In the Dutch debates on Cartesianism of the 1640s, a minority believed that some Cartesian views were in fact Calvinist ones. The paper argues that, among others, a likely precursor of this position is the Aristotelian Franco Burgersdijk (1590-1635), who held a reductionist view of accidents and of the essential extension of matter on Calvinist grounds. It seems unlikely that Descartes was unaware of these views. The claim is that Descartes had two aims in his Replies to Arnauld: to show (...) the compatibility of res extensa and the Catholic transubstantiation but also to differentiate the res extensa from some views of matter explicitly defended by some Calvinists. The association with Calvinism will be eventually used polemically against Cartesianism, for example in France. The paper finally suggests that, notwithstanding the points of conflict, the affinities between the theologically relevant theories of accidents, matter and extension ultimately facilitated the dissemination of Cartesianism among the Calvinists. (shrink)

In 1685, during the heyday of Scottish Cartesianism, regent Robert Lidderdale from Edinburgh University declared Cartesianism the best philosophy in support of the Reformed faith. It is commonplace that Descartes was ostracised by the Reformed, and his role in pre-Enlightenment Scottish philosophy is not yet fully acknowledged. This paper offers an introduction to Scottish Cartesianism, and argues that the philosophers of the Scottish universities warmed up to Cartesianism because they saw it as a newer, better version of their own traditional (...) Reformed scholasticism, chiefly in metaphysics and natural philosophy. (shrink)

This paper wishes to make a contribution to the study of how seventeenth-century scholasticism adapted to the new intellectual challenges presented by the Reformation. I focus in particular on the theory of accidents, which Reformed scholastic philosophers explored in search of a philosophical understanding of the rejection of the Catholic and Lutheran interpretations of the Eucharist. I argue that the Calvinist scholastics chose the view that actual inherence is part of the essence of accidents because it was coherent with their (...) theology. In this paper, I bring to attention the Reformed scholastic philosophy which was taught in the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century, an area so far neglected by scholars. In so doing, I compare Scottish scholasticism with coeval Calvinist sources, and highlight the differences from authoritative Catholic and Lutheran philosophers. The conclusion is that Calvinist scholasticism, both Scottish and Continental, brought about fundamental changes in seventeenth-century metaphysics, which are coherent with a humanist interpretation of Aristotle, and anticipate some themes of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

In the second half of the seventeenth century, philosophy teaching in the Scottish universities gradually moved from scholasticism to Cartesianism. Robert Forbes, regent at Marischal College and King's College, Aberdeen, was a strenuous opponent of Descartes. The analysis of the philosophy of Forbes and of his teacher Patrick Gordon sheds light on the relationship between Scottish Reformed scholasticism and the reception of Descartes in Scotland.

In the manuscript Idea philosophiae moralis, James Dundas, first Lord Arniston, a Presbyterian, a judge and a philosopher, makes extensive use of Stoic themes and authors. About one third of the manuscript is a close reading of Seneca. Dundas judges Stoicism from the perspective of Calvinism: the decisive complaint is that the Stoics are ‘prideful’ when they consider happiness to be within the grasp of fallen human reason. However, pride aside, Dundas is willing to recover some Stoic insights for his (...) Calvinist faith. In what ways? The promise of the practical rewards of Stoicism drives Dundas's interest in arguing that Stoicism can play a crucial psychological and moral contribution to a Christian's life. The investigation of Stoicism in the Idea philosophiae moralis sheds new light on the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment's relationship with Stoicism, commonly characterised as ‘Christian Stoicism’, as well as on the variety of the early modern Christian-Stoic syntheses, such as the Religio Stoici by George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, a friend of Dundas's. (shrink)

The graduation theses of the Scottish universities in the first half of the seventeenth century are at the crossroads of philosophical and historical events of fundamental importance: Renaissance and Humanist philosophy, Scholastic and modern philosophy, Reformation and Counterreformation, the rise of modern science. The struggle among these tendencies shaped the culture of the seventeenth century. Graduation theses are a product of the Scholasticism of the modern age, which survived the Reformation in Scotland and decisively influenced Scottish philosophy in the seventeenth (...) century, including the reception of early modern philosophy. We can therefore speak of a ‘Scottish Scholasticism’, characterised by an original reception and interpretation of the long traditions of Scholastic philosophy and Aristotelianism. The aim of the thesis is the analysis of the general physics of the graduation theses: the two central theories are prime matter and movement. Natural philosophy is a particularly interesting case, and the main features of the graduation theses are the reception of Scholasticism alongside innovation within Scholasticism. Graduation theses adhere to the Scholastic tradition, especially Scotism, while being innovative in their opposition to Catholic forms of Scholasticism. Scottish Scholasticism can be then further qualified as an example of ‘Reformed Scholasticism’. (shrink)

This paper investigates aspects of the philosophy curriculum that Thomas Reid studied during his student years in Aberdeen. In order to assess the nature of philosophy teaching in early eighteenth-century Aberdeen, the graduation theses of the Scottish universities must be read with an eye to the long tradition of university teaching, which reaches back into the seventeenth century. I will seek to show how seventeenth-century Scottish Reformed scholasticism is the backdrop of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This article is an introduction to a special issue on ‘Contexts of Religious Tolerance: New Perspectives from Early Modern Britain and Beyond’, which contains essays on the contributions to the debates on tolerance by non-canonical philosophers and theologians, mainly from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotland and England. Among the studied authors are the Aberdeen Doctors, Samuel Rutherford, James Dundas, John Finch, George Keith, John Simson, Archibald Campbell, Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and John Witherspoon. The introduction draws attention to several methodological points (...) connected to the decision to look at the debates on tolerance through the prism of rarely studied authors. It then presents the essays, which offer novel perspectives by analysing and contextualising political, religious and moral treatments of tolerance. These are tied especially to debates on the articles of faith and on their status, on confessions of faith and their role in the quest for orthodoxy, on liberty of conscience, and on the relation between church and state. (shrink)

This paper investigates the little-known reception of Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Locke in the Scottish universities in the period 1660–1700. The fortune of the English philosophers in the Scottish universities rested on whether their philosophies were consonant with the Scots’ own philosophical agenda. Within the established Cartesian curriculum, the Scottish regents eagerly taught what they thought best in English philosophy and criticised what they thought wrong. The paper also suggests new sources and (...) perspectives for the broader discussion of the ‘origins’ of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

This chapter proposes a dialectical approach to legal interpretation, consisting of three dimensions: a formalization of the canons of interpretation in terms of argumentation schemes; a dialectical classification of interpretive schemes; and a logical and computational model for comparing the arguments pro and contra an interpretation. The traditional interpretive maxims or canons used in both common and civil law are translated into defeasible patterns of arguments, which can be evaluated through sets of corresponding critical questions. These interpretive argumentation schemes are (...) classified in general categories and a distinction is drawn between schemes supporting and rebutting an interpretation. This framework allows conceiving statutory interpretation as a dialectical procedure consisting in weighing arguments pro and contra an interpretation. This procedure is formalized and represented computationally through tools from formal argumentation systems. (shrink)

Definition of the problem Medical ethics is increasingly faced with issues that result from power asymmetries and epistemic injustice. However, medical ethics lacks the epistemic lenses for analyzing these social context factors of clinical practice. A theoretical and conceptual reconfiguration is necessary in order to be able to address these issues. Arguments This paper discusses the foundations of critical medical ethics, which takes perspectives and epistemic categories from critical theories. This includes the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School as well (...) as those approaches from social sciences and cultural studies that reflect on power asymmetries. By drawing on these theories, the epistemic spectrum of medical ethics could be broadened in order to better include real power relations into normative analyses. The paper starts by outlining the contribution of social sciences to empirical medical ethics. This shows that an empirical approach as such cannot bridge the epistemic gap. In a further step, epistemic lenses and concepts from critical theories are discussed, such as Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, feminist approaches, postcolonial approaches, queer theory, gender studies, and science and technology studies (STS). The conclusion sums up the foundations of critical medical ethics and discusses its limitations. Conclusion Critical medical ethics possesses the epistemic categories and broader social perspective needed to address issues in medicine that result from power asymmetries and epistemic injustice in society. (shrink)

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

Pubblicata nel 1930 come summa delle lezioni universitarie del biennio precedente, "La filosofia dell'arte" il primo vero confronto di Giovanni Gentile con il tema dell'Estetica. Dopo decenni in cui il pensatore si era approcciato soltanto in parte o di sfuggita al problema dell'arte, in questo volume affronta esplicitamente l'argomento, per fornire il suo punto di vista - in polemica velata, fra gli altri, con Benedetto Croce - e inquadrarlo meglio all'interno della sua visione attualista, che tanto ha influenzato il (...) pensiero della prima met del XX secolo. (shrink)

Emotions and personhood are important notions within the field of mental health care. How they are related is less evident. This book provides a framework for understanding the important and complex relationship between our emotional wellbeing and our sense of self, drawing on psychopathology, philosophy, and phenomenology.

How can we better understand and treat those suffering from schizophrenia and manic-depressive illnesses? This important new book takes us into the world of those suffering from such disorders. Using self descriptions, its emphasis is not on how mental health professionals view sufferers, but on how the patients themselves experience their disorder. A new volume in the International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry series, this book will be of great interest to all those working with sufferers from such disorders - (...) helping them to better understand their mental lives, and providing important insights into how best to treat them. (shrink)

Argumentation schemes are forms of reasoning that are fallible but correctable within a self-correcting framework. Their use provides a basis for taking rational action or for reasonably accepting a conclusion as a tentative hypothesis, but they are not deductively valid. We argue that teleological reasoning can provide the basis for justifying the use of argument schemes both in monological and dialogical reasoning. We consider how such a teleological justification, besides being inspired by the aim of directing a bounded cognizer to (...) true belief and correct choices, needs to take into account the attitudes of dialogue partners as well as normative models of dialogue and communicative activity types, in particular social and cultural settings. (shrink)

Currently, anomalous lived temporality is not included in the main diagnostic criteria or standard symptom checklists. In this article, we present the Transdiagnostic Assessment of Temporal Experience, a structured interview that can be used by researchers and clinicians without a comprehensive phenomenological background to explore abnormal time experiences in persons with abnormal mental conditions regardless of their diagnosis. When extensive data gathered by this scale are available, it will be possible to delineate well-defined anomalous lived temporality profiles for each psychopathological (...) disorder. This instrument may also prove useful for clinicians by providing a more refined assessment of relevant psychopathological symptoms and an in-depth understanding of the patient’s abnormal behaviour as related to specific types of time experience. In the first part of the article, we provide a brief overview of the phenomenological concept of temporality, including pre-phenomenal and phenomenal time, synthesis, conation and synchronization, and of abnormal time experiences in persons affected by psychopathological conditions. In the following part, we describe the basic structure of the interview that comprises seven categories corresponding to the abnormal features of lived temporality: anomalies of synchrony, of time structure, of implicit time flow, of explicit time flow, and anomalous experiences of the past, the present and the future. The paper also includes a section on administration and scoring of the TATE scale, the complete interview and a Likert table for quantifying the frequency, intensity and interference with daily life of the phenomena explored. (shrink)

Risk and crisis communication (RCC) is a current ethical issue subject to controversy, mainly due to the tension between individual liberty (a core component of fairness) and effectiveness. In this paper we propose a consistent definition of the RCC process in public health emergencies (PHERCC), which comprises six key elements: evidence, initiator, channel, publics, message, and feedback. Based on these elements and on a detailed analysis of their role in PHERCC, we present an ethical framework to help design, govern and (...) evaluate PHERCC strategies. The framework aims to facilitate RCC, incorporating effectiveness, autonomy, and fairness. It comprises five operational ethical principles: openness, transparency, inclusivity, understandability, and privacy. The resulting matrix helps understanding the interplay between the PHERCC process and the principles of the framework. The paper includes suggestions and recommendations for the implementation of the PHERCC matrix. (shrink)

A radical reform of the agri-food biotech regulation in the EU is considered in many quarters as a pressing necessity. Indeed, two important decisions on the legal status of the so-called New Breeding Techniques are expected shortly. In order to clarify some basic aspects of the complex scenario, after a brief introduction regarding the “GMO” fallacy, we offer our point of view on the following facets: A faulty approach is frequent in the discussion of the agri-food regulation; NBTs, genome editing (...) may lead to the disappearance of the “GMO” meme; Beyond health and safety issues: socio-economic considerations; Sustainability: the comprehensive, meaningful starting point of a positive reform; The theoretical and legal basis for the reform are already contained in the EU’s general guidelines to legislation. (shrink)

This paper proposes an argumentation-based procedure for legal interpretation, by reinterpreting the traditional canons of textual interpretation in terms of argumentation schemes, which are then classified, formalized, and represented through argument visualization and evaluation tools. The problem of statutory interpretation is framed as one of weighing contested interpretations as pro and con arguments. The paper builds an interpretation procedure by formulating a set of argumentation schemes that can be used to comparatively evaluate the types of arguments used in cases of (...) contested statutory interpretation in law. A simplified version of the Carneades Argumentation System is applied in a case analysis showing how the procedure works. A logical model for statutory interpretation is finally presented, covering pro-tanto and all-things-considered interpretive conclusions. (shrink)

Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive (...) access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point. (shrink)

Epistemic reliabilism holds that a belief is justified if and only if it is produced by a reliable or truth-conducive process. I argue that reliabilism offers an epistemology for bounded rationality. This latter concept refers to normative and descriptive accounts of real-world reasoning instead of some ideal reasoning. However, as initially formulated, reliabilism involves an absolute, context-independent assessment of rationality that does not do justice to the fact that several processes are reliable in some reasoning environments but not in others, (...) as is widely reported in the cognitive sciences literature. I consider possible solutions to this problem. Resorting to ‘normality reliabilism’, a variant of the theory, is one; but I find it insufficient. Therefore, in addition, I propose to relativise the reliability assessment to reasoning environments. This novel version of reliabilism fits bounded rationality better than the original one does. (shrink)

In everyday reasoning - just as in science and art - knowledge is acquired more by "doing" than with long analyses. What do we "do" when we discover something new? How can we define and explore the pattern of this reasoning, traditionally called "synthetic"? Following in the steps of classic pragmatists, especially C.S. Pierce, Giovanni Maddalena's Philosophy of Gesture revolutionizes the pattern of synthesis through the ideas of change and continuity and proposes "gesture" as a new tool for synthesis. (...) Defining gesture as an action with a beginning and an end that carries on a meaning, Maddalena explains that it is a dense blending of all kinds of phenomena - feelings and vague ideas, actual actions, habits of actions - and of signs - icons, indexes, and symbols. When the blending of phenomena and signs is densest, the gesture is "complete," and its power of introducing something new in knowledge is at its highest level. Examples of complete gestures are religious liturgies, public and private rites, public and private actions that establish an identity, artistic performances, and hypothesizing experiments. A departure from a traditional Kantian framework for understanding the nature and function of reason, The Philosophy of Gesture proposes an approach that is more attuned with our ordinary way of reasoning and of apprehending new knowledge. (shrink)

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science with the publication of his magnum opus the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology), Many of the issues concerning methodology and diagnosis are today the subject of much discussion and debate. This volume brings together leading psychiatrists and philosophers to discuss the impact of this volume, its relevance today, and the legacy it left.

Humanity’s self-ordained mandate to subdue and dominate nature is part of the cognitive foundation of the modern world—a perspective that remains deeply ingrained in science and technology. Marine biology has not been immune to this anthropocentric bias. But this needs to change, and the gaps between basic scientific disciplines and the global conservation imperatives of our time need to be bridged. In the face of a looming ecological and climate crisis, marine biologists must upgrade their values and professional standards and (...) help foster the radical transformation needed to avert a climate and ecological breakdown. To prevent some of the damage, they must cross the imaginary line that separates science from science-based activism and consciously pursue the health and durability of human and natural communities. To this end, they can (1) develop compelling narratives that engage human society, with emphasis on care for the wild living world; (2) move beyond marine conservation on paper and avoid self-serving complaisance; (3) advocate constructive changes in market and human behaviour, not only by documenting damage but also by clarifying how the extraction, production and consumption system can be steered away from practices that harm nature; (4) push for systemic change in politics through individual and collective efforts, supporting environmental activism and those who demand biosphere-saving policies; and (5) endorse a more ecocentric and holistic world vision, relinquishing contempt for spiritual wisdom and liaising with (or at least not dismissing) spiritual traditions that encourage equality, self-restraint and environmental sustainability. (shrink)

This is the first book to provide a coherent overview over the ethical implications of AI-related technologies in medicine. It explores how these technologies transform practices, relationships, and environments in the clinical field. It provides an introduction into ethical issues such as data security and privacy protection, bias and algorithmic fairness, trust and transparency, challenges to the doctor-patient relationship, and new perspectives for informed consent. The book focuses on the transformative impact that technology is having on medicine, and discusses several (...) strategies for dealing with the resulting challenges. It also introduces innovative methods of ethics research for addressing existing desiderata and future challenges. This book is written to inform health care professionals, policy-makers, and researchers in medicine, health sciences, nursing science, social sciences, and ethics, but may also function as a primary textbook for graduate as well as undergraduate university courses. (shrink)

It is well established by psychopathological research that disorders of self-experience are among the main features of schizophrenic prodromes in a pathogenetic sense. Disorders of the phenomenal self, as "lack of ipseity" (the vanishing of the feeling of being embedded in oneself and of distinctiveness between the self and the outer world) and "hyper-reflexivity" (the monitoring of one's own life entailing the tendency to objectify parts of one's own self in an outer space) are considered key phenomena of schizophrenic vulnerability. (...) In this paper, I argue that the analyses of the disorders of phenomenal self catch only some dimensions of schizophrenic vulnerability, since they mainly focus on the pathological changes in subjective experience of an isolated self and disregard the fact that the self is not purely personal. Because our existence is fundamentally tied to a social existence, the feeling of one's own self and the sense of "reality" of an experience are products of intersubjectivity and not only a private process based on introspection or reflexivity in which one is engaged in an idiosyncratic way. Building on, and extending, contributions of the phenomenological tradition, I attempt to demonstrate that intuitive attunement is the basic prerequisite for establishing one's sense of "reality" (feeling familiarly related to one's environment) and for establishing one's sense of "ipseity" (the sense of existing as a subject of awareness). In the last part of the paper, I show the importance of the concepts "lack of attunement" and "antagonomia" (the rejection of conventional knowledge and intuitive attunement, experienced as dangerous sources of loss of individuality) to establish a comprehensive theory of schizophrenic vulnerability. I finally discuss the implications of this view for empirical research and clinical management of schizophrenic vulnerability. (shrink)

Persons with borderline personality disorder are often described as affected by extreme emotional fluctuations and by the sudden emergence of uncontrollable and disproportionate emotional reactions. Borderline persons frequently experience their own self as dim and fuzzy, are deprived of a stable sense of identity and unable to be steadily involved in a given life project. We will interpret these typical features as fluctuations between a clearly normative emotion such as anger and the more diffuse and confusing background of bad moods (...) like dysphoria. Our main focus will be on dysphoria. The intentional structure that characterizes much of human emotional experience, we shall argue, is absent in dysphoria. If we imagine emotions as fluxes of intentionality that innervate the body and connect it to the world, dysphoria is empty intentionality, so to speak, devoid of the moderating power of language and representation. Dysphoria exerts a centrifugal force which fragments the borderline person's representations of herself and of others, inducing a painful experience of incoherence and inner emptiness, a feeling of uncertainty and inauthenticity in interpersonal relationships, and an excruciating sense of futility and inanity of life. But it also entails a sense of vitality, although a disorganized, aimless, and explosive one -- a desperate vitality. (shrink)

Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea of using the logical form of a true sentence as a guide to the metaphysical grounds of the fact stated by that sentence. This paper looks at a particular instance of that idea: the widely accepted principle that disjunctions are grounded in their true disjuncts. I will argue that an unrestricted version of this principle has several problematic consequences and that it’s not obvious how the principle might be restricted in order to (...) avoid them. My suggestion is that, instead of trying to restrict the principle, we should distinguish between metaphysical and conceptual grounds and take the principle to apply exclusively to the latter. This suggestion, if correct, carries over to other prominent attempts at using logical form as a guide to ground. (shrink)

Anticipatory looking on mindreading tasks can indicate our expectation of an agent's action. The challenge is that social situations are often more complex, involving instances where we need to track an agent's false belief to successfully identify the outcome to which an action is directed. If motor processes can guide how action goals are understood, it is conceivable— where that kind of goal ascription occurs in false-belief tasks— for motor representations to account for someone's belief-like state. Testing adults (N = (...) 42) in a real-time interactive helping scenario, we discovered that participants' early mediolateral motor activity (leftwards– rightwards leaning on balance board) foreshadowed the agent's belief-based action preparation. These results suggest fast belief-tracking can modulate motor representations generated in the course of one's interaction with an agent. While adults' leaning, and anticipatory looking, revealed the contribution of fast false-belief tracking, participants did not correct the agent's mistake in their final helping action. These discoveries suggest that adults may not necessarily use another's belief during overt social interaction or find reflecting on another's belief as being normatively relevant to one's own choice of action. Our interactive task design offers a promising way to investigate how motor and mindreading processes may be variously integrated. (shrink)

Philosophy of Mind is usualy seen as the theoretical field in which theories about the functioning of the mind are elaborated, to be afterwards empirically tested through Artificial Intelligence. But this empirical approach does not fit the human mind which is not simply a machine. It is therefore possible to see Philosophy of Mind as a necessary creation to empty AI of its philosophical charge.

The recent outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is posing many different challenges to local communities, directly affected by the pandemic, and to the global community, trying to find how to respond to this threat in a larger scale. The history of the Eyam Plague, read in light of Ross Upshur’s Four Principles for the Justification of Public Health Intervention, and of the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, could provide (...) useful guidance in navigating the complex ethical issues that arise when quarantine measures need to be put in place. (shrink)

Leibnizian-Newtonian calculus was a theory that dealt with geometrical objects; the figure continued to play one of the fundamental roles it had played in Greek geometry: it susbstituted a part of reasoning. During the eighteenth century a process of de-geometrization of calculus took place, which consisted in the rejection of the use of diagrams and in considering calculus as an 'intellectual' system where deduction was merely linguistic and mediated. This was achieved by interpreting variables as universal quantities and introducing the (...) notion of function, which replaced the study of curves. However, the emancipation of calculus from its basis in geometry was not comprehensive. In fact, the geometrical properties of curves were attributed de facto to functions and thus eighteenth-century calculus continued implicitly to use principles borrowed from geometry. There was therefore no transition to a purely syntactical theory based on axiomatically introduced terms, a shift which only took place subsequently in modern times. (shrink)