The period from Plato's birth to Aristotle's death (427-322 BC) is one of the most influential and formative in the history of Western philosophy. The developments of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and science in this period have been investigated, controversies have arisen and many new theories have been produced. But this is the first book to give detailed scholarly attention to the development of dialectic during this decisive period. It includes chapters on topics such as: dialectic as interpersonal debate between (...) a questioner and a respondent; dialectic and the dialogue form; dialectical methodology; the dialectical context of certain forms of arguments; the role of the respondent in guaranteeing good argument; dialectic and presentation of knowledge; the interrelations between written dialogues and spoken dialectic; and definition, induction and refutation from Plato to Aristotle. The book contributes to the history of philosophy and also to the contemporary debate about what philosophy is. (shrink)

Is a phenomenal pain a conscious primitive or composed of more primitive phenomenal states? Are pain experiences necessarily or only contingently unpleasant? Here, I sketch how to answer such questions concerning intra-phenomenal metaphysics using the example of pain and unpleasantness. Arguments for a symmetrical metaphysical independence of phenomenal pain and unpleasant affect are presented, rejecting a composite view like the IASP definition and dimensional views. The motivating intuition of these views is explained by common binding mechanisms in consciousness and characterized (...) as fallacious if generalized. There are, however, underlying commonalities between pain perception and unpleasant affect, e.g. formal content or evolutionary ancestry. (shrink)

This article takes issue with the formalism problem arguably pertaining to Habermas's conception of communicative rationality and discursive justification. Beginning with the Hegelian premises of Habermas's theory of mutual understanding and communicative rationality, the article proceeds to make Kant's doctrine of reflective judgement fruitful for a critique of Habermas's restriction of reasons to discursively articulated endorsements, the 'force of the better reasons'. The argument consists in showing that discursive justification must rely upon endorsements of particulars exhibited in right judgements, and (...) that such endorsements must be expressed or articulated to yield public manifestations of discursive orientations and commitments, constituting what is referred to as 'communicative experience'. On the account presented here, the rational significance of particulars is revealed in the expressive attitude that allows or admits non-discursive constraints to the conception of rational justification. The promise of such an account - as premised upon Kant's insights in his third Critique - consists in its capability to avoid the one-sided formalism of discursive rationality, incorporating ethical, expressive and aesthetic dimensions to our rational self-conception. Key Words: aesthetic experience • communicative experience • concrete other • discourse-ethics • ethical life • feminism • Habermas • Hegel • Kant • morality • rational justification • reflective judgement • world-disclosure. (shrink)

Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids killed more than 17,000 Americans in 2017, marking a five-fold increase since 1999. High prescribing rates of opioid analgesics have been a substantial contributor to prescription opioid misuse, dependence, overdose and heroin use. There was recognition approximately ten years ago that opioid prescribing patterns were contributing to this startling increase in negative opioid-related outcomes, and federal actions, including Medicare reimbursement reform and regulatory actions, were initiated to restrict opioid prescribing. The current manuscript is a description (...) of those actions, the effect of those actions on opioid prescribing and related patient outcomes. We also describe our proposal of methods of expanding these efforts as an important piece to further reduce opioid-related misuse, dependence, and overdose death. (shrink)

Can we find necessary and sufficient conditions for a mental state to be a pain state? That is, does pain have a nature? Or is the term ‘pain’ ambiguous? I argue here that our expression ‘pain’ lacks necessary use conditions if one considers a range of contexts. As use conditions constrain the reference class, I argue that ‘pain’ does not refer to a natural category, but binds together a bunch of loosely resembling phenomena. This leads to problems for scientific and (...) clinical discourse. To solve these, a method of explication is suggested, based on a discursive combination between analysis of first-person reports and theories of natural science. Lastly, I consider the ethical implications of this ambiguity that lead to a reformulation of the goal of pain science: Not alleviation of all pains ought to be our goal, but only manipulation of conscious and negatively emotionally charged pains. (shrink)

Eugen Fink is considered one of the clearest interpreters of phenomenology and was the preferred conversational partner of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Play as Symbol of the World, Fink offers an original phenomenology of play as he attempts to understand the world through the experience of play. He affirms the philosophical significance of play, why it is more than idle amusement, and reflects on the movement from "child's play" to "cosmic play." Well-known for its non-technical, literary style, this (...) skillful translation by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner invites engagement with Fink's philosophy of play and related writings on sports, festivals, and ancient cult practices. (shrink)

I argue that the understanding of "pain" as presented in the official medical definition by the IASP is ambiguous and likely a cluster concept.

This article considers the treatment of intersubjectivity as the core of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. From this standpoint it identifies the problematic of Husserl's theory of the "experience of the Other", which Husserl exposes in his commentaries on Descartes V Meditation. The paper draws a parallel between Husserl and Kant in order to clarify the Husserlian notions, and finally shows the difficulties of Husserl's approach due to his assumption of the premises of the "Subjektsphilosophie".

In this article, I focus on what is we know when we know pain or that someone is in pain. I argue that claims of knowledge about pains are problematic because of the complex nature of the phenomenon and because of "pain" is a cluster concept.

Medical-legal partnerships connect legal advocates to healthcare providers and settings. Maintaining effectiveness of medical-legal partnerships and consistently identifying opportunities for innovation and adaptation takes intentionality and effort. In this paper, we discuss ways in which our use of data and quality improvement methods have facilitated advocacy at both patient (client) and population levels as we collectively pursue better, more equitable outcomes.

So called “shapes of opposition”—like the classical square of opposition and its extensions—can be seen as graphical representations of the ways in which types of statements constrain each other in their possible truth values. As such, they can be used as a novel way of analysing the subject matter of disputes. While there have been great refinements and extensions of this logico-topological tool in the last years, the broad range of shapes of opposition are not widely known outside of a (...) circle of specialists. This ignorance may lead to the presumption that the classical square of opposition fits all disputes. A broader view, which takes expanded shapes of opposition into account, may come to a more nuanced appraisal of possible disputes. Once we take other shapes of opposition into account, some alleged disputes may turn out to be Scheindisputes. In order to do the wide range of linguistic expressions justice and to differentiate Scheindisputes from real ones, a broader view is advised. To illustrate this point, I discuss the notion of “introspective disputes”. These are commonly reconstructed as obeying the square, but are more aptly reconstructed with a more complex octagon. If we reconstruct these disputes based on Buridan’s octagon, it becomes obvious that “introspective disputes” are likely Scheindisputes. (shrink)

Book reviews: Adorno, Theodor W., Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme (reviewed by Ståle R.S. Finke).

In this paper Kirsten Fink-Jensen suggests how a phenomenological-hermeneutic perspective can contribute to the knowledge of learning and teaching processes in music education in school. The philosophical frame is Danish philosophy of life, represented by Knud Ejler Løgstrup, and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of body, both pointing to the wholeness of mind and body in all kinds of actions. Within this framework interpretation is an epistemological, practical-hermeneutic activity based on different analytical methods. Phenomenologically, experiences of music are constituted in an intertwinement of (...) personal, cultural, and local meaning. The challenge facing the teacher is then to understand what becomes meaningful to persons in a given situation. 'Bodily dialogue' is a metaphor of a hermeneutic process of understanding that highlights the importance of bodily aspects in the teacher's answer to a child's musical attuned articulations. This focus can facilitate children's learning processes and change and qualify the teacher's didactic reflections on the impact and progression of music lessons. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to adapt the Austrian-German version of the Multidimensional Inventory for Religious/Spiritual Well-Being into the Italian language and culture, and to investigate possible associations between the RSWB dimensions, “Big Five” personality factors and mental illness within an Italian student sample. Hence, the first Italian translation of the MI-RSWB scale was applied on a sample of 412 undergraduate students in three different cities and regions of Italy: Padova, Rome, and Palermo. Like the original Austrian-German scale, we (...) were able to find convincing psychometric properties for the new Italian version of the scale. By mirroring previous research, the RSWB-dimensions turned out to be substantially associated with personality dimensions, as well as negatively related with a global measure of mental illness. Our initial results confirm that these RSWB-dimensions are important facets of personality and mental health. (shrink)

This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup’s relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system of morality in (...) general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup’s ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup’s position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup, “The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics,” which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant’s. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Disneyland is work disguised as play; school disguised as vacation. While Walt Disney’s curriculum deploys across all of its products, it literally engulfs the approximately 50 million ‘guests’ who visit the Disney Parks each year. Drawing on Sarah Ahmed’s phenomenological reading of orientation in Queer phenomenology, this article investigates the ways in which Disney’s didacticism is made material through practices and procedures designed to orient the park’s visitors, to ensure that those visitors always know where they are and who they (...) are, as a means of educating ‘good’ citizens. The argument focuses not on Disneyland’s narrative curriculum but on its corporeal one: visitors are enticed to make affective investments, to construct or reconstruct their identities to comply with the Disney version of the ideal American worker and consumer, as the park attempts to reorient those who resist those roles. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Wittgenstein’s critique of Moore in _On Certainty,_ and argues that this critique is largely misunderstood, for two reasons. Firstly, Wittgenstein partly misrepresents Moore. Secondly, Wittgenstein is wrongly taken to be an internalist regarding justification for knowledge. Once we realize these two points, we can understand Wittgenstein’s critique properly as a grammatical argument in that Moore fails to see how the concepts of knowledge and certainty relate to those of justification and evidence. On this reading, we can also (...) understand that Moore and Wittgenstein were in more agreement than many people have thought, even though Moore was not able to exploit and express his philosophical insights properly. (shrink)

How to model non-egoic experiences – mental events with phenomenal aspects that lack a felt self – has become an interesting research question. The main source of evidence for the existence of such non-egoic experiences are self-ascriptions of non-egoic experiences. In these, a person says about herself that she underwent an episode where she was conscious but lacked a feeling of self. Some interpret these as accurate reports, but this is questionable. Thomas Metzinger, Rocco Gennaro, and Charles Foster have hinted (...) at the self-defeating nature of such statements if we take them to be genuine reports: Apparently, the reporter explicitly denies her existence during the selfless experience, but implicitly affirms her existence as a witness to that selfless experience in order to give a first-person report about it. So the content of such a report conflicts with the pragmatics of reporting. If all self-ascriptions of non-egoic experiences are self-defeating in this way, then they cannot count as evidence for the existence of non-egoic experiences. Here, I map out why such strong conclusions do not directly follow: What look like self-ascriptions of non-egoic experiences may occur for a number of reasons. Only some explanations for such utterances rely on a change in consciousness. Of those that do rely on a change in consciousness, only one is incoherent. But its alternatives do not lead to contradictions. I argue that the most likely change in phenomenality that leads to self-ascriptions of non-egoic experiences is not one where a felt self disappears, but where it expands. (shrink)

"Ronald Bruzina’s superb translation... makes available in English a text of singular historical and systematic importance for phenomenology." —Husserl Studies "... a pivotal document in the development of phenomenology... essential reading for students of phenomenology twentieth-century thought." —Word Trade "... an invaluable addition to the corpus of Husserl scholarship. More than simply a scholarly treatise, however, it is the result of Fink’s collaboration with Husserl during the last ten years of Husserl’s life.... This truly essential work in phenomenology should find (...) a prominent place alongside Husserl’s own works. For readers interested in phenomenology—and in Husserl in particular—it cannot be recommended highly enough." —Choice "... a thorough critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology... raises many new questions.... a classic." —J. N. Mohanty A foundational text in Husserlian phenomenology, written in 1932 and now available in English for the first time. (shrink)

This special issue focuses on the Philosophy of Psychedelics by Chris Letheby in the form of a book symposium. Introduced by Matthew Johnson, Letheby presents the main claims of this book that explores the apparent conflict between psychedelic therapy and naturalism in a préci​s.​​ Seven contributions criticize, expand or comment on Letheby's arguments, focusing either on his proposed mechanism for psychedelic therapy or on the epistemic implications. The symposium concludes with Letheby’s replies to these commentaries.

This collection of essays engages with several topics in Aristotle's philosophy of mind, some well-known and hotly debated, some new and yet to be explored. The contributors analyze Aristotle's arguments and present their cases in ways that invite contemporary philosophers of mind to consider the potentials--and pitfalls--of an Aristotelian philosophy of mind. The volume brings together an international group of renowned Aristotelian scholars as well as rising stars to cover five main themes: method in the philosophy of mind, sense perception, (...) mental representation, intellect, and the metaphysics of mind. The papers collected in this volume, with their choice of topics and quality of exposition, show why Aristotle is a philosopher of mind to be studied and reckoned with in contemporary discussions. Encounters with Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of ancient philosophy and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

A main goal of the neuroscience of consciousness is: find the neural correlate to conscious experiences (NCC). When have we achieved this goal? The answer depends on our operationalization of “NCC.” Chalmers (2000) shaped the widely accepted operationalization according to which an NCC is a neural system with a state which is minimally sufficient (but not necessary) for an experience. A deeper look at this operationalization reveals why it might be unsatisfactory: (i) it is not an operationalization of a correlate (...) for occurring experiences, but of the capacity to experience; (ii) it is unhelpful for certain cases which are used to motivate a search for neural correlates of consciousness; (iii) it does not mirror the usage of “NCC” by scientists who seek for unique correlates; (iv) it hardly allows for a form of comparative testing of hypotheses, namely experimenta crucis. Because of these problems (i–iv), we ought to amend or improve on Chalmers's operationalization. Here, I present an alternative which avoids these problems. This “NCC2.0” also retains some benefits of Chalmers's operationalization, namely being compatible with contributions from extended, embedded, enacted, or embodied accounts (4E-accounts) and allowing for the possibility of non-biological or artificial experiencers. (shrink)

Nietzsche's Philosophy traces the passionate development of Nietzsche's thought from the aestheticism of The Birth of Tragedy through to the late doctrines of the "will to power" and "eternal return".Inspired by the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and by the work of Martin Heidegger, Fink exposes the central themes of Nietzsche's philosophy, revealing the philosopher who experiences thinking as a fate and who ultimately searches for an expression of his own ontological experience in a negative theology.

Psychometrically sound instruments that assess temporal dynamics of creative abilities are limited. The Ambulatory Battery of Creativity is designed to assess creative ideation performance multiple times in everyday life and was proven to capture the intra-individual dynamic of creative abilities reliably and validly. The present ambulatory study aimed to replicate and extend the psychometric evidence of the novel ABC. Sixty-nine participants worked on the ABC during a 5-day ambulatory assessment protocol. Each day, participants completed six randomly presented items of the (...) verbal and the figural ABC. Matching previous psychometric analyses, the results indicated good between-person and good within-person reliability. Furthermore, evidence for between-person and within-person validity of the ABC was obtained. Performance in the verbal and the figural ABC were interrelated and correlated with an independent measure of creative potential. The verbal ABC was further associated with openness, self-reported creative behavior, creative activities, and creative achievements, thus providing additional evidence of construct validity, especially for the verbal ABC. Finally, the verbal and the figural ABC yielded convincing within-person validity: Longer response times and higher subjective originality ratings were associated with more original ideas. This replication and extension of the ABC’s psychometric properties indicates that it enables a reliable and valid assessment of moment-to-moment fluctuations of creative ideation abilities in everyday life, which may facilitate the investigation of exciting new research questions related to dynamic aspects of creative ability. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by (...) situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noë’s enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5). (shrink)

Wynn's claims are, in principle, entirely reasonable; although, as always, the devil is in the details. With respect to Wynn's discussion of the cultural evolution of artifactual symmetry, we provide a few more arguments for the utility of mirror symmetry and extend the enquiry into the tacit and explicit processing of natural and artifactual symmetry.