In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seventeenth-Century Catholic Polemic and the Rise of Cultural Rationalism: An Example from the EmpireSusan RosaIn Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Sagre-do, an intelligent, cultivated, and well-traveled young man who is persuaded of the truth of arguments in favor of the Copernican opinion presented by the philosopher Salviati, dismisses the counter-arguments of the Aristotelian Simplicio with sympathetic condescension: “I pity him,” he proclaims,no less than I should (...) some fine gentleman who, having built a magnificent palace at great trouble and expense, employing hundreds and hundreds of artisans, and then beholding it threatened with ruin because of poor foundations, should attempt, in order to avoid the grief of seeing the walls destroyed, adorned as they are with so many lovely murals; or the columns fall, which sustain the superb galleries, or the gilded beams, or the doors spoiled, or the pediments and the marble cornices, brought in at so much cost—should attempt, I say, to prevent the collapse with chains, props, iron buttresses, and shores. 1 [End Page 87]This elegant simile, which suggests that the fine gentleman can only preserve his palace by destroying its beauty, is meant to evoke the dilemma of the scholastic philosopher who is confronted by the evident disintegration of his intellectual home. Like the desperate owner who seeks to shore up his real palace, he must rebuild a philosophical edifice whose apparent beauty and coherence have been achieved at the expense of substance and can only be preserved by recourse to means so ugly and inadequate that they destroy even the illusion of credibility.Such a dilemma, I would argue, was the legacy bequeathed to many defenders of traditional religion in the seventeenth century by more than one hundred years of confessional rivalry. To simplify a complex process, this lengthy period of controversy and apologetic, to say nothing of warfare and mutual persecution, had generated a discourse which objectified and prob-lematized religion, making it something to think about rather than to think with. 2 In other words, the formal statements of conviction issued in the wake of the Reformation by competing denominations within Christendom, like the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession, the Genevan Confession, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England had encouraged the development of the notion of religion as adherence to a set of propositions. As Peter Harrison has explained, this creation of a propositional religion in turnenabled discussion of the merits of other “religions” conceived to exist similarly as sets of beliefs. The truth or falsity of a religion had become a function of the truth or falsity of the propositions which constituted it. True religion... [had become]... a body of certain knowledge. 3Harrison’s remarks are significant because they suggest that the origins of rationalized discourse about religion and its consequent transformation from a way of thinking to an object of thought are to be found squarely within orthodoxy itself. 4To be specific, the competing content of official doctrinal pronouncements led not only to the comparison of the religions but implicitly to their emergence as subjects of a discourse which proposed reason as the norm, a [End Page 88] development clearly reflected in the wave of pamphlets, broadsides, printed disputations, and formal polemical treatises written in both Latin and the vernacular languages which poured from the presses of Catholic and mainstream Protestant denominations in England and on the continent throughout the seventeenth century. In this literature, Protestants accused Catholics of “superstition” and “idolatry,” while Catholics urged potential converts to compare the religions with a view to discovering their “marks of truth,” argued for the compatibility of Catholic faith and “natural light,” and identified heresy, on the contrary, with unreason, passion, lust, and self-contradiction. On both sides of the confessional fence, polemicists frequently insisted that religious discussion conform to the rules of logic, accusing one another of failing to argue from incontrovertible first principles, and of succumbing to the fatal dangers of petitio principii and circular reasoning. In other words, they claimed that in religious matters poor argumentation is a sure sign of error, and it would not be... (shrink)

This academic text features articles regarding paranormal, extraordinary, or fringe-science claims. It logically examines the claims of astrology; psychic ability; alternative medicine and health claims; after-death communication; cryptozoology; and faith healing, all from a skeptical perspective. Paranormal Claims is a compilation of some of the most eye-opening articles about pseudoscience and extraordinary claims that often reveal logical, scientific explanations, or an outright scam. These articles, steeped in skepticism, teach critical thinking when approaching courses in psychology, sociology, philosophy, education, or science.

Democratic conceptions of politics are tacitly or explicitly predicated upon a functioning arena for the formation of public opinion in an associated media-space. Policy-making thus requires a reliable connection to processes of ‘public’ will formation. These processes formed the focus for Habermas’s influential study on the public sphere. This contribution presents a look at more recent ‘structural transformation’, the causes of which are by no means limited to social media communication, and examines its consequences. It proceeds in three steps: 1) (...) in some proximity to Habermas, but also by means of the theory of resonance, it seeks to determine the kind of public sphere that a democratic polity requires; 2) an analysis of problems within the contemporary public sphere will feed into 3) a discussion of the conditions for the restoration of a ‘functioning political public sphere’. These include changes in the realms of participation, representation and spaces of encounter. (shrink)

How does rationality bind the agnostic, that is, the one who suspends judgment about whether a given proposition is true? In this paper I explore two alternative ways of establishing what the rational requirements of agnosticism are: the Lockean–Bayesian framework and the doxastic logic framework. Each of these proposals faces strong objections. Fortunately, however, there is a rich kernel of requirements of agnosticism that are vindicated by both of them. One can then endorse the requirements that belong to that kernel (...) without thereby committing oneself to the problematic implications that stem from either of the aforementioned proposals. (shrink)

The paper is concerned with the rational requirements for suspended judgment, or what suspending judgment about a question rationally commits one to. It shows that two purported rational requirements for suspended judgment cannot both be true at the same time, at least when the entailment relation between questions is understood a certain way. The first one says that one is rationally required to suspend judgment about those questions that are entailed by the questions that one already suspends judgment about. The (...) second one says that one is rationally required to believe the presuppositions of the questions one suspends judgment about. Two plausible solutions to the problem are discussed. One of them explicates the relation of entailment between questions in an alternative manner, and the other one rejects the presupposition requirement. Either way, a closure requirement for suspended judgment can be maintained which is analogous to the closure requirement for belief. Whereas belief is ideally closed under entailment between propositions, suspended judgment is ideally closed under entailment between questions. (shrink)

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One of the challenges in the motivation literature is examining the simultaneous effect of different motivational mechanisms on overall motivation and performance. The motivational congruence theory addresses this by stipulating that different motivational mechanisms can reinforce each other if they have similar effects on the perceived locus of causality. Reward salience and choice are two motivational mechanisms which their joint effects have been long debated. Built upon the motivational congruence effect, a recent empirical study affirms that a salient reward in (...) a condition characterized by lack of choice and a non-salient reward in a condition characterized by provision of choice both increase overall motivation and performance. In this study, we examine the effect of reward salience and choice on overall motivation and performance in a controlling context, an effect which has not been studied before. A 2 × 3 factorial design was conducted to examine research hypotheses. The results show that under controlling conditions, salient reward improves overall motivation and performance compared to non-salient and no-reward conditions. (shrink)

Kant’s thought from the 1750s onward can usefully be understood as a series of efforts to overcome the challenge posed in Machiavelli’s Prince: namely, to reconcile our idea of justice with what is actually possible given human nature as it is, rather than as reason tells us that it “should” be. Especially following his reading of Rousseau, this effort took the form of successive translations of the metaphysical concept of a world into the juridical language of world-citizenship, which transformed a (...) rational and physical cosmology into moral and historical cosmopolitanism. The thought of both Hobbes and Rousseau proved instrumental to those efforts. Initially, Kant thought human history oscillated between Hobbesian and Rousseauian conceptions of civil order—i.e., between orders that guarantee, respectively, security and freedom. In his later works, Kant suggested that history progressed from Hobbes to Rousseau, but he hesitated to declare that a transformation from prudence-based security to virtue-based civil independence was completable even in principle. Speaking generally, Kant sought to reconcile a kind of historical providentialism with the sovereign authority of reason. This reconciliation blurs the distinction between, on the one hand, the metaphysical and/or religious and, on the other hand, the secular—a distinction on which Michael Rosen’s perspicuous intellectual history tends to focus. That this earliest version of Kant’s rational providentialism makes reward of effort morally central also suggests that it is ultimately even more important to Kant than the punitive theme on which Rosen himself focusses. (shrink)

The role of mathematics in scientific practice is too readily relegated to that of formulating equations that model or describe what is being investigated, and then finding solutions to those equations. I survey the role of mathematics in: 1. Exact solutions of differential equations, especially conformal mapping; and 2. Simulations of solutions to differential equations via numerical methods and via agent-based models; and 3. The use of experimental models to solve equations (a) via physical analogies based on similarity of the (...) form of the equations, such as Prandtl’s soap-film method, and (b) the method of physically similar systems. Two major themes emerge: First, the role of mathematics in science is not well described by deduction from axioms, although it generally involves deductive reasoning. Creative leaps, the integration of experimental or observational evidence, synthesis of ideas from different areas of mathematics, and insight regarding analogous forms are required to find solutions to equations. Second, methods that involve mappings or transformations are in use in disparate contexts, from the purely mathematical context of conformal mapping where it is mathematical objects that are mapped, to the use of concrete physical experimental models, where one concrete thing is shown to correspond to another. (shrink)

Logic arguably plays a role in the normativity of reasoning. In particular, there are plausible norms of belief/disbelief whose antecedents are constituted by claims about what follows from what. But is logic also relevant to the normativity of agnostic attitudes? The question here is whether logical entailment also puts constraints on what kinds of things one can suspend judgment about. In this paper I address that question and I give a positive answer to it. In particular, I advance two logical (...) norms of agnosticism, where the first one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about the conclusion of a valid argument and the second one allows us to assess situations in which the subject is agnostic about one of the premises of a valid argument. (shrink)

Epistemologists often describe subjects as being capable of adopting a third kind of categorical doxastic stance regarding whether something is the case, besides belief and disbelief. They deploy a variety of idioms in order to ascribe that stance. In this paper, I flesh out the properties that the third kind of categorical stance is supposed to have and start searching for the best ways to ascribe it. The idioms ‘suspends judgment about whether’ and ‘is agnostic about whether’, among others, are (...) found to be unfit to play the desired role. In the end, I suggest that ‘is in doubt as to whether’ is our best choice among the alternatives surveyed here. (shrink)

Abstract:The influence of John Duns Scotus' doctrine of the free will on Charles Peirce's normative theory is proposed in the context of commentaries on James J. Liszka's latest book on Peirce and the normative sciences.

There are many ways in which a speaker can confuse their audience. In this paper, I will focus on one such way, namely, a way of talking that seems to manifest a cross-level kind of cognitive dissonance on the part of the speaker. The goal of the paper is to explain why such ways of talking sound so twisted. The explanation is two-pronged, since their twisted nature may come either from the very mental states that the speaker thereby makes manifest, (...) or from how the speaker chooses to express themselves (even if there is nothing wrong with their mental states). So-called ‘Moore-paradoxical’ utterances are but one example of the phenomenon, and the explanation of what is wrong about them is subsumed under a more general explanation here—one that captures also the twisted-ness of utterances whereby questions are raised or intentions expressed. (shrink)

A timely volume that uses science fiction as a springboard to meaningful philosophical discussions, especially at points of contact between science fiction and new scientific developments. Raises questions and examines timely themes concerning the nature of the mind, time travel, artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, free will, the nature of persons, transhumanism, virtual reality, and neuroethics Draws on a broad range of books, films and television series, including _The Matrix, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Frankenstein, Brave New World, The Time Machine,_ and (...) _Back to the Future_ Considers the classic philosophical puzzles that appeal to the general reader, while also exploring new topics of interest to the more seasoned academic. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with epistemological issues that stem from the hypothesis that reasoning is not only a means of transmitting knowledge from premise-beliefs to conclusion-beliefs, but also a primary source of knowledge in its own right. The idea is that one can gain new knowledge on the basis of suppositional reasoning. After making some preliminary distinctions, I argue that there are no good reasons to think that purported examples of knowledge grounded on pure reasoning are just examples of (...) premise-based inferences in disguise. Next, I establish what kinds of true propositions can to a first approximation be known on the basis of pure reasoning. Finally, I argue that beliefs that are competently formed on the basis of suppositional reasoning satisfy both externalist and internalist criteria of justification. (shrink)

New technology in human reproduction has provoked wide ranging arguments about the desirability and moral justifiability of many of these efforts. Authors of biomedical ethics have ventured into the field to offer the insight of moral theory to these complex moral problems of contemporary life. I believe, however, that the moral theories most widely endorsed today are problematic and that a new approach to ethics is necessary if we are to address the concerns and perspectives identified by feminist theorists in (...) our considerations of such topics. Hence, I propose to look at one particular technique in the growing repertoire of new reproductive technologies, in vitro fertilization, in order to consider the insight which the mainstream approaches to moral theory have offered to this debate, and to see the difference made by a feminist approach to ethics. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Enacting the “Body” of Neurophenomenology: Off-Radar First-Person Methodologies in Pragmatics of Experiencing” by Jakub Petri & Artur Gromadzki. Abstract: Petri and Gromadzki have produced a thought-provoking article that, rather unfortunately, places itself wide of the mark in a couple of places. I will lay out and address their two major concerns and conclude with some remarks about their proposal for broadening the field of neurophenomenological enquiry.

This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-sceptical branches of the European philosophical tradition, including empiricism, until the eighteenth century. It is argued that (...) there is much to learn from this history, and specific features of the traditional distinction are identified as deserving the further, sympathetic consideration given, in effect, in later chapters. (shrink)

The concepts behind three of the principal normative ethical theories (utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics) are evident in a real-life scenario. This case study involves videotapes recorded from inside Grootvlei Prison, Bloemfontein, South Africa in 2002. Prisoners captured sensational footage of warders selling alcohol, drugs, loaded firearms and juveniles for sex to inmates. It was footage every journalist would want to broadcast and it was for sale to the highest bidder. The country’s three flagship current affairs programs, broadcast on three different (...) channels, were each approached to buy the footage. Each of the television channels operates under different business models: one is the public broadcaster; another a free-to-air private channel; the third is a pay channel and part of a multinational listed company. Upon analysis it is clear that each executive producer/company espoused different ethical philosophies, yet each decision was ultimately ethical. The reasoning and philosophies of three ethical theories are highlighted in business decision-making, commercial judgments as well as journalistic choices. (shrink)

Shelter Theology offers insight into the worlds of the invisible: individuals experiencing homelessness and those living in extreme poverty. Based on over ten years of chaplaincy in a homeless shelter, Dunlap shares the nuanced theology of people in harsh circumstances and outlines how their beliefs and practices enable survival and resistance.

Heidegger, Lukacs and Heller confronted the “crisis” of modernity already at the beginning of their own paths of thinking and asked how to address it. Lukacs did never completely lose faith in politics, whereas Heidegger and Heller only briefly leant on a party to direct the course of history. Heidegger and Lukacs described modem life as an “unowned” existence occasioned by the metaphysics’ “forgetfulness of Being” and the “reification of consciousness” in the late capitalism respectively. Whilst Heidegger entrusted the task (...) of preparing a “turning” to the thinking of the truth of Being and Lukacs assigned materialistic dialectic to undertake a revolution, Heller worked out an ethics of responsibility that can both keep under control the modernity’s “dark side” and make again fruitful in today’s multicultural society the main achievement of the modem age, that is, freedom. (shrink)

Human stories lie at the heart of professional practice in the human, social services, though these are often discounted when it comes to researching such services and sharing practice through publication. This article identifies and addresses certain methodological and epistemological biases and consequent challenges in human science research, and discusses the importance of story (autoethnography) and discovery (heuristics) in research which can inform practice, meaningfully and ethically. It considers this by addressing both research and publication, illustrating both the challenges and (...) the solutions from the authors’ own experiences. The article argues for reclaiming the subjective and the subjectivist dimension in human, social science, and, therefore, the experiential, in both research and publication; and addresses four problems with regard to publishing in the human sciences, namely: privilege, quality, anonymity in peer-review, and capital. (shrink)

Questo contributo teorico propone una prospettiva innovativa nel dibattito sul concetto di “bullshit”. L’ipotesi principale è che la vaghezza sia un elemento fondamentale delle bullshit, che si focalizza sull’attività. In questo modo si supera il dibattito in letteratura che mette al centro o l’intenzionalità dell’enunciatore o la struttura e il contenuto degli enunciati. Si sostiene inoltre che la vaghezza non debba essere considerata come un limite, ma come un’opportunità per comprendere situazioni comunicative complesse. Questo differente approccio, basato sulla tradizione pragmatista, (...) supera alcuni limiti evidenziati in letteratura, aprendo la strada a una comprensione più approfondita del fenomeno delle bullshit. Offre inoltre una risposta esaustiva ad alcuni quesiti di Frankfurt e riconosce il lato “produttivo” delle bullshit, adattandosi meglio a molteplici circostanze quotidiane. Un approccio pragmatista al fenomeno-bullshit basato sulla vaghezza offre una maggiore comprensione di fenomeni complessi di comunicazione senza cadere nel “paradigma della sincerità” evidenziato da Frankfurt. (shrink)

So-called “ugly laws” were mostly municipal statutes in the United States that outlawed the appearance in public of people who were, in the words of one of these laws, “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” (Chicago City Code 1881). Although the moniker “ugly laws” was coined to refer collectively to such ordinances only in 1975 (Burgdorf and Burgdorf 1975), it has become the primary way to refer to such laws, (...) which targeted the overlapping categories of the poor, the homeless, vagrants, and those with visible disabilities. Enacted and actively enforced between the American Civil War (1867) and World War I (1918), such laws and their enforcement can tell us much about the very sorts of people who were also, a generation later, subject to explicitly eugenic laws, such as sterilization legislation. And like eugenic laws and policies, such laws continue to affect the lives of people with disabilities to this day (Schweik 2011). (shrink)

Epistemologists take themselves to disagree about whether there are situations where it is rational for one to believe that p and rational for one to believe that one’s evidence does not support p (rational akrasia). The embedded sentence ‘one’s evidence does not support p’ can be interpreted in two ways, however, depending on what the semantic contribution of ‘one’s evidence’ is taken to be. ‘One’s evidence’ might be seen as a sheer indexical or as a descriptive singular term. The first (...) interpretation makes the relevant kind of rational akrasia impossible, whereas the second one makes it possible. But the proposition that is taken to be expressed by ‘one’s evidence does not support p’ by each of these interpretations is not the same. We thus have a rational reconstruction of views that are labeled as being for and against the possibility of rational akrasia according to which they do not really contradict each other. (shrink)

In modern capitalist societies, companies are exposed to enormous pressure to accelerate. However, it has increasingly become apparent that the social and economic acceleration which is the result of systemic imperatives tends to produce conflict both on the micro-level of personal temporal patterns and rhythms and on the macro-ecological level, where it tends to undermine the proper times for natural regeneration and reproduction. Corporations are increasingly called upon as corporate citizens to fulfil their responsibilities to stakeholders such as employees or (...) ecosystems. Business ethics approaches therefore seek to develop strategies for fulfilling this responsibility in view of these conflicts created by social acceleration. In this contribution, we first present a diagnosis of acceleration imperatives for companies based on a sociological analysis of social acceleration. Then we examine the normative aspects of conflicts created by acceleration for employees and the ecosphere using the sociological conception of resonance. We attempt to articulate conceptually the normative requirements for a business ethics which are capable of dealing with the problems of social acceleration in corporations with a particular focus on a resonant stakeholder approach. (shrink)

0. Philippe Huneman and Charles T. Wolfe: Introduction 1. Tobias Cheung, “What is an ‘organism’? On the occurrence of a new term and its conceptual transformations 1680-1850” 2. Charles T. Wolfe, “Do organisms have an ontological status?” 3. John Symons, “The individuality of artifacts and organisms” 4. Thomas Pradeu, “What is an organism? An immunological answer” 5. Matteo Mossio & Alvaro Moreno, “Organisational closure in biological organisms” 6. Laura Nuño de la Rosa, “Becoming organisms. The organisation of development and (...) the development of organisation” 7. Denis Walsh, “Two Neo-Darwinisms” 8. Philippe Huneman, “Assessing the prospects for a return of organisms in evolutionary biology” 9. Johannes Martens, “Organisms in evolution” 10. Susan Oyama, “Biologists behaving badly: Vitalism and the language of language” . (shrink)