In this paper I argue, based on a comparison of Spinoza's and Descartes‟s discussion of error, that beliefs are affirmations of the content of imagination that is not false in itself, only in relation to the object. This interpretation is an improvement both on the winning ideas reading and on the interpretation reading of beliefs. Contrary to the winning ideas reading it is able to explain belief revision concerning the same representation. Also, it does not need the assumption that I (...) misinterpret my otherwise correct ideas as the interpretation reading would have it. In the first section I will provide a brief overview of the notion of inherence and its role in Spinoza‟s discussion of the status of finite minds. Then by examining the relation between Spinoza‟s and Descartes‟ distinction of representations and attitudes, I show that affirmation can be identified with beliefs in Spinoza. Next, I will take a closer look at the identification of intellect and will and argue that Spinoza's identification of the two is based on the fact that Spinoza sees both as the active aspect of the mind. After that, I analyze Spinoza‟s comments on the different scopes of will and intellect, and argue that beliefs are affirmations of the imaginative content of the idea. Finally, through Spinoza‟s example of the utterance of mathematical error, I present my solution to the problem of inherence of false beliefs. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for a novel reading of Spinoza’s position in his exchangewith Boyle about Boyle’s experiment with nitre. Boyle claimed to have shownthrough experiments that nitre ceased to be nitre after heating. Spinozadisagreed and proposed the alternative hypothesis that nitre has changed itsstate and not its nature. Spinoza’s position was construed in the literature asrational scepticism denying that experiments can yield knowledge ofessences because all sensory experience is underdetermined and open tomultiple interpretations. I argue for an alternative (...) reading of Spinoza’sposition which focuses on Bacon’s notion of crucial instance. According tothis reading, Spinoza did not deny the possibility of knowing byexperimentation whether nitre has changed its nature, he asked for a crucialinstance, i.e. an experiment that would refute the hypothesis that nitre haschanged merely its state. Spinoza’s argumentative strategy shows that,contrary to the mainstream reading, the representational content of sensoryideas can be determined even if it does not represent the essence of theobject: we can know with absolute, rather than merely moral, certaintywhether nitre ceased to be nitre without knowing what nitre is. (shrink)

In this paper, through a close reading of Spinoza's use of common notions I argue for the role of experiential and experimental knowledge in Spinoza's epistemology.

In this paper I examine the question whether Spinoza can account for the necessity of death. I argue that he cannot because within his ethical intellectualist system the subject cannot understand the cause of her death, since by understanding it renders it harmless. Then, I argue that Spinoza could not solve this difficulties because of deeper commitments of his system. At the end I draw a historical parallel to the problem from medieval philosophy.

ArgumentI propose that both Moholy-Nagy's suggestions that products of applied, particularly scientific, photography be employed as exemplars for art photography, and his practice of integrating such applied photographs with art photographs in his publications and exhibitions, laid the groundwork for an aestheticization of scientific photography within the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde. This photographic “New Vision,” formulated in the 1920s, also effected a kind of “scientization” of art photography. Rather than Positivist mechanism, however, I argue that the science at play was “biocentrism,” (...) the early twentieth-century worldview that can be described as Naturromantik updated by biologism. His key inspiration in this regard was one of the most important figures of biocentrism, the biologist and popular scientific writer Raoul Heinrich Francé, and his conception of Biotechnik [bionics], in which he proposed that all human technologies are based in natural technologies.The biological, pure and simple, taken as the guide.– Moholy-Nagy. (shrink)

A short overview of the theories of Individuality in early modern philosophy.

This issue is dedicated to consciousness in medieval and early modern philosophy of mind. It aims to shed new light on the continuities and innovations during the transition from medieval to early modern philosophy of mind. The four papers, by Sonja Schierbaum, Daniel Schmal, Oliver Istvan Toth, and Philipp N. Müller, focus on consciousness and, more specifically, on one of its less frequently considered aspects: memory.

In this paper, I investigate whether Spinoza theory of intellect can be considered as an Averroistic, Themistian or Alexandrian theory of intellect. I identify key doctrines of these theories that are argumentatively and theoretically independent from Aristotelian hylomorphism and thus can be accepted by someone rejecting hylomorphism. Next, I argue that the textual evidence is inconclusive: depending on the reading of Spinoza's philosophy accepted, Spinoza's theory of intellect can or cannot be considered as an Averroistic theory.

es ist eine häufig übersehene These der Hegelschen Ästhetik, dass die künstlerische Arbeit ein Ort der Selbstverständigung einer Gesellschaft ist. Schon in seinem ersten Hauptwerk, der "Phänomenologie des Geistes", sind Hegels Überlegungen zur Kunst eingebunden in den Versuch einer Bestimmung der Moderne, und auch in den später publizierten Texten Hegels sowie in seinen Berliner Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Kunst ist die Deutung der Geschichte der Kunst integraler Bestandteil seiner Theorie der Moderne. Hat die Standortbestimmung, die Hegel im Blick auf die (...) Kunst seiner Zeit formuliert, auch für das heutige Selbstverständnis noch Relevanz? Im Zeichen dieser Frage wird in den Beiträgen des Buchs die Stellung der Kunst nach dem "Ende der Kunst", die Interrelationen von Kunst, Religion und Philosophie unter Bedingungen radikalisierter subjektiver Freiheit, sowie die Spannung zwischen Individualität und Allgemeinheit am Ort der Kunst und die Bedeutung der ästhetischen Theorie im Kontext der Moderne erörtert. Mit Beiträgen von: István Fehér, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Francesca Iannelli, Ludwig Nagl, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Alain Patrik Oliver, Sándór Radnóti, Erzsébet Rózsa, Alberto L. Siani, Gerrit Steunebrink, Klaus Vieweg, János Weiss und Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann. (shrink)

Wealth and Virtue reassesses the remarkable contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to the formation of modern economics and to theories of capitalism. Its unique range indicates the scope of the Scottish intellectual achievement of the eighteenth century and explores the process by which the boundaries between economic thought, jurisprudence, moral philosophy and theoretical history came to be established. Dealing not only with major figures like Hume and Smith, there are also studies of lesser known thinkers like Andrew Fletcher, Gershom Carmichael, (...) Lord Kames and John Millar as well as of Locke in the light of eighteenth century social theory, the intellectual culture of the University of Edinburgh in the middle of the eighteenth century and of the performance of the Scottish economy on the eve of the publication of the Wealth of Nations. While the scholarly emphasis is on the rigorous historical reconstruction of both theory and context, Wealth and Virtue directly addresses itself to modern political theorists and economists and throws light on a number of major focal points of controversy in legal and political philosophy. (shrink)

Aristotelian natures – internal principles of motion and rest – provide a rich account of the goal-directed behaviour of natural entities. What such natures cannot account for, on their own, are cases of teleology across natures, where an entity, due to its nature, furthers the goals of another entity. Nevertheless, Aristotle admits such teleological configurations among natures: most notably Politics I.8 1256b15-20 claims that plants are for the sake of animals and animals are for the sake of humans. The paper (...) first scrutinizes two recent attempts– by Mohan Matthen and David Sedley – at an explanation of such teleology across natures. The fundamental move these proposals make is that they claim that the universe has a nature of its own. Accordingly, teleology across natures could be explained as the operation of this single cosmic nature. But the introduction of a cosmic nature contravenes fundamental strictures of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Hence the third section of the paper formulates an alternative proposal, that the teleological interaction across different natures is underpinned by the self-benefittingactivityofindividualnaturalentities,whichareable to use the natural processes of their environment to their own advantage. (shrink)

In his paper ``What is Structural Realism?'' James Ladyman drew a distinction between epistemological structural realism and metaphysical (or ontic) structural realism. He also drew a suggestive analogy between the perennial debate between substantivalist and relationalist interpretations of spacetime on the one hand, and the debate about whether quantum mechanics treats identical particles as individuals or as `non-individuals' on the other. In both cases, Ladyman's suggestion is that an ontic structural realist interpretation of the physics might be just what is (...) needed to overcome the stalemate. The main thesis of this paper is that, whatever the interpretative difficulties of generally covariant spacetime physics are, they do not support or suggest structural realism. In particular, I hope to show that there is in fact no analogy that supports a similar interpretation of the metaphysics of spacetime points and of quantum particles. (shrink)

We agree that the relationship between phenomenology and accessibility can be fruitfully investigated via meshing, but we want to emphasise the importance of proper comparison between meshes, as well as considerations that make comparison especially difficult in this domain. We also argue that Block's interpretation of the neural data in his exemplar mesh is incorrect, and propose an alternative.

Religionskritik wird gerade in der jungeren Vergangenheit bevorzugt als Kritik an der vermeintlichen Irrationalitat religiosen Glaubens artikuliert. Die Autoren der im vorliegenden Konferenzband versammelten Beitrage fragen zunachst anhand exemplarischer Studien zu Hamann, Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche und Rudolf Otto nach der Bedeutung und Funktion des Irrationalen in rezeptionsgeschichtlich massgeblichen religionsphilosophischen Entwurfen der (Nach-)Aufklarung. Erganzt und zugespitzt wird der historische Abschnitt des Bandes durch Analysen zu Werk und Wirkung Soren Kierkegaards, dem neuzeitlichen Irrationalitatstheoretiker par excellence. Daruber hinaus wird aus systematischer Perspektive nach (...) der kritischen und/oder konstruktiven Funktion des Irrationalitatsthemas fur Religionsphilosophie und Theologie gefragt, wobei nicht nur semantische, sondern auch fundamentaltheologische und ethische Aspekte Berucksichtigung finden. Mit Beitragen von: Daniel Conway, Istvan Czako, Dario Gonzalez, Todd Gooch, Zoltan Gyenge, Gesche Linde, William McDonald, Peter Sajda, Jochen Schmidt, Heiko Schulz, Harald Steffes, Jon Stewart, Curtis Thompson, Knut Wenzel, Oliver Wiertz. (shrink)

SC , CA , QA and QEA stand for the classes of Pinter's substitution algebras, Tarski's cylindric algebras, Halmos' quasipolyadic algebras, and quasipolyadic equality algebras of dimension , respectively. Generalizing a result of Németi on cylindric algebras, we show that for K {SC, CA, QA, QEA} and ordinals , the class Nr K of -dimensional neat reducts of -dimensional K algebras, though closed under taking homomorphic images and products, is not closed under forming subalgebras (i.e. is not a variety) if (...) and only if > 1.From this it easily follows that for 1 , the operation of forming -neat reducts of algebras in K does not commute with forming subalgebras, a notion to be made precise. (shrink)

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a new account of plural logic. They argue that there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation in logic, and expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinction between distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists.

In the first part of this paper a relational account of incongruent counterparts is defended against an argument due to Kant. I then consider a more recent attack on such an account, due to John Earman, which alleges that the relationalist cannot account for the lawlike left--right asymmetry manifested in parity-violating phenomena. I review Hoefer's, Huggett's and Saunders' responses to Earman's argument and argue that, while a relationalist account of parity-violating laws is possible, it comes at the cost of non-locality.

In this mini-review, we summarized the results of 12 visual mismatch negativity studies that attempted to use this component as a tool for investigating differences between non-clinical samples of participants as well as the possibility of automatic discrimination in the case of specific categories of visual stimuli. These studies investigated the effects of gender, the effects of long-term differences between the groups of participants, and the effects of short-term states, as well as the vMMN effect elicited by artworks as a (...) special stimulus category. (shrink)

In Subjectivity without Subjects, well-known philosopher and feminist theorist Kelly Oliver looks at aspects of popular culture, film, science, and law to examine contemporary notions of paternity and maternity. Oliver studies the roles of paternal responsibility, virility, and race in such events as the Million Man March and the Promise Keeper's movement and suggests alternative ways to conceive of self-other relations and the subjective identity at stake in them. In addition she offers a detailed analysis of particular works (...) by such well-known filmmakers as Polanski, Bergman, and Varda in developing a theory of identity that opens the subject to otherness and difference. (shrink)

Formal learning theory is the mathematical embodiment of a normative epistemology. It deals with the question of how an agent should use observations about her environment to arrive at correct and informative conclusions. Philosophers such as Putnam, Glymour and Kelly have developed learning theory as a normative framework for scientific reasoning and inductive inference.

The paper is about a chreia—a one-liner used as a grammatical exercise sentence—that presents Pythagoras as proscribing an expression from admissible linguistic usage. This injunction is funny, because it can be construed as Pythagoras railing against the use of a particular variant form of an adjective—and also as against the use of items denoted by that adjective. In the paper I add to this line of interpretation the further point that the chreia also claims that in this latter construal the (...) injunction was Pythagoras’s signature insight, making him the philosopher that he was. (shrink)

Addresses issues that emerged as result of research in pragmatics proper and neighboring fields such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, bilingualism and communication. This book discusses theoretical and empirical work in these paradigms which directed attention to questions that warrant reexamination and revision of some tenets of the field.

The idea that religions should be pluralist is often supported by commentators. It opposes the more rigid suggestion that a particular religion is the only valid route to the truth and salvation. A problem with the latter idea of course is that it makes dialogue meaningless, since the only point to talking to those in other faiths would be to try to convince them of the truth of your own religion. It is not difficult to find indications in many religions (...) that a variety of views on basic issues are acceptable and indeed should be welcomed as progressive. It is argued here, though, that such an approach really does not do justice to the Qur’an. Like many religions, Islam requires obedience to divine authority and is often critical of alternative ways of thinking and behaving. We may regret that this is the case, but religions are often illiberal institutions and should be accurately described as such. (shrink)

The author devotes a good number of pages to clarifying the relations between PHN, experimental psychology, and metaphysics. It is this thesis, a problem of the order of knowledge, that we wish to question. We shall first present some of the difficulties that give rise to the problem. Second, we shall indicate the kind of knowledge which PHN is. Third, we shall attempt to demonstrate that in the body of his work the kind of knowledge represented is that of the (...) "metaphysics of man" and not the "philosophy of human nature." Finally, we shall point out the importance, and non-verbal character, of a correct answer to the problem. (shrink)

In a companion paper (Pooley & Brown 2001) it is argued that Julian Barbour's Machian approach to dynamics provides a genuinely relational interpretation of Newtonian dynamics and that it is more explanatory than the conventional, substantival interpretation. In this paper the extension of the approach to relativistic physics is considered. General relativity, it turns out, can be reinterpreted as a perfectly Machian theory. However, there are difficulties with viewing the Machian interpretation as more fundamental than the conventional, spacetime interpretation. Moreover, (...) this state of affairs provides little solace for the relationist for, even when interpreted along Machian lines, general relativity is a substantival theory although the basic entity is space, not spacetime. (shrink)

Mein Beitrag behandelt zentrale Probleme der Methodologie der Textinterpretation im Lichte der neueren Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie. Nach Vorbemerkungen zum Begriff der Interpretation wende ich mich den Methoden der Bildung und kritischen Prüfung von Interpretationshypothesen zu. Wie ist das Verhältnis von Daten und Hypothesen im Falle der Textinterpretation? Wie können Interpretationshypothesen epistemisch gerechtfertigt bzw. gestützt werden? Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen untersuche ich die Anwendung der Hypothetisch-Deduktiven Methode und der Methode des Schlusses auf die beste Erklärung auf die Textinterpretation. Der Vergleich zeigt, (...) dass die Methode des Schlusses auf die beste Erklärung vorzuziehen ist. (shrink)

Associative memory is the ability to link together components of stimuli. Previous evidence suggests that prior familiarization with study items affects the nature of the association between stimuli. More specifically, novel stimuli are learned in a more context-dependent fashion than stimuli that have been encountered previously without the current context. In the current study, we first acquired behavioral data from 62 human participants to conceptually replicate this effect. Participants were instructed to memorize multiple object-scene pairs and were then tested on (...) their recognition memory for the objects. Importantly, 1 day prior, participants had been familiarized with half of the object stimuli. During the test phase, the objects were either matched to the same scene as during study or swapped with a different object’s scene. Our results conceptually replicated the context-dependency effect by showing that breaking up a studied object-context pairing is more detrimental to object recognition performance for non-familiarized objects than for familiarized objects. Second, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether medial temporal lobe encoding-related activity patterns are reflective of this familiarity-related context effect. Data acquired from 25 human participants indicated a larger effect of familiarization on encoding-related hippocampal activity for objects presented within a scene context compared to objects presented alone. Our results showed that both retrieval-related accuracy patterns and hippocampal activation patterns were in line with a familiarization-mediated context-dependency effect. (shrink)

Von „Big Data“ über die „Künstliche Intelligenz“ bis hin zur „Sozialen Robotik“: Im Kontext der Digitalisierung gibt es unzählige Fachtermini. Das vorliegende Nachschlagewerk ist für alle geeignet, die einen schnellen Einstieg in das Gebiet der Digitalisierung suchen und sich für Fragen der Ethik interessieren. In 350 übersichtlichen Beiträgen werden die Grundlagen und Entwicklungen leicht verständlich erläutert.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 285-300.

Karl Jaspers’ reception of Kierkegaard has been characterized by some commentators as a largely uncritical appropriation. In my paper I argue that this view is not entirely adequate since the former’s attitude to the Danish thinker is by no means purely affirmative. By contrast, it seems to me that the punctum saliens of his criticism is the idea of a religiously motivated negation of the world, which certainly dominates the later thought of Kierkegaard. In order to justify my claim both (...) Jaspers’ existential concept of the world and that of a world negation will be dealt with. In the main part of the article I will try to reconstruct, from a historical point of view the shaping and development of Jaspers’ increasingly sharp criticism of Kierkegaard’s “acosmic” view of Christianity and his late self-distancing from the Danish thinker. In my concluding remarks I will point out that although his criticism is in principal not unfounded, it is nevertheless one-sided and reductionistic, since it is based mainly on Kierkegaard’s polemical writings from the late period of his Kirchenkampf and as such ignores or at least underestimates some important aspects of Kierkegaard’s early thought. (shrink)