The intellectual impact of the First World War in China is often understood as having led to a disenchantment with the West and a discrediting of the authority of “science”, while at the same time ushering in a renewed sense of cultural as well as national “awakening”. Important developments such as the May Fourth Movement, the rise of Chinese Marxism, and the emergence of modern Confucianism have become integral parts of the narrative surrounding the effects of the “European War” in (...) China, and bear witness to the contested relation between tradition and modernity in twentieth-century Chinese thought. Through a case study of a number of wartime and post-war texts written by the “cultural conservative” thinker and publicist Du Yaquan, this paper tries to draw attention to the complexity and occasional ambiguity of responses to the “Great War” in modern Chinese intellectual history. More specifically, the following pages offer an analysis of Du’s critique of “materialism” in the context of his quest for social freedom and cultural continuity, his enduring commitment to scientific notions of social evolution and political governance, and his approach to the relations among war, the nation-state, the individual, and the international interstate order developed against the background of the First World War. (shrink)

In the field of history of Chinese philosophy, the key points and difficulties in the research on Fang Yizhi are mainly reflected in two ideological lines: one is how the academic pattern of the transition from Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties to the texturalism in the Qing Dynasty happened; the other is how the traditional Chinese humanities accepted the western modern natural sciences and technologies. Relatively speaking, in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, there were fewer academic (...) discussions on the relationship between intellectual thought and natural science and technology, and no universally accepted explanatory paradigm has been put forward yet. To understand the relationship between science and humanities in late Ming and early Qing Dynasty, as well as that between modern western natural science and ancient Chinese traditional thought, Fang Yizhi is a precious object of study. Fang Yizhi's thinking and practice about "things" is a bridge linking the natural world and the human world. “Thing” in Chinese philosophy has both concrete and abstract attributes, including but not limited to the category of “matter” in Western philosophy. Fang Yizhi has always been regarded as an encyclopedic thinker, and his theory of things is extremely rich. The theory and practice of things are the core of Fang Yizhi's philosophy. Fang Yizhi believes that the three religions all hold that the ultimate noumenon itself is "unknowable" and at the same time is the fundamental basis of every single thing, so people can only "study its origin" from the "knowable", that is, the "thing". This train of thought lies in the base of Fang’s thinking when describing and analyzing the relationship between Dao and things, which includes both theories of the universe and the ontology. This paper holds that the basic idea of Fang Yizhi's philosophy on the theory of body and function is that ‘there is no body but there is function’, while on the theory of universe it is that what above Yin and Yang are unknowable. Because the Dao has no body, it has only the function. And because nothing above the Yin and Yang can be understood, people can only use what is below the Yin and Yang such as the principle, qi 氣, image and number, to form the universal principle through the induction of the principle of “things”. Furthermore, Fang Yizhi ascribes the body, mind, nature and destiny to the concept of things, that is to say, he regards the self as the object of rational cognition. In this relationship, "I" is not only the subject of cognition, but also the object of cognition, thus realizing introspection inward. Thirdly, utensils and heaven and earth, that is, man-made objects and natural objects, are external to the self. Although Fang Yizhi also advocated "making" things external to human beings, under the social class system of scholars, peasants, workers and businessmen, he could only engage in the research of the theory of external things, that is, the so-called science of quality and measurement. On the whole, Fang Yizhi's physical research and practice did not go beyond the scope of Chinese traditional natural science, but he was good at summarizing research methods, actively absorbing the contents of western natural science, and put forward correct ideas on many specific natural science issues. Mou Zongsan's discussion on the relationship between existence and activity inspires the author to think about the significance of the theory of “round ∴”. Fang Yizhi drew a series of laws represented by the theory of “round∴” through the induction of the principle of being. Although these laws are derived from existing things, they themselves are not static, but show two levels of active states: one is the internal dynamics of the laws, that is, the constant rotation; the other is that the law derived from the existing things can be applied to the activities of people, considering eternity and change, the right timing and other variable factors. This paper tries to follow the essence of Fang Yizhi's thought to seek for communication and connection between objects and things, between being and activity, between natural science and moral and human ethics. From the perspective of the development of modern and contemporary Chinese philosophy, the study of mind has always occupied an important position, and the corresponding philosophical research of “things” is relatively lacking. In theory, mind and thing are relative and inseparable aspects, and the thoughts on “things” in traditional Chinese thought resources are comparable to the study of mind in terms of diachronic, textual volume and theoretical depth. The rapid development of modern natural science and technology and its challenges to the human world have promoted the deep and lasting reflecting on the problem of things and the relationship between people and things in western philosophy. Scientific rationality invades every aspect of human's life. The transformation of knowledge to practical technology enhances human's ability to control and transform things. Instrumental rationality dominates human's understanding of things, and “things” fall from the meaning world of human's living situation and become the means to meet human's needs. A re-examination of this period in Chinese history, when pre-modern ideas and science and technology first collided, may be helpful to enlighten us to think about the relationship between science and technology and the world of human significance. (shrink)

Liang Shuming’s 梁漱溟 China: the Country of Reason is a little-known, posthumously published manuscript composed between 1967 and 1970 during the Cultural Revolution. It offers a unique perspective on Liang’s philosophical attempt to reconcile the Communist revolutionary legacy with the Confucian tradition that he continued to uphold in mainland China after the founding of the People’s Republic. By presenting and analyzing the main themes and concepts of this book, I try to cast some light on Liang’s idiosyncratic repurposing of historical (...) materialist concepts in reinterpreting what he takes to be “early enlightenment” accomplished through the Confucian celebration of “reason” and its “replacement of religion by morality.” In doing so, I explore the complex relations between revolutionary, religious, and ethnic identity in his late philosophy. (shrink)

In this chapter, I review different ways of dealing with values in science that philosophers have developed. I also examine how these play out in practice in contemporary political science debates. In particular, I scrutinize transparency (analyzing the Data Access and Research Transparency (DA-RT) debate in political science), representativeness (using research on central banking as an example), and, citizen engagement (considered in International Political Economy) as three conditions to make the influence of values in science justifiable. Doing so, I defend (...) strategies of dealing with values that go beyond the individual researcher, rather focusing on the role social-epistemic processes play in improving our collective epistemic practices and outputs. Hopefully, this chapter will engage political scientists to reflect on their strategies of dealing with value influences in science as well as help philosophers further developing these strategies – which would benefit from more social and political analysis. (shrink)

At first sight, Isocrates’ use of the term “sophist” may appear contradictory as it is associated with both a positive and a pejorative meaning. The article contends that Isocrates was not being unintentionally vague or imprecise as he deliberately used the term to refer to two disparaging groups of professional teachers or writers who, in his opinion, had nothing in common. Isocrates tended to privilege the positive meaning of the term over the negative one, considering the latter as a contemporary (...) deviation of the former. (shrink)

Girolamo Cardano makes a number of surprising, even shocking claims about the soul in his De subtilitate, one of the most widely read works of natural philosophy in the sixteenth century. When he was finally investigated by the Roman Inquisition and the Index, these claims did not go unnoticed. This study will narrow in on three passages marked as heretical by the first Holy Office censor of De subtilitate. It will consider the Inquisition’s priorities and ask about materialism, determinism, and (...) conceptual inconsistency in Cardano’s views on the soul. The study will give special attention to the claim made by Cardano that souls can be reduced to celestial heat. In addition to De subtilitate, several of Cardano’s other works will be considered for added perspective, especially Contradicentium medicorum libri duodecim. (shrink)

Whether you believe free will exists has profound effects on your behaviour, across different levels of processing, from simple motor action to social cognition. It is therefore important to understand which specific lay theories are held in the general public and why. Past research largely focused on investigating free will beliefs, but largely ignored a second key aspect: free will attitudes. Attitudes are often independently predictive of behaviour, relative to beliefs, yet we currently know very little about FWAs in the (...) general public. One key issue is whether such attitudes are subject to biased, socially desirable responding. The vast majority of the general public strongly believes in the existence of free will, which might create cultural pressure to value free will positively as well. In this registered report, we used a very large, open available dataset measuring implicit and explicit attitudes towards free will and determinism to address this issue. Our results indicate that both explicit and implicit attitudes towards free will are more positive than attitudes towards determinism. We also show that people experience cultural pressure to value free will, and to devalue determinism. Yet, we found no strong evidence that this cultural pressure affected either implicit or explicit attitudes in this dataset. (shrink)

Seng Zhao and his collection of treatises, the Zhao lun, have enjoyed a particularly high reputation in the history of Chinese Buddhism. One of these treatises, The Immutability of Things, employs the Madhyamaka argumentative method of negating dualistic concepts to demonstrate that, while "immutability" and "mutability" coexist as the states of phenomenal things, neither possesses independent self-nature. More than a thousand years after this text was written, Zhencheng's intense criticism of it provoked fierce reactions among a host of renowned scholar-monks. (...) This paper explores Zhencheng's main points as well as the perspectives and motives of his principal adversaries in order to shed light on the nature of philosophical discourse during the late Ming dynasty. (shrink)

Although vast amounts of data have been opened by several levels of government around the world and high hopes continue to be expressed with respect to open data's potential for innovation, whether open government data will live up to expectations is still questioned. Up to now, the OGD literature has focused mostly on the technical side of open data, with little focus on network aspects. We argue that a definition of what an OGD platform is, and what is within its (...) scope, is lacking. In this exploratory article, we use three knowledge epistemologies - cognitivist, connectionist, and autopoietic - as a lens to examine OGD platforms and to define three different platform types. To validate and further enrich the platform types and to identify which types are most prevalent in case study research and which are underrepresented, we performed a literature review of case studies on OGD platforms published in the main e-government outlets between 2009 and 2016. Looking for elements of each OGD platform type in the case study literature resulted in a pressing question for more empirical research focusing on the network aspects of OGD platforms. We also highlighted the underrepresentation of the autopoietic OGD platform type in case study research. We conclude this article by providing a research agenda for OGD platforms. (shrink)

Freedom is one of the major elements in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. In an age when American women were usually engaged or married, James’s heroine, Isabel, was somewhat ahead of her time in hoping for a marriage in which she could still be independent. She was very fond of her liberty and afraid of losing it, but does her return to her husband, Osmond, at the end of the novel suggest that she has put an end to (...) her eagerness for freedom? It is an underlying argument of this study that James’s novel, in its last scene, covers a different aspect of freedom which, through a Schopenhauerian approach, delivers a different insight into liberty. This perception of freedom in The Portrait of a Lady has never been considered in connection with Arthur Schopenhauer’s view on the experience of freedom. The implicit critical point on which the paper is founded is that, although Schopenhauer is not conspicuously mentioned in James’s notes, there is important evidence that shows the convergence between the thoughts of Schopenhauer and Henry James; that is, that evidence through which this study aims to analyse the heroine’s final decision in the last scene. (shrink)

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the way the Chinese intellectual world tried to formulate an answer to the challenge posed by European modernity, as well as to the way European political thinking impacted traditional Chinese political thinking. In contrast, very little attention has been devoted to the way these same political philosophies also influenced the Chinese Buddhist answer to European modernity. This article discusses the ways in which the ‘reform of Buddhism’ proposed by the famous Venerable Taixu was (...) shaped by both the political and military events that determined the history of China in the first half of the twentieth century, and by his genuine determination to modernize Buddhism. (shrink)

While the twentieth-century Confucian thinker Mou Zongsan has left behind one of the most thought-provoking and intensively studied bodies of philosophical writings in modern Chinese intellectual history, his own life and its relation to his philosophy, a theme at the centre of his Autobiography at Fifty from the mid1950s, has so far remained largely unexamined. After some introductory remarks on the context and outlook of the Autobiography, my paper turns to the close relation between Mou’s conception of life and his (...) approach to the “cultural life” of China as a nation. In doing so, I examine the notion of a distinctly Chinese “learning of life” in his writing and explore the motif of “life in itself ” running through the Autobiography. I argue that this motif is crucial for gaining a better understanding of Mou’s relation to his teacher Xiong Shili, his own father, the social conditions of his childhood in rural Shandong, as well as his overall approach to subjectivity as a space for articulating socio-political concerns. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a provisional analysis of the philosophical semantics of "wisdom" in the thought of the New Confucian thinker Tang Junyi. I begin by providing some pointers concerning the concept of wisdom in general and situating the discourse on wisdom in comparative philosophy in the context of the later Foucault's and Pierre Hadot's historical investigations into ancient Graeco-Roman philosophy as a mode of spiritual self-cultivation and self-transformation. In the remainder of the paper, I try to describe and (...) think through what Foucault identifies as a "Cartesian moment," in which self-knowledge becomes the ultimate precondition for the ethico-spiritual project of "caring for the self," in Tang's approach of wisdom. In the course of my argument, I outline the complex relation between his vision of a renewed Confucian mode of religious practice on the one hand and his philosophical presuppositions concerning the transcendental status of subjectivity and the reflexivity of consciousness on the other. (shrink)

Cognitive load plays an important role during learning and working, as it has been linked to well-functioning cognitive processes, performance, burnout and depression. Nonetheless, attempts to assess cognitive load in real-time by means of physiological data have been proven difficult, and interpreting these data remains challenging. The aim of this study is to examine whether and how well experienced cognitive load can be measured through psycho-physiological data. The approach of this study is rather unique, for a combination of reasons. First, (...) this study takes a multimodal approach, monitoring EDA, EEG and EOG. Second, this study is based on a relatively intensive data collection in a controlled lab setting in which varying cognitive load levels are deliberately induced. Finally, not only focussing on statistical significance but also on the size of the association gives insights into how suitable physiological markers are to measure cognitive load. Results from a multilevel analysis suggest that the following physiological markers might be related to cognitive load, for example, in an industrial context: the rate and the duration of skin conductance responses, the alpha power, the alpha peak frequency and the eye blink rate. About 22.8% of the variance in self-reported cognitive load can be explained using these five measures. (shrink)

I argue that no successful version of Williamson's anti‐luminosity‐argument has yet been presented, even if Srinivasan's further elaboration and defence is taken into account. There is a version invoking a coarse‐grained safety condition and one invoking a fine‐grained safety condition. A crucial step in the former version implicitly relies on the false premise that sufficient similarity is transitive. I show that some natural attempts to resolve this issue fail. Similar problems arise for the fine‐grained version. Moreover, I argue that Srinivasan's (...) defence of the more contentious fine‐grained safety condition is also unsuccessful, again for similar reasons. (shrink)

The present paper explores the social lives of European timepieces as a particular set of objects in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Japan, when the archipelago first encountered the “Southern Barbarians” from Portugal and Spain. Rather than viewing them solely as instruments of time measurement or as decorative objects, I discuss clocks as actors that moved within networks of exchange primarily between Europe and Japan, but also, significantly, within East Asia and Japan itself. Along their trajectory, these devices assumed shifting (...) and at times contradictory meanings for various actors; this is particularly true in view of the fundamental clash between European and Japanese systems of time-reckoning, which essentially rendered early European-style mechanical clocks ‘timeless’ in Japan, with its equinoctial system of variable hours. For Jesuit missionaries and foreign emissaries who brought these early devices to Japan, they were timekeepers, objects of ecclesiastical use, paragons of European ingenuity, and above all diplomatic tools that granted access and established connections with the Japanese ruling elite. For the Japanese, by contrast, these global objects assumed meaning within their highly developed local gift-culture as desirable novelty items, particularly within the socially volatile environment of the unification of the country under Tokugawa control. My contention is that these microhistories of exchange help us understand why mechanical clocks did not have the same ‘revolutionary’ effect on time-reckoning in Japan as they did in Europe; the social lives of these objects strikingly illustrate the power imbalances in diplomatic negotiations that made Japan impervious to coercion by the European powers. (shrink)

We analyzed in multimodal Flickr posts how citizens express emotion in response to the outcome of the EU Referendum that led to the Brexit vote. We conceived a model that articulates three levels of analysis, in a bid to understand how meaning operates, namely how inscribed, signalled and/or supported emotion is expressed in narrative and/or conceptual representations, in image and in text, through logico-semantic relations of expansion, projection and/or decoration. We tested this model empirically on a corpus of 173 posts. (...) Our results reveal that emotion is very often supported through images and that narrative representations are particularly prevalent in the text. (shrink)

Kant's concept of the "thing in itself" constitutes a formidable challenge to the project of "historical ontology" with which the name of Li Zehou has become synonymous. Li's radical reinterpretation of Kant's critical philosophy, which locates the conditions of the possibility of knowledge and experience within historical and social evolution and thus seeks to allow for a form of human self-determination, brings us face to face with the dose relation between the epistemological/ontological and normative dimensions of the notion of the (...) thing in itself. My paper attempts to tease out some of the conceptual presuppositions and repercussions of Li's approach to the thing in itself in the Critique of Critical Philosophy, while locating his reading in the broader context of Kant's transcendentalism. (shrink)

First and foremost, this contribution offers a structural and rhetorical reading of the debates on the third day between Clement and Appion in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and shows that there is a well-considered rhetorical ring structure in their disputes. Connected with this first point, the suggested reading will unravel how Clement and Appion use and manipulate their sophisticated rhetoric, linked to this particular structure. This is well worth considering since these debates deal with Greek paideia, which means culture and above (...) all education, of which rhetorical education forms part. The rhetorical features will be displayed as a fine product of the rhetorical and even sophistic background in Late Antiquity. Clement, moreover, will present himself as a master in rhetoric against Appion, who is presented as a sophist and grammarian in the novel. Finally, the focus on the narrative structure of and the rhetorical dynamics in Hom. 6. will contribute to a better understanding of these disputes between Appion and Clement and their function in the novel generally. (shrink)

In Berry's classic work on exchange structure, it was argued that knowledge exchanges consist of some conversational participant who already knows the information and some conversational participant to whom the information is imparted. The former participant is commonly termed the primary knower, whereas the latter is termed the secondary knower. What is missing in Berry's model, however, is an explanation of how rights and access to knowledge can be claimed or resisted on a turn-by-turn and move-by-move basis, and a more (...) elaborated conception of knowledge that goes beyond a sender/receiver model of information. Drawing from a corpus of spoken conversation from diverse sources, I extend Berry's model by showing how a participant's 'knower status' is often negotiated within an exchange. As an interpersonal resource, knowledge can be asserted, challenged, resisted, accepted, expanded, upgraded, downgraded, etc. Furthermore, I argue that 'knowledge' should be given a social/practical epistemological interpretation; from this perspective, knowledge is associated with a speaker's degree of access to information and with a speaker's rights and obligations to know. (shrink)

This article draws upon Derridean philosophy to argue for a more holistic understanding of sovereignty. Sovereignty and lack of it are explained through Derrida’s conceptions of aporia and hospitality, employed here to analyse narratives on state sovereignty as home. The article firstly elaborates on a promised notion of sovereignty a-venir. It then takes on board how already sovereign nation-states encounter the contingency of losing sovereignty. The narrative continues with an effort to empirically and comparatively flesh out these two aspects of (...) sovereignty. With deconstruction as intervention in discourse, we examine the case of Kosovo and the case of sinking states in the Asia Pacific. The concluding remarks bring together inferences from the two case studies for a more profound conceptualisation of sovereignty. The aim of the article is to renegotiate sovereignty by deconstructing its impossibility, undecidability and self-destruction. (shrink)

The aim is to investigate how encounters with peers affect an individual's meaning making in argumentation about socio-scientific issues, and how the individual's meaning making influences the argumentation at the collective level. The analysis is conducted using the analytical method ''transactional argumentation analysis'' which enables in situ studies. TAA combines a transactional perspective on meaning making based on John Dewey's pragmatic philosophy with an argument analysis based on Toulmin's argument pattern. Here TAA is developed further to enable analysis that in (...) detail clarifies the dynamic interplay between the individual and the collective-the intraand the inter-personal dimensions-and the result of this interplay in terms of meaning making and learning. The empirical material in this study consists of a video-recorded lesson in a Swedish upper secondary school. The results show that the analysed student is influenced by peers when construing arguments, and thereby acts on others' reasoning when making meaning. Further, the results show that most of the additions made by the analysed student are taken further by peers in the subsequent discussion. This study shows how an individual's earlier experiences, knowledge and thinking contribute to the collective meaning making in the classroom. (shrink)

Most people believe in free will. Whether this belief is warranted or not, free will beliefs are foundational for many legal systems and reducing FWB has effects on behavior from the motor to the social level. This raises the important question as to which specific FWB people hold. There are many different ways to conceptualize free will, and some might see physical determinism as a threat that might reduce FWB, while others might not. Here, we investigate lay FWB in a (...) large, representative, replicated online survey study in the US and Singapore, assessing differences in FWB with unprecedented depth within and between cultures. Specifically, we assess the relation of FWB, as measured using the Free Will Inventory, to determinism, dualism and related concepts like libertarianism and compatibilism. We find that libertarian, compatibilist, and dualist, intuitions were related to FWB, but that these intuitions were often logically inconsistent. Importantly, direct comparisons suggest that dualism was more predictive of FWB than other intuitions. Thus, believing in free will goes hand-in-hand with a belief in a non-physical mind. Highlighting the importance of dualism for FWB impacts academic debates on free will, which currently largely focus on its relation to determinism. Our findings also shed light on how recent scientific findings might impact FWB. Demonstrating physical determinism in the brain need not have a strong impact on FWB, due to a wide-spread belief in dualism. (shrink)

Even though studies have shown that the impact of professional development on inquiry-based learning tends to remain limited when it fails to consider teachers' beliefs, there is little known about how these beliefs influence teachers' adoption of IBL. In answer to this issue, the present study offers a framework that explains teachers' use of IBL through three constitutive dimensions of beliefs systems, covering the constructs of education, the self, and the context. This framework is empirically investigated through a survey study (...) with 536 secondary school history teachers. The resulting data are used to estimate a structural equation model, which indicates that the framework is able to explain a relatively large portion of the variance in teachers' decision to implement IBL. Based on the findings, the implications for professional development and research on teachers' use of IBL in general, and within history education in particular, are discussed. (shrink)

The celebrated Spanish novelist Javier Marias is often called a philosophical fiction writer, whereas he himself claims that novelsalso his novelsare sui generis, quite unlike philosophy. To him, narrative fiction offers a unique kind of literary thinking not subject to reason yet leading to the recognition of truths, however contradictory these recognized truths. Thus, Marias actually frames the novel less as narrative than as fictionas a world of fiction that paradoxically reveals truth. As I analyze his novel The Infatuations, I (...) agree that Marias illustrates a unique aspect of novelistic literary thinking, but I suggest that this uniqueness is more about the narrative process of swinging between knowledge and ignorance than about finding truth and recognition in fiction. Though said to be devoid of plot, the novel orchestrates the reader's ignorance and doubt so as to produce strong narrativity for the page-turning mind :463-541, 1992; Narrative 9:115-122, 2001; Poet Today 31:507-659, 2010) and this ignorance-based narrativity makes the reader feelthat is, embodiesthe philosophical ideas praised in Marias's oeuvre: ignorance, doubt, hypothesis, truth, fact, knowledge, bias, untrustworthiness, and evil. The Infatuations does have a thin plot but it uses narrative gapping techniques, digression eminently included, to give philosophy a feel and to become a kind of philosophical crime fiction. Marias is therefore more philosophical than he might be willing to concede, though by way of narrative. The essay intends to draw Marias experts to the relevance of Sternberg's narratological framework and to show how Marias's oeuvre throws light on narrativity. (shrink)

This dissertation is focused on the validity of “the data” that are collected in psychotherapy research for the purpose of evidencing treatment efficacy. In the ‘Evidence Based Treatment’ paradigm, researchers rely on the so-called ‘gold standard methodology’ to gather sound and trustworthy evidence, which increasingly influences the organization of mental health care worldwide. In the gold standard, data are collected by quantified self-report measures, to assess the presence and severity of symptoms before and after treatment. When the pre-post difference is (...) larger for a group of people that received the treatment of interest and a group of people who received no or an alternative treatment, the treatment of interest is called effective. In this methodological procedure, researchers tend to assume that when this gold standard methodology is conducted properly, “the data” will speak for themselves. However, when evidence is based on data, that evidence is principally limited by that data. In other words: output depends on input. That implies that when input is flawed, output will be flawed, even when the very best methods of analysis would be used. So what if “the data” yield validity issues despite being collected by validated measures? When “the data” do not straightforwardly evidence treatment effects, will the subsequent steps in the analysis of these data be enough to secure that the evidence in the end does evidence treatment efficacy? In this dissertation, the focus is turned to validity of “the data” that are concretely provided by patient-participants by scoring their own experienced symptoms in self-report questionnaires, in function of evidencing treatment efficacy. A series of empirical case studies were conducted to scrutinize how patient-participants in a randomized controlled psychotherapy study experienced the process of data collection, and how these experiences affected the data that they provided. Each of the studied patient-participants experienced a substantial effect of the questionnaire administration on their complaints. This impacted the level of complaints, but also changed the way in which the complaints were understood at all, and how patient-participants perceived themselves. Thus, rather than neutrally measuring symptoms, questionnaire administration changed the experienced complaints ‘performatively’, which turned measurement into a clinical intervention of its own. Consequently, what is measured cannot straightforwardly be called ‘treatment efficacy’, as it may be entangled with, enabled by or even obstructed by effects of measurement and research. Therefore, the act of measurement itself can pose a vital threat to the validity of “the data”. This way, the empirical case studies exhibited that data can yield validity problems despite the use of validated measures. Consequently, the validity of a measure as such is no guarantee for the validity of data. Nonetheless, in gold standard research, the data are straightforwardly taken as input for analyses of general treatment efficacy. The question is what happens with those validity issues on the level of individual data, when they pursue their journey towards becoming evidence. In this dissertation, it was argued that the validity issues are not sufficiently solved in the methodological steps after data collection, so when data are invalid in the beginning, these validity issues will simply become part of the data set that forms the input for analysis of the final evidence. This urges that validity issues should be solved on the level of individually provided data, as the validity issues will otherwise become inherent to “the data”. Put formally: valid data is a precondition for evidence in EBT. In conclusion, it is crucial for a sound evidence-base to scrutinize the validity of data in function of the overall goal and utility of the research. For this, it is important not to take “the data” as speaking for themselves, but to regard them as clinical narratives, which are framed in a specific format to be communicated between researcher and respondent in a research context. This emphasizes that the choice for a certain format determines what can be evidenced, so it is vital that these choices indeed allow for obtaining evidence that is useful and valid to serve the clinical goal of EBT. (shrink)

Ecology and activism is a burning issue in theatre and performance studies. However, following the French philosopher Bruno Latour, a radically new encounter with ecology is needed today, if eco-activism still wants to have a future. It seems that, in order to survive, eco-activism and eco-art have to move beyond their narrow and limited anthropocentric perspective. In this paradigm shift, the performer as philosopher – in the sense of a diplomat of dissensus – might play an important role. The Flemish (...) artist and performer Benjamin Verdonck picks up this role of a performer as philosopher. In his artistic tree houses, Verdonck invites passers-by for coffee or tea and gently raises ecological issues. He performs protest as what I call “a diplomat of dissensus”, combining Latour’s writings on contemporary ecology and the function of the diplomat therein, and Jacques Rancière’s writings on dissensus and art in public space. Ecology, for its part, moves into the direction of what Félix Guattari in The Three Ecologies refers to as “the ethico-aesthetic aegis of an ecosophy”, a contraction of ecology and philosophy that connects the environmental with a reflection on the psychic production of subjectivity and social relations. (shrink)

This is a comparative study of the concept of nature in Kant and Fichte’s proposals for perpetual peace. I will argue that Kant and Fichte’s ideas of perpetual peace present two very different ways of dealing with nature: whereas Kant’s proposal consists of administrating the natural unsociable inclinations of human beings, departing from the assumption that the unsociable sociability of men is not only inherent to human nature but also the motor of the historical progress of humanity, Fichte, on the (...) contrary, advocates for a total repression of these inclinations, departing from the postulate that the historical progress of humanity concerns exclusively the spiritual or intelligible dimension of human existence. (shrink)

In psychotherapy research, treatment efficacy is commonly studied by means of self-report questionnaires to gain quantitative data on symptom development. The data serve as input for statistical analyses up to the level of evidence-based treatment. We analyzed how a patient in a psychotherapy study experienced the translation of her story into quantitative data by combining a phenomenological qualitative analysis of her therapeutic narrative and a visual analysis of her extensively annotated paper-andpencil questionnaires. Our findings provide a practical empirical illustration of (...) the nature and impact of known validity issues. Beyond, we found the act of questionnaire administration affected the primary complaint such that it became performative toward the symptoms under study. We discuss the epistemic consequences for the validity of data, and we argue that valid data collection requires qualitative scrutiny of meaning within data and a concept of validity that allows for consideration of performativity of data collection. (shrink)

We argue for a conception of ‘philosophy of biology before biology’ which is neither internalist study of biological doctrines, nor a reconstruction of the role philosophical concepts might have played in the constitution of biology as science, but rather a kind of interplay between metaphysical and empirical issues. This should have an impact both on our present understanding of philosophy of biology, given that it is necessarily conditioned by a very specific history and historiography, and on our understanding of how (...) biology as a science of life became unified. (shrink)

When Georg von der Gabelentz’s book Die Sprachwissenschaft was published, the historical-comparative paradigm was the dominant perspective in empirical linguistic enquiry, and the then current theory of language was fijirmly rooted in language psychology. While itself based in this tradition, Gabelentz’s Sprachwissenschaft nevertheless strikes another chord, which sets it apart from contemporary sources. This chapter argues that the book is particularly noteworthy for its wide-ranging bottom-up approach to linguistic phenomena and its propensity to conceive of language both as object and (...) instrument of enquiry in a sense akin to the ‘reflexive’ stance that later would become a hallmark of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The ‘phenomenological mindset’ can in particular be retraced in the way a diffferent philosophy of the language sciences and theory of meaning take shape in Die Sprachwissenschaft. (shrink)

In the last two decades Information and Computer Technology has come to play an increasingly important role in medicine and health care. Many medical practitioners and scholars wonder: will e-health cause a paradigm shift in health care? To answer this question we provide a philosophical analysis of the concept of the 'paradigm shift' through the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn and Larry Laudan. Their work offers key insights to a comprehensive understanding of major evolutions in medicine. Nowadays the long-standing (...) curative paradigm in medicine is facing important challenges due to an aging population, a significant increase in chronic diseases and the development of more expensive diagnostic tools and therapies. This promotes the evolution towards a new paradigm in medicine with an emphasis on preventive, predictive and personalized care. E-health constitutes an essential part of this new paradigm that seeks to solve the challenges presented by an aging population, skyrocketing costs and so forth. On the other hand the characteristics of e-health will be strongly determined by this new paradigm. 'Will e-health cause a paradigm shift in medicine?' might not be the right question to pose. Rather, we should ask how the underlying paradigm shift, from discovery and cure to prevention and prediction, acts as a facilitator to embrace ICT in health care. This analysis is of crucial importance in understanding the impact of digital health care applications and provides a necessary framework for the emerging, dynamic system of e-health. (shrink)

Plutarch and Seneca, with their works on anger, wanted to educate their readers onthe subject. But who were they, these readers? This article examines and confronts the “model readers” of both works. It argues that Seneca’s model reader belonged to the Roman elite, professionally busy with something else, but turning to philosophy in order to deal with anger in an appropriate way. Plutarch, on the other hand, wrote for Greeks and Romans who were or could be his friends, probably living (...) an active life but interested in and familiar with philosophy throughout their lives. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to envisage the body in relation to the notion of theatricality, understood as the moment of tension or drama between the spectator and the performed representation. To perceive the body within the context of a dramatic structure of theatricality means to challenge prevailing theories that eliminate the moment of drama between the spectator and the performance. To justify this, I take Erika Fischer-Lichte's theory of the body as a point of departure. I will acknowledge (...) that [t]he physical articulations which are seen, heard, smelled, or sensed by other spectators or actors...generate perceptible behaviour patterns and actions'. However, I will criticize the possibility of conceptualizing the perceptible in terms of the 'sheer presence of the body or materiality' that Fischer-Lichte's theory proposes by introducing the notion of oscillation. A critical view on oscillation is the return of drama in performance studies. Once every performance is conceived in relation to drama, we have to recognize that the body is discursively constructed through the performative practice of representing and, consequently, that it provides a dramatic moment of theatricality in relation to the spectator. As such, the performing body mobilizes the spectator to envisage different realities and contest dominant politics. (shrink)

This dissertation starts with a concise overview of what philosophers of science have written about unification and its role in scientific explanation during the last 50 years to provide the reader with some background knowledge. In order to bring unification back into the picture, I have followed two strategies, resulting respectively in Parts I and II of this dissertation. In Part I the idea of unification is used to refine and enrich the dominant causalmechanist and causal-interventionist accounts of scientific explanation. (...) In this part of the dissertation I bracket the classical ideas about unification: deduction and derivation. I do grant, for the sake of argument, that explanations are causal and argue that unification is important from within this causalist perspective. In Part II I continue my strategy of digging into scientific practice to find cases of ontological unification. But here I distance myself from the dominant literature that all explanations must be causal. I will investigate whether explanatory unification is possible in non-causal explanations. Part III contains some further reflections and conclusions. I will formulate my primary results, and I will elaborate on their implications for thinking about unification and explanation. The different forms of ontological unification were quite diverse. This relates to the method I have used. Throughout this dissertation the types of unification that were discussed emerged from digging into scientific practice. This philosophy-of-science-practice approach steered me towards a pluralistic view on unification and on explanation. In this dissertation I do not try to develop a new model of explanation and compare it to existing models. The aim is to show that there are important types of explanatory practice which cannot be properly analyzed if we neglect unification as a desideratum for explanations. (shrink)

In this article I inquire into the question of cultural continuity against the background of the problem of modernity through the medium of the specific case of New Confucian philosophy. I reflect on the import of the concept of "culture" from a historical point of view and investigate how the Hegelian notion of "Spirit" was employed by modern Confucian philosophers such as Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi as a conceptual strategy in the face of the structural and semantic discontinuities resulting (...) from modernization. I single out the symbolic May Fourth Movement in order to approach Mou's and Tang's attitude towards historical continuity and point towards the contemporary significance of their philosophical undertaking. (shrink)

During the Renaissance in Europe, between roughly 1300 and 1650, a number of intellectual discourses and practices helped shape the discipline of architecture. This article is not about canonical buildings or the evolution of distinctive stylistic characteristics but rather six key topics within an overall threefold structure: heritage and rupture with the tradition, innovative and original aspects, and impact and legacy. The six topics are geometry as the scientific foundation of architecture; humanism, antiquarianism, and the recovery of ancient architecture; architectural (...) histories and the creation of an all’antica architecture; the canonization of the architectural orders; the production of architectural theory; and disegno and the use of architectural drawings. Intellectual history, rather than an art history of styles, is the general approach. It begins with a history of the term “Renaissance” and its application to architecture. (shrink)

The topic of war and peace is as relevant today as it was several millennia ago. Though views on and motives for warfare have changed over the centuries, Philosophy of War and Peace proves that many past ideas still merit consideration today. This exhaustive collection of essays addresses the historical, cultural and political background of various views on war and peace worldwide. It gives modern readings of ancient philosophers, such as Heraclitus, Renaissance writers, such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Michel de (...) Montaigne, as well as more contemporary thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Its cultural analysis spans from ancient China to the middle ages to the present day, encompassing many different religions. By demonstrating that some of our interpretations of famous texts are inherently flawed and unearthing the philosophical ideas about life, death and the structure of the world that underlie them, this work challenges the roots of some of our most fundamental ideas about conflict and justice today. In addition to the cultural and religious beliefs that underlie a call to arms, these essays consider our contemporary political context of the way we look at war and peace. The way we view our past is shaped by our present beliefs, and the foregrounding or trivialization of certain historical events is often a political act. Philosophy of War and Peace examines different methods we use today for dealing with the trauma of war at peace time and unravels the complexity of philosophical issues caused by the presence and absence of war in our world. (shrink)

Engaging children in design through in-depth interviews is coming to prominence in the IDC community, which increasingly engages with issues about understanding the children's world. To date, research in this area has primarily focused on engaging children using techniques somehow similar to adult-techniques. However, questioning or interviewing children is fraught with difficulties. The proposed workshop seeks to explore where and how a philosophy with children methodology can be adapted for design, exploring themes such as Socratic Attitudes, wondering, and question types. (...) This workshop aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers, and practitioners to share and discuss their work and experiences. (shrink)

This book attempts to grant a clear insight into the problem of culture. Thinking about culture, we are faced with the inevitable, and apparently insuperable, problem of how to study culture in the absence of a consensual definition of this notion. For several reasons, the anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz provide an ideal starting point for tackling this issue. Firstly, both graduated in philosophy before turning to anthropology. Secondly, the linguistic-model-based approach they initiated is founded on the general belief (...) that language is a feature which all men have in common. And thirdly, when taken together, the conclusions reached by Lévi-Strauss and Geertz, which contradict one another, yield a clear view on the conceptual complexity of culture. (shrink)

Although some important criteria, such as work in process and inventory, are recognized to have an impact on Just-in-Time implementations, the exact weights of these criteria for different systems are not known. Consequently, the decision maker will not be able to predict the size of change in the system when implementing his JIT strategy. On the other hand, different weighting methods result in different weight values which makes it more confusing for the decision maker. We therefore consider entropy weighting method (...) and Analytic Hierarchy Process to compute the weights of the selected criteria. A case study is also discussed to demonstrate the differences between these two weighting methods. Simulation modeling is used to validate and compare the results. (shrink)

An investigation of the transformative power of traumas through physical dramaturges by articulating repetition, interruption and failure. Can we create traumas? Find pleasure in them? The workshop will be divided in two sessions where we will – explore different corporeal states through the lenses of alternative models for pre-expressive work. – apply these states in compositional strategies for performance creation.

As an emerging field within higher education, academic development remains fragmented, both as a field of theory and practice. In the vibrant, on-going debate about the theoretical foundations and directions of academic development as a nascent field, some relatively wide-ranging claims which have been made seem to be lacking in supporting empirical evidence. With regards to this limitation, this paper contends that more systematic empirical explorations of the knowledge-base of academic development are vital to gain a better understanding of the (...) field. Informed by Bernstein's social realist frameworks on the structure of academic knowledge, the paper presents an analysis of knowledge recontextualisation processes in two English and two Flemish academic development units, based on semi-structured interviews with 30 academic developers. From the analysis, contrasting patterns of knowledge recontextualisation emerged between the four sites and between the national contexts in particular, pointing towards an increasing epistemological fragmentation. (shrink)

The Bridge of Winds is an ensemble of actors and theatre artists from South America, Europe and Asia, that, guided by Iben Nagel Rasmussen, has been since 1989 researching and exploring the complexity of the actor's stage presence through a psychophysical training based mainly on 5 physical exercises. The group meets to work together every year, for more than 25 years now. Their main energetic exercises may have simple external form but are rather difficult to master. They allow a performer (...) to access and explore an intimate, creative and meditative world of physical theatre impulses, stories and actions. While the structure and essence of the exercises remain the same for all the years, the group members grow old and change both physically and mentally. The age of the group participants ranges from the late 20’s to late 50’s. Moreover, Iben N. Rasmussen, now 70 years old, is still an active participant in the meetings. What are the vital matters keeping the group together for such a long period, investigating, re-thinking, actualizing a training system? What is this path from training to ethos made of? This article proposes to look at a very special relation between repetition, creation and the ethos of the performer through the lenses of the long-term work of the Bridge of Winds. I have been participating in their activities throughout this year and this paper will be based on an empirical experience with their exercises as well as on a series of interviews with Iben Nagel Rasmussen. Along the way, I will look at the concept of repetition as proposed by Gilles Deleuze, I will touch upon neurological matters, to draw an understanding of ethos, which is implicated on the artistic work of the group. (shrink)

In social work literature some papers might matter more than others. We assume this might be the case with ‘Notes on the form of knowledge in Social Work’, written by Mark Philp. Even though it was written in 1979, this paper recurrently keeps appearing on and off through writings and footnotes of many scholars in social work and beyond. In brief, Philp might have been pioneering discours analysis on social work literature and practices and suggests there is an underlying constitution (...) of everything that is said and done in social work. This constitution he argues, creates knowledge in social work but also limits social worker to this very knowledge. His analysis draws on Marxist, Foucauldian theories and is utterly ‘historical’ as social work knowledge “is created by historically located shifts in discursive relations“. However, there might be more continuity, as he positions social work historically as mediator between objectified individuals and subjectivity. A stance, which we assume, might still be acknowledged in social work today. In this respect we wondered how scholars in social work today would read and comprehend this seminal paper. What aspects of Philps’ hypothesis, analysis and arguments would they find relevant for social work analysis today and why? In what way might his ‘notes’ enable us to challenge social works knowledge base and positioning? Our analysis is based on two distinct research methods. Firstly, we read through some of his references in order to get more familiar with his thoughts, sources and time. Secondly, we held two discussion panels: one in Antwerp and one held in Ghent. Participants, 16 in sum, were selected based on their contribution to social work practice, social work education or research. They have scholarly backgrounds in social work, philosophy, criminology, history, pedagogy and psychology. In our presentation and drawing on Philps' analysis and the comments of Belgian scholars, we will focus on the question if social work should preferably should be seen as a mediator. Or is this positioning no longer relevant or tenable in social work today as society since 1979 has changed dramatically. (shrink)

This paper explores the diversity and complexity of Rubens’s humanist interests and illustrates his appropriation of learned and esoteric knowledge by focusing on the anonymous painting from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in which Rubens is shown together with his son Albert. This portrait also depicts a sculpture from Rubens’s collection, that of Hecate Triformis, who, according to ancient authors was considered to be a goddess of the underworld. By focusing on the books, manuscripts, Gnostic gems and the Hecate (...) statue from the artist’s collections, this paper will provide a new iconographic analysis of the Hermitage painting. (shrink)

Descartes is usually taken to be a strict reductionist, and he frequently describes his work in reductionist terms. This dissertation, however, makes the case that he is a nonreductionist in certain areas of his philosophy and natural philosophy. This might seem like simple inconsistency, or a mismatch between Descartes's ambitions and his achievements. I argue that here it is more than that: nonreductionism is compatible with his wider commitments, and allowing for irreducibles increases the explanatory power of his system. Moreover, (...) Descartes depends on nonreductionist knowledge and on irreducibles in order to maintain his epistemology and metaphysics. That is, there is more in the Cartesian world than mind, matter, and God. (shrink)

Engaging children in design through in-depth interviews is coming to prominence in the IDC community, which increasingly engages with issues about understanding the children’s world. To date, research in this area has primarily focused on engaging children using techniques somehow similar to adult-techniques. However, questioning or interviewing children is fraught with difficulties. The proposed workshop seeks to explore where and how a philosophy with children methodology can be adapted for design, exploring themes such as Socratic Attitudes, wondering, and question types. (...) This workshop aims to build an interdisciplinary community of researchers, designers, and practitioners to share and discuss their work. (shrink)

While it is widely accepted that music evokes moods, there is disagreement over whether music-induced moods are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music as such. The arguments against the aesthetic relevance of music-induced moods are: moods cannot be intentionally directed at the music and music-induced moods are highly subjective experiences and are therefore a kind of mind-wandering. This paper presents a novel account of musical moods that avoids these objections. It is correct to say that a listener’s entire mood (...) is not relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music. However, the experience of mood consists of having different feelings. Music induces feelings that are intentionally directed at the music and clusters of these feelings can be recognized as typical of a specific mood. Therefore, mood-feelings are relevant to the aesthetic appreciation of music. (shrink)

If a game refers to the contest between differential positions mobilised by contrasting interests, can we envisage a work of art in relation to a game structure? The answer is yes. All art is structured by game principles. All art is about one idea contesting another excluded from representation or embodiment in a work of art. This operation is reflected in the various ways artistic practices, including the performing arts, perceive and articulate everyday objects and in the diverse ways art (...) theory tries to explain the being of these objects. But, to clarify this answer, let me explain what is at stake here. Firstly, by offering a glimpse of Mette Edvardsen's choreographic work which examines the play between 'presence' and 'absence' of objects. And, secondly, by envisaging how contemporary performances contribute to the development of theoretical perspectives which reflect this play/game through the contestation of the philosophical trajectories of immanence and transcendence. What I am suggesting here is that a consideration of these theories and performance practices in terms of game structures will allow us to understand the political dimension of all social practice, including art and theory. With this in mind, I will attempt to show that the political dimension of artistic practice is constituted in the eternal interplay, or encounter, of two differential aspirations: the ultimate grounding of the being of objects, and the revelation of the historical, contingent and constructed nature of the being of objects. This view opens up the space for understanding the object in terms of agonistic rather than objective relations. The goal of this article is to demonstrate that to acknowledge agonistic objectifications is to invigorate democracy. (shrink)

Most philosophers of art assume that there are three categories with regard to arthood, namely ‘art’, ‘artful’ and ‘non-art’ and that, therefore, a definition must be able to account for ‘artful items’, also called ‘borderline cases of art’. This article, however, defends the thesis that, since there is no agreement over which items fall under the category ‘artful’, the ability to account for borderline cases of art should not be used as a criterion for evaluating definitions of art. The defended (...) thesis is important, not merely because it reveals that virtually all alleged descriptive definitions of art have strong recommendatory consequences, but also because the thesis has implications for the artefacts that are considered to be borderline cases of art. (shrink)

According to Herman Cappelen and Bernard Molyneux, it is widely assumed that intuitions are used as evidence for philosophical theories in all areas of philosophy. Philosophers’ self-image, however, is wrong. This wrong self-image, so they argue, has merely misled metaphilosophers, but has had no substantial implications for philosophical practices. This article examines the role of intuitions in the project of defining art. In accordance with Cappelen and Molyneux, I demonstrate that philosophers of art believe intuitions are used as evidence for (...) their definitions of art and that this belief is false. In contrast with Cappelen and Molyneux, I maintain that philosophers of art’s false self-image causes substantial damage to their philosophical practice. Firstly, intuitions often are used as persuaders, while, in fact, they do not add philosophical force to the defended position. Secondly, and more importantly, intuition-talk and philosophers’ wrong self-image are partly responsible for the confusi.. (shrink)

Historian Ramses Delafontaine presents an engaging examination of a controversial legal practice: the historian as an expert judicial witness. This book focuses on tobacco litigation in the U.S. wherein 50 historians have witnessed in 314 court cases from 1986 to 2014. The author examines the use of historical arguments in court and investigates how a legal context influences historical narratives and discourse in forensic history. Delafontaine asserts that the courtroom is a performative and fact-making theatre. Nonetheless, he argues that the (...) civic responsibility of the historian should not end at the threshold of the courtroom where history and truth hang in the balance. The book is divided into three parts featuring an impressive range of European and American case studies. The first part provides a theoretical framework on the issues which arise when history and law interact. The second part gives a comparative overview of European and American examples of forensic history. This part also reviews U.S. legal rules and case law on expert evidence, as well as extralegal challenges historians face as experts. The third part covers a series of tobacco-related trials. With remunerations as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars and no peer-reviewed publications or communication on the part of the historians hired by the tobacco companies the question arises whether some historians are willing to trade their reputation and that of their university for the benefit of an interested party. The book further provides 50 expert profiles of the historians active in tobacco litigation, lists detailing the manner of the expert’s involvement, and West Law references to these cases. This book offers profound and thought-provoking insights on the post-war forensification of history from an interdisciplinary perspective. In this way, Delafontaine makes a stirring call for debate on the contemporary engagement of historians as expert judicial witnesses in U.S. tobacco litigation. (shrink)

Today the expression ‘ivory tower’ has a merely negative meaning and more than once, philosophers have been told to live into their ivory tower, withdrawn from real life. As a response philosophy should be relieved from its metaphysical history and focus on the acknowledgement of skills or tools for democratic adultery. Philosophy then is a practice of discovering the diversity and relativity of things in life. Even in philosophy itself there is the tendency to throw the ‘whole lot’ overboard and (...) no longer spend energy on the ‘pain of being’. This essay circles around this tendency. Can the desire for wisdom or truth indeed be reduced to the art of living, and are a number of questions that have indeed kindled philosophy definitively closed? Have we closed the books on the problem of truth, and is the philosophy that is still occupied with it indeed an ivory-tower affair? Against the overtly hung for transparency of thought, we analyze the ambivalent biblical background of the use of ‘ivory tower’ in our culture, and get along with this line of thought to question the status of philosophy today: is philosophy an exercise in making this relative or less absolute, or is it just the other way round: the tenacity to think through stubborn dilemma’s or aporetic problems until the very point we are embarrassed by our incompetence to solve them? (shrink)

Purpose - This paper aims to reflect on how Lacanian psychoanalysis might inform management studies, and discuss limitations and consequences of adopting this particular framework for doing research in organizations. Design/methodology/approach - The authors integrate existing literature on the topic, and try to articulate what Lacanian psychoanalysis contributes to the study of organizations and management; what its conceptual premises are; and which methodological consequences these premises have. Special attention is paid to the epistemological position of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and to potential (...) pitfalls in using Lacanian theory. Findings - The authors highlight the danger of Lacanian theory functioning as a dogmatic interpretative frame, and suggest countering this tendency by accentuating both the spirit of investigation fostered by Lacan and the ethical stakes of psychoanalytic intervention. The authors equally contend that Lacanian psychoanalysis problematizes the underpinnings of scientific discourse in general, with the epistemological foundations of the social sciences being called into question. Finally, they note that the scientific character of Lacanian psychoanalysis is itself open to contestation if approached from a positivistic point of view. Addressing these objections, the authors argue for the possibility of a promising epistemological convergence between psychoanalysis and management studies. Originality/value - Overall, the authors' point is that Lacanian theory is unique in its systematic study of the dimension of the excluded and that it is in the study of this dimension that the benefit for organization and management research is to be found. (shrink)

This article argues that philosophers of art wrongly aim for their definitions of art to be both descriptively and normatively adequate, for the method that is used to achieve both aims, namely the method of reflective equilibrium, is not applicable to the project of defining art. Therefore, in order to facilitate genuine debate regarding definitions of art, philosophers must abandon the method of reflective equilibrium and determine which approach, be it descriptive or normative, deems more appropriate.

Since the advent and standardization of the theatrical feature length film, the audio-visual short has been more or less marginalized in the discussions on cinematic experience. Historically stretching from the ‘early cinema’ of the vaudeville, to the now obsolete ‘little films’ of YouTube and beyond, the audio-visual short traverses a wide variety of media platforms, practices and technologies, including animation, video installation art, video clips and TV commercials, as well as animated GIFs, machinima and DIY movies, made to measure for (...) handheld devices. The widespread usage of the format suggests that short audio-visual artefacts are not an anomaly or rarity on the periphery of cinema, but rather should be put at the centre of our discussions when rethinking cinematic experience and the moving image today. Such is the request we have made to the contributors to this volume: to write a short essay on short film experience. (shrink)

In philosophy of science, it is still a mainstream practice to search for the ‘truth’ about fundamental scientific concepts in isolation, blind to knowledge achieved in other domains of science. I focus on the topic of causation. I argue that it is worthwhile for philosophy of science to leave its metaphysical tower in order to pick up knowledge from other domains where empirical research on causal reasoning is carried out, such as psychology. I will demonstrate what the psychologist Peter White’s (...) theory, on the origin and development of causal reasoning, can impart to philosophy of causation. It concerns different but interrelated subjects with respect to the philosophy of causation: conceptual pluralism, a core causal concept of causation, the analysis of ‘what causation is’, epistemological pluralism, causation as a secondary quality and weak causal realism. The divide between metaphysical and epistemological approaches to causation — and hence between philosophy and psychology — may be much smaller than is often presupposed. (shrink)

The chapter points out how and why Kierkegaard's thoughts have been made topical today by contemporary political theorists like Slavoj Zizek. The main argument is that the affinity between Kierkegaard and Zizek is to be found in their belief in the power of the passionate single individual, who with undampened desire intervenes in the social or political order - and thereby provokes a far-reaching disruption.

Is the radical character of Spinoza’s political philosophy only a historiographic matter or are his considerations on the politics and the political still radical today? Which elements of his political thought can be considered as radical in our present? I think that these questions need to be posed when one attempts at thinking of the actuality of Spinoza’s philosophy and in particular, of Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (from now on TTP). In the following pages I tend to give an initial answer (...) to this problem by analysing two controversial points in Spinoza’s TTP, namely, his thesis about the political necessity of a right of censorship exerted exclusively by the state (in terms of supreme power or legally institutionalised authority) and the explicitly anti-revolutionary tone of his political thought. I will examine these awkward issues both in the context of the TTP and in the light of the contemporary crisis of democracy. The main theses of the present paper are, firstly, that both controversial points, contrary to what the majority of the most influential contemporary Spinoza-scholars affirms, do not contradict the spirit of Spinoza’s political thought; secondly, that by showing those polemic views of Spinoza to be actually consistent with the whole of the TTP, a new kind of political philosophical radicality in Spinoza’s thought, which has been until now disregarded, comes to light. I will also show that this radical aspect of his thought can still be considered radical today, unlike other merely historiographically radical motifs of his philosophy such as his absolute materialist monism. (shrink)

The failure to recognize the programmatic similarity between (post-)Kantian German philosophy and early psychology has impoverished psychology's historical self-understanding to a great extent. This article aims to contribute to recent efforts to overcome the gaps in the historiography of contemporary psychology, which are the result of an empiricist bias. To this end, we present an analysis of the way in which Hermann von Helmholtz's theory of perception resonates with Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Ego-doctrine. It will be argued that this indebtedness is (...) particularly clear when focusing on the foundation of the differential awareness of subject and object in perception. In doing so, the widespread reception of Helmholtz's work as proto-positivist or strictly empiricist is challenged, in favor of the claim that important elements of his theorizing can only be understood properly against the background of Fichte's Ego-doctrine. (shrink)

This article discusses the conceptual ambiguities in relation to the current definitions of ‘death’. It addresses the need for an essentially pluralistic approach that probes the limits of epistemic singularity and perceives death as an open concept. Despite the views dependent upon the irrevocable termination of existence, I assume the opposite: first, that there are manifold ways to respond philosophically to the issue, without giving priority to any sovereign or prescribed position; second, that the plurality of unequally convincing positions opens (...) up the ‘democratic’ space of negotiations about life and death as a political space par excellence, privileged by philosophy. Finally, my thesis about the thanatological pluralism gets closer to what I shall call the ‘political philosophy of death’ in the future studies of the issue, here insufficiently explored. (shrink)