The pattern of ups and downs in a sequence with varying pitch can be heard as a melodic contour. Contrary to single pitch, the neural representation of melodic contour information in the auditory cortex is rarely investigated, and it is not clear whether the processing entails a hemispheric asymmetry. The present magnetoencephalography study assessed the neuromagnetic responses of N = 18 normal-hearing adults to four-note sequences with fixed vs. varying pitch that were presented either monaurally or diotically; data were analyzed (...) using minimum-norm reconstructions. The first note of the sequences elicited prominent transient activity in posterior auditory regions (Planum temporale), especially contralateral to the ear of entry. In contrast, the response to the subsequent notes originated from more anterior areas (Planum polare) and was larger for melodic contours than for fixed pitch sequences, independent from the ear of entry and without hemispheric asymmetry. Together, the results point to a gradient in the early cortical processing of melodic contours, both in spatial and functional terms, where posterior auditory activity reflects the onset of a pitch sequence and anterior activity reflects its subsequent notes, including the difference between sequences with fixed pitch and melodic contours. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzscheforschung Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 133-138.

Der Körper hat Konjunktur. Als ausgestellter, verfüg- und verführbarer begegnet er uns täglichim Übermaß. Es war nur eine Frage der Zeit, bis im Spiel der sich in den Wissenschafteneinander ablösenden turns auch ein corporeal (oder body) turn ausgerufen würde. Dabeibleibt im genannten turn der Gegenstand der Untersuchung nicht selten reduziert auf das, wasman im deutschen Sprachgebrauch »Körper« nennt: ein physisches Substrat, das wie ein Dingunter Dingen beschreibbar ist. Gegen diese Verkürzung stellt der Begri des »Leibes«,spätestens seit Edmund Husserl, eine präzise (...) theoretische Intervention in die wissenschaftlicheund philosophische Diskussion um Körper und Körperlichkeit dar: Dem objektiv beobachtbaren Körper, den wir haben, wird der lebendige Leib, der wir sind, gegenübergestellt. Diesem »Leib«, seiner Geschichte, seinen Varianten und seinem Versprechen gehen dieAutoren der vorliegenden Beiträge nach. Inhaltsübersicht Emmanuel Alloa/Thomas Bedorf/Christian Grüny/Tobias Nikolaus Klass: Einleitung I. Der Leibbegriff in der Phänomenologie Emmanuel Alloa / Natalie Depraz: Edmund Husserl – „Ein merkwürdig unvollkommenkonstituiertes Ding“ – Stefan Kristensen: Maurice Merleau-Ponty I – Körperschema undleibliche Subjektivität – Emmanuel Alloa: Maurice Merleau-Ponty II – Fleisch und Dierenz – David Espinet: Martin Heidegger – Der leibliche Sinn von Sein – Thomas Bedorf: EmmanuelLevinas – Der Leib des Anderen – Karel Novotný: Körper, Leib, Aektivität in Jan Pato č kasPhänomenologie der natürlichen Welt – Julia Scheidegger: Michel Henry – TranszendentaleLeiblichkeit – Jörg Sternagel: Bernhard Waldenfels – Responsivität des Leibes – Kerstin Andermann: Hermann Schmitz – Leiblichkeit als kommunikatives Selbst- und Weltverhältnis II. Zur Geschichte des Leibbegris Emmanuel Alloa: Archaische Leiblichkeit. Die griechische Antike und die Entdeckung desKörpers – Theresia Heimerl: Der Leib Christi und der Körper des Christen: Körper und Leib alszentrale Problemzonen des Christentums – Marc Rölli: Philosophische Anthropologie im 19. Jahrhundert – Zwischen Leib und Körper – Tobias Nikolaus Klass: Friedrich Nietzsche – Denkenam „Leitfaden des Leibes“ – Andreas Cremonini: Sigmund Freud – Der gelebte vs. derphantasmatische Leib – Uta Noppeney: Kurt Goldstein und Frederik Buytendijk – Der Leib-Begri in der organismischen Biologie – Volker Schürmann: Max Scheler und Helmuth Plessner– Leiblichkeit in der Philosophischen Anthropologie – Marion Lauschke: Ernst Cassirer und AbyWarburg – Kulturanthropologie III. Grenzen und Kritik des Leibbegris Christian Grüny: Theodor W. Adorno – Soma und Sensorium – Ulrich Johannes Schneider: Michel Foucault – Der Körper und die Körper – Burkhard Liebsch: Paul Ricoeur – Das leiblicheSelbst begegnet dem Widerstand des Anderen – Mirjam Schaub: Gilles Deleuze – Was weiß ein„Körper ohne Organe“ vom Leib? – Kathrin Busch: Jean-Luc Nancy – Exposition und Berührung– Shaun Gallagher: Embodiment: Leiblichkeit in den Kognitionswissenschaften – Marie-Luise Angerer: Gender und Performance – Ist leibliche Identität ein Konstrukt? – Thomas Bedorf/Selin Gerlek: Praxistheorien – Leibkörperliche Praktiken im Vollzug. (shrink)

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the (...) sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. (shrink)

Spinozas Ethik bietet ein metaphysisches Modell der Wirklichkeit, das die Stellung des Menschen in den relationalen Verhältnissen der umgebenden Welt erklärbar macht. Wir haben es hier aber nicht mit einer anthropologischen Theorie des Menschen zu tun, sondern mit einer ontologischen Theorie immanenter Individuation. Spinoza unterzieht seine ontologischen Grundbegriffe einer immanenten Begründung und bestimmt ein Affektionsgeschehen, durch das auch menschliche Individuen konstituiert werden. Affektionen sind dabei als heteronome Machtwirkungen zu verstehen, die die Aktivität und die Passivität menschlicher Individuen bestimmen. Die Erkenntnis (...) dieser kausalen Bedingungen macht es den Menschen möglich, sich selbst zur Ursache ihrer Affekte zu machen. So wird deutlich, dass sich Spinozas Ethik nicht um eine deteministische Bestimmung des Menschen dreht, sondern darum, die Erkenntnis zur Grundlage einer individuellen Freiheit zu machen, die in der vorliegenden Arbeit als Affektfähighkeit ausgewiesen wird."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Entranced Earth looks at audiovisual, literary, performative, and testimonial sources to examine the impact of neocolonial extractivist industries on the natural environment in the Western Hemisphere.

The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics offers a comprehensive overview of Latin American aesthetic and conceptual production addressing the more-than-human environment at the intersection between art, activism, and critique. Fields include literature, performance, film, and other audiovisual media as well as their interactions with community activisms. Scholars who have helped establish environmental approaches in the field as well as emergent critical voices revisit key concepts such as ecocriticism, (post-)extractivism, and multinaturalism, while opening new avenues of dialogue with areas including (...) critical race theory and ethnicity, energy humanities, queer-*trans studies, and infrastructure studies, among others. This volume both traces these genealogies and maps out key positions in this increasingly central field of Latin Americanism, at the same time as they relate it to the environmental humanities at large. By showing how artistic and literary productions illuminate critical zones of environmental thought, articulating urgent social and material issues with cultural archives, historical approaches and conceptual interventions, this volume offers cutting-edge critical tools for approaching literature and the arts from new angles that call into question the nature/culture boundary. (shrink)

Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the modern museum, objects, collections and processes of museaIization have been radically re-signified and re-posited in the cultural arena. The new museums emerging from this shift have redefined their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves now not as disciplinary spaces of academic history but (...) as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make them empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their own contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities in distant places. This dossier seeks to probe these new museographic and curatorial discourses, focusing in particular on the memory museum as an emergent global form of (counter)monumentality. Drawing on different geographical and historical contexts, it argues that the new museums’ apparently global aesthetics implies a danger of surrendering the very specificity of historical experiences the memorial ‘site’ offers its visitors. (shrink)

Entangled with the interconnected logics of coloniality and modernity, the landscape idea has long been a vehicle for ordering human-nature relations. Yet at the same time, it has also constituted a utopian surface onto which to project a space-time 'beyond' modernity and capitalism. Amid the advancing techno-capitalization of the living and its spatial supports in transgenic seed monopolies, fracking and deep sea drilling, biopiracy, geo-engineering, aesthetic-activist practices have offered particular kinds of insight into the epistemological, representational, and juridical framings of (...) the natural environment. This book asks in what ways have recent bio and eco-artistic turns moved on from the subject/object ontologies of the landscape-form? Moving from botanical explorations of early modernity, through the legacies of mid-twentieth century landscape design, up to artistic experimental recodings of New World nature in the 1960s and 1970s and to present struggles for environmental rights and against the precarization of the living, the critical essays and visual contributions included in Natura attempt to push thinking past fixed landscape forms through interdisciplinary encounters that encompass analyses of architectural sites and artworks; ecocritical perspectives on literary texts; experimental place-making practices; and the creation of material and visual ecologies that recognise the agency of non-human worlds. (shrink)

Further to the recent handover of the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s most notorious centre for the clandestine torture and assassination of leftist militants under the dictatorship of 1976–83, to the city of Buenos Aires, in order to create on the premises a ‘Space for Memory’, debates on the proper commemoration of the recent past have gained momentum. In the course of these, it has become clear that there is currently no consensus among the human rights organizations, let alone (...) Argentine society at large, on how the former sites of state terrorism can be adequately ‘recovered’, or what the purpose and function of such a recovery might be. Rather than as a shortcoming, however, this impossibility of closure, and of the monumentalization of a social consensus about the past in museal forms, might be taken as an opportunity to problematize some of the politics and material poetics underpinning the contemporary ‘memorial museum’. The article therefore analyses the principal arguments and positions voiced in the debate about ESMA with a view to their attitudes (explicit or implicit) towards the museum-form as such, and the conclusions that might be derived from these in the context of contemporary debates about ‘postmemory’, ‘secondary witnessing’ and the politics of empathy at the museum. (shrink)

How can we conceive of the relation between technologies of image-making and the formations of political power, without reducing the former to merely superstructural effects of a pre-existing ideology or deducing the latter from the functional determination inherent in technical apparatuses? In this article, I revisit the notion of the state as a visual form I proposed in an earlier work, arguing that in order to understand the articulation between politics and visuality in modernity we need to pay attention to (...) the performance of showing and seeing that mediates between the spectacle and spectatorship. To grasp the way in which historical change (political and technological) impacts on this constellation, in particular in the transition from photographic to cinematic regimes of visuality between the late 19th and early 20th century, I take these questions through two rather different ‘case studies’: photographer Juan Gutiérrez’s images of Brazilian state rituals in the mid-1890s and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘The Aleph’ of 1949. Whereas Gutiérrez’s photographic series, I argue, announces the cinema and its ways of mobilizing actors and spectators alike, as the limit of a 19th-century visuality primed on the stability and self-enclosedness of viewers and objects, Borges’s story retrospectively enacts the transition from photographic to cinematic seeing in an intratextual battle of acts of transcription from the impossible object at the centre of the plot, which grants infinite, universal visibility to the one who beholds it. Reading the two together, or against one another, then, allows us to see the dimension of transience undercutting the apparent solidity and timelessness with which scopic regimes promise us access to the real. (shrink)

Viaje accidentado: vanguardia y velocidad -- Elementos naturales: arquitectura, jardín, modernidad -- La naturaleza insurgente -- El giro ambiental: del marco al medio -- Después de la naturaleza: memorias, derivas, transmutaciones.

In den Begriffen Mythos, Geist und Kultur spiegeln sich die thematische Breite und der innere Zusammenhang des Denkens von Christoph Jamme, dem diese Festschrift gewidmet ist. Die versammelten Beiträge, unter anderem zur mythischen Rationalität und ihrer Transformation in der Moderne, zum deutschen Idealismus, zur Kulturtheorie und zu verschiedenen kulturellen Objektivationen in Literatur und Malerei, zeigen prismatisch die vielfältigen Formen der menschlichen Vernunft sowie die unterschiedlichen Richtungen und Wege ihrer Kritik.

Patient safety has only recently been subjected to wide-spread systematic study. Healthcare differs from other high risk industries in being more diverse and multi-contextual, and less certain and regulated. Also many patient safety problems are low-frequency events associated with many, varied contributing factors. The subject of this paper is the epistemology of patient safety (the science of the method of finding out about patient safety). Patient safety research is considered here on the background of a risk management framework which requires (...) researchers to: • Understand the context - as a subset of healthcare quality, services and systems research, with technical and human behavioural (cultural) components and a range of external and internal organisational influences, a wide range of research disciplines is necessary • Identify the risks - identify the things that go wrong and the frequency and nature of different types of incidents from sources such as medical record review, observational studies, audit, incident and medico-legal reports • Analyse the risks - deconstruct the things that go wrong, identifying contributing factors and trying to detect trends and patterns in contributing factors, detection, mitigation factors, ameliorating factors and actions taken to reduce risk • Evaluate the risks - decide on priorities, identifying preventive and corrective strategies and judging the risk- and cost-benefit of potential corrective strategies such as standardisation or simplification of a process or device • Manage the risk - evaluate and scope preventive and/or corrective strategies and then implement these, or place the problem on a risk register pending solution, or accept that what is needed is unaffordable • Communicate and consult - use interactive sessions, audit, on-going feedback, reminders and patient mediated prompts • Monitor and review the state of the problem - get baseline trends and patterns so that changes can be tracked and properly attributed to an intervention A hierarchy of levels of evidence has been proposed for clinical research and we argue that insufficient weighting has been given to lower ranked levels of research and to qualitative research, although critical interpretive synthesis is now gaining acceptance in mainstream thinking (e.g. by the Cochrane Collaboration). Fundamental challenges remain including how to grasp the elusive concept of patient safety, how to quantify, characterise and cost the problems, how to judge the extent to which harm can be attributed to errors, violations or system failures, how to identify contributing factors and the extent to which they can be implicated, how to judge whether incidents or their precursors are preventable, how to generate strong evidence to make healthcare safer and how to translate research into practice. Future directions include addressing the mundane as well as rare, dramatic events, and developing further research in non-hospital settings and in developing countries. In summary, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, using information from all available data sources and combining retrospective, real time and prospective study designs, is necessary to address some of the more difficult patient safety problems. (shrink)

"A valuable collection both for original source material as well as historical formulations of current problems."-- The Review of Metaphysics "Much more than a mere collection of papers . . . a valuable addition to the literature."-- Mathematics of Computation An anthology of fundamental papers on undecidability and unsolvability by major figures in the field, this classic reference opens with Godel's landmark 1931 paper demonstrating that systems of logic cannot admit proofs of all true assertions of arithmetic. Subsequent papers by (...) Godel, Church, Turing, and Post single out the class of recursive functions as computable by finite algorithms. Additional papers by Church, Turing, and Post cover unsolvable problems from the theory of abstract computing machines, mathematical logic, and algebra, and material by Kleene and Post includes initiation of the classification theory of unsolvable problems. Suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses. 1965 ed. (shrink)

Algorithms silently structure our lives. Algorithms can determine whether someone is hired, promoted, offered a loan, or provided housing as well as determine which political ads and news articles consumers see. Yet, the responsibility for algorithms in these important decisions is not clear. This article identifies whether developers have a responsibility for their algorithms later in use, what those firms are responsible for, and the normative grounding for that responsibility. I conceptualize algorithms as value-laden, rather than neutral, in that algorithms (...) create moral consequences, reinforce or undercut ethical principles, and enable or diminish stakeholder rights and dignity. In addition, algorithms are an important actor in ethical decisions and influence the delegation of roles and responsibilities within these decisions. As such, firms should be responsible not only for the value-laden-ness of an algorithm but also for designing who-does-what within the algorithmic decision. As such, firms developing algorithms are accountable for designing how large a role individual will be permitted to take in the subsequent algorithmic decision. Counter to current arguments, I find that if an algorithm is designed to preclude individuals from taking responsibility within a decision, then the designer of the algorithm should be held accountable for the ethical implications of the algorithm in use. (shrink)

Why are computers so smart these days? And why are humans apparently still a bit smarter? Does this have something to do with the difference between data and meaning? Does this in turn mean that at least some abstract entities, such as numbers, exist independently of human thought? Wouldn’t that require an expansion of our scientific world view? And would that at all be compatible with what we know about our world from physics and chemistry, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and the (...) theory of evolution? Finally, what would this tell us about ethical and aesthetic value theories? These and related questions will be discussed in this book. We will find that the difference between data and meaning, i.e. quantitative and qualitative information, does indeed appear to be of central importance for understanding both artificial and natural intelligence. And then the independent existence of abstract entities not only appears to be a particularly promising hypothesis, but also one that is entirely compatible with the sum of our scientific knowledge, especially with regard to value theories. The book thus arrives at the exploration of a scientifically tenable, panpsychistically inspired, objective idealism that can be derived from our most fundamental intuitions as subjects that perceive qualities, but that can also take into account the structuring of the world already at the micro-scale, found in the modern natural sciences. The result is a Platonic, but in a second step also a scientific realism and a naturalism in the sense that it is informed by the natural sciences in terms of an inductive metaphysics. An objective idealism, not in a rationalistic maximum form, but in a pragmatic minimum form; without eternal truths, but dependent on the continued philosophical-scientific and also philosophicalsocial dialog. The proposed model could offer interesting solutions to a number of problems at and near the mind/matter boundary: Proposals are being considered for the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the problem of molecular symmetry, the neuronal code and the binding problem in neuroscience, mental causation, a more holistic understanding of mental processes, and so on and so forth. However, the extent to which the model threatens to promise far too much is also being discussed. In sum, the core question is how we can imagine human thinking beyond physically conceived information processing. An alternative model of human thinking is then put up for discussion, for which not only machine-like cognitive performance, but above all the intentional perception of qualitative information, i.e. of abstract entities, would be central, as well as the free, ultimately creative linking of patterns of quantitative information (signals, data) with such qualities (meanings). (shrink)

Scanlonian contractualism has difficulties to account for our moral obligations to future generations due to the nonidentity problem. A prominent solution is to refer to the more general standpoints or types of future persons in moral deliberation. This paper critically examines the “types-of-persons approach” and identifies two alternative versions that have been conflated so far. The types-of-persons approach could claim that the relevant reasons for objection are either (a) the reasons of types of persons, or (b) type-based reasons of token (...) persons. I explore these two options in more detail and argue that both are, in their own ways, incompatible with central features of Scanlonian contractualism. Consequently, the types-of-persons approach fails to offer a satisfactory solution to the nonidentity problem for Scanlonian contractualists. (shrink)

Joan Stambaugh's translations of the works of Heidegger, accomplished with his guidance, have made key aspects of his thought and philosophy accessible to readers of English for many years. This collection, writes Stambaugh, contains Heidegger's attempt "to show the history of Being as metaphysics," combining three chapters from the philosopher's Nietzsche ("Metaphysics as a History of Being," "Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics," and "Recollection in Metaphysics") with a selection from Vortrage und Aufsatze ("Overcoming Metaphysics").

Reinholds Kritik an Kants Ausführungen über Willkürfreiheit aus der Einleitung zur "Metaphysik der Sitten". Zur Aktualität dieser Kritik.

Digital contact tracing, in combination with widespread testing, has been a focal point for many plans to “reopen” economies while containing the spread of Covid‐19. Most digital contact tracing projects in the United States and Europe have prioritized privacy protections in the form of local storage of data on smartphones and the deidentification of information. However, in the prioritization of privacy in this narrow form, there is not sufficient attention given to weighing ethical trade‐offs within the context of a public (...) health pandemic or to the need to evaluate safety and effectiveness of software‐based technology applied to public health. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Björn Lundgren and H. Orri Stefánsson (forthcoming) present three objections to normic de minimis expected utility theory (NDEUT) – a decision theoretic framework defended in Smith (2024). In this paper, I respond to these objections and outline some possible ways in which NDEUT might be modified or further developed. Like any de minimis framework, NDEUT employs a risk threshold to sort possibilities into those that must be considered when making a decision, and those that can be (...) legitimately ignored – the so-called ‘de minimis risks’. While this threshold would usually take the form of a probability value, in NDEUT the de minimis risks are identified instead on the basis of their abnormality. In the first section I will set up some of the formalism used in NDEUT and consider Lundgren and Stefánsson’s first objection – which is essentially formal in nature. In the second section I will delve further into the interpretation of NDEUT and consider the second and third objections, which turn on particular examples. (shrink)

Modal phenomena in general, and modal claims in particular, present a problem for contemporary philosophers. The truth conditions of modal claims differ from those of nonemodal claims. I discuss a widely accepted strategy that posits possible and impossible worlds in order to analyze modal claims and thus systematize our intuitions about modal reality.

In academic philosophy, it is easy for students to lose track of how important questions in subfields are interrelated. Philosophy: The Game is an educational resource designed to remedy this by providing the opportunity to discuss ‘big questions’ while playing a card game. The question-answer pairs for the game are taken from the recent PhilPapers Survey[1], with some joker cards added to illustrate the impact that solutions to particular problems in the philosophy of mind might have on philosophy at large. (...) The card design via LaTex/Tikz uses material from the Stack Exchange user ‘Arvid’.[2] (Everyone is welcome to improve the game or come up with their own new version.) -- 'looks like fun!' (David Chalmers). (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism, many critics argue, entails that ordinary speakers are blind to the fact that knowledge claims have context-sensitive truth conditions. This attribution of blindness, critics add, seriously undermines contextualism. I show that this criticism and, in general, discussions about the error theory entailed by contextualism, greatly underestimates the complexity and diversity of the data about ordinary speakers? inter-contextual judgments, as well as the range of explanatory moves that are open to both invariantists and contextualists concerning such judgments. Contextualism does (...) entail that some speakers suffer from semantic blindness; however, at its roots, this blindness concerns not the context-sensitivity of knowledge claims, but the question whether knowledge sentences possess context-independent truth conditions. I argue that this blindness should not be deemed problematic, but that invariantism entails an error theory that is, by comparison, much more troubling. (shrink)

This paper first offers a standard modal extension of dialetheic logics that respect the normal semantics for negation and conjunction, in an attempt to adequately model absolutism, the thesis that there are true contradictions at metaphysically possible worlds. It is shown, however, that the modal extension has unsavoury consequences for both absolutism and dialetheism. While the logic commits the absolutist to dialetheism, it commits the dialetheist to the impossibility of the actual world. A new modal logic AV is then proposed (...) which avoids these unsavoury consequences by invalidating the interdefinability rules for the modal operators with the use of two valuation relations. However, while using AV carries no significant cost for the absolutist, the same isn't true for the dialetheist. Although using AV allows her to avoid the consequence that the actual world is an impossible world, it does so only on the condition that the dialetheist admits that she cannot give a dialetheic solution to all self-refe.. (shrink)

Die vier Studien dieses Bandes behandeln alle das Problem, wie sich ein gutes Leben zu einem moralisch guten Leben verhält. Jede untersucht dieses Verhältnis von einer anderen Seite her; jede führt auf ihre Weise zu dem Schluß, daß der Zusammenhang zwischen dem Guten und dem moralisch Guten weder als letztendliche Identität noch als begriffliche Priorität einer der beiden Komponenten verstanden werden darf. Zusammen bilden sie den Entwurf einer praktischen Philosophie, die die Begriffe des individuellen Guten und des moralisch Richtigen als (...) interdependente Grundbegriffe versteht. (shrink)

A recent article by Kuhn1 showcases the plethora of proposed solutions for the mind-body problem as it is understood in current ’consciousness science’. Perusing this article, philosophers will likely find it surprising to see the inclusion of for instance Indian idealism and Buddhist thought, but neither German, nor British or US idealists, which seems especially unbalanced when instead of them theories like Kastrup’s analytical idealism (Hegel for physicists?) or Hoffmann’s interface theory (Kant for psychologists?) are included. The listings of dualist, (...) panpsychist and further theories seems equally eclectic, with for instance Descartes no more than a side-note in a number of entries, but several listings of religious ideas of body and soul. A possible problem with such omissions is of course that not taking philosophical history more seriously comes with the peril of repeating (now) avoidable errors. Nevertheless, judging from the disclaimers, Kuhn is well aware of this and most likely sees his list as more of a ’sociology of consciousness science’, i.e. a list of people and ideas that are currently circulating in this field. -/- It can in any case be taken from Kuhn’s monumental work effort, that it is often assumed that a solution to the mind-body problem would be either (in the wider sense) materialistic (including nonreductive and quantum theories), dualistic, panpsychistic (including monist theories) or idealistic. The core problems faced are then those of emergence (of consciousness), interaction (between brain and mind), de/combination (of ‘mind dust’ or a unity into proper subjects) or emanation, where the emanation problem is the problem of explaining in detail(!) how the physical world and our scientific theories arise from a given idealistic setup. To me it seems more likely that all these views have a point, but that none manages to cover the whole picture – and that it therefore might be possible to integrate these views into ’consensus models’, if we do not look at the proposed solutions, but the initial intentions and/or intuitions for setting them up (much like as if we would mediate a social conflict). (shrink)

Conceptual Engineering, the practice of stipulating a change in the meaning of a word in order to improve it in some fashion, for some end, has proved a popular topic among philosophers of language in recent times. Deutsch (Philos Stud 177:3935–3957, 2020) has argued that it has received an undue degree of interest since its implementation falls onto one of the horns of a dilemma: either the change to be effected is in the global semantic meaning of the given word/concept, (...) in which case it is infeasible, or it is merely in the local speaker-meaning, in which case it is largely trivial. I suggest, however, that there is a deeper, more troubling, objection to Conceptual Engineering. My criticism does not strictly take the form of a dilemma, since some cases may fall upon both horns at once and others may be able to squeeze through the gap, but it does involve highlighting two potential weaknesses of the project: one of those, as with Deutsch, is the danger of triviality, although it is not concerned only with the division between semantic and speaker meaning. It seems clear that there are cases where a particular authority or legislature has the capacity to alter a word’s legal meaning; others where certain groups may discuss the best way to use a technical term, each putting forward their preferred suggestions; and individual speakers are at liberty to choose to use a word with a particular intention. None of this is new, nor controversial, and, thus, is largely trivial. In all cases, but particularly where meanings are manipulated without due authority, inexplicitly, or in order to further a particular theoretical conception, however, there is a strong chance that the engineer will be led to commit one of the fallacies of language to which philosophy is particularly vulnerable (Hinton Evaluating the language of argument, Springer, Cham, 2021). These include fallacies of vagueness, equivocation, and persuasive definition. In this paper, I use examples to illustrate the likely fallaciousness of conceptual redefinitions and highlight in particular the ‘Philosophical Fallacy’, outlined by Nelson (A theory of philosophical fallacies.Translated by Leal F, Carus D. Springer, Cham 2016). I conclude that, as a method for philosophers, Conceptual Engineering is, in broad terms, either trivial or fallacious. (shrink)

According to both traditional positivist approaches and also to the sociology of scientific knowledge, social analysts should not themselves become involved in the controversies they are investigating. But the experiences of the authors in studying contemporary scientific controversies—specifically, over the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, fluoridation, and vitamin C and cancer—show that analysts, whatever their intentions, cannot avoid being drawn into the fray. The field of controversy studies needs to address the implications of this process for both theory and practice.

The goal of inquiry in this essay is to ascertain to what extent the Principle of Compositionality – the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its parts and its mode of composition – can be justifiably imposed as a constraint on semantic theories, and thereby provide information about what meanings are. Apart from the introduction and the concluding chapter the thesis is divided into five chapters addressing different questions pertaining to the overarching (...) goal of inquiry. Chapter Two is an attempt to determine whether the Principle of Compositionality is a trivial principle. It is argued that this is not the case in the context of providing the semantics of natural languages since it is an open question whether the best theories that respect available syntactic and semantic data are compositional. Chapter Three and Chapter Four ask whether there are reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is true. It is argued that the three most commonly cited reasons for thinking that correct semantic theories must be compositional – Linguistic Creativity, Productivity and Systematicity – in fact only give us reasons to think that the meaning of complex expressions depend on the meanings of their parts and their modes of composition, but not that the meaning of complex expressions depend ONLY on those factors. Chapter Five asks whether there are any reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is false. It is argued that all the phenomena that have been suggested entail non-compositionality are in fact compatible with some versions of compositionality. Even if this conclusion is reached in this chapter, the conclusion of the previous two chapters entails that we are not justified in imposing the Principle of Compositionality as an adequacy constraint on Semantic theories. Chapter Six explores the ways in which information about what meanings are can be derived by imposing constraints on semantic theories. It is argued that the distinction emphasized in Chapter Three and Chapter Four between depending on and depending ONLY on is of critical importance. It is demonstrated that the informative potential of the Principle of Compositionality goes far beyond that of the principle we are in fact justified in imposing on semantic theories. So not only is it the case that we cannot learn anything about meanings from the justified imposition of the Principle of Compositionality – since we cannot justifiably impose it as a constraint on semantic theories – what we could have learned from it had we been justified in imposing it is very different from what we can learn from the principle that we are justified in imposing. (shrink)

The concept of resistance in nursing has been garnering more interest in the last few years, with emerging focus on working conditions, power differentials in clinical settings, health inequities, and planetary health concerns. As a result, it's important to identify what is being resisted, and what is the purpose of the resistance carried out. In whatever way resistance is referenced in nursing, outright or not, it is our contention that it's in response to the same underlying cause, barring some local (...) and contextual variations, which we refer to as ‘the Beast’, where the real catastrophe is societal, and is ‘existential, affective and metaphysical’. It therefore seems coherent to consider this macro catastrophe from an ontological point of view, that is, from the standpoints of ‘being’ in relation to the world, which necessarily refers to specific ways of apprehending reality. In this article, we therefore present two ontologies ‐ antagonistic in every respect, to better situate resistance in nursing in a larger ecosystem. Using the Invisible Committee's book and call to action To our friends, this is our modest contribution to celebrate resistance, to help equip fellow nurses to better organise and strategize in the face of incessant growth and too often undesirable change in healthcare. (shrink)

As coronavirus disease 2019 made its way across the world in 2019, health systems began to develop guidelines to allocate what was expected to be a scarcity of medical resources. Considerable attention was given to triaging intensive care resources such as ventilators. While there was general agreement among bioethicists and policymakers that it may be permissible to withhold life-sustaining interventions from patients with poor prognoses in order to make them available to patients with better prognoses, there was disagreement about the (...) permissibility of withdrawing such interventions for this purpose. Some maintained that the doctrine of double effect (DDE) revealed the intrinsic wrongness of such acts of reallocation. This article argues that so long as there is transparency and effective ongoing communication, the DDE may permit the discontinuation of life-sustaining interventions from patients who may still benefit from them in order to make them available to patients with more favorable prognoses. (shrink)

Marginalized people have used body aesthetic practices, such as clothing and hairstyles, to communicate their worth to the mainstream. One such example is respectability politics, a set of practices developed in post-Reconstruction black communities to prevent sexual assault and convey moral standing to the white mainstream. Respectability politics is an ambivalent strategy. It requires assimilation to white bourgeois aesthetic and ethical standards, and so guides practitioners toward blandness and bodily erasure. Yet, it is an aesthetic practice that cultivates moral agency (...) and helps communities avoid violence and meet social and economic goals. I contrast respectability politics with the anti-assimilationist body aesthetics of Chike Jeffers and Janell Hobson. Because these accounts do not seek to neutralize or erase the body, they fundamentally value black people. As such, they more effectively convey personhood than assimilationist strategies do and also demonstrate the positive role that body aesthetics can play in everyday ethical projects. (shrink)

In this paper, I list various kinds of ‘plurality’ in philosophical investigations. By plurality, I mean a plurality of methodological criteria which we apply to philosophical phenomena and which are very often incompatible with each other. Any philosophical phenomenon can be approached from different methodological viewpoints and result in utterly different ontological and ideological commitments. In other words, I assume that one philosophical problem can have different solutions which depend on different methodological and theoretical presuppositions. Instead of considering this feature (...) of philosophical theories as a problem, I take this plurality as a natural meta-philosophical result. As an example, I consider impossible phenomena and ways of treating them systematically. (shrink)

abstract: Leibniz holds that there are no two perfectly similar things, a doctrine he calls the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (the PII). What is his attitude toward its modal status? Most commentators hold that the principle is best understood as a necessary truth because it is allegedly entailed by doctrines such as the conceptual containment theory of truth, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR), and the denial of purely extrinsic denominations, which are arguably regarded by Leibniz as (...) necessary truths. In this paper, I argue against this consensus and show that (1) neither the conceptual containment theory of truth, nor the PSR, nor the denial of purely extrinsic denominations give Leibniz a good reason to hold that the PII is necessary; (2) Leibniz says that the PII is contingent in the correspondence with Clarke and not for dialectical reasons; and (3) the argument that Leibniz gives for the PII in §21 of his Fifth Letter to Clarke has been misunderstood; properly interpreted, it gives Leibniz a cogent argument rooted in some of his most important doctrines for the conclusion that the PII is a contingent truth. (shrink)

According to anti‐exceptionalism about logic (AEL), logic is not as exceptional in terms of its subject matter and epistemology as has been conventionally thought. As such, AEL either outright rejects certain traditional properties of logic, such as its formality, apriority, or necessity, or rather proposes that while logic possesses these properties, it does so in a similar way to other research areas. In this second part of a two‐part entry on AEL, we focus on contemporary proposals for Methodological AEL, the (...) view that the mechanisms of theory‐choice in logic are similar to those in the sciences. Firstly, we consider the various contemporary motivations for Methodological AEL and highlight how these motivations need not equally motivate Evidential AEL, the view that the sources of logical evidence are the same as the sources of evidence within the sciences. Secondly, we discuss the two most prominent versions of Methodological AEL in the literature, logical abductivism and predictivism, and end by briefly outlining some of the important challenges presently facing Methodological AEL. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of interspecies communication in the pursuit of coexistence with wolves returning to the Netherlands. Low-conflict coexistence with wolves in densely populated countries calls for an abandonment of the traditional culture-nature dichotomy. Moreover, it requires that humans learn to understand the wolf’s needs and ways perceiving the world, and engage in a ‘negotiation process’ with wolves about how to share the landscape. However, the mere knowledge of how other beings perceive the world does not suffice; it (...) might even lead to a more controlling human attitude towards wildlife. Sharing landscapes with resurging wolves in a more ‘meaningful’ or ‘convivial’ way, requires a willingness to co-adapt and recognize wolves as beings with agency and a legitimate claim to space. A mutual learning process is needed, in which humans and nonhumans both can learn how to thrive, and how to avoid unnecessary conflicts in a shared landscape. (shrink)

Der moralische Kontraktualismus scheint als Konzeption einer nicht-konsequentialistischen intergenerationellen Ethik sehr vielversprechend. Eine zentrale theoretische Herausforderung stellt jedoch das Nichtidentitätsproblem dar. Spezifisch ist zu klären, ob zukünftige Personen einen Einwand gegen die Prinzipien unseres Handelns haben, wenn unser Handeln negative Folgen für die Lebensqualität zukünftiger Personen hat, die Existenz der konkreten Personen aber von diesem Handeln abhängt und ihr Leben für sie insgesamt lebenswert ist. Eine prominente Antwort besteht darin, die Einwände zukünftiger Personen “nicht-komparativ” zu verstehen. Ihr Einwand bestehe also (...) nicht darin, dass sie durch unser Handeln schlechter gestellt werden, als sie es andernfalls wären, sondern darin, dass sie dadurch in relevanter Form schlecht dastehen. Es ist bislang unklar, wie genau eine solche Position im Rahmen des moralischen Kontraktualismus aussehen könnte, ob sie eine Lösung des Nichtidentitätsproblems darstellt und ob ihre substanziellen Implikationen überzeugen. Dieser Beitrag prüft daher kritisch die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen eines nicht-komparativen kontraktualistischen Ansatzes. Es wird dafür argumentiert, dass nicht-komparative Einwände mit Bezug auf das Wohlergehen der zukünftigen Personen nicht plausibel sind, solange ihr Leben nicht überwiegend schlecht für sie ist. Der hier diskutierte Ansatz kann für den moralischen Kontraktualismus also höchstens eine Teilantwort auf das Nichtidentitätsproblem darstellen. (shrink)