Popper's critical rationalism is widely accepted under scientists and philosophers of science as a proper method for the reconstruction of scientific theories. On occasion of the application of the Popperian ideas for the reconstruction of chemistry by Akeroyd the flaws of the critical rationalist approach are criticised and a methodical alternative is proposed, involving the operational definition of scientific terms.

Popper's critical rationalism is widely accepted under scientists and philosophers of science as a proper method for the reconstruction of scientific theories. On occasion of the application of the Popperian ideas for the reconstruction of chemistry by Akeroyd the flaws of the critical rationalist approach are criticised and a methodical alternative is proposed, involving the operational definition of scientific terms.

The paper asks about the reasons for the neglect of chemistry in modern philosophy of science and investigates in how far this science can be the object of an autonomous philosophical reflection. It is argued that from a culturalistic point of view chemistry indeed offers a field of interesting questions ranging from the reconstruction of its epistemological objects to the elucidation of the semantic functions of terms like "atom" or "molecule". It is further argued that the philosophical reflection upon chemistry (...) has important consequences for the didactic, the history and even the ethics of this science, making thus philosophy to a partner of chemistry in fulfilling its purposes in human society. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to explore new approaches to the problem of the constitution of the various aspects of sociality and to confront these with received ideas. Therefore many of the contributions to this volume are devoted to a rather holistic and antireductionist conception of social objects, groups, joint actions and collective knowledge. The topics, that are dealt with are: a) the question of the ontological status of social objects and their relation to physical objects, b) collective agency (...) and c) the question whether there can be shared knowledge and shared beliefs - a rather new topic in the discussion of the social aspects of personal life. (shrink)

In this paper a concept of pain is introduced that regards pain as a formal entity that can be realized in various material ways, similarly to the concept of justice. Pain utterances have rather the character of evaluative judgments and not of propositional descriptions. They aren’t therefore true or false, but adequate or inadequate, correct or wrong, according to the circumstances and the context, in which they are made. Because pain is constituted by the interplay of individual and public attitudes (...) also inside a given cultural context we are always capable of extending our concept of pain by integrating other cultural attitudes towards pain and also capable of giving arguments that shall convince the members of an other culture to accept our ideas about pain. (shrink)

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Conference on Collective Intentionality held at the University of Helsinki August 31 to September 2, 2006 and two additional contributions. The common aim of the papers is to explore the structure of shared intentional attitudes, and to explain how they underlie the social, cultural and institutional world. The contributions to this volume explore the phenomenology of sharedness, the concept of sharedness, and also various aspects of the structure of (...) collective intentionality in general, and of the intricate relations between sharedness and normativity in particular. Concepts of Sharedness shows how rich and lively the philosophical research focused on the analysis of collective intentionality has become, and will provide further inspiration for future work in this rapidly evolving field. (shrink)

Normativity involves two kinds of relation. On the one hand, there is the relation of being a reason for. This is a relation between a fact and an attitude. On the other hand, there are relations specified by requirements of rationality. These are relations among a person's attitudes, viewed in abstraction from the reasons for them. I ask how the normativity of rationality—the sense in which we ‘ought’ to comply with requirements of rationality—is related to the normativity of reasons—the sense (...) in which we ‘ought’ to have the attitudes what we have conclusive reason to have. The normativity of rationality is not straightforwardly that of reasons, I argue; there are no reasons to comply with rational requirements in general. First, this would lead to ‘bootstrapping’, because, contrary to the claims of John Broome, not all rational requirements have ‘wide scope’. Second, it is unclear what such reasons to be rational might be. Finally, we typically do not, and in many cases could not, treat rational requirements as reasons. Instead, I suggest, rationality is only apparently normative, and the normativity that it appears to have is that of reasons. According to this ‘Transparency Account’, rational requirements govern our responses to our beliefs about reasons. The normative ‘pressure’ that we feel, when rational requirements apply to us, derives from these beliefs: from the reasons that, as it seems to us, we have. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation.1 But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

At first glance, love seems to be a psychological state for which there are normative reasons: a state that, if all goes well, is an appropriate or fitting response to something independent of itself. Love for one’s parent, child, or friend is fitting, one wants to say, if anything is. On reflection, however, it is elusive what reasons for love might be. It is natural to assume that they would be nonrelational features of the person one loves, something about her (...) in her own right. According to the “quality theory,” for example, reasons for love are the beloved’s personal attributes, such as her wit and beauty. In J. David Velleman’s provocative and ingeniously argued proposal, the reason for love is the beloved’s bare Kantian personhood, her capacity for rational choice and valuation. But no such nonrelational feature works. To appreciate just one difficulty, observe that whatever nonrelational feature one selects as the reason for love will be one that another person could, or actually does, possess. The claim that nonrelational features are reasons for love implies, absurdly, that insofar as one’s love for Jane is responsive to its reasons, it will accept any relevantly similar person as a replacement. (shrink)

Every attempt to examine our consciousness’s passive life and its dynamic in its various forms inevitably intersects with our primal awareness of the future. Even though Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness enjoys a certain fame, his conception of our primordial relation to the future has not been adequately accounted for. The book at hand aims to offer a close study of Husserl’s view of protentional consciousness and to trace its unique contribution to our overall awareness of time. It offers an extensive (...) analysis of various aspects of protention by investigating its connection to different fields and levels of experience. To achieve such a task, the book stresses the need to enrich the familiar formal account of protention with a material one. Thus, alongside issues pertaining exclusively to the form of protention, such as its relation to fulfillment as well as its double-intentional structure, various other dimensions are discussed, such as the phenomena of disappointment and correction as well as the role hyle plays in both of them. In the same vein, special attention is given to the relation between protentional consciousness and affectivity, thus shedding light on the dynamic unity of our living-present. What this study purports to show is that Husserl’s phenomenology is equipped to offer a solid account of the thinnest and subtlest ways in which we are aware of the future in our experiential life. (shrink)

In this paper we will try to find resemblances of the operation of human consciousness with systems with the intention to simulate it mathematically. Also we will try to do the same for the non-conscious operations and try to synthesize the human mind in form of system with subsystems.

As prose dramatic texts Plato's dialogues would have been read by their original audience as an alternative type of theatrical composition. The 'paradox' of the dialogue form is explained by his appropriation of the discourse of theatre, the dominant public mode of communication of his time. The oral performance of his works is suggested both by the pragmatics of the publication of literary texts in the classical period and by his original role as a Sokratic dialogue-writer and the creator of (...) a fourth dramatic genre. Support comes from a number of pieces of evidence, from a statue of Sokrates in the Academy to a mosaic of Sokrates in Mytilene, which point to a centuries-old tradition of treating the dialogues in the context of performance literature and testify to the significance of the image of 'Plato the prose dramatist' for his original and subsequent audiences. (shrink)

Our political thinking is driven, far more than philosophers recognize, by a concern for social equality and, more specifically, a concern to avoid relations of inferiority. Niko Kolodny argues that, in order to make sense of the most familiar ideas in our political thought and discourse - the justification of the state, democracy, and rule of law, as well as objections to paternalism and corruption - we cannot merely appeal to freedom (as libertarians like Nozick do) or to distributive fairness (...) (as liberals like Rawls do). We must, instead, appeal directly to claims against inferiority, that no one stands above or below. (shrink)

We consider a paradox involving indicative conditionals (‘ifs’) and deontic modals (‘oughts’). After considering and rejecting several standard options for resolv- ing the paradox—including rejecting various premises, positing an ambiguity or hidden contextual sensitivity, and positing a non-obvious logical form—we offer a semantics for deontic modals and indicative conditionals that resolves the paradox by making modus ponens invalid. We argue that this is a result to be welcomed on independent grounds, and we show that rejecting the general validity of modus (...) ponens is compatible with vindicating most ordinary uses of modus ponens in reasoning. (shrink)

The hyletic component of kinaesthetic sensation has generally been treated with suspicion. It is usually set aside in favour of Husserl’s later analysis of kinaesthetic experience which emphasizes its practical dimension. I try to show that a nuanced understanding of the hyletic component allows us to consider its deeper temporal function. From a rather neglected passage in his Ding und Raum I show that Husserl was aware of the temporal peculiarity of kinaesthetic sensation: it is characterized by a unique kind (...) of “sameness”. I then try to explain how the hyletic dimension of kinaesthetic sensation is responsible for this peculiarity. By escaping the contingencies of protentional fulfilment kinaesthetic hyle merely unifies in an actual “belonging-together” our sensing of position and the motivation of the correlative appearances. It is on this basis that it fundamentally shapes at a passive-hyletic level the complex temporal dynamic of the practical dimension of kinaesthetic experience. (shrink)

Pélops sur un cratère du début du IVe s. av. J.-C. découvert à Pella L’article se réfère à un fragment de cratère en cloche à figures rouges découvert dans la région de la nouvelle entrée du site archéologique de Pella. Le vase présente un intérêt tout particulier, en raison de la rareté du thème iconographique. Sur la face principale est représenté le char de Pélops dans lequel devait aussi se trouver Hippodamie. Des éléments de la scène évoquent un enlèvement, ainsi (...) que la course de chars entre Pélops et Oenomaos. Le vase est attribué à l’atelier du Peintre d’Athènes 12255 et daté du début du ive s. av. J.-C. Cette datation permet de relier le thème iconographique du cratère à la victoire du roi Archélaos dans une course de chars aux jeux Olympiques, ainsi qu’à la fondation des fêtes olympiques en Macédoine. Notre cratère fait partie des nombreux vases à figures rouges arrivés dans la capitale macédonienne, qui confirment les échanges commerciaux avec l’Attique. (shrink)

A monomethod bias still prevails in the psychology of religion, with the developing field studying the relationship between religiosity, spirituality and health being almost completely dominated by questionnaire research. This comes as a surprise, because the experiential side of religion, spirituality, can by definition be regarded as inner and private experiences of transcendence that have frequently been described as being of utmost importance. At first glance, from this perspective, standardized questionnaire scales appear to be inappropriate for “measuring the unmeasurable”. Until (...) now, no questionnaire instrument developed for the purpose of assessing spiritual and religious experiences has been qualitatively double-checked for intermethod validity. In order to throw light on whether questionnaire instruments are appropriate for measuring domains of spiritual and transcendental experiences, we tested a newly developed questionnaire instrument, the Exceptional Experience Questionnaire , for intermethod validity by conducting post-questionnaire interviews . This revealed that the EEQ was able to grasp these experiences within reasonable limits. However, two thirds of our interview sample said that the study had changed how they viewed these experiences. These findings suggest that the reactivity of quantitative instruments in grasping spiritual and transcendental domains should be taken into account, especially when devising longitudinal designs and further research is clearly needed. As a consequence, introducing a reflective circle of results stemming from both quantitative and qualitative approaches is recommended as the most useful and appropriate research tool for studying spiritual or mystical experiences, if not all constructs. (shrink)

Niko Kolodny It is often said that there is a special class of norms, ‘rational requirements’, that demand that our attitudes be related one another in certain ways, whatever else may be the case.1 In recent work, a special class of these rational requirements has attracted particular attention: what I will call ‘requirements of formal coherence as such’, which require just that our attitudes be formally coherent.2 For example, we are rationally required, if we believe something, to believe what it (...) entails. And we are rationally required, if we intend an end, to intend what we take to be necessary means to it. The intuitive idea is that formally incoherent attitudes give rise to a certain normative tension, or exert a kind of rational pressure on each another, and this tension, or pressure, is relieved just when one of the attitudes is revised. As John Broome observes, these requirements are, by their nature, ‘wide scope’, which is to say that there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to satisfy them. This is because they require just formal coherence, and there is no particular attitude that one must have or lack in order to be formally coherent. (shrink)