The present study examined the effects of mindfulness training on attention regulation in university students and whether the potential benefits of implementation are influenced by the yoga component of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and/or by MBI homework practice. In a non-randomized trial with pre- and post-assessments, n = 180 university students were allocated to either mindfulness training (experimental groups), awareness activities (active control group), or no training (passive control group). Mindfulness was taught through two MBIs, one including yoga and the other (...) excluding yoga. Attention regulation was operationalized via behavioral indicators, namely sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, cognitive inhibition, and data-driven information processing. With the exception of speed in a cognitive flexibility task, the results indicated no systematic or differential advantage arising from mindfulness training, with or without yoga, regarding the aspects of attention regulation. There was no consistent influence of homework quantity or quality. The implications for mindfulness training in academic contexts are discussed. (shrink)

Die »Enzyklopädie Philosophie- und Wissenschaftstheorie«, das größte allgemeine Nachschlagewerk zur Philosophie im deutschsprachigen Raum, wurde 1980 begonnen und 1996 mit dem vierten Band abgeschlossen. Sie erschien 2005 bis 2018 in einer komplett aktualisierten und erweiterten 8-bändigen Neuauflage, die hiermit nun in einer kartonierten Sonderausgabe vorliegt. Die »Enzyklopädie« umfasst in Sach- und Personenartikeln nicht nur den klassischen Bestand des philosophischen Wissens, sondern auch die neuere Entwicklung der Philosophie, insbesondere in den Bereichen Logik, Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie sowie Sprachphilosophie. Zugleich finden Grundlagenreflexionen in (...) den Wissenschaften und deren Geschichte ausführliche Berücksichtigung. Die umfassenden Bibliographien und Werkverzeichnisse wurden für die 2. Auflage in allen Artikeln auf den neuesten Stand gebracht. Der Herausgeber Jürgen Mittelstraß, Professor em. für Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie an der Universität Konstanz, ist einer der international renommiertesten deutschen Philosophen. 1989 erhielt er den Leibniz-Preis der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) und seitdem zahlreiche weitere Wissenschaftspreise sowie Ehrendoktorwürden. Er ist Direktor des Konstanzer Wissenschaftsforums, war Präsident der Academia Europaea (2002-2008) und Vorsitzender des Österreichischen Wissenschaftsrates (2005-2015). Band 1: A-B | Band 2: C-F | Band 3: G-Inn | Band 4: Ins-Loc | Band 5: Log-N | Band 6: O-Ra | Band 7: Re-Te | Band 8: Th-Z. (shrink)

Comme l’indique le sous-titre, ce livre n’est pas une biographie, mais une enquête sur la disparition dans la mémoire collective d’une grande résistante, une des six femmes Compagnons de la Libération, Laure Diebold-Mutschler. Engagée dès 1940 dans la Résistance, à l’âge de vingt-cinq ans, elle est notamment agent de liaison du réseau Mithridate avant d’entrer à Lyon dans les Forces Françaises libres et de devenir la secrétaire de Jean Moulin. Elle sera arrêtée le 24 septembre 1943 à Paris, a...

Chacun sait que la critique sociale n'a pas son origine au cinema et qu'elle est nee quelque part du cote de chez Marx. Mais, dans une periode ou se multiplient des films comme It's a free world! (K. Loach), Louise Wimmer (C. Mennegun), Une vie meilleure (C. Kahn), Dans la tourmente (C. Ruggia) ou La mer a boire (J. Maillot), la question du rapport entre le cinema et la critique sociale retrouve une actualite qu'elle n'a plus eue depuis les (...) annees 70. Dans ce contexte, Franck Fischbach montre que la critique sociale n'est ni un genre, ni un style cinematographique, mais une fonction que certains films mettent en oeuvre parmi d'autres fonctions et quel que soit leur genre d'appartenance. Mais comment situer alors la fonction de critique sociale par rapport au genre du cinema politique? Et quels sont les instruments et les dispositifs proprement filmiques d'une critique sociale cinematographique? (shrink)

Theophrastus of Eresus was Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the Peripatetic School. He is best known as the author of the amusing Characters and two ground-breaking works in botany, but his writings extend over the entire range of Hellenistic philosophic studies. Volume 5 of Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities focuses on his scientific work. The volume contains new editions of two brief scientific essays-On Fish and Afeteoro/o^y-accompanied by translations and commentary. Among the contributions are: "Peripatetic Dialectic in (...) the De sensibus," Han Baltussen; "Empedocles" Theory of Vision and Theophrastus' De sensibus," David N. Sedley; "Theophrastus on the Intellect," Daniel Devereux; "Theophrastus and Aristotle on Animal Intelligence," Eve Browning Cole; "Physikai doxai and Problemata physika from Aristotle to Agtius," Jap Mansfield; "Xenophanes or Theophrastus? An Aetian Doxographicum on the Sun," David Runia; "Place1 in Context: On Theophrastus, Fr. 21 and 22 Wimmer," Keimpe Algra; "The Meteorology of Theophrastus in Syriac and Arabic Translation," Hans Daiber; "Theophrastus' Meteorology, Aristotle and Posidonius," Ian G. Kidd; "The Authorship and Sources of the Peri Semeion Ascribed to Theophrastus," Patrick Cronin; "Theophrastus, On Fish" Robert W. Sharpies. (shrink)

Belief-in reports of the form 'S believes in O' have been taken to have at least two senses: factual and evaluative. I begin by briefly suggesting that there is no evidence for two distinct senses, then spend most of the paper developing a general semantics for belief-in reports. I explore, and use my semantics to explain, several features of belief-in reports: the context-dependence of what belief-that reports they entail, their widespread lack of equivalence with belief-that reports, and their neg-raising property. (...) Put roughly, my semantics says that 'S believes in O' a) asserts that, for some contextually salient property F, S believes that O has F and b) presupposes that S either has a belief that O has F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement or has a belief that O doesn’t have F for which they meet an affective and evidential requirement. (shrink)

On a widely suggested knowledge-first account of belief, to believe p is to phi as if one knew p. I challenge this view by arguing against various regimentations of it. I conclude by generalizing my argument to alternative knowledge-first views suggested by Williamson and Wimmer.

In der Reihe werden herausragende monographische Untersuchungen und Sammelb nde zu allen Aspekten der Philosophie Kants ver ffentlicht, ebenso zum systematischen Verh ltnis seiner Philosophie zu anderen philosophischen Ans tzen in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Ver ffentlicht werden Studien, die einen innovativen Charakter haben und ausdr ckliche Desiderate der Forschung erf llen. Die Publikationen repr sentieren damit den aktuellsten Stand der Forschung.

A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that (...) encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer's theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states' capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries. (shrink)

I develop a challenge for a widely suggested knowledge-first account of belief that turns, primarily, on unknowable propositions. I consider and reject several responses to my challenge and sketch a new knowledge-first account of belief that avoids it.

Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which (almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal is part of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factives are abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due to a difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a computational experiment using an artificial neural (...) network. The results of this experiment support our hypothesis. (shrink)

I develop a challenge for the view that 'believe' is a propositional attitude verb based on two observations: (i) 'believe' can embed 'in O', and (ii) 'in O' does not denote a proposition. To develop my challenge, I argue (section 2) that 'believe' is not homonymous or polysemous between a propositional belief-that and non-propositional belief-in interpretation, and (section 3) that type-shifting 'in O'’s denotation to a proposition falsely predicts that belief-in and belief-that reports are equivalent.

John Cook Wilson is an important predecessor of contemporary knowledge first epistemologists: among other parallels, he claimed that knowledge is indefinable. We reconstruct four arguments for this claim discernible in his work, three of which find no clear analogues in contemporary discussions of knowledge first epistemology. We pay special attention to Cook Wilson’s view of the relation between knowledge and forms of thinking (like belief). Claims of Cook Wilson’s that support the indefinability of knowledge include: that knowledge, unlike belief, straddles (...) an active/passive divide; that, rather than entailing belief, knowledge excludes belief; and that understanding forms of thinking other than knowledge (such as belief) depends on understanding knowledge. Reflecting on Cook Wilson’s framework highlights underappreciated concerns relevant to any attempt to define knowledge. (shrink)

This thesis defends egalitarianism about knowledge and belief, on which neither is understood in terms of the other, from what I call the abductive argument. This argument is meant to favour views opposed to egalitarianism: doxasticism, on which knowledge is understood in terms of belief, and epistemicism, on which belief is understood in terms of knowledge. The abductive argument turns on the idea that doxasticism and epistemicism, by contrast with egalitarianism, explain certain data about knowledge and belief. I argue, however, (...) that no versions of doxasticism and epistemicism currently on offer are preferable to egalitarianism on abductive grounds. As part of my argument, I also defend the claim that knowledge, by contrast with belief, is an attitude to a fact and explore the implications of this claim for doxasticism and epistemicism. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson is increasingly recognised as an important predecessor of ordinary language philosophy. He emphasizes the authority of ordinary language in philosophical theorizing. At the same time, however, he circumscribes the limits of that authority and identifies cases in which it threatens to mislead us. My aim is to consider in detail one case where, according to Cook Wilson, ordinary language has misled philosophical theorizing. Judgement was one of the core notions of the logic, epistemology, and philosophy of mind (...) of Cook Wilson’s time. Cook Wilson rejects this notion, in the form developed by his contemporaries, in part because it is based on a problematic analogy between ordinary language and the thoughts expressed in that language. Cook Wilson’s discussion of judgement also highlights the extent to which Cook Wilson was critical of, but also responsive to, his contemporaries. In addition, variants of the language-thought analogy Cook Wilson opposes continue to feature in 21st century epistemology and philosophy of mind. Cook Wilson’s criticism of the analogy thus raises questions about recent work as well as the theories of his contemporaries. (shrink)

I develop a challenge to reductive views of knowing that φ that appeal to what I call a gradable property. Such appeal allows for properties that are intrinsically very similar to the property of knowing that φ, but differ significantly in their normative significance. This violates the independently plausible claim Pautz (2017) labels the small difference principle.

Are there any dispositions one must have if one believes p? A widespread answer emphasizes the role of beliefs in reasoning and holds that if one believes p, one must be disposed to treat p as true in one’s reasoning. I argue that this answer is subject to counterexamples.

Kant's general term 'categorical imperative' conceals two substantially different ethical principles namely (1) "the" fundamental principle of moral argumentation, called by kant "the principle of pure practical reason", and (2) "a" (one or more than one) procedure for testing maxims and norms for acting. this thesis of the two different functions of the categorical imperative is proved by a detailed systematic analysis of both kant's different formulas of the categorical imperative and kant's examination of four maxims in the "grundlegung".

forall x: Dortmund is an adaptation and German translation of forall x: Calgary. As such, it is a full-featured textbook on formal logic. It covers key notions of logic such as consequence and validity, the syntax of truth-functional (propositional) logic and truth-table semantics, the syntax of first-order (predicate) logic with identity and first-order interpretations, formalizing German in TFL and FOL, and Fitch-style natural deduction proof systems for both TFL and FOL. It also deals with some advanced topics such as the (...) syntax and (Kripke-)semantics of modal logic. The book is provided in PDF and in LaTeX source code. A booklet with solutions for the exercises in the book is available. (shrink)

Cerebral Protuberances. Towards a History of Intellectual Work. In this paper, I unfold the implications of Warburg's notion of “cerebral protuberance” (German: “Gehirnhirnausstülpung”) for a historical epistemology of intellectual work and material imagination. Attention to the penultimate character of conceptual language, I argue, allows for an analysis of unconscious aspects in the process of knowledge formation. Revisiting Gaston Bachelard's conception of historical epistemology in the age of neuroplasticity, I suggest to attend to the reverberations between history of science and intellectual (...) history in order to arrive at a better understanding of the exteriority of intellectual activity and the importance of affect in scientific and scholarly production. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 359-369.