Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 2 Seiten: 129-152.

Empirical approaches on topics such as consciousness, self-awareness, or introspective perspective, need a conceptual framework so that the emerging, still unconnected findings can be integrated and put into perspective. We introduce a model of self-consciousness derived from phenomenology, philosophy, the cognitive, and neurosciences. We will then give an overview of research data on one particular aspect of our model, self-agency, trying to link findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Finally, we will expand on pathological aspects of self-agency, and in particular (...) on psychosis in schizophrenia. We show, that a deficient self-monitoring system underlies, in part, hallucinations and formal thought (language) disorder in schizophrenia. We argue, that self-consciousness is a valid construct and can be studied with the instruments of cognitive and neuroscience. (shrink)

British equality law protections for sex and gender reassignment have grown fraught as activists tussle over legal and social categories of gender, gender transitioning, and sex. This article considers the future of gender-related equality protections in relation to ‘decertification’—an imagined reform that would detach sex and gender from legal personhood. One criticism of decertification is that de-formalising gender membership would undermine equality law protections. This article explores how gender-based equality law could operate in conditions of decertification, drawing on legal thoughtways (...) developed for two other protected characteristics in equality law—religion and belief, and disability—to explore the legal responses and imaginaries that these two grounds make available. Religious equality law focuses on beliefs, communities, and practices, deemed to be stable, multivarious, and subject to deep personal commitment. Disability equality law focuses on embodied disadvantage, approached as social, relational, and fluctuating. While these two equality frameworks have considerable limitations, they offer legal thoughtways for gender oriented to both its hierarchies and its expression, including as disavowal. (shrink)

This book reconstructs Spinoza's theory of the human mind against the backdrop of the twofold notion that subjective experience is explainable and that its successful explanation is of ethical relevance, because it makes us wiser, freer, and happier.

Hylomorphism is the theory that objects are composites of form and matter. Recently it has been argued that form is structure, or the arrangement of an object's parts. This paper shows that the principle of form cannot be ontologically exhausted by structure. That is, I deny form should be understood just as the arrangement of an object's parts. I do so by showing that structure cannot play the role form is supposed to in a certain domain of objects, specifically, in (...) mereological simples. Thus, I show that Hylomorphism does not reduce to Structuralism. I also draw out some important consequences from my argument for Hylomorphism in general. (shrink)

These are set against introductory essays describing the philosophical, historical and psychological approaches, making this a uniquely inclusive overview.

The dominance of the Abrahamic tradition in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion has led some to call for greater exploration of alternatives to the traditional conception of God, such as Pantheism, Ultimism, and Axiarchism. While we think this call for alternatives is important, we go in a different direction. Rather than explore and defend alternative conceptions of God, we defend a range of fairly traditional but non-religious conceptions of God. This range of views, from deism to philosophical theism, enjoys a (...) variety of benefits over its religious competitors and deserves greater attention. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 63 Heft: 3 Seiten: 476-496.

In ancient as well as in early modern theories of emotion, philosophy is often described as some kind of therapy. However, the assumption that philosophical reflection can influence our emotional life is only plausible, if the following requirements are met. First, one has to defend a realist account of self-knowledge. Second, one must allow for some kind of constructivism in regard to the description of one′s own experience. Finally, one has to maintain a strictly cognitivist conception of emotion. The article (...) discusses these three conditions and shows that, while the idea of a therapeutic influence of philosophical reflection is valid in principle, it is only of a restricted use. (shrink)

Since the last two decades of the 20th century it has been widely accepted that testimony has to be acknowledged as a source of knowledge. As a side effect, any form of epistemic individualism has been discredited. The article provides some arguments against the dismissive attitude towards epistemic individualism. I distinguish between three forms of epistemic individualism, and I argue that only the most extreme form can be flatly rejected while there are good reasons for maintaining the other two forms (...) of epistemic individualism. I show that weak individualism, according to which individuals are the bearers of knowledge, is concerned with a necessary condition of the instantiation of knowledge. We only accept knowledge claims if there is good reason to believe that they are maintained by at least one individual. My main interest, however, is focused on a discussion of the third more challenging form of epistemic individualism, namely normative epistemic individualism, which claims that priority of one’s own epistemic experiences over the testimony of others. I first swow that such a priority claim can only be understood as a local device, i.e. if a belief based on our own experiences is challenged by other people’s assertations, then we are committed to trust our own experiences more than the words of others. In a second step, the relations between such a restricted version of the individualist priority claim and the ideal of rationality are discussed. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the concept of the human life-form in philosophy. On the one hand, some have argued that in order to conceive of an individual living being in terms of specific properties, it is necessary to refer to the life form shared by the members of its species. On the other hand, it has been argued that the idea of a good life for humans requires that we think of man’s possible actions (...) and passions in the horizon of the human life form. This article examines whether there is in Spinoza an idea of a specific life-form of humans. Taking the notion of a specifically human good, which is invoked in the Metaphysical Thoughts and in a few parallel passages in the Ethics, it first argues that Spinoza does in fact assume the idea of human species in his philosophy. Examining the correspondence with Henry Oldenburg, it next argues that an interpretation of Spinoza’s views on modality can be developed in a way that allows for the notion of (non-actualized) human capacities. It then discusses how the idea of species is related with the conatus doctrine, before it concludes with a few remarks on the contribution of culture to the development of the human life form. Altogether, the article defends the twofold view that there is conceptual space for the notion of a human life-form in Spinoza and that this notion is crucial for several aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction -- At the start -- In number -- In body -- In action -- In consciousness -- In grace -- In the divine -- In thought -- In creation -- In eros -- In time -- In law -- In freedom -- Epilogue.

Let us imagine that we decided to visit cities at different places in the world. During our journey we would probably consult often one or more of these books known as “travel guides,” which, in our case, describe one or more cities for the benefit of the traveler who knows nothing about them or has only a slight idea of what they are like.Presumably we would be told not infrequently that in the cities being described something is “reflected” - that (...) the city architecture of Paris reflects the immortality - obsessed self-glorification of French kings, emperors, or national presidents; that the baroque layout of Rome reflects the triumphant Catholicism of the counter- Reformation ; that the skyscrapers of Manhattan reflect the unbridled creativity of American civilization. (shrink)

Understanding the relationship of democracy and property ownership is one of the most important tasks for contemporary political philosophy. In his concept of property-owning democracy John Rawls explores the thesis that property in productive means has an indirect effect on the formation of true or false beliefs and that unequal ownership of productive capital leads to distorted and deceived convictions. The basic aspect of Rawls’s conception can be captured by the claim that for securing the fair value of the political (...) liberties a widespread dispersal of property in productive resources is required that minimizes the formation of delusions and therefore improves the conditions of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

Dans ce commentaire, je me pencherai brièvement sur une philosophie du discours performatif qui s’inscrit dans la foulée de l’exploration par Taylor des capacités linguistiques humaines. Cette philosophie vient compléter la pleine étendue de la capacité linguistique, et montrer comment la raison pénètre la pensée grâce au langage. Le langage crée en effet une ouverture à la raison grâce — et c’est ce sur quoi je me concentrerai — à une critique de l’auto-tromperie, qui peut être réalisée grâce à la (...) capacité linguistique. (shrink)

Das Erkenntnisinteresse, das dieses Buch anleitet, gilt dem Begriff der moralischen Wahrheit, der Frage, ob und, wenn ja, warum moralische Urteile Wahrheitsansprüche erheben dürfen.

Biographical note: Hilge Landweer, Freie Universität Berlin; Ursula Renz, ETH Zürich, Schweiz.

This article considers what the implications of decertification would be for single-sex services such as domestic and sexual violence support. Some reform options attached to decertification could (re)allocate authority away from the state to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria. What would the consequences of such re-allocation be in determining eligibility to receive or access services or excluding people on the basis of a characteristic protected under equality law? Engaging with this in the context of domestic and sexual violence (...) support service provision raises a number of questions. Firstly, does the existence of gender-based violence and/or of the effects it produces require a stable category in order to address them? What benefits may emerge from providing single-sex spaces that could not be replicated in other settings? And finally, what criteria of exclusion and inclusion are currently used to determine access to spaces beyond legal gender status? (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 67 Heft: 2 Seiten: 317-323.

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composites of matter and form. If my house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers and its form something like a structure that unites those bricks and timbers into a single substance. Contemporary hylomorphists are divided on how to understand forms best, but a prominent group of theorists argue that forms are emergent powers. According to such views, when material components are arranged appropriately, (...) a novel substance emerges with the power to impose unity on its components through time. I argue that these accounts of form fall prey to a bootstrapping problem, and so, suffer from issues of redundancy, given plausible assumptions about inherence. In their place, I suggest an ontologically minimalist conception of forms as collective manifestations of the powers of matter. (shrink)

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory according to which substances are composed of matter and form. If a house is a substance, then its matter would be a collection of bricks and timbers, and its form is something like the structure of those bricks and timbers. It is widely agreed that matter bears a mereological relationship to substance; the bricks and timbers are parts of the house. But with form things are more controversial. Is the structure of the bricks and timbers (...) best conceived as a part of the house, or is it related to the house in some non‐mereological fashion? Kathrin Koslicki argues that substances have formal parts and that forms are best conceived as bearing a mereological relation to substances. This paper shows that her argument fails, given the traditional and plausible distinction between substances and accidental unities. I close with a brief suggestion for a non‐mereological construal of forms. (shrink)

Bestrewn with relics of subjugation, the frameworks that hinge on social progress have failed to appraise the plight of the marginalized in the democratic discourse. This is the case in the Philippines, as in other fringed spaces caught in hegemonic world-building. In this setup, emancipation is anchored in salvific attempts – salvaging the marginalized from a messianic standpoint. This tends to produce a pejorative image of the marginalized as incapable of self-determination. I argue in a three-part discussion: (1) reexamine the (...) locus of the margin in critical theorizing; (2) retrace the act of recognition vis-à-vis the emancipative struggle; (3) present that the lifeworld of the marginalized offers redemptive alternatives for emancipation. Further, I argue that this offers a foremost framework in critical theorizing at the margin since their situatedness affords a stance that has not formed a patina of the West but is primarily informed by their rich local periphery. (shrink)

Property rights are often seen as a gateway to the destruction of nature. In view of the ecological crisis, criticism of property rights is therefore becoming louder and louder. On the one hand, rightly so, since global warming, resource depletion, global pollution and the loss of species have been made possible by the private ownership of natural assets. On the other hand, the criticism falls short. Even common and public property does not protect natural assets from being overexploited, resources depleted, (...) and values extracted. Moreover, it is questionable whether nature would actually be better off today without any property regulation. A new understanding of property that does justice to natural goods is therefore needed. The article considers the rights of nature as a way to rethink property in this sense and explores reasons to give rights of nature a general validity. (shrink)