Protagonists of the latter are Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas. This book carefully conveys the contradiction between discourse theory and deconstruction.

Andrea Cesalpino is an important figure in the history of science. He demonstrated that blood circulates into heart from veins and from the heart to arteries, paving the way to Harvey’s complete description of blood circulation. Moreover, he was the founder of botany as a systematic discipline, which he based, rather than on the observation of accidental similarities of plants, on the discovery of their vegetative-generative principle. In philosophy, he attempted to conciliate the immortality of the soul (i.e., the form (...) of the body) with the existence of a unique immaterial intellect, which is individuated and multiplied in the singular souls that participate to it. (shrink)

This paper offers an analysis of Johannes Swammerdam’s researches on the brain of the honeybee (Apis mellifera), on the basis both of his published texts and of (1) an early, manuscript version of his treatise on bees (broadly intended) (1673), and (2) a hitherto unedited autograph of his, containing the earliest depiction and description of an insect brain (1673–1677). Through a reconstruction of the genesis of Swammerdam’s texts on bees, both the novelty and accuracy of his observations are highlighted, as (...) well as his reliance on a Cartesian physiology in the interpretation and rendering of the observed parts. (shrink)

So far, the method of supervaluations has been mainly employed to define a non-gradable property of sentences, supertruth, in order to provide an analysis of truth. But it is also possible, and arguably at least as plausible, to define a gradable property of sentences along the same lines. This paper presents a supervaluationist semantics that is quantitative rather than qualitative. As will be shown, there are at least two distinct interpretations of the semantics — one alethic, the other epistemic — (...) which can coherently be adopted to address key issues such as vagueness and future contingents. (shrink)

Socialism is a large and diverse political tradition, unified by opposition to capitalism. Economically, socialists also typically support common ownership or some form of social, democratic control over the bulk of the means of production. There are various views on whether this requires central planning or is compatible with some form of market economy. Others understand socialism as a set of values, and either way, those who understand socialism in economic terms are often motivated by what they see as the (...) ills of capitalism and the values that can be realized in a socialist society in their pursuit of these economic changes. Socialist values include ending exploitation and alienation and replacing them with human flourishing and self-realization, community, distributive justice, equality, and freedom. Some also see socialism as the way to environmental sustainability, gender equality, and racial justice. The question of socialist strategy—how to achieve socialism—has often been posed as a dichotomy between reform and revolution. This inadequately captures the content of fundamental disagreements among socialists. Instead, the disagreement can be understood as varying views on the use of parliamentary democracy in a capitalist state, the pace of social change, and the nature of the envisioned changes. (shrink)

What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom, including freedom in the far future. (...) Second, longtermists should be liberals, particularly under conditions of empirical and moral uncertainty. Third, long-term liberalism plausibly justifies some restrictions on the freedom of existing people to secure the freedom of future people, for example when mitigating climate change. At the same time, it likely avoids excessive trade-offs: for both empirical and philosophical reasons, long-term and near-term freedom show significant convergence. Throughout I also highlight important practical implications, for example on longtermist institutional action, climate change, human extinction, demography, and global catastrophic risks. (shrink)

Modern Philosophy of Science has not yet recognized the significance of physical invariance principles for science and daily life. In this paper we investigate as a simple example, how time independence or time translational invariance of natural laws determines the time scale. We start with informal definitions of the invariance of concepts and laws. We then ask if time independence is an essential feature of natural laws or if time dependent laws are plausible without loss of predictive relevance. In section (...) 3 we investigate the question wether time independence of natural laws is a matter of convention. In sections 5-7 the determination of the time scale by time translational invariance is studied. In section 8 we study the conditions under which this determination is unique. (shrink)

According to relational egalitarianism, justice requires equal relations. In this paper, I ask the question: can equal relations be unjust according to relational egalitarianism? I argue that while on some conceptions of relational egalitarianism, equal relations cannot be unjust, there are conceptions in which equal relations can be unjust. Surprisingly, whether equal relations can be unjust cuts across the distinction between responsibility-sensitive and non-responsibility-sensitive conceptions of relational egalitarianism. I then show what follows if one accepts a conception in which equal (...) relations can be unjust, including why it provides a reason to grant some people less political power than others. (shrink)

Information generally comes from less than fully reliable sources. Rationality, it seems, requires that one take source reliability into account when reasoning on the basis of such information. Recently, Bovens and Hartmann (2003) proposed an account of the conjunction fallacy based on this idea. They show that, when statements in conjunction fallacy scenarios are perceived as coming from such sources, probability theory prescribes that the “fallacy” be committed in certain situations. Here, the empirical validity of their model was assessed. The (...) model predicts that statements added to standard conjunction problems will change the incidence of the fallacy. It also predicts that statements from reliable sources should yield an increase in fallacy rates (relative to unreliable sources). Neither the former (Experiment 1) nor the latter prediction (Experiment 3) was confirmed, although Experiment 2 showed that people can derive source reliability estimates from the likelihood of statements in a manner consistent with the tested model. In line with the experimental results, model fits and sensitivity analyses also provided very little evidence in favor of the model. This suggests that Bovens and Hartmann’s present model fails to explain fully people’s judgements in standard conjunction fallacy tasks. (shrink)

The ongoing debate about reliance and trust in artificial intelligence (AI) systems continues to challenge our understanding and application of these concepts in human-AI interactions. In this work, we argue for a pragmatic approach to defining reliance and trust in AI. Our approach is grounded in three expectations that should guide human-AI interactions: appropriate reliance, efficiency, and motivation by objective reasons. By focusing on these expectations, we show that it is possible to reconcile reliance with trust in a manner that (...) is both theoretically sound and practically useful. To do so, one needs to re-frame trust in AI as a quantitative property of reliance that is antithetical to the investment of resources during the interaction with the system. Our reliance-centered framework does not dismiss the concept of trust in AI but repositions it as a key property of reliance, offering a practical alternative to rational or motivational accounts. As AI continues to integrate into society, particularly in high-stakes environments like healthcare, our pragmatic approach provides a practical and meaningful framework for addressing the nuances of trust in AI. (shrink)

This paper proposes, starting from a detailed analysis of the mythological contents exposed in the tenth chapter of the so-called Fragmentum Censorini (= Nikokrates, FGrHist and BNJ2 376 F 4), a new contextualisation of the excerpt within Pseudo Censorinus’ musical and metrical doctrine.

The paper shows – contra what has been argued by Trenton Merricks – that counterpart theory, when conjoined with composition as identity, does not entail mereological essentialism. What Merrick’s argument overlooks is that contingent identity is but one of the effects of grounding identity across possible worlds on similarity.

Heidegger distinguishes between concern for things and solicitude for other Dasein. As Dasein is already being-in-the-world and being-with from the start, there is no need to define what another Dasein is to recognize it. In this paper it is argued that Dasein is thrown into circles of care, where the distinction between solicitude and concern is given. Although this undermines any attempts to regard a comatose patient as non-Dasein, it raises questions about Dasein's relations with animals. It is suggested that (...) Dasein's relations with animals could be captured by inserting another circle, for which the German word versorgen might be suitable. (shrink)

Andrea Tschemplik provides a fresh and accessible translation of Plato's classic work, specially designed to aid newcomers in better understanding and appreciating the text. In addition, this volume provides a range of student-friendly supplements to enhance the learning experience.

Until recently, Australia had little installed wind capacity, although there had been many investigations into its potential during the preceding decades. Formerly, state-owned monopoly utilities showed only token interest in wind power and could dictate the terms of energy debates. This situation changed in the late 1990s: Installed wind capacity began growing rapidly following the introduction of supportive renewable energy policies and the restructuring of the electricity industry. However, wind farms still provide only 1% of Australia's electricity, the future of (...) supportive policies is uncertain, and industry momentum is yet to become self-sustaining. Wind power, the authors argue, faces significant technological and institutional barriers, which need to be overcome if wind power is to play a significant role in Australia's electricity supply. The current window of opportunity is providing—for the first time—a significant space in which these barriers can be better understood and addressed and the requirements for wind power institutionally embedded. (shrink)

Besides indicating the fundamental themes of the various contributions that come together in this monographic section, the purpose of this introduction is to recall the main features of the Hobbesian concept of power, starting from the belief that Hobbes’ philosophy is above all a phi-losophy of power. Based on a radical materialistic ontology, the Hobbesian semantics of power takes on different variations in the particular discursive fields it crosses, which in turn significantly influence its movement. The double dependence on the (...) authority of the sovereign and on the opinion of the people ultimately highlights the aporetic character of the Hobbesian notion of power. (shrink)

There is much disagreement among many commentators of Hannah Arendt's work about whether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent an explicit attempt to break away from the elements of voluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Despite the many disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, however, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in agreement concerning (...) the decision: it is a threat and a vice, intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature, which ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-) decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. This paper argues, contrary to Arendt's critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can be found scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, it also argues that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics. (shrink)

In the cognitive, computational, and neuro-sciences, practitioners often reason about what computational models represent or learn, as well as what algorithm is instantiated. The putative goal of such reasoning is to generalize claims about the model in question, to claims about the mind and brain, and the neurocognitive capacities of those systems. Such inference is often based on a model’s performance on a task, and whether that performance approximates human behavior or brain activity. Here we demonstrate how such argumentation problematizes (...) the relationship between models and their targets; we place emphasis on artificial neural networks (ANNs), though any theory-brain relationship that falls into the same schema of reasoning is at risk. In this paper, we model inferences from ANNs to brains and back within a formal framework — metatheoretical calculus — in order to initiate a dialogue on both how models are broadly understood and used, and on how to best formally characterize them and their functions. To these ends, we express claims from the published record about models’ successes and failures in first-order logic. Our proposed formalization describes the decision-making processes enacted by scientists to adjudicate over theories. We demonstrate that formalizing the argumentation in the literature can uncover potential deep issues about how theory is related to phenomena. We discuss what this means broadly for research in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology; what it means for models when they lose the ability to mediate between theory and data in a meaningful way; and what this means for the metatheoretical calculus our fields deploy when performing high-level scientific inference. (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)

Abstract: According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have information about the obtaining of (...) p even when p is false. (shrink)

Papers by Andreas Bartels, Ansgar Beckermann, Frédéric Bouchard, Thomas Breuer, Bruno Eckhardt, Bruce Glymour, Claus Kiefer, Roberta Millstein and Alexander Rosenberg.

A key strength of connectionist modelling is its ability to simulate both intact cognition and the behavioural effects of neural damage. We survey the literature, showing that models have been damaged in a variety of ways, e.g. by removing connections, by adding noise to connection weights, by scaling weights, by removing units and by adding noise to unit activations. While these different implementations of damage have often been assumed to be behaviourally equivalent, some theorists have made aetiological claims that rest (...) on nonequivalence. They suggest that related deficits with different aetiologies might be accounted for by different forms of damage within a single model. We present two case studies that explore the effects of different forms of damage in two influential connectionist models, each of which has been applied to explain neuropsychological deficits. Our results indicate that the effect of simulated damage can indeed be sensitive to the way in which damage is implemented, particularly when the environment comprises subsets of items that differ in their statistical properties, but such effects are sensitive to relatively subtle aspects of the model’s training environment. We argue that, as a consequence, substantial methodological care is required if aetiological claims about simulated neural damage are to be justified, and conclude more generally that implementation assumptions, including those concerning simulated damage, must be fully explored when evaluating models of neurological deficits, both to avoid over-extending the explanatory power of specific implementations and to ensure that reported results are replicable. (shrink)

Each Aristotelian science consists in the causal investigation of a specific department of reality. If successful, such an investigation results in causal knowledge; that is, knowledge of the relevant or appropriate causes. The emphasis on the concept of cause explains why Aristotle developed a theory of causality which is commonly known as the doctrine of the four causes. For Aristotle, a firm grasp of what a cause is, and how many kinds of causes there are, is essential for a successful (...) investigation of the world around us. (shrink)

The inapplicability of variations on theory reduction in the context of genetics and their irrelevance to ongoing research has led to an anti-reductionist consensus in philosophy of biology. One response to this situation is to focus on forms of reductive explanation that better correspond to actual scientific reasoning (e.g. part–whole relations). Working from this perspective, we explore three different aspects (intrinsicality, fundamentality, and temporality) that arise from distinct facets of reductive explanation: composition and causation. Concentrating on these aspects generates new (...) forms of reductive explanation and conditions for their success or failure in biology and other sciences. This analysis is illustrated using the case of protein folding in molecular biology, which demonstrates its applicability and relevance, as well as illuminating the complexity of reductive reasoning in a specific biological context. (shrink)

In 'Arbeit am Kanon', Italian musicologist Federico Celestini and German philosopher Andreas Dorschel discuss aesthetic issues in the work of composers Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Anton Webern, and Franz Schreker.

In ‘Vollkommenes hält sich fern’ (‘Perfection keeps itself aloof’) – the book title is drawn from a verse of American poet Kimberly Johnson (*1971) –, Philip Alperson and Andreas Dorschel discuss issues in the philosophy of music and general aesthetics related to the body, to practices and genres, values and education.

Whether meaning is compositional has been a major issue in linguistics and formal philosophy of language for the last 2 decades. Semantic holism is widely and plausibly considered as an objection to the principle of semantic compositionality therein. It comes as a surprise that the holistic peculiarities of scientific language have been rarely addressed in formal accounts so far, given that semantic holism has its roots in the philosophy of science. For this reason, a model-theoretic approach to semantic holism in (...) the language of science is presented here. This approach preserves compositionality to a large extent. *Received September 2009; revised February 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Seminar for Philosophy, Logic, and Theory of Science, Hauspostfach 49, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich 80539, Germany; e-mail: holger.andreas@lrz.uni-muenchen.de. (shrink)

Many of our endeavors -- be it personal or communal, technological or artistic -- aim at eradicating all traces of dissatisfaction from our daily lives. They seek to cure us of our discontent in order to deliver us a fuller and flourishing existence. But what if ubiquitous pleasure and instant fulfilment make our lives worse, not better? What if discontent isn't an obstacle to the good life but one of its essential ingredients? In Propelled, Andreas Elpidorou makes a lively (...) case for the value of discontent and illustrates how boredom, frustration, and anticipation are good for us. Weaving together stories from sources as wide-ranging as classical literature, social and cognitive psychology, philosophy, art, and video games, Elpidorou shows that these psychological states aren't unpleasant accidents of our lives. Rather, they illuminate our desires and expectations, inform us when we find ourselves stuck in unpleasant and unfulfilling situations, and motivate us to furnish our lives with meaning, interest, and value. Boredom, frustration, and anticipation aren't obstacles to our goals--they are our guides, propelling us into lives that are truly our own. (shrink)

There seems to be a minimal core that every theory wishing to accommodate the intuition that the future is open must contain: a denial of physical determinism (i.e. the thesis that what future states the universe will be in is implied by what states it has been in), and a denial of strong fatalism (i.e. the thesis that, at every time, what will subsequently be the case is metaphysically necessary).1 Those two requirements are often associated with the idea of an (...) objective temporal flow and the non-reality of the future. However, at least certain ways to frame the “openness” intuition do not rely on any of these. Branching Time Theory (BTT) is one such: it is compatible with the denial that time flow is objective and it is couched in a language with a (prima facie) commitment to an eternalist ontology. BTT, though, urges us to resist certain intuitions about the determinacy of future claims, which arguably do not lead either to physical determinism or to fatalism. Against BTT, supporters of the Thin Red Line Theory (TRL) argue that their position avoids determinism and fatalism, while also representing the fact that there is a future which is “special” because it is the one that will be the case. But starting with Belnap and Green 1994, some have objected to the tenability of TRL, mainly on metaphysical grounds. In particular, those argue that “positing a thin red line amounts to giving up objective indeterminism,”2 and that “has unacceptable consequences, ranging from a mistreatment of actuality to an inability to talk coherently about what would have happened had what is going to happen not taken place.”3 In this paper, we wish to reframe the.. (shrink)

The visual brain consists of several parallel, functionally specialized processing systems, each having several stages (nodes) which terminate their tasks at different times; consequently, simultaneously presented attributes are perceived at the same time if processed at the same node and at different times if processed by different nodes. Clinical evidence shows that these processing systems can act fairly autonomously. Damage restricted to one system compromises specifically the perception of the attribute that that system is specialized for; damage to a given (...) node of a processing system that leaves earlier nodes intact results in a degraded perceptual capacity for the relevant attribute, which is directly related to the physiological capacities of the cells left intact by the damage. By contrast, a system that is spared when all others are damaged can function more or less normally. Moreover, internally created visual percepts-illusions, afterimages, imagery, and hallucinations-activate specifically the nodes specialized for the attribute perceived. Finally, anatomical evidence shows that there is no final integrator station in the brain, one which receives input from all visual areas; instead, each node has multiple outputs and no node is recipient only. Taken together, the above evidence leads us to propose that each node of a processing-perceptual system creates its own microconsciousness. We propose that, if any binding occurs to give us our integrated image of the visual world, it must be a binding between microconsciousnesses generated at different nodes. Since any two microconsciousnesses generated at any two nodes can be bound together, perceptual integration is not hierarchical, but parallel and postconscious. By contrast, the neural machinery conferring properties on those cells whose activity has a conscious correlate is hierarchical, and we refer to it as generative binding, to distinguish it from the binding that might occur between the microconsciousnesses. (shrink)

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. The aim of Andreas Kalyvas' study is to show why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of its beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? (...) Can a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders. (shrink)

What to do with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory? An Interview with Jacques Rancière Conducted by Andrea Allerkamp, Katia Genel, and Mariem Hazoume Translated by Owen Glyn-Williams This interview was originally published in French as “Que faire de la théorie esthétique d’Adorno?” in Où en sommes-nous avec la Théorie esthétique d'Adorno?.