Suppose that you do not do what you have previously decided to do. Are you to be charged with irrationality? A number of otherwise divergent theories of practical rationality hold that by default, you are; there are rational pressures, it is claimed, that favor the long-term stability and eventual execution of distal intentions. The article challenges this view by examining how these purported pressures can be spelled out. Is intention a normative commitment to act? Are intentions reasons for action – (...) or at least for retaining one's intention until the time to act has come? Or is the rationality of ‘doing as you decide’ governed by diachronic wide-scope norms, as Michael Bratman and John Broome suggest? All of these approaches are shown to raise severe problems, which suggests a more modest view: diachronic pressures on intending are at each point in time confined to the very next instant. (shrink)

Suppose that you intend to go to the theater. Are you therein intending the unconditional proposition that you go to the theater? That would seem to be deeply irrational; after all, you surely do not intend to go if, for instance, in the next instant an earthquake is going to devastate the city. What we intend we do not intend ‘no matter what,’ it is often said. But if so—how can anyone ever rationally intend simply to perform an action of (...) a certain kind? In response to the puzzle, a ‘conditionality’ view of intention has emerged: the contents of everyday intentions are claimed to be fraught with hidden conditional clauses. The paper argues that such claims are radically unmotivated: even unconditional intentions have only limited inferential import and hence contrast sharply with a ‘no matter what’ stance. The point is established by examining relevant patterns of reasoning from unconditional to conditional intentions. (shrink)

Future-directed intentions, it is widely held, involve behavioral dispositions. But of what kind? Suppose you now intend to Φ at future time t. Are you thereby now disposed to Φ at t no matter what? If so, your intention disposes you to Φ even if around t you will come to believe that Φ-ing would be crazy. And would not that be a crazy intention to have? – Like considerations have led Luca Ferrero and others to believe that only intentions (...) with strong internal conditions are capable of rationality. This paper explores in how far a broadly dispositional view of intention supports their claims. Its first point will come as a surprise: Intentions indeed involve dispositions toward follies in plenty. Natural objections against this bizarre-sounding claim are shown to fail, and standard counterfactual analyses of disposition locutions are shown to underpin it further. However, since the dispositions at issue are pro tanto dispositions, the consequences are not as odd as might be expected: When hedged by reasonable habits to reconsider one’s intentions, dispositions toward follies do not entail any actual crazy behavior. On balance, unconditional intention is therefore found rational after all. Dispositions toward crazy actions need not be crazy dispositions. (shrink)

Moral criticism sometimes takes the form of asking: What if everyone acted the way you do? Such criticism seems to be grounded in some form of moral reasoning, which has in the past been the aim of various efforts of clarification, refutation and defense, in the guise of interpretations of Kant's Categorical Imperative as well as in Analytic Ethics. The book forms the first monographic attempt since decades to establish systematic order among contributions to the field. It examines a wide (...) spectrum of generalization procedures with respect to the plausibility of their outputs, analyses their shortcomings and arrives at novel results. (shrink)

In the wake of Kolodny (2005) and Raz (2005), the normativity of rationality has become the topic of an intricate debate: what normative reasons are there, if any, to be rational? This article explains what kinds of ‘reasons to be rational’ there are. It then argues that, while we often have reason to be rationally disposed, rationality is neither itself normative nor necessarily underwritten by normative reasons – at any rate not when construed as conformance with coherence requirements. Allegedly omnipresent (...) reasons to be coherent are shown to be ‘ghost-like’: hard to disprove, and yet irrational to believe in. This conclusion is rendered persuasive with scenarios featuring rewards for violating coherence constraints. The article also deals with the long-standing objection that such ‘irrationality rewards’ would be reasons ‘of the wrong kind’. Furthermore, Kolodny’s explanation of why rationality has the appearance of being normative is replaced with a more credible ‘error theory’. (shrink)

In ethics, deductivism strives for self-evident premises as a foundation for normative claims, whereas coherentism seeks moral justification in relations between abstract normative claims and moral judgments. While Immanuel Kant is still widely believed to have pursued a deductivist project, the article contends that he endeavored to justify his moral philosophy in general as well as the Categorical Imperative in particular in the coherentist manner that has later on been advocated by John Rawls. First, the characteristics of Rawls’ method of (...) reflective equilibrium are summarized and traced within Kant’s writings. The resulting coherentist interpretation is then defended against the opposing view that Kant’s appeal to the ‘fact of reason’ proves his adherence to ethical intuitionism. (shrink)

Since it is hard to see how subjective rationality could be normative, a humbler, purely evaluative account of rationality’s importance has been suggested: rationality is a non-moral virtue, and rational action is good so far as it reveals that an agent ‘functions well’. This paper argues, however, that even this fallback position is threatened by ‘eccentric billionaire’ scenarios: sometimes, flouting purported coherence standards of rationality is maximally virtuous. In defense of the virtue account, I argue that a novel view of (...) rational constraints is called for: rationality requires a certain form of higher-order coherence – as considerations about instrumental coherence can show. (shrink)

The issue of climate change provides a drastic example of the importance, but also the precariousness of public trust in science. Climate science almost unanimously warns that global warming requires governments to effectively pursue long-term agendas of mitigation, adaptation and compensation without further delay. In democracy, however, this requires of citizens a long-term commitment to prioritizing the issue of climate change in their voting decisions. Recent developments prove such prioritizing unlikely as long as scientists think of themselves primarily as political (...) consultants. In fact, climate scientists have long amplified their direct communication with the public, gaining additional support for climate policies, but also aggravating in the eyes of some (what sociologists call) the politicization of science. Against the background of these developments, the article asks what kind of normative model should henceforth govern the relationship of (climate) experts and citizens. Two families of proposals are considered. Scientistic models typically assume that citizens ought to base their autonomous political decisions on scientific facts and that the primary goal of scientists in dealing with the public should hence be to provide detailed, reliable scientific information. Proponents of the model of practical judgment, by contrast, criticize scientistic models for being overly demanding, and suggest the cultivation of practical judgment as an alternative. The article argues in favor of a scientistic model, but shifts the focus from the proliferation of information toward the cultivation of trust in science. According to the suggested account, citizens are obligated to make an effort to correctly identify the community of scientific experts, and to give in their own deliberations appropriate weight to identified expert recommendations. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of (...) language, logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us. (shrink)

This paper analyses a hitherto unknown technique of using logic diagrams to create argument maps in eristic dialectics. The method was invented in the 1810s and -20s by Arthur Schopenhauer, who is considered the originator of modern eristic. This technique of Schopenhauer could be interesting for several branches of research in the field of argumentation: Firstly, for the field of argument mapping, since here a hitherto unknown diagrammatic technique is shown in order to visualise possible situations of arguments in a (...) dialogical controversy. Secondly, the art of controversy or eristic, since the diagrams do not analyse the truth of judgements and the validity of inferences, but the persuasiveness of arguments in a dialogue. (shrink)

Eristic has been studied more and more intensively in recent years in philosophy, law, communication theory, logic, proof theory, and A.I. Nevertheless, the modern origins of eristic, which almost all current researchers see in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, are considered to be a theory of the illegitimate use of logical and rhetorical devices. Thus, eristic seems to violate the norms of discourse ethics. In this paper, I argue that this interpretation of eristic is based on prejudices that contradict the original (...) intention of modern eristic. Eristic is not an art of being right or winning an argument, but an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to gain argumentative acceptance. For this reason, eristic must be seen as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Especially in the age of alternative facts and post-factual politics, this makes eristic a valuable discipline. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of Seneca's 58th letter to Lucilius and Porphyry's Isagoge, which were the origin of the tree diagrams that became popular in philosophy and logic from the early Middle Ages onwards. These diagrams visualise the extent to which a concept can be understood as a category, genus, species or individual and what the method of dihairesis (division) means. The paper explores the dissimilarities between Seneca's and Porphyry's tree structures, scrutinising them through the perspective of modern graph (...) theory. Although traditional trees can be interpreted in a modern way, their terms and definitions defy modern standardisation. These distinctions are not only useful for differentiating between Seneca's and Porphyry's trees, but also for comprehending the evolution of this philosophical tradition. Thus the paper highlights the continued significance of these tree diagrams in analysing concepts and categories in philosophy and structuring objects and information in modern fields such as artificial intelligence, computer science, bioinformatics, graph theory, and many more. (shrink)

Reism or concretism are the labels for a position in ontology and semantics that is represented by various philosophers. As Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Jan Woleński have shown, there are two dimensions with which the abstract expression of reism can be made concrete: The ontological dimension of reism says that only things exist; the semantic dimension of reism says that all concepts must be reduced to concrete terms in order to be meaningful. In this paper we argue for the following two (...) theses: (1) Arthur Schopenhauer has advocated a reistic philosophy of language which says that all concepts must ultimately be based on concrete intuition in order to be meaningful. (2) In his semantics, Schopenhauer developed a theory of logic diagrams that can be interpreted by modern means in order to concretize the abstract position of reism. Thus we are not only enhancing Jan Woleński’s list of well-known reists, but we are also adding a diagrammatic dimension to concretism, represented by Schopenhauer. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents. The standard possible-world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience. A familiar attempt to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal agents that (...) are incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that “anything goes”. But I prove that it is impossible to develop an impossible-world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. Effectively, I show that attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents, or extremely non-ideal agents. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt collects thirty original chapters on the diverse oeuvre of one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Carl Schmitt was a German theorist whose anti-liberalism continues to inspire scholars and practitioners on both the Left and the Right. Despite Schmitt's rabid anti-semitism and partisan legal practice in Nazi Germany, the appeal of his trenchant critiques of, among other things, aestheticism, representative democracy, and international law as well as of his theoretical justifications of (...) dictatorship and rule by exception is undiminished. Uniquely located at the intersection of law, the social sciences, and the humanities, this volume brings together sophisticated yet accessible interpretations of Schmitt's sprawling thought and complicated biography. The contributors hail from diverse disciplines, including art, law, literature, philosophy, political science, and history. In addition to opening up exciting new avenues of research, The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt provides the intellectual foundations for an improved understanding of the political, legal, and cultural thought of this most infamous of German theorists. A substantial introduction places the trinity of Schmitt's thought in a broad context. (shrink)

The counterfactual comparative account of harm has counterintuitive implications in cases involving overdetermination and preemption. A popular strategy for dealing with these problems appeals to plural harm—several events being jointly harmful. Björn Petersson criticizes this strategy on the grounds that it conflicts with a strong intuition that helps to motivate the counterfactual comparative account, namely, that harming someone essentially involves making a difference for the worse for her. In this paper, I argue that Petersson’s argument is unconvincing.

Logic diagrams have been increasingly studied and applied for a few decades, not only in logic, but also in many other fields of science. The history of logic diagrams is an important subject, as many current systems and applications of logic diagrams are based on historical predecessors. While traditional histories of logic diagrams cite pioneers such as Leibniz, Euler, Venn, and Peirce, it is not widely known that Kant and the early Kantians in Germany and England played a crucial role (...) in popularising Euler(-type) diagrams. In this paper, the role of the Kantians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be analysed in more detail. It shows that diagrams (or intuition in general) were a highly contentious topic that depend on the philosophical attitude and went beyond logic to touch on issues of physics, metaphysics, linguistics and, above all, mathematics. (shrink)

Plotinus (204-70) is the founder of Neoplatonism and its most significant thinker. He shaped late antique philosophy and significantly influenced the entire metaphysical tradition of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and German Idealism. In this volume, Jens Halfwassen presents Plotinus' life and work, as well as the most important aspects of his historical influence. Issues of key importance for the Neoplatonists-such as the interaction between Being and Thought, the ascent of the soul, and the interpretation of Plato's theory of principles-are (...) explained in detail in the course of outlining the Neoplatonic metaphysical system. The introduction outlines Halfwassen's significant contribution to the study of Plotinus, paying particular attention to the differences between the current German and Anglophone approaches to the Platonic tradition. (shrink)

The paper gives an overview of Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of rationality. For Schopenhauer, rationality is a human faculty based on language, which, in addition to language, is primarily concerned with knowledge or philosophy of science and practical action. For Schopenhauer, language is the umbrella term under which he subsumes logic and eristics. This paper will first introduce Schopenhauer's logic and clarify its connection to the philosophy of language. This is followed by eristic dialectics, which reflects on how one can protect (...) oneself from people who argue irrationally in a goal-oriented way. Schopenhauer's philosophy of mathematics belongs to the field of philosophy of science. Unlike many other authors of his time, Schopenhauer does not advocate a rationalist but a representationalist approach, which, however, includes a theory of rationality. Therefore, Schopenhauer's representationalist approach will finally be discussed, emphasizing its relationship to his theory of rationality. (shrink)

The article deals with the following: Three brain imaging studies on athletes are evaluated. What do these neuroscientific studies tell us about the brain and mind of the athlete? Empirical investigations will need a neuro-theory of mind if they are to make the leap from neural activity to the mental. The article looks at such a theory, Gerald Edelman's?Neural Darwinism?. What are the implications of such a theory for sport science and philosophy of sport? The article appreciates some of the (...) neurosciences applications, but questions the hope of giving a complete theory of mind. (shrink)

Advanced AI systems are rapidly making their way into medical research and practice, and, arguably, it is only a matter of time before they will surpass human practitioners in terms of accuracy, reliability, and knowledge. If this is true, practitioners will have a prima facie epistemic and professional obligation to align their medical verdicts with those of advanced AI systems. However, in light of their complexity, these AI systems will often function as black boxes: the details of their contents, calculations, (...) and procedures cannot be meaningfully understood by human practitioners. When AI systems reach this level of complexity, we can also speak of black-box medicine. In this paper, we want to argue that black-box medicine conflicts with core ideals of patient-centered medicine. In particular, we claim, black-box medicine is not conducive for supporting informed decision-making based on shared information, shared deliberation, and shared mind between practitioner and patient. (shrink)

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and computer vision, the field can increasingly avail itself of new ways of analyzing and understanding multimodal communication. As a result, there is a general hope that multimodal research may be at the “precipice of greatness” due (...) to technological advances in computer science and resulting extended empirical coverage. However, for this to come about there must be sufficient guidance on key (theoretical) needs of innovation in the field of multimodal communication. Absent such guidance, the research focus of computer scientists might increasingly diverge from crucial issues in multimodal communication. With this paper, we want to further promote interaction between these fields, which may enormously benefit both communities. The multimodal research community (represented here by a consortium of researchers from the Visual Communication [ViCom] Priority Programme) can engage in the innovation by clearly stating which technological tools are needed to make progress in the field of multimodal communication. In this article, we try to facilitate the establishment of a much needed common ground on feasible expectations (e.g., in terms of terminology and measures to be able to train machine learning algorithms) and to critically reflect possibly idle hopes for technical advances, informed by recent successes and challenges in computer science, social signal processing, and related domains. (shrink)

This work is a systematic investigation of a range of solutions offered today for the philosophical problem of mental causation. The premises constituting the problem are analyzed before a survey is developed of the most popular theories on mental causation. It is demonstrated in detail why most of these canonical solutions must be considered deficient. In a third part, the 'new compatibilist's' approach to mental causation is explored, which is characterized by assertion of a non-identity-but-non-distinctness principle. The last part aims (...) to offer an alternative solution to the problem. On the basis of a certain set of counterfactual conditionals, which are jointly taken to provide a definition of 'causal proportionality' that improves the existing definitions, it is shown that a specific, and hitherto widely neglected, version of causal overdeterminationism must be considered the most successful solution to the problem of mental causation. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldts Rechtsphilosophie ist bei weitem nicht so bekannt wie seine Sprachphilosophie oder gar seine Rolle als Bildungsreformer. Der Autor untersucht zu diesem Zweck Humboldts "Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen".

This book marks the inauguration of the Historia Logicae book series, which seeks to publish high-quality monographs, dissertations, textbooks, proceedings, and anthologies on the history of logic in either German or English. Serving as the inaugural volume in this series, the book explores the contemporary interpretation of logic across many centuries and cultures. The first section of the volume comprises a compilation of papers dedicated to ancient and medieval logic, examining prominent thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Porphyry, Proclus, Boethius, (...) Buridan, and Kilwardby. The second section shifts focus towards early-modern and contemporary logics, including the works of Caramuel, Kant, Drobisch, Husserl, and Jaskowski. Topics of discussion encompass the relationship between mathematics and logic, natural deduction, intuitionism, graph theory, categorical judgments, theories of truth, modal logic, opposition relations, logic diagrams, definitions of formal logic, many-sorted logic, model theory, and paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

Nowadays, the forms assumed by knowledge indicate an unhinging of traditional structures conceived on the model of discipline. Consequently, what was once strictly disciplinary becomes interdisciplinary, what was homogeneous becomes heterogeneous and what was hierarchical becomes heterarchical. When we look for a matrix of interdisciplinarity, that is to say, a primary basis or an essential dimension of all the complex phenomena we are surrounded by, we see the need to break with the disciplinary self-restraint in which, often completely inadvertently, many (...) of us lock ourselves up, remaining anchored to our own competences, ignoring what goes beyond our own sphere of reference. However, interdisciplinarity is still a vague concept and a much demanding practice. It presupposes the continuous search for convergent theoretical perspectives and methodologies, and the definition of common spaces and languages, as well as a true dialogical and open mind of several scholars. From ethics to science, from communication to medicine, from climate change to human evolution the volume Controversies and Interdisciplinarity offers a series of original insights beyond disciplinary fragmentation for a new knowledge model. (shrink)

Why, then, has Anglo-American jurisprudence remained staunchly indifferent to history? How has it been able to maintain its confident assumption that the analytical and the historical can be neatly...

The traditional Lewis–Stalnaker semantics treats all counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent as trivially or vacuously true. Many have regarded this as a serious defect of the semantics. For intuitively, it seems, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents—counterpossibles—can be non-trivially true and non-trivially false. Whereas the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then the mathematical community at the time would have been surprised" seems true, "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would (...) have been thrilled" seems false. Many have proposed to extend the Lewis–Stalnaker semantics with impossible worlds to make room for a non-trivial or non-vacuous treatment of counterpossibles. Roughly, on the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics, we evaluate a counterfactual of the form "If A had been true, then C would have been true" by going to closest world—whether possible or impossible—in which A is true and check whether C is also true in that world. If the answer is "yes", the counterfactual is true; otherwise it is false. Since there are impossible worlds in which the mathematically impossible happens, there are impossible worlds in which Hobbes manages to square the circle. And intuitively, in the closest such impossible worlds, sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan are not thrilled—they remain sick and unmoved by the mathematical developments in Europe. If so, the counterpossible "If Hobbes had squared the circle, then sick children in the mountains of Afghanistan at the time would have been thrilled" comes out false, as desired. In this paper, I will critically investigate the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics for counterpossibles. I will argue that the standard version of the extended semantics, in which impossible worlds correspond to maximal, logically inconsistent entities, fails to give the correct semantic verdicts for many counterpossibles. In light of the negative arguments, I will then outline a new version of the extended Lewis–Stalnaker semantics that can avoid these problems. (shrink)

Jens Timmermann provides a detailed philosophical, developmental and historical analysis of Immanuel Kant's 1797 essay 'On a Supposed Right to Lie from Love of Humanity', in which Kant argues that it is criminally wrong to lie to protect a friend from being murdered.

This paper argues in favor of a hybrid conception of identity. A common conception of identity in datafied society is a split between a digital self and a real self, which has resulted in concepts such as the data double, algorithmic identity, and data shadows. These data-identity metaphors have played a significant role in the conception of informational privacy as control over information—the control of or restricted access to your digital identity. Through analyses of various data-identity metaphors as well as (...) philosophical accounts of identity, we argue in favor of a hybrid conception of identity that emphasizes the relations between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’. A hybrid conception of identity—where the digital is an aspect on par with social relations, self-understanding, and values—ultimately calls for an understanding of privacy as the right to influence one’s own identity. (shrink)

Elgar Research Agendas outline the future of research in a given area. Leading scholars are given the space to explore their subject in provocative ways, and map out the potential directions of travel. They are relevant but also visionary. Drawing on the philosophy of existentialism, this thought-provoking Research Agenda questions and encourages deeper ethical thinking about organizational practices during this time of existential crisis. Rather than relying on prescriptive normative ethical theories, it advocates for ethical concerns to be addressed through (...) intersubjective encounters. Chapters engage with diverse philosophical perspectives and illuminate their key ideas through literature, visual arts, and music, bringing forth situated truths that will resonate with and incite the reader to think and act critically to avoid perpetuating dehumanization, precarity, and mindlessness. The Research Agenda will ultimately inspire leaders and scholars to expand, rethink, practice, sustain, and transform organizations towards a future of flourishing for all stakeholders. Integrating qualitative hermeneutics with existential philosophy, this discerning Research Agenda will offer students and scholars of organization studies, business ethics and leadership a unique perspective on organizational ethics. (shrink)

Giambattista Vico gilt als Begründer der Kulturwissenschaft, obwohl er Jurist war und Rhetorik lehrte. Der Autor führt die juristische Provenienz mit Vicos kulturgeschichtlichen Entdeckungen zusammen und begründet diese in Verbindung mit jener. Durch diese Rückbesinnung auf Vicos Theorie kann womöglich auch die Rechtswissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft begriffen werden.

Possible-worlds accounts of mental or linguistic content are often criticized for being too coarse-grained. To make room for more fine-grained distinctions among contents, several authors have recently proposed extending the space of possible worlds by "impossible worlds". We argue that this strategy comes with serious costs: we would effectively have to abandon most of the features that make the possible-worlds framework attractive. More generally, we argue that while there are intuitive and theoretical considerations against overly coarse-grained notions of content, the (...) same kinds of considerations also prohibit an overly fine-grained individuation of content. An adequate notion of content, it seems, should have intermediate granularity. However, it is hard to construe a notion of content that meets these demands. Any notion of content, we suggest, must be either implausibly coarse-grained or implausibly fine-grained (or both). (shrink)

We argue that stereotypes associated with concepts like he-said–she-said, conspiracy theory, sexual harassment, and those expressed by paradigmatic slurs provide “normative inference tickets”: conceptual permissions to automatic, largely unreflective normative conclusions. These “mental shortcuts” are underwritten by associated stereotypes. Because stereotypes admit of exceptions, normative inference tickets are highly flexible and productive, but also liable to create serious epistemic and moral harms. Epistemically, many are unreliable, yielding false beliefs which resist counterexample; morally, many perpetuate bigotry and oppression. Still, some normative (...) inference tickets, like some activated by sexual harassment, constitute genuine moral and hermeneutical advances. For example, our framework helps explain Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical lacunae”: what early victims of “sexual harassment” — as well as their harassers — lacked before the term was coined was a communal normative inference ticket — one that could take us, collectively, from “this is happening” to “this is wrong.”. (shrink)

English summary: The connection between the soul and the material world played an important role in Neoplatonic thought. Generally, this connection prompted questions like: How should one think about the effect of the soul on the material and conversely, of matter on the soul? How is evil to be understood? Does the soul beget evil through itself or is it drawn to evil from the matter? How is the connection between the Logos, as the principle structure of the soul, as (...) well as the principle means by which the material world is organized, understandable? And what role does the intellect play in the fabric of matter and soul, which Plato already confirmed as a divine thought? These and other questions are followed up from a historical-systematic perspective in the essays collected in this volume, contributed by internationally renowned scholars of Neoplatonism. German description: Die Beziehung zwischen Seele und Materie spielt eine bedeutende Rolle im Denken des Neuplatonismus. Allerdings wirft diese Beziehung eine ganze Reihe von Fragen auf: Wie muss die Wirkung der Seele auf die Materie und umgekehrt der Materie auf die Seele gedacht werden? Wie ist das Bose zu verstehen? Bringt die Seele das Bose durch sich selbst hervor oder wird sie von der Materie zum Bosen angezogen? Wie lasst sich der Zusammenhang begreifen, durch den der Logos als das Strukturprinzip der Seele die Welt ordnet? Und welche Rolle spielt im Gefuge von Materie und Seele der Geist, den bereits Platon als ein gottliches Denken bestimmt hat? Diesen und anderen Fragen wird in den hier versammelten Aufsatzen aus historisch-systematischer Perspektive von international renommierten Neuplatonismusforschern nachgegangen. (shrink)

Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times offers a unique and timely reflection of the critical debates around the institutionalisation of feminist and gender-focused ideas and norms into policy. Many states and non-governmental organisations are increasingly invested in 'feminist policymaking' at the domestic and international levels. Yet, this liberal (feminist) agenda is also vastly disputed by critical, intersectional and decolonial voices on the one hand, and by anti-gender movements around the world on the other. Indeed, while opposition to 'gender ideology' is mounting (...) from reactionary, religious and secular forces, feminist policymaking is also being challenged in important ways from within. Thus, this book situates feminist policymaking in a challenging and 'turbulent', global context. This book explores feminist policymaking in multiple areas of policy, examining various gender-focused programmes that states and international organisations have undertaken in the last decade, offering critical interventions and rethinking the relationship between feminism and policy. The book not only reflects on the advances of feminist policymaking globally, but also critically assesses the intersectional challenges embedded within it and lying ahead. It moves the field forward by creating opportunities, based on lived experiences, for re-imagining the transformative potential of the nexus between feminism and policymaking. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing to the fore the voices of both academics and practitioners, the book is the product of an international collaboration, forging links and dialogue that are increasingly necessary to question some of the exclusionary, militaristic and hierarchical assumptions of policymaking which is labelled as feminist. Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times will be of interest to all scholars, students and practitioners interested in the role of gender in policymaking and concerned with contestations around gender-focused projects. (shrink)