The other Hölderlin, an unheroic, unprophetic, un-German, in a word: a poor Hölderlin, might have played an essential role in the development of Eugen Fink’s experienceable ontology as an/other form of idealism. Understood cosmologically as a “quarrel” or “game” between heaven and earth, it is designed to realize Husserl’s term “Weltbewusstseinsleben” as illustrated by Fink’s remark: “Coexistence in cognition is at the same time a testimony to the heavenly spirit.” Thus, a twofold question arises: If, in cognition, coexistence is at (...) the same time a testimony to the heavenly spirit, what is it outside of cognition, if anything? And how does it come to cognition? Reading Fink and Hölderlin together, I suggest the following answers: 1. In cognition, coexistence is at the same time a testimony to the “heavenly”, that is to say: higher, i.e. communal spirit, precisely because 2. it is nothing outside of cognition–nothing but the cosmological laceration of man, the openness of human beings to the world, about which 3. nothing more can be said than that it has always already been there for us to know, for it is being brought to our cognition time and again: through poetry. (shrink)

‘We are before Dante’: In this interview, held via email in March 2020 amid the massive outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jean-Luc Nancy leads us on a brief but far-reaching foray through his thought. He succeeds in providing an overview of the subjects that he has raised since the beginning of his career as a philosopher, while maintaining a focus on their pertinence for what we are currently facing in the world today. He supplements his insight that ‘we are before (...) Dante’ with the equally remarkable conclusion: ‘Desire is what is born par excellence’. In between these two propositions, and in between the lines and words documented here – touching upon topics as diverse as the moai statues of Easter Island, the music of Schumann, Wagner, and techno, as well as the writing of Artaud, Proust, and Verlaine – we find an exciting, up-to-date treatment of the question of how to ‘deal with the world intellectually’ without, in doing so, participating in the modern claim to ‘master’ it. Instead, Nancy suggests, we ought to be attentive to what escapes us by its very principle, with philosophy, literature, and art serving as witnesses of what has always been absent from our mind, that is, the sensibility of meaning, in order to become aware that, since we are always already before and after birth, ‘we come from nowhere and everywhere’. This realization enables us to understand the political consequences that it has for our understanding of a world in metamorphosis, including for highly controversial issues such as colonialism, anti-Semitism, the far right, neo-liberalism, and other totalitarian forms that supposedly manifest a return of the myth, as well as its consequences for the insurmountability of Marx. (shrink)

In order to approach the phenomena of responsibility, which is primarily liability and accountability, the author suggests a phenomenological clarification of the question: What is the precondition that makes a responsible life possible? This question should enable to give an answer to another one which is from high anthropological and even political relevance, namely: Is there a spot beyond or "outside" of any responsibility, i.e. can a human being live as "irresponsible" in the radical meaning of the word? The main (...) thesis of the author is that there is a situation in which a human being has no means to act by making any "own" choices and thus everything in his life is imposed to him from the outside. This situation is the nativity and, more concretely, the time-space of the pre-natal human life. The aim of this paper is to analyze this situation by means of Husserl's phenomenological reduction as well as of the "counter reduction" of Michel Henry, and consequently to propose a new understanding of the responsibility problematics. (shrink)

Following Derrida’s early claim from Voice and Phenomenon that Husserl’s phenomenology was a philosophy of life, the article focuses on the second of two aspects that there are to such a claim. While the first one – which amounts to revealing negatively (as Derrida does) that the Ego in Husserl is immortal, that Husserl is unable to grasp the temporal structure of the Ego in its dependency from its finitude and thus from death (which supposedly only Heidegger did), and so (...) forth – is well-known and widely debated, the second one has been mostly ignored so far: Is Derrida not also implying – positively, as it were – that Husserlian phenomenology does indeed have the potential to show a way to a philosophy of life escaping the pitfalls of transcendental egology? Might deconstruction (an „affirmative business“ after all, as the later Derrida kept reminding us) not be an attempt to a critical, i.e. a non-naïve, philosophy of life and thus a re-appropriation (under better circumstances, as e.g. the knowledge of Husserl’s later and latest works and notes) of motifs known from Georg Misch’s 1930 pioneering project of an approximation of phenomenology and philosophy of life, re-arranged in Derrida and others around the decisive shift of view from death to birth, from being singular to being plural – to the community? (shrink)

Den Prozeß der Phänomenalisierung des Seins, des Weltwerdens der Welt kann nur angemessen verstehen, wer dessen struktureller Selbigkeit mit dem Geborenwerden/Geborensein des Daseins gewahr wird und ihr philosophisch Rechnung trägt. Diese an Hannah Arendt und Hans Saner einerseits sowie an Jacques Derrida und Jean-Luc Nancy andererseits anschließende These versucht der Beitrag im zweifachen Wege eines Aufweises entsprechender Überlegungen bei Husserl und einer Kritik an Heideggers bereits von Günther Anders notierten Tilgungsbemühungen der einschlägigen Implikationen seines Denkens zu plausibilisieren. Als thematischer Leitfaden (...) dient dabei die je unterschiedliche Konzeption der Räumlichkeit des Daseins im Verhältnis zu seiner Zeitlichkeit, von dessen Gewichtung das Gepräge eines Denkens als entweder natologisch-eröffnend oder thanatologisch-schließend mit abhängt. (shrink)

This paper elaborates a new solution to the lottery paradox, according to which the paradox arises only when we lump together two distinct states of being confident that p under one general label of ‘belief that p’. The two-state conjecture is defended on the basis of some recent work on gradable adjectives. The conjecture is supported by independent considerations from the impossibility of constructing the lottery paradox both for risk-tolerating states such as being afraid, hoping or hypothesizing, and for risk-averse, (...) certainty-like states. The new proposal is compared to views within the increasingly popular debate opposing dualists to reductionists with respect to the relation between belief and degrees of belief. (shrink)

This paper explores one way in which the view that emotions can be epistemically justified stands in tension with two common views in epistemology; namely, that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, and that propositional justification is entirely determined by the (inferential) support relations between one's evidence and a given proposition. A tentative solution to the tension is provided.

The human face conveys a myriad of social meanings within an overlapping array of features. Herein, we examine such features within the context of gender-emotion stereotypes. First we detail the pervasive set of gender-emotion expectations known to exist. We then review new research revealing that gender cues and emotion expression often share physical properties that represent a confound of overlapping features characteristic of low versus high facial maturity/dominance. As such, gender-related facial appearance and facial expression of emotions often share social (...) meaning and physical resemblance. Thus, stereotypic and phenotypic information conveyed by the face are intertwined—sometimes confounded, sometimes clashing. We discuss implications of this work for gender-emotion stereotypes, as well as for emotion and face processing more generally. (shrink)

Biblical ethics -- The insights of history.

We start by introducing the idea of echo chambers. Echo chambers are social and epistemic structures in which opinions, leanings, or beliefs about certain topics are amplified and reinforced due to repeated interactions within a closed system; that is, within a system that has a rather homogeneous sample of sources or people, which all share the same attitudes towards the topics in question. Echo chambers are a particularly dangerous phenomena because they prevent the critical assessment of sources and contents, thus (...) leading the people living within them to deliberately ignore or exclude opposing views. In the second part of this paper, we argue that the reason for the appearance of echo chambers lies in the adoption of what we call ‘epistemic vices’. We examine which vices might be responsible for their emergence, and in doing so, we focus on a specific one; ‘epistemic violence’. In assessing and evaluating the role of this epistemic vice, we note that it can be triggered by epistemic contexts characterized by high stakes that may turn ordinary intellectual virtues (such as skepticism) into vices (such as denialism). In the third part of this contribution, we suggest a way to deal with echo chambers. The solution focuses on advocating a responsibilist pedagogy of virtues and vices that -we claim- might be capable of preventing their emergence. (shrink)

As the title of the present publication suggests, the ten essays of this book try to approach an inconvenient trauma of global human reality and the uniformity of media and cyberspace in which human lives suffer harm, loss of inner identity and of broader meaning. Indeed, our postmodern and post-identity times are characterized by a flux of rapid social changes, uncertainty, vague and shaking moral values, by violence and frightening information with its contradictory truths and genuine ambiguity; finally by the (...) violence of unpredictable climate change resulting in various and frequent calamities and devastation of life. Doubt and time are the central concern of modern philosophy and remind us that violence is inherent in the human condition and that reflection on it, regardless of different cultural sensibilities, is ipso facto part of the mainstream of our individual and global concerns. These, and many other fascinating topics from Western and Chinese history, were explored and brought to light by a learned forum of distinguished scholars and experts whose contributions are contained in this publication. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has argued at length and on many occasions that the view according to which evidential support is defined in terms of probability-raising faces serious counterexamples and, hence, should be abandoned. Proponents of the positive probabilistic relevance view have remained unconvinced. The debate seems to be in a deadlock. This paper is an attempt to move the debate forward and revisit some of the central claims within this debate. My conclusion here will be that while Achinstein may be right (...) that his counterexamples undermine probabilistic relevance views of what it is for e to be evidence that h, there is still room for a defence of a related probabilistic view about an increase in being supported, according to which, if p > p, then h is more supported given e than it is without e. My argument relies crucially on an insight from recent work on the linguistics of gradable adjectives. (shrink)

At a purely instrumental level, quantum theory is all about multiplication, addition and taking mod squares of complex numbers called probability amplitudes. The rules for combining amplitudes are deceptively simple. When two or more events are independent you multiply their respective probability amplitudes and when they are mutually exclusive you add them. Whenever you want to calculate probabilities you take mod squares of respective amplitudes. That’s it. If you are prepared to ignore the explanatory power of the theory (which you (...) should not) the rest is just a set of convenient mathematical tools developed for the purpose of book-keeping of amplitudes. Thus we tabulate amplitudes into state vectors and unitary matrices, and place them in Hilbert spaces. (shrink)

For decades the study of social perception was largely compartmentalized by type of social cue: race, gender, emotion, eye gaze, body language, facial expression etc. This was partly due to good scientific practice, and partly due to assumptions that each type of social cue was functionally distinct from others. Herein, we present a functional forecast approach to understanding compound social cue processing that emphasizes the importance of shared social affordances across various cues. We review the traditional theories of emotion and (...) face processing that argued for dissociable and noninteracting pathways, as well as more recent evidence for combinatorial processing of social cues. We argue here that early, and presumably reflexive, visual integration of such cues is necessary for adaptive behavioral responding to others. In support of this claim, we review contemporary work that reveals a flexible visual system, one that readily incorporates meaningful contextual influences in even nonsocial visual processing, thereby establishing the functional and neuroanatomical bases necessary for compound social cue integration. Finally, we explicate three likely mechanisms driving such integration. Together, this work implicates a role for cognitive penetrability in visual perceptual abilities that have often been ascribed to direct encapsulated perceptual processes. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to explore, and clarify, some key features in Aquinas’ account of the virtue of temperance, with an eye to answering some common objections raised against a positive evaluation of temperance. In particular, I consider three features of Aquinas’ understanding of temperance: First, the role of the rational mean in temperance; second, the role of rightly ordered passions in temperance; and third, the ‘despotic’ control of reason over the passions in temperance. Along the way I (...) consider three common objections to Aquinas’ account of temperance: the objection that temperance can be misused for evil, the objection that temperance devalues effort, and the objection that temperance devalues strong passions and thereby implicitly devalues the goodness of sexuality. In responding to these objections on behalf of Aquinas, I take the opportunity to clarify and slightly extend Aquinas’ account of temperance. (shrink)

This article criticizes Mathias Risse and Richard Zeckhauser's recent utilitarian defense of racial profiling. I use a novel thought-experiment to argue that even if a negative phenomenon could be reduced by profiling members of certain groups who happen to be disproportionately associated with it, the practice can be implausible. Specifically, I explore the possibility that in a given society, platinum blondes have a higher per capita incidence of a serious sexually transmitted disease, D. And I argue that doctors and health (...) officials in the society would not be justified in profiling such blondes, given that there is nothing about being a platinum blonde that causes one to have D. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Aquinas’ account of analogy provides resources for resolving the prima facie conflict between his claims that (1) the divine relations constituting the persons are “one and the same” with the divine essence; (2) the divine persons are really distinct, (3) the divine essence is absolutely simple. Specifically, I argue that Aquinas adopts an analogical understanding of the concepts of being and unity, and that these concepts are implicit in his formulation of claims about substance (...) and relation in the Trinity. I then show how Aquinas appeals to key structural features of analogical concepts, notably, the simpliciter/secundum quid characterization, to resolve apparent conflicts between the unity of substance and distinction of relations in the Trinity. (shrink)

Some argue that same-sex marriage is not an equal rights issue because, where same-sex marriage is illegal, heterosexuals and homosexuals have the exact same right to marry—i.e., the right to marry one adult of the opposite sex. I dispute this argument by pointing out that while societies that prohibit same-sex marriage equally permit individual heterosexuals and homosexuals to marry one adult of the opposite sex, same-sex couples in such societies are denied an important right that opposite-sex couples enjoy—i.e., the right (...) to marry. I argue that the right to marry is fundamentally, not an individual right, but a couple’s collective right, analogous to assembly rights. (shrink)

Introduction by the Rev. R. J. Fletcher -- The memory of Francis Bacon. A speech delivered in Gray's Inn hall at the tercentenary celebration by Mr. H. E. Duke -- List of benchers and guests present at the tercentenary celebration, 1908 -- Francis Bacon. A speech delivered by the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, M. P., on the occasion of the unveiling of the Bacon statue at Gray's Inn [27th June 1912] -- Francis Bacon's essays: Of gardens and Of masques (...) and triumphs, reprinted from the earliest editions. (shrink)

In this article I focus on some unduly neglected common-sense considerations supporting the view that one's evidence is the propositions that one knows. I reply to two recent objections to these considerations.

This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs (...) elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quickly and why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research. (shrink)

Not much of this work was done at Leip ig.

According to the good reasoning view of normative reasons, p is a reason to F, just in case p is a premise of a good pattern of reasoning. This article presents two counterexamples to the most promising version of the good reasoning view.

Plato's 'Euthyphro' is important because it gives an excellent example of Socratic dialogue in operation and of the connection of that dialectic with Plato's earlier 'Theory of Forms'. This edition of the dialogue provides a translation with interspersed commentary.

Початок повномасштабного російського вторгнення в 2022 році викликав значні зміни в українській національній ідентичності. Соціологічні опитування демонструють трансформацію цінностей та повсякденних практик українців. Вони почали частіше вживати українську мову, змінили історичні та конфесійні вподобання. Необхідним є отримання об’єктивного соціологічного знання стосовно причин та наслідків цих змін. Передумовою цього є дослідження існуючих робіт по даній тематиці. Метою статті є систематизація та критичне узагальнення наукових праць по тематиці української національної ідентичності у вітчизняній науці. Автор розглядає роботи по цій темі, написані дослідниками в (...) галузі різних наук: історії, філософії, політології, філології, соціології. Особливу увага приділяється огляду дисертацій. Узагальнюються основні ідеї праць, даються авторські висновки по можливості їх використання в майбутньому. Показується, що автори зачіпають широке коло питань, що стосуються національної ідентичності: її історична ґенеза, трансформації, фактори мови та історичної пам’яті, відображення ідентичності в мистецтві та медіа, вплив на неї глобалізації та російської агресії. Автор констатує, що дана проблематика поки що слабо розвинута в рамках соціологічної науки. У відкритому доступі відсутні значні теоретичні роботи, здебільшого соціологи займаються виключно емпіричними дослідженнями. Також відсутні теоретичні роботи, присвячені аналізу трансформацій національної ідентичності, що стались з початку повномасштабної російської агресії в лютому 2022 році. Це пояснюється недостатнім проміжком часу, що пройшов на даний момент. Також складності додає швидка зміна політичних та військових реалій. Враховуючи значну суспільну значимість, автор робить висновок про необхідність посилення соціологічного осмислення цієї тематики. (shrink)

In a recent publication Travis Timmerman has claimed that sometimes it is morally permissible to not prevent something bad from happening, even if it is in one’s power to do so without sacrificing anything nearly as important.1 To defend his point, he has proposed a thought experiment and based his claims on putative common-sense morality intuitions. To aid in the subsequent discussion, Timmerman’s case is reproduced as follows.

Beyond Ideology addresses the predominance of television news. This research attempts to rise above partisanship, that is, go beyond ideology in order to focus on cultural influences, if any, that may exist in the network newsrooms.