From dogs to gods, the science of understanding mysterious minds--including your own. Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club." It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of mind do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who (...) have discovered that minds--while incredibly important--are a matter of perception. Their research opens a trove of new findings, with insights into human behavior that are fascinating, frightening and funny. The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such poor lovers. By investigating the mind perception of extraordinary targets--animals, machines, comatose people, god--Wegner and Gray explain what it means to have a mind, and why it matters so much. Fusing cutting-edge research and personal anecdotes, The Mind Club explores the moral dimensions of mind perception with wit and compassion, revealing the surprisingly simple basis for what compels us to love and hate, to harm and to protect. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the ‘It's OK to be White’ Senate motion made by Australian far-right politician Pauline Hanson in 2018. Deliberately innocuous, the ‘It's OK to be white’ slogan was designed by online white supremacist groups with the intention of ‘triggering liberals’ and provoking outrage. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, I demonstrate that Hanson's ‘It's OK to be white’ motion was an act of calculated ambivalence, which served to address multiple audiences simultaneously. I argue that the motion provided Hanson (...) with a novel way to discuss so-called ‘anti-white’ or ‘reverse’ racism which succeeded in generating the desired controversy and media attention. I further argue that the success of the motion exposed the Australian media's illiteracy on contemporary alt-right/white supremacist tactics and discourses. I also critically examine the implications of the motion and Hanson's promotion of white victimhood narratives. Despite its innocuous framing, the ‘It's OK to be white’ motion represented the successful co-optation of a racist white supremacist political project, the implications of which should not be understated. This research furthers our understanding of the strategies and tactics employed by the far-right, as well as the interrelationship between the populist radical right and online white supremacist groups. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Platon" verfügbar.

I give a semantics for a logic with two pairs of doxastic modals and an indicative conditional connective that all nest without restriction. Sentences are evaluated as accepted, rejected, or neither. Certainty is the necessity-like modality of acceptance. Inferences may proceed from premises that are certain, or merely accepted, or a mix of both. This semantic setup yields some striking results. Notably, the existence of inferences that preserve certainty but not acceptance very directly implies both failure of modus ponens for (...) the indicative conditional in the logic of acceptance and failure of the deduction theorem for the material conditional in the logic of certainty. The latter failure dissolves, in the logic of certainty, the much - discussed tension between modus ponens and the law of import-export. (shrink)

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is (...) so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research. (shrink)

Categorization and memory for specific items are fundamental processes that allow us to apply knowledge to novel stimuli. This study directly compares categorization and memory using delay match to category (DMC) and delay match to sample (DMS) tasks. In DMC participants view and categorize a stimulus, maintain the category across a delay, and at the probe phase view another stimulus and indicate whether it is in the same category or not. In DMS, a standard item working memory task, participants encode (...) and maintain a specific individual item, and at probe decide if the stimulus is an exact match or not. Constrained Principal Components Analysis was used to identify and compare activity within neural networks associated with these tasks, and we relate these networks to those that have been identified with resting state-fMRI. We found that two frontoparietal networks of particular interest. The first network included regions associated with the dorsal attention network and frontoparietal salience network; this network showed patterns of activity consistent with a role in rapid orienting to and processing of complex stimuli. The second uniquely involved regions of the frontoparietal central executive network; this network responded more slowly following each stimulus and showed a pattern of activity consistent with a general role in role in decision-making across tasks. Additional components were identified that were associated with visual, somatomotor and default mode networks. (shrink)

Annie Besant has rarely been identified as a philosopher. Her work as an ethicist has been obscured by the reaction of critics to her abandonment of Anglican Christianity for serial eng...

In “Understanding Demonstratives”, Gareth Evans bites the bullet regarding Rip van Winkle cases in cognitive dynamics: the fact that Rip sleeps for twenty years and completely loses track of time means he is unable to retain his original belief that “Today is a fine day”. In this paper, the author argues that Evans need not bite this bullet because there are resources in his account of the cognitive dynamics involved in belief retention developed in The Varieties of Reference to successfully (...) confront the challenge posed by the Rip van Winkle case. In particular, when we combine the two central elements of Evans’s cognitive dynamics – the skill of keeping track of one’s spatio-temporal location in addition to memory – it is possible to arrive at the conclusion that it is indeed possible for Rip to retain and re-express his original belief. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and epistemology (...) towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

In early German ecology, the key concept used to refer to a synecological unit was Biozönose. Taken together with the concept of the Biotop, it was also understood as an integrated higher-order unit of life, sometimes called a “Holozön”. These units were often perceived as having properties similar to those of individual organisms, and they informed the mainstream of German ecology until at least the late 1960s. Here I ask how “organismic” these concepts really were and what conceptual problems they (...) entailed. To do so, I focus on some almost forgotten dissident positions, especially those of Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer and Fritz Peus, which I contrast with the mainstream German ecology of the time. In a radical paper published in 1954 that postulated the “dissolution of the concepts of biocoenosis and biotope”, Peus in particular elicited a forceful response from many prominent German ecologists. An analysis of the ensuing debate, including especially a colloquium held in 1959 that was partly inspired by Peus’ paper, is helpful for sifting the various arguments proffered with respect to a quasi-organismic perception of the biocoenosis in German speaking ecology. Although German mainstream ecologists rejected the notion of the biocoenosis as a superorganism, ontological holism was quite common among them. Additionally, the mainstream concept of the biocoenosis was plagued by several methodological problems and much conceptual confusion, to which the “dissidents” rightly pointed. Some of these problems are still pertinent today, e.g. in connection with more modern concepts such as “ecosystem”. (shrink)

Badania nad podstawami matematyki przyniosły w ostatnich dziesięcioleciach wyniki, które wydają mi się ciekawe nie tylko dla nich samych, lecz także z uwagi na wnioski, jakie płyną z nich w odniesieniu do tradycyjnych problemów filozoficznych dotyczących natury matematyki. Same wyniki są dość szeroko znane, mimo to jednak sądzę, że warto raz jeszcze przedstawić je w zarysie, zwłaszcza w obliczu faktu, że dzięki pracy szeregu matematyków zyskały one znacznie doskonalszą formę, niż miały pierwotnie. Największy postęp, mający decydujące znaczenie dla tych wyników, (...) stał się możliwy dzięki precyzyjnemu zdefiniowaniu pojęcia skończonej procedury. Definicję taką można uzyskać na różne sposoby, które w efekcie dają dokładnie to samo pojęcie. Najbardziej zadowalający sposób polega moim zdaniem na sprowadzeniu pojęcia skończonej procedury do pojęcia maszyny o skończonej liczbie części, co uczynił brytyjski matematyk Turing. Co do filozoficznych konsekwencji wspomnianych wyników, nie sądzę, by kiedykolwiek należycie je przedyskutowano, czy choćby zwrócono na nie uwagę. (shrink)

Many prominent proponents of Old and New Natural Law morally condemn sexual acts between people of the same sex because those acts are incapable of reproduction; they each offer a distinct set of supporting reasons. While some New Natural Law philosophers have begun to distance themselves from this moral condemnation, there are not many similarly ameliorative efforts within Old Natural Law. I argue for the bold conclusion that Old Natural Law philosophers can accept the basic premises of Old Natural Law (...) without also being committed to morally condemning sexual activity between people of the same sex. I develop an argument from analogy that shows how we can draw metaphysically distinct sub‐categories based on someone's capacity to experience the unitive goods of sex. This unitive capacity constitutes the sub‐category and provides a distinct principle for evaluating how members of that sub‐category (X) act as members of that sub‐category, rather than as acting as defective members of another category (Y). Even though my argument is ‘internal’ to Old Natural Law, I conclude by showing how these conclusions can also address some of the objections to same‐sex sex in New Natural Law. (shrink)

Allies are extremely important to LGBT rights. Though we don’t often enumerate what tasks we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the LGBT community.” In the first section I introduce three difficulties for this position that collectively suggest it is conceptually insufficient. I then develop a positive account by starting with whom allies are allied to instead of what allies are supposed to do. We might obviously say here that allies are allied to the (...) LGBT community, but I will argue that this community is better thought of as a loose coalition because there are often intersectional issues and conflicting interests that challenge any unified sense of community. I argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then allies are required to do more than we commonly think. Although allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would be harmful. I conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. If people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. I conclude by showing that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments, but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn recent work, Maeve Cooke has criticised Jürgen Habermas’s post-metaphysical model in order to motivate an alternative “post-secular” conception of the state, which involves the replacement of the “institutional translation proviso” with the “nonauthoritarian reasoning requirement”. I provide a qualified defence of the Habermasian model by arguing that it does not lead to the kind of negative consequences regarding legitimacy and solidarity Cooke attributes to it. This, in turn, means that Cooke’s proposal for the secular foundation of political authority on (...) a post-secular basis is insufficiently motivated. In the process, I argue that the point of departure for the debate about religion in the public sphere shared by both Habermas and Cooke – the picture of the “total” religious citizen – should be rejected because it presupposes an overly simplistic view of religions and religious identities. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the question of the relative priority between political and social ontology within left-Heideggerianism, a tradition recently reconstructed by Oliver Marchart. Although the title seems to imply that this question is an open and live one within left-Heideggerianism – that the two paths at the crossroads have been clearly delineated when, in fact, the current predicament of left-Heideggerianism resembles more a one-way street – this is somewhat misleading: the identification of left-Heideggerianism with a post-foundationalist political ontology (...) that enjoys systematic priority over the social has contributed to the suppression of the question of the Being of the social and, therefore, prevented a critical re-examination of its relationship to the political. The aim of this article is both modest and ambitious: modest, in that it merely seeks to pose and motivate the question of the social within left-Heideggerianism both at an exegetical and at a systematic level; ambiti... (shrink)

Viel, schwerlich zuviel, wird heute von der Kultur, der Bil dungseinheit des Abendlandes gesprochen. Nicht wenige aller dings empfehlen heute, die ganze überschwer gewordene und wenig versprechende Last abzuwerfen. Wenn aber wirklich der Menschheit der Marsch durch die Eiswüste des Nihilismus beschieden wäre, würde sie den ohne hinreichendes Gepäck überstehen? Zwar kann ihr das bloße "Es war einmal" der Geschichte nichts helfen: Nur was von Kräften gegenwärtig ist, kann uns in die Zukunft tragen. Aber wir werden uns der gegenwärtigen Kräfte (...) und des künftigen Sinnes nicht beV~-"Ußt ohne Rückblick auf unsere Vergangenheit. Wir beleben diese, wenn wir ausstoßen, was verjährt und tot ist. Wir Deutschen sind im gegenwärtigen Verfall versucht, unsere gesamte Vergangenheit zu verurteilen, weil sie uns ins Verderben geführt hat - oder Trost darin zu fühlen, was wir an Wissenschaft und Technik, an Kunst und Philosophie, an Dichtung und Religion Unvergängliches beigetragen haben. Aber eins hat sich heute gezeigt: das, was die Welt heute am meisten braucht, haben wir am wenigsten gefunden -das Maaß. (shrink)

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

Review Essay on: Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story – Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death], foreword by Heather Dundas.. 144 pp, ISBN 9781597144636.

Im Materialismusstreit der 1850er Jahre prallen die oft provokativ vorgetragenen Positionen des naturwissenschaftlich-weltanschaulichen Materialismus (vor allem Carl Vogts, Jacob Moleschotts und Ludwig Büchners) auf Positionen (insbesondere diejenige Rudolf Wagners), die die Naturwissenschaften mit den traditionellen religiösen Überzeugungen – etwa von der Unsterblichkeit der Seele, von der Gültigkeit der biblischen Weltchronologie oder von der Abstammung der Menschheit von einem einzigen Elternpaar – bruchlos verbinden zu können glauben. Mit den wissenschaftlichen Überzeugungen verbinden sich zudem politische Optionen. Jenseits aller lautstarken Polemik werden in (...) diesem Streit die Erklärungskompetenzen der Religion, der Philosophie und der Naturwissenschaften neu gegeneinander abgegrenzt – wobei der Philosophie (in ihren Vertretern I. H. Fichte und F. A. Lange) eine vermittelnde Rolle zufällt. (shrink)