Following an article by John von Neumann on infinite tensor products, we develop the idea that the usual formalism of quantum mechanics, associated with unitary equivalence of representations, stops working when countable infinities of particles (or degrees of freedom) are encountered. This is because the dimension of the corresponding Hilbert space becomes uncountably infinite, leading to the loss of unitary equivalence, and to sectorisation. By interpreting physically this mathematical fact, we show that it provides a natural way to describe the (...) “Heisenberg cut”, as well as a unified mathematical model including both quantum and classical physics, appearing as required incommensurable facets in the description of nature. (shrink)

The paper is meant to be a contribution to the study of Indian and comparative ethics. It treats the Vajjālaggam, an anthology of Prākrit stanzas (subhāsita literature) dealing with a variety of topics. Focusing on the ‘ethical’ sections of the VL, it tries to describe and analyse its underlying ethical system. In Part I the different ethical themes of the VL (Valour and Destiny, Virtues and Vices, Masters and Servants, Friendship and Affection, Poverty and Charity) are described in detail. In (...) Part II it is shown that the VL. offers a clear example of a virtue ethic with a strong emphasis on self‐regarding virtues (gunas), based on a pluralistic and instrumental theory of the good. The paper also treats the crucial ethical problem of the relationship between personal well‐being and virtuousness as described in the VL. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo determine the impact of the affiliate stigma on mental well-being of relatives caring for a person with dementia.DesignThe study was conducted in a cross sectional design.SettingThe study was conducted in a public setting, addressing relatives caring for a person with dementia.ParticipantsParticipants were relatives of patients with a formal diagnosis of dementia. Relatives were defined as caring or living closely to a patient. Participants were recruited with the help of care and welfare organizations.Outcome MeasuresThe main outcome measure was the impact (...) of the affiliate stigma on mental well-being of caring relatives.Results228 participants fully completed the survey. Women, relatives with a higher education and partners experienced more impact of the affiliate stigma on mental well-being than man, relatives with a lower education and relatives with another relationship to the person with dementia. The duration of dementia and the age of the caregiver had a clear significant effect on affiliate stigma.ConclusionThis study revealed that caregiver related features are predicting the presence of an affiliate stigma. Interventions to prevent or reduce the impact of this stigma might focus on these groups. Education about dementia and the impact on patients, relatives and the broader social context might alter the affiliate stigma surrounding dementia. (shrink)

Ce livre a pour objet principal de décrire le sport en tant qu’art de vivre. L’art de vivre pose la question de la vie bonne, du sens, de la qualité de vie. Jadis, les Hellènes en avaient déjà soulevé l’importance d’un point de vue philosophique et pratique. Ainsi, la quête de cette vie bonne n’est possible que si elle prends en compte la dimension du soin du corps. Notre tradition occidentale a trop souvent éliminé la corporéité, le besoin de prendre (...) soin de son corps. Les maladies actuelles de la civilisation (stress, dépressions,...) en sont la preuve. Or, le corps est notre manière primaire d’être-dans-le-monde. L’art de vivre est également synonyme d’harmonie, de juste mesure, de dialogue avec l’environnement. Le sport en tant qu’art de vivre n’a pour dire pas de but; il est le but. Ce qui compte, ce n’est pas de penser en termes de quantité ou d’efficacité, mais en termes de qualité, de bien-être. La manière dont Marc Van den Bossche aborde le sport en tant qu’art de vivre est novatrice. En effet, rares sont les auteurs qui ont présenté l’art de vivre avec cette dimension du soin du corps, ou bien le sport nécessite de performances. (shrink)

In my reply to the commentaries by Babette Babich and Robert C. Scharff I make a distinction between critical remarks and additions that are relevant for my view on philosophy for substantive reasons and others that relate to a style or way of philosophizing. My reply to Scharff concerns the latter. I continue to defend an updated version of Heidegger’s thinking about technology, which I bring together with elements from the work of Don Ihde and Andrew Feenberg. I read all (...) this from the perspective of a neo-pragmatist way of philosophizing, explicitly inspired by Richard Rorty. (shrink)

In this contribution the author tries to formulate an approach to the art of living with technology based on Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason, a work often overlooked by contemporary commentators in the philosophy of technology. This approach couples the concept of releasement to insights hailing from Wolfgang Schirmacher concerning Heidegger’s nihilism.

InPart I of my article I have tried to show how the problem of negation has led the Jains to accept Non-existence and Existence as constituents ordharmas of every real object and to formulate their first dialectical principle:sad-asad-rŪpa $$\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\cdot}$}}{m} $$ vastu or ‘Every real object possesses a mode as an existent and as a non-existent’. Their interpretation of negation seems to be based on the ‘primitive’ realistic standpoint that every word in a true proposition, including the word ‘not(-)’, must have (...) some sort of objective reference. InPart II I have tried to show, using Mereology as a logical tool, howHaribhadra SŪri in the first chapter of theAnekānta-jaya-patākā defends the Jain viewpoint. (shrink)

This paper examines the consequences of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness for theology. Today, it seems, the human cannot encounter a real Otherness in immanence, let alone in history. This is theology’s main problem in today’s western culture marked by the experience of the absence of God. The consequence is that each and everything becomes subjectified, included God’s presence. God seems no longer to be present himself. The author finds in Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, the possibility to think again the (...) encounter with real otherness, and this according to God’s threefold manifestation: God’s invisible mystery as the otherness of history, God’s advent in history in Jesus Christ, and finally, the Eucharistic Christ – indeed these are three manifestations for which Cardinal Ratzinger uses the term of God’s praesentia realis. In the first instance this applies at the level of God’s possible appearing as the Transcendent in immanence. Givenness retrieves a real otherness in our gazing gaze, in the self-giving of phenomenality, and thus makes the phenomenon of the other belong to phenomenality as invisible. The philosophical and theological consequences of this otherness belonging to phenomenality appear to be multiple. Second, Marion succeeds in thinking a phenomenon of revelation-as-possibility, of which Jesus Christ appears to be the historical paradigm. And third, the miraculous event of Eucharistic presence can be understood phenomenologically as a phenomenon of revelation. Looked at from a theological perspective, it appears thus that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness offers to theology a new first philosophy as ancilla theologiae: it provides theology again with a presence, as a present or a gift. (shrink)

This paper explores the functioning of political propaganda during the Brabant Revolution, that is, during Belgium's contribution to the ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’. More in particular, it examines the differences between royalist and patriot propaganda. Detailed reference to the political dialogue pamphlets of the time allows for the reconstruction of the first instance of nation-building in Belgian history. In more general terms, the paper hopes to contribute to the argument for an historic and developmental approach to the study of (...) nation, with particular attention for its multi-faceted and emancipatory functionality. (shrink)

In his recent study on ‘The Excessiveness of Christianity’ the K.U. Leuven professor of phi- losophical anthropology Paul Moyaert describes how Christianity is marked with excessiveness in its ethical, religious-metaphysical and mystical self-understanding. Here we deal only with the middle part of the study, on “the incarnation of meaning.” In the first part of our contribution we explore Moyaerts theory of symbol. Moyaert rightly resists both an instrumental reduction of the symbol and an intellectual reduction. But in his search for (...) the own rationality of the symbol, he inclines towards absolutising its meaning, installing an intrinsic relation between the signifier and the signified. Moyaert recognises the role of human intentionality installing a signification in the symbol, but argues that the symbol exceeds that subjective signification with an objective meaning which it brings about itself. He sees an “intimate entanglement of ‘significatio’ and ‘esse’ ” which is at the heart of what he calls a “realism of meaning.” Our argument against this reasoning is that if the symbol bridges the distance between signifier and signified in an objective relationship between both, apart from every signifying human intentionality, then this symbol escapes historicity, and brings about an absolute presence, or the divine, thus becoming what we call the locus onto-theologicus susceptible to unmasking as an idol. Moyaert partly seems to recognize this, but nonetheless defends it as the “surrealistic perspective” from which we must think the symbol. In the second part of our contribution we follow Moyaert in his application of his theory of symbol to sacramental presence, especially the praesentia realis. He replaces the terms “signifier – signified” with their religious equivalents “incarnans – incarnatum,” seeming to assume that they have the same meaning. But this is not an innocent procedure. Whereas in the symbolic the distance between both poles should be held apart in order to avoid idolatry, in the movement of sacramental incarnation God bridges this distance in His becoming present through the historical. The praesentia realisis in the tradition of the Church not the highest possible symbolic presence of God, hence a kind of “praesentia surrealis”, but God’s sacramental presence, pushed to the limit of its historicity, in a manner analogous with Jesus’ being completely one of us and yet also “without sin.” Hence does faith not occur in a perspective of surrealism, but of realism. In our evaluation, we make a plea for a theological nuance of Moyaerts theory of symbol, recognising that a symbol as signifier needs to maintain distance from its signified in order to avoid becoming an idol, and so must also be recognized the historicity of the indeed irreducible otherness of the symbol for the individual. What is distinctive about the sacrament, as opposed to the symbol, is its accomplishment of God’s Mysterious movement bridging the distance between creation and Creator. Without this nuance, Moyaerts position appears to us to fall back into to the ultimate functionalisation of faith which consists in mastering contingency through the symbolic. Indeed, Moyaert is not alone among contemporary philosophers who turn from recognizing the irreducible groundlessness of life to a rediscovery of Christianity as an inspiration for philosophical anthropology which, however, threatens to reduce faith to a kind of post-religious wisdom tradition. In those cases, one suspects that this new sympathy for Christian faith may turn out to be a Trojan horse in the mother of all religious wars, still ongoing between Greek-modern autonomy and Jewish-biblical heteronomy. (shrink)

Pleidooi voor de beleving als kennis-instrument.

‘Vandaag ga je toch niet hardlopen, met zo'n rotweer?’ Vraag van een collega aan een andere collega. ‘Natuurlijk wel,’ klonk het antwoord. ‘Net met dit regenweer vind ik het heerlijk om er eens tegenaan te gaan.’ Dat antwoord beviel me wel. Vorige winter heb ik het nog zo vaak mogen meemaken tijdens het fietsen. Een geselende wind, ijskoude regendruppels, opspattende modder: bij het begin van een trainingsrit roept dat vraagtekens op naar de zin van dit gedoe. Dat duurt hooguit een (...) uur. Dan worden je twijfels overstemd door wat je lichaam je zeer nadrukkelijk influistert: dit is genieten. Van binnen in je lijf lijken allerlei explosieve stofjes naar buiten te willen. Lijden als springstof. Een klein beetje doodgaan om je springlevend te voelen. Duursporters kennen die wijsheid van het lichaam. (shrink)

This volume consists of several contributions to a refined understanding of religious experience in view of contemporary theological epistemology.

In this volume we present the proceedings from the fourth international Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology (LEST IV, November 5-8, 2003), which focussed ...

In this article we seek to lay bare a couple of potential conceptual and methodological issues that, we believe, are implicitly present in contemporary philosophy of technology. At stake are the sustained pertinence of and need for coping strategies as to ‘how to live with technology ’ notwithstanding PhilTech’s advancement in its non-essentialist analysis of ‘technology’ as such; the issue of whether ‘living with technology’ is a technological affair or not ; and the tightly related question concerning the status of (...) the methodological bedrock of contemporary PhilTech, the ‘empirical turn.’ These matters are approached from the perspective of the philosophical notion of the ‘art of living,’ and our argumentation is developed both as a context for and on the basis of the contributions to the special issue ‘The Art of Living with Technology.’. (shrink)

Het ethos waarin de mens leeft en handelt is in verandering zolang de mens leeft en handelt. In De maakbare moraal reflecteren verschillende filosofen over de antwoorden die het moderne en hedendaagse denken kunnen bieden op vragen die net door dat veranderend ethos tot stand worden gebracht. De idee dat moraal 'maakbaar' zou zijn houdt meteen ook een kritisch standpunt in: wat precies is er in onze morele omgang met elkaar dat beheersbaar, expliciteerbaar, voorstelbaar... zou kunnen zijn? De maakbare moraal (...) bundelt bijdragen van Daniel Acke, Hans Alma, Sonja Lavaert, Julia Maria Mönig, Johan Stuy en Adelheid Rigo, Marc Van den Bossche, Yoni Van Den Eede, Karl Verstrynge en Else Walravens. De reeks Humanismen wil het denken over de hedendaagse condition humaine op een prikkelende en eigenzinnige manier stimuleren. Het begrip humanisme krijgt hier een zeer ruime omschrijving: respect voor de mens in zijn diversiteit en pluraliteit en voor de manier waarop individuen zoeken naar identiteit en zingeving. De reeks komt tot stand onder begeleiding van prof. dr. Marc Van den Bossche van de vakgroep Wijsbegeerte en Moraalwetenschappen van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel. (shrink)

The cloister of the Poor Clares St.-Elisabethsdal in Boxtel, in the present-day province of Brabant, the Netherlands, is one of the monasteries created during the new wave of Observant Clarissan monastic foundations in the Northern Low Countries between ca. 1460 and 1513. It was established after Wamel, Haarlem, Veere, Delft, Brielle, Gouda and Alkmaar.1 But it was not the first Clarissan settlement in what is currently the Netherlands. More than a century before, Willem van den Bossche, lord of Erp, (...) enabled through his last will d.d. 28 augustus 1335 the foundation of a convent of Poor Clares in the town of 's-Hertogenbosch,2... (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is predicted to have a deep impact on the future of work and employment. The paper outlines a normative framework to understand and protect human freedom and justice in this transition. The proposed framework is based on four main ideas: going beyond the idea of a Basic Income to compensate the losers in the transition towards AI-driven work, towards a Responsible Innovation approach, in which the development of AI technologies is governed by an inclusive and deliberate societal (...) judgment; going beyond a philosophical conceptualisation of social justice only focused on the distribution of ‘primary goods’, towards one focused on the different goals, values, and virtues of various social practices (Walzer’s ‘spheres of justice’) and the different individual capabilities of persons (Sen’s ‘capabilities’); going beyond a classical understanding of capital, towards one explicitly including mental capacities as a source of value for AI-driven activities. In an effort to promote an interdisciplinary approach, the paper combines political and economic theories of freedom, justice and capital with recent approaches in applied ethics of technology, and starts applying its normative framework to some concrete example of AI-based systems: healthcare robotics, ‘citizen science’, social media and platform economy. (shrink)

This book discusses issues regarding conceptualization, governance and implementation of responsible innovation. It treats different approaches to making responsible innovation a reality and it contains new case studies that illustrate challenges and solutions. Research on Responsible Innovation is by its nature highly multidisciplinary, and also pro-active, design-oriented and policy-relevant. Until a few years back, the concept of Responsible Innovation was hardly used - nowadays it is increasingly receiving attention from both researchers and policy makers. This is indispensable reading for anyone (...) interested in or working on innovation. (shrink)

Libraries provide access to large amounts of library metadata. Unfortunately, many libraries only offer textual interfaces for searching and browsing their holdings. Visualizations provide simpler, faster, and more efficient ways to navigate, search and study large quantities of metadata. This paper presents GlamMap, a visualization tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. We provide detailed discussion of how GlamMap benefits the work of librarians and researchers. We show how geographic representations help librarians to perform tasks such (...) as collection assessment and how geographic information helps researchers to identify important scientific resources. (shrink)

This article constitutes the introduction to a collection of essays in volume 4 of JAE, representing an extremely diverse collection of pieces written by authors from equally diverse backgrounds with the purpose of sharing the theoretical and practical issues related to research-ethics, or on ethics more generally. All of the articles are fresh contributions to the research-ethics review debate. The 17 authors of the 12 articles come from the United States, South Africa, and Canada. Their disciplinary or research backgrounds include (...) Aboriginal literatures, English literature, English-as-a Second-Language pedagogy, French literature, history, language and literacy, liberal arts, and linguistics – all fields in the cluster of the humanities. The volume also has contributions from social work, sociology, and speech pathology. The world of research-ethics review has become so pervasive that it invades all areas of research: it does not respect disciplinary boundaries. The articles in this special volume represent, in short, a microscope of the research world. (shrink)

* The editorial board wishes to thank Hildegard Penn of Tilburg University for her meticulous editorial work on this issue.

In this interview with Jan Hendrik van den Berg, the Dutch phenomenologist and psychiatrist addresses the origins of his work, his most significant influences, and the purpose of metabletic phenomenology in the modern age. In the course of the interview. Dr. Van den Berg provides a basic overview of his work, and highlights the central finding of his metabletic analyses: a loss of wonder before nature, which results from the more fundamental loss of genuine spirituality in the modern world.

Background: Empirical studies in Muslim communities on organ donation and blood transfusion show that Muslim counsellors play an important role in the decision process. Despite the emerging importance of online English Sunni fatwas, these fatwas on organ donation and blood transfusion have hardly been studied, thus creating a gap in our knowledge of contemporary Islamic views on the subject.Method: We analysed 70 English Sunni e-fatwas and subjected them to an in-depth text analysis in order to reveal the key concepts in (...) the Islamic ethical framework regarding organ donation and blood transfusion.Results: All 70 fatwas allow for organ donation and blood transfusion. Autotransplantation is no problem at all if done for medical reasons. Allotransplantation, both from a living and a dead donor, appears to be possible though only in quite restricted ways. Xenotransplantation is less often mentioned but can be allowed in case of necessity. Transplantation in general is seen as an ongoing form of charity. Nearly half of the fatwas allowing blood transfusion do so without mentioning any restriction or problem whatsoever. The other half of the fatwas on transfusion contain the same conditional approval as found in the arguments pro organ transplantation.Conclusion: Our findings are very much in line with the international literature on the subject. We found two new elements: debates on the definition of the moment of death are hardly mentioned in the English Sunni fatwas and organ donation and blood transfusion are presented as an ongoing form of charity. (shrink)

This essay takes Arthur Danto’s end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by arguing that we need the (...) latter if we want to properly assess the plausibility of the end-of-art thesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BreathingLuk Van den Dries (bio)This text, "Breathing," was conceived for the book From Act to Acting: Fabre's Guidelines for the Performer of the 21st Century (2021). The book was conceived and designed by Jan Fabre, author, theatre artist, and visual artist, active since the 1970s. The book was written by Luk Van den Dries, dramaturg and theatre researcher of the University of Antwerp, in tight collaboration with Jan Fabre (...) and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozic). The book sheds new light on the physical, mental, and vocal training of the performer and furthermore gives insight into Fabre's revolutionary thoughts on contemporary theatre.1Breathing is the first of the ten performative principles that together create the basic grammar in which the language of the performers is grounded.Three-phased breathing (one part in, one part out, one part nothing) is a basic condition in the series of exercises Jan Fabre developed throughout his career. This respiration technique returns in all exercises. Also, it is the first principle that the performers are taught: by dividing breathing into three equal parts, energy is built up and stress or fatigue is canalized. It is a way to rebalance, to find a place of rest after a strenuous effort, or it can also be used as a springboard to a heightened performance. Very regularly during individual exercises, Fabre will refer to this respiration technique, especially in specific situations of high adrenaline, but of course the performers should learn to use this respiration technique autonomously. They should become so familiar with the rhythm of this breathing that they automatically fall back on it when necessary. Because this respiration technique is so crucial to Fabre's acting pedagogy, it is described in detail as the very first exercise in his book. Its basic principles are explained below as well, as the first performative principle.Breathing is a sign of life, and on this primal and essential level it needs to be understood that, through breathing, the performer gives life. He breathes life into the performance. Fabre himself has described this basic condition for the birth of theatre through breathing very precisely: [End Page 30]The most important weapon of the warrior of beauty is his respiration. When the performance starts, life stops. Life itself dies. The warrior of beauty is alive, but life itself is dead. The warrior of beauty remains with just his own breath. When he enters the stage, he needs to breathe life into deceased life. Like a god gives his breath to create life. In the same way he will create life with his breath. How will he achieve this? By breathing correctly: one-third inhaling through the nostrils, one-third exhaling through pursed lips, one-third without breathing. And then the miracle happens. The breath becomes imagination and the imagination breathes. The warrior of beauty is the master of breath and life.2Fabre's abdominal breathing differs from regular forms of breathing, such as techniques derived from Asian yoga techniques, Chi-kung or Tai-chi, as it stresses different parts. At the same time, it is closely related to it, because these practices also adopt the notion that breathing in the first place rouses vitality and spirit and that the right kind of breathing thus aims at controlling life currents and bringing about a clear mind. In yoga it is called pranayama: prana meaning spirit or force of life, ayama meaning 'control' or 'grasp.' Yoga knows many variants in directing the breath, depending on the asanas (yoga postures) in which they are bedded. Sometimes focusing mainly on the diaphragm and the flanks, sometimes on abdominal breathing. Also, suspending your breath (kumbhaka) is a yoga technique, applied at the end of inhalation as well as after exhalation and during taking breath.In Fabre's case, abdominal breathing is stressed: first, air is inhaled through the nose, subsequently sent in the direction of the peritoneal cavity and the flanks, and then again exhaled via a very precise blowing technique (a dosed flow of air through an imaginary straw). During the cycle the diaphragm remains... (shrink)

The present article puts forward a behavioral disinhibition hypothesis stating that, often, at least some levels of behavioral disinhibition are needed to overcome people’s inhibition to intervene in dilemmatic situations in which they have to choose between different actions with good reasons for each of the actions involved. Results reported indeed show that people to whom disinhibited behaviors were salient or people with stronger predispositions toward behavioral disinhibition were more likely to intervene in trolley and footbridge dilemmas.