Balancing the rights and obligations of custodians and applicants in relation to access to biobanks is of utmost importance to guarantee trust and confidence. This study aimed to reveal which issues divide dif..

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the (...) modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. (shrink)

This article contains a reply to Guido Vanheeswijck’s critical study of my book Vloeibare waarden. Politiek, zorg en onderwijs in de laatmoderne tijd. I respond to his criticisms on the following topics: what is behind the liquidity of values; conservatism and the sacred; autonomy and the transcendence of values. The discussion also contains insights relevant to these topics from the work of Leszek Kolakowki.

" The primary U.S. goal in the Third World is to ensure that it remains open to U.S. economic penetration and political control. Failing this the United States exerts every effort to..

This article presents an overall view of Hume's philosophy as it can be found in the Treatise. It shows that Hume's position can be called a nonreductionist naturalism. Hume's philosophy is a philosophical anthropology: it begins with a discussion of what is typically human in human understanding, i.e., knowledge and probability or the belief-systems of science and philosophy. Then, morality and politics are retraced as to their origin in emotions and desires. In the final part of the article it is (...) explained in what sense Hume can be called a nonreductionist naturalist. (shrink)

_An original and insightful account of nature and our place in it from one of France's preeminent historians of philosophy._.

Published in 1960, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s _Truth and Method_ is one of the most influential books on interpretation to have appeared in the past half century. Scholars across the humanities have applied, discussed, and criticized its insights. This volume aims to continue this conversation between hermeneutics and the humanities and tries to map Gadamer’s influence on the humanities, while identifying the possibilities for further interaction between his ideas and contemporary scholarship. This bilingual collection is essential reading for scholars interested in issues (...) of methodology, theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

This is an analysis of the relation of green to nineteenth century thought. the author believes that green stands for three ideas. first, he is the major nineteenth century critic of utilitarianism. second, he is the main critic of laissez-faire individualism. third, he is the major critic of empiricism. green believed that experience is identical with thought; the real world is the intelligible world. the human mind, in knowing, establishes relations with the eternal mind. the author concludes that green is (...) both a platonist and an augustinian, eliminating particulars, or feelings, from philosophical importance. (staff). (shrink)

This collection of papers, celebrating the contributions of Swedish logician Dag Prawitz to Proof Theory, has been assembled from those presented at the Natural Deduction conference organized in Rio de Janeiro to honour his seminal research. Dag Prawitz’s work forms the basis of intuitionistic type theory and his inversion principle constitutes the foundation of most modern accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in Logic, Linguistics and Theoretical Computer Science.

In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001. In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain (...) will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness. Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind-brain relation. (shrink)

Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

In this article a concept of non-local consciousness will be described, based on recent scientific research on near-death experiences . Since the publication of several prospective studies on NDEs in survivors of cardiac arrest, with strikingly similar results and conclusions, the phenomenon of the NDE can no longer be scientifically ignored. In the last thirty years several theories have been proposed to explain an NDE. The challenge to find a common explanation for the cause and content of an NDE is (...) complicated by the fact that an NDE can be experienced during various circumstances, such as severe injury of the brain as in cardiac arrest to conditions when the brain seems to function normally. The NDE is an authentic experience which cannot be simply reduced to imagination, fear of death, hallucination, psychosis, the use of drugs, or oxygen deficiency. Patients appear to be permanently changed by an NDE during a cardiac arrest of only some minutes duration. According to these aforementioned studies, the current materialistic view of the relationship between consciousness and the brain as held by most physicians, philosophers, and psychologists is too restricted for a proper understanding of this phenomenon. There are good reasons to assume that our consciousness does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced or non-local consciousness can sometimes be experienced separately from the body. (shrink)

The standard view of philosophical methodology is that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence. Herman Cappelen argues that this claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

Nous sommes entourés de machines dont une composante tire son nom d’une faculté cognitive du vivant. Les ordinateurs possèdent en effet une ou plusieurs « mémoires » : mémoire morte, mémoire vive, registres du processeur, disques durs, cartes mémoire, clefs USB, etc. Quelle est la raison d’être de la mémoire informatique et à quelles conditions est-elle matériellement possible? Nous montrerons dans un premier temps que la notion de mémoire dérive de l’idée même d’un traitement de l’information, et qu’elle joue à (...) ce titre un rôle majeur dans les modèles formels de l’informatique. Nous montrerons ensuite comment sont compensés les éventuels biais induits par une réalisation physique. On verra par là même le lien particulier qu’entretiennent en informatique la forme et la matière : si l’inscription dans une matière est possible, c’est dans un matériau quelconque, dont sont systématiquement neutralisées les particularités physiques. La forme est ainsi dégagée par abstraction de la matière dans laquelle elle s’exprime. (shrink)

This paper will focus on physically impaired and disfigured soldiers and their perception in Roman antiquity from the late Republic until the early Imperial era (third century BC until third century AD). Based on case studies from literary sources, this paper aims to explore the integration of impaired and disfigured veterans into Roman civil society. The first part outlines the ambiguous attitudes shown towards these veterans, who were both praised and ridiculed, and seeks explanations. The second part argues that few (...) impairments and disfigurements precluded veterans from holding political or religious office. (shrink)

I call the activity of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices ‘conceptual engineering’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to present an argument for why conceptual engineering is important for all parts of philosophy (and, more generally, all inquiry). Section I of the chapter provides some background and defines key terms. Section II presents the argument. Section III responds to seven objections. The replies also serve to develop the argument and clarify what conceptual engineering is.

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? Making AI Intelligible shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical (...) implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (for example, creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants). If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. This ground-breaking study offers insight into how to take some first steps towards achieving Interpretable AI. (shrink)

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing is (...) clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance. (shrink)

Bad Language is the first textbook on an emerging area in the study of language: non-idealized language use, the linguistic behaviour of people who exploit language for malign purposes. This lively, accessible introduction offers theoretical frameworks for thinking about such topics as lies and bullshit, slurs and insults, coercion and silencing.

_Insensitive Semantics_ is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language Defends a distinctive (...) and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well. (shrink)