The essays that follow concern one of these contributions, Günter Figal’s Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2010; English translation of Gegenständlichkeit: das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie, Mohr Siebeck 2006). These pieces are drawn from an “Author Meets Critics” session sponsored by the North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics (NASPH) in conjunction with the 2012 meeting of SPEP. As conceived by the NASPH organizers, the principal purpose of the “Author Meets Critics” session was to further discussion of the significance (...) of Figal’s Objectivity for current research. (shrink)

Las conjugadas nociones del Lugar y del Alcance pretenden promover aquí una forma inédita y potente de cuestionar la misma naturaleza de la (no) experiencia que nos proporcionan la pintura y el dibujo, apuntando para un (no) espacio y un (no) tiempo específicos de los (no) objetos pintados y/o dibujados, que no son en absoluto el espacio, el tiempo, y los objetos de nuestra experiencia perceptiva consciente de serdiciente tal como fue diseñada de un modo globalmente fenomenológico, por Kant o (...) por Husserl por ejemplo. (shrink)

The succession of shocks—sudden social and environmental crises, whether they be episodic or erratic, such as extreme weather events, pandemics, and economic recessions—has dire consequences on the ability of people, especially the vulnerable and precarious, to secure safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods. While the scholarship on multiple shocks and stressors is increasingly recognized in the academic literature, there remains a dearth in scholarship that critically interrogates the impacts of successive and overlapping shocks on the various dimensions and temporalities of (...) food security. In this paper, we adapt the double exposure framework to examine how a triad of shocks—a catastrophic typhoon, the COVID-19 pandemic, and high economic inflation—has led to varying magnitudes of transitory and chronic food insecurity among the fisherfolk in coastal communities in Capiz, the Philippines. Drawing from field research, we illustrate that the succession of shocks induced a decline in household incomes, an escalation of dependence on credit, and the consequential accumulation of debt among the fisherfolk. Credit and debt have allowed the fisherfolk to sustain meal frequency to some extent during periods of high vulnerability, but the succession of shocks continued to aggravate their lack of access to nutritious food. Looming in the background is the gradual crisis of declining fish stocks, which may exacerbate the impacts of successive shocks in the future. (shrink)

This book, ten years in the making, is the first factual and conceptual history of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), a key twentieth-century text whose background until now has been conspicuously absent. Through painstaking investigation of European archives and private correspondence, Theodore Kisiel provides an unbroken account of the philosopher's early development and progress toward his masterwork. Beginning with Heidegger's 1915 dissertation, Kisiel explores the philosopher's religious conversion during the bleak war years, the hermeneutic breakthrough in the war-emergency (...) semester of 1919, the evolution of attitudes toward his phenomenological mentor, Edmund Husserl, and the shifting orientations of the three drafts of Being and Time. Discussing Heidegger's little-known reading of Aristotle, as well as his last-minute turn to Kant and to existentialist terminology, Kisiel offers a wealth of narrative detail and documentary evidence that will be an invaluable factual resource for years to come. A major event for philosophers and Heidegger specialists, the publication of Kisiel's book allows us to jettison the stale view of Being and Time as a great book "frozen in time" and instead to appreciate the erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions of what remains a challenging philosophical "path.". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

The Weimar Nietzsche-Bibliographie, which is available online along with an exhaustive index, contains hundreds of entries, ranging from "absolute Musik" to "Zynismus." But despite references to his treatment in film and to the names of several novelists, it provides no rubric for Friedrich Nietzsche in novels or otherwise as a fictional figure.Yet the twenty-first century alone has already produced at least four such works, in addition to two others over the preceding eighty years—not to mention films in Italian and French. (...) Liliana Cavani's controversial 1977 Italian film Al di là del bene e del male was widely criticized for its focus on violent sex, including... (shrink)

Thus, says Hare, a judgment that someone is happy is an appraisal, not a statement of fact. I do not wish to deny that there are some uses of 'happy', ascribed to a person or to a life, for which this is the case; but I would like to maintain that there are other uses of 'happy', philosophically important ones, in which a judgment that a third person is happy is not an appraisal, but is rather a report about him (...) which may be true or false; and in which a first person judgment that one is happy, while it involves an appraisal, is still a report which may be true or false. (shrink)

Creating android and humanoid robots to furnish companionship in the nursing care of older people continues to attract substantial development capital and research. Some people object, though, that machines of this kind furnish human–robot interaction characterized by inauthentic relationships. In particular, robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been charged with substituting mindless mimicry of human behaviour for the real presence of conscious caring offered by human nurses. When thus viewed as deceptive, the robots also have prompted corresponding concerns regarding (...) their potential psychological, moral, and spiritual implications for people who will be interacting socially with these machines. The foregoing objections and concerns can be assessed quite differently, depending upon ambient religious beliefs or metaphysical presuppositions. The complaints may be set aside as unnecessary, for example, within religious traditions for which even current robots can be viewed as presenting spiritual aspects. Elsewhere, technological cultures may reject the complaints as expression of outdated superstition, holding that the machines eventually will enjoy a consciousness described entirely in materialist and behaviourist terms. While recognizing such assessments, the authors of this essay propose that the heart of the foregoing objections and concerns may be evaluated, in part, scientifically – albeit with a conclusion recommending fundamental revisions in AI modelling of human mental life. Specifically, considerations now favour introduction of AI models using interactive classical and quantum computation. Without this change, the answer to the essay's title question arguably is ‘no’ – with it, the answer plausibly becomes ‘maybe’. Either outcome holds very interesting implications for nurses. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the value of philosophy of science for history of science. I start by introducing a distinction between two ways of integrating history and philosophy of science: historical philosophy of science and philosophical history of science. I then offer a critical discussion of Imre Lakatos’s project to bring philosophy of science to bear on historical interpretation. I point out certain flaws in Lakatos’s project, which I consider indicative of what went wrong with PHS in the past. (...) Finally, I put forward my own attempt to bring out the historiographical potential of philosophy of science. Starting from Norwood Russell Hanson’s insight that historical studies of science involve metascientific concepts, I argue that philosophical reflection on those concepts can be historiographically fruitful. I focus on four issues and discuss their significance and utility for historiographical practice. (shrink)

First published, here, in English. Reproduced (also in English) in Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften, 20.I.

is an important principle, worthy of serious scrutiny. Its truth or falsity bears on the question of whether moral rightness, obligatoriness, etc., are a matter of factors “internal” to an agent, or whether “external” factors are relevant to determining the moral normative status of acts. Moreover, Access enjoys considerable intuitive support. If I destroy Greensboro in professor Sorensen’s example by pushing the wrong button, I seem to have a good excuse to give to anyone who would accuse me of wrongdoing: (...) “I had no way of knowing that this action would be wrong!” But if I have a good excuse, then pushing the button doesn’t seem wrong; and if that action isn’t wrong, then I had no obligation to refrain from pushing that button. A principle distinct from, but analogous to, Access also deserves our attention. (shrink)

Brackets and tables, circles and maps, 1554-1872 -- Early botanical networks and trees, 1766-1815 -- The first evolutionary tree, 1786-1820 -- Diverse and unusual trees of the early nineteenth century, 1817-1834 -- The rule of five, 1819-1854 -- Pre-Darwinian branching diagrams, 1828-1858 -- Evolution and the trees of Charles Darwin, 1837-1868 -- The trees of Ernst Haeckel, 1866-1905 -- Post-Darwinian nonconformists, 1868-1896 -- More late-nineteenth-century trees, 1874-1897 -- Trees of the early twentieth century, 1901-1930 -- The trees of Alfred Sherwood (...) Romer, 1933-1966 -- Additional trees of the mid-twentieth century, 1931-1943 -- The trees of William King Gregory, 1938-1951 -- Hints of new approaches, 1954-1969 -- Phenograms and cladograms, 1958-1966 -- Early molecular trees, 1962-1987 -- Notable trees of the past four decades, 1970-2010 -- Primeval branches and universal trees of life, 1997-2010. (shrink)

A view of Heidegger's divergence from the traditional philosophies of reason.

In this paper I address some of the problems that the historical development of science poses for a realist and discuss whether a realist construal of scientific activity is conducive to historiographical practice. First, I discuss, by means of historical examples, Ian Hacking's defense of entity realism. Second, I try to show, drawing on Kuhn's recent work on incommensurability, that the realism problem is relevant to historiography and that a realist position entails a particular historiographical strategy, which faces problems. Finally, (...) I suggest that for historiographical purposes an agnostic attitude with respect to scientifictheories and unobservable entities is the most appropriate. (shrink)

This dissertation reconstructs some aspects of the historical development of the concept of the electron from 1891, when the term "electron" was introduced, to 1925, when the notion of spin was put forward, in the light of the relevant historiographical and philosophical problems. The central historiographical tool employed is Karl Popper's notion of a problem situation. Furthermore, some of the historical episodes are reconstructed in terms of a "biographical" approach to theoretical entities that portrays them as active agents that participate (...) in the development of scientific knowledge. Their agency is due to the heuristic resources that they embody and to the resistance that they exhibit to manipulation. The historical analysis begins with a reconceptualization of the "discovery" of the electron and aims at situating the principal historical actors within the wider process which led to the acceptance of the electron as an element of the ontology of physics. I continue with a reconstruction of the discovery of the Zeeman effect in the light of recent work on the history and philosophy of experimental science. The next three chapters are devoted to a reading of the development of the old quantum theory of the atom , which aimed at understanding the behavior and distribution of electrons bound within the atom, from the perspective of the electron's biography. Furthermore, I discuss the chemists' representation of the electron and contrast it with its physical counterpart. The main philosophical problem examined concerns the implications of meaning change for scientific realism . I discuss in detail that issue and argue against the widespread view that meaning variance is incompatible with scientific realism. Thus, I provide a way out for the aspiring realist, without however committing myself to a realist position. Finally, I argue that the historical development of the concept of the electron from 1896 to 1925 is compatible with a realist construal of its ontological status. (shrink)

This was the title of a symposium held in Moscow, May 27–30, 1986, and organized by the “International Association for the Study of Dialectical Philosophy—Societas Hegeliana,” in collaboration with the Institute for Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Participation was by invitation only. Thirteen participants came from the Federal Republic of Germany, twelve from the U.S.S.R., six from the Democratic Republic of Germany, four each from France and Italy, two from Bulgaria, as well as one each from (...) Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, Israel, Japan, the Netherlands, and Canada. Papers had been distributed previously and were briefly summarized to allow for more lengthy discussions. The two languages used were Russian and German. Simultaneous translation was provided. (shrink)