This essay aims to introduce readers to the social studies of accounting, attending in particular to the roles and relevance of Foucault’s works for this field. We provide a brief overview of social studies of accounting, discuss recent developments in Foucault oriented accounting scholarship, and position the articles that appear in this special issue in the context of these developments. In the concluding section, we argue that accounting is an inherently territorializing activity. The calculative instruments of accountancy transform not only (...) the possibilities for personhood, they also construct the physical and abstract calculable spaces that individuals inhabit. A focus on territorializing shifts attention to the links between calculating and governing. (shrink)

John Christman has argued that constitutively relational accounts of autonomy, as defended by some feminist theorists, are problematically perfectionist about the human good. I argue that autonomy is constitutively relational, but not in a way that implies perfectionism: autonomy depends on a dialogical disposition to hold oneself answerable to external, critical perspectives on one's action-guiding commitments. This type of relationality carries no substantive value commitments, yet it does answer to core feminist concerns about autonomy.

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)

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are quickly gaining ground in healthcare and clinical decision-making. However, it is still unclear in what way AI can or should support decision-making that is based on incapacitated patients’ values and goals of care, which often requires input from clinicians and loved ones. Although the use of algorithms to predict patients’ most likely preferred treatment has been discussed in the medical ethics literature, no example has been realised in clinical practice. This is due, arguably, to the (...) lack of a structured approach to the epistemological, ethical and pragmatic challenges arising from the design and use of such algorithms. The present paper offers a new perspective on the problem by suggesting that preference predicting AIs be viewed as sociotechnical systems with distinctive life-cycles. We explore how both known and novel challenges map onto the different stages of development, highlighting interdisciplinary strategies for their resolution. (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)

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)

In his recent article ‘Limits of trust in medical AI,’ Hatherley argues that, if we believe that the motivations that are usually recognised as relevant for interpersonal trust have to be applied to interactions between humans and medical artificial intelligence, then these systems do not appear to be the appropriate objects of trust. In this response, we argue that it is possible to discuss trust in medical artificial intelligence (AI), if one refrains from simply assuming that trust describes human–human interactions. (...) To do so, we consider an account of trust that distinguishes trust from reliance in a way that is compatible with trusting non-human agents. In this account, to trust a medical AI is to rely on it with little monitoring and control of the elements that make it trustworthy. This attitude does not imply specific properties in the AI system that in fact only humans can have. This account of trust is applicable, in particular, to all cases where a physician relies on the medical AI predictions to support his or her decision making. (shrink)

By virtue of what do alarm calls and facial expressions carry natural information? The answer I defend in this paper is that they carry natural information by virtue of changing the probabilities of various states of affairs, relative to background data. The Probabilistic Difference Maker Theory of natural information that I introduce here is inspired by Dretske's [1981] seminal analysis of natural information, but parts ways with it by eschewing the requirements that information transmission must be nomically underwritten, mind-independent, and (...) knowledge-yielding. PDMT includes both a qualitative account of information transmission and a measure of natural information in keeping with the basic principles of Shannon's communication theory and Bayesian confirmation theory. It also includes a new account of the informational content of a signal, understood as the combination of the incremental and overall support that the signal provides for all states of affairs at the source. Finally, I compare and.. (shrink)

The demand for social justice, especially in the context of the welfare state, is often framed as a demand of solidarity. But it is not clear why: in what sense, if any, is social justice best understood as a demand of solidarity? This article explores that question. There are two reasons to do so. First, very little has been written on the concept of solidarity, and almost nothing on why and how solidarity can both give rise to and be the (...) target of a moral obligation. The first aim of the article is to fill this gap. The second aim of the article is to explore the normative implications of this account of solidarity for the commitment to social justice at the heart of the welfare state, and in so doing, to put into question the idea that shared experience or shared identity are either necessary or sufficient bases for social justice qua solidarity. (shrink)

I examine the central theoretical construct of ecological psychology, the concept of an affordance. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate the role affordances play in Gibson's theory of perception. In the second part, I argue that affordances are to be understood as dispositional properties, and explain what I take to be their characteristic background circumstances, triggering circumstances and manifestations. The main purpose of my analysis is to give affordances a theoretical identity enriched by Gibson's visionary insight, but (...) independent of the most controversial claims of the Gibsonian movement. (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)

The main purpose of this article is to consider two of the most popular arguments offered in support of the view that emotions do not cause actions. One argument suggests that emotions come after actions and therefore cannot cause them. The other argument suggests that emotions are not necessarily followed by actions and therefore cannot cause them. I argue that neither of these two arguments is compelling. At the same time, some of the concerns of causation skeptics can help us (...) better understand what a theory of the causal connection between emotions and actions should explain. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

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)

We characterize Hegel’s stance on biological purposiveness as consisting in a twofold move, which conceives organisms as intrinsically purposive natural systems and focuses on their behavioral and cognitive abilities. We submit that a Hegelian stance is at play in enactivism, the branch of the contemporary theory of biological autonomy devoted to the study of cognition and the mind. What is at stake in the Hegelian stance is the elaboration of a naturalized, although non-reductive, understanding of natural purposiveness.

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.

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)

The high predictive accuracy of contemporary machine learning-based AI systems has led some scholars to argue that, in certain cases, we should grant them epistemic expertise and authority over humans. This approach suggests that humans would have the epistemic obligation of relying on the predictions of a highly accurate AI system. Contrary to this view, in this work we claim that it is not possible to endow AI systems with a genuine account of epistemic expertise. In fact, relying on accounts (...) of expertise and authority from virtue epistemology, we show that epistemic expertise requires a relation with understanding that AI systems do not satisfy and intellectual abilities that these systems do not manifest. Further, following the Distribution Cognition theory and adapting an account by Croce on the virtues of collective epistemic agents to the case of human-AI interactions we show that, if an AI system is successfully appropriated by a human agent, a _hybrid_ epistemic agent emerges, which can become both an epistemic expert and an authority. Consequently, we claim that the aforementioned hybrid agent is the appropriate object of a discourse around trust in AI and the epistemic obligations that stem from its epistemic superiority. (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 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)

Perceptions of a firm’s stance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) are influenced by its corporate marketing efforts including branding, reputation building, and communications. The current research examines CSR from the consumer’s perspective, focusing on antecedents and consequences of perceived CSR. The findings strongly support the fact that particular cues, namely perceived financial performance and perceived quality of ethics statements, influence perceived CSR which in turn impacts perceptions of corporate reputation, consumer trust, and loyalty. Both consumer trust and loyalty were also (...) found to reduce the perceived risk that consumers experience in buying and using products. From these significant findings, we draw several conclusions and implications, including the importance of enhancing firm focus toward its ethical commitment and long-term reputation. (shrink)

Hursthouse :57–68, 1991) argues that arational actions—e.g. kicking a door out of anger—cannot be explained by belief–desire pairs. The Humean Response to Hursthouse :25–38, 2000b) defends the Humean model from Hursthouse’s challenge. We argue that the Humean Response fails because belief–desire pairs are neither necessary nor sufficient for causing emotional actions. The Emotionist Response is to embrace Hursthouse’s conclusion that emotions provide an independent source of explanation for intentional actions. We consider Döring’s :214–230, 2003) feeling-based Emotionist account and argue that (...) it fails to explain arational actions. Finally, we develop our own Emotionist account, grounded in the Motivational Theory of Emotions one of us has developed. On our account, arational actions form a non-homogeneous class, some members of which must be understood as instrumental actions and some members of which must be understood as displacement behaviors of the kind animals display when their motivations are thwarted or in conflict. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that subliminally presented stimuli accelerate or delay responses afforded by supraliminally presented stimuli. Our experiments extend these findings by showing that unconscious stimuli even affect free choices between responses. Thus, actions that are phenomenally experienced as freely chosen are influenced without the actor becoming aware of the manipulation. However, the unconscious influence is limited to a response bias, as participants chose the primed response only in up to 60% of the trials. LRP data in free choice (...) trials indicate that the prime was not ineffective in trials in which participants chose the non-primed response as then it delayed performance of the incongruently primed response. (shrink)

Background Gerontechnologies are increasingly used in the care for older people. Many studies on their acceptability and ethical implications are conducted, but mainly from the perspective of principlism. This narrows our ethical gaze on the implications the use of these technologies have. Research question How do participants speak about the impact that gerontechnologies have on the different phases of care, and care as a process? What are the moral implications from an ethic of care perspective? Research design Secondary analysis of (...) semi-structure interviews, whose segments on specific technologies were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and research context Sixty-seven Swiss stakeholders involved in the use of gerontechnologies, including professional caregivers, informal caregivers, and older persons themselves. Ethical considerations The research study was evaluated by the Ethics Commission of Northwest and Central Switzerland (EKNZ). All participants received an information document before the interview date detailing the purpose, procedure, and anonymization measures. After explaining the study during the agreed upon interview time and upon receiving their written informed consent, the interview process began. Findings/results Four themes are identified: Identifying care needs, Taking responsibility, Hands-on work, Responding to care. As part of these themes, many codes highlighting the ambivalent impact of gerontechnologies are created, ranging from ‘Expanded capacity for…identifying care needs’ to ‘Create new & (un)necessary…hands-on work’. The moral implications of these results from the care ethics perspective are discussed, through the ethical elements of: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. Conclusions The moral implications of gerontechnologies on care phases from the care ethics perspective open up several questions on whether they actually help give care a central role in social life and provide more competent care. (shrink)

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

According to a widespread view, a complete explanatory reduction of all aspects of the human mind to the electro-chemical functioning of the brain is at hand and will certainly produce vast and positive cultural, political and social consequences. However, notwithstanding the astonishing advances generated by the neurosciences in recent years for our understanding of the mechanisms and functions of the brain, the application of these findings to the specific but crucial issue of human agency can be considered a “pre-paradigmatic science” (...) (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense). This implies that the situation is, at the same time, intellectually stimulating and methodologically confused. More specifically—because of the lack of a solid, unitary and coherent methodological framework as to how to connect neurophysiology and agency—it frequently happens that tentative approaches, bold but very preliminary claims and even clearly flawed interpretations of experimental data are taken for granted. In this article some examples of such conceptual confusions and intellectual hubris will be presented, which derive from the most recent literature at the intersection between neurosciences, on the one hand, and philosophy, politics and social sciences, on the other hand. It will also be argued that, in some of these cases, hasty and over-ambitious conclusions may produce negative social and political consequences. The general upshot will be that very much has still to be clarified as to what and how neurosciences can tell us about human agency and that, in the meantime, intellectual and methodological caution is to be recommended. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize Claude Romano’s recent characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology as a form of Cartesianism. Contra Romano, Husserl is not committed to the view that since individual things in the world are dubitable, then the world as a whole is dubitable. On the contrary, for Husserl doubt is a merely transitional phenomenon which can only characterize a temporary span of experience. Similarly, illusion is not a mode of experience in its own right but a retrospective way of characterizing (...) a span of experience. Therefore, Husserl cannot be plausibly characterized as either a disjunctivist or a conjunctivist. The common premise of both theories – namely, that perception and illusion are two classes of conscious acts standing on equal footing – is phenomenologically unsound. I propose to call Husserl’s theory a hermeneutical theory of perception, i.e., one that interprets perception as a temporal and self-correcting process. In the last part of the paper I argue that Husserl’s positive appraisal of Cartesian doubt is only pedagogical in nature. Husserl does not take Cartesian doubt to be practicable, but the attempt to doubt universally has the positive effect of revealing transcendental subjectivity as the subject matter of phenomenology. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of (...) conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Carl Schmitt is generally considered as the father of exceptionalism – the theory that the heart of politics lies in the sovereign power to issue emergency measures that suspend everyday normality. This is why his name comes up anytime state governments, whether liberal or not, impose limits on constitutional rights and freedoms to cope with emergencies. This article problematises such a received understanding. It argues that Schmitt held an exceptionalist view for a limited period of time and that even (...) in that period his thinking cannot be regarded as unshakably exceptionalist. This interpretation offers a new entry point to Schmitt’s overall theory. While it can hardly be defended from allegations of reactionary conservatism, it remains a juristic theory of the legal order that tries to answer the question of what ensures the stability of social life. The backdrop of this view is an institutional theory of law and politics that is hardly reconcilable with any form of exceptionalism. In this light, the core of Schmitt’s thinking turns out to be the exaltation of legal science as a jurisgenerative practice that shelters a community’s institutional practices and the traditional identity. (shrink)

I discuss an interpretation, recently proposed by Mark Siderits, of the claim that within the Buddhist tradition the self is a convenient fiction. I subsequently propose a novel approach to fictionalism in contemporary metaphysics, outline an application of such an approach to the case of the self and then specify one version of fictionalism combined with some basic tenets of Buddhism.

Kripkenstein’s challenge is usually described as being essentially about the use of a word in new kinds of cases ‒ the old kinds of cases being commonly considered as non-problematic. I show that this way of conceiving the challenge is neither true to Kripke’s intentions nor philosophically defensible: the Kripkean skeptic can question my answering “125” to the question “What is 68 plus 57?” even if that problem is one I have already encountered and answered. I then argue that once (...) the real nature of Kripkenstein’s challenge is properly appreciated, one extremely popular strategy to try to meet it, what usually goes by the name of “semantic dispositionalism”, loses much of its appeal. Along the way, I also explain that Kripkenstein’s challenge is actually two distinct challenges ‒ one concerning the mental state of meaning, or intending, something by a sign and the other concerning the meaning (referentially conceived) of linguistic expressions. (shrink)

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the more (...) popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Appeal to (...) Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant. (shrink)

Gestures are usually regarded as a casual element of communication processes between logicians. By contrast, we aim to show that gestures have played a significant role in logic. We argue that the development of communication techniques and their standardization have led to the rise of formal notation systems commonly used in logic today. In order to substantiate this claim, the historical development of the use of gestures in (early) modern logic is investigated. This investigation uncovers exemplary communication and proof techniques (...) that illustrate the efficacy of gestures as representational media in formal logic. Revisiting the tradition of gestures in logic offers promising paths and insights for today’s logic as a communication practice in the digital age. (shrink)

The paper proposes a dialectical approach to our understanding of the relation between teleology and mechanism. This approach is dialectical both in form and content. In _form_, it proposes a contemporary interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysical account of teleology. This account is grounded in a dialectical methodology, which consists in scrutinizing the inherent limitations of a theoretical position that lead it to suppress itself and evolve into a better one. I apply the same methodology to the function debate. For Hegel, teleology (...) can be understood in three main variants, which can be fruitfully mapped onto the three main positions in the function debate, the key conceptual distinction being whether teleological principles are understood as extrinsic or intrinsic. When it comes to autonomous systems, i.e. systems that embody the regime of _Geist_, extrinsic functionality must be grounded in intrinsic functionality. My approach is dialectical also in _content_, insofar as it concludes that intrinsic functional ascriptions rely on the relation of co-determination between the parts and the whole of a system, as well as between the system and its environment. (shrink)