In this paper, a general perspective on criteria of identity of kinds of objects is developed. The question of the admissibility of impredicative or circular identity criteria is investigated in the light of the view that is articulated. It is argued that in and of itself impredicativity does not constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting a putative identity criterion. The view that is presented is applied to Davidson’s criterion of identity for events and to the structuralist criterion of identity of places (...) in a structure. (shrink)

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies for self-monitoring health-relevant parameters such as heart frequency, sleeping patterns or exercise regimes aim at fostering healthy behavior change and increasing the individual users to promote and maintain their health. We argue that this aspect of mHealth supports healthism, the increasing shift from institutional responsibility for public health toward individual engagement in maintaining health as well as mitigating health risks. Moreover, this healthist paradigm leads to a shift from understanding health as the absence of illness to (...) regarding health as the performance of certain rituals in order to project healthiness. By drawing from the analogy between healthiness and traditional virtues, we evaluate the promises made by proponents of mHealth technologies for self-monitoring. We argue that the implementation and use of mHealth risk entrenching existing inequalities and, more particularly, tend to exclude populations situated at the losing end of those inequalities from participating in the quasi-virtue of healthiness. Consequently, the implementation and use of mHealth technologies not only present challenges for social justice but also undermine their primary societal goal—to promote public health. Finally, we offer several suggestions on how to realize the potential benefit of mHealth. (shrink)

For an action to be free, for an agent to be responsible for his action, it is sometimes thought that he must act from a will that is free or for which he is responsible. There is a connection between freedom of action and freedom or autonomy of will, but the connection cannot be the one envisaged here, modelling free will on a free action, for not only does that set off an obvious regress, but as importantly the elements of (...) the will, beliefs and desires, are not states within an agent's voluntary control, not states for which he is directly responsible. Though these states are not within an agent's control, whether he believes or desires autonomously has a crucial bearing on his responsibility for his subsequent actions. And though he is not directly responsible for these states, he can be indirectly responsible for them, and that factor too can have a crucial bearing on his responsibility for his actions, in particular for those actions that are produced by beliefs that are false. (shrink)

The metaphysics of gender and race is a growing area of concern in contemporary analytic metaphysics, with many different views about the nature of gender and race being submitted and discussed. But what are these debates about? What questions are these accounts trying to answer? And is there real disagreement between advocates of differ- ent views about race or gender? If so, what are they really disagreeing about? In this paper I want to develop a view about what the debates (...) in the metaphysics of gender and race are about, namely, a version of metaphysical deflationism, according to which these debates are about how we actually use or should use the terms ‘gender’ and ‘race’ (and other related terms), where moral and political considerations play a central role. I will also argue that my version of the view can overcome some recent and powerful objections to metaphysical deflationism of- fered by Elizabeth Barnes (2014, 2017). (shrink)

Debates about the theological implications of recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion have tended to focus on the question of theism. The question of whether there is any disagreement about the conceptualization of the individual human being has been largely overlooked. In this article, I argue that evolutionary and cognitive accounts of religion typically depend upon a view of cognition that conceptually isolates the mind from its particular social and physical environmental contexts. By embracing this view (...) of the mind, these accounts also unwittingly embrace an abstract individualist view of individual personhood that Christian theologians have explicitly battled against. Taken as a whole, the field leaves sufficient room for supplementary theories that are compatible with theological accounts of the relational individual, but in practice, no effort has been made to engage, or even to accommodate, any other view of individual personhood. (shrink)

Tarski has shown how the argumentation of the liar paradox can be used to prove a theorem about truth in formalized languages. In this paper, it is shown how the paradox concerning the least undefinable ordinal can be used to prove a no go-theorem concerning the notion of satisfaction in formalized languages. Also, the connection of this theorem with the absolute notion of definability is discussed.

Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.

This paper focuses on the conceptual relationship between rationality and progress as applied to scientific development. The concept of methodology is used in the sense of a model of scientific change. It is argued, as against e.g. recent discussion by Larry Laudan, that progress implies rationality. The notion of rationality useful for this conception of scientific development includes instrumental rationality, butalso the idea of rational paradigm-shift, which is analysed in terms of changes of conceptual frameworks. The key idea is the (...) posibility of a rational reconstruction of series of conceptual frameworks, where the shift from one framework to its successor may be reconstructed as rational in the sense of there being reasons in the successor for accepting the change, and thus the whole series being rational. (shrink)

In this article I start by assuming that positive aesthetic experiences of damaged nature are possible and I argue for the idea that the aesthetic pleasure derived from that contemplation might reveal something of the environment’s overall character. I hope to show that positive aesthetic experiences sometimes help to promote emotional attitudes that can lead to insight into the configuration of other non-aesthetic attitudes. In order to do so, I critically appeal to some of the thoughts Kant articulated about the (...) notion of aesthetic experience and its relationship to cognition and morality. I think that the sort of experience I am after in this article cannot be easily accommodated within a Kantian framework and that the possibility of positive aesthetic experience of damaged nature will show that the relationships between the aesthetic and the cognitive or the moral are more complex and enriching than they have so far been acknowledged to be. (shrink)

In this article we propose to carry out an examination of the notions of ‘other’ based on the philosophical proposals of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Maurice Blanchot. It seeks to show the common point between both thoughts, from a proposal in which the other is understood as a dislocation, which manifests itself in the way of an opening. For this reason, the notion of opening becomes the central element of this analysis, from which the other manifests itself in an ambiguous way. (...) To this end, the proposals of both authors will be analyzed separately, however, highlighting and relating to each other their respective conceptions of opening and the implications they have regarding the question of the other. (shrink)

This article analyses the concept of people in language, as a collective identity and as a subject of political representation in the crisis of the Hispanic monarchy from 1808 and throughout the constituent process that culminated in the promulgation of the Constitution of 1812. Based on the discursive uses of pueblo in chronicles, essays on political philosophy, press articles and parliamentary speeches, it points out the relevance of the semantics of pueblo in the political language of the time until its (...) displacement by that of nation. This semantic shift is related to the problems of constitutional engineering derived from the crisis of the privileged nobility in the context of the Napoleonic invasion. The view reinterprets the urban juntas of 1808 by stressing changes in the foundations of sovereignty, and puts into question the conventional characterisation from social history. It also traces the persistence of a rhetoric about the people in the wake of the Cadiz Constitution. Finally, the proposal claims the need to recover the category of people for the narrative of contemporary history. (shrink)