Gaston Franssen’s essay touches on important medical and literary topics: the experience of patients with unexplained somatic complaints, the importance of giving their symptoms a name or diagnosis, the verbal representation of what bothers them, or the uncertainty all parties have to live with when an underlying cause of the symptoms is missing. A diagnosis or name such as chronic fatigue syndrome can be a relief for its sufferers, as is expressed by one of the patients in the article: “I (...) wept with relief at having a name for it.” Yet CFS is but a name for something that, medically speaking, has no substance except for the patients” complaints. CFS shares this lack of objective physical signs with other... (shrink)

This paper develops an account of committed beliefs: beliefs we commit to through reflection and conscious reasoning. To help make sense of committed beliefs, I present a new view of conscious reasoning, one of putting yourself in a position to become phenomenally consciously aware of evidence. By doing this for different pieces of evidence, you begin to make your up mind, making conscious reasoning, as such, a voluntary activity with an involuntary conclusion. The paper then explains how we use conscious (...) reasoning in reflection not just to form and change committed beliefs, but to become aware of existing ones. The paper concludes with an explanation of how the limitations of conscious reasoning require us to maintain committed beliefs in a system. It is our maintenance of this system that allows us to knit together individual episodes of conscious reasoning into one enduring performance as a committed systematic believer. (shrink)

We conducted an integrative data analysis to examine the hedonic character of nostalgia. We combined positive and negative affect measures from 41 experiments manipulating nostalgia. Overall, nostalgia inductions increased positive and ambivalent affect, but did not significantly alter negative affect. The magnitude of nostalgia’s effects varied markedly across different experimental inductions of the emotion. The hedonic character of nostalgia, then, depends on how the emotion is elicited and the benchmark to which it is compared. We discuss implications for theory and (...) research on nostalgia and emotions in general. (shrink)

In this chapter we give an overview of current and historical conceptions of the nature of obsessions and compulsions. We discuss some open questions pertaining to the primacy of the affective, volitional or affective nature of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Furthermore, we add some phenomenological suggestions of our own. In particular, we point to the patients’ need for absolute certainty and the lack of trust underlying this need. Building on insights from Wittgenstein, we argue that the kind of certainty the patients (...) strive for is unattainable in principle via the acquisition of factual knowledge. Moreover, we suggest that the patients’ attempts to attain certainty are counter-productive as their excessive conscious control in fact undermines the trust they need. (shrink)

According to the traditional Western concept of freedom, the ability to exercise free will depends on the availability of options and the possibility to consciously decide which one to choose. Since neuroscientific research increasingly shows the limits of what we in fact consciously control, it seems that our belief in free will and hence in personal autonomy is in trouble. -/- A closer look at the phenomenology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) gives us reason to doubt the traditional concept of freedom (...) in terms of conscious control. Patients suffering from OCD experience themselves as unfree. The question is whether their lack of freedom is due to a lack of will power. Do they have too little conscious control over their thoughts and actions? Or could it be the opposite: are they exerting too much conscious control over their thoughts and actions? -/- In this chapter, we will argue that OCD patients testify to the general condition that exercising an increased conscious control over actions can in fact diminish the sense of agency rather than increase the experience of freedom. The experiences of these patients show that the traditional conception of freedom in terms of ‘free will’ has major shortcomings. There is an alternative, however, to be found in the work of Hannah Arendt. She advocates a conception of freedom as freedom in action. Combined with phenomenological insights on action, Arendt’s account of freedom helps us to get a more adequate understanding of the role of deliberation in the experience of freedom. We argue that the experience of freedom depends on the right balance between deliberate control and unreflective actions. (shrink)

We challenge Gallagher’s distinction between the sense of ownership (SO) and the sense of agency (SA) as two separable modalities of experience of the minimal self and argue that a careful investigation of the examples provided to promote this distinction in fact reveals that SO and SA are intimately related and modulate each other. We propose a way to differentiate between the various notions of SO and SA that are currently used interchangeably in the debate, and suggest a more gradual (...) reading of the two that allows for various blends of SO and SA. Such an approach not only provides us with a richer phenomenology but also with a more parsimonious view of the minimal self. (shrink)

This study examines an important aspect of energy history and policy: the intertwinement of energy technologies with ideals. Ideals play an important role in energy visions and innovation pathways. Aspirations to realize technical, social, and political ideals indicate a long-term commitment in the design of energy systems, distinguishable from commitment to other abstract goals, such as values. This study offers an analytical scheme that could help to conceptualize these differences and their impact on energy policy. In the proposed model, two (...) spheres of interaction are highlighted: a material sphere in which values and technologies co-evolve, and an imaginary sphere in which ideals interact with idealized technologies. Furthermore, the relation between these two spheres can be understood in different ways. This study examines three cases that are illustrative of the different roles of ideals in the development of energy technologies and visions: (1) the evolution of safety in nuclear reactor design; (2) visions of atomic power in France; (3) the political idealization of a tidal power scheme in the Severn Estuary. Finally, the developed model implies more general insights for the development of sociotechnical systems. Amongst others, it shows why certain projects and technologies remain a political, but not a techno–economic option. (shrink)

Although a large number of studies have explored the main causes of gender inequality in academia, less attention has been given to the processes underlying the failure of gender equality initiatives to enhance gender representation, especially at the professorial level. We offer a critical discourse analysis of recently promulgated gender policy documents of the five Flemish universities, and demonstrate that defensive institutional work is a fundamental process underlying resistance to gender equality in the academic profession. That is, powerful organizational actors (...) resist gender change by intentionally deploying a combination of discursive strategies that legitimate what we describe as non–time-bound gender equality initiatives: The expected outcomes are undetermined in time, and they delegitimate concrete, time-bound measures that define specific outcomes against well-defined deadlines. By explicitly bringing a temporal dimension into our analysis, we argue that defensive institutional work deflects questions regarding what ought to be achieved when, and contributes to the slow pace of gender change in academia. (shrink)

This paper investigates agents’ blameworthiness when they are part of a group that does harm. We analyse three factors that affect the scope of an agent’s blameworthiness in these cases: shared intentionality, interpersonal influence, and common knowledge. Each factor involves circumstantial luck. The more each factor is present, the greater is the scope of each agent’s vicarious blameworthiness for the other agents’ contributions to the harm. We then consider an agent’s degree of blameworthiness, as distinct from her scope of blameworthiness. (...) We suggest that an agent mostly controls her degree of blameworthiness—but even here, luck constrains what possible degrees of blameworthiness are open to her. (shrink)

The semantics of directional prepositions is investigated from the perspective of aspect. What distinguishes telic PPs (like to the house) from atelic PPs (like towards the house), taken as denoting sets of paths, is their algebraic structure: atelic PPs are cumulative, closed under the operation of concatenation, telic PPs are not. Not only does this allow for a natural and compositional account of how PPs contribute to the aspect of a sentence, but it also guides our understanding of the lexical (...) semantics of prepositions in important ways. Semantically, prepositions turn out to be quite similar to nouns and verbs. Nominal distinctions (like singular and plural, mass and count) and verbal classes (like semelfactives and degree achievements) have their prepositional counterparts. (shrink)

We approach the semantics of prepositions from the perspective of conceptual spaces. Focusing on purely spatial locative and directional prepositions, we analyze both types of prepositions in terms of polar coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates. This makes it possible to demonstrate that the property of convexity holds quite generally in the domain of prepositions of location and direction, supporting the important role that this property plays in conceptual spaces.

An important and supposedly impactful form of clinical ethics support is moral case deliberation. Empirical evidence, however, is limited with regard to its actual impact. With this literature review, we aim to investigate the empirical evidence of MCD, thereby a) informing the practice, and b) providing a focus for further research on and development of MCD in healthcare settings. A systematic literature search was conducted in the electronic databases PubMed, CINAHL and Web of Science. Both the data collection and the (...) qualitative data analysis followed a stepwise approach, including continuous peer review and careful documentation of our decisions. The qualitative analysis was supported by ATLAS.ti. Based on a qualitative analysis of 25 empirical papers, we identified four clusters of themes: 1) facilitators and barriers in the preparation and context of MCD, i.e., a safe and open atmosphere created by a facilitator, a concrete case, commitment of participants, a focus on the moral dimension, and a supportive organization; 2) changes that are brought about on a personal and inter-professional level, with regard to professional’s feelings of relief, relatedness and confidence; understanding of the perspectives of colleagues, one’s own perspective and the moral issue at stake; and awareness of the moral dimension of one’s work and awareness of the importance of reflection; 3) changes that are brought about in caring for patients and families; and 4) changes that are brought about on an organizational level. This review shows that MCD brings about changes in practice, mostly for the professional in inter-professional interactions. Most reported changes are considered positive, although challenges, frustrations and absence of change were also reported. Empirical evidence of a concrete impact on the quality of patient care is limited and is mostly based on self-reports. With patient-focused and methodologically sound qualitative research, the practice and the value of MCD in healthcare settings can be better understood, thus making a stronger case for this kind of ethics support. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the moral responsibility of organized groups in light of historicism. Historicism is the view that any morally responsible agent must satisfy certain historical conditions, such as not having been manipulated. We set out four examples involving morally responsible organized groups that pose problems for existing accounts of historicism. We then pose a trilemma: one can reject group responsibility, reject historicism, or revise historicism. We pursue the third option. We formulate a Manipulation Condition and a (...) Guarding Condition as addendums to historicism that are necessary to accommodate our cases of group responsibility. (shrink)

I argue that culpable ignorance can be irreducibly collective. In some cases, it is not fair to expect any individual to have avoided her ignorance of some fact, but it is fair to expect the agents together to have avoided their ignorance of that fact. Hence, no agent is individually culpable for her ignorance, but they are culpable for their ignorance together. This provides us with good reason to think that any group that is culpably ignorant in this irreducibly collective (...) sense is non-distributively collectively responsible for subsequent unwitting acts and consequences. (shrink)

In the social world, multiple sensory channels are used concurrently to facilitate communication. Among human and nonhuman pri- mates, faces and voices are the primary means of transmitting social signals (Adolphs, 2003; Ghazanfar and Santos, 2004). Primates recognize the correspondence between species-specific facial and vocal expressions (Massaro, 1998; Ghazanfar and Logothetis, 2003; Izumi and Kojima, 2004), and these visual and auditory channels can be integrated into unified percepts to enhance detection and discrimination. Where and how such communication signals are integrated (...) at the neural level are poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear what role “unimodal” sensory areas, such as the auditory cortex, may play. We recorded local field potential activity, the signal that best correlates with human imaging and event-related potential signals, in both the core and lateral belt regions of the auditory cortex in awake behaving rhesus monkeys while they viewed vocalizing conspecifics. We demonstrate unequivocally that the primate auditory cortex integrates facial and vocal signals through enhancement and suppression of field potentials in both the core and lateral belt regions. The majority of these multisensory responses were specific to face/voice integration, and the lateral belt region shows a greater frequency of multisensory integration than the core region. These multisensory processes in the auditory cortex likely occur via recip- rocal interactions with the superior temporal sulcus. (shrink)

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that in both (...) the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself. (shrink)

This article identifies the structural and conceptual aspects of a visual construction often used in advertisements to establish a metaphoric or associative relation, that is, symmetric object alignment (SOA). It offers an account of the formal ingredients of SOA, which fall into two groups: object-constitutive factors (like size, shape, and color) and object-depictment factors (like perspective, orientation, and distance from viewing point). Both factors allow us to treat SOA as a visual rhetorical scheme. We also discuss how SOA relates to (...) conceptual structure, metaphoric or otherwise. Four types of relations are distinguished, based on the way in which perceptual and conceptual characteristics interact. Finally, we discuss the way in which these characteristics relate to the processing of such visual messages. One depictment factor will be focused on in particular: one-to-one versus one-to-many alignments. An attempt is made to connect these 2 patterns to the much-discussed topic in verbal metaphor theory, object comparison versus categorization. (shrink)

In this article we describe two core ontologies of law that specify knowledge that is common to all domains of law. The first one, FOLaw describes and explains dependencies between types of knowledge in legal reasoning; the second one, LRI-Core ontology, captures the main concepts in legal information processing. Although FOLaw has shown to be of high practical value in various applied European ICT projects, its reuse is rather limited as it is rather concerned with the structure of legal reasoning (...) than with legal knowledge itself: as many other “legal core ontologies”, FOLaw is therefore rather an epistemological framework than an ontology. Therefore, we also developed LRI-Core. As we argue here that legal knowledge is based to a large extend on common-sense knowledge, LRI-Core is particularly inspired by research on abstract common-sense concepts. The main categories of LRI-Core are: physical, mental and abstract concepts. Roles cover in particular social worlds. Another special category are occurrences; terms that denote events and situations. We illustrate the use of LRI-Core with an ontology for Dutch criminal law, developed in the e-Court European project. (shrink)

Turing progressions have been often used to measure the proof-theoretic strength of mathematical theories: iterate adding consistency of some weak base theory until you “hit” the target theory. Turing progressions based on n-consistency give rise to a \ proof-theoretic ordinal \ also denoted \. As such, to each theory U we can assign the sequence of corresponding \ ordinals \. We call this sequence a Turing-Taylor expansion or spectrum of a theory. In this paper, we relate Turing-Taylor expansions of sub-theories (...) of Peano Arithmetic to Ignatiev’s universal model for the closed fragment of the polymodal provability logic \. In particular, we observe that each point in the Ignatiev model can be seen as Turing-Taylor expansions of formal mathematical theories. Moreover, each sub-theory of Peano Arithmetic that allows for a Turing-Taylor expansion will define a unique point in Ignatiev’s model. (shrink)

This paper is a presentation of astatus quæstionis, to wit of the problemof the interpretability logic of all reasonablearithmetical theories.We present both the arithmetical side and themodal side of the question.Dedicated to Dick de Jongh on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

In this book, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier offers the first systematic study of Pythagoras and his influence on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion, medicine, music, the occult, and social life-as well as on architecture and art-in the late medieval and early modern eras. Following the threads of admiration for this ancient Greek sage from the fourteenth century to Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth, this book demonstrates that Pythagoras's influence in intellectual circles-Christian, Jewish, and Arab-was more widespread than has previously been (...) acknowledged. Joost-Gaugier shows that during this period Pythagoras was respected by many intellectuals in different areas of Europe. She also shows how this admiration was reflected in ideas that were applied to the visual arts by a number of well known architects and artists who sought, through the use of a visual language inspired by the memory of Pythagoras, to obtain perfect harmony in their creations. Among these were Alberti, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Thus did, she suggests, some of the greatest art works in the Western world owe their modernity to an inspirational force that, paradoxically, had been conceived in the distant past. (shrink)

As a member of the British Oxford Group, psychologist Richard Ryder marked the beginning of the modern animal rights and animal welfare movement in the seventies. By introducing the concept “speciesism.” Ryder contributed importantly to the expansion of this movement. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to Ryder’s moral theory, “painism”, that aims to resolve the conflict between the two predominant rival theories in animal ethics, the deontological of Tom Regan and the utilitarian of Peter Singer. First, this paper examines (...) the kernel and historical sources of Ryder’s painist theory, linking it to the work of John Rawls and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Second, it examines Ryder’s critique of utilitarianism. It is argued that his critique of Singer’s use of the word “sentience” is unconvincing and that his critique of utilitarian aggregation as not taking a full account of the metaphysical separateness of persons, has already been countered and dealt with. Finally this paper looks at some of the counterintuitive implications of Ryder’s theory and argues that utilitarianism might have more resources for dealing with its own alleged counterintuitive implications than Ryder acknowledges. (shrink)

"In this illustrated book, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier sets out the panorama of Pythagoras's influence and that of Christian and Jewish thinkers who followed ...

By Solovay’s celebrated completeness result [31] on formal provability we know that the provability logic ${\textbf {GL}}$ describes exactly all provable structural properties for any sound and strong enough arithmetical theory with a decidable axiomatisation. Japaridze generalised this result in [22] by considering a polymodal version ${\mathsf {GLP}}$ of ${\textbf {GL}}$ with modalities $[n]$ for each natural number n referring to ever increasing notions of provability. Modern treatments of ${\mathsf {GLP}}$ tend to interpret the $[n]$ provability notion as “provable in (...) a base theory T together with all true $\Pi ^0_n$ formulas as oracles.” In this paper we generalise this interpretation into the transfinite. In order to do so, a main difficulty to overcome is to generalise the syntactical characterisations of the oracle formulas of complexity $\Pi ^0_n$ to the hyper-arithmetical hierarchy. The paper exploits the fact that provability is $\Sigma ^0_1$ complete and that similar results hold for stronger provability notions. As such, the oracle sentences to define provability at level $\alpha $ will recursively be taken to be consistency statements at lower levels: provability through provability whence the name of the paper. The paper proves soundness and completeness for the proposed interpretation for a wide class of theories, namely for any theory that can formalise the recursion described above and that has some further very natural properties. Some remarks are provided on how the recursion can be formalised into second order arithmetic and on lowering the proof-theoretical strength of these systems of second order arithmetic. (shrink)

This article examines the structure and processing of editorial cartoons appropriating Joe Rosenthal's famous Iwo Jima photograph in view of the theory of conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002 Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. 2002. The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities, New York,, NY: Basic Books. [Google Scholar]). The main claim argued is that Blending theory accounts for complex processes of meaning constructing provoked by editorial cartoons that invoke several conceptual domains to define and evaluate (...) their topic, Iwo Jima cartoons being cases in point. The second section introduces the relevant aspects of Blending theory: mental spaces and types of blending networks. The third section addresses the Iwo Jima image as one particular input space; a moral criterion to which the selected sociopolitical topic of the cartoon is compared and judged. The fourth section isolates four types of graphic operations blending the Iwo Jima image with topical entities. The fifth section demonstrates how various kinds of blends give rise to either positive or negative evaluations. The final section argues that the study's scope of application extends to any kind of multi-domain cartoon, not just those addressed in this article. (shrink)

People suffering from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) do things they do not want to do, and/or they think things they do not want to think. In about 10 percent of OCD patients, none of the available treatment options is effective. A small group of these patients is currently being treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). Deep brain stimulation involves the implantation of electrodes in the brain. These electrodes give a continuous electrical pulse to the brain area in which they are implanted. (...) It turns out that patients may experience profound changes as a result of DBS treatment. It is not just the symptoms that change; patients rather seem to experience a different way of being in the world. These global effects are insufficiently captured by traditional psychiatric scales, which mainly consist of behavioural measures of the severity of the symptoms. In this article we aim to capture the changes in the patients’ phenomenology and make sense of the broad range of changes they report. For that we introduce an enactive, affordance-based model that fleshes out the dynamic interactions between person and world in four aspects. The first aspect is the patients’ experience of the world. We propose to specify the patients’ world in terms of a field of affordances, with the three dimensions of broadness of scope (‘width’ of the field), temporal horizon (‘depth’), and relevance of the perceived affordances (‘height’). The second aspect is the person-side of the interaction, that is, the patients’ self-experience, notably their moods and feelings. Thirdly, we point to the different characteristics of the way in which patients relate to the world. And lastly, the existential stance refers to the stance that patients take towards the changes they experience: the second-order evaluative relation to their interactions and themselves. With our model we intend to specify the notion of being in the world in order to do justice to the phenomenological effects of DBS treatment. (shrink)

Being more than mere passive objects used at human will, technologies co-determine the values and structures that shape the EU agricultural system. Technologies actively shape human interpretation, human action and co-shape our moral standards and routines. It is therefore important to account for the moral significance of agricultural technologies when characterising the structures in place within EU agriculture as well as when trying to understand why a particular agricultural technology is favoured or strongly opposed. From this perspective on technology, an (...) interesting question to pose, is how, within their current use context, genetically modified crops mediate human interpretation and human practice? This technology is of particular interest, because after more than 30 years, the debate on GM crops is still profound and highly polarised within EU society. Yet, too often, this debate is devalued as being irrational or irrelevant, while we show in this article, based on a technological mediation analysis, how ethical concerns about agricultural practices have co-evolved with the technological development of GM crops. This qualifies public debate on GM crops in the EU as both legitimate and relevant, as, from this perspective on technology, it can be seen as an important way to both characterise and discuss how EU agriculture is and should be organised. Analysing technology in terms of the myriad ways in which it mediates the relationship between humans and their world, further allows us to make some suggestions about how to broaden the ongoing EU discussion beyond the current dichotomous Yes/no framing. (shrink)