The present paper attempts to show that a 1915 article by Erich Kretschmann must be credited not only for being the source of Einstein’s point-coincidence remark, but also for having anticipated the main lines of the logical-empiricist interpretation of general relativity. Whereas Kretschmann was inspired by the work of Mach and Poincaré, Einstein inserted Kretschmann’s point-coincidence parlance into the context of Ricci and Levi-Civita’s absolute differential calculus. Kretschmann himself realized this and turned the point-coincidence argument against Einstein in his second (...) and more famous 1918 paper. While Einstein had taken nothing from Kretschmann but the expression “point-coincidences”, the logical empiricists, however, instinctively dragged along with it the entire apparatus of Kretschmann’s conventionalism. Disappointingly, in their interpretation of general relativity, the logical empiricists unwittingly replicated some epistemological remarks Kretschmann had written before General Relativity even existed. (shrink)

This paper analyzes correspondence between Reichenbach and Einstein from the spring of 1926, concerning what it means to ‘geometrize’ a physical field. The content of a typewritten note that Reichenbach sent to Einstein on that occasion is reconstructed, showing that it was an early version of §49 of the untranslated Appendix to his Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre, on which Reichenbach was working at the time. This paper claims that the toy-geometrization of the electromagnetic field that Reichenbach presented in his note should (...) not be regarded as merely a virtuoso mathematical exercise, but as an additional argument supporting the core philosophical message of his 1928 monograph. This paper concludes by suggesting that Reichenbach’s infamous ‘relativization of geometry’ was only a stepping stone on the way to his main concern—the question of the ‘geometrization of gravitation’. (shrink)

We investigate the major mathematical theories of space from a modal standpoint: topology, affine geometry, metric geometry, and vector algebra. This allows us to see new fine-structure in spatial patterns which suggests analogies across these mathematical theories in terms of modal, temporal, and conditional logics. Throughout the modal walk through space, expressive power is analyzed in terms of language design, bisimulations, and correspondence phenomena. The result is both unification across the areas visited, and the uncovering of interesting new questions.

. This paper investigates the mechanisms of knowledge production of twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology. How robotics influences investigations into the structure, development, and change of organic forms? Which definition of form is presupposed by this new approach to the study of form? I answer these questions by investigating how robots are used to understand and generate new questions about the locomotion of extinct animals in the first case study and in high-performance fishes in the second case study. After having illustrated (...) the landscape of twentieth-century morphology, I will reflect on the definition of form adopted in twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology as well as on the differences between this approach to the study of form and the so-called nature-inspired disciplines, such as bionics or biomimetics. In the conclusion, I suggest that we are now in a material turn in morphology, characterized by the coexistence of the robotic, the virtual, and the real, which enables an understanding of how the structures and dynamics of shapes change over time. (shrink)

A standard approach to examining Deleuze's concept of difference in Difference and Repetition is to follow his critique of representation through an overturning of Platonism, which Deleuze finds to be the definitive task of philosophy after Nietzsche. While engaging this largely critical project, however, there is a tendency to overlook the dimensions of Platonism that Deleuze rehabilitates in a differential and immanent register. This paper aims to recover the essential dimensions of Platonism at the very heart of Deleuze's philosophy of (...) difference. This recovery is accomplished by distinguishing Nietzsche's overturning of Platonism through his evaluation of the reactive politics of the Idea from Deleuze's own reversal of Platonism through his evaluation of the active politics of simulacra. (shrink)

This article presents and discusses one of the most prominent inferential strategies currently employed in cognitive neuropsychology, namely, reverse inference. Simply put, this is the practice of inferring, in the context of experimental tasks, the engagement of cognitive processes from locations or patterns of neural activation. This technique is notoriously controversial because, critics argue, it presupposes the problematic assumption that neural areas are functionally selective. We proceed as follows. We begin by introducing the basic structure of traditional “location-based” reverse inference (...) and discuss the influential lack of selectivity objection. Next, we rehearse various ways of responding to this challenge and provide some reasons for cautious optimism. The second part of the essay presents a more recent development: “pattern-decoding reverse inference”. This inferential strategy, we maintain, provides an even more convincing response to the lack of selectivity charge. Due to this and other methodological advantages, it is now a prominent component in the toolbox of cognitive neuropsychology. Finally, we conclude by drawing some implications for philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002;Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part‐of‐speech‐tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept–property types that approximate classical (...) relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept‐internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter‐concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property‐based approach. (shrink)

Reductionists in biology claim that all biological events can be explained in terms of genes and macromolecules alone, while antireductionists argue that some biological events must be explained at a higher level. The literature, however, does not distinguish between different kinds of molecular explanation. The goal of this article is to identify and analyze three such kinds. The analysis of molecular explanations herein carries an important philosophical implication; in shunning crude reductionism and extreme versions of holism, we can combine the (...) insights of thoughtful reductionists with sophisticated antireductionism. When this is done, the question of explanatory reductionism becomes less substantial than often supposed. (shrink)

Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002;Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part‐of‐speech‐tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept–property types that approximate classical (...) relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept‐internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter‐concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property‐based approach. (shrink)

We applied a technique borrowed from the field of bioethics to test whether justice-related factors influence laypersons’ decisions concerning business ethics. In the first experiment, participants judged the acceptability of remuneration policies and in the second that of executive bonuses. In each study, participants judged a set of 36 situations. To create the scenarios, we varied retributive justice—the amount of remuneration; procedural justice—the clarity of the procedure that determined the remuneration; distributive justice—the extent of the distribution of bonus payments amongst (...) employees; and restorative justice—a special compensation for hazardous working conditions or accidents at work. K-means clustering of all 36 judgments revealed four different personal positions in both experiments. One group of people readily accepted all situations. The other three groups’ judgments were mainly a function of distributive justice modulated in different ways by the context determined by the other variables. Furthermore, people conceive of distributive justice as categorical: Acceptability judgments only increase if companies give bonuses to all employees. Granting bonuses to a subset does not increase acceptability. Our results are useful for policy makers and provide business ethics researchers with a novel technique. (shrink)

Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that (...) were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole. (shrink)

Climate change governance is extremely challenging because of both the intrinsic difficulty of the issues at stake and the plurality of values and worldviews. For these reasons, the ethical concerns that characterise climate change should also be meaningfully addressed through a specific version of procedural justice. Accordingly, in this article we adopt an impure notion of procedural justice. On this theoretical basis, we define relevant fairness criteria and contextualise them for climate governance systems. Then, we empirically justify fairness criteria against (...) a critical and divisive element for the future governance of the Green Climate Fund, i.e., the no-objection procedure. The article concludes with some considerations prompted by the analysis. (shrink)

Scott Sehon recently argued that the standard notion of determinism employed in the Consequence Argument makes it so that, if our world turns out to be deterministic, then an interventionist God is logically impossible. He further argues that because of this, we should revise our notion of determinism. In this paper I show that Sehon’s argument for the claim that the truth of determinism, in this sense, would make an interventionist God logically impossible ultimately fails. I then offer and respond (...) to a weaker version of the argument for the claim that we should revise our notion of determinism. (shrink)

Einstein’s “point-coincidence argument'” as a response to the “hole argument” is usually considered as an expression of “Leibniz equivalence,” a restatement of indiscernibility in the sense of Leibniz. Through a historical-critical analysis of Logical Empiricists' interpretation of General Relativity, the paper attempts to show that this labeling is misleading. Logical Empiricists tried explicitly to understand the point-coincidence argument as an indiscernibility argument of the Leibnizian kind, such as those formulated in the 19th century debate about geometry, by authors such as (...) Poincaré, Helmholtz or Hausdorff. However, they clearly failed to give a plausible account of General Relativity. Thus the point-coincidence/hole argument cannot be interpreted as Leibnizian indiscernibility argument, but must be considered as an indiscernibility argument of a new kind. Weyl's analysis of Leibniz's and Einstein's indiscernibility arguments is used to support this claim. (shrink)

According to a widely shared interpretation, research employing spontaneous-response false belief tasks demonstrates that infants as young as 15 months attribute (false) beliefs. In contrast with this conclusion, I advance an alternative reading of the empirical data. I argue that infants constantly form and update their expectations about others’ behaviour and that this ability extends in the course of development to reflect an appreciation of what others can and cannot see. These basic capacities account for infants’ performance in spontaneous-response false (...) belief tasks without the need to assume the existence of a cognitive module specific for mental state attribution. My proposal suggests a plausible explanatory strategy for the problem of the representational format of the information processed in spontaneous-response false belief tasks. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

The genealogy of lexicography represents an ideal standpoint to reveal how sign-making practices may shape cultural objects. In this paper I discuss the revolution that lexicography undertook during the nineteenth century, showing why this process required the availability of a specific set of concepts, and then how it led up to the emergence of new social techniques, to the coming into being of a new kind of people, and to the introduction of new practices of sign-manipulation. Finally, I confront the (...) historical development of lexicography with the project of the dictionary of Newspeak that Orwell envisioned in 1984. (shrink)

Narratives are ever-present in medicine and care: patients, relatives, doctors, nurses and pastoral workers tell quite different stories. The present volume examines the question of the significance of narratives for the ethical judgement in medicine and care and illustrates what theological reflection can contribute to the current discussion about the ethics of medicine and care. The focus of the volume is on the theological discussion on the ethical issues of medicine and care which is enriched by contributions from literary studies, (...) philosophy, nursing science and the ethics of medicine and care. (shrink)

This article provides a contribution to the concept of a peace ethics which understands human peacemaking as a churchly practice accepting and joining in God's reconciling works. From a pacifist stance, the author argues that ecclesial ethics allows a forceful reframing of the just war tradition as it is developed in the largely unknown Reformed confessions of the l61 h century. A theological exploration of the peace church's pathos drives the author towards a rediscovery of the church's central worshiping practices, (...) such as eucharist, as distinctively peacemaking practices. Following John Calvin's and Karl Barth's ethical account, the mode of peacemaking is defined as a hastening that waits. (shrink)

In this event-related potential study a masking technique that prevents conscious perception of words and non-words through attentional distraction was used to reveal the temporal dynamics of word processing under non-conscious and conscious conditions. In the non-conscious condition, ERP responses differed between masked words and non-words from 112 to 160 ms after stimulus-onset over posterior brain areas. The early onset of the word–non-word differences was compatible with previous studies that reported non-conscious access to orthographic information within this time period. Moreover, (...) source localisations provided evidence for automatic activation of prelexical phonological information, whereas no evidence for non-conscious semantic processing was found. When subjects were informed about the masking technique, lexical differences occurred at later time intervals, suggesting conscious access to additional word related information. These results indicate that early visual word processing does not depend entirely on attentional resources, but that non-conscious processing probably is restricted to rather lower-level linguistic information. (shrink)

Philosophers interested in the theoretical consequences of predictive processing often assume that predictive processing is an inferentialist and representationalist theory of cognition. More specifically, they assume that predictive processing revolves around approximated Bayesian inferences drawn by inverting a generative model. Generative models, in turn, are said to be structural representations: representational vehicles that represent their targets by being structurally similar to them. Here, I challenge this assumption, claiming that, at present, it lacks an adequate justification. I examine the only argument (...) offered to establish that generative models are structural representations, and argue that it does not substantiate the desired conclusion. Having so done, I consider a number of alternative arguments aimed at showing that the relevant structural similarity obtains, and argue that all these arguments are unconvincing for a variety of reasons. I then conclude the paper by briefly highlighting three themes that might be relevant for further investigation on the matter. (shrink)

This paper replies to objections that have been raised against my operational-Kantian account of thought experiments by Fehige 2012 and 2013. Fehige also sketches an alternative Neo-Kantian account that utilizes Michael Friedman’s concept of a contingent and changeable a priori. To this I shall reply, first, that Fehige’s objections not only neglect some fundamental points I had made as regards the realizability of TEs, but also underestimate the principle of empiricism, which was rightly defended by Kant. Secondly, in opposition to (...) what he states, my account does not differ in a very essential way from the empiricist solutions either as regards the power of TEs to predict something new about empirical reality, or as regards the criteria for telling apart good from bad TEs. Thirdly, in the light of the Kantian definition of the a priori, Friedman’s corresponding notion is contrary both to the spirit and to the letter of Kant’s philosophy; moreover, from a theoretical point of view, a material a priori is theoretically untenable since, counter to Friedman’s own intentions, it leads to relativism. -/- . (shrink)

The late Narthrop Frye (1912-1991) stands out as one of the most acclaimed and influential literary critics of the twentieth century. Among the authors from whom Frye acknowledged to have drawn inspiration we find the political philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). But Frye’s appreciation of Vico came with significant reservations. While Frye found Vico useful to the extent that the Italian philosopher could be very freely adapted to Frye’s literary vision, beyond that point Frye would not “buy” what Vico had to (...) say. While being fully aware that his adaptation of Vico did not harmonize with the philosopher’s overall theoretical position, Frye set out to put some elements of Vico’s work to use outside of their original argumentative setting. (shrink)

Among the accusations raised against Peter of John Olivi, during the Council of Vienne, one of the strongest concerned de ecclesia vocata Magna meretrix. The Council Fathers were concerned about the identification of the great prostitute of the Apocalypse with the Roman See. This interpretation, as we know, was well weighed by Ubertino de Casale, and the pope, Clement the fifth, preferred to leave the question aside and it disappeared in the final texts of the Council.1The recent “double” publication of (...) the Lectura super Apocalipsim2 now permits us reconsider the question of the conciliar fathers of Vienne regarding the identification between the Church and the great prostitute of Apocalypse. In addition, we can... (shrink)

Two agents endowed with different categorisations engage in bargaining to reach an understanding and agree on a common categorisation. We model the process as a simple non-cooperative game and demonstrate three results. When the initial disagreement is focused, the bargaining process has a zero-sum structure. When the disagreement is widespread, the zero-sum structure disappears and the unique equilibrium requires a retraction of consensus: two agents who individually associate a region with the same category end up rebranding it under a different (...) category. Finally, we show that this last equilibrium outcome is Pareto dominated by a cooperative solution that avoids retraction; that is, the unique equilibrium agreement may be inefficient. (shrink)

In the present article, I review some evidence that shows how body odor disgust sensitivity plays a central role in the so-called behavioral immune system, a set of processes aimed at detecting, emotionally reacting, and behaviorally avoiding pathogen threats. I also report empirical evidence on how the BODS relates to social attitudes such as authoritarianism, xenophobia, and condemnation of “impure” moral violations. This research is interpreted from an Evolutionary psychology framework.

Le texte de l'article de Marco Agnetta & Nathalie Mälzer « Henri Meschonnics holistischer Rhythmusbegriff und einige seiner Implikationen für die Translationswissenschaft » paru dans B. R. Gibhardt, Denkfigur Rhythmus : Probleme und Potenziale des Rhythmusbegriffs in den Künsten, Hannover,‎ Wehrhahn Verlag, 2020, pp. 105-115 est accessible gratuitement ici. I. Einleitung »Du musst alles hundert Mal sprechen, ins eigene Ohr. Du kannst vergessen, was die Worte bedeuten. Nennen wir es - Poétique et Études littéraires – GALERIE – Nouvel article.

Enactive approaches to cognition argue that cognition, including pretense, comes about through the dynamical interaction of agent and environment. Applied to cognition, these approaches cast cognition as an activity an agent _performs_ interacting in specific ways with her environment. This view is now under significant pressure: in a series of recent publications, Peter Langland-Hassan has proposed a number of arguments which purportedly should lead us to conclude that enactive approaches are unable to account for pretense without paying a way too (...) severe theoretical price. In this paper, we will defend enactive approaches to pretense, arguing that they can in fact explain pretense without incurring in the negative theoretical consequences Peter Langland-Hassan fears. To this effect, we start by exposing Langland-Hassan’s challenge (§2), to then highlight its core assumptions and demonstrate their falsity (§3). Having done so, we argue that none of the theoretical consequences Langland-Hassan fears follow (§4), and in fact enactive approaches to cognition may be explanatorily superior to the one Langland-Hassan favors (§5). A brief conclusion will then follow (§6). (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag möchte ich mich darauf beschränken, einige Aspekte von Fichtes Verhältnis zu Kant zu berücksichtigen, die mir sowohl für das Verständnis Fichtes als auch für das Verständnis Kants sehr lehrreich zu sein scheinen. Denn die Einsicht in die unterschiedlichen Auffassungen des alten und des jungen Denkers läßt um so mehr da, wo der zweite meint, den ersten bloß zu wiederholen, treu zu interpretieren oder allenfalls treu weiterzudenken, den Geist der beiden philosophischen Ansätze am deutlichsten zutage treten. Den manchmal (...) unbestimmten Ausdruck »Geist« darf man in diesem Fall wohl verwenden, da die Textstellen, die dem Vergleich feste Bezugspunkte angeben, nicht isoliert dastehen, sondern jeweils in zwei verschiedene und scharf konturierte philosophische Ansätze hinein konvergieren. (shrink)

Psychological game theory, as defined by Colman, is meant to offer a series of solution concepts that should reduce the indeterminacy of orthodox game theory when applied to a series of situations. My main criticism is that, actually, they introduce a second-order indeterminacy problem rather than offering a viable solution. The reason is that the proposed solution concepts are under-specified in their definition and in their scope.