Strategije Montserrat Sarto, namenjene spodbujanju branja, ki je ključna kompetenca, in doseganju avtonomne bralne pismenosti, temeljijo na igri, postopnosti in dialoškosti. V delo v skupini vključujejo vse udeležence (učence, dijake, študente, bralce). Izhajajo iz bralskega potenciala vsakega posameznega bralca ter njegovega notranjega doživljanja in odziva na prebrano besedilo. Postopno razvijajo razu­mevanje in užitek pri samostojnem branju. Spodbujajo komunikacijo z besedilom in o besedilu, učitelj je le usmerjevalec in posrednik.

Its author was a Carthusian monk. Offered here is a translation, with annotation and an important introduction, of the four books on natural philosophy, the predecessor of modern science.

When does a human being begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard have argued that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. In their view, a human individual begins to exist at gastrulation, i. e. at about sixteen days after fertilization. In this paper we argue that even granting Smith and Brogaard's ontological commitments and biological assumptions, the existence of a human being can be shown to (...) begin much earlier, viz., with fertilization. Their interpretative claim that a zygote divides immediately into two substances and therefore ceases to exist is highly implausible by their own standards, and their factual claim that there is no communication between the blastomeres has to be abandoned in light of recent embryological research. (shrink)

Although the idiom “genesis and structure” is usually associated with the rise of structuralism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two notions are arguably among the most persistent methods in the history of modern philosophy. This article outlines the emergence of “genetic epistemology” in the seventeenth century, when the seemingly antithetical character of the conceptual pair was reworked into a productive epistemological theory, especially in Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who increasingly used diachronic (genetic) narratives to explain the (...) synchronic (structural) features in their theories. Against Cassirer, I argue that it was Descartes rather than Hobbes who first presented structural issues genetically. In Descartes’ natural philosophy, his frequent claims that showing how a thing is produced reveals its true nature foreshadow precisely what Hobbes and Isaac Barrow later describe as causal definitions of geometric figures, in which the process of ideal generation by motion is what constitutes the very essence of a figure. I link this method to the historicizing discourse on origins in the Enlightenment and conclude by suggesting that there is a trace of Platonic idealism in genetic epistemology. (shrink)

By means of multi-agent simulations, it investigates the truth and consensus-conduciveness of controversial debates. The book brings together research in formal epistemology and argumentation theory.

This collection of essays by Gregor Sebba (1905-1985) reflects the curiosity and insight of his mind. The range of topics is wide, including philosophy and the history of ideas, literature and art; yet there is a single underlying theme - human creativity and the search for truth - pursued along paths as diverse as Greek tragedy, Eric Voegelin's concept of order in history, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and T.S.Eliot.

Gregor Betz explores the following questions: Where are the limits of economics, in particular the limits of economic foreknowledge? Are macroeconomic forecasts credible predictions or mere prophecies and what would this imply for the way economic policy decisions are taken? Is rational economic decision making possible without forecasting at all?

The ideal of value free science states that the justification of scientific findings should not be based on non-epistemic (e.g. moral or political) values. It has been criticized on the grounds that scientists have to employ moral judgements in managing inductive risks. The paper seeks to defuse this methodological critique. Allegedly value-laden decisions can be systematically avoided, it argues, by making uncertainties explicit and articulating findings carefully. Such careful uncertainty articulation, understood as a methodological strategy, is exemplified by the current (...) practice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (shrink)

Wie ist es philosophisch zu erklären, dass Menschen frei und selbstbestimmt Entscheidungen treffen, die durch das klassische Begründungsmuster der Eigennützlichkeit und Selbsterhaltung unverständlich bleiben? Der Autor rekonstruiert und erweitert mit seiner neuartigen Konzeption - der autoeidetischen Struktur - Möglichkeitsbedingungen der praktischen Vernunft. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die eigene Existenz. Das Streben nach Selbsttreue bedingt das Wollen des Gesollten. Urteil und Praxis werden hierdurch nachvollziehbar zu Bedingungen gelingenden Lebens."--Publisher's website.

Cervantesu antični klasiki niso bili tuji, z njimi se je seznanil v času šolanja in med bivanjem v Italiji. Da mu je bil klasični svet blizu, dokazuje z vpletanjem antičnih elementov, snovi in motivike. Huma­nistična nota v njegovem delu je najbolj opazna v nenehni obrambi svobode in človeškega dostojanstva oziroma vrednosti človeškega bitja samega po sebi v skladu z renesančnim konceptom človeka. Svoboda kot ključni pojem in temelj Cervantesove poetike navezuje njegov opus na renesančno tradicijo. Premiso o človekovi svobodi in (...) njeni temeljni vrednosti Cervantes izrazi na številnih mestih. Cervantesovo izrazito usmerjenost k svobodi in prežetost njegovega dela z njo pa je treba razumeti tudi skozi njegovo osebno izkušnjo in mučno ujetništvo v Alžiru, kjer je preživel pet let. Da bi preživel ter ohranil bistrost duha in razuma, je začel pisati. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Fußballfans bilden eine eigene Subkultur, die sich selbst noch einmal im Fußballstadion von den anderen Zuschauern als soziale Gruppierung unterscheidet. Ausgehend von Schütz’s Lebensweltbegriff wird die Fankultur als ein geschlossenes Sinngebiet mit einem eigenen Realitätsakzent sowie einem besonderen Erkenntnis- und Erlebnisstil aufgefasst. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die konstitutiven Elemente dieser fanspezifischen Lebenswelt am Beispiel der Fangemeinschaft des FC Energie Cottbus. Die dort beobachteten Rituale, symbolischen Darstellungsmittel, Selbstinszenierungen und Kollektivausdrücke stellen die Konstitutionsbedingungen für einen gemeinsamen Wirklichkeitsentwurf dar. Es wird gezeigt, (...) dass es der Fankultur, trotz der ständigen Spielerwechsel und fortschreitenden Ökonomisierung im Fußball, keineswegs an Vielfalt und identitätsstiftenden Orientierungen fehlt. (shrink)

The article deals with a seldom exposed but ubiquitous method in the 18th century philosophy, named conjectural history by Dugald Stewart. Its characteristic feature is a peculiar combination of historically verified facts and speculations, which in some authors are even openly fictitious. The hypotheses about prehistory (always set forth in the form of temporal historical narrative) are meant to aid a certain classic philosophical topos of the 18th century: the quest for origins. The article first surveys and compares common points (...) as well as peculiarities of various “treatises on the origins” in the Scottish and French Enlightenment. In the second half it focuses on an implicit but clearly identifiable conjectural history in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, and on the application of conjectural history in the domain of the intellect and knowledge in the Encylopédie. It seems that the genealogy of knowledge in d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse most manifestly confirms the initial designation of conjectural history: that it is in fact another name for philosophy. If this holds true, than it might prove useful to search for its first seeds in Descartes’ Discourse on method, a work which places itself on the cross-section of history and fable. (shrink)

Cet article examine comment, par leur discours, les femmes se construisent comme mère, dans leurs interactions avec leurs enfants adolescent-e-s, occasionnellement avec leurs maris, contribuant ainsi à la reproduction sociale des stéréotypes de masculinité et de féminité ou, au contraire, de quelle façon elles rompent avec la tradition et proposent des modèles alternatifs. Acceptent-elles ou non leur héritage symbolique en matière de genre? En voulant la reproduire, comment réinvestissent-elles la dimension genrée dans un contexte d’interactions verbales avec leurs adolescent-e-s, les (...) renvoyant ou pas à leurs « origines » culturelles? Les mères dépassent-elles le modèle de binarité des sexes traditionnel pour parvenir à un modèle agentif? À travers le continuum de normativité et d’agentivité, l’entre-deux prend tout son sens : en quoi l’imaginaire linguistique constitue-t-il un espace à construire, un « à travers »? This research paper examines the way women discursively construct themselves as mothers, in their interactions with their teenage children, and occasionally with their husbands, and the way they thus contribute to the social reproduction of manhood and womanhood stereotypes or on the contrary break with the tradition to propose alternative models. Do they or don’t they accept their symbolic heritage as regards sex and gender? While intending to reproduce this heritage, how do they reinvest the gendered dimension in the context of verbal interaction with their teen-agers, sending them back or not to their cultural “origins”? Do the mothers go beyond the traditional binary model of sex and gender to reach an agentive model? Through the continuum that goes from normativity to agentivity, the idea of an in-between stage makes sense: in what way does the linguistic imaginary constitute an area to be forged, a crossing space? (shrink)

Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel.

The dynamics of neural populations capture the laws of the mindThis paper focuses on the level of neural networks. Examining the case of recurrent neural networks, the paper argues that the dynamics of neural populations form a privileged level of explanation in cognitive science. According to Schöner, this level is privileged, because it enables cognitive scientists to discover the laws governing organisms’ cognition and behaviour.

Wo Meinungen aufeinanderprallen, um Verständnis geworben und Überzeugungsarbeit geleistet wird, sind Begründungen nicht weit. Für jede Überzeugung gibt es immer ein, zwei Gründe, die mit Gegengründen konfrontiert und, im Gegenzug, mit weiteren Überlegungen verteidigt werden usw. usf. Schnell sind wir verwirrt und drohen, ohne uns der "Grammatikregeln" vernünftigen Argumentierens zu besinnen, nicht mehr durchzublicken. Die Theorie dialektischer Strukturen leistet einen Beitrag zur Grammatik vernünftigen Argumentierens. Sie stellt Begriffe und Verfahren bereit, um Fragen, die sich angesichts einer komplexen Argumentation stellen können, (...) zu beantworten: Wie beziehen sich die einzelnen Argumente der Debatte aufeinander? Welche Positionen vertreten die verschiedenen Proponenten, und wie lassen sich diese bewerten? Wie gut ist die zentrale These der Kontroverse alles in allem begründet? Ist die und die Argumentationshandlung angesichts des Debattenstandes tatsächlich zweckmäßig und rational? Liegt hier eine zirkuläre - und damit fehlerhafte - Argumentation vor? Die klassische Logik, die sogenannte informal logic und argumentationstheoretische Ansätze der Künstlichen Intelligenz bilden Anknüpfungspunkte der Theorie dialektischer Strukturen. Exemplarisch werden die entwickelten argumentationstheoretischen Methoden zur Analyse umfangreicher philosophischer Kontroversen eingesetzt. (shrink)

Climate models don’t give us probabilistic forecasts. To interpret their results, alternatively, as serious possibilities seems problematic inasmuch as climate models rely on contrary-to-fact assumptions: why should we consider their implications as possible if their assumptions are known to be false? The paper explores a way to address this possibilistic challenge. It introduces the concepts of a perfect and of an imperfect credible world, and discusses whether climate models can be interpreted as imperfect credible worlds. That would allow one to (...) use models for possibilistic prediction and salvage widespread scientific practice. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Fußballfans bilden eine eigene Subkultur, die sich selbst noch einmal im Fußballstadion von den anderen Zuschauern als soziale Gruppierung unterscheidet. Ausgehend von Schütz’s Lebensweltbegriff wird die Fankultur als ein geschlossenes Sinngebiet mit einem eigenen Realitätsakzent sowie einem besonderen Erkenntnis- und Erlebnisstil aufgefasst. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die konstitutiven Elemente dieser fanspezifischen Lebenswelt am Beispiel der Fangemeinschaft des FC Energie Cottbus. Die dort beobachteten Rituale, symbolischen Darstellungsmittel, Selbstinszenierungen und Kollektivausdrücke stellen die Konstitutionsbedingungen für einen gemeinsamen Wirklichkeitsentwurf dar. Es wird gezeigt, (...) dass es der Fankultur, trotz der ständigen Spielerwechsel und fortschreitenden Ökonomisierung im Fußball, keineswegs an Vielfalt und identitätsstiftenden Orientierungen fehlt. (shrink)

Neural language models (NLMs) are susceptible to producing inconsistent output. This paper proposes a new diagnosis as well as a novel remedy for NLMs' incoherence. We train NLMs on synthetic text corpora that are created by simulating text production in a society. For diagnostic purposes, we explicitly model the individual belief systems of artificial agents (authors) who produce corpus texts. NLMs, trained on those texts, can be shown to aggregate the judgments of individual authors during pre-training according to sentence-wise vote (...) ratios (roughly, reporting frequencies), which inevitably leads to so-called discursive dilemmas: aggregate judgments are inconsistent even though all individual belief states are consistent. As a remedy for such inconsistencies, we develop a self-training procedure—inspired by the concept of reflective equilibrium—that effectively reduces the extent of logical incoherence in a model's belief system, corrects global mis-confidence, and eventually allows the model to settle on a new, epistemically superior belief state. Thus, social choice theory helps to understand why NLMs are prone to produce inconsistencies; epistemology suggests how to get rid of them. (shrink)

Contribution on Peri ton areskonton philosophois physikon dogmaton (Placita philosophorum), 2nd c. CE, based on a work by Aetius, falsely attributed to Plutarch.

An e-mail interview made by Francisco Guzmán. April 2010.

Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates concerning Hegel, Spinoza, and their relation. Hegel and Spinoza are two of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, and the traditions of thought they inaugurated have been in continuous dialogue and conflict ever since Hegel first criticized Spinoza. Notably, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Idealists aimed to overcome the determinism of Spinoza’s system by securing a place for the freedom of the subject within (...) it, and twentieth-century French materialists such as Althusser and Deleuze rallied behind Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This conflict, or mutual rejection, lives on today in recent discussions about materialism. Contemporary thinkers either make a Hegelian case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death, or in a way that is inspired by Spinoza they abolish the concepts of the subject and negation and argue for pure affirmation and the vitalistic production of differences. Hegel and Spinoza traces the historical roots of these alternatives and shows how contemporary discussions between Heideggerians and Althusserians, Lacanians and Deleuzians are a variation of the disagreement between Hegel and Spinoza. Throughout, Moder persuasively demonstrates that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast but together: as Hegel and Spinoza. (shrink)

As climate policy decisions are decisions under uncertainty, being based on a range of future climate change scenarios, it becomes a crucial question how to set up this scenario range. Failing to comply with the precautionary principle, the scenario methodology widely used in the Third Assessment Report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seems to violate international environmental law, in particular a provision of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. To place climate policy advice on a (...) sound methodological basis would imply that climate simulations which are based on complex climate models had, in stark contrast to their current hegemony, hardly an epistemic role to play in climate scenario analysis at all. Their main function might actually consist in ‘foreseeing future ozone-holes’. In order to argue for these theses, I explain first of all the plurality of climate models used in climate science by the failure to avoid the problem of underdetermination. As a consequence, climate simulation results have to be interpreted as modal sentences, stating what is possibly true of our climate system. This indicates that climate policy decisions are decisions under uncertainty. Two general methodological principles which may guide the construction of the scenario range are formulated and contrasted with each other: modal inductivism and modal falsificationism. I argue that modal inductivism, being the methodology implicitly underlying the third IPCC report, is severely flawed. Modal falsificationism, representing the sound alternative, would in turn require an overhaul of the IPCC practice. (shrink)

Se postula que ciencia y tecnología tienen consecuencias positivas y negativas para la humanidad, cargadas de intención y propósito, y reflejo de las visiones, intenciones, prejuicios y objetivos particulares de cada sociedad. Desde este marco, el trabajo se centra en el campo de la bio/gene/nanomedicina, que busca reparar supuestas discapacidades, incapacidades, enfermedades y defectos, pero instala el dilema ético de quién decide lo que es discapacidad, enfermedad, incapacidad o “defecto”. Propone el autor un camino desde la Declaración sobre la Ciencia (...) de la Conferencia Mundial sobre la Ciencia de la Unesco de 1999. (shrink)

The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change is a highly influential welfare analysis of climate policy measures which has been published in 2006. This paper identifies and systematically assesses the long-term socioeconomic and climatic predictions the Stern Review relies on, and reflects them philosophically. Being a cost-benefit analysis, the Stern Review has to predict the benefits of climate mitigation policies, i.e.the damaging consequences of climate change which might be avoided, as well as the costs of implementing such policies. (...) While distinguishing deterministic, probabilistic, and possibilisitic forecasts, this paper finds that the Review's major predictions severly suffer from a lack of robustness. It argues, moreover, that the use of subjective probabilities as well as the fact/value entanglement pose additional problems. Given our ignorance, this assessment raises finally the question how detailed an analysis of climate policy decisions should reasonably be at all, and whether the argument for acting against climate change is maybe very simple. (shrink)

This article discusses how inference to the best explanation can be justified as a practical meta - argument. It is, firstly, justified as a practical argument insofar as accepting the best explanation as true can be shown to further a specific aim. And because this aim is a discursive one which proponents can rationally pursue in — and relative to — a complex controversy, namely maximising the robustness of one’s position, IBE can be conceived, secondly, as a meta - argument. (...) My analysis thus bears a certain analogy to Sellars ’ well - known justification of inductive reasoning ; it is based on recently developed theories of complex argumentation. (shrink)