Der Big Data-Technologie wird das Potenzial zugeschrieben, durch Mustererkennung in aggregierten Daten Verhaltensweisen von Personen zu prognostizieren, noch bevor diese intendiert und reflektiert würden. Zumeist widmet sich die Big Data-Debatte daher den Befürchtungen möglicher Einbußen von Privatheit und Freiheit. In unserem Beitrag wählen wir jedoch einen anderen Zugriff und fragen, inwiefern die Big Data-Visionen das Selbstsein betreffen, also das Konzept davon, wer ich selbst eigentlich bin. Wenn Selbstsein, Martin Heidegger zufolge, eigentlich bedeutet, in kritischer Distanz zu vorgegebenen Möglichkeiten zu leben, (...) stellt sich die Frage, welches Kriterium hier eine klare Unterscheidbarkeit gewährleistet: Wie kann ich wissen, echt ich selbst zu sein, ohne nur wiederum andere Üblichkeiten nachzuahmen? Wir fragen daher, ob die Big-Data-Technologie subjektive Verzerrungen und Täuschungen über das Selbst ausschalten könnte. Hierfür wird der Begriff „Selbstsein“ bei Heidegger erarbeitet. Dabei lässt sich allerdings zeigen, dass dieser letztlich ohne Trennschärfe bleibt, da die nur negative Charakterisierung von eigentlichem Selbstsein, Heidegger zufolge, echt oder unecht ausgestaltet sein kann – der aus der Möglichkeit echter oder unechter Selbsterzählung resultierende Relativismus wurde bisher nicht hinreichend beachtet. Big Data kann zwar uneigentliche Erzählmuster vermeiden, nicht aber uneigentliches oder eigentliches Verhalten differenzieren; ob ich z.B. manches – unecht eigentlich – aus Trotz oder Kalkül gegen mein eigenes Selbstverständnis tat, bleibt verborgen. Fazit: Es muss entweder ein Kriterium für echtes Eigentlichsein entwickelt oder der Anspruch, darüber Auskunft zu geben, verworfen werden – bei Heidegger und Big Data. Verzichtet man jedoch auf die Idee einer (echten) Eigentlichkeit verzichtet man auf den Begriff des Selbst. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume engage with issues of normativity within naturalised philosophy. The issues are critical to naturalism as most traditional notions in philosophy, such as knowledge, justification or representation, are said to involve normativity. Some of the contributors pursue the question of the correct place of normativity within a naturalised ontology, with emergentist and eliminativist answers offered on neighbouring pages. Others seek to justify particular norms within a naturalised framework, the more surprising ones including naturalist takes on the (...) a priori and intuitions. Finally, yet others examine concrete examples of the application of norms within particular epistemic endeavours, such as psychopathology and design. The overall picture is that of an intimate engagement with issues of normativity on the part of naturalist philosophers – questioning some of the fundamentals at the same time as they try to work out many of the details. (shrink)

The introduction to the volume and the overview of the idea of naturalizing the mind.

Naturalism is currently the most vibrantly developing approach to philosophy, with naturalised methodologies being applied across all the philosophical disciplines. One of the areas naturalism has been focussing upon is the mind, traditionally viewed as a topic hard to reconcile with the naturalistic worldview. A number of questions have been pursued in this context. What is the place of the mind in the world? How should we study the mind as a natural phenomenon? What is the significance of cognitive science (...) research for philosophical debates? In this book, philosophical questions about the mind are asked in the context of recent developments in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, psychology, and the project of the naturalisation. Much of the focus is upon what we have learned by studying natural mental mechanisms as well as designing artificial ones. In the case of natural mental mechanisms, this includes consideration of such issues as the significance of deficits in these mechanisms for psychiatry. The significance of the evolutionary context for mental mechanisms as well as questions regarding rationality and wisdom is also explored. Mechanistic and functional models of the mind are used to throw new light on discussions regarding issues of explanation, reduction and the realisation of mental phenomena. Finally, naturalistic approaches are used to look anew at such traditional philosophical issues as the correspondence of mind to world and presuppositions of scientific research. (shrink)

Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between your work and Derrida’s?De Man: I’m not really the right person to ask where the difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to Derrida, I don’t determine whether my work resembles or is different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with Derrida—which I think is typical and important for all that relationship which followed closely upon my first encounter with him in Baltimore at the colloquium on “The (...) Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”—had not to do with Derrida nor with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence. It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis between what Derrida does and what I’m doing. And there may be something in that difference between us that remained there, to the extent that in a very genuine sense—not as denegation or as false modesty —my starting point, as I think I already told you, is not philosophical but basically philological and for that reason didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working hypothesis , that the text knows in an absolute way what it’s doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated way, I would hold to that statement that “the text deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive” rather than being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida’s text is so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn’t need Rousseau, he doesn’t need anybody else; I do need them very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this topic says that Derrida and myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction: I agree with that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this particular matter and I don’t claim to be on that level … Stephano Rosso teaches English literature at the University of Verona and is writing a dissertation in comparative literature at SUNY—Binghamton. Among other works, he has coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e letteratura and Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently translating Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory into Italian. (shrink)

The starting-point of my essay is conviction of wide-spread crisis of western civilization. The analysis of this crisis was achieved basing on the Horkheimer's theoretical settlements which are leading to show typical of Plato character of western culture. Basing on the example of 'solar myth' presented by Plato in "Politeia", it is shown totalitarian and captivating human-beings paideia model, which is being realized till the present day in the Mediterranean culture region. Dictatorial, anti-humanistic and oppressing elements of Platonism and related (...) to it civilization, are shown from the G. Bataille's settlements point of view. In his project, ones are suspecting the chance of liberation of human-being. (shrink)

In this article I address the following question: When are reformulations in argumentative criticisms reasonable and when do they become fallacious straw men? Following ideas developed in the integrated version of pragma-dialectics, I approach argumentation as an element of agonistic exchanges permeated by arguers’ strategic manoeuvring aimed at effectively defeating the opponent with reasonable means. I propose two basic context-sensitive criteria for deciding on the reasonableness of reformulations: precision of the rules for interpretation (precise vs. loose) and general expectation of (...) cooperativeness (critical vs. constructive). On the basis of analysis of examples taken from online political discussions, I argue that in some contexts, especially those that are critical and loose, what might easily be classified as a straw man following conventional treatment should be taken as a harsh, yet reasonable, strategic argumentative criticism. (shrink)

This article aims to uncover the processes of developing sustainable business models in innovation ecosystems. Innovation ecosystems with sustainability goals often consist of cross-sector partners and need to manage three tensions: the tension of value creation versus value capture, the tension of mutual value versus individual value, and the tension of gaining value versus losing value. The fact that these tensions affect all actors differently makes the process of developing a sustainable business model challenging. Based on a study of four (...) sustainably innovative cross-sector collaborations, we propose that innovation ecosystems that develop a sustainable business model engage in a process of valuing value in which they search for a result that satisfies all actors. We find two different patterns of valuing value: collective orchestration and continuous search. We describe these patterns and the conditions that give rise to them. The identification of the two patterns opens up a research agenda that can shed further light on the conditions that need to be in place in order for an innovation ecosystem to develop effective sustainable business models. For practice, our findings show how cross-sector actors in innovation ecosystems may collaborate when developing a business model around emerging sustainability-oriented innovations. (shrink)

This last work by Paul de Man before his death in 1983 brings together what is essentially his complete work on the study of European Romanticism and post-Romanticism.

Entre las tesis características del Postscriptum de Kierkegaard se encuentra la distinción entre el conocimiento objetivo y el subjetivo, y en concreto la afirmación de que el conocimiento ético y el ético-religioso son subjetivos. El presente artículo busca ofrecer una interpretación de esta posición que salvaguarde el elemento cognitivo de la tesis en cuestión, notando el paralelo entre la distinción kierkegaardiana entre conocimiento objetivo y subjetivo y la aristotélica entre conocimiento teórico y práctico.

El artículo busca, a través de una exposición general de su obra de filosofíamoral, presentar la concepción de la conciencia moral desarrollada por JosephButler. Se busca así presentar el pensamiento de este autor a la comunidadfilosófica hispanoparlante, y responder a algunas críticas que ha recibido departe de filósofos como Elizabeth Anscombe.

First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Finally, our argument suggests that the relationship and the distinction between literature and philosophy cannot be made in terms of a distinction between aesthetic and epistemological categories. All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent upon figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical. The apparent symmetry of these statements is not as reassuring as it sounds since what seems to bring literature and philosophy together is, (...) as in Condillac's argument about mind and object, a shared lack of identity or specificity. Contrary to common belief, literature is not the place where the unstable epistemology of metaphor is suspended by aesthetic pleasure, although this attempt is a constitutive moment of its system. It is rather the place where the possible convergence of rigor and pleasure is shown to be a delusion. The consequences of this lead to the difficult question whether the entire semantic, semiological, and performative field of language can be said to be covered by tropological models, a question which can only be raised after the proliferating and disruptive power of figural language has been fully recognized. Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the comparative literature department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Political Allegory in Rousseau," appeared in the Summer 1976 issue and appears in his book Allegories in Reading. (shrink)

Résumé L’article presente les changements qui se sont manifestes dans la recherche polonaise, essentiellement en litterature et histoire des Lumieres, entre 1945 et 1990. L’accent est mis sur l’impact du contexte politique sur la recherche. Les annees 1945-1956 ont ete marquees par de fortes contraintes ideologiques car le regime communiste imposait aux chercheurs une vision simplifiee des Lumieres censee repondre aux besoins de ses plans. Apres l’epoque stalinienne, la pression ideologique et institutionnelle s’est progressivement reduite, ouvrant la voie a davantage (...) de liberte de recherche et d’interpretation des Lumieres. Si certains episodes historiques continuaient a faire l’objet de debats publics, la vision des Lumieres produite par les travaux s’effectuait desormais sans ingerence directe du pouvoir. (shrink)

In the Social Contract, the model for the structural description of textuality derives from the incompatibility between the formulation and the application of the law, reiterating the estrangement that exists between the sovereign as an active, and the State as a static, principle. The distinction, which is not a polarity, can therefore also be phrased in terms of the difference between political action and political prescription. The tension between figural and grammatical language is duplicated in the differentiation between the State (...) as a defined entity and the State as a principle of action or, in linguistic terms, between the constative and the performative function of language. A text is defined by the necessity of considering a statement, at the same time, as performative and constative, and the logical tension between figure and grammar is repeated in the impossibility of distinguishing between two linguistic functions which are not necessarily compatible. It seems that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively, like the thieving lawmaker in the Social Contract, and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows. The distinction between a text as narrative and a text as theory also belongs to this field of tension. Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the French department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His forthcoming study of the theory of figural language, of which this essay will be a part, centers on Rousseau and involves as well Rilke, Proust, and Nietzsche. He has also contributed "The Epistemology of Metaphor" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Our goal in this paper is to establish a set of criteria for understanding the meaning and sources of attributing (un)fairness to AI algorithms. To do so, we first establish that (un)fairness, like other normative notions, can be understood in a proper primary sense and in secondary senses derived by analogy. We argue that AI algorithms cannot be said to be (un)fair in the proper sense due to a set of criteria related to normativity and agency. However, we demonstrate how (...) and why AI algorithms can be qualified as (un)fair by analogy and explore the sources of this (un)fairness and the associated problems of responsibility assignment. We conclude that more user-driven AI approaches could alleviate some of these difficulties. (shrink)

We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopedia on memory, from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory and much closer to Augustine's advice about how to remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription, or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is forced (...) to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words and of thought[…]No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aesthetics turns out to be a double and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start. Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently historical and the properly theoretical components of the work. This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the Aesthetics occurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable philosophical category. What the Aesthetics calls the beautiful terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau", "The Epistemology of Metaphor", and "A Letter". (shrink)

This paper presents our work on textual inference and situates it within the context of the larger goals of machine reading. The textual inference task is to determine if the meaning of one text can be inferred from the meaning of another and from background knowledge. Our system generates semantic graphs as a representation of the meaning of a text. This paper presents new results for aligning pairs of semantic graphs, and proposes the application of natural logic to derive inference (...) decisions from those aligned pairs. We consider this work as first steps toward a system able to demonstrate broad-coverage text understanding and learning abilities. (shrink)

It is shown that de re formulas are eliminable in the modal logic S5 extended with the axiom scheme □∃xφ ⊃ ∃x□φ.

The article describes Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec's perspective on four classic philosophical images of man and the resulting theoretical and practical implications for the nursing profession. The first three images, namely man as a set of elements, man as a soul imprisoned in the body and man as a rational animal, are regarded by Krąpiec as reductionist anthropologies and are thus inadequate for nursing. The first image reduces man to a biological element. The second one reduces man to a soul and (...) treats a body as something an obstacle in personal development. The third image absolutizes reason in man. While the body is not rejected in this image, it is viewed as an indifferent mass. The last image, which regards man as a person, is an adequate image for nursing. The exceptional character of man emphasized in this image is determined by the following personal qualities: the ability for cognition, freedom, love, religiousness, dignity, subjectivity to law and completeness. These characteristics reveal the specificity of personal being in both the body and the spirit. By viewing man as a person, a nurse discovers a wide range of possibilities of providing effective help to the patient. (shrink)

Dialectical fallacies are typically defined as breaches of the rules of a regulated discussion between two participants. What if discussions become more complex and involve multiple parties with distinct positions to argue for? Are there distinct argumentation norms of polylogues? If so, can their violations be conceptualized as polylogical fallacies? I will argue for such an approach and analyze two candidates for argumentative breaches of multi-party rationality: false dilemma and collateral straw man.