One of the most important lesson to be learned from the corona pandemic might be, that it makes a difference which normativity sets the norms for our way of living. It makes no small difference to the life of humans and society, whether this normativity is prophylactic or pedagogical. Disease, insecurity and death are faithful companions of the pandemic; and prophylactic reason rules in times of such critical occurences. In such times it might occur that pedagogy so to speak falls (...) into the hands of prophylaxis, thus turning pedagogy into a handmaid of prophylaxis. The essay problematizes this through non-simultaneous specula principum rooted in the ancient art of medicine and living. (shrink)

Die {raquo}Revolution der Denkart{laquo} hat nicht nur den Anlauf genommen, welchem sie ihren Namen verdankt.! Gezahlt werden noch weitere Umstellungen der Theorie bildung als bloG die kopernikanische Kants. Hier interessieren gleich zwei. Die eine liefert den Gegenstand, die entsprechende, RevolutionPhanomenologie.

Does the universe embody beautiful ideas? Artists as well as scientists throughout human history have pondered this "beautiful question." With Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek as your guide, embark on a voyage of related discoveries, from Plato and Pythagoras up to the present. Wilczek's groundbreaking work in quantum physics was inspired by his intuition to look for a deeper order of beauty in nature. In fact, every major advance in his career came from this intuition: to assume that the universe (...) embodies beautiful forms, forms whose hallmarks are symmetry--harmony, balance, proportion--and economy. There are other meanings of "beauty," but this is the deep logic of the universe--and it is no accident that it is also at the heart of what we find aesthetically pleasing and inspiring. As he reveals here, this has been the heart of scientific pursuit from Pythagoras, the ancient Greek who was the first to argue that "all things are number," to Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and into the deep waters of twentieth-century physics. Gorgeously illustrated, A Beautiful Question is a mind-shifting book that braids the age-old quest for beauty and the age-old quest for truth into a thrilling synthesis. Yes: the world is a work of art, and its deepest truths are ones we already feel, as if they were somehow written in our souls.--From publisher description. (shrink)

One of our great contemporary scientists presents ten insights that illuminate what every thinking person needs to know about what the world is and how it works. Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek's Fundamentals is built around a simple but profound idea: the models of the world we construct as children are practical and adequate for everyday life, but they do not bring in the surprising and mind-expanding revelations of modern science. To do that, we must look at the world (...) anew, combining clear thinking with an openness to wonder. This "born again" world is in many ways larger, fuller, and much stranger than it appears. Through an exploration of space, time, matter, and ideas--and equipped with facts, questions, and brilliant speculations--Wilczek guides us through the past, present, and future of fundamental science. Readers will emerge with an expanded vision of our universe. Author Bio: Frank Wilczek won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was among the earliest MacArthur fellows, and has won many awards both for his scientific work and his writing. He is the author of A Beautiful Question, The Lightness of Being, Fantastic Realities, Longing for the Harmonies, and hundreds of articles in leading scientific journals. His "Wilczek's Universe" column appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal. Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founding director of the T. D. Lee Institute and chief scientist at the Wilczek Quantum Center in Shanghai, China, and a distinguished professor at Arizona State University and Stockholm University. (shrink)

Der Übergang vom Verhältnisbewußtsein zum Selbstbewußtsein kann unmöglich nur vom Verhältnisbewußtsein aus gedacht werden, weil wir uns eine Welt, in der das Bewubtsein unserer selbst verteilt ist auf die Dimensionen der Handlung vor deren Zentrierung in uns, gar nicht vorstellen können. Jedes Tableau der Handlungsmöglichkeiten, so abstrakt es auch abgefaßt sein mag, ist gebunden an Vorstellungen möglicher Handlungssubjekte, denen wir Handlungsmöglichkeiten zuschreiben. Handlungstheorie ist daher notwendig Reflexion unserer Praxis, in der wir uns selbst als Selbstbewußtsein erfahren, das seinem Verhältnisbewubtsein enthoben (...) ist, ohne dieses dadurch selbst schon aufzuheben zu können. Daß uns Freiheit im Handeln unaufhebbar prekär und problematisch bleiben mub, ist die Grundvoraussetzung dafür, dab wir Handlungstheorien historisch und bereichsbezogen ständig neu entwerfen müssen. Das Verhältnis von Handlungsphilosophie zu Handlungstheorien kann daher so gefaßt werden, daß Handlungsphilosophie die Grundbegrifflichkeit in kritischer Absicht bereitstellt, die den bereichsorientierten, mehr oder weniger deskriptiven Handlungstheorien abgehen muß. Dazu muß die ontologische Differenz von Handlung und Interpretation methodologisch ernst genommen werden. Die radikale Andersheit der hier zu begründenden Konzeption liegt vor allem in der Ansicht, daß Handlungen nicht als isolierbare Ereignis-Entitäten aufgefaßt werden können, die gegenüber der »Welt der Tatsachen des Bewußtseins« eine kausale, d.h. von der Welt des Bewußtseins abgetrennte Rolle übernehmen. (shrink)

**** Reprint of the Indiana U. Press edition of 1966--which is cited in BCL3. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Although declarations of the death of God seem to be provocations announcing the end of the era of theology, this announcement is actually central to the Christian revelation in its most classic forms, as well as to its reworkings in contemporary religious thought. Indeed provocative new possibilities for thinking theologically open up precisely in the wake of the death of God. Already Hegel envisaged a revolutionary new realization of divinity emerging in and with the secular world through its establishment of (...) a total order of immanence. However, in postmodern times this comprehensive order aspired to by modern secularism implodes or cracks open towards the wholly Other. A hitherto repressed demand for the absolute difference of the religious, or for “transcendence”, returns with a vengeance. This difference is what could not be stated in terms of the Hegelian System, for reasons that poststructuralist writers particularly have insisted on: all representations of God are indeed dead. Yet this does not mean that they cannot still be powerful, but only that they cannot assign God any stable identity. Nietzsche’s sense of foreboding concerning the death of God is coupled with his intimations of the demise of representation and “grammar” as epistemologically bankrupt, but also with his vision of a positive potential for creating value in the wake of this collapse of all linguistically articulated culture. He points the way towards the emergence of a post-secular religious thinking of what exceeds thought and representation. (shrink)

Are virtual objects real? I will claim that the question sets us up for the wrong type of conclusion: Chalmers (2017) argues that a virtual calculator (like other entities) is a real calculator when it is “organizationally invariant” with its non-virtual counterpart—when it performs calculation. However, virtual reality and games are defined by the fact that they always selectively implement their source material. Even the most detailed virtual car will still have an infinite range of details which are missing (gas, (...) engines, pistons, fuel, chemical reactions, molecules, atoms). This means that even the most detailed virtual object will still have fictional aspects. Rather than argue that virtual objects are, or aren’t, real, it is preferable to think of overlaps and continuities between the fictional and the real, where even the most painstakingly detailed virtual reality implementation of a non-virtual object is still art: a human process of selection and interpretation. Virtual reality should therefore not be philosophically understood just as a technological implementation on a trajectory to perfection, but as a cultural artifact which derives its value in part from its simplification and difference from its source material. (shrink)

Background: In this study, we aimed to investigate the effects of a mindfulness program including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on the mental health of student teachers when offered at their educational institution in a real-life context.Methods: A parallel randomized controlled trial was conducted among self-selected student teachers at a Danish undergraduate program for teacher education in the autumns of 2019 and 2020. Participation was not recommended in case of clinical depression or a diagnosis of psychosis or schizophrenia, abuse of alcohol, drugs, (...) and/or medicine. Randomization was performed by a Statistician who was blinded to the identity of the students. Data was collected using self-reported questionnaires. The primary outcome was a change in perceived stress 3 months from baseline. Secondary outcome measures were symptoms of anxiety and depression, well-being, resilience, mindfulness, and thoughts and feelings during rest. The effects were analyzed according to the intention-to-treat principle using mixed-effect linear regression models. Mediating effects of mindfulness skills on the mental health outcomes were explored using structural equation modeling.Results: The study group included 67 student teachers with 34 allocated to the intervention group ; and 33 students allocated to a waiting list control group. At baseline, mean Perceived Stress Scale scores were 18.88 in the intervention group and 17.91 in the waiting list control group. A total of 56 students completed the questionnaire at a 3-month follow-up. Statistically significant effects of the intervention were found on perceived stress, symptoms of anxiety and depression, well-being, and on three of seven resting-state dimensions. No effects were found on resilience or mindfulness. Statistically significant mediated effects via resting-state dimensions were found.Conclusion The findings suggested that offering a mindfulness program at an undergraduate program for teacher education could significantly improve the mental health among self-selected students within 3 months. Results of mediation analysis supported the hypothesis that some of the effects might be explained by reduced distracting thoughts.Clinical Trial Registration: [www.ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT04558099]. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to the formulation of a non-excluding concept of solidarity which is of relevance to contemporary society. The assumption is that in the present individualized and culturally diverse society there is an urgent need for a new form of solidarity to create social cohesion. The central theme is that contemporary solidarity is about recognition and a fair distribution of chances for recognition. This ideal may function as a normative standard for critical research and (...) as a guideline for people in their moral struggles. What ultimately needs to be done is not a purely theoretical question but something which must be settled by a judgement that constitutes a battlefield where conflicting values and perceptions of reality confront each other. (shrink)

In the context of discovery-oriented hypothesis testing research, behavioral scientists widely accept a convention for false positive (α) and false negative error rates (β) proposed by Jacob Cohen, who deemed the general relative seriousness of the antecedently accepted α = 0.05 to be matched by β = 0.20. Cohen’s convention not only ignores contexts of hypothesis testing where the more serious error is the β-error. Cohen’s convention also implies for discovery-oriented hypothesis testing research that a statistically significant observed effect is (...) four times more probable to be a mistaken discovery than for a statistically significant true observed effect to be independently replicable. In the long run, Cohen’s convention thus is epistemically harmful to the development of a progressive science of human behavior, making its acceptance crucial in explaining the replication crisis in behavioral science. The balance between α- and β-errors generally ought to be struck using both epistemic and practical considerations. Yet epistemic considerations alone imply that making a genuine contribution to the body of knowledge in behavioral science requires error rates that are not only small but also symmetrical. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Does multiculturalism imply that certain cultural minorities – nomos groups, whose cultural conceptions extend in important ways into views about the law – should have forms of legal autonomy that go beyond normal multicultural accommodations such as exemptions and special protection? In other words: should we allow «minority jurisdictions» for multicultural reasons and give certain minorities powers of legislation and adjudication on certain issues? The paper sketches how one might arrive at such a conclusion given some standard multicultural reasoning, and (...) then proceeds by examining eight key rejoinders to such a proposal. None of these rejoinders provide by themselves knockdown arguments against extending multicultural rights to forms of legal autonomy, but together they do provide a basis for some skepticism about the cogency and desirability of at least more ambitious forms of legal autonomy for cultural minorities within a liberal framework. (shrink)

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Frank Ramsey was the greatest of the remarkable generation of Cambridge philosophers and logicians which included G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes. Before his tragically early death in 1930 at the age of twenty-six, he had done seminal work in mathematics and economics as well as in logic and philosophy. This volume, with a new and extensive introduction by D. H. Mellor, contains all Ramsey's previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics. The (...) latter gives the definitive form and defence of the reduction of mathematics to logic undertaken in Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica; the former includes the most profound and original studies of universals, truth, meaning, probability, knowledge, law and causation, all of which are still constantly referred to, and still essential reading for all serious students of these subjects. (shrink)

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate some problems of using finite (or *finite) computational arguments and of the nonstandard notion of an infinitesimal. We will begin by looking at the canonical example illustrating the distinction between classical and constructive analysis, the Intermediate Value Theorem.

Fifty years ago, in 1961, Feinstein published his first path-breaking articles leading to his seminal work Clinical Judgement and to the establishment of clinical epidemiology. Feinstein had an Aristotelian approach to scientific method: methods must be adapted to the material examined. Feinstein died 10 years ago and few years before his death he concluded that efforts to promote a person-oriented medicine had failed. He criticised medicine for not having recognized that only persons can suitably observe, evaluate and rate their own (...) health status. Feinstein’s position was—as in Clinical Judgement—methodological. He didn’t espouse ethical principles. He pointed to methodological deficiencies in clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine. In this article we’ll provide a framework for understanding and justifying Feinstein’s call for a person-oriented medicine which recognizes patients as co-actors in clinical reasoning. It’s argued that craftsmanship and practical wisdom are integrated in clinical judgement and reasoning and that clinical reasoning is not only about means to achieve the end, health. We do also reason and deliberate about ends. The ‘defining end’ of medicine (health) has continuously been negotiated and so been the object of deliberation. For centuries among professionals, in recent years among professionals and patients. These negotiations and deliberations lead to ongoing specifications of health as a ‘guiding end’, i.e. an end guiding clinical reasoning about what to do in particular situations. Feinstein’s self-critical account to clinical epidemiology at the end of his professional career reflects the fact that patients during the last 30–40 years (i.e. in the period after the publication of Clinical Judgement) widely have been recognized as persons with rights to autonomy. Feinstein’s lesson is, however, that espousing and recognizing ethical ideals is not enough. A change of clinical practice and its methods is necessary. His critique also implies that clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine as practiced haven’t provided such a turn. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the relationship between Inference to the Best Explanation and Bayesianism, both of which are well-known accounts of the nature of scientific inference. In Sect. 2, I give a brief overview of Bayesianism and IBE. In Sect. 3, I argue that IBE in its most prominently defended forms is difficult to reconcile with Bayesianism because not all of the items that feature on popular lists of “explanatory virtues”—by means of which IBE ranks competing explanations—have confirmational import. (...) Rather, some of the items that feature on these lists are “informational virtues”—properties that do not make a hypothesis \ more probable than some competitor \ given evidence E, but that, roughly-speaking, give that hypothesis greater informative content. In Sect. 4, I consider as a response to my argument a recent version of compatibilism which argues that IBE can provide further normative constraints on the objectively correct probability function. I argue that this response does not succeed, owing to the difficulty of defending with any generality such further normative constraints. Lastly, in Sect. 5, I propose that IBE should be regarded, not as a theory of scientific inference, but rather as a theory of when we ought to “accept” H, where the acceptability of H is fixed by the goals of science and concerns whether H is worthy of commitment as research program. In this way, IBE and Bayesianism, as I will show, can be made compatible, and thus the Bayesian and the proponent of IBE can be friends. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer an analysis of the radical disagreement over the adequacy of string theory. The prominence of string theory despite its notorious lack of empirical support is sometimes explained as a troubling case of science gone awry, driven largely by sociological mechanisms such as groupthink (e.g. Smolin 2006). Others, such as Dawid (2013), explain the controversy by positing a methodological revolution of sorts, according to which string theorists have quietly turned to nonempirical methods of theory assessment given (...) the technological inability to directly test the theory. The appropriate response, according to Dawid, is to acknowledge this development and widen the canons of acceptable scientific methods. As I’ll argue, however, the current situation in fundamental physics does not require either of these responses. Rather, as I’ll suggest, much of the controversy stems from a failure to properly distinguish the “context of justification” from the “context of pursuit”. Both those who accuse string theorists of betraying the scientific method and those who advocate an enlarged conception of scientific methodology objectionably conflate epistemic justification with judgements of pursuit-worthiness. Once we get clear about this distinction and about the different norms governing the two contexts, the current situation in fundamental physics becomes much less puzzling. After defending this diagnosis of the controversy, I’ll show how the argument patterns that have been posited by Dawid as constituting an emergent methodological revolution in science are better off if reworked as arguments belonging to the context of pursuit. (shrink)

A defense of material implication as implication.

We develop a Bayesian framework for thinking about the way evidence about the here and now can bear on hypotheses about the qualitative character of the world as a whole, including hypotheses according to which the total population of the world is infinite. We show how this framework makes sense of the practice cosmologists have recently adopted in their reasoning about such hypotheses.

Frank Palmeri sees the conjectural histories of Rousseau, Hume, Herder, and other Enlightenment philosophers as a template for the development of the social sciences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without documents or memorials, these thinkers, he argues, employed conjecture to formulate a naturalistic account of society's commercial and secular progression. This approach can be traced in the work of political economists, anthropologists, sociologists, and sociologists of religion, and its speculative framework creates a surprising ambivalence toward modernity in (...) these disciplines. In addition, Palmeri shows that conjectural histories by Darwin and Nietzsche opened the way to new disciplines in the late twentieth century. (shrink)

Frank E. Zachos offers a comprehensive review of one of today's most important and contentious issues in biology: the species problem. After setting the stage with key background information on the topic, the book provides a brief history of species concepts from antiquity to the Modern Synthesis, followed by a discussion of the ontological status of species with a focus on the individuality thesis and potential means of reconciling it with other philosophical approaches. More than 30 different species concepts (...) found in the literature are presented in an annotated list, and the most important ones, including the Biological, Genetic, Evolutionary and different versions of the Phylogenetic Species Concept, are discussed in more detail. Specific questions addressed include the problem of asexual and prokaryotic species, intraspecific categories like subspecies and Evolutionarily Significant Units, and a potential solution to the species problem based on a hierarchical approach that distinguishes between ontological and operational species concepts. A full chapter is dedicated to the challenge of delimiting species by means of a discrete taxonomy in a continuous world of inherently fuzzy boundaries. Further, the book outlines the practical ramifications for ecology and evolutionary biology of how we define the species category, highlighting the danger of an apples and oranges problem if what we subsume under the same name ("species") is in actuality a variety of different entities. A succinct summary chapter, glossary and annotated list of references round out the coverage, making the book essential reading for all biologists looking for an accessible introduction to the historical, philosophical and practical dimensions of the species problem. (shrink)

Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative (...) outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. If participants lack competence or are prone to biases, a correct deliberative outcome requires limiting participation. The central question for public argumentation, therefore, is how to strike a balance between both ideals. Rather than advocating a preferred normative framework, our main purpose is to illustrate the complexity of this theme. (shrink)

In this article, I consider an important challenge to the popular theory of scientific inference commonly known as ‘inference to the best explanation’, one that has received scant attention.1 1 The problem is that there exists a wide array of rival models of explanation, thus leaving IBE objectionably indeterminate. First, I briefly introduce IBE. Then, I motivate the problem and offer three potential solutions, the most plausible of which is to adopt a kind of pluralism about the rival models of (...) explanation. However, I argue that how ranking explanations on this pluralistic account of IBE remains obscure and pluralism leads to contradictory results. In light of these objections, I attempt to dissolve the problem by showing why IBE does not require a ‘model’ of explanation and by giving an account of what explanation consists in within the context of IBE. (shrink)