Este artículo se ocupa del problema de cuál pueda ser la naturaleza de la creencia y cuál la mejor explicación de su normatividad. Se analizan diversas teorías que desarrollan el modelo ¿estado más contenido¿, y se presenta como alternativa una concepción de filiación wittgensteiniana que entiende la creencia como acción simbólica y expresiva. This paper is devoted to the question of the nature of belief, and what the best explanation of its normativity is. Several theories based on the model "state (...) plus content" are analysed, and is presented a wittgensteinianan conception which understands belief as symbolic and expressive action. (shrink)

In this paper a non-paradoxical interpretation of Hobbes’s defence of scientific realism of materialistic type is proposed. It attempts to explain how this author was able to defend the truth of materialism and at the same time to deny that it could be demonstrated in a metaphysical way. The key to his position depends on the metaphorical use of the concept of ‘imitation’ and the treatment of the infinite and irresistible power as the philosophically relevant attribute of God. So Hobbes’s (...) intention would consist of saying that the explanation, but not the demonstration, of the truth of materialism depends on the ontological parity and continuity between the world and the human being, in the way in which they are explained by empirical science. In this sense Hobbes’s project, very different to Descartes’s one, would be an attempt to naturalise the epistemology that yet is conscious of the metaphysical limits affecting the naturalistic proposals of philosophy. (shrink)

La meva intenció en les pàgines següents és analitzar la teoria del llenguatge que es troba en el Cràtil de Plató. D'una banda, s'analitza la concepció del significat de les paraules quePlató sembla defensar en aquest diàleg; de l'altra, s'ocupa del problema dels orígens delllenguatge. Aquestes qüestions s'estudien en relació amb la perspectiva ontològica i epistemològicade Plató: essencialisme, teoria de la reminiscència i les tesis dels sofistes sobre laimpossibilitat de parlar amb falsedat. La conclusió és que en el Cràtil podem (...) trobar ja la preparació de la teoria del llenguatge que Plató necessitarà per a la seva ulterior teoria de les idees. (shrink)

La meva intenció en les pàgines següents és analitzar la teoria del llenguatge que es troba en el Cràtil de Plató. D'una banda, s'analitza la concepció del significat de les paraules quePlató sembla defensar en aquest diàleg; de l'altra, s'ocupa del problema dels orígens delllenguatge. Aquestes qüestions s'estudien en relació amb la perspectiva ontològica i epistemològicade Plató: essencialisme, teoria de la reminiscència i les tesis dels sofistes sobre laimpossibilitat de parlar amb falsedat. La conclusió és que en el Cràtil podem (...) trobar ja la preparació de la teoria del llenguatge que Plató necessitarà per a la seva ulterior teoria de les idees. (shrink)

Este artículo se ocupa del problema de cuál pueda ser la naturaleza de la creencia y cuál la mejor explicación de su normatividad. Se analizan diversas teorías que desarrollan el modelo ¿estado más contenido¿, y se presenta como alternativa una concepción de filiación wittgensteiniana que entiende la creencia como acción simbólica y expresiva.

The concept of randomness has been unjustly neglected in recent philosophical literature, and when philosophers have thought about it, they have usually acquiesced in views about the concept that are fundamentally flawed. After indicating the ways in which these accounts are flawed, I propose that randomness is to be understood as a special case of the epistemic concept of the unpredictability of a process. This proposal arguably captures the intuitive desiderata for the concept of randomness; at least it should suggest (...) that the commonly accepted accounts cannot be the whole story and more philosophical attention needs to be paid. 1. Randomness in science1.1Random systems1.2Random behaviour1.3Random sampling1.4Caprice, arbitrariness and noise2. Concepts of randomness2.1Von Mises/church/martin-löf randomness2.2KCS-randomness3. Randomness is unpredictability: preliminaries3.1Process and product randomness3.2Randomness is indeterminism?4. Predictability4.1Epistemic constraints on prediction4.2Computational constraints on prediction4.3Pragmatic constraints on prediction4.4Prediction defined5. Unpredictability6. Randomness is unpredictability6.1Clarification of the definition of randomness6.2Randomness and probability6.3Subjectivity and context sensitivity of randomness7. Evaluating the analysis[R]andomness … is going to be a concept which is relative to our body of knowledge, which will somehow reflect what we know and what we don't know. Henry E. Kyburg, Jr ([1974], p. 217)Phenomena that we cannot predict must be judged random. Patrick Suppes ([1984], p. 32). (shrink)

This paper aims at reconstructing how the positive image of Octavian resp. Augustus, which can be found in the Greek literature of the early 2nd century AD (e. g. in Plutarch), was formed. During their conflict with Octavian, Marc Antony and his party were creating an image of their opponent which displayed numerous forms of disparagement and of invective elements. After his victory, Octavian faced the challenge to restore his reputation also in the Greek East. As a starting point for (...) this restoration he provided his autobiography, which was probably published at an early date, i. e. about the late 20s BC. At the same time, both in poetry (Crinagoras) and prose (Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo) an image of the princeps as a bringer of peace and culture was created. After a cooperation with Timagenes had failed, Nicolaus of Damascus added to the positive image of Augustus by composing a panegyrical biography of Augustus which incorporated also his childhood and youth. (shrink)

This book explores Caputo's proposal for a radical theology of our time. Philosophers and theologians from within Europe respond to Caputo's attempt to configure a less rigid, less dogmatic form of religion. These scholars, in turn, receive responses by Caputo, thereby strengthening the development of radical theology in Europe and abroad.

We examined social facilitation and emotional convergence in amusement, sadness, and fear in dynamic interactions. Dyads of friends or strangers jointly watched emotion-eliciting films while they either could or could not communicate nonverbally. We assessed three components of each emotion (expressions, appraisals, and feelings), as well as attention to and social motives toward the co-participant. In Study 1, participants interacted through a mute videoconference. In Study 2, they sat next to each other and either were or were not separated by (...) a partition. Results revealed that facilitation and convergence are not uniform across different emotions and emotion components. Particularly strong supporting patterns emerged for the facilitation of and convergence in smiling. When direct interaction was possible (Study 2), friends showed a general tendency for strong convergence, with the exception of fear-related appraisals. This suggests that underlying processes of emotional contagion and social appraisal are differentially relevant for different emotions. (shrink)

According to standard assumptions in semantics, ordinary users of a language have implicit beliefs about the truth-conditions of sentences in that language, and they often agree on those beliefs. For example, it is assumed that if Anna and John are both competent users of English and the former utters ‘grass is green’ in conversation with the latter, they will both believe that that sentence is true if and only if grass is green. These assumptions play an important role in an (...) intuitively compelling picture of communication, according to which successful communication through literal assertoric utterances is normally effected thanks to our shared beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences uttered in the course of the conversation. Against these standard assumptions, this paper argues that the participants in a conversation rarely have the same beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences involved in a linguistic interaction. More precisely, it argues for Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition which more than one language user believes to be that utterance’s truth-conditional content. If Variance is true, we must reject the standard picture of communication. Towards the end of the paper I identify three ways in which ordinary conversations can be communication-like despite the truth of Variance and argue that the most natural amendments to the standard picture fail to explain them. (shrink)

In der Vorlesung des Sommersemesters 1927 unter dem Titel Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie nimmt Martin Heidegger eine Neue Ausarbeitung des 3. Abschnitts des I. Teiles von 'Sein und Zeit' in Angriff. Der Gesamtbestand der Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie in ihrer Systematik und Begrundung besteht in der Diskussion der Grundfrage nach dem Sinn von Sein uberhaupt und der aus ihr entspringenden Probleme. Die so gekennzeichnete Thematik von Zeit und Sein wird auf dem Umweg einer phanomenologischen Erorterung von vier geschichtlichen Thesen uber (...) das Sein behandelt. Die phanomenologisch-kritische Diskussion dieser Thesen fuhrt zu der Einsicht, dass allem zuvor die Grundfrage nach dem Sinn von Sein uberhaupt beantwortet sein muss, um die aus den vier geschichtlichen Thesen herausgeschalten vier Grundprobleme in zureichender Weise systematisch ausarbeiten zu konnen. Wer Sein und Zeit als einen Weg zur Ausarbeitung der Seinsfrage uberhaupt als dem Ziel studiert, bleibt auf Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie verwiesen. (shrink)

I am trying...to go back through all those places where I was exiled-enclosed so he could constitute his there. To read his text to try to take back from it what he took from me irrecoverably...I am trying to re-discover the possibility of a relation to air. Don’t I need one, well before starting to speak?

Indirect speech reports can be true even if they attribute to the speaker the saying of something weaker than what she in fact expressed, yet not all weakenings of what the speaker expressed yield true reports. For example, if Anna utters ‘Bob and Carla passed the exam’, we can accurately report her as having said that Carla passed the exam, but we can not accurately report her as having said that either it rains or it does not, or that either (...) Carla passed the exam or pandas are cute. This paper offers an analysis of speech reports that distinguishes weakenings of what the speaker expressed that yield true reports from weakenings that do not. According to this analysis, speech reports are not only sensitive to the informational content of what the speaker expressed, but also to the possibilities a speaker raises in making an utterance. As I argue, this analysis has significant advantages over its most promising competitors, including views based on work by Barwise and Perry : 668–691, 1981), views appealing to recent work on the notion of content parthood by Fine :199–226, 2016) and Yablo, and Richard’s : 605–616, 1998) proposal appealing to structured propositions. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in metaphysical explanation, and philosophers have fixed on the notion of ground as the conceptual tool with which such explanation should be investigated. I will argue that this focus on ground is myopic and that some metaphysical explanations that involve the essences of things cannot be understood in terms of ground. Such ‘essentialist’ explanation is of interest, not only for its ubiquity in philosophy, but for its being in a sense an ultimate (...) form of explanation. I give an account of the sense in which such explanation is ultimate and support it by defending what I call the inessentiality of essence. I close by suggesting that this principle is the key to understanding why essentialist explanations can seem so satisfying. (shrink)

In this paper I describe the apparent differences between the views of Mizrahi and Seidel on the strength of arguments from expert opinion. I show that most of Seidel's objections rely on an understanding of the words 'expert' and 'opinion' different from those which Mizrahi employs. I also discuss certain inconsistencies found in both papers over the use of these key terms. The paper concludes by noting that Mizrahi is right to suggest that evidence shows expert predictions to be unreliable, (...) but Seidel is correct to observe that this finding should not be used to claim that expert opinion in general is not to be trusted. (shrink)

Any explanation of one fact in terms of another will appeal to some sort of connection between the two. In a causal explanation, the connection might be a causal mechanism or law. But not all explanations are causal, and neither are all explanatory connections. For example, in explaining the fact that a given barn is red in terms of the fact that it is crimson, we might appeal to a non-causal connection between things’ being crimson and their being red. Many (...) such connections, like this one, are general rather than particular. I call these general non-causal explanatory connections 'laws of metaphysics'. In this paper I argue that some of these laws are to be found in the world at its most fundamental level, forming a bridge between fundamental reality and everything else. It is only by admitting fundamental laws, I suggest, that we can do justice to the explanatory relationship between what is fundamental and what is not. And once these laws are admitted, we are able to provide a nice resolution of the puzzle of why there are any non-fundamental facts in the first place. (shrink)

Sentence comprehension involves maintaining and continuously integrating linguistic information and, thus, makes demands on working memory. Past research has demonstrated that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, is critical for integrating word meanings across some distance and resolving semantic interference in sentence comprehension. Here, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the comprehension of center-embedded relative clause sentences, often argued to make heavy demands on WM. Additionally, we examined the relation between phonological and semantic WM and the (...) comprehension of transitive and dative active and passive sentences, which may also draw on WM resources depending on the number of propositions that must be maintained and the difficulty of processing passive clauses. In a large sample of individuals with aphasia, we assessed whether comprehension performance on more complex vs. simpler active-passive or embedded relative clause sentences would be predicted by semantic but not phonological WM when controlling for single word comprehension. For performance on the active-passive comprehension task, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of dative sentences when controlling for comprehension of transitive sentences. We also found that phonological WM, but not semantic WM, predicted mean comprehension for reversible active-passive sentences when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. On the relative clause comprehension task, consistent with prior results, we found that semantic WM, but not phonological WM, predicted comprehension of object relative clause sentences and relative clause sentences with a passive construction. However, both phonological WM and semantic WM predicted mean comprehension across all relative clause types for reversible trials when controlling for trials with lexical distractors. While we found evidence of semantic WM’s role in comprehension, we also observed unpredicted relations between phonological WM and comprehension in some conditions. Post-hoc analyses provided preliminary evidence that phonological WM maintains a backup phonological representation of the sentence that may be accessed when sentence comprehension processing is less efficient. Future work should investigate possible roles that phonological WM may play across sentence types. (shrink)

I : PETRARCH'S BRITAIN 1: Piero Boitani: Petrarch and the barbari Britanni II: PETRARCH AND THE SELF 2: Jennifer Petrie: Petrarch solitarius 3: Zygmunt G. Baranski: The Ethics of Ignorance: Petrarch's Epicurus and Averroes and the Structures of the De Sui Ipsius et Aliorum Ignorantia 4: Jonathan Usher: Petrarch's Second Death III: PETRARCH IN DIALOGUE 5: Francesca Galligan: Poets and Heroes in Petrarch's Africa: Classical and Medieval Sources 6: Enrico Santangelo: Petrarch reading Dante: the Ascent of Mont Ventoux 7: John (...) Took: Petrarch and Cino da Pistoia: A Moment in the Pre-history of the Canzoniere IV: PETRARCHISM AND ANTIPETRARCHISM IN ITALY 8: Abigail Brundin: Petrarch and the Italian Reformation 9: Hilary Gatti: Petrarch, Sidney, Bruno 10: Diego Zancani: Renaissance Misogyny and the Rejection of Petrarch 11: Letizia Panizza: Impersonations of Laura in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Italy V: PETRARCHISM: ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH CONNECTIONS 12: Michael Wyatt: Other Petrarchs in Early Modern England 13: Stephen Clucas: Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia and European Petrarchism 14: John Roe: The Comedy of Astrophil: Petrarchan Motifs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella 15: Syrithe Pugh: Sidney, Spenser and Political Petrarchism 16: R. D. S. Jack: Petrarch and the Scottish Renaissance Sonnet VI: PETRARCH AND THE MODERNS: ITALY AND BRITAIN 17: Pamela Williams: Leopardi and Petrarch 18: Ela Tandello: Between Tradition and Transgression: Amelia Rosselli's Petrarch 19: Martin McLaughlin: Nineteenth-century British Biographies of Petrarch 20: Peter Hainsworth: Translating Petrarch. (shrink)

Martin Mees | : Cet article propose une réévaluation de la notion d’« événement » en matière d’esthétique, ce qui nécessite de s’interroger plus spécifiquement sur la temporalité propre au concept de « sublime », associé traditionnellement à une fulgurance, un instant sidérant qui ferait justement événement. Le développement s’appuie sur l’Analytique kantienne du sublime qui, en diverses occasions, met en avant le caractère paradoxal d’un sublime qui ne semble pouvoir se déployer qu’au prix d’une temporalité double, qualifiée ultimement (...) de régressive. Je défendrai ici la thèse que le sublime renvoie en réalité à une expérience esthétique de l’événement comme tel, à même de nous faire penser une certaine « Idée esthétique » du temps. Une telle expérience semble d’ailleurs pouvoir trouver forme dans différentes productions poétiques de notre modernité. | : This article proposes a re-evaluation of the notion of “event” in the field of aesthetics, which requires to question the specific temporality of the concept of “sublime”, traditionally associated with a flash, a staggering moment, which precisely constitutes an event. The development leans on the Kantian Analytic of the sublime which, on diverse occasions, highlights the paradoxical character of a sublime that only seems able to fulfil itself at the price of a double temporality, ultimately named regressive. I shall defend here the thesis that the sublime refers actually to an aesthetic experience of the event per se, allowing us to conceptualise a certain “aesthetic idea” of time. Such an experience, as a matter of fact, seems to be embodied in different poetic productions of our modernity. (shrink)

The Concept of Time presents the reconstructed text of a lecture delivered by Martin Heidegger to the Marburg Theological Society in 1924. It offers a fascinating insight into the developmental years leading up to the publication, in 1927, of his magnum opus Being and Time, itself one of the most influential philosophical works this century. In The Concept of Time Heidegger introduces many of the central themes of his analyses of human existence which were subsequently incorporated into Being and (...) Time, themes such as Dasein, Being-in-the-world, everydayness, disposition, care, authenticity, death, uncanniness, temporality and historicity. Starting out by asking: What is time?, Heidegger proceeds to radicalise the concept of time and our relation to it, ending with the question: Are we ourselves time? Am I time? (shrink)

We live in a world where it is impossible to exist without, and beyond, technologies. Despite this omnipresence, we tend to overlook their influence on us. The vigorously developing approach of postphenomenology, combining insights from phenomenology and pragmatism, focuses on the so-called technological mediation, i.e., on how technologies as mediators of human-world relations influence the appearing of both the world and the human beings in it. My analysis aims at demonstrating both the methodological weaknesses and open possibilities of postphenomenology. After (...) summarizing its essentials, I will scrutinize, first, its ability to turn to the technological things themselves and, second, the so-called empirical turn as realized by postphenomenology. By assessing its conceptual framework from the phenomenological perspective, I hope to demonstrate that postphenomenology needs philosophical clarification and strengthening. In short, it needs a more phenomenological, and less pragmatic, approach to technology in its influence on human experience. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to give a good account of the argument from ignorance, with a presumptive argumentation scheme, and to raise issues on the work of Walton, the nature of abduction and the concept of epistemic closure. First, I offer a brief disambiguation of how the terms 'argument from ignorance' and 'argumentum ad ignorantiam' are used. Second, I show how attempts to embellish this form of reasoning by Douglas Walton and A.J. Kreider have been unnecessary and (...) unhelpful. Lastly, I offer a full and effective account of the argument from ignorance and discuss the lessons of the analysis.Le but de cet article est double: donner un bon compte rendu de l'argument par l'ignorance, avec un schème d'argumentation présomptif, et soulever des questions sur certains aspects de l’œuvre de Walton, la nature des raisonnements abductifs et le concept de fermeture épistémique. Premièrement, j'offre une brève désambiguïsation de la façon dont les termes «argument par l'ignorance» et «argumentum ad ignorantiam» sont utilisés. Deuxièmement, je montre comment les tentatives de Douglas Walton et de A.J. Kreider d'embellir cette forme de raisonnement ont été ni nécessaires et ni utiles. Enfin, j'offre un compte-rendu complet et utile de l'argument par l'ignorance et je discute des leçons de l'analyse. (shrink)

The nexus of the moral luck debate is the control principle, which says that people are responsible only for things within their control. In this paper, I will first argue that the control principle should be restrained to blameworthiness, because responsibility is too wide a concept to square with control. Many deniers of moral luck appeal to the intuitiveness of the control principle. Defenders of moral luck do not share this intuition and demand a stronger defence of the control principle. (...) I will establish a defence of the control principle based on the value of simplicity for selecting a theory of blameworthiness. A simpler theory of blameworthiness is more likely to be true, and not being falsely judged blameworthy is desirable. I will conclude that simplicity advices the acceptance of the control principle over other theories of blameworthiness that embrace factors beyond control. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall defend externalism for the contents of perceptual experience. A perceptual experience has representational properties; it presents the world as being a certain way. A visual experience, for example, might present the world to a subject as containing a surface with a certain shape, lying at a certain distance, in a certain direction; perhaps a square with sides about 30 cm, lying about one metre in front of the subject, in a direction about 20 degrees to (...) the left of straight ahead. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar qué tipo de respuesta al escepticismo filosófico podemos esperar de los llamados argumentos transcendentales. La conclusión general es que los argumentos transcendentales no son capaces de neutralizar las dudas escépticas en tanto que formulaciones verbales de posibilidades lógicas. Ahora bien, teniendo en cuenta que el escéptico no puede presentar sus dudas significativamente, parece que sólo tiene tres opciones: dudar con la ayuda de un silencio místico, dudar usando las palabras de una manera metafórica (...) o evocativa, o dudar usando las palabras con sentido literal pero siendo consciente de estar diciendo algo sin sentido. En suma: la duda escéptica nunca puede tener el valor de una duda real. (shrink)

The editors of this volume, in their introduction, take Jonathan Bennett’s A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics as the exemplar for the eleven essays collected here, hailing Bennett’s book as setting “new standards for philosophical research on Spinoza”. Bennett’s work is indeed a worthy model. Aside from its more generic virtues, such as learnedness and conceptual rigor, perhaps what is most distinctive about Bennett’s treatment of Spinoza is his method, which he calls the “collegial approach.” This method proceeds by studying “the (...) texts in the spirit of a colleague, an antagonist, a student, a teacher—aiming to learn as much philosophy as one can from studying them.” Bennett has, employing this approach, produced a large number of useful works on early modern philosophers, and his efforts concerning Spinoza are among the best of them. But does Bennett’s example provide any unity for this collection? A number of these essays, Della Rocca’s and Manning’s, for example, indeed take what could be fairly described as a collegial approach to the study of Spinoza. Still others, however, such as Kulstad’s, place more emphasis on historical scholarship than the collegial approach prescribes. This matters, however, very little. Exemplary as Bennett’s work is, the study of the history of early modern philosophy has, in recent years, benefited from the work of scholars using a wide variety of methods. I think it fair to say that the essays collected in this volume, not at all to their detriment, reflect this diversity. (shrink)

As more and more sophisticated software is created to allow the mining of arguments from natural language texts, this paper sets out to examine the suitability of the well-established and readily available methods of corpus linguistics to the study of argumentation. After brief introductions to corpus linguistics and the concept of meta-argument, I describe three pilot-studies into the use of the terms Straw man, Ad hominem, and Slippery slope, made using the open access News on the Web corpus. The presence (...) of each of these phrases on internet news sites was investigated and assessed for correspondence to the norms of use by argumentation theorists. All three pilot-studies revealed interesting facts about the usage of the terms by non-specialists, and led to numerous examples of the types of arguments mentioned. This suggests such corpora may be of use in two different ways: firstly, the wider project of improving public debate and educating the populace in the skills of critical thinking can only be helped by a better understanding of the current state of knowledge of the technical terms and concepts of argumentation. Secondly, theorists could obtain a more accurate picture of how arguments are used, by whom, and to what reception, allowing claims on such matters to be evidence, rather than intuition, based. (shrink)

This paper begins with an assessment of the origin of the term ‘deep disagreement’ to reflect fundamental differences in argument procedure and suggests an alternative explanation of such stalemates that may apply in many cases and does lead to a possible resolution strategy, through discussion of the ordering of certain principles, rather than their acceptance or rejection. Similarities are then drawn with disputes which are supported by conflicting expert opinions and I lay out the advantages of seeking to resolve them (...) through the construction of an epistemic hierarchy. It is noted that while such hierarchies may not be easy to build, and are certainly not fool-proof, their importance is in the provision of a mechanism by which an apparently stalled debate can move forward, leading to a better understanding of the conflicting positions, if not full resolution. (shrink)

. Science at the interface with society is regarded with mistrust among parts of the public. Scientific judgments on matters of practical concern are not infrequently suspected of being incompetent and biased. I discuss two proposals for remedying this deficiency. The first aims at strengthening the independence of science and suggests increasing the distance to political and economic powers. The drawback is that this runs the risk of locking science in an academic ivory tower. The second proposal favors “counter-politicization” in (...) that research is strongly focused on projects “in the public interest,” that is, on projects whose expected results will benefit all those concerned by these results. The disadvantage is that the future use of research findings cannot be delineated reliably in advance. I argue that the underlying problem is the perceived lack of relevance and reliability and that pluralism is an important step toward its solution. Pluralism serves to stimulate a more inclusive research agenda and strengthens the well-testedness of scientific approaches. However, pluralism also prevents the emergence of clear-cut practical suggestions. Accordingly, pluralism is part of the solution to the credibility crisis of science, but also part of the problem. In order for science to be suitable as a guide for practice, the leeway of scientific options needs to be narrowed – in spite of uncertainty in epistemic respect. This reduction can be achieved by appeal to criteria that do not focus on the epistemic credentials of the suggestions but on their appropriateness in practical respect. (shrink)

As a distinctive voice in the current philosophy of technology, postphenomenology elucidates various ways of how technologies “shape” both the world and humans in it. Distancing itself from more speculative approaches, postphenomenology advocates the so-called empirical turn in philosophy of technology: It focuses on diverse effects of particular technologies instead of speculating on the essence of technology and its general impact. Critics of postphenomenology argue that by turning to particularities and emphasizing that technologies are always open to different uses and (...) interpretations, postphenomenology becomes unable to realize how profoundly technology determines our being in the world. Seeking to evaluate the postphenomenological ability to radically reflect on the human being conditioned by technology, I discuss the two most pertinent criticisms of postphenomenology: an “existential” one by Robert C. Scharff and an “ontological” one by Jochem Zwier, Vincent Blok, and Pieter Lemmens. Assessing the ontological alternative, I point to incapacity of Heidegger’s concept of Enframing to do justice to material technologies. Simultaneously, I acknowledge the necessity of speculating on technology as transcending concrete technologies. Such speculating would be instrumental in reviving Ihde’s idea of non-neutrality of technology in its full philosophical potency. (shrink)

The vast majority of gamete donations worldwide are made anonymously, and in some countries, including Spain, France, and Denmark, the anonymity of donors is explicitly protected by law. Nonetheless, a growing number of countries have called into question the morality of such practices and are enacting laws allowing children access to identifying information about their gamete donor. A significant reason for the growing legislative support for nonanonymous gamete donations is the belief that donor‐conceived children have a fundamental moral right to (...) know their genetic origins and that the right should be legally protected. A variety of factors, such as the increasing number of children born by means of gamete donation, advances in genetic science and technology that make it easy to discover the identity of a person's genetic parents, and the widespread belief that genetic information is important for protecting people's health, have made this alleged right quite salient, even leading some to challenge the ethical appropriateness of gamete donation practices altogether. Often, however, this right is assumed rather than explicitly justified. The purpose of this paper is to call into question the ethical justifications that are often thought to ground a right to know one's genetic origins.Proponents of a right to know this information usually argue that such a right protects at least three vital interests: the interest of donor‐conceived people in having strong family relationships, their health interests, and their interest in forming a healthy identity. These different interests might be protected by different aspects of the right to know one's genetic origins: knowing one's mode of conception, accessing medically relevant information, and accessing identifying information about one's genetic parents. I will discuss each of these interests and explore whether and how they might be set back by an individual's lack of access to information about his or her genetic parentage. I will also evaluate whether donor anonymity policies are, as many of their opponents argue, morally impermissible because they fail to protect these important interests. (shrink)

The focus in the literature on scientific explanation has shifted in recent years towards model-based approaches. In recent work, Alisa Bokulich has argued that idealization has a central role to play in explanation. Bokulich claims that certain highly-idealized, structural models can be explanatory, even though they are not considered explanatory by causal, mechanistic, or covering law accounts of explanation. This paper focuses on Bokulich’s account in order to make the more general claim that there are problems with maintaining that a (...) structural criterion can capture the way that highly-idealized models explain. This paper examines Bokulich’s claim that the structural model explanation of quantum wavefunction scarring, featuring semiclassical mechanics, is deeper than the explanation provided by the local quantum model. The challenge for Bokulich is to show that the semiclassical model answers a wider range of w-questions, as this is her method of assessing structural information. I look at two reasonable approaches employing w-questions, and I argue that neither approach is ultimately satisfactory. Because structural similarity has preferences for more fundamental models, I argue that the local quantum model provides explanations that at least as deep as the semiclassical ones. The criterion either wrongly identifies all models as explanatory, or prefers models from fundamental theory. Either way, it cannot capture the way that highly-idealized models explain. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that (at least many) philosophical thought experiments are unreliable. But I argue that this notion of unreliability has to be understood relative to the goal of thought experiments as knowledge producing. And relative to that goal many thought experiments in science are just as unreliable. But in fact thought experiments in science play a varied role and I will suggest that knowledge production is a goal only under quite limited circumstances. I defend the view that (...) these circumstances can (sometimes) arise in philosophy as well. (shrink)

Starting from Dennett's distinction between personal and sub-personal levels of description, I consider the relationships amongst three levels: the personal level, the level of information-processing mechanisms, and the level of neurobiology. I defend a conception of the relationship between the personal level and the sub-personal level of information-processing mechanisms as interaction without reduction . Even given a nonreductionist conception of persons, philosophical theorizing sometimes supports downward inferences from the personal to the sub-personal level. An example of a downward inference is (...) provided and an objection is considered. (shrink)

In this paper, I define tacit knowledge as a kind of causal-explanatory structure, mirroring the derivational structure in the theory that is tacitly known. On this definition, tacit knowledge does not have to be explicitly represented. I then take the notion of a modular theory, and project the idea of modularity to several different levels of description: in particular, to the processing level and the neurophysiological level. The fundamental description of a connectionist network lies at a level between the processing (...) level and the physiological level. At this level, connectionism involves a characteristic departure from modularity, and a correlative absence of syntactic structure. This is linked to the fact that tacit knowledge descriptions of networks are only approximately true. A consequence is that strict causal systematicity in cognitive processes poses a problem for the connectionist programme. (shrink)

Agnotology concerns the creation and preservation of confusion and ignorance. Certain positions are advocated in science in order to promote sociopolitical interests with the result of launching mock controversies or epistemically unjustified dissent. I propose to identify agnotological ploys by the discrepancy between the conclusions suggested by the design of a study and the conclusions actually drawn or intimated. This mechanism of “false advertising” serves to implement agnotological endeavors and helps identify them without having to invoke the intentions of the (...) relevant agents. I discuss three agnotological cases, i.e., studies on bisphenol A, Bt-maize/Roundup, and Oslo’s airport Gardermoen. Pinpointing agnotological endeavors is a means for weeding out approaches that look fitting at first glance, but are blatantly inappropriate, in fact. (shrink)

Upon introspection, we judge that suffering feels bad. I argue there is no appearance-reality gap when it comes to introspective judgments about simple, intrinsic, nonrepresentational phenomenal states like itches, tingling, and suffering's feeling bad. On constitutivism about phenomenal introspection, there is no appearance-reality gap here because these judgments are literally constituted by the phenomenal states they are about. As a result, we are directly acquainted with the intrinsic properties of experience in having these judgments. Reflecting on our direct acquaintance with (...) intrinsic badness, we can know that our suffering instantiates this judgment-independent evaluative property. (shrink)

In his lectures on pragmatism, William James famously proposed that the question of ‘the one and the many’ constitutes the most central of all philosophic problems, and that it is ‘central because so pregnant’. Prompted by James’ proposition, this article explores the intimately political connection in James’ thought between his pluralistic metaphysics and the nature of the problematic as a generative force that impregnates worlds and thoughts with differences: what I here call ‘the pluralistic problematic’. Exploring the generative significance of (...) the problematic in James’ philosophy, I propose that, where James is concerned, the pluriverse has a thoroughly problematic mode of existence. And pluralism, rather than a celebration of the many, rather than a philosophical exposition on multiple worlds and ontologies, or a theory of the organisation of a diverse polis, is first and foremost a pragmatics of the pluriverse – a political, experimental and pragmatic response to the ongoing insistence of the pluralistic problematic. (shrink)

The present article commences analyzing the origins and influences of the religious discourse on the configuration of the modern constitutional discourse and the contributions of the jus-positivism in the consolidation of this sacred-civil language. The second issue is the definition of the U.S. Constitution as a mixed and not as a democratic constitution, with regard to the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius to the Drafters of the first modern constitutional text; stability and equilibrium took preference over democracy in (...) a wide sense. I also analyze how the Drafter’s decision has conditioned the modern constitutional system up to the present. (shrink)

The present article commences analyzing the origins and influences of the religious discourse on the configuration of the modern constitutional discourse and the contributions of the jus-positivism in the consolidation of this sacred-civil language. The second issue is the definition of the U.S. Constitution as a mixed and not as a democratic constitution, with regard to the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius to the Drafters of the first modern constitutional text; stability and equilibrium took preference over democracy in (...) a wide sense. I also analyze how the Drafter’s decision has conditioned the modern constitutional system up to the present. (shrink)

How can laypeople justifiably distinguish between reliable experts and unreliable experts? This problem, usually called the 'problem of expert identification', is highly debated in recent social epistemology. A great amount of work has been undertaken in order to find satisfactory criteria for identifying experts in different branches of the empirical sciences, but hardly in the domain of moral knowledge. This asymmetry between social and moral epistemology is the motivation behind my paper. I reconsider the epistemological problem of identifying moral experts (...) by applying identification criteria developed in general social epistemology to the area of morality. As I will show, all of these criteria turn out to be inappropriate for identifying moral experts. This result seems implausible, because it conflicts with the observation that moral experts play an important role in public and scientific discourse, in ethics committees and boards. But this is not a real contradiction as I will illustrate by explaining which tasks these experts can, in my view, fulfill. (shrink)