We introduce a new model of reduction inspired by Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model [Kemeny & Oppenheim 1956] and argue that this model is operative in a “ruthlessly reductive” part of current neuroscience. Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model was quickly rejected in mid-20th-century philosophy of science and replaced by models developed by Ernest Nagel and Kenneth Schaffner [Nagel 1961], [Schaffner 1967]. We think that Kemeny and Oppenheim’s model was correctly rejected, given what a “theory of reduction” was supposed to account for at (...) that time. But their guiding insights about what constitutes scientific reduction—increases in explanatory scope and systematization—reflect actual practices of current reductionistic neuroscience. The key rehabilitative step to make their insights fit current scientific details is to restate them using resources from recent work on causal-mechanistic explanation. We begin with a scientific case study, drawn from the relatively new field of “molecular and cellular cognition”. It provides an explanation of the well-known Ebbinghaus spacing effect on learning and memory in terms of interactions between a transcriptional enhancer protein and its inhibiting phosphatase in neurons recruited into the memory trace. Next we briefly describe some popular models of reduction from mid-20th-century philosophy of science. We point out how these models fail to illuminate key features of our scientific case study. Finally we present our causal-mechanistically updated Kemeny and Oppenheim-inspired model and argue that it nicely accounts for the details of our scientific case study. We close with a remark that will hopefully undercut the surprise many may feel to learn that a long-rejected philosophical account of reduction actually is at work in one of the most prominent reductionistic endeavors in current science. (shrink)

Il lavoro di Kari Palonen è rimasto negli anni una fonte di ispirazione per gli storici concettuali e intellettuali e per i teorici politici. La sua carriera e i suoi contributi lo rendono un interlocutore ideale per una conversazione sulla pratica congiunta della storia concettuale e dello studio del pensiero politico. Questa intervista, condotta da Rosario López e José María Rosales, si è svolta come una delle sessioni del seminario online _On the Joint Practice of Conceptual History and the (...) Study of Political Thought_, organizzato da Concepta: Research Seminars in Conceptual History and Political Thought l’8 e il 9 gennaio 2024. (shrink)

This paper considers a solution to a scenario found in Tom Regan’s Case for Animal Rights, offered by Daniel Kary. Regan considers a case where either one human or any number of dog’s must be sacrificed. He chooses the human because they would be harmed more than any dog would be. This is initially puzzling since Regan claims that humans and dogs have equal inherent value (the objective value as an end that entities have). Kary’s solution argues the human should (...) be saved since their possible experiences have greater intrinsic value (the objective value as an end that experiences have) than those of any number of dogs’. The rationale is that dog experiences are too similar to be additive. The paper acknowledges that Kary’s alternative solution is more plausible than Regan’s, but it ultimately fails to be convincing. (shrink)

The history of concepts has partly replaced the older style of the `history of ideas' and can be extended to a critique of normative political theory and, thereby, understood as an indirect style of political theorizing. A common feature in Quentin Skinner's and Reinhart Koselleck's writings lies in their critique of the unhistorical and depoliticizing use of concepts. This concerns especially the classical contractarian theories, and both authors remark that this still holds for work by their contemporary heirs, such as (...) Rawls, Habermas and other contemporary normative theorists. Conceptual history offers us a chance to turn the contestability, contingency and historicity of the use of concepts into instruments for conceptualizing politics. The alternative, indirect mode of political theorizing Skinner and Koselleck practise consists of a `Verfremdungseffekt', which helps us to distance ourselves from thinking in terms of contemporary paradigms, unquestioned conventions, given constellations of alternatives or implicit value judgements. In the Skinnerian variant the conceptual changes are made intelligible through analysis of the rhetorical redescriptions among the political agents, whereas Koselleck thematizes the differences in the temporal index of concepts. The subversive aspect in the history of concepts consists of the explication and historical variation of the tacit normative content in the use of concepts. (shrink)

This article examines narratives, images, and stories that give insight to everyday experimentation and ethical self‐formation. I use the case of World Vision and its early leaders to unpack genealogies of American evangelical humanitarianism. Rather than seeking to identify American evangelicalism’s normative ethical stance, I aim to expand the discussion in anthropology of ethics on ethical self‐formation through examining the tensions, reflections, and processes of becoming among evangelical humanitarians. In doing so, I examine two focal areas of ethical self‐formation among (...) early World Vision leaders. The first is oscillation between and mixing of passion and compassion frameworks in the American evangelical imagination. Second, I identify a range of temporal frames that evangelicals draw on to make sense of and formulate ethical responses to human needs encountered abroad. (shrink)

It is often maintained that Samuel Pufendorf founded natural equality on human dignity. This article partly questions this interpretation, maintaining that the dignity Pufendorf attributed to human nature did not indicate the Kantian idea of absolute and incomparable worth but only superiority in relation to other animals. This comparative dignity of humanity implied that all humans are equally obliged to obey natural law, but it did not offer a foundation for the similarity of their innate duties. The latter followed from (...) the fundamental principle of natural law, the duty to maintain sociality, and from observations concerning human self-esteem. (shrink)

The rapid change of values in the latter half of the 2Qth century required new ethical answers and considerations in all areas of society (family, corporate world, medicine, biotechnology, etc.). The need for a new »Christian Ethics« in Germany permeated all of society after the collapse of Nazi-ideology and valuesystems. The article shows how Protestant ethics in and around Germany have failed to adress this need. There are two main reasons for the inadequate response. First, the mainstream of Protestant ethics (...) widely refused to offer specifically »Christian« contributions to the moral reconstruction of society, based on a fear that core of Christianity would yet again be utilized as a lable of legitimacy. Secondly, theological ethics were focused on the discourse of principle to an extent that the laboraus work of application was left more or less undone. Protestant ethics did not succeed in making ethical commitments and considerations relevant for specific questions and needs for example in the area of medicine and biotechnological research or in the realm of corporate action and interaction. The lack of applicability and immediate relevance calls for a discourse and collaboration that integrates the ethical disciplines with those members and institutions in society that are confronted with and confronting the ethical challenge. (shrink)

Research on entrepreneurship as a policy discourse has focused mostly on relations between the discourse and targets of the policy, that is, actors intended to become entrepreneurial or entrepreneurs, while the role of policy implementers has received much less attention. The present study examines the ‘rationality’ of entrepreneurship policies by analyzing how actors in charge of the grassroots level policy implementation in the farming context use entrepreneurship discourse and argue for the communicative and interactive viability of their mission. The analysis (...) of stances and positioning in interview talk reveals that policy implementers are active discourse users who, on the one hand, are able to reflect on the dilemmas and problems inherent in their task but, on the other hand, use their rhetorical agency to maintain and defend their mission as promoters of entrepreneurship policy and to save and support their own face as experts. As a result, the implementation emerges as a delicately managed interaction process. (shrink)

Recently, some mechanists have embraced reductionism and some reductionists have endorsed mechanism. However, the two camps disagree sharply about the extent to which mechanistic explanation is a reductionistic enterprise. Reductionists maintain that cellular and molecular mechanisms can explain mental phenomena without necessary appeal to higher-level mechanisms. Mechanists deny this claim. I argue that this dispute turns on whether reduction is a transitive relation. I show that it is. Therefore, mechanistic explanations at the cellular and molecular level explain mental phenomena. I (...) make my case in part by noting that mechanisms at higher levels are composed of mechanisms at lower levels. Compositional relations are transitive. In addition, they are explanatory. I conclude that there are explanatory linkages from cellular and molecular mechanisms to mental phenomena within a hierarchy of nested mechanisms. (shrink)

The current antireductionist consensus rests in part on the indefensibility of the deductive-nomological model of explanation, on which classical reductionism depends. I argue that the DN model is inessential to the reductionist program and that mechanism provides a better framework for thinking about reductionism. This runs counter to the contemporary mechanists’ claim that mechanism is an alternative to reductionism. I demonstrate that mechanists are committed to reductionism, as evidenced by the historical roots of the contemporary mechanist program. This view shares (...) certain core commitments with reductionism. It is these shared commitments that constitute the essential elements of the reductionist program. (shrink)

Quentin Skinner’s thesis ‘that political life itself sets the main problems for the political theorist’ marks a turning point in the study of the history of political thought. The Protestant princes who revised Luther’s doctrine of disobedience in order to save Lutheranism as a political force are the best example of this ‘Skinnerian revolution’ in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. This is in accordance with his claim that principles play a legitimating and innovating role in politics. A tacit implication (...) of the thesis is that we should not only read theorists as politicians but also read politicians as theorists. The politician possesses a special competence in discerning between various types of situation, has a distinct contestational imagination, is a person who is prepared to acknowledge the inherent paradoxes of the situation and who has the capacity to deal politically with limited time. (shrink)

In science as in mathematics, it is popular to know little and resent much about category theory. Less well known is how common it is to know little and like much about set theory. The set theory of almost all scientists, and even the average mathematician, is fundamentally different from the formal set theory that is contrasted against category theory. The latter two are often opposed by saying one emphasizes Substance, the other Form. However, in all known systems of mathematics (...) throughout history, mathematicians have moved fluidly between ideas conceived of as thing-like, property-like, and process-like. On the other hand one way to advance science is to better distinguish between thing, property, and process. All this constitutes a distracting background for those interested in, or distressed by, the possible application of category theory to science, and to mathematics as well. (shrink)

In the majority of research, resettled immigrant and refugee parents are often considered to be less involved with their children’s schooling than majority parents. This study challenges such research positions, based on narrative interviews about parenting in exile conducted with refugee parents resettled in Norway. Cultural psychology and positioning theory have inspired the analyses. The choice of methodology and conceptualisations have brought forth a rich vein of material, which illuminated agency and active positions in the parents’ narratives about involvement with (...) their children’s education. Involvement narratives of success achieved by parents taking action are presented as well as narratives of thwarted agency. Parents’ narrated action includes also involvement outside officialdom, such as informal contact with teachers. It is assumed that the latter involvement forms have become invisible in the majority of earlier research on refugee parents’ school involvement due to methodological choices, and may have contributed to deficit positioning of refugee parents as passive in school involvement. This article’s agency narratives form a sharp contrast to such deficit positioning. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of science have attempted to articulate a theory of non-epistemic emergence that is compatible with mechanistic explanation and incompatible with reductionism. The 2005 account of Fred C. Boogerd et al. has been particularly influential. They argued that a systemic property was emergent if it could not be predicted from the behaviour of less complex systems. Here, I argue that Boogerd et al.'s attempt to ground emergence in complexity guarantees that we will see emergence, but at (...) the cost of rendering it either trivial or epistemic. There are three basic problems. First, neither the measures of complexity explicitly mentioned by Boogerd et al. nor the most popular measures in the literature can do the practical and theoretical work that they assign to complexity. Second, I argue that while the success of their view depends on restricting the base of information available to the reductionist, this cannot be done in a way that is metaphysically neutral with respect to emer.. (shrink)

This book brings together essays dealing with the question of zoopoetics both as an object of study—i.e. texts from various traditions and periods that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, on the relationship between animality, language and representation—and as a methodological problem for animal studies, and, indeed, for literary studies more generally. What can literary animal studies tell us about literature that conventional literary studies might be blind to? How can literary studies resist the tendency to press animals into symbolic service as (...) metaphors and allegories for the human whilst also avoiding a naïve literalism with respect to the literary animal? The volume is divided into three sections: “Texts,” which focuses on the linguistic and metaphorical dimensions of zoopoetics; “Bodies,” which is primarily concerned with mimesis and questions of embodiment, performance, and lived experience; and “Entanglement,” which focuses on interspecies encounters and the complex interplay between word and world that emerges from them. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in the fields of animal studies, area studies and comparative literature, gender studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and the broader field of posthumanism. (shrink)