Technologies not only change “external reality” but also change our internal consciousness, shaping the way we experience the world. As the reality of intelligent environments is upon us—ushered along with the age of ubiquitous computing—we must be careful that the ideology these technologies embody is not blindly incorporated into the environment. As disciplines, engineering and computer science make implicit assumptions about the world that conflict with traditional modes of cultural production. For example, space is commonly understood to be the void (...) left behind when no objects are present. Unfortunately, once we see space in this way, we are unable to understand the role it plays in our everyday experience. In order to make computationally enhanced spaces that are meaningful at the level of the everyday, we must exorcise the notion of intelligence from their design and replace it with life. Henri Lefebvre’s discussions of the space of everyday life provide a framework to help conceive this transition. (shrink)

The defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped (...) this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history. (shrink)

In a seminal book, Alvin I. Goldman outlines a theory for how to evaluate social practices with respect to their “veritistic value”, i.e., their tendency to promote the acquisition of true beliefs in society. In the same work, Goldman raises a number of serious worries for his account. Two of them concern the possibility of determining the veritistic value of a practice in a concrete case because we often don't know what beliefs are actually true, and even if we did, (...) the task of determining the veritistic value would be computationally extremely difficult. Neither problem is specific to Goldman's theory and both can be expected to arise for just about any account of veritistic value. It is argued here that the first problem does not pose a serious threat to large classes of interesting practices. The bulk of the paper is devoted to the computational problem, which, it is submitted, can be addressed in promising terms by means of computer simulation. In an attempt to add vividness to this proposal, an up-and-running simulation environment is presented and put to some preliminary tests. (shrink)

‘Public moods’ are often referred to in laymen’s accounts of public reactions to social events, yet the concept has rarely been invoked by social scientists. Taking public moods seriously as an analytical concept, this article relies on recent work on the moods of individuals as a means of exploring the moods of the public. To be in a certain mood is to attune oneself to the situation in which one finds oneself. Our mood is the report we give on the (...) state of our attunement. A public mood can either be understood as the mood of a certain age, the mood of an audience which jointly attends to a public performance, or the bonding which takes places between bodies which are in close physical proximity to each other. It is in the public mood that emotions, thoughts and plans for action arise. (shrink)

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. and their critics :977–981, 2006; Weitzman in J Econ Lit XLV:703–724, 2007; Nordhaus in J Econ Lit XLV:686–702, 2007). The article examines the role of values in this debate. Firstly, it is shown that time discounting is a case in which values are key because (...) it is at heart an ethical problem. Secondly, it is argued that time discounting in climate economics is a case of economists making frequent and routine references to ethical values and indeed conduct ethical debates with each other. Thirdly, it is argued that there is evidence for deep and pervasive entanglement between facts and values in the prevalent methodologies for time discounting. Finally, it is argued that this means that economists have given up the ‘value-free ideal’ concerning time discounting, and discussed how the current methodology of time discounting in economics can be improved. (shrink)

This paper explores applications of concepts from argumentation theory to mathematical proofs. Note is taken of the various contexts in which proofs occur and of the various objectives they may serve. Examples of strategic maneuvering are discussed when surveying, in proofs, the four stages of argumentation distinguished by pragma-dialectics. Derailments of strategies (fallacies) are seen to encompass more than logical fallacies and to occur both in alleged proofs that are completely out of bounds and in alleged proofs that are at (...) least mathematical arguments. These considerations lead to a dialectical and rhetorical view of proofs. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus in the literature on probabilistic coherence that such coherence cannot be truth conducive unless the information sources providing the cohering information are individually credible and collectively independent. Furthermore, coherence can at best be truth conducive in a ceteris paribus sense. Bovens and Hartmann have argued that there cannot be any measure of coherence that is truth conducive even in this very weak sense. In this paper, I give an alternative impossibility proof. I provide a relatively (...) detailed comparison of the two results, which turn out to be logically unrelated, and argue that my result answers a question raised by Bovens and Hartmann’s study. Finally, I discuss the epistemological ramifications of these findings and try to make plausible that a shift to an explanatory framework such as Thagard’s is unlikely to turn the impossibility into a possibility. (shrink)

This paper examines some connections between Hume’s epistemology in his Treatise of Human Nature and his political economy. I make three claims: First, I argue that it is the development of Hume’s account of the faculty of reason in Book I of the Treatise that leads him to emphasize social science—including political economy—and the humanities over more abstract modes of intellectual inquiry. Second, I argue that Hume’s conception of reason has implications for his methodology in political economy. His perception of (...) human reason leads him to deploy a method of qualified generalization that emphasizes the by-and-large nature of theoretical statements. Third, when it comes to policy matters, the method of qualified generalization in theory cashes out in terms of practical maxims. I suggest that two central maxims in Hume’s political economy derive from his views of the usefulness of economic liberty and the coordinating nature of the status quo. (shrink)

We aim to further develop and evaluate the prospects of a uniquely Islamic extension of the Standard Aquinas/Calvin model. One obstacle is that certain Qur’an passages such as Surah 8:43–44 apparently suggest that Muslims have reason to think that Allah might be deceiving them. Consistent with perfect/maximally good being theology, Allah would allow such deceptions only if doing so leads to a greater good, so such passages do not necessarily give Muslims reason to doubt Allah’s goodness. Yet the possibility of (...) deception of the faithful threatens to provide a subjective defeater for the (epistemic) reliability of their cognitive faculties. (‘Even if Allah can be morally good while deceiving, how do you know you aren’t being deceived for a greater good on a more macro level, such as about the nature of the Qur’an?’) Similar in structure to Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), this defeater threatens to undermine all of a Muslims warrant claims. We consider and evaluate the reply that there are other Qur’anic passages and/or additional conceptual resources in the Islamic tradition that provide grounds for thinking that God’s faithfulness or truthfulness is more centrally and securely embedded in a Muslim’s noetic structure than such doubts. Specifically, we will argue that under certain conditions, there exists a subjective defeater for some Muslims that, unlike McNabb’s approach, isn’t based off of the proper function condition but Plantinga’s truth aimed condition. (shrink)

The author makes the case for sortition from a Marxist perspective, explaining how sortition could become part of an anticapitalist political strategy.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that just about everyone agrees that the highest good is eudaimonia while disagreeing with one another about what eudaimonia is. A similar situation exists among many contemporary philosophers: they agree that naturalism is true while disagreeing with one another about what naturalism is. By their lights, the claim that a given entity exists is worth taking seriously only if the entity in question is compatible with naturalism ; otherwise, the entity is queer or spooky (...) and the claim that it exists should be rejected outright.In God, Value, and Nature, Fiona Ellis considers five increasingly expansive version of naturalism, ranging from a view according to which the only entities that qualify as natural rather than spookily supernatural are those that can be studied by the hard sciences to a view about that classifies the Christian God as natural. Part of Ellis’s project is to consider the extent to wh .. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 688-695, September 2021.

It is well known that John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine contains strong autobiographical elements. Equally, the essay is an important 19th century contribution to the development of the history of theology. Another fact is lesswell known: in the case of Newman, biography and the history of ideas go hand in hand. This article aims to explain how Newman’s personal search for a spiritual home influenced his conception of the development of Christian thought. This is done (...) by analysing Newman’s own writing as well as looking at the critical appraisal of Newman’s thought by Rowan Williams. Both authors share an interest in the development of theological ideas but differ in their opinion on the necessity of continuity in this development. (shrink)

The idea of paying donors in order to make more human bodily material available for therapy, assisted reproduction, and biomedical research is notoriously controversial. However, while national and international donation policies largely oppose financial incentives they do not treat all parts of the body equally: incentives are allowed in connection to the provision of some parts but not others. Taking off from this observation, I discuss whether body parts differ as regards the ethical legitimacy of incentives and, if so, why. (...) I distinguish two approaches to this issue. On a ”principled” approach, some but not all body parts are inherently special in a way that proscribes payment. On a ”pragmatic” approach, the appropriateness of payment in relation to a specific part must be determined through an overall assessment of e.g. the implications of payment for the health and welfare of providers, recipients, and third parties, and the quality of providers’ consent. I argue that the first approach raises deep and potentially divisive questions about the good life, whereas the second approach invokes currently unsupported empirical assumptions and requires difficult balancing between different values and the interests of different people. This does not mean that any attempt to distinguish between body parts in regard to the appropriateness of payment necessarily fails. However, I conclude, any plausible such attempt should either articulate and defend a specific view of the good life, or gather relevant empirical evidence and apply defensible principles for weighing goods and interests. (shrink)

In this article, I want to make the following points, none of which are totally new, but their constellation here is meant to be challenging. First, world is not a (Cartesian) thing but an event, the event of sense. This event is opening and meaning – verbal tense. God may be a philosophical name of this event. This is recognized by late-modern religious atheist thought. This thought differs from modern scientific rationalism in that the latter’s so-called areligious atheism is actually (...) a hyperreligious theism. On the way, the alleged opposition between philosophy and theology, between thought and faith is seen to erode. The core matter of this philosophy of religion will be the absolute reference, the system of objectivity and the holiness of the name. All this because of a prefix a- that has its sense turned inside out by the death of God. (shrink)

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition (...) of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act. (shrink)

This paper traces the historical origins of Friedrich A. Hayek's theory of cultural evolution, and argues that Hayek's evolutionary thought was significantly inspired by Alexander M. Carr-Saunders and Oxford zoology. While traditional Hayek scholarship emphasizes the influence of Carl Menger and the British eighteenth-century moral philosophers, I claim that these sources underdetermine what was most characteristic of Hayek's theory, viz. the idea that cultural evolution is a matter of group selection, and the idea that natural selection operates on acquired as (...) well as on inherited properties. (shrink)

In this note we show that Friedman's syntactic translation for intuitionistic logical systems can be carried over to Martin-Löf's type theory, inlcuding universes provided some restrictions are made. Using this translation we show that the theory is closed under a higher type version of Markov's rule.

Henri Maldiney’s aesthetics can be seen as an attempt to push traditional phenomenological descriptions of the image, such as can be found in the works of Husserl and Sartre, to their theoretical limits. In this paper, I examine how Maldiney’s phenomenological approach to visual works of art leads him to disclose a non-intentional dimension of the image which is that of “form.” At this level, the image is not primarily a structure or modification of consciousness, but a mode of presence (...) to the world. Next, in turning towards what Maldiney considers to be non-objective forms of pictorial representation, exemplified by Byzantine mosaics and the works of Paul Cézanne, I show how this presence is articulated rhythmically in a tension which embraces both image and viewer. Finally, I explore the meaning of Maldiney’s claim that the image is not an imitation of reality, but synonymous with reality itself. (shrink)

This paper is discusses some central points in a dissertation for the degree of dr. phil., "Regulation as Productive Tool Use - a Participatory Observation in the Control Room of a District Heating System." An earlier version of the paper was presented by the author as part of the defense of the dissertation at Roskilde University Center June 14 2002. As suggested by the title, the dissertation was an empirical study of regulation in a control room. The object of the (...) authors participatory observation was how the operators in the control room followed rules when they regulated a highly automated plant. When I was shown the plant I was told that the technology ran smoothly and without error. Its control structures are based on formal logic and mechanical principles, all the same human beings are required in the control room to take care of anomalies. Among other things, the observations provide an opportunity to discuss the limitations of psychologies that study human beings on the basis of formal principles. The present paper focuses on two characteristic aspects of this discussion in the dissertation. First, it takes its point of departure in some practical problems of the control structures of the control room. It will demonstrate that the practical problems are problems of principle, and that formal principles are not adequate to study the object of human sciences, namely, human beings. Second, it sketches out what is required of a conception of human beings. As human beings are trusted to handle anomalies, we must explain how they are able to act on an incomplete understanding of the situation. And since they are able to identify what is wrong, we must explain how they develop new knowledge. The paper presented at the defense summarized the main arguments of the dissertation and alluded to an expansion of the main point using a particular instance. Here the weight is shifted to the latter expansion. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell claimed in the Analysis of Matter that physics is purely structural or relational and so leaves out intrinsic properties of matter, properties that, he said, are evident to us at least in one case: as the internal states of our brains. Russell's hypothesis has figured in recent discussions of physicalism and the mind body problem, by Chalmers, Strawson and Stoljar, among others, but I want to reject two popular interpretations: 1. a conception of intrinsic properties of matter as (...) categorical properties and 2. a fallacious line of descent argument that attributes pan-psychist or proto-experientialist properties to matter by analogy with human minds. Instead, I think Russell's hypothesis points us toward 1. a doctrine of concretely instantiated dispositions in matter and 2. selectively instantiated relations. (shrink)

Our results on hippocampal long-term potentiation are considered in the context of Xia et al.'s hypothesis. Whereas the target article proposes presynaptic PKC involvement in adenylyl cyclase activation by phosphorylation of nenromodulin, we suggest an additional postsynaptic role involving RC3/nenrogranin. Finally, we examine the possibility that the adenylyl cyclase mutant mouse may display normal learning with a selective impairment of memory.

We propose and defend a distinction between two types of self-censorship: public and private. In public self-censorship, individuals restrain their expressive attitudes in response to public censors. In private self-censorship, individuals do so in the absence of public censorship. We argue for this distinction by introducing a general model which allows us to identify, describe, and compare a wide range of censorship regimes. The model explicates the interaction between censors and censees and yields the distinction between two types of self-censorship. (...) In public self-censorship, the censee aligns her expression of attitudes according to the public censor. In private self-censorship, the roles of censor and censee are fullled by the same agent. The distinction has repercussions for normative analysis: principles of free speech can only be invoked in cases of public self-censorship. (shrink)