Bernard Rimé effectively reorients emotions and emotional disclosure in a more social and interpersonal direction, outlining the intricate interplay between emotion generation, emotional sharing, and social integration. However, he also takes a hard line on the intra-psychic emphasis of emotional disclosure, which he frames as the product of an individualistic “Lone Ranger” perspective. In many ways Rimé's critique is on target, but it does not fully credit research and theory demonstrating the benefits of private, self-to-self disclosure. This commentary proposes a (...) reconciliation between Rimé's social structuralist perspective and an intra-psychic, self-based perspective. George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism, which suggests that the people can relate to their own selves as with another person, provides the basis for this accord. (shrink)

In public debates about the desirability of force feeding in the Netherlands the inclination of people with dementia to refrain from eating and drinking tends to be either taken as their gut-way of expressing their will, or as a symptom of their disease running its natural course. An ethnographic inquiry into daily care, however, gives a quite different insight in fasting by relating it to common practices of eating and drinking in nursing homes. In a nursing home eating and drinking (...) are important social activities that may be shaped quite differently. And while necessary for survival, food and drink also have other qualities: taste, temperature, texture, smell. Whether we want it or not, in the end we all die. But with different modes of care come different modes of dying and of living. (shrink)

In this paper we have two aims: first, to draw attention to the close connexion between interpretation and scientific understanding; second, to give a detailed account of how theories without a spacetime can be interpreted, and so of how they can be understood. In order to do so, we of course need an account of what is meant by a theory ‘without a spacetime’: which we also provide in this paper. We describe three tools, used by physicists, aimed at constructing (...) interpretations which are adequate for the goal of understanding. We analyse examples from high-energy physics illustrating how physicists use these tools to construct interpretations and thereby attain understanding. The examples are: the ’t Hooft approximation of gauge theories, random matrix models, causal sets, loop quantum gravity, and group field theory. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper, factual information is given about developments in European business ethics since it started on a more or less institutionalized basis, five or six years ago. In the second part some comments are presented on the meaning of the developments and the possible causes. Attention is given to resemblances and differences between American and European business ethics. In the short last part some suggestions are proposed about tasks business ethics will face in the next (...) decade. (shrink)

Three experiments examined whether the mere priming of potential action effects enhances people’s feeling of causing these effects when they occur. In a computer task, participants and the computer independently moved a rapidly moving square on a display. Participants had to press a key, thereby stopping the movement. However, the participant or the computer could have caused the square to stop on the observed position, and accordingly, the stopped position of the square could be conceived of as the potential effect (...) resulting from participants’ action of pressing the stop key. The location of this position was primed or not just before participants had to stop the movement. Results showed that priming of the position enhanced experienced authorship of stopping the square. Additional experimentation demonstrated that this priming of agency was not mediated by the goal or intention to produce the effect. (shrink)

In the September 2020 edition of Perception, Alan Gilchrist published an editorial entitled “The Integrity of Vision” (Gilchrist, 2020). In it, Gilchrist critiques motivated perception research. His main points are as follows: (1) Motivated perception is compromised by experimental demand: Results do not actually show motivated perception but instead reflect subjects’ desires to comply with inferred predictions. (2) Motivated perception studies use designs that make predictions obvious to subjects. These transparent designs conspire with experimental demand to yield confirmatory but compromised (...) results. (3) Motivated perception research lacks guiding theory and cannot explain what appear to be contradictory results. (4) Motivated perception presents an unsupportable assault upon the impermeability of perception. The present commentary responds to these four assertions. (shrink)

This article examines the role of philosophy in the development of the kinetic theory of gases. Two opposing accounts of this role, by Peter Clark and John Nyhof, are discussed and criticized. Contrary to both accounts, it is argued that philosophical views of scientists can fundamentally influence the results of their scientific work. This claim is supported by a detailed analysis of the philosophical views of Maxwell and Boltzmann, and of their work on the kinetic theory, especially concerning the so-called (...) specific heat anomaly. It leads to the conclusion that the scientific development of the kinetic theory cannot be understood without taking into account the role of philosophy. (shrink)

In der Geschichte des Wiener Kreises lässt sich eine private und eine öffentliche Phase unterscheiden. Die private Phase ist 1929 zu Ende. Im Sommer dieses Jahres beschliessen die Mitglieder mit ihrer Philosophie der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung vor die Öffentlichkeit zu treten.

The articles by Henk Bodewitz collected in this volume, published between 1969 and 2013, deal with Vedic cosmology and ethics on basis of a systematic philological study of early Vedic texts, from the Ṛgveda to various Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads.

Originally the Adoro te devote was not a liturgical hymn but a prayer, probably intended by Thomas Aquinas for personal use when attending mass. Quoting the at present most reliable version of the poem, the author studies Adoro te devote from the angle of transformation: poetic, Eucharistic and mystic or eschatological transformation. Structure and form are analysed, and a number of themes discussed: two alternative interpretations of adoration, several concepts of truth intended in the poem, the good thief and doubting (...) Thomas as symbols of moral and spiritual imperfection, and living in connection, in union with God. (shrink)

One of the most important contributions of A. Church to logic is his invention of the lambda calculus. We present the genesis of this theory and its two major areas of application: the representation of computations and the resulting functional programming languages on the one hand and the representation of reasoning and the resulting systems of computer mathematics on the other hand.

The paper is replaced by a new version (12-2019): DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3572846 -/- Physical phenomena emerge from the quantum fields everywhere in space. However, not only the phenomena emerge from the quantum fields, the law of the conservation of energy must have its origin from the same spatial structure. This paper describes the relations between the main law of physics and the mathematical structure of the “aggregated” quantum fields.

In this paper I present my reflections on the ethics of science as described by Merton and as actually practiced by scientists and technologists. This ethics was the subject of Kuipers' paper "'Default norms' in Research Ethics" (Kuipers 2001). There is an implicit assumption in this ethics, notably in Merton's norm of communism, that knowledge is always, or unconditionally good, and hence that scientific research, and the dissemination of its results, is unconditionally good. I will give here reasons why scientists (...) are not permitted to proceed, as they actually do, on the basis of this assumption. There is no factual or other binding justification for this assumption, and the activities it gives rise to frequently conflict with the broadly accepted ethical principle of restricted liberty. A recent discussion on the risks and hazards of science and on the issue of relinquishment is presented. What is shown in this paper is that the scientists and technologists participating in this discussion frequently violate core values of science relating to logical and empirical scrutiny and systematic criticism, as mentioned in Merton's norms of universalism, organized skepticism, and disinterestedness. It is concluded that, in order to live up to these values and in order to operate in agreement with broader ethical principles, science should stimulate open and critical discussion on the hazards and negative effects of science and technology, and on the present failure on the part of law and politics to control those hazards and negative effects. Science should also take the possibility of relinquishing certain themes of research seriously as long as such flaws in the systems of law and political decision-making persist. (shrink)

When viewing a circular coin rotated in depth, it fills an elliptical region of the distal scene. For some, this appears to generate a two-fold experience, in which one sees the coin as simultaneously circular (in light of its 3D shape) and elliptical (in light of its 2D ‘perspectival shape’ or ‘p-shape’). An energetic philosophical debate asks whether the latter p-shapes are genuinely presented in perceptual experience (as ‘perspectivalists’ argue) or if, instead, this appearance is somehow derived or inferred from (...) experience (as ‘anti-perspectivalists’ argue). This debate, however, has largely turned on introspection. In a recent study, Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020) aim to provide the first empirical test of this question. They asked subjects to find an elliptical coin seen face-on from a search array that also included a circular coin seen either face-on or at an angle. They found that subjects reacted more slowly when the distracting circle was seen at an angle, such that it’s p-shape matched that of the target ellipse. From this, they concluded that the similar p-shape between the ellipse and circle constituted a phenomenal similarity between the two, and thus that perspectivalism is true. We show that these results can also be explained by pre-attentive guidance by unconscious representations (in what follows, just “unconscious pre-attentive guidance”) and that this explanation is at least as plausible as one from phenomenal similarity. Thus, we conclude that the experiment does not support perspectivalism over anti-perspectivalism. (shrink)

Analyse van de positie van de vrouw in gezins- en arbeidssituaties en de rol van de staat daarbij.

Global society is facing formidable current and future problems that threaten the prospects for justice and peace, sustainability, and the well-being of humanity both now and in the future. Many of these problems are related to science and technology and to how they function in the world. If the social responsibility of scientists and engineers implies a duty to safeguard or promote a peaceful, just and sustainable world society, then science and engineering education should empower students to fulfil this responsibility. (...) The contributions to this special issue present European examples of teaching social responsibility to students in science and engineering, and provide examples and discussion of how this teaching can be promoted, and of obstacles that are encountered. Speaking generally, education aimed at preparing future scientists and engineers for social responsibility is presently very limited and seemingly insufficient in view of the enormous ethical and social problems that are associated with current science and technology. Although many social, political and professional organisations have expressed the need for the provision of teaching for social responsibility, important and persistent barriers stand in the way of its sustained development. What is needed are both bottom-up teaching initiatives from individuals or groups of academic teachers, and top-down support to secure appropriate embedding in the university. Often the latter is lacking or inadequate. Educational policies at the national or international level, such as the Bologna agreements in Europe, can be an opportunity for introducing teaching for social responsibility. However, frequently no or only limited positive effect of such policies can be discerned. Existing accreditation and evaluation mechanisms do not guarantee appropriate attention to teaching for social responsibility, because, in their current form, they provide no guarantee that the curricula pay sufficient attention to teaching goals that are desirable for society as a whole. (shrink)

The rise of the mechanistic worldview in the seventeenth century had a major impact on views of biological generation. Many seventeenth century naturalists rejected the old animist thesis. However, the alternative view of gradual mechanistic formation in embryology didn’t convince either. How to articulate the peculiarity of life? Researchers in the seventeenth century proposed both “animist” and mechanistic theories of life. In the eighteenth century again a controversy in biology arose regarding the explanation of generation. Some adhered to the view (...) that life is a physical property of matter (e.g. Buffon), others saw living entities as the result of the development of pre-existing germs (e.g. Bonnet). Naturalists, lacked a convincing account that could guide their research. In interaction with leading naturalists of his time Immanuel Kant articulated an approach to explaining generation. Kant’s account, delineated in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the power of judgment) (1790), is a combination of Newtonian non-reductionist mechanism in explanation, and a concept of natural end comparable to Stahl’s formal conception of organic bodies. It consists of two claims: a) in biology only mechanical explanation is explanatory, and b) living entities contain some original organisation, which is mechanically unexplainable. In the nineteenth century this approach influenced naturalists as Müller, Virchow, and Von Baer, in their physiological research. Dissatisfied with a sheer mechanistic or, on the other hand, a sheer teleological approach, they appreciated the Kantian account of mechanical explanation of natural ends. In Germany, in the second halve of the nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel reopened the debate about abiogenesis, which still continuous. (shrink)

This article goes into the intentions and motives behind De Veritate (1627), famous apologetic work by the Dutch humanist and jurisconsult Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). De Veritate will be compared with two other seminal works written by Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and the Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (1641-1650). The focus will be on one particular aspect that comes to the fore in all three works: the way Grotius reduced the Christian faith to a minimal religion by singling out (...) the essential tenets this faith had in common with other religions. The core of Grotius’s argumentation consists in the idea that believers and, in particular, civil authorities have to distinguish between a few essential religious tenets that could be made rationally acceptable, and a set of supernatural dogmas, derived from divine revelation, that did not pass a certain, albeit very high degree of probability. As far as the second category was concerned, civil tolerance was called for. As becomes clear from contemporary correspondences, Grotius did not develop these rather controversial ideas in an intellectual vacuum. During his exile in Paris, he fostered contacts with members of the circle that formed around the French monk Marin Mersenne (1588-1648). This circle functioned as a kind of hothouse for the development of a minimal Christian creed. Members of this group saw promotion of a minimal creed as a solution to current religious controversies and the ensuing political turmoil and (civil) war, which were abhorred for their detrimental effects on the advancement of learning in the first place. On the other hand, it is also apparent that overt adherence to such an ideal was considered to be dangerous, because it would at least evoke the embarrassing and even repressive attention of the authorities in Church and government. An additional problem was that by defending such a religious stance, members of Mersenne’s circle laid themselves open to accusations of endorsing ‘rational beliefs’ like Socinianism, generally considered to be the worst heresy among all Christian denominations. (shrink)

The contributions in this volume focus on the Bayesian interpretation of natural languages, which is widely used in areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and computational linguistics. This is the first volume to take up topics in Bayesian Natural Language Interpretation and make proposals based on information theory, probability theory, and related fields. The methodologies offered here extend to the target semantic and pragmatic analyses of computational natural language interpretation. Bayesian approaches to natural language semantics and pragmatics are based on (...) methods from signal processing and the causal Bayesian models pioneered by especially Pearl. In signal processing, the Bayesian method finds the most probable interpretation by finding the one that maximizes the product of the prior probability and the likelihood of the interpretation. It thus stresses the importance of a production model for interpretation as in Grice’s contributions to pragmatics or in interpretation by abduction. (shrink)

From the nineteen sixties onwards a branch of philosophy of science has come to development, called history-oriented philosophy of science. This development constitutes a reaction on the then prevailing logical empiricist conception of scientific knowledge. The latter was increasingly seen as suffering from insurmountable internal problems, like e. g. the problems with the particular "observational-theoretical distinction" on which it drew. In addition the logical empiricists' general approach was increasingly criticized for two external shortcomings. Firstly, the examples of scientific knowledge that (...) the logical empiricists were focusing on were con sidered as too simplistic to be informative on the nature of real life science. Secondly, it was felt that the attention of these philosophers of science was restricted to the static aspects of scientific knowledge, while neglecting its developmental aspects. History-oriented philosophy of science has taken up the challenge implicit in the latter two criticisms, i. e. to develop accounts of science that would be more adequate for understanding the development 1 of real life science. One of the more successful products of this branch of philosophy of science is Lakatos's theory of scientific development, sometimes called the "methodology of scientific research programmes". This theory conceives science as consisting of so called research program mes developing in time, and competing with each other over the issue which one generates the best explan~tions of the phenomena that they address. (shrink)

This paper approaches the scientific realism question from a naturalistic perspective. On the basis of a historical case study of the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Ludwig Boltzmann on the kinetic theory of gases, it shows that scientists’ views about the epistemological status of theories and models typically interact with their scientific results. Subsequently, the implications of this result for the current realism debate are analysed. The case study supports Giere’s moderately realist view of scientific models and theories, based (...) on the notion of similarity, and it highlights the crucial role of model users. The paper concludes with a discussion of Boltzmann’s Bildtheorie, the sophisticated form of realism that he developed in response to the scientific problems of kinetic theory. (shrink)

International schools are growing rapidly with the number of students educated in them predicted to reach seven million by 2023. They are both diverse in themselves and exist in a diverse range of...

This article proposes the use of agent-based simulation to analyze complex design trade-offs that involve value tensions. This is illustrated by a case study in the domain of train traffic control. In this case, agent-based simulation supported the involvement of stakeholders and increased understanding of a design trade-off.

The 7725 letters of Hugo Grotius's correspondence of the years 1594 to 1645 reflect the highlights and drawbacks of an eventful career. Some important gradual developments and abiding features in the letters will be pointed out. In this way Grotius's political and scholarly activities can be analysed from the perspective of the correspondence.

Žižek’s intellectual endeavor aims at relocating political subjectivity as the foundation of communal life. As a Leninist he anchors the possibility of a revolution in Heidegger’s ‘decisionism’ and in the practice of St Paul,whose conversion is the bottom line of a revolutionary attitude. Current consumerism avoids this subject and in that sense a-voids or empties subjectivity. The revolutionary subject is the very act of affirmatively a-voiding one's current ethical system in order to radically change the coordinates of the system.

In this article, we report on eight grand challenges for value sensitive design, which were developed at a one-week workshop, Value Sensitive Design: Charting the Next Decade, Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, November 14–18, 2016. A grand challenge is a substantial problem, opportunity, or question that motives sustained research and design activity. The eight grand challenges are: Accounting for Power, Evaluating Value Sensitive Design, Framing and Prioritizing Values, Professional and Industry Appropriation, Tech policy, Values and Human Emotions, Value Sensitive Design (...) and Intelligent Algorithms, and Value Tensions. Each grand challenge consists of a discussion of its importance and a set of tractable key questions. (shrink)

Achieving understanding of nature is one of the aims of science. In this paper we offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with actual scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. Our analysis provides a general account of (...) how understanding is provided by scientific explanations of diverse types. In this way, it reconciles conflicting views of explanatory understanding, such as the causal-mechanical and the unificationist conceptions. (shrink)

A λ-theory T is a consistent set of equations between λ-terms closed under derivability. The degree of T is the degree of the set of Godel numbers of its elements. H is the $\lamda$ -theory axiomatized by the set {M = N ∣ M, N unsolvable. A $\lamda$ -theory is sensible $\operatorname{iff} T \supset \mathscr{H}$ , for a motivation see [6] and [4]. In § it is proved that the theory H is ∑ 0 2 -complete. We present Wadsworth's proof (...) that its unique maximal consistent extention $\mathscr{H}^\ast (= \mathrm{T}(D_\infty))$ is Π 0 2 -complete. In $\S2$ it is proved that $\mathscr{H}_\eta(= \lambda_\eta-\text{Calculus} + \mathscr{H})$ is not closed under the ω-rule (see [1]). In $\S3$ arguments are given to conjecture that $\mathscr{H}\omega (= \lambda + \mathscr{H} + omega-rule)$ is Π 1 1 -complete. This is done by representing recursive sets of sequence numbers as λ-terms and by connecting wellfoundedness of trees with provability in Hω. In $\S4$ an infinite set of equations independent over H η will be constructed. From this it follows that there are 2^{ℵ_0 sensible theories T such that $\mathscr{H} \subset T \subset \mathscr{H}^\ast$ and 2 ℵ 0 sensible hard models of arbitrarily high degrees. In $\S5$ some nonprovability results needed in $\S\S1$ and 2 are established. For this purpose one uses the theory H η extended with a reduction relation for which the Church-Rosser theorem holds. The concept of Gross reduction is used in order to show that certain terms have no common reduct. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the turn to polytheism in postmodern theory. In postmodernism, there is a strong interest in polytheism as an alternative to the much-criticized dominance of onto-theology in the philosophical tradition. The article argues that the new polytheism cannot be unequivocally understood as an alternative for an onto-theological way of thinking, or as a ‘liberation’ from monotheism. Already in Romanticism, the engagement with polytheism and paganism was ambiguous. There was the familiar superiority of Christian monotheism over polytheism. But there (...) was also an appropriation of polytheism that served a new self-perception of the West. This article focuses on this second line of interpretation and argues that postmodern theory inherits the theo-political concerns central to eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Romanticism. The article sets out to sketch the role of polytheism in a post-secular paradigm. Subsequently, it sketches the engagement with polytheism in British and German Romanticism. It will be argued that in Romanticism, polytheism was always embedded in more substantial cultural and political narratives. The remainder of the article will scrutinize the function of polytheism in the writings of Richard Rorty and John Milbank and how their respective forms of polytheism give way to different political theologies. (shrink)