The period from Plato's birth to Aristotle's death (427-322 BC) is one of the most influential and formative in the history of Western philosophy. The developments of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and science in this period have been investigated, controversies have arisen and many new theories have been produced. But this is the first book to give detailed scholarly attention to the development of dialectic during this decisive period. It includes chapters on topics such as: dialectic as interpersonal debate between (...) a questioner and a respondent; dialectic and the dialogue form; dialectical methodology; the dialectical context of certain forms of arguments; the role of the respondent in guaranteeing good argument; dialectic and presentation of knowledge; the interrelations between written dialogues and spoken dialectic; and definition, induction and refutation from Plato to Aristotle. The book contributes to the history of philosophy and also to the contemporary debate about what philosophy is. (shrink)

The results of this comparison of the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics can be summed up thusly: the texts share the same methodology, this methodology is based on a functional account of human nature, and whereas Plato believes that political philosophy needs grounding in metaphysics, Aristotle considers such a thing possible but superfluous.I shall here focus on exclusively. The shared methodology is characterized by two Platonic similes: the cave from the Republic, and the racecourse simile that Aristotle attributes to Plato (...) in EN 1.4. Both represent a research program with three steps: starting from ordinary intuitions about political matters and ascending towards higher principles... (shrink)

This collection of essays engages with several topics in Aristotle's philosophy of mind, some well-known and hotly debated, some new and yet to be explored. The contributors analyze Aristotle's arguments and present their cases in ways that invite contemporary philosophers of mind to consider the potentials--and pitfalls--of an Aristotelian philosophy of mind. The volume brings together an international group of renowned Aristotelian scholars as well as rising stars to cover five main themes: method in the philosophy of mind, sense perception, (...) mental representation, intellect, and the metaphysics of mind. The papers collected in this volume, with their choice of topics and quality of exposition, show why Aristotle is a philosopher of mind to be studied and reckoned with in contemporary discussions. Encounters with Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of ancient philosophy and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Collection of articles on medieval logic and semantics. Introduction by Sten Ebbesen and 24 contributions by scholars in the history of medieval theories of language. The papers in this volume treat several aspects of the history of theories of language from the 12th to the 14th century, aspects that have in a way or another been dealt with by Ebbesen himself.Festschrift in honor of Sten Ebessen in the occasion of his 65th birthday.

This study defends the view that Plato’s account of meaning and truth does not depend on strong Platonism. Strong Platonism is based, among other things, on the assumption that basic entities are pure and cannot mix with anything. In a semantic theory, such entities provide stability of reference to single terms and so keep the danger of fluctuating meanings at bay. Unfortunately, strong Platonism pays a heavy price for this stability in that it cannot explain how terms can be combined (...) into sentences and how statements can be true if truth consists in correspondence between the statement and how things really are. The book under review offers an account of a more restricted ontology. By doing so, it... (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the present study, attentional bias was investigated as a potential predisposing mechanism for the contamination-related subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Fifty healthy participants with varying degrees of subclinical C-OC symptoms performed a visual search task to measure differential attentional biases elicited by neutral, disgust-, and fear-specific pictorial material. Participants had to find a target picture within five neutral distractor pictures randomly presented on different locations in an array. The task was to decide whether the array contained an unpleasant target picture (...) or not. In randomly-selected emotional trials, participants were further asked about the content of the picture and the confidence of their answer. The results show that the reaction times significantly differed between the emotional and neutral pictures. Participants were significantly more confident in answering questions referring to fear compared to disgust pictures. This effect was mar... (shrink)

This volume is a collection of essays on a special theme in Aristotelian philosophy of mind: the internal senses. The first part of the volume is devoted to the central question of whether or not any internal senses exist in Aristotle’s philosophy of mind and, if so, how many and how they are individuated. The provocative claim of chapter one is that Aristotle recognizes no such internal sense. His medieval Latin interpreters, on the other hand, very much thought that Aristotle (...) did introduce a number of internal senses as shown in the second chapter. The second part of the volume contains a number of case studies demonstrating the philosophical background of some of the most influential topics covered by the internal senses in the Aristotelian tradition and in contemporary philosophy of mind. The focus of the case studies is on memory, imagination and estimation. Chapters introduce the underlying mechanisms of memory and recollection taking its cue from Aristotle but reaching into early modern philosophy as well as studying composite imagination in Avicenna’s philosophy of mind. Further topics include the Latin reception of Avicenna’s estimative faculty and the development of the internal senses as well as offering an account of the logic of objects of imagination. (shrink)

Aristoteles' (384-322 f.Kr.) mange filosofisk-videnskabelige værker er blevet studeret og kommenteret i over 2.000 år, men aldrig så intensivt som i tiden mellem 1100 og 1600, hvor de var rygraden i den såkaldt "skolastiske" lærdomskultur, der skabte det europæiske universitetssystem. Der forskes stadig i Aristoteles verden over, men moderne fortolkere drager kun sjældent nytte af den rige ældre tradition. Denne bog beskriver og sammenligner fortolkningsmetoder og publikationsstrategier hos skolastikerne og nutidens aristotelikere. Der argumenteres for, at dele af den gamle metodik (...) med fordel kunne genoptages, og det vises, at der i konkrete tilfælde kan findes værdifulde fortolkningsforslag, som ikke ses i den nyere litteratur. (shrink)

Actes d’un colloque qui s’est tenu à Copenhague en 2007, l’ouvrage veut combler un manque : traiter du développement de la dialectique de Platon à Aristote, non pas en se focalisant sur la méthode et l’ontologie, mais en se fondant sur le cadre du débat dialectique. Selon J. Fink (p. 2), la dialectique ici signifie d’abord et avant tout argumentation adressée à un interlocuteur. La pratique de l’argumentation dialectique et son extension dans la forme littéraire du dialogue constituent le (...) cœu... (shrink)

The language of hope is a ubiquitous part of political life, but its value is increasingly contested. While there is an emerging debate about hope in political philosophy, an assessment of the prevalent scepticism about its role in political practice is still outstanding. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of historical and recent treatments of hope in political philosophy and to indicate lines of further research. We argue that even though political philosophy can draw on recent (...) analyses of hope in analytic philosophy, there are distinct challenges for an account of hope in political contexts. Examples such as racial injustice or climate change show the need for a systematic normative account that is sensitive to the unavoidability of hope in politics as much as its characteristic dangers. (shrink)

In recent years, the science and the philosophy of consciousness has seen growing interest in structural questions about consciousness. This is the Editorial Introduction for a special volume for Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on “Structuralism in Consciousness Studies.”.

We challenge Bruineberg et al's view that Markov blankets are illicitly reified when used to describe organismic boundaries. We do this both on general methodological grounds, where we appeal to a form of structural realism derived from Bayesian cognitive science to dissolve the problem, and by rebutting specific arguments in the target article.

This is first English edition of Ethical Concepts and Problems (1971) by the great Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup (1905-81). Løgstrup presents key elements of his ethical and political thinking, on topics from duty, responsibility, will, and choice to cultural policy, democracy, and the right of resistance.

The separation, uniformization, and other properties of the Borel and projective hierarchies over hyperfinite sets are investigated and compared to the corresponding properties in classical descriptive set theory. The techniques used in this investigation also provide some results about countably determined sets and functions, as well as an improvement of an earlier theorem of Kunen and Miller.

Autism spectrum disorder is characterised by differences in unimodal and multimodal sensory and proprioceptive processing, with complex biases towards local over global processing. Many of these elements are implicated in versions of the rubber hand illusion, which were therefore studied in high-functioning individuals with ASD and a typically developing control group. Both groups experienced the illusion. A number of differences were found, related to proprioception and sensorimotor processes. The ASD group showed reduced sensitivity to visuotactile-proprioceptive discrepancy but more accurate proprioception. (...) This group also differed on acceleration in subsequent reach trials. Results are discussed in terms of weak top-down integration and precision-accuracy trade-offs. The RHI appears to be a useful tool for investigating multisensory processing in ASD. (shrink)

Including empirical examples and theoretical clarifications on many of the analytical issues raised in his recently published Down to Earth, this conversation with Bruno Latour and his collaborator, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, offers key insights into Latour’s recent and ongoing work. Revolving around questions on political ecology and social theory in our ‘New Climatic Regime’, Latour argues that in order to have politics you need a land and you need a people. This interview present reflections on such politics, such land (...) and such people, and it ends with a call for a sociology that takes up the task of connecting the three by investigating what he and Schultz call ‘geo-social classes’. The interview was conducted by Jakob Stein in Paris in November 2018. (shrink)

Auf welchen normativen Grundlagen beruhte das NS-System? Mit welcher Rechtfertigung konnte der Führerwille dort zu einer Quelle des Rechts werden? Wie war es gemäß der NS-Strafgesetzgebung möglich, Handlungen zu bestrafen, die gegen kein geschriebenes Gesetz verstießen? Die in diesem Band versammelten und kommentierten Originaltexte geben Einblick in das Denken von Rechtstheoretikern, die mit dem Nationalsozialismus sympathisierten, und belegen deren Versuch, autoritäre und dem Rechtsstaat widersprechende Rechtsprinzipien zu legitimieren. Dabei zeigt sich ein überraschender und bis jetzt von der rechts- und moralphilosophischen (...) Forschung weitgehend unbeachteter Aspekt des NS-Unrechtssystems: der Versuch einer »Ethisierung« des Rechts und die damit verbundene Totalisierung des machtstaatlichen Einflusses. (shrink)

This article discusses the phenomenon of normative resilience, with a focus on evaluative resilience. An object can become more or less valuable. In addition to this change in an object's value, the object's value can become more or less resilient. If it is less resilient, it cannot withstand as much evaluative change without its degree of value changing, as compared to an object with more resilient value. The article consists of three parts. First, examples of resilience are presented to give (...) the reader an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon, Second, the Fitting Attitudes Analysis of value is invoked to provide a formal account of evaluative resilience. Third, the theoretical and practical advantages of acknowledging the existence of evaluative resilience are brought to light. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that questions about which mathematical ideas mathematicians are exposed to and choose to pay attention to are epistemologically relevant and entangled with power dynamics and social justice concerns. There is a considerable body of literature that discusses the dissemination and uptake of ideas as social justice issues. We argue that these insights are also relevant for the epistemology of mathematics. We make this visible by a journalistic exploration of relevant cases and embed our insights into (...) the larger question how mathematical ideas are taken up in mathematical practices. We argue that epistemologies of mathematics ought to account for questions of exposure to and choice of attention to mathematical ideas, and remark on the political relevance of such epistemologies. (shrink)

People tend to grossly overestimate the size of their mirror-reflected face. Although this overestimation bias is robust, not much is known about its relationships to self-face perception. In two experiments, we investigated the overestimation bias as a function of the presentation of the own face , the identity of the seen face, and prior exposure to a real mirror. For this we developed a computerized task requiring size estimations of displayed faces. We replicated the observation that people overestimate the size (...) of their mirror-reflected face and showed that the overestimation can be reduced following a brief mirror exposure. We also found that left–right reversal modulates the overestimation bias, depending on the perceived face’s identity. These data underline the enhanced familiarity of left–right reversed self-faces and the importance of size perception for understanding mirror reflection processing. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In recruitment, promotion, admission, and other forms of wealth and power apportion, an evaluator typically ranks a set of candidates in terms of their competence. If the evaluator is prejudiced, the resulting ranking will misrepresent the candidates’ actual rankings. This constitutes not only a moral and a practical problem, but also an epistemological one, which begs the question of what we should do—epistemologically—to mitigate it. In a recent paper, Jönsson and Sjödahl in [Episteme 14:499–517, 2017], argue that the epistemic problem (...) can be fruitfully addressed by way of a novel statistical method that changes the products of biased behaviour, i.e. the rankings themselves, rather than the biased persons. Jönsson and Sjödahl’s pioneering proposal is a both a welcome addition to the literature on implicit bias, due the problems with existing implicit bias interventions [see e.g. Lai et al. in J Exp Psychol Gen 143:1765–1785; J Exp Psychol Gen 145:1001–1016, 2014; 2016; Forscher et al. in J Person Soc Psychol 117:522–559, 2019] but also to the literature on prejudice more generally, where many proposed prejudice-reduction strategies enjoy less than adequate empirical support [Paluck and Green in Ann Rev Psychol 60:339–367, 2009]. Their proposal, however, needs supplementation in two ways: the circumstances that must hold in order for it to work needs to be refined, and their claim that it works as intended in these circumstances needs to be validated. We argue that four of Jönsson and Sjödahl’s method’s presumed presuppositions can be weakened, but needs to be supplemented by two additional assumptions, overlooked by Jönsson and Sjödahl. Moreover, we demonstrate that the method does work as intended by way of a statistical simulation. (shrink)

Cephalopods are extraordinary molluscs equipped with vertebrate‐like intelligence and a unique buoyancy system for locomotion. A growing body of evidence from the fossil record, embryology and Bayesian molecular divergence estimations provides a comprehensive picture of their origins and evolution. Cephalopods evolved during the Cambrian (∼530 Ma) from a monoplacophoran‐like mollusc in which the conical, external shell was modified into a chambered buoyancy apparatus. During the mid‐Palaeozoic (∼416 Ma) cephalopods diverged into nautiloids and the presently dominant coleoids. Coleoids (i.e. squids, cuttlefish (...) and octopods) internalised their shells and, in the late Palaeozoic (∼276 Ma), diverged into Vampyropoda and the Decabrachia. This shell internalisation appears to be a unique evolutionary event. In contrast, the loss of a mineralised shell has occurred several times in distinct coleoid lineages. The general tendency of shell reduction reflects a trend towards active modes of life and much more complex behaviour. (shrink)

We outline some ways in which motor neglect (the underutilization of a limb despite adequate strength) and hysterical paralysis (failure to move a limb despite no relevant structural damage or disease) may throw light on the pathophysiology of catatonia. We also comment on the manifold inadequacies of distinguishing too firmly between symptoms of “neurologic origin” and of “psychiatric origin.”.

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

In 1935, the Nazi government introduced what came to be known as the abrogation of the pro- hibition of analogy. This measure, a feature of the new penal law, required judges to stray from the letter of the written law and to consider instead whether an action was worthy of pun- ishment according to the ‘sound perception of the people’ and the ‘underlying principle’ of existing criminal statutes. In discussions of Nazi law, an almost unanimous conclusion is that a system (...) of criminal law ought not to contain legislation of this sort. This conclusion is often based on how the abro- gation relates to the normative claim that the law ought to be predictable. In particular, it has been argued that since the law ought to be predictable, and since this type of analogy legis- lation implied, caused or contributed to the diminution of the law’s predictability, this type of legislation ought to be prohibited. In this paper, we argue that this argument is not entirely correct. While we believe that the law ought to be predictable and that there is evidence for the claim that the Nazis’ intro- duction of analogical reasoning implied, caused, or contributed to a diminution of predictability, this fact is logically too weak to ground the conclusion that necessarily a penal system ought not to contain legislation of this kind. Despite the undeniable wickedness of the Nazi penal system, this type of analogical reasoning can be made consistent with the pre- dictability of the law. We argue that consistency of this sort depends on whether the use of analogy is supplemented by certain contextual background conditions. The occurrence of these conditions blocks an inference from the fact that the law ought to be predictable to the conclusion that a penal system ought not to allow for this type of analogical reasoning. (shrink)

This special issue focuses on the Philosophy of Psychedelics by Chris Letheby in the form of a book symposium. Introduced by Matthew Johnson, Letheby presents the main claims of this book that explores the apparent conflict between psychedelic therapy and naturalism in a préci​s.​​ Seven contributions criticize, expand or comment on Letheby's arguments, focusing either on his proposed mechanism for psychedelic therapy or on the epistemic implications. The symposium concludes with Letheby’s replies to these commentaries.