Social epistemologists should be well-equipped to explain and evaluate the growing vulnerabilities associated with filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization in social media. However, almost all social epistemology has been built for social contexts that involve merely a speaker-hearer dyad. Filter bubbles, echo chambers, and group polarization all presuppose much larger and more complex network structures. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for a properly social epistemology that gives the role and structure of networks their due. In particular, (...) we formally define epistemic constructs that quantify the structural epistemic position of each node within an interconnected network. We argue for the epistemic value of a structure that we call the (m,k)-observer. We then present empirical evidence that (m,k)-observers are rare in social media discussions of controversial topics, which suggests that people suffer from serious problems of epistemic vulnerability. We conclude by arguing that social epistemologists and computer scientists should work together to develop minimal interventions that improve the structure of epistemic networks. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...) accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half are con-vaccine. We also show that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, we question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular fora such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds. We conclude by pointing to directions for further research in digital social epistemology. (shrink)

Full virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

Modern thinking about the ground tends to take it as a purely material base for the unfolding of history and ideas emerging on its surface. In this article, I question above-ground visions of city building by drawing on both the history of ground engineering and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Paris with geotechnicians. I address the difficulties that theorists have faced over past centuries in modelling soils, and the contemporary practice of building piles underneath buildings to anchor them. From this (...) unfolds an understanding of the ground as produced through an equilibrium between forces and materials in which buildings become participants, rather than a solid base upon which they stand. Looking at the activities of foundation builders, we find that the inertia of the urban soil no longer betokens an absence of activity or movement, but is rather a continuous achievement, a slow and dangerous process of balancing tensions. (shrink)

This paper studies the capture of organisms and materials in soil construction – a branch of ecological engineering dedicated to making soil in order to compensate for soil degradation. This approach takes all organisms to be ‘ecosystem engineers’, and often refers to earthworms as ‘collaborators’ in making soil. I examine the claim that such a convocation of worms amounts to a redistribution of agency and the underlying assumption that form-taking is the shaping of raw matter according to pre-existing forms. Drawing (...) on processual anthropology, I question the distinction between living and material components of soils, and between growing and making. I elaborate on soil scientists’ description of soil growth as pedogenesis in order to propose a view in which soil materials, along with organisms, participate in soil’s transformative and generative fluxes. I envisage the process as a concrescence, an experimentation that brings humans, worms, and soil materials together in new ways. (shrink)

Fictional realists maintain that fictional characters are part of the world’s ontology. In an influential article, Anthony Everett argues that the fictional realist is thereby committing herself to problematic entities. Among these are entities that are indeterminately identical. Recently, Ross Cameron and Richard Woodward have answered Everett’s worry using the same strategy. They argue that the fictional realist can bypass the problematic identities by contending that they are merely semantically indeterminate. This paper concisely surveys Everett’s original argument, Cameron’s and Woodward’s (...) responses, and then argues that the strategy employed by Cameron and Woodward fails to satisfactorily answer Everett’s worries. (shrink)

Abating the threat climate change poses to the lives of future people clearly challenges our development models. The 2011 Human Devel- opment Report rightly focuses on the integral links between sustainability and equity. However, the human development and capabilities approach emphasizes the expansion of people’s capabilities simpliciter, which is ques- tionable in view of environmental sustainability. We argue that capabilities should be defined as triadic relations between an agent, constraints and poss- ible functionings. This triadic syntax particularly applies to climate (...) change: since people’s lives and capabilities are dependent on the environment, sus- tainable human development should also include constraining human activi- ties in order to prevent losses in future people’s well-being due to the adverse effects of exacerbated climate change. On this basis, we will advocate that the goals of sustainable human development should be informed by a fra- mework that consists of enhancing capabilities up to a threshold level, as well as constraining the functionings beyond this threshold in terms of their green- house gas emissions. (shrink)

This paper reviews the debate on the notion of biological function and on functional explanation as this takes place in philosophy. It describes the different perspectives, issues, intuitions, theories and arguments that have emerged. The author shows that the debate has been too heavily influenced by the concerns of a naturalistic philosophy of mind and argues that in order to improve our understanding of biology the attention should be shifted from the study of intuitions to the study of the actual (...) practice of biological inquiry. (shrink)

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk (...) responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly. (shrink)

According to moral error theory, moral discourse is error-ridden. Establishing error theory requires establishing two claims. These are that moral discourse carries a non-negotiable commitment to there being a moral reality and that there is no such reality. This paper concerns the first and so-called non-negotiable commitment claim. It starts by identifying the two existing argumentative strategies for settling that claim. The standard strategy is to argue for a relation of conceptual entailment between the moral statements that comprise moral discourse (...) and the statement that there is a moral reality. The non-standard strategy is to argue for a presupposition relation instead. Error theorists have so far failed to consider a third strategy, which uses a general entailment relation that doesn’t require intricate relations between concepts. The paper argues that both entailment claims struggle to meet a new explanatory challenge and that since the presupposition option doesn’t we have prima facie reason to prefer it over the entailment options. The paper then argues that suitably amending the entailment claims enables them to meet this challenge. With all three options back on the table the paper closes by arguing that error theorists should consider developing the currently unrecognised, non-conceptual entailment claim. (shrink)

I argue that there are at least four different ways in which the term ‘function’ is used in connection with the study of living organisms, namely: function as activity, function as biological role, function as biological advantage, and function as selected effect. Notion refers to what an item does by itself; refers to the contribution of an item or activity to a complex activity or capacity of an organism; refers to the value for the organism of an item having a (...) certain character rather than another; refers to the way in which a trait acquired and has maintained its current share in the population. The recognition of a separate notion of function as biological advantage solves the problem of the indeterminate reference situation that has been raised against a counterfactual analysis of function, and emphasizes the importance of counterfactual comparison in the explanatory practice of organismal biology. This reveals a neglected problem in the philosophy of biology, namely that of accounting for the insights provided by counterfactual comparison. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relation between philosophy and madness. It is often assumed that madness has to be suppressed, excluded, or conquered before a philosophically sensible text, logical argument, or world of meaning can appear. I argue, instead, that a certain concept of madness, when grafted on phenomenological psychiatry and philosophical mysticism, is intrinsically related to the project of philosophy. With the help of experiences of madness as presented in psychiatry and articulated in mad autobiographical reports, including my (...) own, I will show that philosophy and madness are in closer connection than is commonly assumed. In the introduction, I refer to some superficial... (shrink)

Following Mayr (1961) evolutionary biologists often maintain that the hallmark of biology is its evolutionary perspective. In this view, biologists distinguish themselves from other natural scientists by their emphasis on why-questions. Why-questions are legitimate in biology but not in other natural sciences because of the selective character of the process by means of which living objects acquire their characteristics. For that reason, why-questions should be answered in terms of natural selection. Functional biology is seen as a reductionist science that applies (...) physics and chemistry to answer how-questions but lacks a biological point of view of its own. In this paper I dispute this image of functional biology. A close look at the kinds of issues studied in biology and at the way in which these issues are studied shows that functional biology employs a distinctive biological perspective that is not rooted in selection. This functional perspective is characterized by its concern with the requirements of the life-state and the way in which these are met. (shrink)

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

"Absolute Beginners" is a multi-approach study of the founding role of the Absolute as the very beginning of knowledge in medieval philosophy (Henry of Ghent, Richard Conington), the subject being addressed from historical, methodological, ...

Despite the Aristotelian renaissance in the philosophy of education, the development of virtue has not received much attention. This is unfortunate, because an attempt to draft an Aristotelian model of moral development can help philosophers to evaluate the contribution Aristotelian virtue ethics can make to our understanding of moral development, provide psychologists with a potentially richer account of morality and its development, and help educators to understand the developmental phase people are in. In the article, it is argued that the (...) Aristotelian categories of the ‘morally indifferent’, ‘un-self-controlled’, ‘self-controlled’ and ‘properly virtuous’ can be interpreted as the successive stages or levels of a comprehensive developmental model. For each stage, it will be made clear whether people are committed to virtue, whether they act virtuously or not, whether they act with pleasure or pain, and which desires and reasons they have for acting. The article closes with suggestions about what needs to be done if the proposed Aristotelian account of moral development is to become psychologically more realistic and educationally useful. (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether there is a measure of coherence that could be rightly claimed to generalize the notion of logical equivalence. I show that Fitelson’s (2003) proposal to that effect encounters some serious difficulties. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that no mutual-support measure could ever be suitable for the formalization of coherence as generalized logical equivalence. Instead, it appears that the only plausible candidate for such a measure is one of relative overlap. The measure I propose (...) in this paper is quite similar to Olsson’s (2002) proposal but differs from it by not being susceptible to the type of counterexample that Bovens and Hartmann (2003) have devised against it. (shrink)

Wouter Van Haaften; The Justification of Conceptual Development Claims, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 51–70, https.

Moral error theorists face the now what question. How, if at all, ought they to adjust their moral practice after having discovered the error? Various answers have emerged in the literature, including, but not limited to, revisionary fictionalism, revisionary expressivism, and revisionary naturalism. Recently, François Jaquet has argued that there are only two available answers to the now what question, since every extant answer except revisionary fictionalism collapses into abolitionism. This paper provides a response. First, it argues that revisionary naturalism (...) does not collapse into abolitionism. The argument is that abolitionists can neither utter schmoralist naturalist replacement judgments that contain moral terms nor eliminativist naturalist replacement judgments that do not contain moral terms. This means that abolitionists cannot utter replacement judgments at all. Since revisionary naturalists can utter replacement judgments, their view does not collapse into abolitionism. Second, the paper gives reason to believe that this result extends beyond revisionary naturalism to the other revisionary metaethical theories, and that this is good news for moral error theory. (shrink)

It is well known that Carnap, early in his philosophical career, took most of metaphysics to consist of meaningless pseudostatements. In contrast to this meaning-theoretic critique of metaphysics, we develop what we take to be Carnap’s later value-based critique. We argue that this later critique is forceful against several central contemporary metaphysical debates, its origin in the principle of tolerance notwithstanding.

This paper evaluates Kuipers' account of functional explanation in biology in view of an example of such an explanation taken from real biology. The example is the explanation of why electric fishes swim backwards (Lannoo and Lannoo 1993). Kuipers' account depicts the answer to a request for functional explanation as consisting only of statements that articulate a certain kind of consequence. It is argued that such an account fails to do justice to the main insight provided by the example explanation, (...) namely the insight into why backwards swimming is needed by fishes that locate their food by means of an electric radar. The paper sketches an improved account that does justice to this kind of insight. It is argued that this account is consistent with and complementary to Kuipers' insight that function attributions are established by means of a process of hypothetico-deductive reasoning guided by a heuristic principle. (shrink)

Climate change and other contemporary harms are often depicted as New Harms because they seem to constitute unprecedented challenges. This New Harms Discourse rests on two important premises, both of which we criticise on empirical grounds. First, we argue that the Premise of changed conditions of human interaction—according to which the conditions regarding whom people affect have changed recently and which emphasises the difference with past conditions of human interaction—risks obfuscating how humanity’s current predicament is merely the transient result of (...) long-term, gradual processes and developments. Second, we dispute the Premise that New Harms have certain features that render them new and argue that New Harms share characteristics with other harms. On the basis of these premises, the New Harms Discourse concludes that climate change is a unique social challenge that requires radically new moral thinking, but we argue that this Uniqueness Myth distracts attention from the valuable lessons we can draw from humanity’s successes and failures in dealing with past harms. We will illustrate how action to tackle climate change and other complex, systemic harms can be informed by the interdisciplinary study of historic harms. We will argue that rejecting the New Harms Discourse is not only empirically justified, it also gives cause for optimism, because it opens up the possibility to draw upon the past to face problems in the present and future. (shrink)

If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We point to various ways in which the advocates of (...) a coherence theory of justification may attempt to divert the threat of these results. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAs neo-Aristotelian character education approaches have become more popular, the list of objections has increased too. This paper focuses on the objection that while character education proponents claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘reformative’ they seem to maintain the educational status quo. This paper examines what happens to neo-Aristotelian character education approaches when they are implemented in schools. First, a range of authors is consulted that has critically followed character education approaches, in particular the one advocated by the Jubilee Centre for (...) Character and Virtues. Second, the Bildung tradition is discussed, which was also intended as a progressive and cosmopolitan project, but was used by German governments in the 19th century to fashion the nation state. Finally, a comparison between the two approaches is made, raising the question whether it is possible for states to run an education system that does not distort ideals of what it means to be human. (shrink)

The capabilities approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum has become an influential viewpoint for addressing issues of social justice and human de- velopment. It has not yet, however, given adequate theoretical consideration to the requirements of environmental sustainability. Sen has focussed on the instrumental importance of human development for achieving sustainability, but has failed to consider the limits of this account, especially with respect to consumption-reduction. Nussbaum has criticised constraining material consumption for its paternalistic prescription of one particular conception (...) of the good life, without considering it as an imperative of justice. We discuss two possible extensions of the capabilities approach. First, the concept of ca- pability ceilings contains several attractive elements, but it also suffers from some shortcomings. Therefore, second, we advocate constraining people’s combinations of functionings in accordance with a personal budget which con- sists of a fair share of environmental resources. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer a new perspective on role modelling by examining adolescents’ own efforts to lead a morally virtuous life. While traditional approaches to moral education emphasize the importance of teachers as role models, this study proposes a shift in focus towards adolescents’ own role models. Drawing on the philosophical concept of moral self-cultivation and psychological insights on identity development and social cognitive learning, it is argued that adolescents have the ability to cultivate their moral character by (...) emulating others. However, empirical evidence suggests that adolescents often do not perceive teachers as their role models. Consequently, moral educational theories are advised to demand less of teachers as role models. Teachers could invest more time in understanding students’ personal role models and encourage them to compare these role models with their own behavior. By acknowledging and addressing students’ role models, teachers can facilitate the moral self-cultivation of adolescents. (shrink)

In order to develop a model of equitable and sustainable distribution, this paper advocates integrating the ecological space paradigm and the capabilities approach. As the currency of distribution, this account proposes a hybrid of capabilities and ecological space. Although the goal of distributive justice should be to secure and promote people’s capabilities now and in the future, doing so requires acknowledging that these capabilities are dependent on the biophysical preconditions as well as inculcating the ethos of restraint. Both issues have (...) been highlighted from the perspective of the ecological space paradigm. Concerning the scope of distributive justice, the integration can combine the advantages of the ecological space paradigm regarding the allocation of the responsibilities involved in environmental sustainability with the strength of the capabilities approach regarding people’s entitlements. The pattern of distribution starts from a capability threshold. In order to achieve this threshold, ecological space should be provided sufficiently, and the remaining ecological space budget could then be distributed according to the equal per capita principle. (shrink)

(2001). Association and deliberation in risk society: Two faces of ecological democracy. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 4, Associative Democracy: The Real Third Way, pp. 85-104.

Research into the so-called “philosophical” Hermetica has long been dominated by the foundational scholarship of André-Jean Festugière, who strongly emphasized their Greek and philosophical elements. Since the late 1970s, this perspective has given way to a new and more complex one, due to the work of another French scholar, Jean-Pierre Mahé, who could profit from the discovery of new textual sources, and called much more attention to the Egyptian and religious dimensions of the hermetic writings. This article addresses the question (...) of how, on these foundations, we should evaluate and understand the frequent hermetic references to profound but wholly ineffable revelatory and salvational insights received during “ecstatic” states. Festugière dismissed them as “literary fictions”, whereas Mahé took them much more seriously as possibly reflecting ritual practices that took place in hermetic communities. Based upon close reading of three central texts (CH I, CH XIII, NH VI6), and challenging existing translations and interpretations, this article argues that the authors of the hermetic corpus assumed a sequential hierarchy of “levels of knowledge”, in which the highest and most profound knowledge (gnōsis) is attained only during ecstatic or “altered” states of consciousness that transcend rationality. While the hermetic teachings have often been described as unsystematic, inconsistent, incoherent or confused, in fact they are grounded in a precise and carefully formulated doctrine of how the hermetic initiate may move from the domain of mere rational discourse to the attainment of several “trans-rational” stages of direct experiential knowledge, and thereby from the limited and temporal domain of material reality to the unlimited and eternal one of Mind. (shrink)

Deductivism is not merely a logical technique, but also a theory of normativity: it provides an objective and universal standard of evaluation. Contemporary dialectical logic rejects deductive normativity, replacing its universal standard by an intersubjective standard. It is argued in this paper that dialectical normativity does not improve upon deductive normativity. A dialogico-rhetorical alternative is proposed.

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with reasonings that purport to explain why certain organisms have certain traits by showing that their actual design is better than contrasting designs. Biologists call such reasonings 'functional explanations'. To avoid confusion with other uses of that phrase, I call them 'design explanations'. This paper discusses the structure of design explanations and how they contribute to scientific understanding. Design explanations are contrastive and often compare real organisms to hypothetical organisms that cannot possibly exist. They are not (...) causal but appeal to functional dependencies between an organism's different traits. These explanations point out that because an organism has certain traits, it cannot be alive if the trait to be explained were replaced by a specified alternative. They can be understood from a mechanistic point of view as revealing the constraints on what mechanisms can be alive. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the (...) response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end. (shrink)

If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts (...) about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions. (shrink)

Bovens and Hartmann propose to analyze coherence as a confidence-boosting property. On the basis of this idea, they construct a new probabilistic theory of coherence. In this paper, I will attempt to show that the resulting measure of coherence clashes with some of the intuitions that motivate it. Also, I will try to show that this clash is not due to the view on coherence as a confidence-boosting property or to the general features of the model that Bovens and Hartmann (...) use to analyze coherence. It will turn out that there is at least one other measure that is similarly based on the concept of a confidence-boosting property, but does not have the same counterintuitive results. (shrink)

\noindent\textbf{Introduction} Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring about change. TCPR faces two challenges: how to derive meaningful change processes from texts, and secondly, how to assess these complex, varied and multi-layered processes? We advocate the use text mining and multi-level (...) models (MLMs): the former offers tools and methods to discovers patterns in texts; the latter can analyse these change processes as outcomes that vary at multiple levels. \noindent\textbf{Method} We (re-)used the data from \cite{Lamers2015} because it includes outcomes and the complete online intervention for clients with mild depressive symptoms. We used text mining to obtain basic text-variables from e-mails, that we analysed through MLMs. \noindent\textbf{Results} We found that we could relate outcomes of interventions to variables containing text-information. We conclude that we can indeed bridge text mining and MLMs for TCPR as it was possible to relate text-information (obtained through text mining) to multi-levelled TCPR outcomes (using a MLM). \noindent\textbf{Discussion} Text mining can be helpful to obtain change processes, which is also the main challenge for TCPR. We showed how MLMs and text mining can be combined, but our proposition leaves open how to obtain the most relevant textual operationalization of TCPR concepts. That requires interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion. The future does look bright: based on our proof-of-concept study we conclude that MLMs and text mining can indeed advance TCPR. (shrink)

In this meticulous study, Wouter Hanegraaff examines the structure, themes, and development of Emanuel Swedenborg's massive work _Secrets of Heaven_, published between 1749 and 1756. Written as a work of biblical exegesis, Swedenborg also interpolated material on his visionary experiences, which have long fascinated readers. In the second part of the study, Dr. Hanegraaff examines the contemporary reception of the multi-volume work, particularly the critical reactions of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. He finds that Swedenborg's biblical exegesis, so (...) important in his divine calling, was largely ignored in favor of the mystical experiences. (shrink)