ZusammenfassungDie Odysseus-Verfügung ist als besondere Form der Patientenverfügung zumindest in der Literatur hinlänglich bekannt. Die Verwendung des Begriffs und damit sein Gegenstandsbereich sind hingegen noch immer umstritten. Zudem wird oft nicht beachtet, dass es innerhalb dieses Gegenstandsbereichs Varianten von OVs zu differenzieren gilt, die sich auch in ihrer moralischen Rechtfertigung unterscheiden. Nicht zuletzt ist die Grundstrukturstruktur dieser Rechtfertigung umstritten. Vor diesem Hintergrund plädieren wir im Folgenden zunächst für eine Eingrenzung des Begriffs, mit der argumentative und klinisch-praktische Verwirrungen vermieden werden können. (...) Anschließend betrachten wir zwei Varianten von – Zwang legitimierenden – OVs, die sich in der individuellen Kompetenz des Destinatärs unterscheiden. Schließlich zeigen wir, dass deren Rechtfertigung ungeachtet des Umstandes, dass OVs auf Wiedererlangung der Urteils- und Steuerungsfähigkeit des Patienten angelegt sind, weder in einer gemutmaßten noch gar in einer faktischen retrospektiven Billigung von Zwang durch den Patienten liegt. Die primäre Legitimationsgrundlage von OVs besteht vielmehr in der ex ante erfolgenden Autorisierung durch den Betroffenen selbst. Die hier einzuräumende Autorität wiederum basiert auf dem Recht jeder Person auf lebensplanerische Selbstbestimmung. In einem kurzen abschließenden Teil skizzieren wir dann noch die besondere Bedeutung der Odysseus-Vereinbarung als einer Unterform der OV. (shrink)

Does the real world, defined as a world of objects that exist independent of human interests, concerns, and cognitive activities, really exist? Jan Westerhoff argues that we have good reason to believe it does not. His discussion considers four main facets of the idea of the real world, ranging from the existence of a separate external and internal world, to the existence of an ontological foundation that grounds the existence of all the entities in the world, and the existence of (...) an ultimately true theory that provides a final account of all there is. As Westerhoff discusses the reasons for rejecting the postulation of an external world behind our representations, he asserts that the internal world is not as epistemically transparent as is usually assumed, and that there are good reasons for adopting an anti-foundational account of ontological dependence. Drawing on conclusions from the ancient Indian philosophical system of Madhyamaka Buddhism, Westerhoff defends his stance in a purely Western philosophical framework, and affirms that ontology, and philosophy more generally, need not be conceived as providing an ultimately true theory of the world. (shrink)

Jan Westerhoff unfolds the story of one of the richest episodes in the history of Indian thought, the development of Buddhist philosophy during the first millennium CE. He aims to offer the reader a systematic grasp of key Buddhist concepts such as non-self, suffering, reincarnation, karma, and nirvana.

The aim of this book is a recovery of interest in the experience of meaning. Jan Zwicky defends the claim that we experience meaning in the apprehension of wholes and their internal structural relations, providing examples of such insight in mathematics and physics, literature, music, and Plato's ancient theory of forms. Taken together, these essays constitute a powerful indictment of the aggressive reductionism and the reliance on calculative modes of thought that dominate our present conception of understanding. The Experience of (...) Meaning proposes a more just epistemology, arguing for a new grammar of thought, a new way of understanding the relationship of human intelligence to the world. Engaging with philosophy, psychology, literature, fine arts, music, and environmental studies in a profound way, The Experience of Meaning will interest any reader who ponders the question of meaning and its relation to true human expression. (shrink)

Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyavartani is one of the most important Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophical texts. Jan Westerhoff offers a new translation, reflecting the best current philological research and all available editions, and adds his own philosophical commentary on the text. His nuanced, philosophically sophisticated commentary explains Nagarjuna's arguments in a way that is both grounded in historical and textual scholarship and connected explicitly to contemporary philosophical concerns.

As the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science. It enables physicists, chemists, and technicians to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments and to create new and advanced technology based on the insight into the behavior of atomic objects. But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination. It seems to violate some fundamental principles of classical physics, principles that eventually have become a part (...) of western common sense since the rise of the modern worldview in the Renaissance. So the aim of any metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics is to account for these violations. (shrink)

The book gives an painstaking analysis of Niels Bohr's understanding of quantum mechanics based on a claim that Bohr was influenced by Harald Høffding's approach to philosophical problems.

This book provides the reader with an analysis of backward causation. The notion of backward causation faces many different paradoxes that threaten to make the notion inconsistent or incoherent. The book denies that these pose a real threat. It developed a theory of causation according to which the orientation of causation is not dependent on the direction of time. In this process it takes issues with David Lewis' contrafactual analysis of causation, and denies that the direction of time is determined (...) by irreversible processes . Likewise the book argues that the conceptual possibility of backward causation requires that the future is just as real as the past and present. Finally the book considers what the physical processes may look like if backward causation not only a a conceptual possibility but also a physical possibility. The conclusion is that no normal matter can possibly participate in backward causal processes. Instead objects moving backwards in time seem to posses negative mass and energy, a kind of objects that would be different from both ordinary objects and hypothetical tachyons. (shrink)

Sometimes also called retro causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature (...) and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause. (shrink)

Group judgements are often – implicitly or explicitly – influenced by their members’ individual expertise. However, given that expertise is seldom recognized fully and that some distortions may occur (bias, correlation, etc.), it is not clear that differential weighting is an epistemically advantageous strategy with respect to straight averaging. Our paper characterizes a wide set of conditions under which differential weighting outperforms straight averaging and embeds the results into the multidisciplinary group decision-making literature.

Niels Bohr and Philosophy of Physics: Twenty-First Century Perspectives examines the work, influences and legacy of the Nobel Prize physicist and philosopher of experiment Niels Bohr. While covering Bohr's groundbreaking contribution to quantum mechanics, this collection reveals the philosophers who influenced his work. Linking him to the pragmatist C.I. Lewis and the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding, it draws strong similarities between Bohr's philosophy and the Kantian way of thinking. Addressing the importance of Bohr's views of classical concepts, it discusses how (...) his interpretation of quantum mechanics now compares with a variety of issues that have arisen only since his lifetime, including decoherence and other non-collapse arguments. Balancing historical themes with contemporary ideas, Niels Bohrs and Philosophy of Physics reveals Bohr's on-going contribution to the philosophy of science and confirms his place in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The Indian philosopher Acharya Nagarjuna was the founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism and arguably the most influential Buddhist thinker after Buddha himself. Indeed, in the Tibetan and East Asian traditions, Nagarjuna is often referred to as the 'second Buddha.' His primary contribution to Buddhist thought lies is in the further development of the concept of sunyata or 'emptiness.' For Nagarjuna, all phenomena are without any svabhaba, literally 'own-nature' or 'self-nature', and thus without any underlying essence. In this (...) book, Jan Westerhoff offers a systematic account of Nagarjuna's philosophical position. He reads Nagarjuna in his own philosophical context, but he does not hesitate to show that the issues of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy have at least family resemblances to issues in European philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that medical specialists interpret and diagnose through technological mediations like X-ray and fMRI images, and by actualizing embodied skills tacitly they are determining the identity of objects in the perceptual field. The initial phase of human interpretation of visual objects takes place during the moments of visual perception before we are consciously aware of the perceived. What facilitate this innate ability to interpret are experiences, learning and training that become humanly embodied skills. These embodied (...) skills are actualized during the moments of visual perception. My argument is that biology, society and instruments constitute unique individual ontologies influencing specialist readings of the technological output, in other words, putting limits on the ‘‘truth-to-nature’’ relation, which is so much sought for in science. (shrink)

New computer systems of discovery create a research program for logic and philosophy of science. These systems consist of inference rules and control knowledge that guide the discovery process. Their paths of discovery are influenced by the available data and the discovery steps coincide with the justification of results. The discovery process can be described in terms of fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence such as heuristic search, and can also be interpreted in terms of logic. The traditional distinction that places (...) studies of scientific discovery outside the philosophy of science, in psychology, sociology, or history, is no longer valid in view of the existence of computer systems of discovery. It becomes both reasonable and attractive to study the schemes of discovery in the same way as the criteria of justification were studied: empirically as facts, and logically as norms. (shrink)

BackgroundSexual boundary violations in healthcare are harmful and exploitative sexual transgressions in the professional–client relationship. Persons with mental health issues or intellectual disabilities, especially those living in residential settings, are especially vulnerable to SBV because they often receive long-term intimate care. Promoting good sexual health and preventing SBV in these care contexts is a moral and practical challenge for healthcare organizations.MethodsWe carried out a qualitative interview study with 16 Dutch policy advisors, regulators, healthcare professionals and other relevant experts to explore (...) their perspectives on preventing SBV in mental health and disability care organizations. We used inductive thematic analysis to interpret our data.ResultsWe found three main themes on how healthcare organizations can prevent SBV in mental health and disability care: setting rules and regulations, engaging in dialogue about sexuality, and addressing systemic and organizational dimensions.ConclusionOur findings suggest that preventing SBV in mental health and disability care organizations necessitates setting suitable rules and regulations and facilitating dialogue about positive aspects of sexuality and intimacy, as well as about boundaries, and inappropriate behaviors or feelings. Combining both further requires organizational policies and practices that promote transparency and reflection, and focus on creating a safe environment. Our findings will help prevent SBV and promote sexual health in mental health and disability care organizations. (shrink)

Many philosophers consider explanation to be objective such that facts explain facts independently of human beings. This paper rejects such an ontological view and argues in favor of an epistemic view, named the pragmatic-rhetorical view, according to which explanations depend on our knowledge and are grounded in the public or scientific discourse.

Belief in the afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. Originally Greece and Israel - the cultures that gave us Christianity - had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly (...) readable book, Jan N. Bremmer - one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion - takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience. (shrink)

These sixty-one numbered paragraphs offer an overview of the idea and practice of lyric philosophy. They draw heavily on the author's texts Lyric Philosophy, Wisdom & Metaphor, and “Bringhurst's Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology”. The present essay outlines key concepts — clarity as resonance, metaphor as gestalt shift, meaning as gesture, the overlap between philosophy and poetry, the nature of lyric truth — and suggests that they are essential to an adequate epistemology. These concepts allow us to address serious gaps in (...) our understanding of how humans think, gaps that have arisen owing to the limitations of linguified intelligence coupled with a disinclination to admit the existence of these limitations. The overview also describes fundamental differences between lyric philosophy and analytic philosophy, while insisting on a robust conception of truth and on the existence of a knowable mind-independent world. The importance of a lyric approach for our understanding of a range of ecological questions is discussed, and lyric philosophy is positioned, politically, as a critique of technocracy. (shrink)

Notes on the life of Adolf Lindenbaum, a complete bibliography of his published works, and selected references to his unpublished results.

Tibetan Buddhist writings frequently state that many of the things we perceive in the world are in fact illusory, as illusory as echoes or mirages. In Twelve Examples of Illusion , Jan Westerhoff offers an engaging look at a dozen illusions--including magic tricks, dreams, rainbows, and reflections in a mirror--showing how these phenomena can give us insight into reality. For instance, he offers a fascinating discussion of optical illusions, such as the wheel of fire (the "wheel" seen when a torch (...) is swung rapidly in a circle), discussing Tibetan explanations of this phenomenon as well as the findings of modern psychology, and significantly clarifying the idea that most phenomena--from chairs to trees--are similar illusions. The book uses a variety of crystal-clear examples drawn from a wide variety of fields, including contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, as well as the history of science, optics, artificial intelligence, geometry, economics, and literary theory. Throughout, Westerhoff makes both Buddhist philosophical ideas and the latest theories of mind and brain come alive for the general reader. -/- "This delightful book offers a rich and satisfying philosophical feast to anyone interested in the phenomenon of illusion itself or in the Buddhist analysis of the human condition. Westerhoff draws together classical Buddhist scholarship, contemporary cognitive science and his own judicious philosophical reflection in a serious but refreshingly accessible engagement with the Buddhist tradition in the exploration of the role of illusion in our cognitive and emotional lives." Jay L. Garfield, author of Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika -/- "Jan Westerhoff creatively juxtaposes an important Buddhist study of illusion with fascinating modern researches on illusory experiences, using the latter to illuminate the former. The result is a revealing account of the pervasiveness of illusion in our cognitive experience and the very structure of our cognitive apparatus. It brings to life the Buddhist discussion of illusion, making it relevant to our everyday experience instead of being high-minded intellectual exercises only." -/- Tao Jiang, author of Contexts and Dialogue: Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind -/- "The twelve similes for the illusory nature of this world are very profound, and Westerhoff does them wonderful justice in this excellent book." -/- Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University. (shrink)

Recent research in Baroque Scholastic and early modern meditational exercises has demonstrated similarity between Descartes’s Meditations and St. Teresa of Ávila’s El Castillo Interior. While there is growing agreement on the influence of Catholic meditations on Descartes, the extent of Teresa’s role is debated. Instead of discussing the full extent of Teresa’s influence, this paper concentrates on one example of the considered influence: the skeptical scenario of demonic deception, having clear anticipation in Teresa’s work where the exercitant faces off against (...) deceiving demonic forces, which confound and temporarily halt the meditative progress. The paper analyzes Teresa’s use of deceptive demons and its influence on the Cartesian Evil Demon scenario, while contrasting both with a discussion of demonic deception in the late Medieval and Baroque Scholastic context, arguing that demonological discussions in 1500s allowed both Teresa’s and Descartes’s deceivers to not only cause diversions but to make the deception laborious to resist. (shrink)

Political theorists tend to dismiss the concept of constitutional patriotism for two main reasons. On the one hand, constitutional patriotism — understood as a post-national, universalist form of democratic political allegiance — is rejected on account of its abstract quality. On the otherhand, it is argued that constitutional patriotism, while apprearing universalist, is in fact particular through and through. According to this genealogical critique, it is held that constitutional patriotism might have been appropriate in the context when it originated — (...) namely West Germany, a half-nation with a deeply compromised sense of nationality on account of the Nazi past — but it is not universally applicable. This article reconstructs the origins of constitutional patriotism arguing that both the ‘protective’ and state-centred patriotism of Dolf Sternberger, and the ‘purifying’ patriotism of Jurgen Habermas — focused mainly on the public sphere — can indeed be understood as relying on ‘supplements of particularily’. However, there are also normative connections between universalist constitutional morality and militant democracy on the one hand, and universalist constitutionalist morality and an imperative to remember on the other. Thus, the genealogical critique by itself is insufficient to invalidate the idea of constitutional patriotism. (shrink)

The pragmatic theory of explanation is an attempt to see explanation as a linguistic response to a cognitive problem where the content of the response depends on the context of the scientific inquiry. The present paper draws on the rhetorical situation, as it is defined by Loyld Bitzer, in order to understand how the context may influence the content as well as the acceptability of the response.

This innovative book proposes a unique and original perspective on the nature of the mind and how phenomenal consciousness may arise in a physical world. From simple sentient organisms to complex self-reflective systems, Faye argues for a naturalistic-evolutionary approach to philosophy of mind and consciousness. Drawing on substantial literature in evolutionary biology and cognitive science, this book offers a promising alternative to the major theories of the mind-body problem: the quality of our experiences should not, as some philosophers have claimed, (...) be associated with subjectivity that is not open for scientific explanation, nor should it be associated with intrinsic properties of the brain. Instead, Faye argues that mental properties are extrinsic properties of the brain caused by the organism’s interaction with its environment. Taking on the explanatory gap, and rejecting the ontological pluralism of present naturalist theories of the mind, Faye thus proposes a unified view of reality in which it is possible to explain qualitative mental presentations as part of the physical world. (shrink)

Jan Zwicky - Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 670-671 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jan Zwicky University of Victoria Susan G. Sterrett. Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World. New York: Pi Press, 2006. Pp. xxii + 329. Cloth, $26.95 Wittgenstein Flies a Kite focuses (...) on intellectual developments in philosophy, physics, aeronautics, and engineering in the years just prior to the First World War. Sterrett points out that certain thinkers were involved simultaneously in more than one of these fields, and argues for conceptual cross-pollination among them. In particular, she wishes to make a case for connections between the modeling of.. (shrink)

Summary This article examines the complex nature of post-war Italian political thought, stressing the importance of Italy's unusual institutional and historical political arrangements, but also the vibrancy of its political ideologies in this period. In the past it has often been argued that the dysfunctional nature of post-war Italian democracy with its rapidly changing governments, and widespread corruption—which nonetheless coexisted with the one party, the Christian Democrats, being constantly in power—led to the atrophying of political theory in general, and political (...) ideologies in particular. But this picture is strongly disputed here—on the contrary it is argued that Christian Democratic, Left and liberal political ideologies were all complex and interesting. Thus if Christian democracy should ultimately be seen as an ‘ideology of transition’ which existed to help Catholicism adapt to the parameters of modern mass democracy, and which lacked a thinker of the calibre of Jacques Maritain, it nevertheless contained within it important debates on the role of the state, between such interesting thinkers as Giuseppe Dossetti and Alcide De Gasperi. And if anything, political thinking on the Left in the post-war period was even more complex, with visceral debates within the (large) Communist Party (PCI) over whether to work within the law—between such thinkers as Palmiro Togliatti and the Il Manifesto group. Equally on the more revolutionary Left, there were important debates about how quickly capitalism could be made to collapse through revolutionary action between thinkers such as Raniero Panzieri and his more radical disciples, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, while later, due to the general failure of these revolutionary efforts, post-modern thinkers such as Gianni Vattimo sought to abandon grand metaphysical narratives, whilst retaining a commitment to Left of centre political commitments. Finally, although not part of a widespread mass movement, the liberal thought of Norberto Bobbio was also highly interesting and sophisticated—borrowing from Hobbes and Kelsen, he sought to advocate a modest form of liberal democracy which allowed for civilised forms of conflict, and the protection of minorities, and which rejected the contention of Marxists that civil rights could not be distinguished from economic ones. Overall, if normative aspirations in post-war Italian politics were often frustrated in practice, this was certainly not due to any lack of theoretical vibrancy. (shrink)

Embodied cognition is an interpretative—or hermeneutical—cognition inherent in motor-sensory perception intrinsically informed by biological and sociocultural memory, a cognition embedded in the organism as well as the socio-cultural environment interacting with it (Ward et al. TOPOI 36:365–375, 2017), of which technologies are a part. Yet, smart machines are advancing on human abilities to perceive and interpret concerning the accuracy, quantity, and quality of the data processed. Machines process and categorize images, perform classification tasks, they calculate and perform pattern analysis, all (...) machine learning processes are task-specific. Machine learning processes resemble human interpretative processes; however, these are two very different ways of “dealing with something,” although both can be said to be hermeneutical, one enactive, the other material; the first is a meaning-generating interpretative process, the second a statistics-based information output. The information extracted from all the data fed into the computer is the end-product of machine learning, whereas human interpretative enactments are continuous and necessary for any application of the information output. (shrink)

I offer a novel reading in this dissertation of René Descartes’s (1596–1650) skepticism in his work Meditations on First Philosophy (1641–1642). I specifically aim to answer the following problem: How is Descartes’s skepticism to be read in accordance with the rest of his philosophy? This problem can be divided into two more general questions in Descartes scholarship: How is skepticism utilized in the Meditations, and what are its intentions and relation to the preceding philosophical tradition? -/- I approach the topic (...) from both a historical and a text-based analysis, combining textual and contextual research. I examine Descartes’s skepticism against two main traditions in the historical analysis: philosophical skepticism and Aristotelian Scholasticism. I argue that skepticism in the Meditations is intended to oppose and upheave both Scholasticism and skepticism. The intended results of the work are not merely epistemological but also metaphysical and even ethical. Furthermore, these ambitions cannot be neatly distinguished but merge into each other. -/- The third historical context against which the skeptical meditations are examined is the literary genre of meditative exercises, particularly from the 1500–1600’s, which, while religiously and spiritually oriented, likewise provided the practitioner with an enlightened understanding of self-knowledge and their cognitive place in the world on the way to closer spiritual proximity to God. I argue by this reading that the skepticism of the Meditations is an attentive, meditational cognitive exercise that is not merely instrumental and methodological but is to have a genuine and serious (psychologically real) effect on our thinking. The skeptical meditation is not simply a theoretical thought experiment but is to be seriously practiced as a transformative process of reorienting one’s cognitive framework to discover truth, certainty, and a way to a happy, tranquil, and virtuous life. -/- I offer a close reading in the textual analysis of the first three meditations of the Meditations. I argue that the meditative skepticism employed in the work does not reject the previous beliefs but suspends judgment on them, withdrawing assent until further evidence can be found. I introduce a new term into Descartes scholarship in this analysis, based on the terminology of ancient skepticism: Cartesian epochē (gr. epochē, suspension, withdrawal). Instead of rejecting previous beliefs or assenting to the probably false, the skeptical procedure of the Meditations is argued to emulate in important ways the suspension of judgment on equally balanced reasons in ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism. Novel interpretations are presented along the way of the will’s freedom, of the First Meditation’s skeptical scenarios, of the cogito, and of the vindication of metaphysical certainty, as well as a clarification of the Cartesian Circle problem. -/- Reinterpreting the relation of Descartes’s skepticism to the preceding historical and literary traditions leads to a new look at the skeptical method itself. Presenting a new interpretation of skepticism in the Meditations leads at the same time to a new look at its relation to the historical context. The two research questions are, then, intrinsically tied together. -/- My focus in the study is on the Meditations, but I also reference and discuss Descartes’s other philosophical works, as well as his correspondence, when necessary. (shrink)

Friis and Crease illustrate the diversity of content and styles in postphenomenology, a burgeoning field that has attracted attention among scholars engaged in technology studies. Contributors to this edited collection seek to analyze, clarify, and develop postphenomenological language and concepts, expand the work of Don Ihde, the field's founder, and delve into areas that Ihde never tackled.

Alkibiades, a central character in Plato's Symposium, claims that philosophy touches him to the quick. When Socrates speaks, he's often moved to tears and realizes he must change his life. In Alkibiades' Love, Jan Zwicky demonstrates that this image of philosophy is not anachronistic, but remains the living heart of the discipline. Philosophy can indeed matter to our lives, but for it to do so, we must reconceive the methods that, since the Enlightenment, have dominated its self-image in the West. (...) In these meticulously researched essays, Zwicky argues that analytic and poststructuralist philosophy are not simply fashions in academic discourse, but are manifestations of the technocracy which they sustain and promote. The alternative she develops, by showing it in action, is lyric philosophy - an integrated mode of understanding whose foundations lie in the way we comprehend music and metaphor. Written in lucid and powerful prose, Alkibiades' Love will interest a broad readership, from students of ancient Greek philosophy to ecologists seeking a coherent foundation for their work. Zwicky offers deep and original readings of Freud, Plato, and Simone Weil, and resuscitates Max Wertheimer's work, linking it to our comprehension of mathematics, metaphor, and ecological structures. Zwicky has been hailed as one of the most important and original thinkers of our time. Alkibiades' Love illuminates and extends her groundbreaking work while providing an accessible introduction for those coming to her thought for the first time. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue, via a revision of Freud's notions of primary and secondary process, that experiences of resonant form lie at the root of many serious ineffability claims. I suggest further that Western European culture's resistance to the perception of resonant form underlies some of its present crises.

Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky’s trenchant exploration of the root of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West’s most noted achievements. The Renaissance merged imperial enterprise with Islamic algebra and recently recovered Greek mathematics to precipitate mechanized industry and resource extraction; these in turn made possible the growth of capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Big Technology. Despite its self-image as objective, Zwicky argues, the West’s style of (...) thought is not politically neutral, but intensely anthropocentric. It has led those who adopt it to regard the more-than-human world as nothing more than timber licences and drilling sites, where value is not recognized unless it is monetized. Oblivious to context and blind to big-picture thinking, it analyzes, mechanizes, digitizes, and systematizes, while rejecting empathy and compassion as distorting influences. Lyric comprehension, in Zwicky’s view, offers an alternative to this way of thinking, and she provides a wide range of examples. Once upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left Western thought blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of that blinkered vision are now beginning to unfold. (shrink)

I argue that meaning is a result of our biological evolution, and that language evolved from primates’ ability to grasp conceptually the most important features of their environment. I hold that natural selection and adaptation ensure that primates both sense and conceptualize their world similarly, and that they therefore think similarly, whenever they receive the same sense impressions. This cognitive similarity enabled our predecessors to learn and develop a language because of the regular association of a particular sound and a (...) particular image. The evolutionary pressure on our predecessors to develop a language was the advantage that such a language had for cooperation and survival. Finally, I argue that the old, but in wider circles frowned-upon theory of meaning, the expressive theory of language, provides the best explanation of the relationship between thought, meaning, and words, because it operates with words and not sentences as the basic semantic unit. (shrink)

The paper discusses the regularity account of causation but finds it insufficient as a complete account of our notion of causality. The attractiveness of the regularity account is its attempt to understand causation in terms of empirically accessible features of the world. However, this account does not match our intuition that singular causality is prior in normal epistemic situations and that there is more to causation than mere succession. Apart from succession and regularity, the concept of causality also contains a (...) modal feature which allows us to engage in counterfactual discourses about singular causal events and to claim that a particular cause is both sufficient and necessary for its effect in the circumstances. However, we may directly observe singular causes, but the modal element is not something we can possibly observe. Rather, this element is something we add to our perception of succession. Thus, the paper suggests that the modal feature of causality is a mental construction which was originally formed by our knowledge of certain structural features of similar events in other situations. It stems not from what we actually observe but from what we have observed or may observe under different but relevant circumstances. So the concept of causation has partly an empirical content and partly a constructed one. (shrink)

Some of our reasons for action are grounded in the fact that the action in question is a means to something else we have reason to do. This raises the question as to which principles govern the transmission of reasons from ends to means. In this paper, we discuss the merits and demerits of a liberal transmission principle, which plays a prominent role in the current literature. The principle states that an agent has an instrumental reason to whenever -ing is (...) a means for him to do what he has intrinsic reason to do. We start by discussing the objection that this principle implies counterintuitive reason statements. We argue that attempts to solve this “too many reasons problem” by appealing to pragmatic strategies for debunking intuitions about so-called negative reason existentials are questionable. Subsequently, we discuss three important arguments in favor of Liberal Transmission, and argue that they fail to make a convincing case for this principle. In the course of the discussion, we also provide alternative, less liberal transmission principles. We argue that these alternative principles allow us to accommodate those phenomena that seem to support Liberal Transmission while avoiding its problems. (shrink)

I first became interested in De dialectica in 1966, while I was doing re search on Augustine's knowledge of logic. At the time I made a transla tion of the Maurist text and included it as an appendix to my doctoral dissertation (Yale, 1967). In 1971 I thoroughly revised the translation on the basis of the critical text of Wilhelm Crecelius (1857) and I have re cently revised it again to conform to Professor Jan Pinborg's new edition. The only previously (...) published translation of the whole of De dialectica. is N. H. Barreau's French translation in the Oeuvres completes de Saint Augustin (1873). Thomas Stanley translated parts of Chapters Six and Nine into English as part of the account of Stoic logic in his History of Philosophy (Pt. VIII, 1656). I offer De dialectica in English in the hope that it will be of some interest to historians of logic and of the liberal arts tradition and to students of the thought of Augustine. In translating I have for the most part been as literal as is consistent with English usage. Although inclusion of the Latin text might have justified a freer translation, for example, the use of modern technical terms, it seemed better to stay close to the Latin. One of the. values in studying a work such as De dialectica is to see familiar topics discussed in a terminology not so familiar. In the translation I follow these conventions. (shrink)

Modern cosmology treats space and time, or rather space-time, as concrete particulars. The General Theory of Relativity combines the distribution of matter and energy with the curvature of space-time. Here space-time appears as a concrete entity which affects matter and energy and is affected by the things in it. I question the idea that space-time is a concrete existing entity which both substantivalism and reductive relationism maintain. Instead I propose an alternative view, which may be called non-reductive relationism, by arguing (...) that space and time are abstract entities based on extension and changes. (shrink)

In this essay, part of a cluster of pieces on her concept of “lyric philosophy,” the author explores connections between imagination, understood as the capacity to think in images, and what Wittgenstein called “seeing-as.” In seeing-as, we focus on what Wittgenstein identifies as inner structural relations. This is a term that Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of gestalt philosophical psychology, used independently to describe how seeing-as involves seeing into a thing or situation. The present essay suggests that both seeing-as (...) and seeing-into depend on, and develop, sensitivity to ontological resonance, the attunement of things with one another, the deep analogies that constitute the underlying structure of the world. Imagination is thus fundamental to the good, or ethical, life. For its disciplined exercise relieves us of what Simone Weil calls the “Ring of Gyges”: the refusal to perceive significant analogies between ourselves and other beings, which is the root of injustice. (shrink)

In this contribution we shall characterize matrix consequence operation determined by a direct product and an ultraproduct of a family of logical matrices. As an application we shall describe finite consequence operations with the help of ultrapowers.

The paper discusses properties of 4QL, a DATALOG⌉⌉-like query language, originally outlined by Maluszyński and Szalas (Maluszyński & Szalas, 2011). 4QL allows one to use rules with negation in heads and bodies of rules. It is based on a simple and intuitive semantics and provides uniform tools for “lightweight” versions of known forms of nonmonotonic reasoning. Negated literals in heads of rules may naturally lead to inconsistencies. On the other hand, rules do not have to attach meaning to some literals. (...) Therefore 4QL is founded on a four-valued semantics, employing the logic introduced in (Maluszyński et al., 2008; Vitória et al., 2009) with truth values: ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘inconsistent’ and ‘unknown’. In addition, 4QL is tractable w.r.t. data complexity and captures PTIME queries. Even though DATALOG⌉⌉ is known as a concept for the last 30 years, to our best knowledge no existing approach enjoys these properties.In the current paper we:investigate properties of well-supported models of 4QLprove the correctness of the algorithm for computing well-supported modelsshow that 4QL has PTIME data complexity and captures PTIME. (shrink)

The pragmatic theory of explanation is an attempt to see explanation as a linguistic response to a cognitive problem where the content of the response depends on the context of the scientific inquiry. The present paper draws on the rhetorical situation, as it is defined by Loyld Bitzer, in order to understand how the context may influence the content as well as the acceptability of the response.

Forms of understanding -- Understanding as organized beliefs -- On interpretation -- Representations -- Scientific explanation -- Causal explanations -- Other types of explanations -- The pragmatics of explanation -- Not just why-questions -- A rhetorical approach to explanation -- Pluralism and the unity of science.

Forms of understanding -- Understanding as organized beliefs -- On interpretation -- Representations -- Scientific explanation -- Causal explanations -- Other types of explanations -- The pragmatics of explanation -- Not just why-questions -- A rhetorical approach to explanation -- Pluralism and the unity of science.