In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thomists at War:Pierre Mandonnet, Étienne Gilson, and the Contested Relationship between Aquinas's and Dante's Thought (1879-2021)*George CorbettAt the turn of 1921, the French Dominican Pierre Mandonnet (1858–1936) helped to launch a new historical institute for Thomistic Studies at the Dominican study house of Le Saulchoir in Belgium. One of the pressing purposes of the foundation of the Institut historique d'études thomistes was to provide a properly historical approach to (...) Aquinas's doctrine which would defend its integrity and authority, and refute the alarming assertations of those outside the Dominican order who were, on the view of its founders, abusing the historical method to undermine the true sense of Aquinas's thought.1 The founders singled out Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), whose Le Thomisme, introduction au système de saint Thomas [End Page 1053] was published a couple of years earlier (in 1919); according to Mandonnet, Gilson's volume distorted the very nature and pedagogy of Thomist philosophy.2 Mandonnet and Gilson would become principal antagonists in the famous debates about Aquinas's thought in the 1920s and 1930s. Less known, however, are their parallel skirmishes in the field of Dante studies. In this article, I suggest that we need to consider the battles in Thomism and Dante studies together, as part of a wider intellectual war that would question the very nature of Catholic theology and philosophy. I first survey the main battlefield—the debates about Aquinas's thought—with specific reference to the controversies in the 1920s and 1930s about Gilson's "Christian philosophy" and about Marie-Dominique Chenu (1895—1990)'s Une école de théologie. In the second part, I turn to the skirmishes in the field of Dante studies between scholars such as, on the one hand, the French Dominicans Mandonnet and Joachim Berthier (1848—1924), who presented Dante as an essentially Thomist and Catholic poet, and, on the other hand, the lay historians Gilson and Bruno Nardi (1884—1968), who deconstructed the "myth of the Thomist Dante" and saw a fundamental disharmony between Aquinas's and Dante's thought, a view which profoundly influenced post-war Dante scholarship to the present day. In light of this intellectual history, in the third part, I reappraise constructively eight alleged points of divergence between Aquinas's and Dante's thought. I demonstrate that these key points of apparent divergence—as on the natural desire for the beatific vision, on the doctrine of two final ends for man, or on the relationships between philosophy and theology and between nature and grace—have as much to do with these scholars' interpretations of Aquinas's works as with their interpretations of Dante.Mandonnet, Gilson, and a Civil War in ThomismThe Institut historique d'études thomistes: Maintaining the "Authority" and "Integrity" of Aquinas's DoctrineHaving entered the Dominican order in 1882, Mandonnet was professor of history at the University of Fribourg from 1891 to 1918; on retirement, he continued to research and teach at Le Saulchoir.3 Author of significant research on Siger of Brabant and St. Dominic, he collaborated on the critical edition of Aquinas's works commissioned by Pope Leo XIII as [End Page 1054] editor, for example, of Aquinas's commentary on the Sentences and was one of three founders of the Revue thomiste in 1893.4 At Le Saulchoir, Mandonnet was also instrumental in the founding and mission of the Institut historique d'études thomistes from its inception in 1921 to his death in early 1936.5 One of "the giants of medieval studies," and founder (also in 1921) and honorary president of the Société Thomiste (which published the Bulletin Thomiste beginning in 1924), Mandonnet's name became "synonymous with fundamental research into the thought and writings of Thomas Aquinas."6 For Mandonnet, the historical method facilitated a greater penetration into the thought of Aquinas and his contemporaries, and historical research, in this way, enriched and complemented the institutional teaching of Thomism as Scholastic theology and a perennial philosophy.7 But, like other founders of the institute, Mandonnet believed [End Page 1055] that some recent scholars were using the historical method to undermine Aquinas's doctrine, and... (shrink)

And, much worse, nearly nobody cares about this conceptual disaster -- the main thing being, whether or not you are taking sides with the good guys. This volume is an analytical attempt to end this disaster. What is Terrorism?

What makes our brain a brain? This is the central question posited in Unlocking the Brain. By providing a fascinating venture into different territories of neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy, the author takes a novel exploration of the brain's resting state in the context of the neural code, and its ability to yield consciousness.

Vier Metaphysische Kapitel :1. Die Transzendenz des Lebens2. Die Wendung zur Idee3. Tod und Unsterblichkeit4. Das individuelle Gesetz.

Das Wissen, welches zuerst oder unmittelbar unser Gegenstand ist, kann kein anderes sein als dasjenige, welches selbst unmittelbares Wissen, Wissen des Unmittelbaren oder Seienden ist. Wir haben uns ebenso unmittelbar oder aufnehmend zu verhalten, also nichts an ihm, wie es sich darbietet, zu verändern, und von dem Auffassen das Begreifen abzuhalten.Der konkrete Inhalt der sinnlichen Gewißheit läßt sie unmittelbar als die reichste Erkenntnis, ja als eine Erkenntnis von unendlichem Reichtum erscheinen, für welchen ebensowohl wenn wir im Raume und in der (...) Zeit, als worin er sich ausbreitet, hinaus-, als wenn wir uns ein Stück aus dieser Fülle nehmen, und durch Teilung in dasselbe hineingehen, keine Grenze zu finden ist. (shrink)

Changing the information format from probabilities into frequencies as well as employing appropriate visualizations such as tree diagrams or 2 × 2 tables are important tools that can facilitate people’s statistical reasoning. Previous studies have shown that despite their widespread use in statistical textbooks, both of those visualization types are only of restricted help when they are provided with probabilities, but that they can foster insight when presented with frequencies instead. In the present study, we attempt to replicate this effect (...) and also examine, by the method of eye tracking, why probabilistic 2 × 2 tables and tree diagrams do not facilitate reasoning with regard to Bayesian inferences (i.e., determining what errors occur and whether they can be explained by scan paths), and why the same visualizations are of great help to an individual when they are combined with frequencies. All ten inferences of N = 24 participants were based solely on tree diagrams or 2 × 2 tables that presented either the famous “mammography context” or an “economics context” (without additional textual wording). We first asked participants for marginal, conjoint, and (non-inverted) conditional probabilities (or frequencies), followed by related Bayesian tasks. While solution rates were higher for natural frequency questions as compared to probability versions, eye-tracking analyses indeed yielded noticeable differences regarding eye movements between correct and incorrect solutions. For instance, heat maps (aggregated scan paths) of distinct results differed remarkably, thereby making correct and faulty strategies visible in the line of theoretical classifications. Moreover, the inherent structure of 2 × 2 tables seems to help participants avoid certain Bayesian mistakes (e.g., “Fisherian” error) while tree diagrams seem to help steer them away from others (e.g., “joint occurrence”). We will discuss resulting educational consequences at the end of the paper. (shrink)

In this paper, we approach the idea of group cognition from the perspective of the “extended mind” thesis, as a special case of the more general claim that systems larger than the individual human, but containing that human, are capable of cognition (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Instead of deliberating about “the mark of the cognitive” (Adams & Aizawa, 2008), our discussion of group cognition is tied to particular cognitive capacities. We review recent studies of group problem-solving and group (...) memory which reveal that specific cognitive capacities that are commonly ascribed to individuals are also aptly ascribed at the level of groups. These case studies show how dense interactions among people within a group lead to both similarity-inducing and differentiating dynamics that affect the group's ability to solve problems. This supports our claim that groups have organization-dependent cognitive capacities that go beyond the simple aggregation of the cognitive capacities of individuals. Group cognition is thus an emergent phenomenon in the sense of Wimsatt (1986). We further argue that anybody who rejects our strategy for showing that cognitive properties can be instantiated at multiple levels in the organizational hierarchy on a priori grounds is a “demergentist,” and thus incurs the burden of proof for explaining why cognitive properties are “stuck” at a certain level of organizational structure. Finally, we show that our analysis of group cognition escapes the “coupling-constitution” charge that has been leveled against the extended mind thesis (Adams & Aizawa, 2008). (shrink)

Der finanzielle Druck auf die Krankenhäuser in Deutschland führt zu einer Ökonomisierung medizinischer Entscheidungen, die die Qualität der Patientenversorgung beeinträchtigt und das Gesundheitspersonal erheblich belastet. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht, welche Möglichkeiten ein organisationsethischer Ansatz bietet, den Herausforderungen durch die Ökonomisierung zu begegnen. Ausgewählte empirische Befunde sollen zunächst verdeutlichen, welche Auswirkungen die Ökonomisierung auf die Patientenversorgung und das Personal in den Krankenhäusern hat. Zudem liefern sie erste Hinweise auf mögliche Handlungsspielräume für die Krankenhäuser. Dabei wird deutlich, dass die Ökonomisierung einen organisationsethischen (...) Ansatz erfordert, der die Handlungsspielräume auf der Mesoebene, d. h. auf der Ebene der einzelnen Krankenhäuser nutzt. Der organisationsethische Ansatz wird in seinen Grundzügen vorgestellt und dann im Sinne eines Wertemanagements als Lösungsperspektive für die Herausforderungen der Ökonomisierung konkretisiert. Abschließend entwickelt der Beitrag Perspektiven, wie klinische Ethikkomitees mit organisationsethischer Arbeit den negativen Auswirkungen der Ökonomisierung auf die Patientenversorgung und das Personal im Krankenhaus entgegenwirken können. (shrink)

For Descartes, minds were essentially non-extended things. Contemporary cognitive science prides itself on having exorcised the Cartesian ghost from the biological machine. However, it remains committed to the Cartesian vision of the mental as something purely inner. Against the idea that the mind resides solely in the brain, advocates of the situated and embodied nature of cognition have long stressed the importance of dynamic brain-body-environment couplings, the opportunistic exploitation of bodily morphology, the strategic performance of epistemically potent actions, the generation (...) and use of external representations, and the cognitive scaffolding provided by artifacts and social-cultural practices. According to the “extended mind” thesis, a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the brain into the body and its environment. My goal in this book is to clarify the nature and scope of this thesis, and to defend its central insight that cognition is not confined to the boundaries of the biological individual. (shrink)

This paper concerns Carnap’s early contributions to formal semantics in his work on general axiomatics between 1928 and 1936. Its main focus is on whether he held a variable domain conception of models. I argue that interpreting Carnap’s account in terms of a fixed domain approach fails to describe his premodern understanding of formal models. By drawing attention to the second part of Carnap’s unpublished manuscript Untersuchungen zur allgemeinen Axiomatik, an alternative interpretation of the notions ‘model’, ‘model extension’ and ‘submodel’ (...) in his theory of axiomatics is presented. Specifically, it is shown that Carnap’s early model theory is based on a convention to simulate domain variation that is not identical but logically comparable to the modern account. (shrink)

In this paper my primary aim is to present a logical system of practical reasoning that can be used to assess the validity of practical arguments, that is, arguments with a practical judgment as conclusion. I begin with a critical evaluation of other approaches to this issue and argue that they are inadequate. On the basis of these considerations, I explain in Sect. 2 the informal conception of practical validity and introduce in Sect. 3 the logical system P , which (...) is an extension of propositional logic and can be used to assess the validity of a wide range of practical arguments. In the last section, I apply this system to some examples of practical reasoning in order to demonstrate how it can be used in practice. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and relevance, access to facts and beliefs, non-propositional contributions to knowledge and understanding, and epistemic efficiency. We identify two core issues in the discussions about (...) such epistemic functions of emotions: First, even though it is plausible that emotions are involved in epistemic processes, it may be doubted whether they really matter for the normative question of what counts as knowledge or justified belief. Second, some of the epistemic functions claimed for emotions in general may only be attributed to some specifically epistemic emotions, which have been present all along in traditional epistemology, albeit under different labels such as ‘intuitions’. (shrink)

What drives much of the current philosophical interest in the idea of group cognition is its appeal to the manifestation of psychological properties—understood broadly to include states, processes, and dispositions—that are in some important yet elusive sense emergent with respect to the minds of individual group members. Our goal in this paper is to address a set of related, conditional questions: If human mentality is real yet emergent in a modest metaphysical sense only, then: (i) What would it mean for (...) a group to have emergent cognitive states? (ii) Is this even a metaphysically coherent view? (iii) Relative to which notion of emergence do we have reason to believe that certain groups in fact have emergent cognitive states? We shall argue that evidence from a wide variety of social science domains makes it plausible that there are group cognitive states and processes no less metaphysically emergent than human cognitive (and other special science) states and processes. (shrink)

In my dissertation, I explore the remarkable talent of human beings to modify and co-opt resources of their material and socio-cultural environment, and integrate them with their biological capacities in order to enhance their cognitive prowess. In the first part, I clarify and defend the claim – known as the extended mind thesis – that a significant portion of human cognition literally extends beyond the head into the world, actively incorporating our bodies and an intricate web of material resources (Clark, (...) 2003, 2008; Wilson, 2004). Yet since much of distinctively human cognition occurs when we think in groups, I argue that the bias of this thesis to view cognition as an essentially solitary (albeit bodily or technologically extended) activity is misplaced. In the second part, I re-deploy the idea of cognitive extensions to establish a scientifically respectable version of the group mind thesis – i.e., the claim that groups can have emergent cognitive properties and capacities in their own right. (shrink)

Wegner, Giuliano, and Hertel (1985) defined the notion of a transactive memory system (TMS) as a group level memory system that “involves the operation of the memory systems of the individuals and the processes of communication that occur within the group (p. 191). Those processes are the collaborative procedures (“transactions”) by which groups encode, store, and retrieve information that is distributed among their members. Over the past 25+ years, the conception of a TMS has progressively garnered an increased interest among (...) social and organizational psychologists, communication scholars, and management theorists (Ren & Argote 2011). But there remains considerable disagreement about how exactly Wegner’s appeal to group memory should be understood. My goal in this paper is contribute to this debate, by articulating more clearly the value of conceptualizing groups as TMSs. This value, I argue, consists in providing us with a blueprint for how to explain group memory in terms of collective information-processing mechanisms. Collective information-processing mechanisms are dependent on, and interact with, the brain-bound information-processing of individuals, but cannot be reduced to the latter. In my analysis, I lean on extant accounts of mechanistic explanation in the philosophy of science (Bechtel & Richardson 1993; Machamer, Darden, & Craver 2000; Wimsatt 2007) that have been used to analyze the explanatory practices of psychology and cognitive neuroscience (Bechtel 2008, 2009). Based on my reconstruction of Wegner’s conceptualization of a TMS, I argue that the reality of emergent group cognition is compatible with its mechanistic explanation. More generally, my analysis shows that group cognition cannot be reduced to individual cognition, while avoiding the false dilemma between “wholism” and “nothing but-ism” which has hampered traditional construals of the “group mind” thesis (Allport 1968). (shrink)

Georg Simmel developed a "form" method for the newly revived field of sociology, drawing on the subjectivity/objectivity dialectic. While his book's organization differs from that of contemporary texts, his method remains implicit in the field to this day.

Welche Rolle spielen die Begriffe des Zwecks und der Funktion für die Biologie und die Bestimmung ihres Grundbegriffs, des Organismus?

Traditionally, morphology is seen merely as an auxiliary subdiscipline of biology and other fields. Allegedly, it does not provide explanations for phenomena but merely describes forms as a preliminary step in their analysis. Here, the view is defended that forms, and hence morphology, can also take over an important explanatory function and even, ultimately, constitute the explanatory level fundamental to biology as a distinct science. According to this thesis, the form of organisms and their parts provide the only specifically biological (...) causal factors. Nothing but the form, the specific spatial arrangement of matter, determines the peculiarity of organisms’ ways of being. Therefore, biological explanation must start from specific structures. These structures provide the respective boundary conditions for harnessing the general laws of nature, thus determining their trajectory. Ultimately, then, forms play the most fundamental explanatory role in biology. (shrink)

Der Band enthält Essays des bekannten Zürcher Philosophen, die auf vielfältige Weise so grundlegende Dinge wie den Ursprung des Bösen, die Machbarkeit des Glücks, die Möglichkeit von Hoffnung oder das Wesen der Verführung behandeln. Gemeinsam ist diesen Arbeiten die Absicht, die großen Philosophischen Themen aus ihrem Zusammenhang in den alltäglichen Empfindungen unseres Daseins zu verstehen. Das ist das, was Kohler die >Kunst des Philosophierens nennt: Kunst vergnügt, weil sie, ohne zu langweilen, viel zum Denken aufgibt.