Emotions are the focus of intense debate both in contemporary philosophy and psychology, and increasingly also in the history of ideas. Simo Knuuttila presents a comprehensive survey of philosophical theories of emotion from Plato to Renaissance times, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with careful historical reconstruction. The first part of the book covers the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism and, in addition, their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and (...) Origen to Augustine and Cassian. Knuuttila then proceeds to a discussion of ancient themes in medieval thought, and of new medieval conceptions, codified in the so-called faculty psychology from Avicenna to Aquinas, in thirteenth century taxonomies, and in the voluntarist approach of Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and their followers. Philosophers, classicists, historians of philosophy, historians of psychology, and anyone interested in emotion will find much to stimulate them in this fascinating book. (shrink)

Studies in modal notions, such as necessity, possibility or impossibility, have always played an important role in philosophical analysis. The history of these conceptions is a fascinating story of a variety of assumptions which have given shape to one part of rational discourse. A typical modern approach to modality is codified in what is generally known as possible worlds semantics. According to this view, necessity refers to what is actual in any alternative state of affairs, possibility to what is actual (...) in some, and impossibility to what is not actual in any alternative domain. The idea of spelling out the meaning of modal terms with the synchronic alternatives hardly occurred at all in ancient thinkers. They did not draw any sharp distinction between conceptual and real modalities and they were inclined to think that all generic possibilities must prove their mettle through actualization. Why and when did ancient modal conceptions and the modes of thought based on them lose their dominance? The main thesis of this book is that the idea of modality as multiplicity of reference with respect to alternative domains emerged in early medieval discussions and that it was originally influenced by the theological conception of God acting by choice. After a discussion of ancient modal paradigms, the author traces the interplay of old and new modal views in medieval logic and semantics, philosophy and theology. A detailed account is given of late medieval discussions of the new modal paradigms and attempts to apply them to modal logic, epistemic logic, and the logic of norms. These theories show striking similarities to some basic tenets of contemporary approaches to modal matters. This work will thus be of considerable interest to historians of philosophy and ideas, and philosophers of intensional logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

The study of the cultural Cold War and East–West interaction outside diplomacy and high politics has emerged as an important research field during the last two decades. With a few exceptions, however, scholarly interaction has been overshadowed by other forms of interaction. Existing research has mostly paid attention to technological exchange and to espionage, which was at times connected with scientific exchanges across the Iron Curtain. This article discusses scholarly exchanges in the human sciences between Finland and the Soviet Union. (...) Even though Finland was a western-style democracy with a market economy, it had close political ties with the Soviet Union, which allowed for the development of active scholarly connections between the countries. This article discusses the emergence of such connections in the human sciences and the reasons for their rapid expansion in the 1970s. (shrink)

Review of Sylvia Sauter & Willmar Sauter: _Teater på jiddisch – i Sverige och i världen._ Stockholm: Gidlunds förlag, 2023.

Originally published in 1993, Modalities in Medieval Philosophy looks at the idea of modality as multiplicity of reference with respect to alternative domains. The book examines how this emerged in early medieval discussions and addresses how it was originally influenced by the theological conception of God acting by choice. After a discussion of ancient modal paradigms, the author traces the interplay of old and new modal views in medieval logic and semantics, philosophy and theology. A detailed account is given of (...) late medieval discussions of the new modal logic, epistemic logic, and the logic norms. These theories show striking similarities to some basic tenets of contemporary approaches to modal matters. This work will be of considerable interest to historians of philosophy and ideas and philosophers of logic and metaphysics. (shrink)

The word "modem" in the title of this book refers primarily to post-medieval discussions, but it also hints at those medieval mo dal theories which were considered modem in contradistinction to ancient conceptions and which in different ways influenced philosophical discussions during the early modem period. The me dieval developments are investigated in the opening paper, 'The Foundations of Modality and Conceivability in Descartes and His Predecessors', by Lilli Alanen and Simo Knuuttila. Boethius's works from the early sixth century (...) belonged to the sources from which early medieval thinkers obtained their knowledge of ancient thought. They offered extensive discus sions of traditional modal conceptions the basic forms of which were: (1) the paradigm of possibility as a potency striving to realize itself; (2) the "statistical" interpretation of modal no tions where necessity means actuality in all relevant cases or omnitemporal actuality, possibility means actuality in some rel evant cases or sometimes, and impossibility means omnitemporal non-actuality; and (3) the "logical" definition of possibility as something which, being assumed, results in nothing contradic tory. Boethius accepted the Aristotelian view according to which total possibilities in the first sense must prove their met tle through actualization and possibilities in the third sense are assumed to be realized in our actual history. On these presump tions, all of the above-mentioned ancient paradigms imply the Principle of Plenitude according to which no genuine possibility remains unrealized. (shrink)

The article defends the no-harm principle as an intuitively plausible and a common-sense way to justify individual emitters’ duties to take more radical steps in the fight against climate change. The appearance of climate change as requiring large-scale collective action should not lead us astray with respect to the fundamental moral nature of the problem: individual emitters who knowingly sustain and foster the carbon intensive ways of acting also bear personal moral responsibility for the foreseeable climate-related harm and acquire in (...) line with the no-harm principle a direct personal duty to contribute to the efforts of preventing the harm. The article examines more closely the so-called collectivistic approach, according to which emitters’ responsibilities are primarily collective, and argues that without individualistic grounds of emitters’ personal moral responsibility for the harm the collectivistic approach fails to provide unstructured emitters with sufficient reason to act together and fulfil their correlative duty of effective harm prevention. The article argues that since an emitter's personal moral responsibility warrants others to expect her personal engagement in the efforts of effective harm prevention and can justify blame if she fails, identifications of personal responsibility may also significantly increase unstructured emitters’ collective capability of remedying the climate crisis. (shrink)

In this review I provide a brief analysis of the main features of the collective volume Shifting Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2020), edited by Teresa Marques and Åsa Wikforss. The volume addresses several related topics, and it contains contributions from psychologists and philosophers. It deals with the topic of concept variation understood in a broad sense, for it tackles diachronic, contextual, interpersonal and even intrapersonal variation; besides, the second part of the book is devoted to the topic of concept revision (...) and amelioration. I provide a brief description of the book and then I critically assess each of the contributions. (shrink)

Semanticists often restrict their theories by imposing constraints on the parameters that can be employed for interpreting the expressions of a language. Such constraints are based on non-logical features of actual contexts of utterance, but they often have important effects on issues that do pertain to logic, like analyticity or entailment. For example, Kaplan’s restriction to so-called “proper contexts” was required in order to count “I am here now” as valid. In this paper I argue that constraints of this kind (...) are often posited in an arbitrary and non-consistent way, and that they yield the intended results only at the price of imposing ad hoc principles whose justification could in turn justify further, often undesirable restrictions into the theory. I also introduce a criterion for telling whether such constraints are imposed in a legitimate manner. (shrink)

In this paper I defend two claims regarding complex demonstratives. On the one hand I argue that, when one of these expressions misdescribes the referred object, the right semantic analysis is to treat the expression as uninterpretable. On the other, I claim that the uninterpretability thesis finds itself in trouble when it comes to dealing with non-deictic uses of complex demonstratives, i.e., uses of “that F” in which the speaker has no acquaintance or direct perception of any object that could (...) satisfy the predicative material. In order to make these two claims compatible, I set out to modify the way the uninterpretability thesis has been traditionally formulated. (shrink)

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific (...) flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested. (shrink)

Current ecological threats, such as the sixth mass extinction or climate change, highlight the need to evaluate the moral implications of changing populations, both human and non-human. The paper sketches a non-anthropocentric and multispecies sufficientarian account of population ethics. After discussing several other options for multispecies population ethics, the paper proposes a two-level account of multispecies sufficientarianism, according to which the value of populations depend on two kinds of sufficientarian thresholds. First, there is a species-relativized individual-level threshold for what species-specific (...) flourishing is for an organism. Second, there is a population-level threshold for a sufficiently viable population enough to support the species-specific flourishing of the current and future members of that population. The paper concludes by discussing some of the practical implications and concerns raised by the two-level account suggested. (shrink)

In his book Knowledge and Belief, Jaakko Hintikka uses a model-theoretic approach of modal semantics as a theoretical basis for investigating the principles of epistemic logic. I shall first summarize the main points of Hintikka’s classic work and then address the most disputed themes raised by it in the 60s and later, such as logical omniscience and the KK-thesis, as well as Hintikka’s modifying his views on the basis of criticism. The last part of the book treats quantified epistemic logic, (...) particularly quantifying into “intensional” or “referentially opaque” epistemic contexts defended against Quine’s objections. I deal with this topic in Sect. 17.3 and add some relevant comparisons with John Buridan’s medieval approach in Sect. 17.4. A survey of Hintikka’s later theory of modelling knowledge acquisition is presented in Sect. 17.5; this includes the semantics of questions and inquiry in terms of game-theoretical semantics and their application to the logic of epistemology and scientific reasoning in the interrogative model of inquiry. Combining these results with the theory of independence friendly logic provides, Hintikka argues, a promising improvement of general epistemology which he calls a second-generation epistemic logic. The subject of the last section is “knowing who” in the sense of a basic epistemic attitude associated with identification which is the key notion in Hintikka’s epistemic theory of questions and answers, reference, and quantification. A central issue in this context is Hintikka’s discovery of the duality of cross-identification methods, the public or descriptive and the perspective ones. (shrink)

JAAKKO HINTIKKA GAPS IN THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING: AN EXERCISE IN THE METHODOLOGY OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS* For some historians, to understand everything is to pardon everything. For others, like Lord Acton, history is not only a judge, ...

Following the 15th anniversary of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), one can definitely say that this relatively young society has come of age. Through regular meetings, a journal, a prize, fellowships and various other activities, the ESHS has been striving to create a space fostering diversity, plurality and internationalization among historians of science, located in Europe and elsewhere. This paper revisits my own research on the past of the sciences in Portugal, examining in particular the role (...) of the 18th century naturalist and diplomat Abbé Correia da Serra. As a member of an extended network of estrangeirados (Europeanized intellectuals), Correia da Serra played a decisive role in the circulation of knowledge in Europe and also in the world, a role forgotten by his peers within the time interval of a generation. This case study acts as a springboard to discuss the importance of geographical and methodological diversity in the past of the sciences in Europe. In the present historiographical predicament in which the international community finds itself, I advocate that one of the main challenges faced by the ESHS is to turn its historical gaze to Europe again, while fiercely repudiating Eurocentrism. This enables to show how much the building of the European spaces of scientific practice were never a prerogative of a few regions or a small set of countries, but, on the very contrary, took shape as the result of complex interactions between diverse spaces and cultures, not only intra-European but also non-European. (shrink)

In Neither Physics Nor Chemistry, Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simoes examine the evolution of quantum chemistry into an autonomous discipline, tracing its development from the publication of early papers in the 1920s to the dramatic changes ...

Celem artykułu jest pokazanie możliwości zastosowania J.M. Bocheńskiego koncepcji zabobonu filozoficznego (pogląd fałszywy stwarzający pozory prawdziwości) w analizie etycznych ocen i argumentacji. Dla osiągnięcia tego celu koncepcja Bocheńskiego jest najpierw omówiona, następnie wskazane są cechy myślenia etycznego sprzyjające jego podatności na zabobony filozoficzne oraz podjęty jest problem możliwości rozpoznawania i ograniczania zabobonów w refleksji nad moralnością.

1. Complex demonstratives (noun phrases of the form ‘that F’) often behave in devious ways which do not fit well with their traditional understanding as devices of direct reference. Namely, there a...

Activities protesting against major polluters who cause climate change may cause damage to private property in the process. This paper investigates the case for a more international general basis of moral justification for such protests. Specific reference is made to the Kingsnorth case, which involved a protest by Greenpeace against coal-powered electricity generation in the UK. An appeal is made to Rawlsian fairness arguments, traditionally employed to support the obligation of citizens to their national governments as opposed to their international (...) duties. The argument made here, however, is that there seem to be sufficient reasons for holding that a stable climate is one of the first truly global public goods that is indispensable to acceptable standards of living everywhere. This would suffice to justify international and intergenerational 'atmospheric' political obligations, which in turn may justify protests - even those causing some damage to private property - against the laws and policies that violate the fair terms of cooperation in providing a stable climate. The fairness argument aims also to provide a ground from which Green political theory could integrate accounts of radical forms of citizenship into appeals to state political authority. This leads to justifying acts of civil disobedience on the basis of novel understandings of 'atmospheric' citizenship obligations. (shrink)

Taking the regime established by the Convention on Biological Diversity as a foundation, the purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines how the international biodiversity regime integrates the private property paradigm into its toolbox for conservation and sustainability and then critically evaluates the shortcomings of the intellectual property mechanism. Second, it argues that the increasing ubiquity of open access emerging technologies should lead the international community to carefully assess the benefits for conservation research of reverting to a framework (...) that places biodiversity within the global commons. The impasse between global commons advocates and the intellectual property status quo obscures the underlying problematic of the “commodity fiction” of biodiversity and increasing use of digital sequence information likely exacerbates power asymmetries. One remedy explored here is an alternative to these two approaches that dislodges rather than discards the concept of private property. Drawing inspiration from Polanyi and building on May (2010), the article shows how a hybrid approach bridging a public and private conception of genetic resources and traditional knowledge could more effectively and equitably distribute benefits to countries and communities providing resources of value to industry. (shrink)

This book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism, but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. Pentecostal theologians increasingly acknowledge that their theological methodology should be informed by a Pentecostal rationality, epistemology and theological hermeneutics. Simo Frestadius offers such a Pentecostal rationality from a Foursquare perspective. Frestadius first analyses and evaluates some of the main contemporary Pentecostal rationalities and epistemologies to date, with a particular emphasis on the works of (...) Amos Yong and James K.A. Smith and L. William Oliverio Jr., before proposing that Alasdair MacIntyre's tradition-focused and historically-minded narrative approach is conducive in providing a more tradition-constituted Pentecostal rationality. Utilising the methodological insights of MacIntyre, the book then provides a philosophically informed historical narrative of a major British Pentecostal tradition, namely, the Elim Foursquare Gospel Alliance, by exploring its underlying context and roots as a classical Pentecostal movement, its emergence as a religious tradition, and its two major 'epistemological crises'. Based on this historical narration and analysis, it is argued that Elim's tacit Pentecostal rationality is best defined as Pentecostal Biblical Pragmatism in a Foursquare Gospel framework. This form of rationality is then developed vis-à-vis Elim's Pentecostal concept of truth, biblical hermeneutics, and pragmatic epistemic justification in dialogue with William P. Alston. In doing the above, the book not only articulates a tradition-specific Pentecostal rationality of Biblical Pragmatism but also provides the first intellectual history of a major British classical Pentecostal denomination. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the historical debate between materialism and idealism, in the field of Philosophy, extends, in new clothes, to the field of Quantum Physics characterized by realism and anti-realism. For this, we opted for a debate, also historical, between the realism of Albert Einstein, for whom reality exists regardless of the existence of the knowing subject, and Niels Bohr, for whom we do not have access to the ultimate reality of the matter, unless (...) conditioning it to the existence of an observer endowed with rationality, position adopted in the Interpretation of Complementarity – posture that was expanded in 1935 when Bohr assumed a “relationalist” conception, according to which the quantum state is defined by the relationship between the quantum object and the entire measuring device. This is an extremely important debate, as it further consolidates the results of nascent Quantum Mechanics, guaranteeing Bohr the leadership of the orthodoxy based on the interpretation of complementarity. Here, when dealing with Quantum Theory, we will not make any distinction between the terms Quantum Physics, Quantum Theory or Quantum Mechanics. The entire discussion will be held under the name “Quantum Theory”. Theory that tries to analyze and describe the behavior of physical systems of reduced dimensions, close to the sizes of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles. We hope that the reader will appreciate the genius of these two titans in this field of Physics when they magnificently formulate the arguments that support the object of their defenses. (shrink)