Giordano Bruno's notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his philosophical works he addressed such delicate issues as the role of Christ as mediator and the distinction, in human beings, between soul and matter. This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism for (...) a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena. (shrink)

In what is undoubtedly his most famous essay, the late F.C.S. Schiller posed the deceptively simple query: “Must philosophers disagree?” To Schiller and, seemingly, the bulk of philosophers before and after him, the question should be answered in the negative. Yet, the dialogues among contemporaneous philosophers, past and present, as among the vast number of protagonists in the long, “unscripted” dialogue which constitutes the history of thought, reveal that the disagreements among philosophers justly may be said to define a central (...) problem of philosophy, if not the root problem. Perhaps fearful lest the diversity of philosophical alternatives evidence the defeat of reason, many have striven to piece together a unified whole, to gloss over deep rifts in convictions among individuals, and even to institutionalize some contemporaneously acceptable explanation. But none of these moves has been successful to the present and none seem destined to gain the field in the future. Indeed, contrary to the end which the “heart” may desire, the “mind” drives us towards the conclusion that the ineluctable characteristic of reason is disagreement. Yet this in no way disparages reason or its usages, for no principle of logic has been violated when one chooses from among diverse basic convictions which form the foundation of alternative philosophic systems. (shrink)

In Chapter II of his work The Philosophy of Spinoza, Wolfson accepts Descartes' distinction between the geometrical method of philosophizing and the geometrical form of literary exposition. The geometrical method of philosophizing is a method of demonstration and is essentially identical with “valid syllogistic reasoning as practised throughout the history of philosophy.” The geometrical form of literary exposition is one modelled after the literary form of Euclid's Elements. Wolfson proceeds to present two theses which serve as the premises of a (...) conclusion respecting the relation between form and content in Spinoza's Ethics. The first thesis is that as a consequence of Spinoza's “mathematical way of looking at things” the geometrical method “is adopted by Spinoza and used consistently in his discussions of metaphysical matters throughout his chief philosophic work.” The second thesis is to the effect that there is no logical connection between the geometrical method of philosophizing and the geometrical literary form of exposition, i.e., a geometrizing philosopher, e.g., Descartes, need not employ the geometrical literary form. From these theses, serving as premises, Wolfson concludes that “there is no logical connection between the substance of Spinoza's philosophy and the form in which it is written” and, hence, “his choice of the Euclidian geometrical form is to be explained on other grounds.” Wolfson proceeds to present four possible reasons which, either individually or conjointly, may lie behind Spinoza's employment of the geometrical literary form: on pedagogical grounds, in reaction against certain literary forms which had developed since the Renaissance, to avoid arguing against his opponents, and for the sake of novelty. (shrink)

Ugar and Malele 1 critique the use of ‘generic’ technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for mental health diagnoses, particularly in sub-Saharan African countries. They highlight how these AI medical tools often overlook traditional perspectives and local contexts. The article has the merit of working on ethical issues regarding the particularities and risks of using AI and ML for health diagnosis in the Global South, an urgent and neglected topic. According to the authors, the use of these (...) AI technologies leads to overgeneralisation in diagnosing mental disorders, which could be especially problematic in the mental health field because of value-laden judgements intrinsic to the definition of mental health disorders. This argument is theoretically grounded in the hybrid conceptualisation of mental disorders proposed by Wakefield. 2 This author’s perspective incorporates both factual and value components in defining mental disorders, framing them as context-dependent ‘harmful dysfunctions’... (shrink)

The keenly contested debates over the passage from the Middle Ages to modernity have steadily revealed how this transition was itself characterised by tensions and complexities. Narratives and inte...

Apresentam-se resultados de um estudo que examinou o juízo moral das crianças sobre a ingratidão. Participaram 77 crianças (49% do sexo feminino), distribuídas em três grupos (5-6, 8-9 e 11-12 anos). Utilizaram-se duas histórias protagonizadas por um(a) benfeitor(a) e um(a) ingrato(a). Após cada his..

The Gompertz distribution is commonly used in biology for modeling fatigue and mortality. This paper studies a class of models proposed by Adham and Walker, featuring a Gompertz type distribution where the dependence structure is modeled by a lognormal distribution, and develops a new multivariate formulation that facilitates several numerical and computational aspects. This paper also implements the FBST, the Full Bayesian Significance Test for pertinent sharp (precise) hypotheses on the lognormal covariance structure. The FBST’s e-value, ev(H), gives the epistemic (...) value of hypothesis, H, or the value of evidence in the observed in support of H. (shrink)

El presente ensayo busca contraponer la producción escrita de Walter Benjamin y Carl Schmitt, en busca de la vinculación y ruptura filosófica política de ambos en torno a conceptos como el de estado de excepción y soberanía. Para ello proponemos una lectura en orden cronológico de sus obras entre 1920 y 1930, cual si existiese un diálogo mudo, en el cual el punto de partida es común pero las críticas y distanciamiento entre ambos se vuelven más evidentes y abismales.

Resumo: A epistemologia é usualmente neutra quanto aos diferentes tipos de objeto que a ciência investiga. Entretanto, seguindo Popper e Stengers, podemos descrever que os objetos vivos impõem à investigação científica uma mudança radical em sua abordagem. As ciências que lidam com objetos vivos não podem mais compartilhar os pressupostos do experimentalismo: o ser vivo não é isolável de seu ambiente. Palavras-chave: Conhecimento; Evolução; Filosofia da ciência.

Resumen: Las ciencias sociales y políticas latinoamericanas, por su rol en la geopolítica del conocimiento, han puesto más el acento en la comprobación empírica de las formulaciones teóricas y conceptuales exógenas, que en descubrir cómo describir a partir de la innovación conceptual. Una de las excepciones a este desarrollo periférico fue la vocación intelectual de los latinoamericanistas por comprender el cambio de régimen desde el autoritarismo a la democracia denominado “transitología”. En este dominio disciplinar, uno de los aportes para comprender (...) los cerrojos y herencias autoritarias proviene de los trabajos de Manuel Antonio Garretón y la noción de “enclaves”, la cual ha sido ampliamente utilizada, pero escasamente analizada en términos epistemológicos y metodológicos. Para ello, en un primer momento, analizaremos la génesis e itinerario en la formulación de dicho concepto; luego, daremos cuenta de la tarea intelectual para adjetivar el concepto raíz y dar lugar a una clasificación en torno a los tipos de enclaves; y, por último, observaremos el uso y reformulación posterior que ha tenido el concepto en la ciencia política latinoamericana para extender el dominio de aplicabilidad del concepto.: The Latin American social and political sciences, due to their role in the geopolitics of knowledge, have placed more emphasis on the empirical verification of exogenous theoretical and conceptual formulations, than on discovering how to describe from conceptual innovation. One of the exceptions to this peripheral development was the intellectual vocation of Latin Americanists to understand the change of regime from authoritarianism to democracy, called “transitology”. In this disciplinary domain, one of the intellectual contributions to understand authoritarian locks and inheritances comes from the works of Manuel Antonio Garretón and the notion of "enclaves", which has been widely used but scarcely analyzed in epistemological and methodological terms. To do this, at first, we will analyze the genesis and itinerary in the formulation of this concept; then, we will give an account of the intellectual task to adjective the root concept and give rise to a classification around the types of enclaves; and, finally, we will observe the use and subsequent reformulation that the concept has had in Latin American political science to extend the domain of its applicability. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 2 Seiten: 303-319.

The editors conclude the volume with a study of recent German and UK reforms and their effects on personal savings.ContributorsTheodore C. Bergstrom, A. Lans Bovenberg, Antoine Bozio, Woojen Chung, Juan C. Conesa, Gabrielle Demange, Richard ...

We report an experiment that unambiguously shows an effect of full-form frequency for fully regular Dutch inflected verbs falling into Clahsen's “default” category, negating Clahsen's claim that regular complex words in the default category are not stored.

Anwendungen der Gendiagnostik und Reproduktionsmedizin erlauben es Wunscheltern, immer weiter auf das Erbgut ihrer Nachkommen Einfluss zu nehmen. Eine solche „liberale Eugenik“ wird mittlerweile auch in der Philosophie und Bioethik befürwortet. Wo liegen aber die Ursprünge eines solchen Denkens und wie ist eine umfassende Fortpflanzungsfreiheit zu bewerten? Ausgehend von einer freiheitlichen Ethik leistet die Studie eine immanente Kritik an der liberalen Eugenik und entwirft dabei eine eigene Position zum Umgang mit neuen gentechnischen Möglichkeiten.

Arno Bohm and Ilya Prigogine's Brussels-Austin Group have been working on the quantum mechanical arrow of time and irreversibility in rigged Hilbert space quantum mechanics. A crucial notion in Bohm's approach is the so-called preparation/registration arrow. An analysis of this arrow and its role in Bohm's theory of scattering is given. Similarly, the Brussels-Austin Group uses an excitation/de-excitation arrow for ordering events, which is also analyzed. The relationship between the two approaches is discussed focusing on their semi-group operators and time (...) arrows. Finally a possible realist interpretation of the rigged Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics is considered. (shrink)

This article documents experiences of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions during COVID-19 pandemic via interviews with 29 participants. Sessions included an international, gender balanced, and cross generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3 months of twice weekly improvisation sessions, 29 interviews with participants were undertaken, recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Key themes include how the sessions provided opportunities for artistic development, enhanced (...) mood, reduced feelings of isolation, and sustained and developed community. Particular attention is placed upon how improvisation as a universal, real time, social, and collaborative process facilitates interaction, allowing the technological affordances of software (latencies, sound quality, and gallery/speaker view) and hardware (laptop, tablet, instruments, microphones, headphones, and objects in room) to become emergent properties of artistic collaborations. The extent to which this process affects new perceptual and conceptual breakthroughs for practitioners is discussed as is the crucial and innovative relationship between audio and visual elements. Analysis of edited films of the sessions highlight artistic and theoretical and conceptual issues discussed. Emphasis is given to how the domestic environment merges with technologies to createThe Theatre of Home. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Henri Bergson’s argument at the beginning of the second chapter of his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience for his view that every idea of number involves sp...

Menzius war ein prominenter politischer Denker des antiken China und ein hochrangiger Berater des mächtigen Fürsten von Qí. Im Werk Mèngzi “Junker Mèng” sind Dialoge zu politischen Fragen überliefert, die er mit wichtigen Fürsten, mit seinen Gefolgsleuten und mit Gegnern führte. Angesichts des Niedergangs der Zhou-Könige sind Fragen der Herrschaftsform sowie der adäquaten Verwaltung zentral. Dabei behandelte er anthropologische Aspekte der geistigen Konstitution der Menschen und verteidigte so die traditionelle verwandtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Organisation und ihre Werte. Das Werk bietet eine (...) neue Rekonstruktion der Biographie und der Zeit des Menzius, eine darauf fussende Übersetzung in neuer Anordnung mit detaillierten Kommentaren sowie umfangreiche Anhänge zu Chronologie, Geschichte, Personen und zentralen Begriffen. Es richtet sich an ein sinologisches Fachpublikum und an ideengeschichtlich Interessierte. (shrink)

For four decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will according to which agents are required to be ultimately responsible for the creation or formation of their own wills (characters and purposes). The aim of this paper is to explain how a free will of this traditional kind -which..

The idea that nous comes from without, deriving from Aristotle’s Generation of Animals II.3, became a key element in late ancient and Medieval accounts of human rationality drawing on Aristotle’s De Anima. But two very different understandings of the concept were around (often occurring next to each other): either it was taken to refer to the human capacity for thought and its origin outside the natural ontogenetic process; or it was taken to stand for the most perfect act of thought, (...) existing separately as the supreme divinity, and becoming, hopefully, ours at the very climax of human development. This paper shows how these two influential conceptions derive from the work of the two greatest scholars of Aristotle’s school, Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias, respectively. More to the point: it shows that (i) there is an intriguing philosophical story to be told of how the notion developed from one understanding to the other, this being the core of a larger story of nous from without in Western thought; and that (ii) this story sheds new light on what was at stake in the early – genuinely Peripatetic – reception of Aristotle’s account of nous (as contrasted with later, heavily Platonized, interpretations). (shrink)

Contrary to the belief of most Kantians and Kant scholars, Kant is in fact an anarchist. In this paper, I distinguish sharply between two concepts of enlightenment, enlightenment lite and heavy duty or radical enlightement ; show how there is an unbridgeable gap between Kant’s official political theory in The Doctrine of Right and his ethics; show how Kant’s real political theory is worked out in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and is in fact a heavy-duty, radically enlightened (...) version of anarchism; refute and debunk widely-believed Hobbesian assumptions about human nature, which are in fact nothing but cognitive illusions; and propose a de-biasing strategy in political aesthetics for ridding ourselves of these Hobbesian cognitive illusions. (shrink)