Heidegger hielt die unter dem Titel Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs angekundigte Vorlesung im Sommer-Semester 1925 in der Marburger Universitat. Er gelangte jedoch nicht mehr zur Ausfuhrung der zentralen Thematik. Der Themenkreis der Vorlesung ist mit der Nennung des Untertitels abgesteckt: Prolegomena zu einer Phanomenologie von Geschichte und Natur. Heideggers thematische Uberlegungen beginnen mit einer Kennzeichnung der Situation von Philosophie und Wissenschaft in der zweiten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und stellen das seiner Deutung nach entscheidende Ereignis dieser Zeit heraus: den Durchbruch der (...) Phanomenologie als philosophische Forschung. Er untersucht ihre wesentlichen Entdeckungen, verteidigt sie gegen Missverstandnisse, um dann seinerseits Kritik vorzubringen, wo die Phanomenologie ihrer Forderung zu den Sachen selbst nicht gerecht wird. (shrink)

Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.--Die Zeit des Weltbildes.--Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung.--Nietzsches Wort "Gott ist tot".--Wozu Dichter?--Der Spruch des Anaximander.

Wie kein anderer Philosoph vor oder nach ihm thematisierte Heidegger die metaphysischen Denkschemata, die der abendländisch-neuzeitlichen Technikentwicklung zugrunde liegen. Auf verständliche Weise rekonstruiert dieses Buch Heideggers radikal metaphysikkritischen Ansatz vor dem Hintergrund seiner frühen und mittleren Schriften. Dabei wird nicht nur deutlich, wie sehr sein spätes Denken der Technik in Kontinuität zu seinem frühen fundamentalontologischen Projekt (und dessen Scheitern) steht, sondern es werden auch die Alternativen zum rechnenden Denken und Handeln in Kunst und Dichtung aufgezeigt. (Quelle: www.buchhandel.de).

Im ersten Hauptstück dieser Vorlesung interpretiert Heidegger die Wahrheitsfrage bei Aristoteles, insbesondere das Kapitel 10 des IX. Buches der Metaphysik. Das zweite Hauptstück entfaltet ein radikalisiertes Fragen nach der Wahrheit im Sinne der Zeitproblematik, wie sie die Daseinsanalytik ermöglicht; hier steht die Interpretation von Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' im Zentrum. Zum Verständnis der Genese von Heideggers Denken ist die Kenntnis dieser Vorlesung unentbehrlich.

"Is higher education a right, or a privilege? This author argues that all citizens in a free and open society should have an unconditional right to higher education. Such an education should be costless for the individual and open to everyone regardless of talent. A readiness and willingness to learn should be the only qualification. It should offer opportunities that benefit citizens with different interests and goals in life. And it should aim, as its foundational moral purpose, to help citizens (...) from all walks of life live better, freer lives. Using concepts and ideas from liberal political philosophy the author argues that access to educational goods and services is something to which all citizens have a right over a full life. Such goods, it is argued, play a key role in helping citizens realize self-determined goals. Higher education should therefore be understood a basic social institution responsible for ensuring that all citizens can access such 'autonomy-supporting' goods. The book examines the implication of this justification of the right to higher education for questions of educational justice, political authority, distributive justice, civic education, and personal autonomy"--. (shrink)

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called “lookism”). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three (...) ways of responding to these questions: beauty advo- cacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal charac- ter. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revision- ists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first-personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. (shrink)

The requirement of total evidence is a mainstay of Bayesian epistemology. Peter Fisher Epstein argues that the requirement generates mistaken conclusions about several examples that he devises. Here we examine the example of Epstein’s that we find most interesting and argue that Epstein’s analysis of it is flawed.

Innovation processes are extremely complex and opaque, which makes it tough or even impossible to govern them. Innovators lack control of large parts of these developments and lack of foreknowledge about the possible consequences of emerging technologies. Because of these features some scholars have argued that innovation processes should be structurally reformed and the agent-centered model of responsibility for innovation should be dismissed altogether. In the present article it will be argued that such a structural idea of responsible research and (...) innovation presumes rational agents who can be motivated by reasons. Instead of dismissing the agent-centered approach to responsibility for innovation processes a virtue ethical approach will be developed. Virtues should be considered as the intellectual and moral dispositions presumed for good decision making. It will be shown that creativity and eagerness are creditable character traits that have a distinct positive value for managing the opaqueness of innovation processes. Such traits are mandatory for change and betterment. Furthermore, it will be argued that the notion of responsibility of innovators should not be understood merely as means for constraining them but also as a tool to perpetuate their integrity and happiness. Through discussing the captivating examples of Steve Jobs and the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein it will be shown how to apply this virtue ethical framework for innovators in practice. (shrink)

Imagine that in entering a café, you are struck by the absence of Pierre, with whom you have an appointment. Or imagine that you realize that your keys are missing because they are not hanging from the usual ring-holder. What is the nature of these absence experiences? In this article, we discuss a recent view defended by Farennikova (2012) according to which we literally perceive absences of things in much the same way as we perceive present things. We criticize and (...) reject the perceptual interpretation of absence experiences but we also reject the cognitive view which reduces them to beliefs. We propose an intermediary, metacognitive account according to which absence experiences belong to a specific kind of affective experience, involving the feeling of surprise. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the claim that justification is closed under conjunction, and confront its most alarming consequence — that one can have justification for believing propositions that are unlikely to be true, given one's evidence.

Museums might seem to be the enemy of metabolism: mausoleums that preserve collections and their knowledge-producing potential, out of time. We argue that museums are in fact intensely metabolic: in their attempts to manipulate the life course and temporalities of objects they proliferate metabolic processes, limits, and potentials. We suggest that looking at the museum in this way can help articulate pressing practical as well as theoretical issues: storage rooms are “constipated,” as traditional practices of disposal cannot keep pace with (...) rapidly growing collections from an over-productive present. The paper consists of three main sections. First, we follow imaginations of the museum as preserver, contrasting these with more recent descriptions of the museum as metabolism, and highlighting the intimate relationship between the two. We describe the material and metaphorical ways in which objects and their meanings are transformed within a “museum metabolism,” and suggest that cultivating such transformations might help to imagine new approaches to problems of proliferation and disposal. This leads us to The Living Room, a workshop and installation at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, where we encourage fringe objects destined for disposal to metabolize, entangled with living heritage eaters such as fungi and worms. Following Ian Bogost, this is a piece of “metabolic carpentry”; a thinking machine that explores ontology by practicing it. In the third main section, we reflect on this approach, and on how materially producing metabolic paradoxes might open new avenues for thinking about their concrete consequences, within an ethos of hospitality. We conclude by arguing for the creative potential of metabolism to link objects, organisms, and environments, emphasizing exchanges between transformation and stability at co-constituting interfaces. (shrink)

The epistemology of religion is the branch of epistemology concerned with the rationality, the justificatory status and the knowledge status of religious beliefs – most often the belief in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and loving God as conceived by the major monotheistic religions. While other sorts of religious beliefs – such as belief in an afterlife or in disembodied spirits or in the occurrence of miracles – have also been the focus of considerable attention from epistemologists, I shall (...) concentrate here on belief in God. There were a number of significant works in the epistemology of religion written during the early and mid Twentieth Century. The late Twentieth Century, however, saw a surge of interest in this area, fuelled by the work of philosophers such as William Alston, Alvin Plantinga and Linda Zagzebski amongst others. Alston, Plantinga and Zagzebski succeeded in importing, into the epistemology of religion, various new ideas from mainstream epistemology – in particular, externalist approaches to justification, such as reliabilism, and virtue theoretic approaches to knowledge (see, for instance, Alston, 1986, 1991, Plantinga, 1988, 2000, Zagzebski, 1993a, 1993b). This laid fertile ground for new research – questions about the justificatory and knowledge status of belief in God begin to look very different when viewed through the lens of theories such as these. I will begin by surveying some of this groundbreaking work in the present article, before moving on to work from the last five years – a period in which the epistemology of religion has again received impetus from a number of ideas from mainstream epistemology; ideas such as pragmatic encroachment, phenomenal conservatism and externalist theories of evidence. (shrink)

Some psychopathologic experiences have as one of their structural aspects the experience of restructured temporality. The general argument is that one of the universal microstructures of experience, namely, lived time offers a particular perspective relevant to certain psychopathologic experiences. Lived time is connected with the experience of the embodied human subject as being driven and directed towards the world in terms of bodily potentiality and capability. The dialectical relationship between the embodied human subject and the world results in a sense (...) of lived time (personal time), a lived time that is intimately synchronized with the time of others (intersubjective time). Some experiences of acute suffering, and in particular acute melancholic suffering, can dramatically alter the temporal microstructure of experience to the extent that personal lived time becomes disordered. Normally, past and future withdraw on their own according with their nature of "not being." The future is characterized as openness to change and movement. The absence of this openness is the closing of the future; without this openness, the future appears static and deterministic. When the future is experienced as static, then one longer has the possibility of "things getting better," nor does one have any possibility of relinquishing or escaping from the past because a static future does not allow openness to change and movement. In short, both past and future become static. With the presence of melancholic suffering and the absence of temporal movement, a sense of hopelessness may arise in the individual because suffering without temporal movement becomes, from the sufferer's perspective, eternal suffering. (shrink)

The tremendous advances of research into artificial intelligence as well as neuroscience made over the last two to three decades have given further support to a renewed interest into philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem. Especially the last decade has seen a revival of panpsychist and idealist considerations, often focused on solving philosophical puzzles like the socalled hard problem of consciousness.1–9 While a number of respectable philosophers advocate some sort of panpsychistic solution to the mind-body problem now, fewer advocate that (...) idealism can contribute substantially to the debate. Interest in idealism has nevertheless risen again, as can be seen also from recent overview articles and collections of works.10–14 The working hypothesis here is that a properly formulated idealism can not only provide an alternative view of the mind/matter gap, but that this new view will also shed light on open questions in our common scientific, i.e. materialist, world view. To investigate this possibility, idealism first of all needs a model for the integration of modern science which allows for a mathematically consistent reinterpretation of the physical world as a limiting case of a both material and non-material world, which would make the outcome of idealistic considerations accessible to scientific investigation. To develop such a model I will first try to explain what I mean when I speak of a ‘scientifically tenable’ idealism, including a formulation of the emanation problem which for idealism replaces the interaction problem, then give a very brief summary of the available elements of such a theory in the philosophical literature, before sketching out some ‘design questions’ which have to be answered upon the construction of such models, and finally put forward a first model for a scientifically tenable objective idealism. (shrink)

Interest in idealism has increased substantially since the publication of Sprigge’s Vindication of Absolute Idealism in 1984,1 and again with more vigor over the last decade in the context of the mind-body problem and panpsychism. This will probably not come as a surprise to objective idealists, among which Vittorio Hosle has proposed that philosophy cycles through stages with some form of idealism as end point of each cycle.2 More recently, David Chalmers mused about a corresponding development in the worldview of (...) single individuals from materialism over dualism and panpsychism to idealism.3 Traditional accounts of idealism include for instance those of Plato, Plotinus, Leibniz, Berkeley, or Hegel. An overview of contemporary approaches is given in the article by Chalmers, where he mentions amongst others a recent collection of essays on idealism,4 but also for instance the (recently extended5) works of Philip Goff on Russellian monism.6 A more classically oriented collection of works on idealism was edited by Hosle and Suarez Muller.7 In his article ‘Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem’, David Chalmers presents a classification of possible versions of idealism with the goal of assessing the prospects of idealism in the context of the mind-body problem without having to pay too much attention to its ‘historical baggage’. This goal seems to me highly laudable and the resulting classification an important contribution to the contemporay discussion. In addition, the conclusions drawn from the subsequent analysis seem very plausible from the viewpoints of dualistic, panpsychistic and similar thinking. I nevertheless believe that the presented classification is not really adequate to capture the core of traditional idealistic thinking, which in turn leads to somewhat distorted conclusions about the opportunities for idealism to play a role for understanding the mind-body problem: First, the distinction between micro- macro- and cosmic idealism ist not fitting well into the idealistic venture. Instead, idealism is artificially reduced to a bad alternative to panpsychism. Secondly, the initially mentioned, but afterwards not discussed again difference between subjectinvolving and non-subject-involving idealism needs to be further extended, to account for the special role of subjects in traditional accounts of objective idealism. To elaborate on this, I will first give a short summary of Chalmers classification and some of the mentioned problems with idealism. Afterwards I will come back to my two objections in more detail. (shrink)

Responsible research and innovation features the dialog of science “with society,” and research performed “for society,” i.e., for the benefit of the people. I focus on this latter, outcome-oriented notion of RRI and discuss two kinds of problems. The first one concerns options to anticipate the future course of science and technology. Such foresight knowledge seems necessary for subjecting research to demands of social and moral responsibility. However, predicting science and technology is widely considered impossible. The second problem concerns moral (...) evaluation. The benefit or harm produced by certain research and innovation achievements is often hard to estimate. Against this background of uncertainty in factual and moral assessment, I explore opportunities left for RRI. First, RRI should contribute to maintaining a wide range of approaches. Second, judgments about RRI should draw on zones of convergence among the variety of research approaches pursued. Third, decisions about implementing a technology should be revisable. Fourth, the more specific inclusion of demands from society should be reserved to technology development. Fifth, in many respects, the social compatibility of a new technology is due rather to the social context than the inherent features of the product. Favorable circumstances are transparency, representation of all relevant parties, and procedural fairness. As a result, some of the benefits and detriments of research and innovation can be identified without detailed knowledge of future findings. (shrink)

Die Schrift bringt den Text einer Vorlesung, die im Wintersemester 1935/36 unter dem Titel »Grundfragen der Metaphysik« an der Universität Freiburg/Br. gehalten wurde. Sie ist zu einem wesentlichen Teil Auslegung der Lehre Kants vom 'System aller Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes' in der »Kritik der reinen Vernunft« und führt fort, was in der Abhandlung »Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik« (1929) begonnen wurde.

Public surveys conducted in many countries report widespread willingness of individuals to donate a kidney while alive to a family member or close friend, yet thousands suffer and many die each year while waiting for a kidney transplant. Advocates of financial incentive programs or “regulated markets” in kidneys present the problem of the kidney shortage as one of insufficient public motivation to donate, arguing that incentives will increase the number of donors. Others believe the solutions lie—at least in part—in facilitating (...) so-called “altruistic donation;” harnessing the willingness of relatives and friends to donate by addressing the many barriers which serve as disincentives to living donation. Strategies designed to minimize financial barriers to donation and the use of paired kidney exchange programs are increasingly enabling donation, and now, an innovative program designed to address what has been termed “chronologically incompatible donation” is being piloted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States. In this program, a person whose kidney is not currently required for transplantation in a specific recipient may instead donate to the paired exchange program; in return, a commitment is made to the specified recipient that priority access for a living-donor transplant in a paired exchange program will be offered when or if the need arises in the future. We address here potential ethical concerns related to this form of organ “banking” from living donors, and argue that it offers significant benefits without undermining the well-established ethical principles and values currently underpinning living donation programs. (shrink)

After about a century since the first attempts by Bohr, the interpretation of quantum theory is still a field with many open questions.1 In this article a new interpretation of quantum theory is suggested, motivated by philosophical considerations. Based on the findings that the ’weirdness’ of quantum theory can be understood to derive from a vanishing distinguishability of indiscernible particles, and the observation that a similar vanishing distinguishability is found for bundle theories in philosophical ontology, the claim is made that (...) quantum theory can be interpreted in an intelligible way by positing a bundle-theoretic view of objective idealism instead of materialism as the underlying fundamental nature of reality. (shrink)

Die 'Beiträge zur Philosophie. Vom Ereignis' dürfen mit Fug und Recht nach 'Sein und Zeit' als das zweite Hauptwerk Heideggers bezeichnet werden. Denn sie enthalten nach der fundamentalontologischen Ausarbeitung der Seinsfrage in 'Sein und Zeit' die erste Durchgestaltung des seinsgeschichtlichen Weges derselben Frage. Das seinsgeschichtliche Denken entfaltet das Wesen des Seins nicht mehr im Überstieg (Transzendenz) über das Seiende auf dessen Wahrheit hin (Horizont), sondern im Vollzug des ereigneten Entwurfs aus dem ereignenden Zuwurf der Wahrheit des Seins. 'Ereignis' ist der (...) Name für die Zusammengehörigkeit der ereignend sich zuwerfenden Wahrheit und des ereigneten Seinsentwurfes das Da-seins. Die 'Beiträge zur Philosophie' sind das Werk, in dem sich das Denken der im 'Brief über den Humanismus' genannten 'Kehre' vollzieht. (shrink)

W. V. Quine is commonly read as holding that there are no analytic truths and no a priori truths. I argue that this is a misreading. Quine’s view is that no sentence is determinately analytic or determinately a priori. I show that my reading is better supported by Quine’s arguments and general remarks about meaning and analyticity. I then briefly reexamine the debate between Quine and Carnap about analyticity, and show that the nature of their disagreement is different than what (...) it is usually thought to be. (shrink)

The International Bill of Human Rights (IBHR) enjoys universal acclaim as the source of the best standards and definition of human rights. This paper argues that the IBHR is inspired by liberalism and harbours ambiguities that open the door to a neoliberal seizure of the rights agenda; and that this effectively destabilises the focus on the IBHR on socio-economic and community rights, and therefore its stated ideal of the equal value of all human rights. I argue that Kwame Gyekye's moderate (...) communitarian political philosophy affords a viable philosophical basis for justification of a more balanced conception of human rights than the theoretical basis of the IBHR does. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship education is increasingly becoming a focal strategy for promoting entrepreneurship, particularly to foster entrepreneurial intentions and startups. However, learning and support are equally important after startup for novice entrepreneurs to gain a good level of confidence to manage their business and achieve the desired outcomes. Using a sample of 189 young self-employed individuals in Uganda, this study examines the differential impact of mentoring and self-efficacy on the achievement of intangible outcomes of entrepreneurship including satisfaction of need for autonomy, work (...) satisfaction and the intention to stay in self-employment. We found self-efficacy to mediate the effects of mentoring on these intangible outcomes. In addition, the results showed substantial gender differences. Whereas women’s satisfaction of the need for autonomy and intention to stay in self-employment were strongly associated with the direct effects of mentoring, their male counterparts seemed to benefit more if mentoring resulted in increased self-efficacy. Overall, our findings suggest that whereas mentoring improves the competence of small business owners and consequently achievement of superior outcomes, mentoring should also focus on boosting self-efficacy which in turn is essential for the application of the entrepreneurial competencies. (shrink)

In recent decades, an increasing interest in the dynamics of collections has brought to view how objects circulate as parts of networks of knowledge and how collections can acquire new meanings. Introducing this special issue on Collections, Knowledge, and Time, we want to shift focus from geographical circulation towards the temporal dynamics of collections: the layering and interweaving of asynchronous temporalities as collections are preserved, frozen, reinterpreted, sampled, and destroyed over time, and how these temporalities constitute knowledge potentials. We treat (...) collections broadly across museums of history of medicine, history of science, and ethnography, and scientific institutions including biobanks, seed banks, and fly centres, to investigate the considerable overlap in collection practices, as well as how objects can move between cultural historical and scientific uses. We limit ourselves, however, to epistemic collections, mainly scientific ones, assembled with research as a main purpose. This introduction first explores apparently mundane collection practices such as preservation and care, as well as technologies such as freezers and boxes, to unravel them as temporal practices that make stored items transcend time. We then discuss historical practices across cultural and scientific collections to show how historical thinking plays a central part in scientific collection work and how new scientific methods shape investigations of the past. Finally, we outline the potentialities for future knowledge in collections. In conclusion, we sketch out a pluralist epistemology of collections focusing specifically on how the dynamics of time create multiple epistemic potentials for historical scholarship and scientific research in the present and future. (shrink)

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of (...) this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”. (shrink)

A political challenge facing constitutional democracies in Africa is the lack of adequate representation and participation of citizens in democratic processes and institutions. This challenge is manifest in the vesting of power solely in, and the exercise of this power by, a sectional group – the majority party – to the exclusion of others; as evinced in the liberal democratic systems extensively practised on the continent. Wiredu proposes as a solution to these challenges the adoption of consensual democracy; an indigenous, (...) non-party democratic system rooted in the traditional African humanist and communitarian conceptions of the individual and the community, in which political decisions are characteristically reached by consensus. In this article, I present a critical exposition of Wiredu’s consensual democracy and defend it against liberal democracy on the one hand, and criticisms levelled against it on the other hand. I also offer some modifications to Wiredu’s theory in a bid to render it more suitable for practice in Africa. (shrink)

Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has been developing a project that aims to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of communication and coexistence with other animal organisms. In this article, I point out the importance of using modern visualization technologies to analyze and investigate the structure of communication frameworks and their modalities in the animal world, specifically using the example of spiders. The visualization of what is normally invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear rearticulates the realm of the (...) visible and the audible, which Saraceno then uses for art-critical purposes, with the aim of forming a new type of posthuman attunement to the environment and other animal species. The condition for outlining and articulating Saraceno’s artistic vision is the use of the latest technologies of visualization, which operate on the principle of digital and algorithmic code. They synthesize different planes of affectivity and transform, modulate, and combine the different modes of signs into a single technical-organic complex: they offer new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Thus, hybrid ecology in Saraceno’s case does not imply a return to primordial ways of life, but on the contrary, it forms a semiosphere attuned to a specific plane of consistency that enfolds distinct modes of signs and develops them into an expression of hitherto unsuspected variants of life. (shrink)

Emotional creativity (EC) is a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience. EC has been found to be related to various constructs across different fields of psychology during the past 30 years, but a comprehensive examination of previous research is still lacking. The goal of this review is to explore the reliability of use of the Emotional Creativity Inventory (ECI) across studies, to test gender differences and to compare levels of EC in (...) different countries. Thirty-five empirical studies focused on EC were retrieved and the coefficients required for the meta-analysis extracted. The meta-analysis revealed that women showed significantly higher EC than men (total N = 3,555). The same gender differences were also found when testing scores from three ECI subscales, i.e. emotional novelty, emotional preparedness and emotional effectiveness/authenticity. When comparing EC in 10 different countries (total N = 4,375), several cross-cultural differences were revealed. The Chinese sample showed a significantly lower average ECI total score than all the other countries. Based on the integration of results, the avenues for future research on EC and the breadth of influence of the concept of EC across different fields of psychology are discussed. Keywords: Emotional Creativity, Review, Meta-Analyses, Meta-Analysis, Definition, Emotional Creativity Inventory, ECI, Reliability, Gender Differences, Cross-cultural, Cross-culture, Personality Traits, NEO Personality Inventory, Big Five, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, Introversion, Neuroticism, Emotions, Creativity, Cognition, Cognitive Abilities, Affect, Fantasy, Coping, Alexithymia, Anhedonia, Self-understanding, Motivation, Creativeness, Innovative Performance, Creative Ability, Artistic Creativity, Creative Thinking. MeSH Headings: Emotions, Creativity, Affect, Affective Symptoms, Gender, Sex, Gender Identity, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Transcultural Studies, Temperament, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Anhedonia, Creativeness, Cognition, Cognitive Function, Artistic Creativity, Creative Ability, Creative Thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss an intriguing and relatively little studied symptomatic expression of schizophrenia known as experiences of activity in which patients form the delusion that they can control some external events by the sole means of their mind. I argue that experiences of activity result from patients being prone to aberrantly infer causal relations between unrelated events in a retrospective way owing to widespread predictive deficits. Moreover, I suggest that such deficits may, in addition, lead to an aberrant (...) intentional binding effect i.e., the subjective compression of the temporal interval between an intentional action and its external effects. In particular, it might be that patient’s thoughts are bound to the external events they aimed to control producing, arguably, a temporal contiguity between these two components. Such temporal contiguity would reinforce or sustain the feeling that the patient mind is directly causally efficient. (shrink)

This paper examines the question of whether human rights are related to ontology. It examines perspectives on this question from human rights theories in the Western and African traditions of philosophy and defends the thesis that a good account of human rights requires an explicit ontology of the human, and that taking this seriously engenders divergent conclusions about what rights are. It then proceeds to claim that the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights adds substantive features to the International (...) Bill of Human Rights, and that the Charter expresses Kwame Gyekye’s ontology of the human being. (shrink)

The idea that the changing entropy of a system is relevant to explaining why we know more about the system's past than about its future has been criticized on several fronts. This paper assesses the criticisms and clarifies the epistemology of the inference problem. It deploys a Markov process model to investigate the relationship between entropy and temporally asymmetric inference.

Discussion of sexuality in African cultures has a long history, but since the 1990s ethical reflections on homosexuality on the continent have often degenerated into furors and provoked a spate of anti-gay legislation in several countries. Refutations of homophobic dispositions encounter as barrier a pervasive belief in African cultures, that childbearing for community replenishment is a cherished moral duty. Several philosophers consider these to be exaggerated inhibitions that unjustifiably impede social acceptance of homosexuality, and have proposed as a solution what (...) they consider to be self-justifying political-moral principles, that terminate in value-pluralistic ideas such as the acceptance of the equality of sexual orientations and vindication of the right to the freedom to choose and satisfy sexual desire. I question the adequacy of such self-justificatory normative principles and consider the solutions they proffer as depreciating the moral point of the African pro-natalist position. Consequently, I develop a moral argument grounded in the ontology of Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarian theory of personhood as the most persuasive justification for homosexuality. (shrink)

Creativity in science and engineering has moral significance and deserves attention within professional ethics, in at least three areas. First, much scientific and technological creativity constitutes moral creativity because it generates moral benefits, is motivated by moral concern, and manifests virtues such as beneficence, courage, and perseverance. Second, creativity contributes to the meaning that scientists and engineers derive from their work, thereby connecting with virtues such as authenticity and also faults arising from Faustian trade-offs. Third, morally creative leadership is important (...) at all levels of science and engineering. (shrink)

Daniel Taylor and Dawn Goodwin present a case study of the Morecambe Bay Inquiry (MBI), which examined the high rate of maternal and neonatal deaths over a period of 9 years (2004–2013), within the small maternity unit of Furness General Hospital (FGH), one of the three hospitals comprising Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust.1 They examine this through a conceptual lens, and provide a solution involving changes in medical education. This commentary explores both these elements. First, they use the lens of ‘Normalisation (...) of Deviance’ (NoD) to explain organisational failure. However, other available lenses such as ‘Sociology of Disasters’, ‘Organisational Silence’ and ‘Comfort-seeking Behaviour’ may point to different problems and solutions. More justification for their choice of the lens of NoD would have been useful. Similarly, more justification for their focus on a cluster of five ‘serious untoward incidents’ (SUIs) occurring in 2008 would also have been useful. They suggest that before 2008, the perinatal mortality rate was low, patient satisfaction was high and recent level 2 accreditation of maternity services by the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts all suggested standards of care within the obstetric department were adequate. This stream of positive signals is likely to have contributed towards a genuine belief of safe operation within the maternity unit by staff and board members. However, as they acknowledge, the first problem can be seen in 2004. According to the MBI,2 there were SUIs in the years before and after 2008, but this …. (shrink)

The first case of COVID-19 infection in Africa was recorded in Egypt on 14 February 2020. Following this, several projections of the possible devastating effect that the virus can have on the population of African countries were made in the Western media. This paper presents evidence for Africa’s successful responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and under-reporting or misrepresentation of these successes in Western media. It proceeds to argue for accounting for these successes in terms of Africa’s communitarian way of life (...) and conceptions of self, duty, and rights; and that a particular orientation in theorizing on global justice can highlight the injustices inherent in the misrepresentation of these successes and contribute shared perspectives to formulating a framework of values and concepts that would facilitate the implementation of global policy goals for justice. The paper is thus grounded in a rejection of the insular tenets of theorizing prevalent in the global justice debate and to persistent inclinations in Western scholarship to the thinking that theorizing in the African context that draws inspiration from the cultural past has little to contribute to the quest for justice globally. On the contrary, it argues that reflexive critique of cultural history is a necessary source of normative ideals that can foster tolerant coexistence and a cooperative endeavour toward shared conceptions of justice in the contemporary world. (shrink)

Two major reports in the UK and USA have recently sanctioned as ethically acceptable genome editing of future generations for the treatment of serious rare inherited conditions. This marks an important turning point in the application of recombinant DNA techniques to humans. The central question this paper addresses is how did it became possible for human genetic engineering (HGE) of future generations to move from an illegitimate idea associated with eugenics in the 1980s to a concrete proposal sanctioned by scientists (...) and bioethicists in 2020? The paper uses the concept of a regime of normativity to understand the co-evolution and mutual shaping of technology, imaginaries, norms and governance processes in debates about HGE in the USA and UK. It will be argued that interlinked discursive, institutional, political and technological changes have made proposals for the use of genome editing in the genetic engineering of future generations both “thinkable” and legitimate. (shrink)

The historical consensus is that logical evidence is special. Whereas empirical evidence is used to support theories within both the natural and social sciences, logic answers solely to a priori evidence. Further, unlike other areas of research that rely upon a priori evidence, such as mathematics, logical evidence is basic. While we can assume the validity of certain inferences in order to establish truths within mathematics and test scientifi c theories, logicians cannot use results from mathematics or the empirical sciences (...) without seemingly begging the question. Appeals to rational intuition and analyticity in order to account for logical knowledge are symptomatic of these commitments to the apriority and basicness of logical evidence. This chapter argues that these historically prevalent accounts of logical evidence are mistaken, and that if we take logical practice seriously we fi nd that logical evidence is rather unexceptional, sharing many similarities to the types of evidence appealed to within other research areas. (shrink)

A semiotic phenomenology of the scission point boundary condi-tion between Karl Jaspers’s concepts of existence and Existenz reveal them as fundamental distinctions that can manifest in healthy or pathological forms of communication, including the “inner action” of the competing “voices” “heard” by the patient undergoing treatment. My analysis illustrates that the mind, for Jaspers, represents how communicability as truth involves us in a natural rhetorical (tropic) relationship with a society. In this analysis, I frame the problematic boundary between existence and (...) Existenz in the language of Husserl. To provide context, I introduce Jaspers’s semiotics and explicate his theory of communication. Lastly, I connect what we have learned from the scission boundary condition between existence and Existenz to the competing voices of the patient. We discover that for Jaspers, our “selves” are cyphers, striving for communicability in a world of others. (shrink)

Mr. B. A. Farrell has argued that psychoanalysis is refutable, without clarifying different senses of 'refutable'. Once this clarification is done and the relevant literature examined, however, it is seen that psychoanalysis is not refutable in several important senses of 'refutable', although it is refutable in a sense that is quite uninteresting.

There has been extensive work in the space of Indigenous epistemological approaches to research. Because Australian Indigenous peoples have been researched significantly, there are guidelines around the ethical and cultural conduct of this type of research. Via investigating the Academy’s approach to research in general, we can illuminate the vast differences between empirical approaches to research from the ‘West’ compared to knowledge acquisition and sharing through ‘relationality’ from an Indigenous perspective. This paper investigates this dichotomy and brings into question the (...) premise of power and value attributed to each approach, arguing that this is still not an equal ascription. This paper posits a reconfiguration of approaches to research as a way of extending on research in general, and provides a platform of how Indigenous knowledges can extend on and reconfigure, in a positive way, approaches to research. (shrink)

Der europäische Nihilismus.--Die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilsmus.

Genome editing enables very accurate alterations to DNA. It promises profound and potentially disruptive changes in healthcare, agriculture, industry, and the environment. This paper presents a multidisciplinary analysis of the contemporary development of genome editing and the tension between continuity and change. It draws on the idea that actors involved in innovation are guided by “sociotechnical regimes” composed of practices, institutions, norms, and cultural beliefs. The analysis focuses on how genome editing is emerging in different domains and whether this marks (...) continuity or disruption of the established biotechnology regime. In conclusion, it will be argued that genome editing is best understood as a technology platform that is being powerfully shaped by this existing regime but is starting to disrupt the governance of biotechnology. In the longer term is it set to converge with other powerful technology platforms, which together will fundamentally transform the capacity to engineer life. (shrink)