There is a rapid growth in published knowledge about different aspects of age and aging. While this is highly welcome, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up even with the main insights provided by this literature. Our review thus aims to provide a compact overview of current social science research in three major domains of older people’s life: health, families, and work. Moreover, we briefly discuss some theoretical issues and introduce the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). (...) The research findings discussed here demonstrate both the challenges and opportunities lying ahead of us as life expectancy is increasing steadily and as the proportion of older people in our societies will grow further. More generally, we find a great value of life course and cross-nationally comparative perspectives in aging research. We conclude with an outlook on perspectives for future studies in this field. (shrink)

In this timely and wide-ranging study, Karsten Stueber argues that empathy is epistemically central for our folk-psychological understanding of other agents--that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy (...) thesis.Empathy, regarded at the beginning of the twentieth century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the plausible philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance.Crucial in this context is his defense of the assumption, very much contested in contemporary philosophy of mind, that the notion of rational agency is at the core of folk psychology. Stueber then discusses the contemporary debate between simulation theorists--who defend various forms of the empathy thesis--and theory theorists. In distinguishing between basic and reenactive empathy, he provides a new interpretive framework for the investigation into our mindreading capacities. Finally, he considers epistemic objections to empathy raised by the philosophy of social science that have been insufficiently discussed in contemporary debates. Empathy theorists, Stueber writes, should be prepared to admit that, although empathy can be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, there are certain limitations in its ability to make sense of other agents; and there are supplemental theoretical strategies available to overcome these limitations. (shrink)

In this paper I defend an account of the nature of propositional content according to which the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is a certain type of action a speaker performs in uttering that sentence. On this view, the semantic contents of proper names turn out to be types of reference acts. By carefully individuating these types, it is possible to provide new solutions to Frege’s puzzles about names in identity- and belief-sentences.

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content, according to which the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. He explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

It is common to define egalitarianism in terms of an inequality ordering, which is supposed to have some weight in overall evaluations of outcomes. Egalitarianism, thus defined, implies that levelling down makes the outcome better in respect of reducing inequality; however, the levelling down objection claims there can be nothing good about levelling down. The priority view, on the other hand, does not have this implication. This paper challenges the common view. The standard definition of egalitarianism implicitly assumes a context. (...) Once this context is made clear, it is easily seen that egalitarianism could be defined alternatively in terms of valuing a benefit to a person inversely to how well off he is relative to others. The levelling down objection does not follow from this definition. Moreover, the common definition does not separate egalitarian orderings from prioritarian ones. It is useful to do this by requiring that on egalitarianism, additively separable orderings should be excluded. But this requirement is stated as a condition on the alternative definition of egalitarianism, from which the levelling down objection does not follow. (shrink)

Despite its linguistic roots in ancient Greek, the concept of empathy is of recent intellectual heritage. Yet its history has been varied and colorful, a fact that is also mirrored in the multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. In its philosophical heyday at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, empathy had been hailed as the primary means for gaining knowledge of other minds and as the method (...) uniquely suited for the human sciences, only to be almost entirely neglected philosophically for the rest of the century. Only recently have philosophers become again interested in empathy in light of the debate about our folk psychological mindreading capacities. In the second half of the last century, the task of addressing empathy was mainly left to psychologists who thematized it as a psychological phenomenon and process to be studied by the method of the empirical sciences. Particularly, it has been studied by social psychologists as a phenomenon assumed to be causally involved in creating prosocial attitudes and behavior. Nevertheless, within psychology it is at times difficult to find agreement of how exactly one should understand empathy; a fact of which psychologists themselves have become increasingly aware. The purpose of this entry is to clarify the concept of empathy by surveying its history in various philosophical and psychological discussions and by indicating why empathy was and should be regarded to be of such central importance in understanding human agency in ordinary contexts, in the human sciences and for the constitution of ourselves as social and moral agents. (shrink)

Der demographische Wandel, die Veränderung von Akteurskonstellationen und Besitzverhältnissen, Suburbanisierungsprozesse, die Energiewende sowie neue private und öffentliche Nutzungsansprüche an Raum und Landschaft schaffen neue kulturelle, soziale, ökonomische, ökologische und politische Herausforderungen. Architektonische und planerische Disziplinen sind daher zur Zusammenarbeit aufgerufen, um die Herausforderungen der Zukunft bei der nachhaltigen Gestaltung, Nutzung und Schonung einer weiterhin bewohnbaren Welt annehmen, begleiten und mitsteuern zu können. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes gehen daher der Frage nach, ob und wie das wissenschaftstheoretische Konzept der Transdisziplinarität so genutzt (...) werden kann, dass die aspekthaften Ergebnisse der vielen Landschaftsforschungen und die ausserwissenschaftlichen Ansprüche lebensweltlicher Akteure wieder zusammengeführt und auf gemeinsame Forschungsperspektiven und Anwendungskontexte hin organisiert werden können. (shrink)

The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Geary suggests that implicit mathematical principles exist across human cultures and transcend sex differences. Is such knowledge present in animals as well, and is it sufficient to account for performance in all species, including our own? I attempt to trace the implications of Gearys target article for comparative psychology, questioning the exclusion of “subitizing” in describing human mathematical performance, and asking whether human researchers function as cultural agents with animals, elevating their implicit knowledge to secondary domains of numerical performance.

To date, a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship has done little to clarify either the why or the how of empathy. Preston & de Waal attempt to remedy this, although it remains unclear whether empathy consists of two discrete processes, or whether a perceptual and motor component are joined in some sort of behavioral inevitability. Although it is appealing to offer a neuroanatomy of empathy, the present level of neuropsychology may not support such reductionism.

The seventeenth-century Spanish Dominican Cosme de Lerma authored numerous philosophical works, some ofwhich were posthumously reorganised into a Cursus philosophicus, intended as an arts course for the Dominican studia in Italy. Lerma’s philosophical project consisted in developing the doctrines proposed a century earlier by his fellow Dominican friar Domingo de Soto. Through analysing Lerma’s Compendium and Disputationes based on Soto’s Summulae and Lerma’s Commentaries on Aristotle’s Logic, this paper explores three issues: first, Lerma’s axiomatic theory of inference, including the development (...) of Soto’s project of relevance logic (relating to the analysis of the paradoxes of implication); second, the question whether there are different degrees of validity (answered negatively by Lerma); third, Lerma’s psychology of inference, which offers an interpretation of human inferential behaviour and its limitations in terms of the scholastic theories of causation and natural agency. (shrink)

In 1910 Bertrand Russell abandoned the theory of propositions that he advocated in 1903 in The Principles of Mathematics because of the problem of the unity of the proposition. This is the problem of explaining how the constituents of a proposition are bound together into a unified, representational whole. This problem has largely been ignored by contemporary advocates of Russellian propositions. I argue that this problem is the result of the Fregean distinction between content and force, the arguments for the (...) content-force distinction are inconclusive and there is independent linguistic evidence against the content-force distinction. For these reasons I think that Frege's distinction between content and force should be abandoned; this is the main negative conclusion of the dissertation. ;The main positive component of the dissertation is an account of structured propositions that individuates propositions in terms of force or mood. On the account I defend, propositions are types of representational actions or states. The proposition expressed by 'Jones loves Smith', for example, is a type of representational state, tokens of which are particular assertions that Jones loves Smith or belief-states that Jones loves Smith. The proposition expressed by 'Does Jones love Smith?', on the other hand, is a type of interrogative action or state, tokens of which are instances of asking whether Jones loves Smith or wondering whether Jones loves Smith. This account solves the problem of the unity of proposition by locating the unifying element in a proposition in an act of the subject. In addition, this account provides an empirical foundation for semantics. A semantic theory, on this view, is a theory of what speakers do with sentences in contexts. To say that a sentence S expresses a proposition p in context c is to record a fact about the literal and direct illocutionary act that could be performed using S in c. (shrink)

Even when we confine ourselves to poetry, we have to agree with Ortega y Gasset's observation that "the instrument of metaphoric expression can be used for many diverse purposes." It can be used to embellish or ennoble things or persons—Campion's poem offers a good example. Such embellishment need not involve semantic innovation. Metaphors can also function as weapons turned against reality. There are metaphors that negate the referential function of language so successfully that talk about truth or, for that matter, (...) about lattices or lenses seems inappropriate. Yet as poetry pushes towards this extreme, it may acquire a revelatory power all its own: from the ruins of literal sense emerges not a new semantic congruence but a silence that is heard as the language of transcendence. This is not to deny that metaphors can effect semantic change or help to establish a new world. As David Tracy's contribution to this symposium shows, Scripture furnished the most obvious example. Heidegger's claim that poetry establishes the world can indeed be shown to rest on this paradigm. It is a claim that tends to ascribe something of the prophetic power of Scripture to all great poetry. But, although we may long to rediscover the prophet in the poet, to what extent does the scriptural paradigm help to illuminate poetry in general and, more especially, the poetry of this godless age? Most modern poetry has an aesthetic character that is incompatible with a religious world view. Theories of poetic metaphor cannot afford to neglect the history of poetry, just as general theories of metaphor cannot afford to neglect the many uses of metaphor. (shrink)

European theorists of childhood still tend to locate the first positive acknowledgements of childhood as a human developmental period in its own positive right between the 16th and 18th century in Europe. Even though the findings of Ariès have been constantly challenged, it still remains a commonplace, especially within the history of education, to refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau of the 18th century as one of the earliest and most prominent conceptualisers of childhood as a positive period that must not be (...) evaluated in the light of its distance to adulthood but for its inherent value as an important and unmissable period of human life. Such a view is as unhistorical as it is biased and eurocentred. This article endeavours to shed at least a small light on the history of education and of childhood outwith the usual focus. The central objects of examination are the theoretical treatises of Zeami Motokiyo regarding the Noh theatre which have long been recognised as one of the great cultural achievements of humankind. Despite their acknowledged importance, theorists of education have hardly engaged with these treatises even though they present us with a whole theory of education that also embraces a very original and positive theory of childhood. Given that the treatises originate from the 14th-early 15th century, they pre-date everything the typical Western History of Education would bring forth as the beginning of a positive childhood and a pedagogy that acts accordingly. (shrink)

The content of a work of literature, Walter Benjamin reminds us in “The Author as Producer,” is inextricably bound up with its form. Hence, it is hardly astounding that much critical attention has been focused on the proper generic classification of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig . This task, though, has not been easy. Henry Louis Gates, rediscoverer and earliest critic of Our Nig, for example, goes to great length discussing parallels between Wilson’s work and Nina Baym’s ‘overplot’ of the (...) ‘women’s novel,’ before settling on reading it as a new form of distinctly African-American lit- erature that combines “conventions of the sentimental novel with certain key conventions of the slave narratives” . Elizabeth Ammons, by contrast, places Our Nig squarely in the feminist tradition of the sentimental novel and argues that “the ideal of mother love explicit in Uncle Tom’s Cabin operates implicitly in Our Nig.” 4 2 3 Contesting Ammons’ claim, Eric Gardner asserts that Our Nig is not a ‘novel of abolition’ but “a novel about Northern racial issues, a young black woman’s bildungsroman, and, as such, is far from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” 5 Echoing some of Gardner’s points, Elizabeth Breau contends that Our Nig “is actually satiric” and therefore gives an overly “bleak picture of northern antebellum society.” Foregrounding neither Bildung nor “ironic inversions” but the “politics of rage at work in Wilson’s tale,” Julia Stern argues that Our Nig “used the sentimental form to mask a gothic message.” 7 Rejecting Gates’ attempt to posit Our Nig as “a significant beginning of an African-American literary mode, a distinctive first in a century of firsts,” John Ernest wants to read Wilson’s work as a traditional “blend of autobiography and fiction,” hoping to ‘re-place’ it “within the racial, gender, and economic matrix of secular history.” R.J. Ellis, while accepting Gates’ assessment that Our Nig “draw[s] on the genres of sentimental fiction and abolitionist slave narrative,” stresses the ways in which the ‘hybrid’ work “fractures generic boundaries” in order to provide a “full retrieval of Frado’s pain, her experience of body politics.” Lastly, offering a reading that links Our Nig to the Puritan tradition, Elizabeth West argues that Our Nig “manipulates well-known trappings of the conversion narrative” by telling “the story of the heroine’s failed initiation into the community of earthly saints.”. (shrink)

Foucault’s theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of ‘freedom as critique’: Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect upon one’s own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and social institutions. The article develops this concept through a critical discussion of the standard response by Foucault interpreters to the standard objection that Foucault’s thinking obscures freedom. The standard response (...) interprets Foucault’s later works, especially The Subject and Power, as a solution to the problem of freedom. It is mistaken, because it conflates different concepts of freedom that are present in Foucault’s work. By differentiating these concepts, this article proposes a new institutionalist approach to solve the problem of freedom that breaks with the partly anarchist underpinnings of Foucault scholarship: As freedom as critique is not given, but itself a result of subjectification, it entails a demand for ‘modal robustness’ and must therefore be institutionalized. This approach helps to draw out the consequences of Foucault’s thinking on freedom for postfoundationalist democratic theory and the general social-philosophical discussion about freedom. (shrink)

In 1913 Wittgenstein raised an objection to Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment that eventually led Russell to abandon his theory. As he put it in the Tractatus, the objection was that “the correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement,” (5.5422). This objection has been widely interpreted to concern type restrictions on the (...) constituents of judgment. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken and that Wittgenstein’s objection is in fact a form of the problem of the unity of the proposition. (shrink)

James Griffin has considered a form of superiority in value that is weaker than lexical priority as a possible remedy to the Repugnant Conclusion. In this article, I demonstrate that, in a context where value is additive, this weaker form collapses into the stronger form of superiority. And in a context where value is non-additive, weak superiority does not amount to a radical value difference at all. These results are applied on one of Larry Temkin's cases against transitivity. I demonstrate (...) that Temkin appeals to two conflicting notions of aggregation. I then spell out the consequences of these results for different interpretations of Griffin's suggestion regarding population ethics. None of them comes out very successful, but perhaps they nevertheless retain some interest. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem. In two studies with healthy adults, we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via (...) right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks. (shrink)

In deze beschouwing ordent Karsten Harries zijn gedachten over het fenomeen ‘kitsch’. Hij gaat daarbij uit van de vraag of kitsch eigenlijk wel zo afkeurenswaardig is. Of hoort ze bij de menselijke natuur en haar hang naar romantiek en nostalgie? We kwalificeren iets als kitsch als we denken dat het voortkomt uit onoprechtheid en getuigt van slechte smaak. Maar is de nostalgie, het dromerige of stichtelijke van kitsch niet beter dan postmoderne ironie of moedeloosheid? Daar staat tegenover dat kitsch (...) onder het mom van authenticiteit de werkelijkheid afbeeldt, maar deze feitelijk met zijn leugens aan het zicht onttrekt. Iets dergelijks geldt ook voor kitsch en religie: niet langer tracht het kunstwerk een werkelijkheid uit te beelden die ons voorstellingsvermogen te boven gaat, maar het wordt in de plaats van die werkelijkheid gesteld. In de politiek kan eenzelfde esthetisering de werkelijkheid een schijn van betekenis geven die mensen blind maakt voor de menselijkheid van hun medemensen. Niet kitsch, maar alleen het ‘aura’ van kunst kan en moet ons ontvankelijk maken voor deze werkelijkheid, die uitstijgt boven wat de rede kan bevatten. (shrink)

It has become something of a consensus among philosophers of history that historians, in contrast to natural scientists, explain in a narrative fashion. Unfortunately, philosophers of history have not said much about how it is that narratives have explanatory power. they do, however, maintain that a narrative’s explanatory power is sui generis and independent of our empathetic or reenactive capacities and of our knowledge of law-like generalizations. In this article I will show that this consensus is mistaken at least in (...) respect to explanatory strategies used to account for rational agency using the “folk-psychological” framework of intentions, beliefs, desires, and the like. philosophers distinguish insufficiently among different aspects and different types of information needed for a historian to persuasively account for an agent’s behavior in particular circumstances. If one keeps these aspects apart it will become apparent exactly how one should understand the epistemic contribution of empathy, generalizations, and narrative for the explanation of action. (shrink)

The problem of the source of necessity is the problem of explaining what makes necessary truths necessarily true. Simon Blackburn has presented a dilemma intended to show that any reductive, realist account of the source of necessity is bound to fail. Although Blackburn's dilemma faces serious problems, reflection on the form of explanations of necessities reveals that a revised dilemma succeeds in defeating any reductive account of the source of necessity. The lesson is that necessity is metaphysically primitive and irreducible.

Philosophy is a radical inquiry whose task is to interrogate the fundamental assumptions of some given activity, discipline, or set of beliefs. In doing so, philosophical inquiry must attempt to delineate a problem and to develop a method for resolving that problem. However, to be true to its intention, philosophy must be able to examine not only the object of its inquiry but also its own method of interrogation. To accomplish this task, philosophical inquiry must be able to create a (...) distance not only from the assumptions under investigation but also from its own assumptions, which is to say, that it must be able to raise questions about its own method. This self-reflexivity requires that any given philosophical investigation must be examined from an alternative vantage point. Since the assumptions which inform the inquiry are deeply imbedded within a given culture, immanent critique is insufficient. The only way to step outside the boundaries of these cultural presuppositions is to reflect on the given problem from the vantage point of another culture's philosophical tradition. Thus, I argue that philosophical inquiry is unable to go beyond certain limits without being cross-cultural philosophy. I illustrate the way in which cross-cultural philosophy does this with respect to the problem of the self by placing the Western philosophical approach to this problem in dialogue with the Indian Hindu-Buddhist narrative. (shrink)

Ethical evaluation of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease is complicated by results that can be described as involving changes in the patient’s identity. The risk of becoming another person following surgery is alarming for patients, caregivers and clinicians alike. It is one of the most urgent conceptual and ethical problems facing deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease at this time. In our paper we take issue with this problem on two accounts. First, we elucidate what is (...) meant by “becoming another person” from a conceptual point of view. After critically discussing two broad approaches we concentrate on the notion of “individual identity” which centers on the idea of “core attitudes”. Subsequently we discuss several approaches to determine what distinguishes core attitudes from those that are more peripheral. We argue for a “foundational-function model” highlighting the importance of specific dependency relations between these attitudes. Our second aim is to comment on the possibility to empirically measure changes in individual identity and argue that many of the instruments now commonly used in selecting and monitoring DBS-patients are inappropriate for this purpose. Future research in this area is advised combining a conceptual and an empirical approach as a basis of sound ethical appraisal. (shrink)