Sjoerd Griffioen investigates the polemics between Löwith, Blumenberg and Schmitt in the German secularization debate. ‘Secularization’ is revealed as a contested concept in ideological struggles over modernity and religion, both in this debate and contemporary postsecularism.

In this paper we argue that to adequately capture the complicated relationship between Descartes' work and late medieval thought, philosophers need to think not only about his ideas but also about his presentation and choice of genre. Reading the Meditations as a mere discursive treatise containing a progressive and consistent set of arguments intended to establish a particular philosophical position fails to appreciate the eponymous genre that Descartes explicitly chose to employ in writing them. Instead, we argue that reading the (...) text in light of the long tradition of contemplative meditative literature opens up a radically new way of interpreting the Meditations as a “mystagogical” project of spiritual edification and epistemic and volitional transformation. During such a transformation, the meditator undergoes a series of revelatory experiences structurally similar to those we find in various so-called “mystical” or “mystagogical”literature, in the Christian West. We show how paying attention to these mystagogical aspects of the Meditations can open up new avenues for understanding the connection between the theoretical, practical, and theological aspects of Descartes' thought. Such a reading resolves a number of seemingly glaring problems and peculiarities in the Meditations including the Cartesian circle, and the tension in the Cartesian notion of the freedom of the will. We also argue that the odd detours the meditator takes in the Sixth Meditation through physiology are not mere digressions but rather mark an often overlooked aspect of the mystagogical story – the return to embodiment as a transformed self. Indeed, the overly intellectualist emphasis of contemporary scholars on both the contemplative aspects of mystagogical literature and the epistemological focus of Descartes' project in the Meditations have caused them to largely overlook the ways in which the aim of both medieval and Cartesian meditation involves a transformative re-orientation of the whole person and their understanding of the world – one which has practical, moral, and social consequences that have gone underexplored in discussions of these texts. (shrink)

The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. In the decade before this publication, Popper fiercely attacked the ideas of Rudolf Carnap about confirmation and induction; and ten years later, in the famous tenth chapter of Conjectures he introduced his own ideas about scientific progress and verisimilitude. Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve (...) the purpose of approach to the truth. To substantiate this idea he formalized the common sense intuition about preferences, that is: B is to be preferred to A if B has more advantages andfewer drawbacks than A. In 1974, however, David Millerand Pavel Tichy proved that Popper's formal explication could not be used to compare false theories. Subsequently, many researchers proposed alternatives or tried to improve Popper's original definition. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that Arrow’s well-known impossibility theorem is instrumental in bringing the ongoing discussion about verisimilitude to a more general level of abstraction. After some preparatory technical steps, we show that Arrow’s requirements for voting procedures in social choice are also natural desiderata for a general verisimilitude definition that places content and likeness considerations on the same footing. Our main result states that no qualitative unifying procedure of a functional form can simultaneously satisfy the requirements of Unanimity, (...) Independence of irrelevant alternatives and Non-dictatorship at the level of sentence variables. By giving a formal account of the incompatibility of the considerations of content and likeness, our impossibility result makes it possible to systematize the discussion about verisimilitude, and to understand it in more general terms. (shrink)

In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

Bible and tradition remain silent on intelligent extraterrestrial life, and few modern theologians have expressed themselves on this topic. Scientific insight suggests the possibility, even likelihood, of the development of life on extrasolar earthlike planets. It is argued that such life forms would resemble earthly life and also develop a religious and moral life. As creatures with free will they would be prone to sin and in need of salvation. It is argued that this would not require multiple incarnations, since (...) Jesus is the cosmic Christ. (shrink)

In this paper we report on our experiences with using network analysis to discern and analyse ethical issues in research into, and the development of, a new wastewater treatment technology. Using network analysis, we preliminarily interpreted some of our observations in a Group Decision Room session where we invited important stakeholders to think about the risks of this new technology. We show how a network approach is useful for understanding the observations, and suggests some relevant ethical issues. We argue that (...) a network approach is also useful for ethical analysis of issues in other fields of research and development. The abandoning of the overarching rationality assumption, which is central to network approaches, does not have to lead to ethical relativism. (shrink)

In this article, we develop an approach for the moral assessment of research and development networks on the basis of the reflective equilibrium approach proposed by Rawls and Daniels. The reflective equilibrium approach aims at coherence between moral judgments, principles, and background theories. We use this approach because it takes seriously the moral judgments of the actors involved in R & D, whereas it also leaves room for critical reflection about these judgments. It is shown that two norms, namely reflective (...) learning and openness and inclusiveness, which are used in the literature on policy and technological networks, contribute to achieving a justified overlapping consensus. We apply the approach to a case study about the development of an innovative sewage treatment technology and show how in this case the two norms are or could be instrumental in achieving a justified overlapping consensus on relevant moral issues. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Epidemiological studies have shown that environmental green space contributes to the reduction of psychosis incidence in the population. Clarifying the psychological and neuro-functional mechanisms underlying the risk-decreasing effects of green surroundings could help optimize preventive environmental interventions. This perspective article specifically aims to open a new window on the link between environmental green space and psychosis by considering its core psychopathological features. Psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia, are essentially characterized by self-disturbances. The psychological structure of the self has been described (...) as a multidimensional phenomenon that emerges from the reciprocal interaction with the environment through intrinsic and extrinsic self-processes. The intrinsic self refers to the experience of mental activity and environmental information as inherently related to one’s own person, which involves self-referential processing, self-reflection, memory, interoception, and emotional evaluation. The extrinsic self refers to sensorimotor interactions with the environment and the sense of agency, that is, the experience of being the source of one’s own actions and the multisensory consequences thereof. In psychosis, anomalous self-processing has been related to a functional fragmentation of intrinsic and extrinsic self-processes and related brain networks. Moreover, evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that green space could have beneficial effects on self-related processing. Based on the literature, it could be hypothesized that self-processing is involved in mediating the beneficial effects of green space for psychosis. Considering the multidimensionality of the self, it is proposed that urban green space design aimed at improving mental health ideally impacts the complexity of self-facets and thus restores the individual’s self. (shrink)

Comparison of the concepts of creation from chaos and creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) leads me to reject the latter for several reasons: it is not the biblical concept, and it presents serious conceptual, scientific, and theological problems. Chaos theology is outlined under the headings creation from chaos; chaos and contingency; chaos, evil, and creativity; chaos and incarnation; chaos and eschatology. It is shown to be well suited for the science‐theology dialogue by some examples of its application to (...) aspects of cosmic and biological evolution: initial mystery, separation and ordering; chaos and entropy; contingency and fine‐tuning of the universe; purpose and progressiveness in evolution; and complexity theory and chaos events. (shrink)

Abstract.The title question was raised by Philip Hefner in an editorial in the March 2007 issue of Zygon, and answered in various ways in sixteen guest editorials in the June, September, and December 2007 issues. In this article, after defining some pertinent concepts, I comment on these essays. I review critical statements made by the guest editorialists and survey their proposals for further dialogue topics. I conclude with my own views on the future of the dialogue and the role of (...) Zygon therein. (shrink)

Aristotle's philosophically most explicit and sophisticated account of the concept of a (primary-)universal proof is found, not in "Analytica Posteriora" 1.4, where he introduces the notion, but in 1.5. In 1.4 Aristotle merely says that a universal proof must be of something arbitrary as well as of something primary and seems to explain primacy in extensional terms, as concerning the largest possible domain. In 1.5 Aristotle improves upon this account after considering three ways in which we may delude ourselves into (...) thinking we have a primary-universal proof. These three sources of delusion are shown to concern situations in which our arguments do establish the desired conclusion for the largest possible domain, but still fail to be real primary-universal proofs. Presupposing the concept of what may be called an immediate proof, in which something is proved of an arbitrary individual, Aristotle in response now demands that a proof be immediate of the primary thing itself and goes on to sketch a framework in which an intensional criterion for primacy can be formulated. For the most part this article is a comprehensive and detailed commentary on Aristotle's very concise exposition in 1.5. One important result is that the famous passage 74a17-25 referring to two ways of proving the alternation of proportions cannot be used as evidence for the development of pre-Euclidean mathematics. (shrink)

Kuipers' choice to let logical models of a theory represent the applications or evidence of that theory leads to various problems in ICR. In this paper I elaborate on four of them. 1. In contrast to applications of a theory, logical models are mutually incompatible. 2. An increase and a decrease of a set of models both represent an increase of logical strength; I call this the ICR paradox of logical strength. 3. The evidence logically implies the strongest empirical law. (...) 4. A hypothesis and its negation can both be false. My conclusion therefore reads that we should not identify (newly invented) applications of a theory with its logical models, but with partial models that can be extended to the logical model(s) of the language used to formulate the theory. As an illustration I give a model theoretical account, based on partial models, of the HD-method and crucial experiments. (shrink)

Joris van Eijnatten’s critique of our view of ‘directional pluralism’ touches on matters central to Pluralisms and Horizons. It is a honour to have our book subjected to such a careful and sensitive reading. Some of the points he raises we want to keep thinking about, but others are so pivotal to our account — as well as, we believe, to Reformational philosophy as a whole — that a prompt answer is called for. Therefore, we welcome this opportunity for a (...) public response. (shrink)

In recent years the humanities, social sciences and neuroscience have witnessed an 'affective turn, ' especially in discourses around post-Fordist labor, economic and ecological crises, populism and identity politics, mental health, and political struggle. This new awareness would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who replaced judgment with affect as the very material movement of thought: every concept is an affective experience, a becoming. Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without (...) passive affects or passions. Instead of a calm and rational philosophy of passions, Deleuzian thought is therefore inseparable from "isolated and passionate cries" that deny what everybody knows and what nobody can deny: "every true thought is an aggression." This inseparability of reason and passion is by no means an anti-intellectualist or irrationalist stance. Rather, it is critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (betise) by relating it to the unthought forces that condition it. And it is clinical, because thought becomes possessed by a power of selection. The purely active, i.e. free-floating, unrecorded desire, is never enough to produce a consistent relation to the future, which is why we need the passions to give us an initial orientation, to force and enable us to think. Passions are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world; they make up the very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. Instead of truth as the ultimate criterion of judgment, the only principle according to which affective becomings can be selected and evaluated is the extent to which they proliferate joy. Spinoza and Marx show how the recruitment of desire traditionally takes place through the tyrants and priests who inspire sad passions in us. Similarly, the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia can be read as an encyclopedia of the passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of the socius of contemporary capitalism. If it takes a lot of inventiveness or imagination to be able to diagnose our present becomings, this is because becomings are always composites of joyful and sad passions. Capitalism could not exist if it did not also inspire happiness, love, courage, and perhaps even beatitude. That is why, today, we witness "the spectacle of the happily dominated" (Frederic Lordon) of the self-entrepreneur, the managerial class, the flex worker, the citizen-consumer, the bean-roasting hipster, and the self-managed team. It is within this field of contradictory and heterogeneous passions that the authors of this volume pursue the diagnosis of our past and present becomings. Their contributions add up to a systematic taxonomy of the passions and indicate their importance for a thinking that reaches beyond itself. (shrink)

The rise of populism, cynicism, fanaticism and fundamentalism challenges us to reconsider the problem of ressentiment, characterized by Friedrich Nietzsche in 'On the Genealogy of Morals' (1887) as the self-poisoning of the will by interiorization of trauma in the form of a postponed and imaginary revenge. The concept of ressentiment is now making a comeback in political discourse"-- Back cover.

In this paper we carefully study the problem of liberty as it applies to school choice, and whether there ought to be restricted liberty in the case of homeschooling. We examine three prominent concerns that might be brought against homeschooling, viz., that it aggravates social inequality, worsens societal conflict and works against the best interests of children. To examine the tensions that occur between parental liberty, children's interests, and state oversight, we consider the case of homeschooling in the Dutch context.

This article uses recent work in philosophy of science and social epistemology to argue for a shift in analytic philosophy of religion from a knowledge-centric epistemology to an epistemology centered on understanding. Not only can an understanding-centered approach open up new avenues for the exploration of largely neglected aspects of the religious life, it can also shed light on how religious participation might be epistemically valuable in ways that knowledge-centered approaches fail to capture. Further, it can create new opportunities for (...) interaction with neighboring disciplines and can help us revitalize and transform stagnant debates in philosophy of religion, while simultaneously allowing for the introduction and recovery of marginalized voices and traditions. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele (CMS)—and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to my proposal—namely, (...) that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

The notion of template has recently been discussed in relation to cross-disciplinary transfer of modeling efforts and in relation to the representational content of models. We further develop and disambiguate the notion of template and find that, suitably developed, it is useful in distinguishing and analyzing different types of transfer, none of which supports a non-representationalist view of models. We illustrate our main findings with the modeling of technology substitution with Lotka-Volterra Competition equations.

Examining afresh the 16th-century style of mannerism, Sjoerd van Tuinen synthesises philosophy and aesthetics to demonstrate not only the contemporary relevance of mannerism but its broader significance as a form of modal thinking. Beyond a style of art that spurned the balance and proportion of earlier Renaissance painting in favour of compositional instability and tension, this book looks a-historically at mannerism to investigate what it can tell us about continental modal metaphysics, focusing in particular on its artificial and what (...) Van Tuinen calls 'secondary' nature. In three main parts, Van Tuinen first explores the ontology, aesthetics and ethics of mannerism. He then develops this through an extended study of Leibniz as a modal and indeed mannerist philosopher, before outlining in the final part a (neo)-mannerist aesthetics that incorporates diagrammatics, alchemy and contemporary technologies of speculative design. Drawing on Bergson, Simondon, Deleuze, Stengers and Agamben, together with artworks from Lomazzo to Arcimboldo, The Philosophy of Mannerism uncovers the rich new pathways created by the combination of philosophy, art history and contemporary theory. (shrink)

This paper presents the design and first result of a longitudinal case study on the change process from mainstream to sustainability of a Hotel Restaurant in The Netherlands. In this paper, after a brief introduction on the Hotel Restaurant and the chosen theoretical frame, the first steps in the research process will be presented including a sketch of the situation before the new executive chef officially took the insigne of the Hotel Restaurant executive chef; the management hypothesis; the plans of (...) the executive chef and the changes in the first months at HR. (shrink)

Joris van Eijnatten’s critique of our view of ‘directional pluralism’ touches on matters central to Pluralisms and Horizons. It is a honour to have our book subjected to such a careful and sensitive reading. Some of the points he raises we want to keep thinking about, but others are so pivotal to our account — as well as, we believe, to Reformational philosophy as a whole — that a prompt answer is called for. Therefore, we welcome this opportunity for a (...) public response. (shrink)

Jon Stewart's continued criticism of the inconsistency and irrationality of the American media, the notion of truthiness has relevance for any fan of The Daily Show. This chapter looks a little bit more closely at two notions of truthiness. Focusing on the first sense, it draws some parallels between truthiness and paradigm cases of motivated epistemic irrationality like wishful thinking and self‐deception. Then, it turns to the second sense to see if relying on our guts in the way Colbert suggests (...) might sometimes be rational. (shrink)

In his lectures from 1987, Deleuze draws an analogy between Michelangelo's figures and Leibnizian substances by claiming that neither are essences but rather sources of modifications or manners of being. The best way to explore this analogy, I argue, is by focusing on Michelangelo's preference for serpentine shapes. By putting key passages from The Logic of Sensation, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and What is Philosophy? in resonance with the Leibnizian accounts of corporeal aggregates and possible worlds on the (...) one hand and art history on the other, I will try to develop a Deleuzian concept for the typically Mannerist ideal of the serpentine figure. Although Deleuze usually prefers to speak in musical terms of refrains and counterpoints by which various blocs of sensation resonate with each other, in the visual arts it is the serpentine figure that renders visible sensory becoming as a rhythmic counter-positioning of possible worlds within a single body without organs. (shrink)

Several threads of research towards developing artificial gametes are ongoing in a number of research labs worldwide. The development of a technology that could generate gametes in vitro has significant potential for human reproduction, and raises a lot of interest, as evidenced by the frequent and extensive media coverage of research in this area. We have asked researchers involved in work with artificial gametes, ethicists, and representatives of potential user groups, how they envisioned the use of artificial gametes in human (...) reproduction. In the course of three focus groups, the participants commented on the various aspects involved. The two recurring themes were the strength of the claim of becoming a parent genetically, and the importance of responsible communication of science. The participants concurred that (a) the desire or need to have genetic offspring of one’s own does not warrant the investment of research resources into these technologies, and that (b) given the minefield in terms of moral controversy and sensitivity that characterises the issues involved, how information is communicated and handled is of great importance. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern devotional works rarely receive serious treatment from philosophers, even those working in the subfields of philosophy of religion or the history of ideas. In this article, I examine one medieval devotional work in particular—the Middle High German image- and verse-program, Christus und die minnende Seele —and I argue that it can plausibly be viewed as a form of medieval public philosophy, one that both exhibited and encouraged philosophical innovation. I address a few objections to my proposal—namely, (...) that CMS is neither public enough nor that it counts as proper philosophy—and I attempt to defend CMS’s public philosophical credentials in light of these objections. I conclude with a brief discussion of how devotional texts like CMS can help us do innovative public philosophy today. (shrink)

This Element looks at religious experience and the role it has played in philosophy of religion. It critically explores the history of the intertwined discourses on mysticism and religious experience, before turning to a few specific discussions within contemporary philosophy of religion. One debate concerns the question of perennialism vs. constructivism and whether there is a 'common core' to all religious or mystical experience independent of interpretation or socio-historical background. Another central discussion concerns the epistemology of purportedly theophanic experience and (...) whether a perceptual model of religious experience can provide evidence or justification for theistic belief. The Element concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of religion can productively widen its treatment of religious experience in the service of creating a more inclusive and welcoming discipline. (shrink)