In collective harm cases, bad consequences follow if enough people act in a certain way even though no such individual act makes a difference for the worse. Global warming, overfishing and Derek Parfit’s famous case of the harmless torturers are some examples of such harm. Shelly Kagan argues that there is a threshold such that one single act might trigger harm in all collective harm cases. Julia Nefsky points to serious shortcomings in Kagan’s argument, but does not show that his (...) conclusion is incorrect. I argue that our best theories of vagueness (the epistemic view of vagueness, three-valued logic, and supervaluationism) entail that there is a threshold in all collective harm cases. However, my analysis points to another problem with Kagan’s argument: the thresholds are not necessarily perceptible. Given the assumption that only perceptible differences matter morally, passing such a threshold does not necessarily trigger morally relevant harm, pace Kagan. Last, I consider two variants of Kagan’s argument and find both problematic. One controversially assumes that observational relations like ‘cannot perceive the difference between’ are transitive. The other problematically assumes that so called triangulation always is possible. (shrink)

Abstract: Nietzsche’s famously wrote that “consciousness is a surface” (EH, Why I am so clever, 9: 97). The aim of this paper is to make sense of this quite puzzling contention—Superficiality, for short. In doing this, I shall focus on two further claims—both to be found in Gay Science 354—which I take to substantiate Nietzsche’s endorsement of Superficiality. The first claim is that consciousness is superfluous—which I call the “superfluousness claim” (SC). The second claim is that consciousness is the source (...) of some deep falsification—which I call the “falsification claim” (FC). I shall start by considering Nietzsche’s notion of consciousness. Here, I shall argue that the kind of consciousness he is concerned with is in fact self-consciousness and that he put forward a higher-order theory of it. Then, I shall address the two claims. Regarding (FC), my proposal will be that, according to Nietzsche, the content of (self-)conscious mental states is falsified in virtue of its being articulated propositionally. Regarding (SC), I shall claim that it is best read as a weak version of epiphenomenalism about conscious causation. In addressing both points, I shall discuss in particular the influential reading of Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness offered by Katsafanas (2005). (shrink)

Do I cause global warming, climate change and their related harms when I go for a leisure drive with my gas-guzzling car? The current verdict seems to be that I do not; the emissions produced by my drive are much too insignificant to make a difference for the occurrence of global warming and its related harms. I argue that our verdict on this issue depends on what we mean by ‘causation’. If we for instance assume a simple counterfactual analysis of (...) causation according to which ‘C causes E’ means ‘if C had not occurred, E would not have occurred’, we must conclude that a single drive does not cause global warming. However, this analysis of causation is well-known for giving counterintuitive results in some important cases. If we instead adopt Lewis’s analysis of causation, it turns out that it is indeterminate whether I cause global warming when I go for a single drive. Still, in contexts where we seek to control or understand global warming, there is a pressure to adopt a more fragile view of this event. When we adopt such a view, it turns out that a single drive does cause global warming. This means that we cannot like Sinnott-Armstrong and Kingston and Sinnott-Armstrong reject the idea that I should refrain from going for a leisure drive simply because such a drive does not cause global warming. (shrink)

Nietzsche vs. Kant? Der siebzehnte Aphorismus aus dem ersten Teil von Menschliches, Allzumenschliches schliesst mit der korrosiven Bemerkung, das Ding an sich [sei] eines homerischen Gelachters werth. Aufgrund dieser Passage nun aber zu vermuten, Nietzsche habe diesen von Kant stammenden Terminus einfach so ad acta gelegt, ware jedoch ubereilt, denn die Auseinandersetzung mit der Unterscheidung zwischen Erscheinung und Ding an sich lasst sich als Konstante durch Nietzsches gesamtes Werk verfolgen. Mattia Riccardi widmet sich in seiner Studie den verschiedenen Positionen, (...) die Nietzsche im Zusammenhang mit dieser Problematik eingenommen hat: von der im Hintergrund der Geburt der Tragodie prasenten Artisten-Metaphysik bis zur radikalen Infragestellung des kantischen Denkmusters in den Jahren nach 1880. Riccardi beschrankt sich aber nicht auf eine historisch akkurate, direkte und indirekte Textquelle mit einbeziehender Rekonstruktion von Nietzsches kampferischer Lekturepraxis. Vielmehr stellen die wiederholt auftretenden Bezuge auf Kants Begrifflichkeit fur ihn ein geeignetes Instrument dar, um die Entfaltung von Nietzsches Denken in aller Scharfe sichtbar zu machen. Die Kritik an Kant wird auf diese Weise zum Ausgangspunkt einer differenzierten Interpretation von Nietzsches perspektivistischer Philosophie der Macht im Sinne einer relationalen Ontologie. Damit versteht sich das Buch auch als Beitrag zur - vor allem im englischsprachigen Raum sehr lebendigen - Debatte um das Verhaltnis Nietzsches zu Kant. (shrink)

How can imitation lead to free musical expression? This article explores the role of auditory imitation in jazz. Even though many renowned jazz musicians have assessed the method of imitating recorded music, no systematic study has hitherto explored how the method prepares for aural jazz improvisation. The article picks up an assumption presented by Berliner (1994), suggesting that learning jazz by aural imitation is “just like” learning a mother tongue. The article studies three potential stages in the method, comparing with (...) imitative, rhythmic, multimodal, and protosymbolic behavior of infant perception (building on the works of Stern, Trevarthen, and Merleau-Ponty). The demonstrations of the aural-imitation method draw on pedagogic experiences accumulated since 1979 in the Jazz Program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. By analyzing structures of behavior suggested by the method, the article indicates key traits that render aural jazz improvisation possible, such as a fundamental sense of rhythm, formation of symbolic behavior, joint musical attention, and the facility to “hear via the other.” In conclusion, we critically address a frequent theoretical model describing musical improvisation as a synthesis of discrete elements or building blocks. (shrink)

Nietzsche believes that we do not know our own actions, nor their real motives. This belief, however, is but a consequence of his assuming a quite general skepticism about introspection. The main aim of this paper is to offer a reading of this last view, which I shall call the Inner Opacity (IO) view. In the first part of the paper I show that a strong motivation behind IO lies in Nietzsche’s claim that self-knowledge exploits the same set of cognitive (...) capacities as well as the same folk-psychological framework involved in outward-directed mind-reading. In the second part I turn to Nietzsche’s view of agency and argue that he sees a fundamental discrepancy between the conscious attitudes we have introspective access to, on the one hand, and the subpersonal processes and states occurring at the unconscious level of the drives, on the other hand. (shrink)

psychiatric diagnoses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a rapidly growing and globally increasing phenomenon, not least in different educational contexts such as in family and in school. Children and youths labelled as ADHD are challenging normative claims in terms of nurturing and education, whereas those labelled as ADHD are considered a risk for society to handle. The dominant paradigm regarding ADHD is biomedical, where different levels of attention and activity-impulsivity are perceived as neurobiological dys/functions within the brain best (...) managed by means of an individual diagnosis and instrumental pedagogy. The majority of those labelled as having ADHD encounter a dominant educational model in the form of what is referred to in this article as neurobehaviorism, which is based on onto-epistemological violence. As opposed to this act of violence against being—and against the psychiatrized subject—a less violent educational model is proposed, based on French philosopher Alain Badiou’s ontological examination of being and his concept of love as a truth procedure. In terms of the latter, the focus is on the potential of the encounter as a ‘Two scene of love’. Here, the encounter is a place where it is possible to create new truths and subjects, instead of taking the individual diagnosis as an axiom which only leads to individuals having fixed identities codified in a hierarchical order. This argument is drawn from the ‘mathematical’ formula 1 + 1 = ♥, which originates from an online forum for people who have come into contact with ADHD in one way or another. (shrink)

When a belief has been influenced, in part or whole, by factors that, by the believer's own lights, do not bear on the truth of the believed proposition, we can say that the belief has been, in a sense, arbitrarily formed. Can such beliefs ever be rational? It might seem obvious that they can't. After all, belief, supposedly, “aims at the truth.” But many epistemologists have come to think that certain kinds of arbitrary beliefs can, indeed, be rational. In this (...) paper, I want to do two things. First, I want to show that the claim that arbitrary beliefs can be rational is inconsistent with the conjunction of two other attractive claims: one saying that rationality requires a certain kind of epistemic immodesty, and one saying that rationality forbids certain kinds of self-ascriptions of epistemic luck. Second, I want to evaluate different ways one might respond to this inconsistent triad. I won't defend any response in particular, but I'll draw out some notable costs and benefits of each response, which may help shed light on the question of whether arbitrary beliefs can be rational. (shrink)

Nowadays, almost everyone seems to agree that science is facing an epistemological crisis – namely the replicability crisis – and that we need to take action. But as to precisely what to do or how...

We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, or to doubt that some particular belief of ours is rational. Perhaps we learn that a trusted friend disagrees with us about what our shared evidence supports. Or perhaps we learn that our beliefs have been afflicted by motivated reasoning or other cognitive biases. These are examples of higher-order evidence. While it may seem plausible that higher-order evidence should impact our beliefs, it is less clear how and (...) why. Normally, when evidence impacts our beliefs, it does so by virtue of speaking for or against the truth of theirs contents. But higher-order evidence does not directly concern the contents of the beliefs that they impact. In recent years, philosophers have become increasingly aware of the need to understand the nature and normative role of higher-order evidence. This is partly due to the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence in human life. But it has also become clear that higher-order evidence plays a central role in many epistemological debates, spanning from traditional discussions of internalism/externalism about epistemic justification to more recent discussions of peer disagreement and epistemic akrasia. This volume brings together, for the first time, a distinguished group of leading and up-and-coming epistemologists to explore a range of issues about higher-order evidence. (shrink)

This book offers a systematic account of Nietzsche's thought on the human mind. A central theme is the nature of and relation between the unconscious and conscious mind, relating Nietzsche's work to contemporary debates about consciousness and theory of mind.

What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive communicative (...) approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference. (shrink)

This paper investigates the phenomenological status of musical affordances through a Gadamerian focus on human communication. With an extra emphasis on Reybrouck’s much-cited affordance-driven theory, I locate fundamental premises in the affordance concept. By initiating a dialogue with Gadamer’s perspective, I suggest a slight yet important shift of perspective that allows us to see an autonomous, transformative, and intrinsically active ‘ideality’ potentially emerging in music. In the final section, I try to demonstrate how Gadamer’s perspective is supported by recent empirical (...) studies on communicative musicality and child development, and allows us to see how protoversions of the transformative ‘ideality’ are already present at the beginning of human life. (shrink)

In De Trinitate XII Augustine refuses the idea that a family could be the image of God. This is curious, because the theologian that in De Trinitate elaborates a “communitarian model” of the Trinity – the Lover, the Beloved and the Love – at the same time does not see the image of God in the first natural community, the family. The purpose of this paper is to show the deeper reasons for this refutation. After the exposition of Augustine’s argument, (...) the paper identifies Augustine’s polemical reference to a part of the Eastern Tradition, which used the example of the first family (Adam, Eve and Abel/Seth) in order to express the mystery of the Trinity. It examines also how the example of the first family was used by Gregory of Nazianzus in his fifth theological discourse (which some scholars identify as the possible source of the idea of the family as the image of God for Augustine) in a trinitarian way. This study then considers two aspects of Augustine’s argument: that his refutation is not justified by the association of the Holy Spirit with the mother and the bride; that the real reason for it is exegetical, and dependent upon Augustine’s reading of Gn. 1:26. Finally the paper shows that the view of gender differences as merely corporeal is what prevents the Doctor of Grace from reading Gn. 1:27 in a relational-dialogical way to express the intimate communion of the Trinity. (shrink)

In On What Matters Derek Parfit advocates the Kantian Contractualist Formula as one of three supreme moral principles. In important cases, this formula entails that it is wrong for an agent to act in a way that would be partially best. In contrast, Parfit’s wide value-based objective view of reasons entails that the agent often have sufficient reasons to perform such acts. It seems then that agents might have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. In this paper I will argue that (...) such reasons are a symptom of a fundamental inconsistency between the Kantian Contractualist Formula and Parfit’s view of reasons. The formula requires that we consider what everyone could rationally will, while a wide value-based objective view requires that we consider only what the agent has sufficient reasons for doing. The same inconsistency is particularly obvious in Parfit’s version of the Consent Principle, which share important features with the Kantian Contractualist Formula. Parfit accepts that moral principles might entail that we sometimes have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. However, to accept that supreme moral principles have such implications is objectionable if you, like Parfit, also hold that principles with such implications should be rejected or revised. I suggest that we could abandon the requirement that we have to consider the reasons of everyone. This would make the Kantian Contractualist Formula consistent with Parfit’s view of reasons, at least in this respect. I also argue that we can keep most implications of the Kantian Contractualist Formula that Parfit finds attractive. (shrink)

In this article we use proportional hazards models to examine how low-level processes affect the probability of making a saccade over time, through the period of fixation, during reading. We apply the Cox proportional hazards model to investigate how launch distance (relative to word beginning), fixation location (relative to word center), and word frequency affect the hazard of a saccadic response. This model requires that covariates have a constant impact on the hazard over time, the assumption of proportional hazards. We (...) show that this assumption is not supported. The impact of the covariates changes with the time passed since fixation onset. To account for the non-proportional hazards we fit step functions of time, resulting in a model with time-varying effects on the hazard. We evaluate the ability to predict the timing of saccades on held-out fixation data. The model with time-varying effects performs better in predicting the timing of saccades for fixations as short as 100 ms and as long as 500 ms, when compared both to a baseline model without covariates and a model which assumes constant covariate effects. This result suggests that the time-varying effects model better recovers the time course of low-level processes that influence the decision to move the eyes. (shrink)

Focusing on stakeholder inclusion, this article investigates the consequences of implementing the responsible research and innovation framework in a public funding regime. I use a Norwegian transdisciplinary project as a case study, demonstrating how the Research Council of Norway relies heavily on the assumption that stakeholders will pay for further development of the project as long as they are appropriately engaged. In analysing my case, I show how a real risk exists for a project that can potentially deliver value to (...) society and address the grand challenges of our time ends up as waste. I refer to this as 4E Waste which I break into four types: Economic Waste – when money put into the initial project becomes “worthless” because the research is not followed up, Eidetic Waste – where knowledge is lost when the community of practice that is building the novel understanding dissipates, Ecological Waste – when polluting practices associated with current production methods prevail, and Ethical Waste – when the potential enterprise becomes a missed chance to do something good. Keywords: RRI; stakeholder inclusion; funding policy; Mode 2 research. (shrink)

Uitleg van het zogenoemde 'ontologisch godsbewijs' van Anselmus van Canterbury (gestorven in 1109).

In this paper, we present a new account of teleological reasons, i.e. reasons to perform a particular action because of the outcomes it promotes. Our account gives the desired verdict in a number of difficult cases, including cases of overdetermination and non-threshold cases like Parfit’s famous _Drops of water._ The key to our account is to look more closely at the metaphysics of causation. According to Touborg (_The dual nature of causation_, 2018), it is a necessary condition for causation that (...) a cause increases the security of its effect. Building on this idea, we suggest, roughly, that you have a teleological reason to act in a certain way when doing so increases the security of some good outcome. This represents a middle way between the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _would_ cause a good outcome and the proposal that you have a reason to act in a certain way just in case this _could_ cause a good outcome. (shrink)

We refine the intuitively appealing idea that you are blameworthy for something if it happened because you did not care enough. More formally: you are blameworthy for X (where X may be an action, omission, or outcome) just in case there is the right causal-explanatory relation between your poor quality of will and X. First, we argue that blameworthiness for actions, omissions, and outcomes is concerned with negative differences: you are blameworthy for the fact that X occurred instead of X*, (...) where X is worse than X*. Second, we argue that the way in which your quality of will is poor has to fit what you are blameworthy for. With these refinements, the account already gives intuitively correct verdicts in cases of forgetting, making a negative difference to a nevertheless good result, and doing an action with runaway consequences. We then discuss what the right causal-explanatory relation is and suggest that it is simply causation, understood in the right way. Here, we draw on the account of causation developed in Touborg, The Dual Nature of Causation. According to this account, there are two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for causation. Roughly, C causes E rather than E* iff (a) C is process-connected to E, and (b) C makes E more secure and E* less secure. With this account of causation, our account of blameworthiness now also gives correct verdicts in omission, pre-emption, and switching cases, Frankfurt-style cases, and collective harm cases. (shrink)

The modelling of concepts, besides involving disciplines like philosophy of mind and psychology, is a fundamental and lively research problem in several artificial intelligence (AI) areas, such as knowledge representation, machine learning, and natural language processing. In this scenario, the most prominent proposed solutions adopt different (often incompatible) assumptions about the nature of such a notion. Each of these solutions has been developed to capture some specific features of concepts and support some specific (artificial) cognitive operations. This paper critically reviews (...) the most notable computational approaches to the representation of concepts. The main goals are (i) to provide a shared terminology for the desiderata of concepts and their computational representation; (ii) to classify and assess the heterogeneous computational approaches according to the provided terminology; (iii) to provide a reader who may not be very familiar with theories of concepts with an introduction to major themes in this research and with pointers to different research projects, and (iv) to offer philosophers, and potentially AI practitioners, a well-informed guide for selecting among various (and possibly competing) computational representations of concepts. (shrink)

The late Nietzsche defended a position which he sometimes to refers as ‘sensualism’ and which consists of two main theses: senses ‘do not lie’ (T1) and sense organs are ‘causes’ (T2). Two influential interpretations of this position have been proposed by Clark and Hussain, who also address the question whether Nietzsche's late sensualism is (Hussain) or not (Clark) compatible with the epistemological view which he held in his previous work and which has been dubbed the ‘falsification thesis’ (FT). In my (...) paper I will show that both readings raise substantial difficulties and propose an alternative account of Nietzsche's sensualism. In particular, I will argue: (a) that according to Nietzsche the representational content of sensory experience ‘does not lie’ since it is physically grounded in causal exchanges with the external world which are mediated by sense organs; (b) that Nietzsche believes that the claim that senses ‘do not lie’ is also true of the phenomenal, qualitative content of sensory experience; and (c) that FT, despite its prima facie tension with (a) and (b), fit well Nietzsche's sensualism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Ethics by Thomas SternMattia RiccardiThomas Stern, Nietzsche’s Ethics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 69 pp. ISBN: 9781108713320. Paper, $22.00.Thomas Stern sets out his approach in this “Cambridge Element” on Nietzsche’s ethics in a bold and straightforward way: “My own intention is to stay very close to the texts, to read them in light of what we know about Nietzsche’s intellectual background, and to present the philosophical ideas (...) found in them as clearly, neutrally and thoroughly as possible” (3). As a result, Stern guesses, the “Nietzsche on display in these pages may seem, in places, dated, wrong-headed and extremely unappealing.” In my case, the guess is mostly correct. Fortunately, there are reasons to doubt that Stern’s Nietzsche is also the “real one,” contrary to what is claimed. (I don’t mean to suggest Nietzsche is never “dated,” “wrong-headed,” or “extremely unappealing.”)Stern, who focuses on the ethics of the late Nietzsche—roughly, from BGE onward—claims it consists of two basic claims. The first claim is a descriptive one—the “Life Theory”—to the effect that striving for power is an essential feature of life as such: “Living and power seeking cannot be pulled apart” (6). Power seeking, in turn, is manifested in behaviors that could be generically described as aggressive. A suggestive passage: “life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting” (BGE 259; if not otherwise indicated, Nietzsche’s works are quoted from the Cambridge University Press translations). The second claim—the “Normative Command”—is directly derived from the descriptive one: “it is ethical to further the goals of Life and it is unethical to impede them” (11). On this reading, Nietzsche turns out to defend a version of metaethical realism: the very nature of (biological) reality gives us an objective criterion for what is ethical. As Stern puts it, “His ethics track what he takes to be a deep, fundamental fact about living things, the Life Theory, which applies at all times and in all places” (23). [End Page 226]In my view, there are many problems with this reading, both interpretive and conceptual. To start with, although Nietzsche often supplies characterizations of life like the one in BGE 259, it is not clear that they should be understood as (merely) descriptive. BGE 22 makes explicit that a claim to the effect that nature (considered here as the object of physics) is a “tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims” cannot count as part of a description of the (physical) world. Of course, Nietzsche is not talking here about life. But that he explicitly classifies a will to power claim as “interpretation,” and not as part of (physical) nature’s “text,” should warn readers from taking such claims to be (merely) descriptive (even if they often look like that)—a point already made by Maudemarie Clark in Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 222–23). A similar worry also applies to the idea, at the heart of the Normative Command, that life has certain goals. For although there are passages where Nietzsche talks of life’s goals, the problem is again whether they are about “goals” that “life” really has. Sometimes Nietzsche writes that nature lacks any goal whatsoever—it is “indifferent without measure, without purpose and regard” (BGE 9). And sometimes he writes that goals (and values) are a human product. (See, for instance, TI “Errors” 8: “We have invented the concept of ‘purpose’: there are no purposes in reality”; on values, see Z I “Thousand and One Goals.”) Thus, the very status of Nietzsche’s claims about the essence of life and its goals is not as straightforward as Stern suggests.Another kind of textual evidence points in the same direction. For although it is true that Nietzsche often describes life as such as power seeking, as in BGE 259, this is not always the case. In the very late writings from which Stern draws a great deal of the textual evidence to back up his... (shrink)

According to many philosophers and scientists, human sociality is explained by our unique capacity to “share” attitudes with others. The conditions under which mental states are shared have been widely debated in the past two decades, focusing especially on the issue of their reducibility to individual intentionality and the place of collective intentions in the natural realm. It is not clear, however, to what extent these two issues are related and what methodologies of investigation are appropriate in each case. In (...) this article, I propose a solution that distinguishes between epistemic and ontological interpretations of the demand for the conditions of reduction of collective intentionality. While the philosophical debate has contributed important insights into the former, recent advances in the cognitive sciences offer novel resources to tackle the latter. Drawing on Michael Tomasello’s research in the ontogeny of shared intentionality in early instances of interaction based on joint attention, I propose an empirically informed argument of what it would take to address the ontological question of irreducibility, thus making a step forward in the naturalization of collective intentionality. (shrink)

Many theories of rational action are predicated on the idea that what it is rational to do in a given situation depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe in that situation. In short: they treat epistemic rationality as explanatorily prior to practical rationality. If they are right in doing so, it follows, on pain of explanatory circularity, that epistemic rationality cannot itself be a form of practical rationality. Yet, many epistemologists have defended just such a view of (...) epistemic rationality. According to them, there is no such thing as a distinctively epistemic form of rationality which could be explanatorily prior to practical rationality. Rather, they maintain, there is just one form of rationality—practical rationality—of which epistemic rationality is a species. What to make of this conflict? The aim of this paper is to motivate a view about the relationship between epistemic and practical rationality which resolves the conflict in a way that should be attractive to both sides. The central idea is to ground both epistemic and practical rationality in an independently motivated notion of evidential probability which is itself to be understood in non-normative terms. Doing so, I argue, allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in a way that does justice to the idea that what it is rational to do depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe; and to do so in a way that avoids explanatory circularity. (shrink)

This Special Issue titled "Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine and Technology" aims to shed new light on the understanding of severe uncertainty and its multifaceted implications. The main idea of the papers of this collection is that, despite possible sophisticated statistical judgments towards future risks in science, medicine, and technology, severe forms of uncertainty still exist.While ignorance is usually assumed to be a total absence of knowledge, uncertainty often refers to the incompleteness of knowledge or information. In its extreme form, (...) this is called "severe uncertainty" but is also known as "fundamental," "radical," "deep," "great," or "genuine" uncertainty. A common characteristic of these... (shrink)

This paper analyses the importance of the forest in understanding the Old French Partonopeus de Blois. The forest embodies the dual nature of the romance, mixing religious and supernatural elements. It provides a structural framework for the action, as both parts of the romance start with a journey into the forest: it is the passage to the Otherworld, the frontier between reality and the unknown. Placed at the limit of the civilised world, the forest is the space of perigrinations and (...) of reconciliation, both with other characters and with God. In Partonopeus the forest also leads to the sea, the next step in the journey to the Otherworld, and the passage from one realm of reality to the other is achieved with the help of an animal. The author also reflects on the otherworldly roles of Melior and Uraque, in the traditions of the fairy lover and the healing fairy. (shrink)

BackgroundTraditionally, palliative care has focused on patients suffering from life-threatening somatic diseases such as cancer or progressive neurological disorders. In contrast, despite the often chronic, severely disabling, and potentially life-threatening nature of psychiatric disorders, there are neither palliative care units nor clinical guidelines on palliative measures for patients in psychiatry.Main textThis paper contributes to the growing literature on a palliative approach in psychiatry and is based on the assumption that a change of perspective from a curative to a palliative approach (...) could help promote patient-centeredness and increase quality of life for severely ill patients in psychiatry as well as in somatic medicine. To exemplify this, we offer three different clinical scenarios: severe and enduring anorexia nervosa, treatment-refractory schizophrenia, and chronic suicidality and persistent self-injury in borderline personality disorder.ConclusionWe emphasize that many typical interventions for treatment-refractory psychiatric disorders may indeed be of a palliative nature. Furthermore, introducing traditional features of palliative care, e.g. so-called goals of care conversations, could aid even further in ensuring that caregivers, patients, and families agree on which treatment goals are to be prioritized in order to optimize quality of life in spite of severe, persistent mental disorder. (shrink)

Although the fictional domain exhibits a prima facie freedom from real-world moral constraints, certain fictive imaginings seem to deserve moral criticism. Capturing both intuitions, this paper argues for double-standard moralism, the view that fictive imaginings are subject to different moral standards than their real-world counterparts. I show how no account has, thus far, offered compelling reasons to warrant the moral appropriateness of this discrepancy. I maintain that the normative discontinuity between fiction and the actual world is moderate, as opposed to (...) one that leaves fictive engagements wholly exempt from moral evaluations. I propose a way of addressing the gamer’s dilemma that is compatible with a moderate kind of discontinuity. Finally, I contend that the audience is justified in adopting deviant moral attitudes in fictional situations because their consequences largely differ from those that analogous real-world events would have. (shrink)

Nietzsche scholars have remarked on the similarities between his conception of the ideal soul and that of Plato. This article provides a systematic examination of this issue. The first part of the article demonstrates that there is in fact a substantive convergence between their views. However, this result is puzzling given that Nietzsche accuses Plato’s moral psychology of being deeply ascetic. Thus, the second part of the article focuses on this charge. Though the textual evidence provided by Plato’s dialogues remains (...) ambiguous, the article concludes that it tends to support Nietzsche’s case. However, Nietzsche not only recognizes—at least occasionally—that Platonic ascetism is less rabid than Christian ascetism but even concedes that it can prove healthy for certain people. (shrink)

The institutionalization of a rights-based proportionality review shares a number of salient features and puzzles with the practice of contestation that the Socrates of the early Platonic dialogues became famous for. Understanding the point of Socratic contestation, and its role in a democratic polity, is also the key to understanding the point of proportionality based rights review. To begin with, when judges decide cases within the proportionality framework they do not primarily interpret authority. They assess reasons. Not surprisingly, they, like (...) Socrates, have been prone to the charge that they offend the values and traditions of the community. The article discusses four types of pathologies that occasionally infect democratic decision-making that rights-based proportionality review is particularly suited to identify. But more basic and equally important is a second kind of justification: Proportionality-based judicial review institutionalizes a right to contest the acts of public authorities and demand a public reasons-based justification. Having a legal remedy that allows for the contestation of acts by public authorities before an impartial and independent court and demanding its justification in terms of public reason is as basic a commitment of liberal democracy as the right to vote. The real question is not whether judicial review is democratically legitimate, but how judicial institutions ought to be structured to best serve their democracy-enhancing and rights protecting purpose. If Socrates was right to insist that the practice of contestation he engaged in deserves the highest praise in a democratic polity, it is equally true that a well structured and appropriately embedded court engaged in rights based proportionality review deserves to be embraced as a vital element of liberal constitutional democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze a case of extreme response to need of security in the landscape of advanced democracies: the role of Golden Dawn in the management and reproduction of the profound socio-economic crisis in Greece. I argue that the keys behind the success of such a party are to be found in two distinct but self-reinforcing elements: its organizational strength and its anti-system ideology. The most significant organizational structures and activities which transformed Golden Dawn into a quasi-mafia style (...) “industry of private protection” are thus investigated, along with the most important contents of its radical and anti-systemic message. (shrink)