This paper demonstrates the central role of the Socratic elenchus in the Sophist. In the first part, I defend the position that the Stranger describes the Socratic elenchus in the sixth division of the Sophist. In the second part, I show that the Socratic elenchus is actually used when the Stranger scrutinizes the accounts of being put forward by his predecessors. In the final part, I explain the function of the Socratic elenchus in the argument of the dialogue. By contrast (...) with standard scholarly interpretations, this way of reading the text provides all the puzzles about being (241c4–251a4) with a definite function in the dialogue. It also reveals that Plato’s methodology includes a plurality of method and is more continuous than what is often believed. (shrink)

With aims to both increase organ supply and better reflect individual donation preferences, many nations worldwide have shifted from ‘opt‐in’ to ‘opt‐out’ systems for post‐mortem organ donation (PMOD). In such countries, while a prospective donor's willingness to donate their organs/tissues for PMOD was previously ascertained—at least partially—by their having recorded positive donation preferences on an official register prior to death, this willingness is now presumed or inferred—at least partially—from their not having recorded an objection to PMOD—on an official organ donation (...) register. Using evidence regarding the presence and prevalence of selective donation preferences, and via exploration of how appeals to donation preferences are used to both motivate and legitimate shifts to opt‐out frameworks, this paper draws attention to a set of previously unexplored problems for opt‐out organ donation arising in contexts where: (a) individuals demonstrate selective post‐mortem organ/tissue donation preferences, (b) legislation provides prospective donors with the opportunity to selectively permit/refuse the donation of certain organs/tissues in line with these preferences. While selective preferences pose few problems for opt‐in systems where a selective occasion is built into the process of signing the donor register, this is not the case for opt‐out systems. The loss of this selective occasion can cause significant problems where appeals to preferences motivate/legitimate shifts to opt‐out but evidence regarding variable preferences does not feed into determinations regarding organ/tissue exclusions. The nature of these problems depends on how the authorization aspect of ‘opt‐out’ systems is framed (e.g. as presumed consent, deemed consent or, given the role of familial consent in many jurisdictions as consent in name only). (shrink)

Nicolas Weill propose une lecture stimulante de ces textes qui constituent une des découvertes philosophiques les plus importantes de ces dernières années. La publication des "Cahiers" redonne une actualité brûlante à la question qui divise épigones et détracteurs du penseur allemand : comment continuer à philosopher avec Heidegger sans tenir compte d'une éventuelle contamination de cette philosophie par l'idéologie nazie? Par une analyse sans concession des "Cahiers", en se concentrant sur les Réflexions (tenues par Heidegger de 1931 à 1941) mais (...) tout en cherchant à en dégager les éléments proprement philosophiques, cet ouvrage invite à une approche équilibrée, quitte à "penser avec Heidegger, contre Heidegger", comme le suggérait Jürgen Habermas dès le début des années 1950. Il montre notamment comment l'auteur d'Etre et temps, en inventant une nouvelle forme de philosopher, a poursuivi et prolongé dans ces carnets la critique de la modernité telle qu'elle a été formulée par la "révolution conservatrice" allemande et par Oswald Spengler, le théoricien du déclin de l'Occident. (shrink)

What semantics should we attribute to nouns like "wisdom" and "generosity", which are derived from gradable adjectives? We show that, from a morphosyntactic standpoint, these nouns are mass nouns. This leads us to consider and answer the following questions. How are these nouns interpreted in their various uses? What formal representations may one associate with their interpretations? How do these depend on the semantics of the adjective? And where lies the semantic unity of nouns like wisdom and generosity with the (...) more familiar concrete mass nouns, like wine and furniture? (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for other (...) phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social problems, broadly conceived. (...) In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss how we used institutional ethnography (Institutional ethnography as practice, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD and 2006) to map out powerful ruling relations that organize nurses’ wound care work. In recent years, the growing number of people living with wounds that heal slowly or not at all has presented substantial challenges for those managing the demands on Canada's publicly insured health‐care system. In efforts to address this burden, Canadian health‐care administrators and policy‐makers rely on scientific evidence (...) about how wounds heal and what treatments are most effective. Advanced wound care exemplifies the growing authorization of particular forms of evidence that change the ways in which nurses come to know about and conduct their work. The focus of this paper's nursing inquiry is a critique of registered nurses’ wound work as it arises within the established uptake of scientific evidence. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a morally good person? It can be tempting to think that it is simply a matter of performing certain actions and avoiding others. And yet there is much more to moral character than our outward actions. We expect a good person to not only behave in certain ways but also to experience the world in certain ways within.

In recent years much research has been undertaken regarding the feasibility of the human uterine transplant as a treatment for absolute uterine factor infertility. Should it reach clinical application this procedure would allow such individuals what is often a much-desired opportunity to become not only social mothers, or genetic and social mothers but mothers in a social, genetic and gestational sense. Like many experimental transplantation procedures such as face, hand, corneal and larynx transplants, UTx as a therapeutic option falls firmly (...) into the camp of the quality of life transplant, undertaken with the aim, not to save a life, but to enrich one. However, unlike most of these novel procedures – where one would be unlikely to find a willing living donor or an ethics committee that would sanction such a donation – the organs to be transplanted in UTx are potentially available from both living and deceased donors. In this article, in the light of the recent nine-case research trial in Sweden which used uteri obtained from living donors, and the assertions on the part of a number of other research teams currently preparing trials that they will only be using deceased donors, I explore the question of whether, in the case of UTx, there exist compelling moral reasons to prefer the use of deceased donors despite the benefits that may be associated with the use of organs obtained from the living. (shrink)

This paper offers a framework for consciousness of internal reality. Recent PET experiments are reviewed, showing partial overlap of cortical activation during self-produced actions and actions observed from other people. This overlap suggests that representations for actions may be shared by several individuals, a situation which creates a potential problem for correctly attributing an action to its agent. The neural conditions for correct agency judgments are thus assigned a key role in self/other distinction and self-consciousness. A series of behavioral experiments (...) that demonstrate, in normal subjects, the poor monitoring of action-related signals and the difficulty in recognizing self-produced actions are described. In patients presenting delusions, this difficulty dramatically increases and actions become systematically misattributed. These results point to schizophrenia and related disorders as a paradigmatic alteration of a ''Who?'' system for self-consciousness. (shrink)

Has the time come to put to bed the concept of a harm threshold when discussing the ethics of reproductive decision making and the legal limits that should be placed upon it? In this commentary, we defend the claim that there exist good moral reasons, despite the conclusions of the non-identity problem, based on the interests of those we might create, to refrain from bringing to birth individuals whose lives are often described in the philosophical literature as ‘less than worth (...) living’. (shrink)

Some things have positive value and some things have negative value. The things with positive value are good and the things with negative value are bad. There are also things in-between that are neither good nor bad, which are neutral. All in all, then, there are three monadic value predicates: “good,” “bad,” and “neutral.”.

In the 20th century, the boundaries of psychosis emerged as an area in which psychiatric judgement faced numerous and profound uncertainties. Between obvious neuroses and personality and reactive disorders on the one hand, and unquestionable psychoses on the other, psychiatrists faced a world of suspected cases of schizophrenia, doubtful personality disorder diagnoses or probable cases of psychosis constituting a garden of equivocal clinical presentations in which both individual psychiatrists and the discipline as a whole were confronted with the limits of (...) their knowledge. This article examines how psychiatrists from two German university clinics managed the multiple uncertainties involved in diagnosing cases of early psychosis between 1950 and 1980. Based on the analysis of a sample of records, we propose a pragmatic interpretation of the ways in which these uncertainties were recorded by psychiatrists. How were uncertainties and doubts expressed in the records and managed by clinicians? What means were used to dispel doubt? What were the consequences for patients of these diagnostic uncertainties? The article defines an uncertainty diagnosis as a diagnosis expressed with reservations by its author and recorded as such in a medical file. Depending on the nature of the uncertainty, the types of evidence used by the professionals and how this evidence was dealt with, we have identified three types of uncertainty diagnoses: suspicion, plausibility and probability diagnoses. The article then reflects on the role of the patients themselves in shaping these uncertain situations. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

Il n’est pas inhabituel de considérer l’imagination comme une conscience d’objets non réels, ayant la forme d’images internes ou de représentations privées de toute incarnation spatiale. Dans cet article j’interroge la phénoménologie de l’imagination de Husserl à partir de deux questions : l’imagination est-elle un type de conscience d’image ? L’imagination, est-elle privée de toute incarnation spatiale ? Après avoir reconstruit la distinction nette opérée par Husserl entre imagination et conscience d’image (l’imaginaire n’est pas une image mentale interne), j’explore la (...) thèse de Husserl, fort suggestive, selon laquelle toute imagination implique la projection du corps vécu. Loin d’être entièrement dépourvu de spatialité, l’imaginaire exhibe des caractéristiques quasi-spatiales, et il est fondé sur ce qui est « le plus propre » de mon corps vécu – cela même que, pour ainsi dire, j’amène toujours avec moi, même dans les envols les plus éloignés de mon imagination. (shrink)

Il n’est pas inhabituel de considérer l’imagination comme une conscience d’objets non réels, ayant la forme d’images internes ou de représentations privées de toute incarnation spatiale. Dans cet article j’interroge la phénoménologie de l’imagination de Husserl à partir de deux questions : l’imagination est-elle un type de conscience d’image? L’imagination, est-elle privée de toute incarnation spatiale? Après avoir reconstruit la distinction nette opérée par Husserl entre imagination et conscience d’image (l’imaginaire n’est pas une image mentale interne), j’explore la thèse de (...) Husserl, fort suggestive, selon laquelle toute imagination implique la projection du corps vécu. Loin d’être entièrement dépourvu de spatialité, l’imaginaire exhibe des caractéristiques quasi-spatiales, et il est fondé sur ce qui est « le plus propre » de mon corps vécu – cela même que, pour ainsi dire, j’amène toujours avec moi, même dans les envols les plus éloignés de mon imagination. (shrink)

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

In order to describe the logic of morality, "contractualist" philosophers have studied how individuals behave when they choose to follow their moral intuitions. These individuals, contractualists note, often act as if they have bargained and thus reached an agreement with others about how to distribute the benefits and burdens of mutual cooperation. Using this observation, such philosophers argue that the purpose of morality is to maximize the benefits of human interaction. The resulting "contract" analogy is both insightful and puzzling. On (...) one hand, it captures the pattern of moral intuitions, thus answering questions about human cooperation: why do humans cooperate? Why should the distribution of benefits be proportionate to each person's contribution? Why should the punishment be proportionate to the crime? Why should the rights be proportionate to the duties? On the other hand, the analogy provides a mere as-if explanation for human cooperation, saying that cooperation is "as if" people have passed a contract-but since they didn't, why should it be so? To evolutionary thinkers, the puzzle of the missing contract is immediately reminiscent of the puzzle of the missing "designer" of life-forms, a puzzle that Darwin's theory of natural selection essentially resolved. Evolutionary and contractualist theory originally intersected at the work of philosophers John Rawls and David Gauthier, who argued that moral judgments are based on a sense of fairness that has been naturally selected. In this book, Nicolas Baumard further explores the theory that morality was originally an adaptation to the biological market of cooperation, an arena in which individuals competed to be selected for cooperative interactions. In this environment, Baumard suggests, the best strategy was to treat others with impartiality and to share the costs and benefits of cooperation in a fair way, so that those who offered less than others were left out of cooperation while those who offered more were exploited by their partners. It is with this evolutionary approach that Baumard ultimately accounts for the specific structure of human morality. (shrink)

When attempting to determine which of our acts affect future generations and which affect the identities of those who make up such generations, accounts of personal identity that privilege psychological features and person affecting accounts of morality, whilst highly useful when discussing the rights and wrongs of acts relating to extant persons, seem to come up short. On such approaches it is often held that the intuition that future persons can be harmed by decisions made prior to their existence is (...) mistaken as identity is a most fragile thing with even the smallest differences in the conditions under which we procreate affecting not the interests of distinct future persons, but the identities of those who will come to exist in the future. Within this paper I reject this view, holding that a subscription to these two accounts need not result in the conclusion that virtually all acts relating to possible persons are permitted. Further, I argue that such accounts may in fact allow a great deal more scope for the determination of prenatal harms than accounts of personal identity that privilege physical features. Finally, by interpreting claims regarding causal identity such as Parfit’s Time Dependence Claim in terms of Counterpart Theory I suggest that a solution to the non-identity problem can be found in the acceptance of, as relevant in prenatal cases, three kinds of objective similarity relations: Biological, Environmental and Decisional counterpart relations. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, (...) meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. (shrink)

How might a human communication system be bootstrapped in the absence of conventional language? We argue that motivated signs play an important role (i.e., signs that are linked to meaning by structural resemblance or by natural association). An experimental study is then reported in which participants try to communicate a range of pre-specified items to a partner using repeated non-linguistic vocalization, repeated gesture, or repeated non-linguistic vocalization plus gesture (but without using their existing language system). Gesture proved more effective (measured (...) by communication success) and more efficient (measured by the time taken to communicate) than non-linguistic vocalization across a range of item categories (emotion, object, and action). Combining gesture and vocalization did not improve performance beyond gesture alone. We experimentally demonstrate that gesture is a more effective means of bootstrapping a human communication system. We argue that gesture outperforms non-linguistic vocalization because it lends itself more naturally to the production of motivated signs. (shrink)

To become more broadly applicable, positions on AI ethics require perspectives from non-Western regions and cultures such as China and Japan. In this paper, we propose that the addition of the concept of harmony to the discussion on ethical AI would be highly beneficial due to its centrality in East Asian cultures and its applicability to the challenge of designing AI for social good. We first present a synopsis of different definitions of harmony in multiple contexts, such as music and (...) society, which reveals that the concept is, at its core, about well-balanced relationships and appropriate actions which give rise to order, balance, and aesthetically pleasing phenomena. The mediator for these well-balanced relationships isTaktwhich is an ability to act thoughtfully and sensibly according to the specific situation and to put things into proportion and order. We propose that the central challenge of building harmonizing AI is to make intelligent systems tactful and also to design and use them tactfully. For an AI system to become tactful, it needs to be able to have an advanced sensitivity to the specific contexts which it is in and their social and ethical implications and have the capability of approximately inferring the emotional and cognitive states of people with whom it is interacting. (shrink)

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment testing the social collaboration account. Participants engaged in a graphical communication task either as a member of a community, where they interacted with seven different partners drawn from the same pool, or as a member of an isolated pair, where they interacted with the same partner across the same number of games. Participants’ horizontal, pair‐wise interactions led (...) “bottom up” to the creation of an effective and efficient shared sign system in the community condition. Furthermore, the community‐evolved sign systems were as effective and efficient as the local sign systems developed by isolated pairs. Finally, and as predicted by a social collaboration account, and not by an iterated learning account, interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems. (shrink)

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart was born in Yorkshire in 1907 to second generation Jewish immigrants. Having won a scholarship to Oxford University, he went on to become the most famous legal philosopher of the twentieth century. From 1932-40 H.L.A Hart practised as a barrister in London. He was pronounced physically unfit for military service in 1940, and was recruited by MI5, where he worked until 1945. During his time at the Bar he had continued to study philosophy and at M15 (...) his interest was further stimulated by his philosopher colleagues in M16, Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle. After the war, Hart returned to Oxford to take up a philosophy fellowship, later to become Professor of Jurisprudence. H.L.A Hart single-handedly reinvented the philosophy of law and influenced the nation's thinking in the 1960s on abortion, the legalization of homosexuality, and on capital punishment. Hart's approach to legal philosophy was at once disarmingly simple and breathtakingly ambitious, combining as it did the insights of Austin and Bentham and the new linguistic philosophy of J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He sought to elucidate a concept of law which would be of relevance to all forms of law, wherever or whenever they arose: his bestselling book, The Concept of Law, has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide. In 1941, he married Jenifer Williams (a high-ranking civil servant, later an Oxford academic) with whom he had four children. Their relationship was an enduring if unconventional one. In the early 1950s, Jenifer was rumoured to be having a long-standing affair with Isaiah Berlin, one of Hart's closest friends. She was also, falsely, accused by the Sunday Times of having been a Russian spy, an allegation which was all the more scandalous given Hart's position at MI5 during the War. Nicola Lacey draws on Hart's previously unpublished diaries and letters to reveal a complex inner life. Outwardly successful, Hart was in fact tormented by doubts about his intellectual abilities, his sexual identity and his capacity to form close relationships. Her biography also sheds fascinating light on the origins of his ideas, and assesses his overall contribution. Above all, it chronicles of a life which had a depth ands impact far greater than many of Hart's readers have realized. (shrink)

Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to “speak” of indeterminism, its inability to present us a worldview in which new information is created as time passes. In such a case, scientific determinism would only be an illusion due to the timeless mathematical language scientists use. To investigate this possibility it is necessary (...) to develop an alternative mathematical language that is both powerful enough to allow scientists to compute predictions and compatible with indeterminism and the passage of time. We suggest that intuitionistic mathematics provides such a language and we illustrate it in simple terms. (shrink)

This special issue of History of the Humane Sciences intends to shed light on a series of psychopathological entities that do not target well defined conditions and experiences, but rather aim at delimiting zones of uncertainty that defy psychopathology’s order of things: mild diagnoses or subthreshold disorders, borderline conditions, culture bound syndromes, or ideas of dimensions and dimensionality. While these categories have come to play an increasingly central role in psychiatric and psychological thinking during the last 50 years, historians and (...) social scientists have had remarkably little to say about how they have been created, what they have been used for, and what kind of realities they have helped to shape. In this introductory article we propose the concept of ‘psychopathological fringes’ to refer to these categories that are located somewhere at the border of psychopathological classifications and refer to zones of conceptual underdetermination. The notion of fringes serves to highlight both the conceptually and the socially marginal nature of the conditions, personal identities, and worlds delimited by these categories. The fringes of psychopathology are zones of vagueness, of epistemic uncertainty, and moral ambiguity. This introduction proposes a first incursion in these zones. It suggests some of the reason why they might have had attracted little interest in the past and why they may be more salient recently. It follows some analytical clues that might help chart a way through it and proposes a map through the collection of articles included in this issue. (shrink)

Interest in the computational aspects of modeling has been steadily growing in philosophy of science. This paper aims to advance the discussion by articulating the way in which modeling and computational errors are related and by explaining the significance of error management strategies for the rational reconstruction of scientific practice. To this end, we first characterize the role and nature of modeling error in relation to a recipe for model construction known as Euler’s recipe. We then describe a general model (...) that allows us to assess the quality of numerical solutions in terms of measures of computational errors that are completely interpretable in terms of modeling error. Finally, we emphasize that this type of error analysis involves forms of perturbation analysis that go beyond the basic model-theoretical and statistical/probabilistic tools typically used to characterize the scientific method; this demands that we revise and complement our reconstructive toolbox in a way that can affect our normative image of science. (shrink)

To generations of lawyers, H. L. A. Hart is known as the twentieth century's greatest legal philosopher. Whilst his scholarship revolutionized the study of law, as a social commentator he gave intellectual impetus to the liberalizing of society in the 1960s. But behind his public success, Hart struggled with demons. His Jewish background, ambivalent sexuality, and unconventional marriage all fuelled his psychological complexity; allegations of espionage, though immediately quashed, nearly destroyed him. Nicola Lacey s biography explores the forces that (...) shaped an extraordinary life. (shrink)

Digital technologies are pervasively used, and they are becoming part of our everyday actions by being designed to be connected to every aspect of our private life like emotions. However, it is not very clear how they are going to change who we are through their tight intertwinement. Especially in relation to emotions, it is not clear at all what happens when they become digitalized and visualized through these digital devices. Usually, the research focusses on the effect on the privacy (...) of the intrusion of digital devices in our lives as if this process of digitalization leaves the meanings human beings give to their emotions untouched. This article does not focus on the privacy related to the personal information captured by the devices, but it aims to open an analysis of the effects of this digitalization on the emotions in order to highlight the fact the introduction of these digital technologies change what emotions are. (shrink)