During the early 19th century, a peculiarly systematic way of organizing books emerged in Germany. This systematization, which purported to be a rational organization of subject matter, was an outgrowth of the philosophy of Hegel. This article attempts to outline Hegel's organizational practice. It argues that Hegel's encyclopedia was a reaction against the Enlightenment encyclopedia, and that it attempted to restore the systematic mindset of pre-modern reference books. Yet it did this, not in a straightforward fashion, but by developing a (...) method for organizing material that both stresses the interconnectedness of knowledge and promises to be highly scalable. In its attempt to trace the Hegelian organizational method, this article revisits and calls attention to a forgotten work in Hegel scholarship by Michael John Petry, who was the first writer to seriously stress the importance of classification in Hegel's work. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that Hegelianism and information organization can be brought into fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue. (shrink)

The intensive process of differentiation of knowledge that has in the past decade come to include philosophy has had the results, inter alia, that ethics, esthetics, and empirical sociology have undergone a kind of secondary "branching off" from the philosophy of society and culture . On the level of teaching this had the consequence that a department of esthetics and ethics was carved out of the department of historical materialism at the Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University, and was subsequently divided (...) into departments of esthetics and ethics, respectively. It was thus that the independent department of ethics made its appearance for the first time in the history of Moscow University. This occurred in 1969, and recently the department of Marxist- Leninist ethics marked its modest first decade. (shrink)

The article explores the relation between personal identity and life-changing decisions such as the decision for a certain career or the decision to become a parent. According to L.A. Paul, decisions of this kind involve “transformative experiences”, to the effect that - at the time we make a choice - we simply don’t know what it is like for us to experience the future situation. Importantly, she claims that some new experiences may be “personally transformative” by which she means that (...) one may become a “new kind of person” having a different subjective perspective and “identity”. The article discusses this understanding of a transformed future self. It will be argued that different notions of identity can be distinguished with respect to Paul’s claim: the notion of identity in the sense of a personality as well as the notion of numerical identity in the sense of sameness. By distinguishing these two notions it will become more clear how a future experience may indeed qualify as “personally transformative”. Moreover, it will be shown that the notion of a self-understanding of persons helps to further clarify the kind of change at issue. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the particular structure of the content of so-called generic memories, specifically of those of recurring events from one's past. This way of remembering has two central features that are in tension to each other: what is mentally represented is both rather specific as one is typically simulating a scene and sufficiently abstract as the represented scene stands for a series of similar former events. It will be argued that the phenomenon can be adequately described as a (...) mental state representing personal event prototypes. This description further allows to account for the dynamic process of remembering, in which, depending on the context, different forms of personal remembering may come to the fore. (shrink)

There is general acknowledgement that both the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex are implicated in reinforcement-guided decision making, and emotion and social behaviour. Despite the interest that these areas generate in both the cognitive neuroscience laboratory and the psychiatric clinic, ideas about the distinctive contributions made by each have only recently begun to emerge. This reflects an increasing understanding of the component processes that underlie reinforcement- guided decision making, such as the representation of reinforcement expectations, the exploration, updating and representation (...) of action values, and the appreciation that choices are guided not just by the prospect of reward but also by the costs that action entails. Evidence is emerging to suggest that the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex make distinct contributions to each of these aspects of decision making. (shrink)