The protests at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) that began in November 2014 as a reaction to severe cuts in the department of humanities have sparked a broad debate nationally and even internationally about the future of the university and the values and ideals that should define it. It turned out that dissatisfaction was much more widespread in different parts of the university than some had previously thought, and many turned out to share the concerns first put forward in the (...) humanities department, to extend beyond the borders of the university and the country. Increasing focus on getting as many students as possible to graduate promptly has shifted the attention ever more towards quantitative indicators for the evaluation of education rather than qualitative ones, leading to raising the question of whether the quality of education has suffered from these priorities. How did this come about and what could be done to improve this quality? In this essay we briefly consider the history of the university as an institute that aims to combine research and education, subsequently mentioning some more recent challenges for the university, finishing it with a brief description of a ‘circulation model of education’ that we consider to be a fruitful source for answering some of the challenges we identified from the current discussions. In this model circulation rather than unidirectional traffic occurs between different elements: circulation between research and education, between insights of teachers and of students, between disciplines, between general and contextualized knowledge, between disciplinary and experi- ential knowledge, between doing research and (meta-)reflection upon research, and so on. (shrink)

Neuroscience offers more than new empirical evidence about the details of cognitive functions such as language, perception and action. Since it also shows many functions to be highly distributed, interconnected and dependent on mechanisms at different levels of processing, it challenges concepts that are traditionally used to describe these functions. The question is how to accommodate these concepts to the recent evidence. A recent proposal, made in Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003) by Bennett and Hacker, is that concepts play a (...) foundational role in neuroscience, that empirical research needs to presuppose them and that changing concepts is a philosophical task. In defending this perspective, PFN shows much neuroscientific writing to be dualistic in nature due to our poor grasp of its foundations. In our review article we take a different approach. Instead of foundationalism we plead for a mild coherentism, which allows for a gradual and continuous alteration of concepts in light of new evidence. Following this approach it is also easier to deal with some neurological conditions (like blindsight, synaesthesia) that pose difficulties for our concepts. Finally, although words and concepts seem to seduce us to thinking that many skills and tasks function separately, it is language skill that – as neuroscientific evidence shows – co-emerges with action/perception cycles and thus seems to require revision of some of our central concepts. (shrink)

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

How can we explain the intentional nature of an expert’s actions, performed without immediate and conscious control, relying instead on automatic cognitive processes? How can we account for the differences and similarities with a novice’s performance of the same actions? Can a naturalist explanation of intentional expert action be in line with a philosophical concept of intentional action? Answering these and related questions in a positive sense, this dissertation develops a three-step argument. Part I considers different methods of explanations in (...) cognitive neuroscience (Bennett & Hacker’s philosophical, conceptual analysis; Marr’s three levels of explanation; Neural Correlates of Consciousness research; mechanistic explanation), defending ‘mechanistic explanation’ as a method that provides the necessary tools for integrating interdisciplinary insights into human action. Furthermore, a dynamic, explanatory mechanism allows the assessment of the impact of learning and development on expert action in a valuable way that other methods don’t. Part II continues by scrutinizing several cognitive neuroscientific theories of learning and development (neuroconstructivism; dual-processing theories; simulation theory; extended mind/cognition hypothesis), arguing for the complex interactions between different types of processing and different action representations involved in expert action performances. Moreover, according to our discussion of a particular ‘simulation theory’ these interactions can be influenced in several ways with the use of language, allowing an agent to configure a specific action representation for performance at a later stage. The results of Parts I and II are then applied in Part III to a parallel discussion of philosophical analyses of intentional action (discussing i.a. Frankfurt, Bratman, Pacherie and Ricoeur) and cognitive neuroscientific insights in it. Both approaches are found to converge in emphasizing the importance for an expert to develop stable patterns of actions that comply maximally not only with his intentions, but also with his motor expertise and with situational conditions. Consequently, his actions – automatic, or not – rely on this ‘sculpted space of actions’. (shrink)

Zoals bekend is de verhouding tussen filosofie en politiek problematisch. De veroordeling van Socrates door de polis maakte diepe indruk op zijn leerling Plato. Mede om dit soort misstappen te voorkomen ontwierp deze een ideale staat waarin filosofen koningen moesten worden. Vanuit dit idee probeerde hij ook Dionysus, de heerser van Syracus, tot een wijsgerig verantwoorde politiek te brengen. De mislukking van dit Siciliaans avontuur heeft velen na hem ervan overtuigd dat filosofen zich beter niet in kunnen laten met politieke (...) besluitvorming. Immers, Plato’s poging om Dionysus tot een wijsgerig verantwoorde politiek te brengen strandde jammerlijk. Maar, filosofen zijn natuurlijk hardleers en de aantrekkingskracht van het rijk der mensen en dingen op hen, die zich zo thuisvoelen in het rijk der ideeën valt niet altijd te loochenen. Hoewel voor Plato de politieke arena van alledag wezenlijk ongeschikt bleek te zijn voor filosofische uiteenzettingen, heeft toch zijn leerling en collega Aristoteles zich nog korte tijd met het onderwijs aan de jonge Alexander de Grote bemoeid – hoewel Aristoteles’ ambities al bescheidener waren dan van Plato. Het verhaal wil zelfs, dat Alexander op diens veldtochten een exemplaar van het werk van Homerus met aantekeningen van Aristoteles erin bij zich droeg. Na de dood van Alexander werd de anti-Macedonische atmosfeer in Athene voor Aristoteles zodanig bedreigend dat hij de stad verliet, om te voorkomen ‘dat de polis zich ten tweede male aan de filosofie bezondigde.’ Wie wel in het lot van Sokrates heeft moeten delen, is Thomas More, de auteur van het in 1516 verschenen ‘Utopia’. More weigerde Henry VIII als hoofd van de kerk te erkennen en moest dat met zijn dood bekopen. Dit vonnis vloeide dus niet direct voort uit het boek waarmee More zo bekend zou worden. Wellicht had More geleerd van de eerdere moeizame betrekkingen tussen filosofie en politiek en had hij daarom besloten om zich over ‘Ou-topia’ of ‘Nus-quama’ te buigen: over niet-plaats of nergens. Het in dialoogvorm opgetekende reisverhaal gaf op indirecte wijze kritiek op het Engeland van zijn tijd. Waarschijnlijk nog belangrijker dan het vermijden van risico’s door het schrijven over een niet reëel bestaande samenleving was het voordeel dat More op die manier een geheel ander beeld van een samenleving kon opstellen en beschrijven – ongehinderd door contingente omstandigheden, praktische bezwaren of politieke obstakels. More sloot de dialoog in ‘Utopia’ af met een korte overweging, waarin de auteur zegt zich nauwelijks te kunnen voorstellen dat deze samenleving ergens gerealiseerd zou kunnen worden. Vele lezers hebben deze overweging echter niet gezien of serieus genomen, zodat er al snel een ernstig meningsverschil over het genre van de utopie ontstond: vormde een utopie een blauwdruk voor een ideale samenleving die zonder meer ingevoerd zou moeten worden, of moest de utopie veeleer gelezen worden als een mengvorm van kritiek en ideaal – kritiek op de bestaande samenleving en richtinggevend ideaal voor nastrevenswaardige veranderingen van de huidige samenleving? (shrink)

De l'apathie de l'âme humaine, ou, L'incapacité de l'âme de se sentir, et l'absence de faculté de sentir en elle, alors que notre oragnisme vivant possède ces qualités -- Sur les idées distinctes des choses qui appartiennent soit à notre âme, soit à notre corps organique vivant -- Traité de l'art de philosopher avec simplicité et précision.

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set (...) of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article. (shrink)

This pioneering work in the history of science, which originated in a series of three Gauss Seminars given at Princeton University in 1984, demonstrated how the roots of the scientific revolution lay in medieval scholasticism.

Recent research on infant and animal imitation and on mirror neuron systems has
brought imitation back in focus in psychology and cognitive science. This topic has
always been important for philosophical hermeneutics as well, focusing on theory and
method of understanding. Unfortunately, relations between the scientific and the
hermeneutic approaches to imitation and understanding have scarcely been investigated,
to the loss of both disciplines. In contrast to the cognitive scientific emphasis on
sharing and convergence of representations, the hermeneutic analysis emphasizes the
indeterminacy and openness of action understanding (...) due to preunderstanding, action
configuration, and the processual nature of understanding. This article discusses empirical
evidence in support of these aspects and concludes that hermeneutics can
contribute to the scientific investigation of imitation and understanding. Since, conversely,
some grounding—and constraining—aspects of hermeneutics may be derived
from cognitive science, both should be integrated in a multilevel explanation of
imitation and understanding. This holds also for explanations that are largely based on
mirror neuron systems, since these appear to be sensitive to developmental and
experiential factors, too. (shrink)

In their response to our article (Keestra and Cowley, 2009), Hacker and Bennett charge us with failing to understand the project of their book Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (PFN; Bennett and Hacker, 2003) and do this by discussing foundationalism, linguistic conservatism and the passivity of perception. In this rebuttal we explore disagreements that explain the alleged errors. First, we reiterate our substantial disagreement with Bennett and Hacker (B&H) regarding their assumption that, even regarding much debated concepts like ‘consciousness’, we (...) can assume conceptual consensus within a community of competent speakers. Instead, we emphasize variability and divergence between individuals and groups in such contexts. Second, we plead for modesty in conceptual analysis, including the use of conceptual ambiguities as heuristics for the investigation of explanatory mechanisms. Third, we elucidate our proposal by discussing the interdependence of perception and action, which in some cases appear to be problematic for PFN. Fourth, we discuss why our view of conceptual innovation is different from B&H’s, as we plead for linking explanatory ingredients with conceptual analysis. We end by repeating our particular agreement with their mereological principle, even though we present different reasons: psychological concepts should not be applied to mere components or operations of explanatory mechanisms, for which another vocabulary should be developed. (shrink)

Is it not surprising that we look with so much pleasure and emotion at works of art that were made thousands of years ago? Works depicting people we do not know, people whose backgrounds are usually a mystery to us, who lived in a very different society and time and who, moreover, have been ‘frozen’ by the artist in a very deliberate pose. It was the Classical Greek philosopher Aristotle who observed in his Poetics that people could apparently be moved (...) even by the imitation of a person or an act. And although we are usually well aware that it is a simulacrum, not a real situation, it nevertheless sometimes seems as if we ourselves are standing there on the stage or in the painting, so intense and emotional is our response, even though we are just spectators. Aristotle concludes from this that we have intellectual capacities which allow us put ourselves in another’s place and consequently to react to simulated situations as though they are actually happening to us, here and now. In this process, he contends, observation, memory, imagination and emotions are crucial elements. In the past it was not customary to invoke human mental faculties to explain our response to works of art. The Ancient Greeks, after all, knew little about the human body or brain and usually referred to the extended world of the gods in their endeavours to comprehend the ‘inner world’ of human beings. In our time the situation is completely different—such an allusion to the brain no longer surprises us. Whether it is about the mystery of the consciousness, the question of free will or accounts of bizarre psychological aberrations or disorders, we have become accustomed to references to parts of the brain, to images of brain scans, to reports about neural networks and the like. However, because there are so many factors that play a part in our appreciation of works of art we need a complex explanation for it, and it is not enough to look only at certain properties of the brain that are determined by evolution. Those properties are shared by every human being, and so are rather useless in explaining people’s different reactions to the same work of art. Evidently the brains of individuals differ so much that they make it possible for people to respond differently to one and the same artwork. This, of course, raises questions concerning the painted emotions that can be seen in this exhibition. Virtually everyone, after all, is fascinated by such paintings and usually recognizes the emotions they represent. The reactions to these painted emotions are also often similar. This is probably why artworks like this are generally highly valued, then and now, here and elsewhere: from the enigmatically smiling Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and the startled Rembrandt to a seemingly despairing African mask. Aristotle observed that in the theatre players imitate actions that are associated with emotions in a number of ways and that these emotions are shared in a particular fashion by the playwright, the actors and the audience. The audience may even be carried away by these emotions to such an extent that they are in a sense purged of them and can subsequently leave the theatre relieved. Are such emotional reactions perhaps related to the fact that emotions are universal and that brains respond similarly to them? Is this why we can so readily identify painted emotions? May we therefore also assume that the properties of the brain determined by evolution help us to explain these emotions? In answering these questions we shall discuss a number of insights into emotions in psychology and brain science and explore some theories about the possible function of emotions and their expression. (shrink)

A crucial socio-political challenge for our age is how to rede!ne or extend group membership in such a way that it adequately responds to phenomena related to globalization like the prevalence of migration, the transformation of family and social networks, and changes in the position of the nation state. Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant assumed that international connectedness between humans would inevitably lead to the realization of world citizen rights. Nonetheless, globalization does not just foster cosmopolitanism but simultaneously yields the (...) development of new group boundaries. Group membership is indeed a fundamental issue in political processes, for: “the primary good that we distribute to one another is membership in some human community” – it is within the political community that power is being shared and, if possible, held back from non-members. In sum, it is appropriate to consider group membership a fundamental ingredient of politics and political theory. How group boundaries are drawn is then of only secondary importance. Indeed, Schmitt famously declared that “[e]very religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is suffciently strong to group human beings e#ectively according to friend and enemy”. Even though Schmitt’s idea of politics as being constituted by such antithetical groupings is debatable, it is plausible to consider politics among other things as a way of handling intergroup di#erences. Obviously, some of the group-constituting factors are more easily discernable from one’s appearance than others, like race, ethnicity, or gender. As a result, factors like skin color or sexual orientation sometimes carry much political weight even though individuals would rather con!ne these to their private lives and individual identity. Given the potential tension between the political reality of particular groupmembership defnitions and the – individual and political – struggles against those definitions and corresponding attitudes, citizenship and civic behavior becomes a complex issue. As Kymlicka points out, it implies for citizens an additional obligation to non-discrimination regarding those groups: “[t]his extension of non-discrimination from government to civil society is not just a shift in the scale of liberal norms, it also involves a radical extension in the obligations of liberal citizenship”. Unfortunately, empirical research suggests that political intolerance towards other groups “may be the more natural and ‘easy’ position to hold”. Indeed, since development of a virtue of civility or decency regarding other groups is not easy, as it often runs against deeply engrained stereotypes and prejudices, political care for matters like education is justified. Separate schools, for example, may erode children’s motivation to act as citizens, erode their capacity for it and!nally diminish their opportunities to experience transcending their particular group membership and behave as decent citizens. This chapter outlines a possible explanation for such consequences. That explanation will be found to be interdisciplinary in nature, combining insights from political theory and cognitive neuroscience. In doing so, it does not focus on collective action, even though that is a usual focus for political studies. For example, results pertaining to collective political action have demonstrated that the relation between attitudes and overt voting behavior or political participation is not as direct and strong as was hoped for. Several conditions, including the individual’s experiences, self-interest, and relevant social norms, turned out to interfere in the link between his or her attitude and behavior. Important as collective action is, this chapter is concerned with direct interaction between agents and the in$uence of group membership on such interaction – in particular joint action. Although politics does include many forms of action that require no such physical interaction, such physical interaction between individuals remains fundamental to politics – this is the reason why separate schooling may eventually undermine the citizenship of its isolated pupils. This chapter will focus on joint action, de!ned as: “any form of social interaction whereby two or more individuals coordinate their actions in space and time to bring about a change in the environment”. Cognitive neuroscienti!c evidence demonstrates that for such joint action to succeed, the agents have to integrate the actions and expected actions of the other person in their own action plans at several levels of speci!city. Although neuroscienti!c research is necessarily limited to simple forms of action, this concurs with a philosophical analysis of joint action, which I will discuss below. (shrink)

Recensie van: Christoph Menke, Tmgodie im Sittlichen. Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996. Paul Cobben, Postdialectische zedelijkheid. Ontwerp voor een Hegeliaans antwoord op Heidegger, Habermas, Derrida en Levinas. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1996. Hegels rechtsfilosofie speelt in de hedendaagse discussie tussen communitaristen en liberalen een belangrijke rol. Hij wordt door sommigen beschouwd als iemand die de vrijheid van het individu het primaat geeft - een echte liberaal dus -, dan wel als iemand die het individu ondergeschikt maakt aan de (...) gemeenschap, omdat indivi- dualiteit slechts binnen een gemeenschap kan ontstaan. Deze discussie vormt ook een deel van de achtergrond van Tragodie im Sittlichen en Postdialectische zedelijk- heid. Christoph Menke en Paul Cobben betogen beiden dat Hegel weliswaar te- kortgeschoten is in het doordenken van (aspecten van) de verhouding tussen indivi- du en gemeenschap, maar dat reeds in zijn eigen werk aanwijzingen te vinden zijn voor een correctie daarvan. Menke richt zich daarbij nadrukkelijker op de kant van het individu, Cobben meer op een herschrijving van de inrichting van de gemeen- schap. (shrink)

Moral distress has been well reviewed in the literature with established deleterious side effects for all healthcare professionals, including nurses, physicians, and others. Yet, little is known about the quality and effectiveness of interventions directed to address moral distress. The aim of this integrative review is to analyze published intervention studies to determine their efficacy and applicability across hospital settings. Of the initial 1373 articles discovered in October 2020, 18 were appraised as relevant, with 1 study added by hand search (...) and 2 after a repeated search was completed in January and then in May of 2021, for a total of 22 reviewed articles. This review revealed data mostly from nurses, with some studies making efforts to include other healthcare professions who have experienced moral distress. Education-based interventions showed the most success, though many reported limited power and few revealed statistically lowered moral distress post intervention. This may point to the difficulty in adequately addressing moral distress in real time without adequate support systems. Ultimately, these studies suggest potential frameworks which, when bolstered by organization-wide support, may aid in moral distress interventions making a measurable impact. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists have across the ages been amazed about the fact that development and learning often lead to not just a merely incremental and gradual change in the learner but sometimes to a result that is strikingly different from the learner’s original situation: amazed, but at times also worried. Both philosophical and cognitive neuroscientific insights suggest that experts appear to perform ‘different’ tasks compared to beginners who behave in a similar way. These philosophical and empirical perspectives give some insight (...) into what happens when a novice is transitioning to a stage of expertise. Generally, this implies that increased skill and expertise support better results and a more flexible performance, in part because these allow an agent to withdraw part of her attention and other cognitive resources from the tasks involved, enabling her to devote those resources to supporting, or completely different, tasks. As positive as these developments appear, these changes have also raised concerns. The main concern is whether gaining expertise is like raising a ‘cognitive monster’ which escapes the individual’s conscious control and influences her actions with undesirable automatisms. If so, we should ask ourselves whether experts are capable of taming this monster. The answer appears initially not to be positive. Indeed, it has been noted that since it is difficult for experts to withhold automatic responses this can lead to inflexibility or performance that is only optimal under certain conditions, because it is limited to a specific domain, often context-dependent, biased and inflexible. In what follows, I will consider this challenge of protecting expertise and harnessing this brittleness from philosophical and cognitive neuroscientific perspectives. Taking into account that action is in general determined by a multitude of factors, with learning and development affecting how these factors exert their influence, a philosophical question is how this complex and dynamic process can be explained and subsequently, how controlling it might be understood. First, though, I will present the issue at hand more closely: should we appreciate expertise if it is similar to growing a ‘cognitive monster’? Second, I will introduce the framework of a “Sculpted Space of Actions” (Keestra, 2014), which I developed in order to explain how the challenge of selecting an adequate option for action is facilitated by expertise as it helps to constrain the space of potential action options. Subsequently, the question is raised of how such a Sculpted Space of Actions influences an expert’s engagement with specific situations, like teaching students in a classroom setting. It will be argued that a well prepared expert—teacher or otherwise— is not only able to rely upon her routines but will at the same time be more perceptive and attentive to unforeseen events and actions, according to the recent cognitive neuroscientific theory of Predictive Processing. Integrating the theory of Predictive Processing with the Sculpted Space of Actions framework, I conclude that expertise contributes to adaptive and flexible responses to specific contexts, yet only if it is associated with explicit planning and articulation of situation specific intentions—the latter effectively putting the cognitive monster at rest for a while. (shrink)

Trauma and traumatization have arguably always been part of the human experience yet have in the last few decades come to occupy a prominent place in various popular and academic contexts. This chapter offers an interdisciplinary and comparative investigation of trauma and traumatization in different historical contexts. More specifically, my aim is to discuss whether the rich bodies of research in trauma and traumatization in Holocaust survivors and their descendants yield relevant insights for post-slavery contexts. It has been shown that (...) children of Holocaust survivors suffer from stress and other symptoms related to their parents’ traumatization which influence the interactions with their environments. Such results made me wonder whether the traumatic impact of chattel slavery—which has been abolished some 160 years ago—might have a similar impact, yet now across several generations. Issues of the transmission and current persistence of trauma are inherently linked to questions of social justice, recognition and reparations. This chapter is meant, however, as an exploration of interdisciplinary connections that should be studied in concert to account for the traumatic impact of historical and present day experiences. It starts by discussing the concepts of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Continuing by exploring the phenomenon of the inter- and transgenerational transmission of trauma, it relies in part on the important body of research conducted on families of Holocaust survivors. I then turn to the much less researched ‘post-traumatic slave syndrome’ (DeGruy) and discuss two factors that might contribute to the transgenerational transmission of trauma in the families of former enslaved: epigenetics and the continuation of traumatization even after the abolition of slavery as articulated in Historical Trauma theory. Drawing upon these insights, I conclude that it is plausible that a continuing transgenerational transmission of trauma might occur in some families of slavery survivors, the knowledge of which might help to break the chains of such traumatization across generations. (shrink)

Humans are capable of understanding an incredible variety of actions performed by other humans. Even though these range from primary biological actions, like eating and fleeing, to acts in parliament or in poetry, humans generally can make sense of each other’s actions. Understanding other people’s actions is called action understanding, and it can transcend differences in race, gender, culture, age, and social and historical circumstances. Action understanding is the cognitive ability to make sense of another person’s action by integrating perceptual (...) information about the behavior with knowledge about the immediate and sociocultural contexts of the action and with one’s own experience. Scholars are increasingly dissatisfied with monodisciplinary approaches to understanding human action. Such one-sidedness can rest upon various motives. For example, “hermeneutic interpretations” of action understanding tend to emphasize historical and cultural influences while overlooking that ultimately such influences depend upon individual cognitive processes. This has provoked criticism of the corresponding assumption that humans are born as a “blank slate” and that culture is solely responsible for all cognitive contents. However, such critique in turn easily slides into an overemphasis on the biology of human nature and a denial of sociocultural influences on cognition (Pinker, 2003). Fortunately, recent interdisciplinary endeavors have shown that an interdisciplinary approach is preferable when investigating complex functions like action understanding. The purpose of this chapter is to propose a “mechanism-based explanation” of action understanding that will provide a theoretical framework for integrating various and often conflicting disciplinary insights. (shrink)

Introduction: the neuroscientific turn in political science The observation that brains and political orders are interdependent is almost trivial. Obviously, political orders require brain processes in order to emerge and to remain in place, as these processes enable action and cognition. Conversely, every since Aristotle coined man as “by nature a political animal” (Aristotle, Pol.: 1252a 3; cf. Eth. Nic.: 1097b 11), this also suggests that the political engagements of this animal has likely consequences for its natural development, including the (...) development of its psychological functions. Given these mutual interdependencies, it is remarkable that only since the 1960s, the more general domain of ‘biopolitics’ has attracted attention though first particularly in the form of behavioral politics (Alford and Hibbing). Since then biopolitics has gained in interest, so much so that different subdomains can be identified. Indeed, a 2008 review of the field of biopolitics identified five ‘headings’ of it: “(1) the case for a ‘more biologically oriented political science’, (2) ‘biologically related’ public policy issues, (3) physiological measures of political attitudes and behaviour, (4) the influence of physiological factors on actual political behaviour, and (5) the manner in which our species’ evolutionary history has left homo sapiens genetically endowed with certain social and political behavioural tendencies” (Somit and Peterson 43). Striking is how the relation between biology and politics is taken here in a rather unidirectional way, emphasizing particularly the decisive power of biology upon politics. The reverse relation is not mentioned specifically, reflecting the field of biopolitics, perhaps until quite recently. This absence of studies of political influences on our biology may have to do with the difficulty in investigating such influences. Empirical studies in biopolitics have two foci, broadly speaking: genetics and the brain, both of which have turned out to be complex and dynamic phenomena (Alford and Hibbing). Yet the studies of genetics and brain processes have made much progress in the last few decades, thanks to the development of research instruments - like fMRI brain scanners and TMS brain stimulation instruments - and of computational tools for data analysis and the simulation of explanatory models. For the field of biopolitics it is particularly relevant that within cognitive neuroscience the study of social and political issues has witnessed an increasing interest of researchers even more recently. Indeed, aware of the enabling and mediating role of the brain regarding those issues, a truly ‘neuroscientific turn’ can be observed in the social sciences, testified for example by the emergence of the field of ‘neuropolitics’ (Connolly; Vandervalk). Developing a systematic neuropolitics or biopolitics in general is a difficult challenge because of the wealth of causal influences on and interdependencies between biological, brain, cognitive and socio-political factors. Taking a somewhat more abstract perspective, this paper focuses on the process of emerging complexity in adaptive systems, enabling those to conduct ever more complex processes. Yet, parallel to that development can be observed that such systems, or organisms, are also capable in reducing the complexity of the information they are to process. Once they’re capable of developing and adjusting such compressed and complex representations of information, those systems or organisms can handle more information faster and more efficient and adaptive, yielding important benefits to the organism in navigating its environment (Halford, Wilson and Phillips). Before focusing on the role of narrative as a cognitive strategy for such a reduction of informational complexity, I will discuss the development of stable structures and increasing complexity in dynamic systems. Such a more general perspective prepares our discussion of the structures of both narratives and politics and in doing so contributes to the explanation of their interaction. (shrink)

Introduction: Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and action research of a city in lockdown. As we write this chapter, most cities across the world are subject to a similar set of measures due to the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus, which is now a global pandemic. Independent of city size, location, or history, an observer would note that almost all cities have now ground to a halt, with their citizens being confined to their private dwellings, social and public gatherings being almost entirely forbidden, and (...) commercial areas being nearly devoid of visitors. Striking as these apparent similarities are, closer scrutiny would reveal important differences between cities and within cities – differences that can be highly relevant to consider when scholars are assessing the responses of cities to this pandemic or trying to predict the consequences of those responses. For example, the public health systems in some cities are better prepared than in others for coping with the increasing number of patients in life threatening conditions. Multigenerational households, which are associated with a greater risk for elderly members, are not equally common in all cities. Tourist destinations have taken a more severe economic hit from the lockdown than those cities which are economically less dependent upon this particular source of income. Communal celebrations in one city will result in a higher number of contagions and perhaps even deaths in this situation, whereas that same social fabric generally does contribute to a population’s health. The pandemic has also had unprecedented effects on differences and inequalities within cities. In cities in the United States, neighborhoods primarily inhabited by African Americans have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 due to living and health conditions, yet also due to the fact they disproportionately perform vital jobs. Parks and green spaces are crowded, while city centers like Amsterdam’s Red Light District have suddenly lost the bustle of tourism, providing opportunities for citizens to reoccupy scarce public spaces and reclaim ownership. Clearly, such differences between cities are in many cases only discernible to the eye of an expert, possessing the necessary background knowledge to interpret the perceptible local changes caused by the global pandemic. Typically, drawing upon his or her disciplinary training, the expert also knows how to further probe the impact of the pandemic in an appropriate way. However, compared to the usual application of expertise, this crisis situation might, in an unusual way, test even experts. For the pandemic has created a unique situation, imposing unfamiliar constraints on the health, economic, social, and other conditions of cities, constraints that interact in sometimes unexpected ways with each other. Such interactions in turn force experts to collaborate across the boundaries commonly associated with disciplines, their concepts, theories, methods, and assumptions (Klein, 1996). These brief observations of how a virus pandemic can have differential impacts upon various cities, and what this exceptional situation might mean for the application of city methods, allow us to draw a few consequences for the current context of this chapter on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. First, whenever we are investigating a complex and dynamic phenomenon it is by no means easy to determine which disciplinary perspectives are required to do justice to it. Indeed, the choice of useful disciplines can only be made after an initial overview of the situation and a preliminary selection of what appear to be the most important features of the situation. Relevance is key in guiding this selection process and scholars must remain open to the possibility that they may need to revise their earlier assessments of what is relevant and what is not. Second, if scholars from different disciplines were to study different features of a city in isolation, their ‘multidisciplinary’ account would miss important dynamic and complex interactions, such as those between a city’s demographics and geographical situation, its governance and economy. In other words, it is the integration of the perspectives of different disciplines that is crucial, as only then are such interactions taken into account. Indeed, this integration between disciplinary perspectives is what distinguishes an interdisciplinary from a multidisciplinary account. Thirdly, in addition to checking the relevance of disciplines and aiming for their integration, the outcome of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research has typically limited generalizability. Since a city is sensitive to a multitude of internal and external dynamical factors, in ways that partly rest upon its socio-cultural history, its investigation will often have the nature of a case study rather than be capable of leading to law-like insights (Krohn, 2010; Menken & Keestra, 2016). As can be seen from these three characteristics of ascertaining the relevance of different disciplinary contributions, the challenge of their integration, and the limited generalizability of their results owing to the specificity of interdisciplinary (ID) and transdisciplinary (TD) research, such research into ‘real world problems’ is clearly distinct from most monodisciplinary research. A consequence of this distinction is the absence of a general ID/TD methodology that can guide specific case studies. By contrast, the collaboration implied in such research requires researchers – and stakeholders, if they are involved – to reflect upon their potential contribution and the implicit assumptions associated with that. We will elaborate on this in the next section. Next, we offer several typologies of integration that urban scholars could employ for their research projects, after which we will offer a few brief analyses of initial collaborations of urban research. Finally, we discuss in more detail the process of the interdisciplinary research project. This will include a brief reflection upon the decision-making process that is implied in such projects. In sum, we aim to provide some guidance in conducting an ID/TD project, albeit not in the form of a definite methodology. (shrink)

With the positively ending Elektra, Sophocles wanted to show the audience how political and moral independence, judgment and the courage to act are necessary - to a sometimes extreme extent - for the good of the family and the state. Even in the old democracy, virtue - which for Hegel was a principle of democracy - was not enough on its own. The downfall of democracy was probably due to a lack of individuality rather than the emergence of that individuality. (...) We find the negative result of Hegel's general assessment of the contribution of an individual to democracy not only in relation to ancient democracy. In a similar sense he expresses himself about contemporary conditions. In the Reform Bill article he describes how a French voter makes up a ninety-millionth part of the legislative power and will therefore pay little attention to his contribution to the general public. Although the Athenian democracy was smaller and different from the French one, its citizens probably needed proof of the need for individual participation in it too. Sophocles' Electra served this purpose. How Elektra and Orestes re-paved the way for an essential institution of democracy, the court of justice, will not have escaped the onlookers' attention. In this play it was shown that individuality could have negative as well as positive consequences. After all, it was only through the appearance of Electra and Orestes that justice could be saved and become a public matter again. (shrink)

What can insights from psychological science contribute to interdisciplinary research, conducted by individuals or by interdisciplinary teams? Three articles shed light on this by focusing on the micro- (personal), meso- (inter-personal), and macro- (team) level. This Introduction (and Table of Contents) to the 'Special Section on Interdisciplinary Collaborations' offers a brief description of the conference session that was the point of departure for two of the three articles. Frank Kessel and Machiel Keestra organized a panel session for the March (...) 2015 meeting of the International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) in Amsterdam, which was the titled “Theoretical and Methodological Contributions of Inter/Trans-Disciplinarity (ID/TD) to Successful Integrative Psychological Science.” Machiel Keestra's article analyses how metacognition and philosophical reflection complement each other by making scholarly experts aware of their cognitive processes and representations. As such, these processes contribute to individual and team interdisciplinary research. Hans Dieleman's article proposes a transdisciplinary hermeneutics that acknowledges the embodied nature of cognition and contributes to richer and more creative interdisciplinary knowledge production. The article by Lash-Marshall, Nomura, Eck & Hirsch was added later and continues by focusing on the macro-level of institutional and team arrangements and the role of facilitative leadership in supporting interdisciplinary team research. The original conference panel session's introduction by Frank Kessel and the contribution on the Toolbox Project's dialogue method by Michael O'Rourke are briefly described as well. Together, this Special Section on Interdisciplinary Collaboration offers a wide variety of insights in and practical instructions for successfully conducting interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

Brasil tiene una larga historia de problemas ambientales, pero la filosofía parece ir atrás de otras disciplinas que activamente consideran esta historia. Sin embargo, existe una tradición intelectual suficientemente rica para permitir el surgimiento de una filosofía ambiental genuina. Basados sobre una detallada panorámica de las discusiones pertenecientes a la reflexión ambiental y al activismo en Brasil, este trabajo revela tres campos de tensión en su historiaambiental reciente –desarrollismo militar versus activismo ambiental militante, realismo antropocéntrico versus utopía ecocéntrica, desarrollo sostenible (...) versus sostenibilidad dura–todo lo cual presupone posiciones filosóficas y representa tres correspondientes "culpables intelectuales" que deben abordarse. Entre las tendencias emergentes de la filosofía ambiental, pueden destacarse dos avenidas de pensamiento que prometen dispersar estos "culpables": pluralismo etnocultural y responsabilidad ambiental global. (shrink)

(text in Dutch) Mediated by the so-called Dream-organ ('Traumorgan') which opera composer Richard Wagner mentions in his writings, the author engages in a fictitious dialogue with Wagner. Their dialogue focuses on a few topics related to the conference theme 'Conflict and compassion' that were of concern to Wagner in his days and which have undergone some serious changes since his death. The author discusses with Wagner the 'death of tragedy', sexuality and desire after the sexual revolution, the attractivity of musical (...) genres like film and dance music, and the role of travel. (shrink)

Brasil tiene una larga historia de problemas ambientales, pero la filosofía parece ir atrás de otras disciplinas que activamente consideran esta historia. Sin embargo, existe una tradición intelectual suficientemente rica para permitir el surgimiento de una filosofía ambiental genuina. Basados sobre una detallada panorámica de las discusiones pertenecientes a la reflexión ambiental y al activismo en Brasil, este trabajo revela tres campos de tensión en su historiaambiental reciente –desarrollismo militar versus activismo ambiental militante, realismo antropocéntrico versus utopía ecocéntrica, desarrollo sostenible (...) versus sostenibilidad dura–todo lo cual presupone posiciones filosóficas y representa tres correspondientes "culpables intelectuales" que deben abordarse. Entre las tendencias emergentes de la filosofía ambiental, pueden destacarse dos avenidas de pensamiento que prometen dispersar estos "culpables": pluralismo etnocultural y responsabilidad ambiental global. (shrink)

The starting-point and, at the same time, the foundation of recent scholarship on the Arabic translations of Aristotle's Metaphysics are Maurice Bouyges' excellent critical edition of the work in which the extant translations of the Metaphysics are preserved – i.e. Averroes' Tafsīr of the Metaphysics – and his comprehensive account of the Arabic translations and translators of the Metaphysics in the introductory volume. Relying on the texts made available by Bouyges and the impressive amount of philological information conveyed in his (...) edition, subsequent scholars have been able to select and focus on more specific topics, providing, for example, a closer inspection of the Arabic translations of the single books of the Metaphysics, or a detailed comparison of some of these translations with the original text of the Metaphysics. A new trend of research in recent times has been the study of these versions as part of the wider context of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. (shrink)

When introduced around 1925, interdisciplinarity, grounded in the notion of the unity of knowledge, was meant to reconnect the fragmented and specialized disciplines of academia. However, interdisciplinary research became more and more challenging as the plurality and heterogeneity of disciplinary perspectives and insights increased. Insisting on this divergence and diversity, Julie Thompson Klein has nonetheless contributed in important ways to convergence in interdisciplinarity with her work on the process of integration as interdisciplinarity's defining feature. Of course, she is aware that (...) the increasing inclusion of extra-academic stakeholders in transdisciplinary research constitutes a fundamental challenge to integrative interdisciplinarity. This challenge implies that next to academic contributions, experiential knowledge, interests, and norms must be recognized as valuable to the process, and stakeholder expectations of applicable results must be met. Exploring the future by extending this crucial development further, this article focuses on the actionability of knowledge as an additional criterion for effective interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, as it is in Action Research. With action options for stakeholders being an important goal for such research, it is argued that joint deliberation about these options must be part of the process, aiming for reflective equilibrium. At the same time, an important role for imagination is defended, enabling adequate consideration of action options with their ramifications and implications. The future of interdisciplinarity, it is concluded, will entail an important role for the actionability criterion and for the related role of imagination of potential outcomes, much greater roles than these now have. (shrink)

Humans are capable of understanding an incredible variety of actions performed by other humans. Even though these range from primary biological actions, like eating and fleeing, to acts in parliament or in poetry, humans generally can make sense of each other’s actions. Action understanding is the cognitive ability to make sense of another person’s action by integrating perceptual information about the behavior with knowledge about the immediate and sociocultural contexts of the action, understanding of relevant meanings and one’s own experience. (...) Given the importance of action understanding in every domain of human life and society, and in light of the complexities that surround it, a comprehensive scientific understanding of this capacity is needed. Scholars are increasingly dissatisfied with monodisciplinary approaches to understanding human action, like when an action is interpreted only in sociocultural terms while overlooking cognitive constraints, or when an action is understood in biological terms while neglecting its psychological impact on the agent. Recent interdisciplinary endeavors demonstrate how an interdisciplinary approach is possible when investigating complex functions like action understanding. Ever more insight is gained in the mutual influences between biological, cognitive and sociocultural processes that together contribute to action and action understanding. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how a ‘mechanistic explanation’, or a ‘mechanism-based explanation’ of action understanding provides a theoretical framework for integrating various and often conflicting disciplinary insights. By applying the heuristics of ‘definition’, ‘decomposition’ and ‘localization’, researchers can determine the phenomenon that they collaboratively investigate while at the same time dividing this task into smaller component tasks of which the results must eventually be put together. Some researchers, for example, can apply a hermeneutic approach to the sociocultural environment in which action understanding takes place, while others aim to specify the cognitive processes or the neuro-electrical pathways that are activated under those conditions. After having presented a step-by-step analysis of an interdisciplinary investigation of action understanding by way of developing a mechanistic explanation the chapter closes with some suggestions for testing its result and mentions some limitations of this approach. (shrink)

[This book replaces the - discontinued - first edition of 'Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research' (2016, by Menken & Keestra)] We are increasingly realizing that, as a result of technological developments and globalization, problems are becoming so complex that they can only be solved through cooperation between scientists from different disciplines. Healthcare, climate change, food security, globalization, and quality of life are just a few examples of issues that require scientists to work across disciplines. In many cases, extra-academic stakeholders must (...) be involved in order to arrive at robust solutions. Young academics are being called on to step beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines to contribute to addressing fundamental, often societal problems. As a result of these developments, an interdisciplinary approach is becoming increasingly necessary and popular in higher education. Students need to learn more about how to integrate and apply knowledge, methods, and skills from different fields. The crucial step of integration within interdisciplinary research is treated extensively in this textbook, which contains a comprehensive ‘interdisciplinary integration toolbox’. In addition, students must learn to collaborate in teams. An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Research serves as a systematic manual to guide students through this interdisciplinary research process. (shrink)

This book offers a fresh account of one of the remarkable figures in the Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), by focusing on a neglected aspect of his work; his reading of scholasticism and its reception in the fifteenth century.

"Perceptions of Jewish History scintillates with original ideas and insights. It will appeal to a broad audience." --Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame "Students of the Jewish past will welcome this volume; it will also attract readers with the widest possible range of interests." --Robert Chazan, New York University.

El presente trabajo pretende ser una reflexión teórica sobre las rupturas y nuevas articulaciones de las formas de movilización política en el periodo postcrisis. Proponemos que en la década de 2010, catalizadas por las tecnologías digitales, cristalizan tres grandes rupturas: socioeconómicas, en las que la precarización de las condiciones laborales y vitales supone la reemergencia de una crítica social material; temporales, en las que la dinámica aceleradora del capitalismo tardío intensifica la primacía del corto plazo; y socioculturales, en las que (...) la fragmentación se traduce en una sensación de inseguridad e incertidumbre. Todo ello deriva en una transformación en las formas de movilización, que tienden hacia una acción colectiva efímera, espasmódica. Esta puede dar pie al surgimiento del gran evento, donde lo primordial es juntar físicamente a personas y recuperar el sentido de comunidad. (shrink)