The in-depth examination of primary sources in this comprehensive volume provides a platform for research into apophasis in the wider field of psychoanalysis. It will prove valuable reading for scholars and analysts of Jungian psychology studying religion and mysticism. (shrink)

The media attention and subsequent scientific backlash engendered by the claim, announced by spokespeople for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, that 80% of the human genome has a “biochemical function” highlights the need for a clearer understanding of function concepts in biology. This article provides an overview of two major function concepts that have been developed in the philosophy of science – the “causal role” concept and the “selected effects” concept – and their relevance to ENCODE. Unlike (...) some previous critiques, the ENCODE project is not considered problematic because it employed a causal role definition of function, but because of how this concept was misused. In addition, several unique challenges that arise when dealing with transposable elements, but which were ignored by ENCODE, are highlighted. These include issues surrounding TE-level versus organism-level selection, the origins versus the persistence of elements, and accidental versus functional organism-level benefits. Finally, some key questions are presented that should be addressed in any studies aiming to ascribe functions to major portions of large eukaryotic genomes, the majority of which is made up of transposable elements. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

This book explores Patan̄jali's Yoga Sütra from a contemporary scholarly perspective. Chapters in this book explore questions regarding its metaphysics, epistemology, and praxis. Contributors to this volume guide us in a philosophical journey through this text that will be of interest to scholars and yoga practitioners alike.

ABSTRACT This commentary defends an interpretation of Spinoza that preserves some key elements of traditional rationalism, in which reason does have an independent path to the truth. While it agrees with Lloyd’s general view, in which reason, imagination, and emotion are more closely tied than the Cartesian scheme, in which reason is distinct from the world of bodies, the paper disagrees with her central claim that reason is constituted by the imagination. It argues that the imagination is effective (...) to the extent that it produces forms of knowledge that are analogous to reason. The paper considers her interpretation of Flaubert and the Biblical prophets and claims that it cannot account for why some forms of the imagination might be mistaken or superior to others. In conclusion, it points out that, while ‘unresolved multiplicity’ might be the predicament of those led by the imagination, Spinoza thinks that reason leads to a common perspective and is a superior guide to life. (shrink)