Modern societies depend on a growing production of scientific knowledge, which is based on the functional differentiation of science into still more specialised scientific disciplines and subdisciplines. This is the basis for the paradox of scientific expertise: The growth of science leads to a fragmentation of scientific expertise. To resolve this paradox, the present paper investigates three hypotheses: 1) All scientific knowledge is perspectival. 2) The perspectival structure of science leads to specific forms of knowledge asymmetries. 3) Such perspectival knowledge (...) asymmetries must be handled through second order perspectives. We substantiate these hypotheses on the basis of a perspectivist philosophy of science grounded in Peircean semiotics and autopoietic systems theory. Perspectival knowledge asymmetries are an unavoidable and necessary part of the growth of scientific knowledge, and more awareness of this fact can help avoid blind and futile struggles between scientific perspectives, and direct efforts toward more appropriate ways of handling these fundamental knowledge asymmetries. Concretely, we show how different kinds of scientific knowledge, expertise, disagreement and learning can be correlated to the perspectival structure of science, and propose how polyocular communication based on observations of the observations made by specialised perspectives can be used to handle such perspectival knowledge asymmetries. This can help overcome the observed problems in carrying out cross-disciplinary research and in the collective use of different kinds of scientific expertise, and thereby make society better able to solve complex, real-world problems. (shrink)

This article addresses the topic of artistic mímēsis, and attempts to illuminate the contemporary discussion between two seemingly irreconcilable positions. The first, framed in a traditional interpretation of Aristotelian texts, considers the work of art as an imitation of nature, finding in it its only rule. The second, supported by a different interpretation, states that, according to Aristotle himself, artistic creativity is fictional, that is, independent of natural reality, and therefore debtor only of the artist’s subjectivity. However, when considering the (...) analogy between téchnē and phýsis, within Aristotle’s teleological worldview, it is possible to notice a kind of “common work” that harmonizes them. In this context, and advancing on the consideration of the mimetic poiésis, the philosopher’s texts allow an interpretation that, without detaching itself from the original naturalness of art and taking it as a guide, opens the horizon to the artist’s creativity. (shrink)

The “post-truth” phenomenon is not primarily a cognitive problem, but a moral or existential problem, a problem of self-deception. But what does this mean? In order to clarify that, two things need to be discussed. First, if the conception of belief is rejected according to which a belief has sense in isolation from the roles it, and the holding of it, plays in our lives, then the problem of self-deception needs to be met as a problem of life. Second, a (...) problem of life is not something that individuals get into all by themselves. In other words, ways of living can be self-deceptive. The task of the text is hence to discuss some of the ways in which truth, belief and self-deception unfold on this non-individual level, specifically on the political one. Keywords: post-truth, self-deception, belief, democracy, Simone Weil. (shrink)

This paper argues that the idea of creative destruction enters the social sciences by way of Friedrich Nietzsche. The term itself is first used by German economist Werner Sombart, who openly acknowledges the influence of Nietzsche on his own economic theory. The roots of creative destruction are traced back to Indian philosophy, from where the idea entered the German literary and philosophical tradition. Understanding the origins and evolution of this key concept in evolutionary economics helps clarifying the contrasts between today’s (...) standard mainstream economics and the Schumpeterian and evolutionary alternative. (shrink)

Wir sind Teil einer Natur, die uns übersteigt - Grund genug, die Natur wieder zum Gegenstand philosophischer Reflexionen zu machen. Durch den Essentialismus-Verdacht schien der Begriff bereits für die Philosophie disqualifiziert. Doch Robert Hugo Ziegler zeigt, gestützt unter anderem auf Lukrez und Spinoza, dass die Natur, sobald man sie ernsthaft ins Auge fasst, alles andere als essentialistisch ist. Er ordnet das philosophische Problem der Natur damit in eine Wiederentdeckung metaphysischer Fragestellungen ein, die er originell vorantreibt - und beweist, dass (...) sich die Philosophie dadurch nicht nur zur bloßen Kommentatorin der Naturwissenschaften machen muss. (shrink)

El texto pretende un desarrollo espistemológico basado en la apropiación crítica de del marxismo de la "introducción" de 1857, y de algunos autores que, más tarde, han llevado a cabo profundizaciones metodológicas y espistemológicas, como Galvano della Volpe, Karel Kosik y Erns Bloch, entre otros. Este libro constituye una reflexión epismológica en torno al concepto de razón crítica; busca transformarlo en el núcleo de una metodología dinámica que sea capaz de aprehender la realidad social, heterogénea y en constante movimiento.

My purpose in this article is to provide a reconstruction of the mechanics of philosophical analysis that Wittgenstein carried out in “On Certainty”. I will show that this analysis is based, specifically, on an appeal to a wide propositional typology that serves to evaluate and diagnose Moore’s propositions. To this end, I shall first explain how common readings of the methodological issues in “On Certainty” fail. Secondly, I focus on the mechanics of analysis found in paragraphs 1-65, specifically the analysis (...) of three sentences: “There are physical objects”, “I know that there is a hand here” and “here the mistake is impossible”. Thirdly, I proceed to identify different stages of the method and justify in what sense the strategic core of such research is the table of propositional typologies. (shrink)

“Ex nihilo nihil fit” é uma máxima da metafísica e da teologia medievais que, digamos, tinha como finalidade ajudar na organização do inventário de uma herança cultural cujas bases não eram compatíveis com aquelas do pensamento cristão no qual o universo é Criação de um Criador. A ideia de que “do nada, nada vem” pode ser talvez identificada como a ideia central do novo livro do professor Ronai Rocha, da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, intitulado Escola partida: ética e política (...) na sala de aula. (shrink)

No hay duda que la cuestión de los trascendentales y su posible distinción atrajo la atención de los pensadores del siglo XIII. Sin embargo, este tema siguió caminos diversos. En tal sentido, la Summa Halensis propone un abordaje que no sólo delimita cada transcendental en sí, sino que además los incorpora al plano soteriológico humano. Así, el presente trabajo se ocupará de ambos aspectos.

(1997). Introduction: “Poohness”; or, of Universals, paradigms, and literature. The European Legacy: Vol. 2, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 199-205.

We are witnessing a return of the real which philosophy seems illequipped to handle. I argue (1) that this return of the real must be read as a rejection of those philosophical tendencies which were prevalent in the past decades and which I call philosophies of mediation: They supplanted all references to something real by the sole reference to those processes in which reality was supposed to be given or shaped (in interpretations, linguistic structures, historical or social conditions, media…). The (...) current urgency of the question of the real indicates that those philosophies have lost credibility. On the other hand (2), the contemporary attempts to resuscitate philosophical realism cannot be considered satisfactory either. It is curiously the real itself they fail to fully appreciate. All in all (3), the return of the real has to be interpreted as the effect of an event that has little to do with philosophy, namely the return of politics. (shrink)

The persistence of multiple educational pathways into the nursing profession continues to occupy scholars internationally. In the Netherlands, various groups within the Dutch healthcare sector have tried to differentiate nursing practice on the basis of educational backgrounds for over 50 years. Proponents argue that such reforms are needed to retain bachelor‐trained nurses, improve quality of care and strengthen nurses' position in the sector. Opponents have actively resisted reforms because they would mainly benefit bachelor‐trained nurses and neglect practical experience and technical (...) skills. This historical case study aims to provide insight in this apparent stalemate. Our analysis of this debate is informed by literature on institutional work and current debates within the historiography of nursing. This study contributes to a better understanding of this contemporary debate by examining a broader timeframe than is usually studied, and by highlighting nurses' roles in complex processes of change. We argue that, rather than being stuck in their professional development, different groups of nurses have forged their own path forward in their professional development, albeit via different strategies. (shrink)

"A book from the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics." Includes bibliographical references (p. [141]-195) and index.

This collection of essays, Global Bioethics: The Collapse of Consensus, deals with the issue of the repeated failure of attempts to derive a universal set of ...

Are we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them (...) to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear. (shrink)

We elaborate on the approach to syllogistic reasoning based on “case identification” (Stenning & Oberlander, 1995; Stenning & Yule, 1997). It is shown that this can be viewed as the formalisation of a method of proof that dates back to Aristotle, namely proof by exposition ( ecthesis ), and that there are traces of this method in the strategies described by a number of psychologists, from St rring (1908) to the present day. We hypothesised that by rendering individual cases explicit (...) in the premises, the chance that reasoners would engage in a proof by exposition would be enhanced, and thus performance improved. To do so, we used syllogisms with singular premises (e.g., this X is Y ). This resulted in a uniform increase in performance as compared to performance on the associated standard syllogisms. These results cannot be explained by the main theories of syllogistic reasoning in their current state. (shrink)

Nietzsche's impact on the world of culture, philosophy, and the arts is uncontested, but his political thought remains mired in controversy. By placing Nietzsche back in his late-nineteenth-century German context, Nietzsche's Great Politics moves away from the disputes surrounding Nietzsche's appropriation by the Nazis and challenges the use of the philosopher in postmodern democratic thought. Rather than starting with contemporary democratic theory or continental philosophy, Hugo Drochon argues that Nietzsche's political ideas must first be understood in light of Bismarck's (...) policies, in particular his "Great Politics," which transformed the international politics of the late nineteenth century. Nietzsche's Great Politics shows how Nietzsche made Bismarck's notion his own, enabling him to offer a vision of a unified European political order that was to serve as a counterbalance to both Britain and Russia. This order was to be led by a "good European" cultural elite whose goal would be to encourage the rebirth of Greek high culture. In relocating Nietzsche's politics to their own time, the book offers not only a novel reading of the philosopher but also a more accurate picture of why his political thought remains so relevant today. -- from dust jacket. (shrink)

Much evidence has accumulated in favor of such a dual view of reasoning. There is however some vagueness in the way the two systems are characterized. Instead of a principled distinction, we are presented with a bundle of contrasting features - slow/fast, automatic/controlled, explicit/implicit, associationist/rule based, modular/central - that, depending on the specific dual process theory, are attributed more or less exclusively to one of the two systems. As Evans states in a recent review, “it would then be helpful to (...) have some clear basis for this distinction”; he also suggests that “we might be better off talking about type 1 and type 2 processes” rather than systems. We share the intuitions that drove the development of dual system theories. Our goal here is to propose in the same spirit a principled distinction between two types of inferences: ‘intuitive inference’ and ‘reflective inference’. We ground this distinction in a massively modular view of the human mind where metarepresentational modules play an important role in explaining the peculiarities of human psychological evolution. We defend the hypothesis that the main function of reflective inference is to produce and evaluate arguments occurring in interpersonal communication. This function, we claim, helps explain important aspects of reasoning. We review some of the existing evidence and argue that it gives support to this approach. (shrink)

A cognitive architecture aimed at cumulative learning must provide the necessary information and control structures to allow agents to learn incrementally and autonomously from their experience. This involves managing an agent's goals as well as continuously relating sensory information to these in its perception-cognition information processing stack. The more varied the environment of a learning agent is, the more general and flexible must be these mechanisms to handle a wider variety of relevant patterns, tasks, and goal structures. While many researchers (...) agree that information at different levels of abstraction likely differs in its makeup and structure and processing mechanisms, agreement on the particulars of such differences is not generally shared in the research community. A dual processing architecture has been proposed as a model of cognitive processing, and they are often considered as responsible for low- and high-level information, respectively. We posit that cognition is not binary in this way and that knowledge at any level of abstraction involves what we refer to as neurosymbolic information, meaning that data at both high and low levels must contain both symbolic and subsymbolic information. Further, we argue that the main differentiating factor between the processing of high and low levels of data abstraction can be largely attributed to the nature of the involved attention mechanisms. We describe the key arguments behind this view and review relevant evidence from the literature. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt, one of the most influential legal and political thinkers of the twentieth century, is known chiefly for his work on international law, sovereignty, and his doctrine of political exception. This book argues that greater prominence should be given to his early work in legal studies. Schmitt himself repeatedly identified as a jurist, and Hugo E. Herrera demonstrates how for Schmitt, law plays a key role as an intermediary between ideal, conceptual theory and the messiness and complexity of (...) practical, concrete situations. Law is concerned precisely with balancing the extremes of theory and reality, and in this respect, Schmitt associates it with philosophical thinking broadly as being able to understand and explain the tensions in human experience. Reviewing and analyzing prevailing interpretations of Schmitt by Jacques Derrida, Heinrich Meier, and others, Herrera argues that the importance of Schmitt's legal framework is both significant and overlooked. (shrink)