Illustrations played an important role in the articulation of Wundt’s experimental program. Focusing on the woodcuts of apparatus and experimental designs in the six editions of his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (published between 1873 and 1911), we investigate the uses and functions of illustrations in the experimental culture of the physiological and psychological sciences. We will first present some statistics on the increasing number of illustrations Wundt included in each new edition of his handbook. Next we will show how Wundt (...) managed to introduce the material and literary technologies of physiology into the ‘new psychology’. The distribution of Wundt’s material technology will be further demonstrated by highlighting the crucial role of technicians and instrument-makers. We will use Shapin and Schaffer’s notions of the ‘three technologies’ and ‘virtual witnessing’, combined with Latour’s concept of ‘immutable mobiles’, as analytical tools to explore the strategic aspects of Wundt’s illustrations. (shrink)

"Perfect Worlds offers an extensive historical analysis of utopian narratives in the Chinese and Euro-American traditions.

How to repeat what never has been? Heinz Kimmerle Introduction We do not know what time is. Is it something outside us, just passing by like a car on the ...

A review of the literature on the subject and a discussion involving philosophical analysis, philosophy of science and phenomenology in the style of Merleau-Ponty. The study has practical interest in addition to scientific and philosophical relevance: the way a person conceptualizes his body is important to the way he behaves and the quality of his social interactions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

A prominent feature of late nineteenth-century psychology was its intense preoccupation with precision. Precision was at once an ideal and an argument: the quest for precision helped psychology to establish its status as a mature science, sharing a characteristic concern with the natural sciences. We will analyse how psychologists set out to produce precision in 'mental chronometry', the measurement of the duration of psychological processes. In his Leipzig laboratory, Wundt inaugurated an elaborate research programme on mental chronometry. We will look (...) at the problem of calibration of experimental apparatus and will describe the intricate material, literary, and social technologies involved in the manufacture of precision. First, we shall discuss some of the technical problems involved in the measurement of ever shorter time-spans. Next, the Cattell-Berger experiments will help us to argue against the received view that all the precision went into the hardware, and practically none into the social organization of experimentation. Experimenters made deliberate efforts to bring themselves and their subjects under a regime of control and calibration similar to that which reigned over the experimental machinery. In Leipzig psychology, the particular blend of material and social technology resulted in a specific object of study: the generalized mind. We will then show that the distribution of precision in experimental psychology outside Leipzig demanded a concerted effort of instruments, texts, and people. It will appear that the forceful attempts to produce precision and uniformity had some rather paradoxical consequences. (shrink)

The search for an ontological basis of medical practice is questioned from the viewpoint that ontologies are always related to the interpreting person in his situation, and that the definition of medicine includes a certain choice. This choice-character comes into greater play when ethical proposals are made. A foundation of medical ethics on an ontology of the healthy body or the factual medical practice is a naturalistic fallacy. Prior to an ontological basis, the ethical event of responsibility for the suffering (...) and transcendent other (Levinas) is constitutive for medicine. This event with its dimension of infinity of the other can only be ontologized by a totalitarian act. A philosophy of medicine should start with the heteronomy of the other. (shrink)

This study investigates the methodology and tradition of Aëtius' Doxography of physics and provides a full reconstruction of Book II as a single unified text.

This ground-breaking study offers the first full-length critical examination of H. Diel's Doxographi Graeci , focussing on the doxographer Aëtius, whose work Diels reconstructed from various later sources. Diel's theory is analysed, revised and improved at significant points.

This collection of essays written between 1989 and 2009 records the authors’ exploration of the important but elusive genre of ancient doxography. Focusing primarily on the Placita of Aëtius, it can be used as a companion volume for the two earlier volumes of Aëtiana.

This study shows that professional identity should not be viewed as a composed variable with a uniform structure. Based on the literature and previous research, we view teachers? job satisfaction, self?efficacy, occupational commitment and change in the level of motivation as indicators of teachers? professional identity. Using two?step cluster analysis, three distinct professional identity profiles have empirically been identified, based on data of 1214 teachers working in secondary education in the Netherlands. These profiles differed significantly regarding the indicators of teachers? (...) professional identity. Teachers belonging to the found profiles did not significantly differ in their amount of experience. (shrink)

The relationship between topological explanation and mechanistic explanation is unclear. Most philosophers agree that at least some topological explanations are mechanistic explanations. The crucial question is how to make sense of this claim. Zednik (Philos Psychol 32(1):23–51, 2019) argues that topological explanations are mechanistic if they (i) describe mechanism sketches that (ii) pick out organizational properties of mechanisms. While we agree with Zednik’s conclusion, we critically discuss Zednik’s account and show that it fails as a general account of how and (...) when topological explanations are mechanistic. First, if topological explanations were just mechanism sketches, this implies that they could be enriched by replacing topological terms with mechanistic detail. This, however, conflicts how topological explanations are used in scientific practice. Second, Zednik’s account fails to show how topological properties can be organizational properties of mechanisms that have a place in mechanistic explanation. The core issue is that Zednik’s account ignores that topological properties often are _global_ properties while mechanistic explanantia refer to _local_ properties. We demonstrate how these problems can be solved by a recent account of mechanistic completeness (Craver and Kaplan in Br J Philos Sci 71(1):287–319, 2020; Kohár and Krickel in Calzavarini and Viola (eds) Neural mechanisms—new challenges in the philosophy of neuroscience, Springer, New York, 2021) and use a multilayer network model of Alzheimer’s Disease to illustrate this. (shrink)

During the past three decades the Utrecht scholar Jaap Mansfeld has built up a formidable reputation in the field of the history of ancient philosophy. This state-of-the-art collection of articles is presented to him by colleagues and friends on his sixtieth birthday.

Giving feedback during active learning is an important, though difficult, task for teachers. In the present study, the problems elementary school teachers perceive and the beliefs they hold regarding this task were investigated. It appeared that teachers believe conditional teacher skills, especially time management, hinder them most from giving good feedback. The most widely held belief was that ?feedback should be positive?. Teachers also believed that it is important to adopt a facilitative way of giving feedback, but they found this (...) difficult to implement. Only some teachers believed goal-directedness and a focus on student meta-cognition were important during active learning and teachers did not perceive problems regarding these aspects. It was discussed whether teachers? feedback behaviour was in line with these perceived problems and beliefs. The results give directions for the professional development of teachers to improve their feedback during active learning. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

According to a 17th-century European fantasy, certain sponges were used in the South Seas to record and transmit sound. A message spoken into one of these sponges would be exactly replayed when a recipient squeezed it appropriately, even across great distances in time and space. It's hard for us to remember just how magical it is, in a natural world made up solely of warring elements, that any information can be enduringly stored, transported without distortion, and precisely reproduced. Our lives (...) are irretrievably tangled with artificial systems which keep their contents ordered and immune from melding, and we trust that our computers won't creatively blend our files overnight. But despite our best efforts to tidy our own minds, the blurry and insistently productive operations of human memory, in contrast, often resist both control and understanding. (shrink)

Leading philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips argues that intellectuals need not see their task as being for or against religion, but as one of understanding it. What stands in the way of this task are certain methodological assumptions about what enquiry into religion must be. Beginning with Bernard Williams on Greek gods, Phillips goes on to examine these assumptions in the work of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Frazer, Tylor, Marett, Freud, Durkheim, Le;vy-Bruhl, Berger and Winch. The result exposes confusion, but (...) also gives logical space to religious belief without advocating personal acceptance of that belief, and shows how the academic study of religion may return to the contemplative task of doing conceptual justice to the world. Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation extends in important ways D. Z. Phillips' seminal 1976 book Religion Without Explanation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and theology. (shrink)

In 1999, da Silva, D'Ottaviano and Sette proposed a general definition for the term translation between logics and presented an initial segment of its theory. Logics are characterized, in the most general sense, as sets with consequence relations and translations between logics as consequence-relation preserving maps. In a previous paper the authors introduced the concept of conservative translation between logics and studied some general properties of the co-complete category constituted by logics and conservative translations between them. In this paper we (...) present some conservative translations involving classical logic, Lukasiewicz three-valued system L3, the intuitionistic system I1 and several paraconsistent logics, as for instance Sette's system P1, the D'Ottaviano and da Costa system J3 and da Costa's systems Cn, 1≤ n≤ω. (shrink)

This is Part 1 of a paper on fibred semantics and combination of logics. It aims to present a methodology for combining arbitrary logical systems L i , i ∈ I, to form a new system L I . The methodology `fibres' the semantics K i of L i into a semantics for L I , and `weaves' the proof theory (axiomatics) of L i into a proof system of L I . There are various ways of doing this, we (...) distinguish by different names such as `fibring', `dovetailing' etc, yielding different systems, denoted by L F I , L D I etc. Once the logics are `weaved', further `interaction' axioms can be geometrically motivated and added, and then systematically studied. The methodology is general and is applied to modal and intuitionistic logics as well as to general algebraic logics. We obtain general results on bulk, in the sense that we develop standard combining techniques and refinements which can be applied to any family of initial logics to obtain further combined logics. The main results of this paper is a construction for combining arbitrary, (possibly not normal) modal or intermediate logics, each complete for a class of (not necessarily frame) Kripke models. We show transfer of recursive axiomatisability, decidability and finite model property. Some results on combining logics (normal modal extensions of K) have recently been introduced by Kracht and Wolter, Goranko and Passy and by Fine and Schurz as well as a multitude of special combined systems existing in the literature of the past 20-30 years. We hope our methodology will help organise the field systematically. (shrink)

Organ procurement presents several ethical concerns (from what constitutes acceptable criteria for death to issues involved in specifically designating to whom an organ can be given), but none is more central than the concern for what are appropriate means for acquiring organs. The following discussion attempts a different perspective on the issue of organ procurement by arguing that, rather than appealing to our charitable consciences or our pocketbooks, relinquishing our organs after death in this day and age is, in fact, (...) obligatory for most people. Each of us is pressed by the growing demand for our organs should we die ?rightly,? and that desperate need has risen to such a level that not to release our organs for transplantation would constitute a serious moral wrong. (shrink)

In 1999, da Silva, D'Ottaviano and Sette proposed a general definition for the term translation between logics and presented an initial segment of its theory. Logics are characterized, in the most general sense, as sets with consequence relations and translations between logics as consequence-relation preserving maps. In a previous paper the authors introduced the concept of conservative translation between logics and studied some general properties of the co-complete category constituted by logics and conservative translations between them. In this paper we (...) present some conservative translations involving classical logic, Lukasiewicz three-valued system L₃, the intuitionistic system Iⁱ and several para-consistent logics, as for instance Sette's system Pⁱ, the D'Ottaviano and da Costa system J₃ and da Costa's systems $\text{C}_{n}$ , 1 ≤ n ≤ ω. (shrink)

Ancient Peripatetics and Neoplatonists had great difficulty coming up with a consistent, interpretatively reasonable, and empirically adequate Aristotelian theory of complete mixture or complexion. I explain some of the main problems, with special attention to authors with whom Avicenna was familiar. I then show how Avicenna used a new doctrine of the occultness of substantial form to address these problems. The result was in some respects an improvement, but it also gave rise to a new set of problems, which were (...) later to prove fateful in the history of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Augustine tells us in the Confessions that his reading of Cicero's Hortensius at the age of nineteen aroused in him a burning ‘passion for the wisdom of eternal truth’. He was inspired ‘to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly’. And thus he embarked on his arduous journey to the truth, which was at the same time a conversion to Catholic Christianity, and which culminated twelve years later (...) in his experience in the garden in Milan. (shrink)

At the beginning of his book, Principles of Christian Theology, John Macquarrie says that theology ‘implicitly claims to have its place in the total intellectual endeavour of mankind’. The question I want to discuss is this: in what terms, if any, can that claim be justified?