What kind of a science is psychoanalysis? What constitutes its domain? What truth claims does it maintain? In this unique and scholarly work concerning the nature of psychoanalysis, Gunnar Karlsson guides his arguments through phenomenological thinking which, he claims, can be seen as an alternative to the recent attempts to cite neuropsychoanalysis as the answer to the crisis of psychoanalysis. Karlsson criticizes this effort to ground psychoanalysis in biology and neurology and emphasizes instead the importance of defining the psychoanalytic (...) domain from the vantage point of the character of consciousness. His understanding of the unconscious, the libido and the death drive offer new insights into the nature of psychoanalysis, and he also illuminates and develops neglected dimensions such as consciousness and self-consciousness. Karlsson's approach to psychoanalysis is rigorous yet original, and this book fills an intellectual gap with implications for both the theoretical understanding and clinical issues of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this narrow-focused text is to argue against the claim that the appresentation of unperceived features of objects that is implied in perceptual intentionality presupposes a reference to perceptions other subjects could have of these objects. This claim, as it has been defended by Dan Zahavi, rests upon an erroneous supposition about the modal status of the perceptual possibilities to which the perceived object refers, which shall not be interpreted as effectively realizable but as mere de jure possibilities, (...) perceptions that could have been realized in principle, but that are maybe beyond one’s reach considering one’s concrete factual powers and opportunities. Horizontal intentionality is better accounted for in terms of perceptions that one could have had because of one’s embodied character and the always open possibility of occupying another position with respect to the object. This modal ubiquity which is inherent to one’s being-in-space is what supports the field of de jure possibil... (shrink)

My purpose in this article is to raise the problem of meaning in sport. The problem has two aspects. One is whether sport has any meaning in itself. The other is about how sport can be a part of a...

How do people survive under extreme conditions? Will selfish, non-cooperating free-rider types – the solo players – have the best chances of surviving? Or would cooperating, hard-working types – the team players – have higher chances? All morale put aside, it is interesting to know whether non-cooperation or cooperation pays off in a game characterized by scarcity and hard competition for survival. A study of people in such a Hobbesian state of nature can also teach us important lessons about social (...) dynamics in contemporary, prosperous societies. An interesting case of ‘The survival game’ can be found in Solzhenitsyn’s (1963 [1962]) self-biographical book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, depicting life in a Soviet Gulag prison camp in Siberia January 1951. We use Solzhenitsyn’s work as evidence of the interplay between five player types among prisoners: Cooperative blind-riders (BRs), hard-riders (HRs) and tough-riders (TRs), i.e. the so-called ‘toilers’; non-cooperative easy-riders (ERs), looked upon by the toilers as ‘bastards’, ‘screws’ and ‘errand boys’; and finally Low-riders (LRs), comprising ‘goners’ and ‘jackals’. The main research question addresses the successfulness of the survival strategies of the five player types. Apart from a Multiple Player Approach (MPA) that may be seen as a further development of second-generation theory of collective action (Ostrom & Ahn, 2009), we apply Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical theory on our case. Hence, we argue that impression management at two different ‘stages’ – the Brigade stage and the Camp stage – is crucial for survival for hard-riding as well as for easy-riding players, in particular strategic masking. Seeking to unite Goffman and game-theoretic MPA, our overall purpose is to make a theoretical contribution to “game-related sociology” (Swedberg, 2001). (shrink)

The chapter begins by introducing the problem of free will and moral responsibility and the standard terminology used to frame it in the philosophical context. It turns to the contributions of experimental philosophy and the prospects for the use of this methodology in the area. People believe that experimental philosophy is relevant to the traditional debates. The chapter discusses an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions proposed by Eddy nahmias and colleagues, and the role that empirical studies might have in the (...) assessment of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism. It also presents the suggestion that empirical studies reveal that core criteria for moral responsibility ought not to be applied invariantly across different sorts of cases. A number of philosophers argue that the results of surveys provide confirming evidence for a meta‐view about moral theories, variantism. (shrink)

International scientific collaboration has increased both in volume and importance. In this article, the authors study the interpretation of macro-level data on international co authorship collaboration. They address such questions as how one might explain country- to-country differences in the rates of international coauthorship, networks of interna tional scientific collaboration among countries, and patterns of international collaboration in scientific fields. Attention is drawn to cognitive, social, historical, geopolitical, and economic factors as potential determinants of the observed patterns. They present a (...) methodology that gives one a measure, independent of size, of countries'propensities to collaborate internationally. (shrink)

Taking up ordinal notations derived from Skolem hull operators familiar in the field of infinitary proof theory we develop a toolkit of ordinal arithmetic that generally applies whenever ordinal structures are analyzed whose combinatorial complexity does not exceed the strength of the system of set theory. The original purpose of doing so was inspired by the analysis of ordinal structures based on elementarity invented by T.J. Carlson, see [T.J. Carlson, Elementary patterns of resemblance, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 108 (...) 19–77], [G. Wilken, Σ1-Elementarity and Skolem hull operators, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 145 162–175], and [G. Wilken, Assignment of ordinals to patterns of resemblance, The Journal of Symbolic Logic ]. Within the arithmetical context laid bare in this work, the “-numbers” play a role analogous to the role epsilon numbers play in the ordinal arithmetic based on the notion of Cantor normal form. (shrink)

This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...) entities seem to be free to either reach their ends or not, it was assumed that they could not be deterministic. Mayr’s modern account of teleonomy adheres to this basic assumption. Yet, the seeming tension between teleology and determinism is illusory because freedom and agency do not, in fact, conflict with a deterministic world. To show this, we present a taxonomy of different types of freedom that we see as inherent in teleological systems. Then we show that our taxonomy of freedom, which is crucial to understanding teleology, shares many of the features of a philosophical position regarding free will that is known in the contemporary literature as ‘compatibilism’. This position maintains that an agent is free when the sources of its actions are internal, when the agent itself is the deterministic cause of those actions. Our view shows that freedom is not only indispensable to teleology, but also that, contrary to common intuitions, there is no conflict between teleology and causal determinism. (shrink)

The ordinary space is continuously cluttered with bodies and constantly, when we move, we must maneuver, push and shove, walk around, make space. The awareness of having to operate in a limited space, where the places are always already occupied, is sustained by a special mode of appearing of ordinary space: the occupancy field. A phenomenological analysis of the occupancy field demonstrates that: the format in which space presents itself in ordinary perception is marked by our awareness of occupying space (...) with our body and having to squeeze it somewhere each time we move; bodies and space are co-dependent on an intentional level: ordinary space has, by a sense of vacuum, a mode of appearing which is indissociable from the phenomenological structure of bodies; the presentation of space is dependent on an anticipation of possibilities: it is because the situation is considered from the opportunities and constraints on the possible set up by our body that a space presents itself to us. We could not experience space if our perceptual apparatus took a mere snapshot of the current states of aff airs, if through it we had only access to the state in which the environment is at time t. To experience space means fundamentally to be ahead of one’s time, consider the present not from the future, but from the possible. (shrink)

In "Criticism and the History of Science" Karl Popper's falsificationist conception of science is developed and defended against criticisms raised by Thomas ...

Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological explanation. No (...) consensus has seemed possible in this debate. This paper takes a different approach. It argues that teleology is a perfectly acceptable scientific notion, but that the debate took an unfortunate misstep some 2300 years ago, one that has confused things ever since. The misstep comes in the beginning of Aristotle’s Physics when a distinction is made between two types of teleological explanation. One type pertains to artifacts while the other pertains to entities in nature. For Aristotle, artifacts are guided by something external to themselves, human intentions, while natural entities are guided by an internal nature. We aim to show that there is, in fact, only one type of legitimate teleological explanation, what Aristotle would have considered a variant of an artifact model, where entities are guided by external fields. We begin with an analysis of the differences between the two types of explanation. We then examine some evidence in Aristotle’s biological works suggesting that on account of his natural-artifactual distinction, he encountered difficulties in trying to provide teleological accounts of spontaneous generation. And we show that it is possible to resolve these difficulties with a more robust version of an artifact model of teleology, in other words, with an externalist teleology. This is McShea’s model, in which goal-directed entities are guided by a nested series of upper-level fields. To explain teleological behavior, this account invokes only external physical forces rather than mysterious internal natures. We then consider how field theory differs from other efforts to naturalize teleology in biology. And finally, we show how the account enables us to grapple with certain difficult cases – genes and intentions – where, even in biology today, the temptation to posit internal natures remains strong. (shrink)

Actions in sport are intentional in character. They are directed at and are about something. This understanding of intentional action is common in continental as well as analytic philosophy. In sport philosophy, intentionality has received relatively little attention, but has more recently come on the agenda. In addition to what we can call ‘action intentionality,’ studied by philosophers like Searle, the phenomenological approach forwarded by Merleau-Ponty has opened up for a concept of ‘motor intentionality,’ which means a basic bodily attention (...) and relatedness to the surrounding world. This conception is very relevant for the study of bodily actions as we find them in sports. However, there may be even deeper layers. The identification of mirror neurons in the brain has opened up for a type of almost ‘muscular intentionality’ whereby a simple bodily movement like grasping a cup to drink seems to be intentionally controlled and orchestrated. My goal in this paper is to discuss the relation between different levels of intentionality, such as a) ‘action intentionality’ operating at a conscious cognitive level, as for instance, when a player shoots a goal in football, b) the ‘motor intentionality’ directing the bodily movements when kicking the ball, and c) the muscular ‘mirror neuron intentionality’ of the goal keeper which is in operation when the keeper is seeing how the kicker’s foot hits the ball. How are these different layers of intentionality related and how can they give a more nuanced and integrated picture of the body–mind in action in sports? (shrink)

Stephanie Collins’ Group Duties offers interesting new arguments and brings together numerous interconnected issues that have hitherto been treated separately. My critical commentary focuses on two particularly original and central claims of the book: (1) Only groups that are united under a group-level decision-making procedure can bear duties. (2) Attributions of duties to other groups should be understood as attributions of “coordination duties” to each member of the group, duties to take steps responsive to the others with a view to (...) the group’s φ-ing or express willingness to do so. In support of the first claim, Collins argues that only groups that can make decisions can bear duties, and that the ability to make decisions requires the relevant sort of decision-making procedure. I suggest that both parts of this argument remain in need of further support. I furthermore argue that Collins’ account of coordination duties gets certain kinds of cases wrong, and suggest that attributions of duties to groups without decision-making procedures are more plausibly understood as attributing shared duties. (shrink)

In the Concept of Mind from 1949 Gilbert Ryle distinguished between knowing how and knowing that. What was Ryle’s basic idea and how is the discussion going on in philosophy today? How can sport philosophy use the idea of knowing how? My goal in this paper is first to bring Ryle and the post-Rylean discussion to light and then show how phenomenology can give some input to the discussion. The article focuses especially on the two main interpretations of knowing how, (...) intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. In the second part of the article I discuss how views from phenomenology and philosophy of mind can enrich and widen our understanding of what knowing how means in relation to sport practices. It is argued that knowing how is not limited to athletic abilities but includes knowledge of how the environing world operates in relation to athletic action. (shrink)

The Bachmann-Howard structure, that is the segment of ordinal numbers below the proof theoretic ordinal of Kripke-Platek set theory with infinity, is fully characterized in terms of CARLSON’s approach to ordinal notation systems based on the notion of Σ1-elementarity.

According to a view defended by Hubert Dreyfus and others, elite athletes are totally absorbed while they are performing, and they act non-deliberately without any representational or conceptual thinking. By using both conceptual clarification and phenomenological description the article criticizes this view and maintains that various forms of conscious thinking and acting plays an important role before, during and after competitive events. The article describes in phenomenological detail how elite athletes use consciousness in their actions in sport; as planning, attention, (...) thinking, decision, and monitoring of performance. Elite athletes do not act as zombies. It is concluded that qualia and phenomenal consciousness are important phenomena in elite sport. (shrink)

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives. A spectacular reading (...) of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh , and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience—to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art. (shrink)

When is it fitting for an agent to feel guilt over an outcome, and for others to be morally indignant with her over it? A popular answer requires that the outcome happened because of the agent, or that the agent was a cause of the outcome. This paper reviews some of what makes this causal-explanatory view attractive before turning to two kinds of problem cases: cases of collective harms and cases of fungible switching. These, it is argued, motivate a related (...) but importantly different answer: What is required for fitting guilt and indignation is that the agent is relevantly implicated in that outcome: that the agent’s morally substandard responsiveness to reasons, or substandard caring, is relevantly involved in a normal explanation of it. This answer, it is further argued, makes sense because when an agent’s substandard caring is so involved, the outcome provides a lesson against such caring, a lesson central to the function of guilt and indignation. (shrink)

This paper examines two senses of the term “transgender:” transgender as across the gender binary and transgender as beyond the gender binary. Explored are the difficulties this ambiguity poses to transpeople. In short, using the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Richard Rorty, this paper argues that the meaning of “transgender” must simultaneously embrace both senses of the term, rather than one or the other.

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range (...) of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering. (shrink)

My perspective in this paper is to look at sport and other physical activities as a way of exploring and experimenting with the environing world. The human being is basically the homo movens – born...

ABSTRACTSince the 1960s environmental problems have increasingly been on the agenda in Western countries. Global warming and climate change have increased concerns among scientists, politicians and the general population. While both elite sport and mass sport are part of the consumer culture that leads to ecological problems, sport philosophers, with few exceptions, have not discussed what an ecologically acceptable sport would look like. My goal in this article is to present a radical model of ecological sport based on Arne Naess’s (...) version of deep ecology called ecosophyT. After outlining the Naessian ecocentric view of biospheric egalitarianism I present the consequences for sport and physical activities. I also give examples from Arne Naess’s own practice of sport which was guided by the principle ‘Richness in ends, simplicity in means!’ I discuss whether Naessian deep ecological sport is what we will all end up with after the ecocatastrophe or whether it can be an inspiring ideal for many of us right now. (shrink)

Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i den norske idrettsmodellen der topp og bredde hører sammen, og der toppidrettsutøvere uvegerlig blir rollemodeller for barn og unge. Den moderne toppidretten er i økende grad preget av egoistiske holdninger der det dreier seg hele tiden om å skaffe seg fordeler. I denne artikkelen tar jeg opp egoisme, rettferdighet og sjenerøsitet som tre grunnleggende holdninger i idrettskonkurranser og drøfter hvorvidt man med inspirasjon fra sjenerøsitetsidealer og praktiske eksempler kan tenke seg en toppidrett som i større grad (...) bygger på sjenerøsitet. Artikkelen starter med en kort presentasjon av den norske idrettsmodellen og jeg skisserer deretter tre kriterier som alle idrettskonkurranser må oppfylle: 1) spille for å vinne, 2) klare regler som følges, og 3) respekt for konkurrenter. Deretter presenterer jeg egoisme, fairness og sjenerøsitet som tre mulige grunnholdninger, og de implikasjonene de har i en idrettslig sammenheng. Etter en gjennomgang av den grunnleggende egoismen i dagens toppidrett, som infiserer ikke bare utøveren, men også hele systemet rundt utøveren, diskuteres muligheten for å utvikle holdninger basert på sjenerøsitet. Det nevnes tre kilder til inspirasjon; engelsk overklassesport, Nietzsches tanker om den overlegne mester, og Arne Næss' sportspraksis og hans saklighetslære for gode diskusjoner. Deretter presenteres empiriske eksempler på sjenerøsitet og hva en spillteoretisk analyse av ulike holdninger gir som resultat. Jeg konkluderer med at en endring i retning av sjenerøsitet vil gi en rikere toppidrett og et bedre grunnlag for en helhetlig idrettsmodell.Nøkkelord: etikk, idrett, egoisme, rettferdighet, sjenerøsitetEnglish summary: From egoism to generosity – can elite sport be reformed?The Norwegian sport model can be visualized as a pyramid with mass sport at the base and elite sport at the top. This means that elite athletes become role models for children and young athletes. However, modern elite sport is increasingly characterized by egoistic attitudes where the goal is to acquire advantages that the other athletes do not have. The article discusses egoism, fairness and generosity as three fundamental attitudes in sporting competitions and discusses whether it is possible to develop an elite sport that is based on generosity to a greater extent than now. The article starts with a presentation of the Norwegian sport model and then sketches three criteria that every sporting competition must fulfill, 1) play to win, 2) clear rules that must be complied with, 3) respect for fellow competitors and opponents. Then there is a delineation of egoism, fairness and generosity as three possible attitudes and the implications they have in the context of sport. Egoism seems to be the basic attitude in elite sport today and it infuses not only the athletes but the whole system around them. The article then looks into the possibilities for generosity in elite sport and draws inspiration from three quite different sources; 1) British upper-class sport in the 19th century, 2) Nietzsche's views of the superior and brilliant masters, and 3) the philosopher Arne Næss' sport philosophy and his rules for good academic debates. This is followed by empirical examples of generosity and a game theoretical illustration of the consequences of egoism and generosity. The conclusion is that a change in the direction of generosity will lead to a richer and more meaningful elite sport and provide a better basis for an organic sport model. (shrink)

This book takes a stand against the narrowing focus of (German) jurisprudence on state law, rooted in the history of the territorially organised nation state. In the shadow of this tradition, state( -hood) law was only conceived of as state law. However, a gradual decoupling of state and law is observable - not least because of globalisation - which inevitably entails a pluralisation of legal regulations. Jurisprudence has to react to this, if it wants to remain relevant.

This paper lists a number of puzzles for shared obligations – puzzles about the role of individual influence, individual reasons to contribute towards fulfilling the obligation, about what makes someone a member of a group sharing an obligation, and the relation between agency and obligation – and proposes to solve them based on a general analysis of obligations. On the resulting view, shared obligations do not presuppose joint agency.

Recently, a number of people have argued that certain entities embodied by groups of agents themselves qualify as agents, with their own beliefs, desires, and intentions; even, some claim, as moral agents. However, others have independently argued that fully-fledged moral agency involves a capacity for reactive attitudes such as guilt and indignation, and these capacities might seem beyond the ken of “collective” or “ corporate ” agents. Individuals embodying such agents can of course be ashamed, proud, or indignant about what (...) the agent has done. But just as an entity needs to have its own beliefs, desires, and intentions to qualify as a bona fide agent, the required capacity for reactive attitudes is a capacity to have one’s own reactive attitudes. If fully-fledged moral agency requires reactive attitudes, the corporate agent must itself be capable of guilt and indignation. In this paper, we argue that at least certain corporate agents are. Or, more precisely, we argue that if there are bona fide corporate agents, these agents can have the capacities that are both associated with guilt and indignation and plausibly required for moral agency; in particular certain epistemic and motivational capacities. (shrink)