This book on the topic of ethics and poetry consists of contributions from different continents on the subject of applied ethics related to poetry. It should gather a favourable reception from philosophers, ethicists, theologians and anthropologists from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America and allows for a comparison of the healing power of words from various religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions. The first part of this book presents original poems that express ethical emotions and aphorism related to a philosophical questioning (...) of the grounding of our values for life. The poems are written by twelve authors coming from four continents, for whom poetic emotions are sources of artistic inspiration and that can be used for conflict resolution. In the second part, which features short essays, nine authors tackle how poems, symbolic representations, metaphorical narratives and lies impact the space of possibilities, in which we are moved to action, knowledge formation, and how we imagine the world together. (shrink)

Poetry and Ethics: Inventing Possibilities in Which We Are Moved to Action and How We Live Together, Obiora Ike / Andrea Grieder / Ignace Haaz (Eds.), Global Series No. 16, Geneva: Globethics Publications, 2018, pp. 247-262.

Though researchers working on congenital aphantasia (henceforth “aphantasia”) agree that this condition involves an impairment in the ability to voluntarily generate visual imagery, disagreement looms large as to which other impairments are exhibited by aphantasic subjects. This article offers the first extensive review of studies on aphantasia, and proposes that aphantasic subjects exhibit a cluster of impairments. It puts forward a novel cognitive theory of aphantasia, building on the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis of memory and imagination. It argues that aphantasia (...) is best explained as a malfunction of processes in the episodic system, and is therefore an episodic system condition. (shrink)

This 1995 book takes as its starting point Plato's incorporation of specific genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues. The author argues that Plato's 'dialogues' with traditional genres are part and parcel of his effort to define 'philosophy'. Before Plato, 'philosophy' designated 'intellectual cultivation' in the broadest sense. When Plato appropriated the term for his own intellectual project, he created a new and specialised discipline. In order to define and legitimise 'philosophy', Plato had to match it against genres of (...) discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating the text or discourse of another genre, Plato 'defines' his new brand of wisdom in opposition to traditional modes of thinking and speaking. By targeting individual genres of discourse Plato marks the boundaries of 'philosophy' as a discursive and as a social practice. (shrink)

Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...) a correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and to semantics. This thesis has a negative and a positive side. The negative side is that a deeply rooted presumption about logical form turns out to be overly optimistic: there is no unique notion of logical form that can play both roles. The positive side is that the distinction between two notions of logical form, once properly spelled out, sheds light on some fundamental issues concerning the relation between logic and language. (shrink)

In recent works, Časlav Brukner and Jacques Pienaar have raised interesting objections to the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics. We answer these objections in detail and show that, far from questioning the viability of the interpretation, they sharpen and clarify it.

This book offers a comprehensive account of vitalism and the Romantic philosophy of nature. The author explores the rise of biology as a unified science in Germany by reconstructing the history of the notion of “vital force,” starting from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Further, he argues that Romantic Naturphilosophie played a crucial role in the rise of biology in Germany, especially thanks to its treatment of teleology. In fact, both post-Kantian philosophers and naturalists were guided by teleological (...) principles in defining the object of biological research. The book begins by considering the problem of generation, focusing on the debate over the notion of “formative force.” Readers are invited to engage with the epistemological status of this formative force, i.e. the question of the principle behind organization. The second chapter provides a reconstruction of the physiology of vital forces as it was elaborated in the mid- to late-eighteenth century by the group of physicians and naturalists known as the “Göttingen School.” Readers are shown how these authors developed an understanding of the animal kingdom as a graded series of organisms with increasing functional complexity. Chapter three tracks the development of such framework in Romantic Naturphilosophie. The author introduces the reader to the problem of classification, showing how Romantic philosophers of nature regarded classification as articulated by a unified plan that connects all living forms with one another, relying on the idea of living nature as a universal organism. In the closing chapter, this analysis shows how the three instances of pre-biological discourse on living beings – theory of generation, physiology and natural history – converged to form the consolidated disciplinary matrix of a general biology. The book offers an insightful read for all scholars interested in classical German philosophy, especially those researching the philosophy of nature, as well as the history and philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies broadly understood are tools that have the capability to read, record and modify our mental activity by acting on its brain correlates. The emergence of increasingly powerful and sophisticated techniques has given rise to the proposal to introduce new rights specifically directed to protect mental privacy, freedom of thought, and mental integrity. These rights, also proposed as basic human rights, are conceived in direct relation to tools that threaten mental privacy, freedom of thought, mental integrity, and personal identity. In (...) this paper, our goal is to give a philosophical foundation to a specific right that we will call right to mental integrity. It encapsulates both the classical concepts of privacy and non-interference in our mind/brain. Such a philosophical foundation refers to certain features of the mind that hitherto could not be reached directly from the outside: intentionality, first-person perspective, personal autonomy in moral choices and in the construction of one's narrative, and relational identity. A variety of neurotechnologies or other tools, including artificial intelligence, alone or in combination can, by their very availability, threaten our mental integrity. Therefore, it is necessary to posit a specific right and provide it with a theoretical foundation and justification. It will be up to a subsequent treatment to define the moral and legal boundaries of such a right and its application. (shrink)

According to a view called 'nihilism', sentences containing vague expressions cannot strictly speaking be true or false, because they lack definite truth conditions. While most theorists of vagueness tend to regard nihilism as a hopeless view, a few isolated attempts have been made to defend it. This paper aims to develop such attempts in a new direction by showing how nihilism, once properly spelled out, can meet three crucial explanatory challenges that respectively concern truth, assertibility, and communication.

An influential tradition holds that thoughts are public: different thinkers share many of their thoughts, and the same applies to a single subject at different times. This ‘publicity principle’ has recently come under attack. Arguments by Mark Crimmins, Richard Heck and Brian Loar seem to show that publicity is inconsistent with the widely accepted principle that someone who is ignorant or mistaken about certain identity facts will have distinct thoughts about the relevant object—for instance, the astronomer who does not know (...) that Hesperus is Phosphorus will have two distinct thoughts Hesperus is bright and Phosphorus is bright. In this paper, I argue that publicity can be defended if we adopt a relational account on which thoughts are individuated by their mutual relations. I then go on to develop a specific relational theory—the ‘linking account’—and contrast it with other relational views. (shrink)

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by (...) somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding. (shrink)

Philosophical cognitivists have argued for more than four decades that emotions are special types of judgments. Anti-cognitivists have provided a series of counterexamples aiming to show that identifying emotions with judgments overintellectualizes the emotions. I provide a novel counterexample that makes the overintellectualization charge especially vivid. I discuss neurophysiological evidence to the effect that the fear system can be activated by stimuli the subject is unaware of seeing. To emphasize the analogy with blind sight , I call this phenomenon blind (...) fright . Cognitivists may reply that blindfright is nothing but an unconscious judgment subcortically elicited. This reply is in line with the strategy commonly employed by cognitivists against their critics. I call it the Elastic Strategy, because it consists of ‘stretching’ the notion of judgment in order to accommodate counterexamples. This strategy, I argue, turns cognitivism into a theory that is at worst unfalsifiable and at best trivially true. The final portion of my article aims to rescue cognitivism from the damage done by the Elastic Strategy. I distinguish three varieties of cognitivism, one concerned with what emotions essentially are (Constitutive Cognitivism), one concerned with what causes emotions (Etiological Cognitivism) and one concerned with what emotions represent (Representational Cognitivism). I conclude that what cognitivism has to offer to emotion theory are primarily insights concerning the causes and representational content of emotions. The constitutive identification of emotions with judgments, on the other hand, does more harm than good. (shrink)

Political theorists aiming to articulate normative standards for the EU have almost entirely focused on whether or not the EU suffers from a ‘democratic deficit'. Almost nothing has been written, by contrast, on one of the central values underpinning European integration since at least the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), namely solidarity. What kinds of principles, policies, and ideals should an affirmation of solidarity commit us to? Put another way: what norms of socioeconomic justice ought to apply to the (...) EU? This is not an empirical or narrowly legal question. We are not trying to gauge the degree of attachment there currently is in the EU by, for example, citing the latest Eurobarometer poll. We are also not attempting to state the implicit rationale followed by the Court of Justice in its recent ‘solidarity’ jurisprudence, let alone trying to fix what the Commission might mean by it. In this article, I ask the more fundamental question underlying both the legal and the empirical questions: What principles of social solidarity ought to apply between states and citizens of the emerging European polity? This question has rarely been asked or answered by political theorists in an EU context, so we are entering largely uncharted territory. The article develops a tripartite model of EU solidarity in Section 2, and then applies it to the case of free movement of persons in Section 3. (shrink)

SummaryThe following paper is an attempt to deal with relations as elements of certain closed structures which I call relation schemata. A relation schema is essentially a lattice whose alements are m‐ary relations over a domain of individuals. The approach is based upon methods well known from linear algebra and throws light upon some analogies between classic syllogistic and relational logic; it also suggests a natural way of extending classic syllogistic to a system of 42 syllogisms.RésuméL'article suivant est une tentative (...) de traiter les relations comme des éléments de certaines structures fermées que j'appelle schémas relationnels. Un schéma relationnel est essentiellement un treillis dont les éléments sont des relations n‐aires sur un domaine d'individus. L'essai s'inspire de méthodes bien connues en algèbre linéaire et éclaire des analogies entre la syllogistique classique et la logique relationnelle; il suggère aussi une maniére naturelle d'étendre cette syllogistique classique à un système à 42 syllogismes.ZusammenfassungDie folgende Arbeit versucht, Relationen als Elemente gewisser geschlossener Strukturen, die ich Relationenschemata nenne, darzustellen. Ein Relationenschema ist im wesentlichen ein Verband, dessen Elemente m‐stellige Relationen ilber einern Individuenbereich sind. Die hier gegebene Darstellung beruht auf bekannten Methoden der linearen Algebra, weist ferner einige zwischen der klassischen Syllogistik und der Relationenlogik bestehende Analogien auf und legt eine natürliche Erweiterung der klassischen Syllogistik auf 42 Syllogismen nahe. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie Bedeutung des Koinzidenzbegriffs für eine protophysikalische Chronometrie wird untersucht und eine Abänderung der von P. Janich gegebenen Definition einer Uhr vorgeschlagen. Einige Beziehungen zwischen protophysikalischer und Relativistischer Zeitmessung, insbesondere eine mögliche Unverträglichkeit beider, werden erörtet und einige Folgerungen bezüglich des Sinnes 〈protophysikalischer Begründung〉 gezogen.SummaryThe significance of the concept of coincidence for a protophysical chronometry is investigated and an alteration to P. Janich's definition of a clock proposed. Some relations, in particular a possible incompatibility, between proto‐physical and relativistic time measurement (...) are discussed and some conclusions drawn as to the meaning of “proto‐physical foundation”.RésuméUne analyse de la signification de la notion de coïncidence en chronométrie protophysique conduit à proposer une modification de la définition d'une horloge donnée par P. Janich. Certaines relations entre la mesure proto‐physique et relativiste du temps et plus particuliàrement la possibilité d'une incompatibilité entre elles sont étudiées. Il en découle quelques conclusions concernant le sens exact d'un 〈fondement proto‐physique〉. (shrink)

The thought determinations of Hegel's Logic are tentatively considered as three mutually intersecting systems giving rise to a set of general ordering relations. Each main category is given its place in a main sequence with triadic structure and is associated with two sequences of dependent partial determinations. In this way a number of clear distinctions can be introduced and some significant but hitherto largely neglected correspondences between categories and their partial determinations, in particular the so-called moments, be studied.

In recent works, Kind has argued that imagination is a skill, since it possesses the two hallmarks of skill: improvability by practice, and control. I agree with Kind that and are indeed hallmarks of skill, and I also endorse her claim that imagination is a skill in virtue of possessing these two features. However, in this paper, I argue that Kind’s case for imagination’s being a skill is unsatisfactory, since it lacks robust empirical evidence. Here, I will provide evidence for (...) by considering data from mental rotation experiments and for by considering data from developmental experiments. I conclude that imagination is a skill, but there is a further pressing question of how the cognitive architecture of imagination has to be structured to make this possible. I begin by considering how can be implemented sub-personally. I argue that this can be accounted for by positing a selection mechanism which selects content from memory representations to be recombined into imaginings, using Bayesian generation. I then show that such an account can also explain. On this basis, I hold that not only is imagination a skill, but that it is also plausibly implemented sub-personally by a Bayesian selection mechanism. (shrink)

This paper reviews the uneven history of the relationship between Anthropology and Cognitive Science over the past 30 years, from its promising beginnings, followed by a period of disaffection, on up to the current context, which may lay the groundwork for reconsidering what Anthropology and (the rest of) Cognitive Science have to offer each other. We think that this history has important lessons to teach and has implications for contemporary efforts to restore Anthropology to its proper place within Cognitive Science. (...) The recent upsurge of interest in the ways that thought may shape and be shaped by action, gesture, cultural experience, and language sets the stage for, but so far has not fully accomplished, the inclusion of Anthropology as an equal partner. (shrink)

In this paper, I (1) offer a general introduction of rewilding and (2) situate the concept in environmental philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I work from definitions and typologies of rewilding that have been put forth in the academic literature. To these, I add secondary notions of rewilding from outside the scientific literature that are pertinent to the meanings and motivations of rewilding beyond its use in a scientific context. I defend the continued use of rewilding as (...) a single term, despite its seemingly disparate usages, and I advance a clustered concept of eight overlapping characteristics as a way to conceptualise these. I argue that this breadth helps in understanding the wider interest in rewilding as an emerging environmental phenomenon. In the paper's second part, I turn to three key issues in environmental philosophy in order to connect rewilding with the historic themes of: (1) the exclusion of humans from wild or wilderness places, (2) the ontological purity of wilderness areas through their non-human origins and history, and (3) cultural landscapes and notions of place. I suggest that rewilding carries on some of the main themes of the wilderness debate, but considering rewilding broadly allows tensions and novel questions to manifest that are important to how rewilding should be discussed and understood going forward. (shrink)

We present a theory VF of partial truth over Peano arithmetic and we prove that VF and ID 1 have the same arithmetical content. The semantics of VF is inspired by van Fraassen's notion of supervaluation.

The goal of this paper is to encourage participants in the debate about the locus of cognition (e.g., extended mind vs embedded mind) to turn their attention to noteworthy anthropological and sociological considerations typically (but not uniquely) arising from transhumanist and posthumanist research. Such considerations, we claim, promise to potentially give us a way out of the stalemate in which such a debate has fallen. A secondary goal of this paper is to impress trans and post-humanistically inclined readers to embrace (...) (or at least seriously reflect on) the extended mind thesis as a potential gamechanger to the state of play in their own debates. We start off (Sect. 1) by reviewing two crucial ideas (homo faber and plasticity of the body schema) that are instrumental in setting up the dispute between extended and embedded. We then summarise (Sect. 2), the stalemate between these two competing accounts of cognition, and review some of the dialectics underlying it. In Sect. 3, to get out of the stalemate, we propose to focus on a series of important anthropological and sociological considerations derived from and related to trans and posthumanist research. In doing so, we claim (Sect. 4) that an extended approach to cognition becomes anthropologically preferable and morally as well as socially more desirable than an embedded one. (shrink)

Collective impact cases are situations where people collectively bring about a morally significant outcome by each acting in a certain way, and yet each individual action seems to make no, or almost no difference to the outcome. Intuitively, the beneficial or harmful outcomes give individuals moral reason to act (or refrain from acting) in collective impact situations. However, if the individual action does not make a difference to the outcome, it is not clear what those moral reasons are. The problem (...) of collective impact is the challenge of identifying such moral reasons. Julia Nefsky has presented an account of how an individual action can help without making a difference – call it the Helping Account – that claims to provide a general solution to the problem of collective impact while avoiding problems faced by previously suggested solutions. I present an internal critique of Nefsky’s work. First, I argue that, based on the problems that Nefsky has raised against previously suggested solutions, three success conditions for a general solution to the problem of collective impact can be formulated: The Weightiness condition, the Generalizability condition, and the Connectedness condition. Second, I argue that the Helping Account fails to satisfy the three success conditions, thereby failing, by Nefsky’s own standards, to provide a general solution to the problem. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whether future contingents are knowable, that is, whether one can know that things will go a certain way even though it is possible that things will not go that way. First I will consider a long-established view that implies a negative answer, and draw attention to some endemic problems that affect its credibility. Then I will sketch an alternative line of thought that prompts a positive answer: future contingents are knowable, although our epistemic access of (...) them is limited in some important respects. (shrink)

A study of a group of elementary school students learning to control a computer‐implemented Newtonian object reveals a surprisingly uniform and detailed collection of strategies, at the core of which is a robust “Aristotelian” expectation that things should move in the direction they are last pushed. A protocol of an undergraduate dealing with the same situation shows a large overlap with the set of strategies used by the elementary school children and thus a marked lack of influence of classroom physics (...) training on this student's naive physics. The data from these two studies are pooled and elaborated into a “genetic task analysis” of how one might come to understand Newtonian dynamics as a more or less natural evolution from the naive state. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the _ethics of how_ to approach the introduction of MAiD as an organizational ethics challenge, a focus that diverges from the traditional focus in healthcare ethics on the _ethics of why_ MAiD is right or wrong. It describes a method co-designed and implemented by ethics and medical leadership at a tertiary hospital to develop a values-based, grassroots response to the decriminalization of assisted dying in Canada. This organizational ethics engagement method embodied core tenants that drew inspiration (...) from a variety of sources, including poetic ones. These tenants are: make the problem bigger; focus on values; cultivate open moral spaces; and trust emergence. The paper describes how these tenants were put into practice in order to create a rigorous and sustainable MAiD program that delivers high-quality care to patients and families while honoring the moral diversity of the hospital workforce. One of the goals in sharing this method is to provide a roadmap for healthcare organizations in Canada and other jurisdictions around the world that are facing the challenge of responding to patient requests for MAiD following the decriminalization of this care option. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the role of the imagination in creativity, using aphantasia as a case study. It first distinguishes between imagination and mental imagery, before giving an overview of what we know about aphantasia to date, focusing in particular on findings pertaining to creativity, imagination, and memory. It then turns to the role of the imagination in creativity, agreeing with philosophers that the imagination plays an essential role in creativity, which allows individuals to imagine a multitude of possibilities. This (...) view is then supplemented with a theory of the neuro-cognitive underpinnings of the imagination, whereby both the imagination and memory are supported by the same neural network – the default mode network. Finally, the chapter argues that this fuller picture allows us to understand the creative abilities of people with aphantasia, thoroughly resisting the thought that they might generally be unimaginative or uncreative. (shrink)

In his interesting commentary, Joshua Shepherd raises two points—one related to epistemology, the other to ethics—about our article on human cerebral organoids.1 2 From the epistemological standpoint, he calls into question the need for a theory of consciousness. A theory of consciousness, for him, is not necessary because of the lack of consensus about the very nature of consciousness. Shepherd suggests that ‘given widespread disagreement, applying a theory of consciousness may not be helpful when attempting to diagnose the presence of (...) consciousness in cerebral organoids’. In Shepherd’s view, it would be better to transfer ‘concepts already under development in work on the presence and structure of consciousness in difficult marginal cases involving traumatic brain injury’.2 We could not agree more on this last point; detecting a minimal capacity for consciousness in the brain of comatose patients is a very similar challenge to inferring the presence of consciousness in cerebral organoids. Every day, as a by-product of saving many lives, intensive care medicine artificially produces thousands of brains that may remain isolated, split or fragmented; in the worst case, cortical islands, or an archipelago of islands, may survive while being disconnected from the outside world. Can these islands host some form of consciousness? That is, does it feel like anything to be a large piece of human cortex? Addressing this difficult question requires the development of general, objective brain-based indices of consciousness that are independent of sensory processing, executive functions and motor outputs.3 Consider, for example, a patient showing reflexive spontaneous behaviour, no response to command and no ability to communicate. In her brain, afferent pathways are damaged, thereby impairing the recruitment of cortical areas in response to sensory stimulation; basal ganglia, as well as other frontal structures supporting executive functions, are impaired. However, resting metabolism and significant electroencephalography …. (shrink)

In our recent article ‘The Ethics of the Algorithmic Prediction of Goal of Care Preferences: From Theory to Practice’1, we aimed to ignite a critical discussion on why and how to design artificial intelligence (AI) systems assisting clinicians and next-of-kin by predicting goal of care preferences for incapacitated patients. Here, we would like to thank the commentators for their valuable responses to our work. We identified three core themes in their commentaries: (1) the risks of AI paternalism, (2) worries about (...) attacks to our humanity stemming from the use of AI and (3) the possibility of designing AI systems for more relevant use cases than the one we consider in our work. We shall focus on these themes, leaving aside some other interesting suggestions, given the limited space available for our response. Diaz Milian and Bhattacharyya discuss the risks of AI paternalism highlighting how the use of an AI to predict goal of care preferences may incentivise clinicians and surrogates to shift the burden of decision making to the machine.2 In particular, ‘[i]f the AI-generated response is given priority above the other agents’2 and the AI makes decisions autonomously, then ‘AI paternalism’ would emerge.2 Against this possibility, the authors suggest four safeguards to be implemented in the AI life-cycle.2 These are procedures that may improve the trustworthiness of the AI and human control over it.3 We agree that it is important …. (shrink)

This paper employs some outcomes (for the most part due to David Lewis) of the contemporary debate on the metaphysics of dispositions to evaluate those dispositional analyses of meaning that make use of the concept of a disposition in ideal conditions. The first section of the paper explains why one may find appealing the notion of an ideal-condition dispositional analysis of meaning and argues that Saul Kripke’s well-known argument against such analyses is wanting. The second section focuses on Lewis’ work (...) in the metaphysics of dispositions in order to call attention to some intuitions about the nature of dispositions that we all seem to share. In particular, I stress the role of what I call "Actuality Constraint". The third section of the paper maintains that the Actuality Constraint can be used to show that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist (in so doing, I develop a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian). This immediately implies that ideal-condition dispositional analyses of meaning cannot work. The last section discusses a possible objection to my argument. The point of the objection is that the argument depends on an illicit assumption. I show (1) that, in fact, the assumption in question is far from illicit and (2) that even without this assumption it is possible to argue that the dispositions with which ideal-condition dispositional analyses identify my meaning addition by "+" do not exist. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to provide Quantum Field Theory with conceptually clear and mathematically rigorous foundations; remarkable examples are the Bohmian and the algebraic perspectives respectively. In this essay we introduce the dissipative approach to QFT, a new alternative formulation of the theory explaining the phenomena of particle creation and annihilation starting from nonequilibrium thermodynamics. It is shown that DQFT presents a rigorous mathematical structure, and a clear particle ontology, taking the best from the mentioned perspectives. Finally, after the (...) discussion of its principal implications and consequences, we compare it with the main Bohmian QFTs implementing a particle ontology. (shrink)