This book presents the psychological basis, methodology, and application of Marton's phenomenographic approach to the theory of learning.

Introductory essay / Peter Jones -- The usefulness of the arts and the humanities : the case of Descartes / Gábor Boros -- Roads of remembrance : the treatment of imagination and memory in Gerard's Essay on genius / Zsolt Komáromy -- Diderot's untimeliness / László Kisbali ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Melody vs. harmony : Rousseau, or, The aesthetics of vowels / Mária Ludassy ; transl. Zsolt Komáromy -- Judgement and taste : from Shakespeare to Shaftesbury / Ferenc (...) Hörcher -- Lord Shaftesbury's "aesthetic freedom" / Endre Szécsényi -- Why one should imitate the Greeks : on Winckelmann / Sándor Radnóti ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Beauty or beast, or, Monstrous regiments? : Robertson and Burke on women and the public scene / László Kontler -- The concept of nature and the theodicy problem in the Malebranche-Arnauld-Leibniz debate / Dániel Schmal -- Lessing's anti-candide : between reason and revelation / Krisztina Utasi ; transl. Márton Dornbach. (shrink)

_Freedom of the Will_ provides a novel interpretation of G. E. Moore’s famous conditional analysis of free will and discusses several questions about the meaning of free will and its significance for moral responsibility. Although Moore’ theory has a strong initial appeal, most metaphysicians believe that there are conclusive arguments against it. Huoranszki argues that the importance of conditional analysis must be reevaluated in light of some recent developments in the theory of dispositions. The original analysis can be amended so (...) that the revised conditional account is not only a good response to determinist worries about the possibility of free will, but it can also explain the sense in which free will is an important condition of moral responsibility. This study addresses three fundamental issues about free will as a metaphysical condition of responsibility. First, the book explains why agents are responsible for their actions or omissions only if they have the ability to do otherwise and shows that the relevant ability is best captured by the revised conditional analysis. Second, it aims to clarify the relation between agents’ free will and their rational capacities. It argues that free will as a condition of responsibility must be understood in terms of agents’ ability to do otherwise rather than in terms of their capacity to respond to reasons. Finally, the book explains in which sense responsibility requires self-determination and argues that it is compatible with agents’ limited capacity to control their own character, reasons, and motives. (shrink)

This book covers the field of and points to the intersections between politics, art and philosophy. Its hero, the late Sir Roger Scruton had a longstanding interest in all fields, acquiring professional knowledge in both the practice and theory of politics, art and philosophy. The claim of the book is, therefore, that contrary to a superficial prejudice, it is possible to address the philosophical issues of art and politics in the same oeuvre, as the example of this Cambridge-educated analytical philosopher (...) proves. Accordingly, the book has a bold thesis on the general, theoretical level, mapping the connections between politics, art and philosophy. However, it also has a pioneering commitment on the level of the particular, offering the first full-length study into the philosophical legacy of Roger Scruton, probably the most important British conservative philosopher of the late 20th and the first decades of the 21st century. It also allows reader to look into the philosopher’s fascination with Central European art and culture. Finally, it also provides a daring analysis of the late Scruton’s metaphysical inspirations, connecting the arts, and especially music, with religion and the bonds of love. (shrink)

This paper argues against dismissing the Principle of Alternative Possibilities merely on the ground of so-called Frankfurt-style cases. Its main claims are that the interpretation of such cases depends on which substantive theory of responsibility one endorses and that Frankfurt-style cases all involve some form of causal overdetermination which can be interpreted either as being compatible with the potentially manipulated agent’s ability to act otherwise or as a responsibility undermining constraint. The paper also argues that the possibility of such scenarios (...) can support the truth of classical compatibilism as much as the truth of semicompatibilism. (shrink)

Agents have no control over the formation of their own zygote. Others may do. According to a well-known argument, the so-called Zygote Argument for incompatibilism, these facts, together with a prima facie plausible further assumption, are sufficient to prove that human agents cannot be responsible for their actions if they live in a deterministic universe. This paper argues that the lack of agents’ control over the constitution of their own zygote can undermine their responsibility only in exceptional conditions and that (...) the occurrence or non-occurrence of those conditions has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of determinism. What undermines agents’ responsibility in the situations described by the Zygote Argument is the occurrence of some specific initial conditions which may render the manipulation of agents’ behaviour possible, and not the truth of determinism. (shrink)

In this new book, Fr. Damian Ference proposes a more precise lens for decoding Flannery O'Connor's narrative art, one that originates in O'Connor's own words about herself: Hillbilly Thomism. The author examines the various ways in which St. Thomas Aquinas and the philosophical tradition of Thomism shaped not only O'Connor's view of reality but also the stories she told to help us see and know it."--from inside front flap.

Diese Studie führt einen Dialog mit dem französischen Philosophen Gilles Deleuze, um anhand seines Denkens die Erscheinungsweisen von Ereignis zeit- und sprachphilosophisch zu beschreiben. Ereignis, dieses Begriffswort, das sich jeder Definition naturgemäß entzieht, wird in der jüngeren Praktischen Theologie und in der Systematischen Theologie seit Karl Barth häufig gebraucht und selten bestimmt. In dieser Studie geht Ferenc Herzig dem Ereignis nach, ohne es mit einer „Was-ist“-Frage einzuzäunen. Die Konsequenzen für liturgische und homiletische Grundfragen werden daraufhin ebenso dargestellt wie der (...) Versuch unternommen, die Frage nach Gott unter poststrukturalistischen Vorzeichen zu stellen. (shrink)

Here, we propose that the heterogeneity of mutational types in populations underpins alternative pathways of evolutionary adaptation. Point mutations, deletions, insertions, transpositions and duplications cause different biological effects and provide distinct adaptive possibilities. Experimental evidence for this notion comes from the mutational origins of adaptive radiations in large, clonal bacterial populations. Independent sympatric lineages with different phenotypes arise from distinct genetic events including gene duplication, different insertion sequence movements and several independent point mutations. The breadth of the mutational spectrum in (...) the ancestral population should be viewed as a form of bet‐hedging, reducing the risk of evolutionary dead ends and complementing the phenotypic and epigenetic heterogeneities that improve the survival capabilities of a population. Different mutational events arise from distinct cellular processes and are subject to separate environmental impacts, so the availability of any particular type of mutation may constrain or promote adaptive pathways in populations. (shrink)

Various approaches have been taken recently to a reinterpretation of the European reception of China and the sinophilia-sinophobia dichotomy (Hung 2003, Millar 2010, Jacobsen 2013). In the present article, a nineteenth-century approach to China is examined using Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) as examples. It will be argued that this approach differs from earlier attitudes. First, the central currents will be surveyed in the European reception of China between the Jesuit missionaries and early nineteenth-century philosophies of (...) history, introducing an interpretational framework that differentiates between various approaches to China, namely a _universalistic_ and a _progression-based approach_. Then, first Tocqueville's and then Mill's depictions of China in comparison with the concepts of preceding centuries will be analyzed. It will be argued that Tocqueville and Mill's understanding of China represents a third view that I will call _relation-based_. (shrink)

I offer an analysis of Reid's notion of the will. Naturalism in the philosophy of action is defined as the attempt to eliminate the capacity of will and to reduce volition to some class of appetite or desire. Reid's arguments show, however, that volition plays a particular role in deliberation which cannot be reduced to some form of motivation present at the time of action. Deliberation is understood as an action over which the agent has control. Will is a higher-order (...) mental capacity enabling us to control our own attitudes, decisions and actions. Reid investigates several distinct forms of this control. I conclude with some remarks about the relation between Reid's arguments about the function of the will and his moral rationalism. (shrink)

The question of the relationship of the State and the law is one of the oldest questions of the history of the theory of state. It is one of those fundamental issues which can be regarded as real dividing lines: the decision one takes in this theoretical question determines a lot in the thinker's later theory. It is difficult to find the reasons for this phenomenon. One might argue that this is so because these two concepts are so basic, that (...) while one has to use them quite frequently, one would hardly dare to define them. But even if we accept this aversion from clearcut definitions, the explanation of why the relationship of these two concepts is so important is an unavoidable task for a number of reasons. (shrink)

First we prove that the set of countable linear orders of the form I + I form a complete analytic set. As a consequence of this we improve a result of Humke and Laczkovich, who showed in [HL] that the set of functions of the form f ⚬ f form a true analytic set in C[0, 1]. We show that these functions form a complete analytic set, solving a problem mentioned on p. 215 of [K1] and on p. 4 of (...) [B]. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy has argued that agents’ reasons for their actions are facts or features of the situations rather than their psychological states. The purpose of the paper is to show that even if we grant that this is so in most of the cases, there is a class of mental states that can be reasons. Although beliefs and desires are not reasons for actions, some emotional states—like loving, liking or disliking someone—can generate reasons. The distinctive feature of these states is (...) that their content is a particular, and not a proposition. Hence in certain situations their love or admiration can provide agents with reasons to do one particular thing rather than another. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explain the sense in which laws of physics are contingent. It argues, first, that contemporary Humean accounts cannot adequately explain the contingency of physical laws; and second, that Hume’s own arguments against the metaphysical necessity of causal connections are not applicable in this context. The paper concludes by arguing that contingency is an essentially emergent, macroscopic phenomenon: we can understand the contingency of fundamental physical laws only through their relation to the distribution of (...) macroscopic modal properties in the manifest world. (shrink)

This paper aims to defend the common-sense view that we exempt compulsive agents from responsibility to the extent that they are unable to choose what they do and hence they cannot control their actions by their choices. This view has been challenged in a seminal paper by Gary Watson, who claimed that akratic agents lack control in the same sense but they are responsible nonetheless. In the first part of the paper, I critically examine the arguments Watson advances for this (...) claim first in his original paper and then in some more recent works. I conclude that his account is based on the widely held assumption that both compulsive behavior and weakness of the will must be understood as a direct result of some inner motivational conflict. In the second part, I argue for an alternative understanding of the difference between weakness and compulsion. My claim is that compulsion is a cognitive rather than a motivational deficiency, since the compulsive, unlike the weak-willed, does not desire to perform the action which she actually performs. Furthermore, I argue that compulsive agents cannot control their actions by their choices because they have a distorted view of their own actional abilities. In the final part of the paper, I discuss a consequence of this account to the conditional analysis of free will as a condition of responsibility. (shrink)

Argument for fatalism attempts to prove that free choice is a logical or conceptual impossibility. The paper argues that the first two premises of the argument are sound: propositions are either true or false and they have their truth-value eternally. But the claim that from the fatalistic premises with the introduction of some innocent further premise dire consequences follow as regards to the possibility of free choice is false. The introduced premise, which establishes the connection between the first two premises (...) (which are about the nature of propositions) and the concept of free choice is not innocent. It creates the impression that the truth of certain propositions can somehow determine the occurrence of certain events. But no proposition can have such an effect since the counterfactuals If proposition P were true, event E would happen does not say anything about determination. The argument for fatalism is, however, not a boring sophism. It does reveal something about the nature of propositional representation. It shows that each proposition represents necessarily the fact what it represents, i.e. it shows that propositions have their truth conditions non-contingently. But from this nothing follows as regards to the contingent nature of the facts represented. On the bases of the first two premises of the argument for fatalism we cannot infer to the impossibility of free choice. The argument for fatalism should not be interpreted as an attempt to prove on purely logical or conceptual grounds that we do not have the ability to influence future events by our choices. But it could be used to show something about the nature of propositional representation. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. First, it raises the issue whether and how contractarian political theory can justify political obligations toward some particular political authority. Second, it attempts to draw some brief conclusion from this regarding the prospect of Europe as a political community. The paper argues that there is a common assumption to almost all contemporary versions of contractarian political theory which must be dropped in order to make room for the contractarian justification of such obligations. The assumption of (...) mutual unconcern seems to make it impossible for such theories to rationally justify particular obligations towards a particular political authority. I suggest that this limitation can be theoretically overcome. But I also suggest that the feeling of mutual concern of citizens towards each other is a necessary condition of their rationally justifiable obligations towards the decisions of a political authority. The development of this social emotion is a precondition of Europe as a political community. (shrink)

The paper addresses the problem whether arts, sciences and humanities can be regarded as useful. First it examines the means-ends relation and argues that some means are not causally but rather constitutively connected to ends. Second, it specifies two dimensions along which the problem of values will be addressed. One is the issue about the relation between values and desirability, the other is the active and affective conceptions of valuation. Third the paper offers a concise reconstruction of the answers to (...) the question of usefulness formulated during the enlightenment. It will be argued that traditionally usefulness was understood causally and not on the individual, but rather on the social level. In the final section the paper contends that values should be understood in terms of activities rather than in terms ofdesire satisfaction and that this interpretation can bring us closer to answering the question whether and why arts and sciences are useful. (shrink)

Some things happen or exist only contingently: although they do happen or exist, they do not have to. Some other things do not happen or come to exist, although they could. They are contingent possibilities. Philosophers have tried to understand contingent possibilities in two different ways. According to one, possibilities should be understood with reference to worlds. A nonactual event is possible because there is a world in which it does happen. According to another, possibilities should be understood with reference (...) to modal properties. An event or an object is possible because it would occur or come to exist if a modal property of some substance, another object or set of objects were exercised. -/- This book argues that the latter approach provides a better account of possibilities than the former. It develops a theory of contingent possibilities according to which possibilities within a world must be distinguished from the possibility of worlds. It is the distribution of modal properties within a world which metaphysically determines what could happen in that world. The most important of these modal properties are abilities and dispositions. Dispositions explain nomic and behavioural regularities, while abilities ground more or less abstract possibilities. By way of connecting the ascription of more or less specific modal properties to different counterfactual conditionals, we can identify various possibilities that we are concerned with when we try to understand what can happen in our world. (shrink)