© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Young children help others in a range of situations, relatively indiscriminate of the characteristics of those they help. Recent results have suggested that young children’s helping behaviour extends even to humanoid robots. However, it has been unclear how characteristics of robots would influence children’s helping behaviour. Considering previous findings suggesting that certain robot features influence adults’ perception of and their behaviour towards robots, the question arises of whether young children’s behaviour and perception would follow the same principles. The current study (...) investigated whether two key characteristics of a humanoid robot (animate autonomy and friendly expressiveness) would affect children’s instrumental helping behaviour and their perception of the robot as an animate being. Eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in one of four experimental conditions manipulating a robot’s ostensible animate autonomy (high/low) and friendly expressiveness (friendly/neutral). Helping was assessed in an out-of-reach task and animacy ratings were assessed in a post-test interview. Results suggested that both children’s helping behaviour, as well as their perception of the robot as animate, were unaffected by the robot’s characteristics. The findings indicate that young children’s helping behaviour extends largely indiscriminately across two important characteristics. These results increase our understanding of the development of children’s altruistic behaviour and animate-inanimate distinctions. Our findings also raise important ethical questions for the field of child-robot interaction. (shrink)

Over evolutionary time, humans have developed a selective sensitivity to features in the human face that convey information on sex, age, emotions, and intentions. This ability might not only be applied to our conspecifics nowadays, but also to other living objects (i.e., animals) and even to artificial structures, such as cars. To investigate this possibility, we asked people to report the characteristics, emotions, personality traits, and attitudes they attribute to car fronts, and we used geometric morphometrics (GM) and multivariate statistical (...) methods to determine and visualize the corresponding shape information. Automotive features and proportions are found to covary with trait perception in a manner similar to that found with human faces. Emerging analogies are discussed. This study should have implications for both our understanding of our prehistoric psyche and its interrelation with the modern world. (shrink)

This article investigates the anthropology of Spinoza as a strategy for happiness, political, as well as individual. Inspired by the readings, comments, and perspectives of Matheron, Deleuze, and Balibar, I will analyze Spinoza’s theory of the affects as the basis for this strategic anthropology. These authors all share an ontological and political vision organized around the concepts of multitude and the transindividual which result directly from Spinoza’s analysis of the human affects in books III and IV of the Ethics, and (...) his theory of political dynamics developed in the Political treatise. They consider Spinoza a contemporary and share with him the idea of a relational ontology and an inextricable and mutual interdependence of the individual and the community which is captured in the concept of the transindividual. With Matheron/Spinoza I will focus on the question of anthropology and the structure of thought, with Deleuze/Spinoza on the kinds of knowledge in relation to the human mind and body, and with Balibar/Spinoza on the transindividual, productive, active, and thus strategic nature of our thinking. These three analyses of human thought and affects all proceed from the hypothesis of conatus/desire as human essence and aim not just at theoretical knowledge but rather at the effective improvement of our well-being and lives, that is, at happiness. (shrink)

Although anger as a negative emotion is associated with unpleasantness, recent research on anger highlights its motivational effect. The present study tested whether individuals experience both, an unpleasant and an activating affect, after real-life provocations. Results revealed that an anger situation evoked not only typical subjective and cardiovascular anger reactions but also a sense of strength, which is a positive affect. A comparison of participants with low versus high anger disposition according to the STAXI-2 at baseline, treatment, and recovery showed (...) that participants with high trait anger consistently scored higher in subjective ratings of feeling strong than their counterparts did. Moreover, we found a larger and longer lasting effect of feeling strong than feeling angry after an anger treatment. Thus, differences in anger disposition influence the positive correlation between trait anger and positive affect. (shrink)

This paper grapples with two objections against Max Weber’s methodology that arise because Weber borrows some ideas from Heinrich Rickert’s neo-Kantian philosophical system. The first objection (“the contradiction argument”) is raised by Julius J. Schaaf who disagrees with Weber’s claim that historical objects are constituted through retrospectively and hypothetically applied selections of value relations and that we can understand these objects. Weber’s idea that the relating ideal type constructions are also non-arbitrary—i.e., not merely subjective—and can be rectified, Schaaf maintains, contradicts (...) his own characterization of historical objects and reality. The second objection (“the incom¬patibility argument”) was made by Gerhard Wagner and Heinz Zipprian. It focuses on the conception of objective possibility. According to this, counter¬factual chains of historical events are contrived to figure out the relevant set of causes by which a certain event can be said to necessarily occur. The critics claim that it is only based on the ontological assumption of a preexisting real object that this thought-experiment can operate. That is, the pre-emptive assumption of realism is indis¬pensable for explaining the historical individual. To refute these two objections, I clarify some foundational notions and ideas of Weber’s methodology. (shrink)

The paper analyzes the concept of collective improvisation and draws out its potentials for social and political theory. Translating the ideas of collective improvisation from their original context in the theatre into the field of political thought, I argue that they offer a new understanding of political action by reevaluating the concepts of dissensus and community, as well as the ways in which politics as a system needs to produce collectively binding decisions. I conclude that the ideas inherent in the (...) practice of collective improvisation, as it has been developed within the tradition of modern theatre improvisation, subvert our intuitive ways of thinking about politics and thereby offer an alternative model of being and acting together. nema. (shrink)

The Reshaping of Phytogeographical Knowledge as the “Transition zone” Wallacea: An American Expansion Project in the Philippines, 1902–1928. This paper examines the development of a concept that to this day plays an important role in biogeography: the region Wallacea. Focussing on the work of the American tropical botanist Elmer D. Merrill in the Philippines, I argue that his research on the geographical movement and settlement of Philippine plants reflects a shift in the United States’ scientific and cultural understanding of the (...) Pacific area towards a notion of “American tropics”. While inventorying plants for the American administration from 1901 to 1923, the composition of Philippine flora prompted Merrill to question biogeographical regionalization in Wallace's Malay Archipelago. Not being able to situate the Philippine flora within “Asian” or “Australasian” biota, Merrill described the islands as an area of trans‐regional plant migration. Together with the paleontologist Roy E. Dickerson, he later conceptualized the region Wallacea as biogeographical “transition zone” between the Philippines and Australia. In addition to the scientific conceptualization, Wallacea constitutes a space between two biogeographical subregions, whose flora was considered as being part of both, but could not be unambiguously attributed to either of these regions. In this respect, the plants resembled the inhabitants of the United States’ insular overseas territories, who were legally defined neither as aliens nor as citizens. In this sense, Wallacea embodies epistemic as well as geopolitical boundaries, while its case also illustrates some of the ways in which colonial interests in the usability of plants found expression in botanical research during the early period of American overseas expansion. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Christian Wolff’s conception of motivating and normative reasons. My aim is to show that in the discussion of error cases, Wolff pursues a strategy that is strikingly similar to the strategy of contemporary defenders of nicht-psychologist accounts of motivating reasons. According to many nicht-psychologist views, motivating reasons are facts. My aim is to show that Wolff’s motivation in pursuing this strategy is very different. The point is that due to his commitment to the Principle of (...) Sufficient Reason, Wolff has to show that error cases are compatible with the PSR. The issue is worth discussing because it is not yet sufficiently explored what motivating reasons are, according to Wolff, and how they relate, in substance, to normative reasons. Methodologically, my approach can be characterized as one of “mutual illumination”: I think it is possible to highlight some crucial ambiguities of Wolff’s conception against the backdrop of the contemporary conception of motivating reasons, but also to question the importance and role of the ontological question of what motivating reasons are in contemporary discussions against the backdrop of Wolff’s position. (shrink)

Research within the operational approach to the logical foundations of physics has recently pointed out a new perspective in which quantum logic can be viewed as an intuitionistic logic with an additional operator to capture its essential, i.e., non-distributive, properties. In this paper we will offer an introduction to this approach. We will focus further on why quantum logic has an inherent dynamic nature which is captured in the meaning of "orthomodularity" and on how it motivates physically the introduction of (...) dynamic implication operators, each for which a deduction theorem holds with respect to a dynamic conjunction. As such we can offer a positive answer to the many who pondered about whether quantum logic should really be called a logic. Doubts to answer the question positively were in first instance due to the former lack of an implication connective which satisfies the deduction theorem within quantum logic. (shrink)

If public self-expression is a crucial feature of democracy, how might it work on the democratic – or at least, mass – medium par excellence, television? Television talk shows often allow ‘ordinary’ participants the opportunity to express themselves, i.e. deploy identities, feelings and opinions, presumably to further their own ends. This article uses speech act theory and Bakhtinian genre theory to analyze the talk on Jan Publiek, a Flemish talk show. This close reading helps to determine how two of the (...) 20 ‘ordinary’ participants co-created shifting and even contradictory identities with other participants, the host, the producers, the conventions of television talk shows and larger discourses such as those of gender and class. In these two cases, the participants seem mostly to fail in employing the medium of Jan Publiekto achieve their stated aims. The authors claim that while discourses may never be completely transparent, their means of functioning can still be better understood. All participants of television – producers, actors, viewers, media scholars – can benefit from the kind of media literacy to which this article contributes. (shrink)

This article discusses some possible issues and tasks that are particularly important for information and communication sciences. It deals with ethical and technological issues, the role and responsibility of information and communication intellectuals, anthropological issues in information and communication sciences, political economy, propaganda and public relations, corporations and post-politics, practical foundations of information and communication sciences, creation, the utopian dimension of information and communication sciences, libraries and the market, challenges in the education of information and communication experts, and a look (...) into the future. Deliberations about questions and tasks of information and communication sciences emphasise the need for their humanisation. This means that information and communication sciences should refrain from an uncritical adoption of affirmative discourses on the information society and adopt a truly critical relationship to life and society as a whole. (shrink)

We analyze G.M. Hardegree's interpretation of the Sasaki hook as a Stalnaker conditional and explain how he makes use of the basic conceptual machinery of OQL, i.e. the operational quantum logic which originated with the Geneva Approach to the foundations of physics. In particular we focus on measurements which are ideal and of the first kind, since these encode the content of the so-called Sasaki projections within the Geneva Approach. The Sasaki projections play a fundamental role when analyzing the condition (...) under which the properties expressed by Sasaki hooks can be considered as actual. We finish with a note on how the Sasaki hook can be conceived as ``assigning causes for properties to be actual", which links the interpretation of G.M. Hardegree to what has been called ``dynamic OQL". (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to show that William Ockham succeeds in accounting for a particular kind of self-knowledge, although in doing so he restricts the direct cognitive access to mental acts and states as they occur, in a way similar to the restriction in contemporary debates on self-knowledge. In particular, a considerable number of Ockham-scholars have argued that Ockham’s theory of mental content bears a substantial likeness to contemporary ‘externalist’ approaches, and I will argue for the success of (...) this theory in three steps: first, I show that, although the form of what is judged implies the ascription of an act to oneself, through ‘intuition’ it suffices to directly cognize the act but not the subject. In Ockham’s conception, intuition is a specific kind of singular cognition. In the second step I show that, according to Ockham’s thesis of mental language, Person is an aspect of mental verbs and not of acts of intuition. Lastly I argue that the correctness of first-person judgments about one’s acts is guaranteed by an ontological fact, and not an epistemological fact. It becomes apparent that this reading is compatible with an epistemological externalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 45, no. 1. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 253 Sonja Thomas The Women’s Wall in Kerala, India, and Brahmanical Patriarchy On January 1, 2019, a human chain of women, between three and five million strong and 385 miles long, gathered to protest the barring of menstruating women from entering Sabarimala Temple in Kerala, India. The so-called Women’s Wall received widespread news coverage; in the United (...) States, NPR, the BBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all had stories on it. Debra Messing, Kerry Washington, and Rose McGowan tweeted about it. As a scholar of caste, gender, and religion in Kerala, India, I watched the news and international attention with a good deal of interest and a bit of unease about how the intersections of casteism and patriarchy (brahmanical patriarchy) were glossed over in the reporting. The issues surrounding the Women’s Wall reveal the ways in which certain groups invest in the protection of brahmanical patriarchal power; a power that is reflected in political tensions between the Kerala state and the Indian central government that may come to a head in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Casteism and religious divides in Kerala are rarely discussed in depth because Kerala is largely seen as a progressive state, with a 94 percent literacy rate. Other development indicators also point to the assumption that Kerala is exceptional: low infant mortality rates, low maternal mortality rates, low fertility rates, and a population where there are more women than men. Kerala is seen as secular because there is a large number of both Christian and Muslim religious minorities. In 1957, 254 News and Views Kerala made history by democratically electing a communist government and initiating a set of far-reaching (although not all-encompassing) land distribution policies. The state is seen as transgender friendly with a transgender beauty pageant and support for trans surgery. The “feminist ” Women’s Wall protest fits in quite neatly within the dominant narrative that Kerala is exceptional, progressive, and thus a model for other Indian states and for countries in the Global South to follow. However, even as “progressive” Kerala is celebrated today, it is not clear that women in the state are necessarily as empowered as commonly believed. The state has some of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation and violence against women is widespread.1 Kerala’s suicide rates are two times the national average, and Kerala leads all other states in India in the number of family murder/suicides.2 Women are vastly underrepresented in politics.3 Although women are educated, the female workforce participation rate is one of the lowest in India.4 There is evidence to suggest that educated, nonworking women are using their education toward securing a better marriage match rather than for employment or empowerment.5 Kerala has a history of extremely repressive caste practices. This area of India once not only practiced untouchability, but what is known as “distance pollution.” A Dalit (the most oppressed caste in the caste hierarchy) was not allowed within sixty feet of a Brahmin (the most privileged caste), and the mere shadow of a Dalit falling upon a dominant-caste person could result in a Dalit’s death.6 Dalit Bahujans were prohibited 1. See Swapna Mukhopadhyay, ed., The Enigma of the Kerala Woman: A Failed Promise of Literacy (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2007). 2. Jocelyn Lim Chua, In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 3. J. Devika and Binitha V. Thampi, New Lamps for Old? Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralisation in Kerala (New Delhi: Zubaan: 2012). 4. Praveena Kodoth and Mridul Eapen, “Looking Beyond Gender Parity: Gender Inequities of Some Dimensions of Well-Being in Kerala,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 30 (2005): 3278. 5. Sonja Thomas, “Education as Empowerment? Gender and the Human Right to Education in Postcolonial India,” in Human Rights in Postcolonial India, ed. Om Prakash Dwivedi and V. G. Julie Rajan (New York: Routledge, 2016), 82; Ritty A. Lukose, Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 104. 6... (shrink)

I know of nothing that has caused me to dream more on Plato’s secrecy and his sphinx nature than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his deathbed there was found no “Bible,” nothing Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a volume of Aristophanes. How could even a Plato have endured life—a Greek life to which he said No—without an Aristophanes? Diogenes Laertius reports that Plato was reputed to have been so “well regulated”(kosmiois) as never once to have been (...) seen to “laugh excessively” (gelôn huperagan . . . kômikôn).1 Nietzsche describes Plato as so humorless as to be positively “boring” (1968, 117). John Sallis not only ascribes to this notoriously solemn philosopher a sense of .. (shrink)

In this essay I wish to discuss the theme of wisdom from within the field of aesthetics and to present the aesthetics of Japanese flower art of ikebana, kadô, as an example. Concepts of nature, beauty and wisdom will be related to each other: we have plenty of knowledge of nature, but we need deep wisdom to understand nature of beauty, and spiritual wisdom to see and enjoy beauty of nature. Through flower art of ikebana I search to discover the (...) essence of beauty of nature, a path to wisdom within the saying “See beauty in nature, cultivate elegance in spirit”. (shrink)

In his recent book "Explaining Behavior," Fred Dretske has outlined a naturalized theory of intentionality. Several philosophers, including Dretske himself, view his theory as lending credence to the claim that mental state content should be construed widely. In this paper I argue that careful analysis of his theory reveals that this view is mistaken. In Dretske's theory, the notion of the function of a state plays a central role in the determination of content. It will be my contention that this (...) notion of function cannot be used in Dretske's theory to distinguish between the wide construal of the content of an intentional state and the narrow or individualistic construal. This inability of his notion of function to discriminate between wide content and individualistic content undermines any claim that Dretske's theory endorses wide content. Instead, we are lead to the conclusion that Dretske's theory entails pervasive content indeterminacy. (shrink)

Comedy and philosophy have too often been thought immiscible, a tradition supported by a solemn reading of philosophers such as Plato. A closer look at Plato – and specifically at what may be his most familiar dialogue – the Republic, suggests just the contrary. Far from immiscible, comedy and philosophy are entwined in ways that are mutually illuminating. I argue that a joke in Book V reveals the self-forgetting involved in founding the city in speech, and so illustrates the vitality (...) of self-knowledge to political ventures. Glaucon criticizes the first city in speech as akin to one “of sows”, prompting a new city altogether, and yet the city that he helps to create not only eradicates distinctions between animals and humans but is founded on principles of animal husbandry and described overwhelmingly in animalistic terms. Justice in this city is defined as a minding of one’s own business, but what exactly “one’s own” is expands to accommodate Glaucon’s pleonexia and accompanying tyrannical allowances. Glaucon has forgotten himself. Without a limit – without a restriction on what one’s own is – the city degenerates into a tyranny. Glaucon’s self-forgetting may be a minor, comical incident, but it has significant philosophical consequences, including a radical undercutting of the city in question as well as the distinction between humans and animals. The comical mode employed here suggests that it may be a comical understanding of the self that best supersedes the forgotten self. (shrink)

The Protagoras exhibits several traits of metatheatrical comedy. Through the use of role-playing and intertextual reference, I argue that the Protagoras exhibits metatheatrical comedy which Socrates uses to expose the pretension at the heart of philosophical dialogue itself. In this way, Socrates pulls back the curtain of philosophical dialogue to expose the theatricality of such dialogue and, in doing so, offers the audience a unique opportunity to laugh at ourselves.

This paper investigates the affiliation of Book I of the Latin translation of Euclid's Elements attributed to Hermann of Carinthia with the Arabic transmission of the Greek mathematical work. It argues that it is a translation of a text of the Arabic secondary transmission, that is, of an Arabic edition mixed with comments. Two methodological claims are made in the paper. The first insists that the determination of a text whose transmission was as multifaceted and complex as the Euclidean Elements (...) needs to be based on a systematic investigation of entire books rather than on selected theorems or diagrams of global, mostly structural relevance. The second claim starts from the experience that almost all results regarding the place of a particular document in a chain of transmission are conjectural. It acknowledges that individual results are more or less persuasive, depending upon the qualitative status of the argument. It suggests that the quantitative accumulation of similarities, differences, errors, regularities, or peculiarities allows one to recognize patterns and thus improves the reliability of judgment. (shrink)

In this paper, I proceed from the assumption that Ockham’s account of self-awareness can be correctly described as a kind of higher-order approach, because just like modern higher-order theorists, Ockham accounts for a mental act being conscious in terms of a higher-order act that takes the act as its object. I aim to defend Ockham’s approach against the objection that it fails to provide an explanation of how self-awareness comes about because any such explanation would be circular. Part of the (...) critique, in light of recent findings in Ockham scholarship, is that the ontological identity of the subject does not suffice to explain – in a non-circular way – the psychological identity and unity of the subject of awareness. Here, I argue that Ockham can respond to this objection by highlighting the power of will. Roughly speaking, the idea is that he can account for the limits of the psychological subject in terms of what the subject can want or will with respect to her own acts and these acts alone. It is along these lines that Ockham can account for the asymmetry between first-person and third-person perspective in a non-circular way, with reference to the exotic case of angelic mind-reading and the comparatively less exotic case of human memory. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe “raison d'être” of this paper is my dissatisfaction with current portrayals of the place and the fate of the so-called rational sciences in Muslim societies. I approach this issue from the perspectives of West European visitors to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I show that these travelers encountered educated people capable of understanding and answering their visitors' scholarly questions in non-trivial ways. The travels and the ensuing encounters suggest that early modern Muslim (...) societies and their institutions, their ways of producing knowledge, the types of their knowledge, and their material resources contributed important elements to various early modern West European approaches to gaining knowledge about nature, history, and politics. (shrink)

I discuss my long-term observation that history of science in Islamic societies is marginalized within the general history of science community as well as in the academic world of Islamic studies, Near Eastern language and civilization programs, Middle Eastern history, or the investigation of the modern Muslim world. I ask what the possible causes for this situation are and what can be done to change the bleak situation.

We address the old question whether a logical understanding of Quantum Mechanics requires abandoning some of the principles of classical logic. Against Putnam and others (Among whom we may count or not E. W. Beth, depending on how we interpret some of his statements), our answer is a clear "no". Philosophically, our argument is based on combining a formal semantic approach, in the spirit of E. W. Beth's proposal of applying Tarski's semantical methods to the analysis of physical theories, with (...) an empirical-experimental approach to Logic, as advocated by both Beth and Putnam, but understood by us in the view of the operationalrealistic tradition of Jauch and Piron, i. e. as an investigation of "the logic of yes-no experiments" (or "questions"). Technically, we use the recently-developed setting of Quantum Dynamic Logic (Baltag and Smets 2005, 2008) to make explicit the operational meaning of quantum-mechanical concepts in our formal semantics. Based on our recent results (Baltag and Smets 2005), we show that the correct interpretation of quantum-logical connectives is dynamical, rather than purely propositional. We conclude that there is no contradiction between classical logic and (our dynamic reinterpretation of) quantum logic. Moreover, we argue that the Dynamic-Logical perspective leads to a better and deeper understanding of the "non-classicality" of quantum behavior than any perspective based on static Propositional Logic. (shrink)

Any account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of (...) faculty psychology is the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them. (shrink)

Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

Externalist readings of Ockham are currently most prominent in the literature. For instance, an externalist interpretation with respect both to mental content and the meaning of expressions is advocated by prominent scholars. In this paper, I want to argue that although this externalist picture is certainly not incorrect, it is nonetheless incomplete. As I show, Ockham distinguishes between two ways of acquiring concepts: one of them can be accounted for in wholly externalist terms while the other involves the understanding of (...) linguistic expressions. According to the reading of Ockham I suggest here, it turns out that we can have two kinds of concepts pertaining to the same kind of things. But only one of the two is completely determined by external relations. Thus I conclude that the externalist picture of Ockham calls for some additions. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the relevance of judgment for practical considerations by discussing Christian August Crusius’s conception of rational desire. According to my interpretation of Crusius’s distinction between rational and non-rational desire, we are responsible at least for our rational desires insofar as we can control them. And we can control our rational desires by judging whether what we want complies with our human nature. It should become clear that Crusius’s conception of rational desire is normative in that we (...) necessarily desire things that are compatible with our nature, such as our own perfection. Therefore, a desire is rational if the desired object is apt to satisfy the desires compatible with our nature. From a contemporary perspective, such a normative conception of rational desire might not appear very attractive; it is apt, however, to stimulate a debate on the normative criteria and the role of judgment for rational desire, which is the ultimate aim of this paper. (shrink)

In this paper I want to show that Ockham seeks to account for our knowledge of what there is and of what there can be in terms of the possession of a certain type of concepts. These concepts are based on a kind of singular cognition of things that are present to the subject. It should become clear that although Ockham’s sketchy account of concepts of beings in the Summa Logicae is open to various objections it is not open to (...) objections raised by Geach against “abstractionist” accounts of concept acquisition: the point is simply that Ockham does not want to account for the correct application of concepts to things, that is, for the recognition of things as being of a certain kind in the first place. (shrink)

In this article I use conceptual frames drawn from autobiography studies and feminist theory to examine the relationships between bodily experience and the social construction of sex, gender and class as they play themselves out in a selection of womens medical consultation letters written to the eminent Swiss physician, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, during the second half of the eighteenth century. My analysis of a selection of consultation letters - all of which are situated and read in the context of a rich (...) archival collection of some 1,200 letters - considers the role that bodily experience plays in the construction of self and suggests that not only the experience, but also the textual articulation of the body, were imagined both through and against accepted understandings of sex, gender and class during this period. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy, voluntarists—that is, philosophers committed to some version of the freedom of indifference—have worried about its metaphysical credentials, but only a few, at least to my knowledge, have attempted to argue for more than its mere existence. Freedom of indifference is the option to choose between opposites in a given situation. In this paper, I present the ambitious attempt of the German pre-Kantian philosopher Christian August Crusius (1715–1775) to argue for the claim that we have freedom (...) of indifference as a matter of hypothetical necessity. The point is that, in his view, there can be no actual world without freedom of indifference. This is not a logical but a metaphysical truth. I argue that a possible (motivational) reason for Crusius’s choice to tread this slippery path is that he attempts to bestow some metaphysical dignity on the freedom of indifference. As a consequence, this metaphysical value of freedom of indifference shapes the relation between the divine and free, rational agents in a way that is completely different from a rationalist’s conception such as Leibniz’s. In this paper, I give a plausible interpretation of a metaphysical argument that has been neglected in the relevant literature. (shrink)

My general aim in commenting on Băltuță’s paper is to elucidate the metaphor of a dialogue she uses to characterize the general, methodological framework of her undertaking. For this purpose, I turn to a certain strand of the contemporary discussion of the role of the historian of philosophy. According to Băltuță, the determination of the limits of such a dialogue is a matter of degree, not of principle. I agree with her. My concern is that the determination of the limits (...) of the dialogue is thwarted if the central, contemporary notion that is taken to be applicable to the historical account in question is used equivocally. In my view, there is a serious concern that Băltuță’s account equivocates on the term “intentional,” making it difficult to determine the limits of the dialogue between contemporary and medieval views on the intentionality of pain. My specific aim in this comment is to show that although Băltuță equivocates on the term “intentional,” her analysis of Kilwardby’s account can be adjusted such that her argument succeeds in showing that pain is in fact an intentional state for Kilwardby. (shrink)

We formalise a notion of dynamic rationality in terms of a logic of conditional beliefs on (doxastic) plausibility models. Similarly to other epistemic statements (e.g. negations of Moore sentences and of Muddy Children announcements), dynamic rationality changes its meaning after every act of learning, and it may become true after players learn it is false. Applying this to extensive games, we “simulate” the play of a game as a succession of dynamic updates of the original plausibility model: the epistemic situation (...) when a given node is reached can be thought of as the result of a joint act of learning (via public announcements) that the node is reached. We then use the notion of “stable belief”, i.e. belief that is preserved during the play of the game, in order to give an epistemic condition for backward induction: rationality and common knowledge of stable belief in rationality. This condition is weaker than Aumann’s and compatible with the implicit assumptions (the “epistemic openness of the future”) underlying Stalnaker’s criticism of Aumann’s proof. The “dynamic” nature of our concept of rationality explains why our condition avoids the apparent circularity of the “backward induction paradox”: it is consistent to (continue to) believe in a player’s rationality after updating with his irrationality. (shrink)

As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction—including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from the context of adoption, donor-conceived and surrogacy-born persons have recently demanded the same protections and focused on the right to genetic (...) knowledge. This article explores possible implications of epigenetic knowledge on identity. I start by articulating the deep influence of genetics on the notion of identity, and how this unfolds in legal contexts. Next, I examine how epigenetic findings that stress the importance of seeing biological life as situated and embedded in environments can challenge how adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy are experienced and understood. While I argue that epigenetic knowledge can reify identity with the same determinism underpinning genetics, it can also allow for more biosocial understandings of identity that consider history and experience as entangled with biology. (shrink)

We formalise a notion of dynamic rationality in terms of a logic of conditional beliefs on plausibility models. Similarly to other epistemic statements, dynamic rationality changes its meaning after every act of learning, and it may become true after players learn it is false. Applying this to extensive games, we "simulate" the play of a game as a succession of dynamic updates of the original plausibility model: the epistemic situation when a given node is reached can be thought of as (...) the result of a joint act of learning that the node is reached. We then use the notion of "stable belief, i.e. belief that is preserved during the play of the game, in order to give an epistemic condition for backward induction: rationality and common knowledge of stable belief in rationality. This condition is weaker than Aumann's and compatible with the implicit assumptions underlying Stalnaker's criticism of Aumann's proof. The "dynamic" nature of our concept of rationality explains why our condition avoids the apparent circularity of the "backward induction paradox": it is consistent to believe in a player's rationality after updating with his irrationality. (shrink)

Within a German sample, the current cross-sectional questionnaire study conducts interreligious and interdenominational comparisons between Catholics, Protestants, free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, Muslims, Spiritualists, i.e., religiously unaffiliated persons who label themselves as “spiritual,” and religious/spiritual “nones.” The comparisons refer to self-ratings of religiosity and spirituality, centrality of religiosity, as assessed by the Centrality of Religiosity Scale, and God concepts. The study is largely exploratory in nature, but also aims at identifying contexts of faith in which the term “spiritual” is typically used as (...) a self-description. The results show that only Spiritualists and free-church Protestants substantially label themselves as “spiritual.” However, they differ in many respects from each other, thus representing two distinct contexts of faith. The results further reveal a medium position of Catholics and Protestants in between the other subgroups, commonalities as well as specific differences between free-church Protestants, Bahá’ís, and Muslims, and some religious/spiritual approaches even within the “nones.”. (shrink)

The present study investigated the construct validity of the Test Anxiety Questionnaire, a revised and shortened version of the German Test Anxiety Inventory, by comparing it with math anxiety. A sample of German fifth- and sixth-grade students was analyzed. Math anxiety was measured by a German adaptation of the Math Anxiety Questionnaire. A significant but moderate correlation between test anxiety and math anxiety was found. In regression analyses, math anxiety predicted math performance whereas test anxiety explained additional variance for both (...) math and overall performance. It can be concluded that math and test anxiety have overlaps, but do not constitute the same construct. Thus, the results support the construct validity of the PAF indicating its usefulness in practical application. (shrink)

The dominant view on grieving processes throughout the twentieth century was based on the idea that grief ’s purpose is to loosen and finally sever the bonds with the deceased in order to set oneself free (free to enter new relationships). An expanded view, which aims at a more complete and more complex understanding of grief, corrected the former approach by arguing in favor of continuing bonds. The expanded view certainly fits better the meaning of attachment relations in human life. (...) So-called disenfranchised grief nonetheless reveals additional normative constraints in terms of (culturally varying) social control mechanisms taking effect with regard to expressions of grief. The present paper argues that duly considering the complex and ambiguous nature of grief, as well as its transformative power, requires challenging the standard view of disenfranchised grief. I propose an expanded view that is based on the idea that proponents of the standard view have failed to inquire into the equivocal meaning of a common conversation about “coping with grief ” (getting over it vs. getting along with it). Arguing in favor of an expanded account of disenfranchised grief by following the second reading (“getting along with grief ”) then requires acknowledging the inseparability of grief ’s existential depth and social implications. With a view to this inseparability, it is argued that coping with grief is a public (or even political) affair instead of a merely private experience. (shrink)

This manuscript presents a topological argumentation framework for modelling notions of evidence-based (i.e., justified) belief. Our framework relies on so-called topological evidence models to represent the pieces of evidence that an agent has at her disposal, and it uses abstract argumentation theory to select the pieces of evidence that the agent will use to define her beliefs. The tools from abstract argumentation theory allow us to model agents who make decisions in the presence of contradictory information. Thanks to this, it (...) is possible to define two new notions of beliefs, grounded beliefs and fully grounded beliefs. These notions are discussed in this paper, analysed and compared with the existing notion of topological justified belief. This comparison revolves around three main issues: closure under conjunction introduction, the level of consistency and their logical strength. (shrink)

Teorija samo-modela Thomasa Metzingera nudi okvir naturaliziranja subjektivnih iskustava, to jest perspektive prve osobe. Ovi se fenomeni objašnjavaju referiranjem na reprezentacijske sadržaje za koje se kaže da su međuodnošajni na različitim razinama svijesti i suodnošajni s moždanim aktivnostima. Članak počinje razmatranjem o naturalizmu i anti-naturalizmu u svrhu grubog skiciranja pozadine Metzingerove tvrdnje da njegova teorija drži filozofijske spekulacije o umu ne-nužnima . Posebice, Husserlova se fenomenološka koncepcija svijesti odbacuje kao nekritička i neprimjerena. Pokazat će se da je ta kritika pogrešno (...) usmjerena . Glavni nedostaci Metzingerove teorije osvijetlit će se referiranjem na koncepciju fenomenalne transparencije koja će se usporediti s fenomenološkom idejom transparencije . Tada ćemo povećati naš kritički horizont fokusirajući se na neke implikacije reprezentacionalizma, uključujući reifikaciju svijesti, mozgovni kartezijanizam, te isključivanje socijalne dimenzije . Konačno, primijenit ćemo naše meta-teorijske refleksije na raspravu o naturalizmu. (shrink)