In natural kind debates, Boyd's famous Homeostatic Property Cluster theory (HPC) is often misconstrued in two ways: Not only is it thought to make for a normative standard for natural kinds, but also to require the homeostatic mechanisms underlying nomological property clusters to be uniform. My argument for the illegitimacy of both overgeneralizations, both on systematic as well as exegetical grounds, is based on the misconstrued view's failure to account for functional kinds in science. I illustrate the combination of these (...) two misconstruals with recent entries into the natural kind debate about emotions. Finally, I examine and reject Stich's "Kornblith-Devitt method" as a potential justification of these misconstruals. (shrink)

Intentional Mentalism is the view that mental intentionality is primary to non-mental intentionality and that the latter is derived from the former. In this article I examine three views which have been taken to motivate Intentional Mentalism: conventionalism as invoked by Searle, Gricean pragmatism, and the language of thought hypothesis. I argue that none of these views motivates Intentional Mentalism, and that, in fact, the former two imply its rejection.

According to a classic position in analytic philosophy of mind, we must interpret agents as largely rational in order to be able to attribute intentional mental states to them. However, adopting this position requires clarifying in what way and by which criteria agents can still be irrational. In this paper I will offer one such criterion. More specifically, I argue that the kind of rationality methodologically required by intentional interpretation is to be specified in terms of psychological efficacy. Thereby, this (...) notion can be distinguished from a more commonly used notion of rationality and hence cannot be shown to be undermined by the potential prevalence of a corresponding kind of irrationality. (shrink)

Can scientific evidence prompt us to revise philosophical theories or folk theoretical accounts of phenomena of the mind? We will argue that it can—but only under the condition that they make a so-called ‘ontological commitment’ to something that is actually subject to empirical inquiry. In other words, scientific evidence pertaining to neuroanatomical structure or causal processes only has a refuting effect if philosophical theories and folk notions subscribe to either account. We will illustrate the importance of ‘ontological commitment’ with the (...) ‘neuroanatomical approach’ to amusement as proposed in a recent paper by Palencik :419–434, 2007). We will show that the scientific evidence presented in said neuroanatomical approach has no bearing on the conceptual issues, in that the philosophical theories and folk distinction that are criticized do not subscribe to any account of the underlying neuroanatomical structure or causal processes. Our suggestions in this paper are not limited to philosophical accounts of humor but apply to the relationship of philosophy, common sense and science in general. (shrink)

Studie over het werk van de Duitse wijsgeer (1762-1814), met een beknopte levensbeschrijving.

In this paper I will analyze and criticize Linsbichler’s recent proposition to interpret the fundamental axiom of Praxeology as analytic. I will first describe Linsbichler’s problem situation. I will then describe and criticize Linsbichler’s proposed solution to his problem; namely his interpretation of the fundamental axiom as analytic. I will argue that this idea does not fully utilize critical potentials that are available to improve the fundamental axiom. I will propose an alternative interpretation which I call the ‘critical interpretation’ that (...) conserves the progressive aspects of Linsbichler’s proposal while eliminating undesirable ones. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

In this paper I will discuss the problem of evaluating dynamic properties of the procedural rules that govern science. I will propose a novel framework for evaluating dynamic properties of such rules. This framework is based upon an analogy from New Institutional Economics. I will argue that the concept of ‘adaptive efficiency’, as it has been developed by Douglass North, solves a problem in economics that is analogous to the problem of evaluating dynamic properties of the procedural rules that govern (...) science. I will propose to apply the main ideas underlying this concept to Chrysostomos Mantzavinos’s theory of Explanatory Games. Based on these ideas, I will develop the concept of ‘explanatory efficiency’. This concept is meant to provide the means to evaluate the dynamic properties of Explanatory Games. I will argue that the proposed analogy also motivates more general applications of New Institutional Economics to traditional problems of philosophy of science. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell in his essay On Denoting [1905] presented a theory of description developed in response to the one proposed by Gottlob Frege in his paper Über Sinn und Bedeutung [1892]. The aim of our work will be to show that Russell underestimated Frege three times over in presenting the latter’s work: in relation to the Gray’s Elegy argument, to the Ferdinand argument, and to puzzles discussed by Russell. First, we will discuss two claims of Russell’s which do not do (...) justice to Frege: that we speak of a sense by means of quotation marks, and that all Frege does to cope with phrases that might denote nothing is define an arbitrary object as their reference. Second, we will show that Russell omitted the fact that Frege’s theory provided some answers for the puzzles presented by Russell in his essay. (shrink)

This paper reports research on the influence of corporate and individual characteristics on managers'' social orientation in Germany. The results indicate that mid-level managers expressed a significantly lower social orientation than low-level managers, and that job activity did not impact social orientation. Female respondents expressed a higher social orientation than male respondents. No impact of the political system origin (former East Germany versus former West Germany) on social orientation was shown. Overall, corporate position had a significantly higher impact on social (...) orientation than did the characteristics of the individuals surveyed. (shrink)

Forthcoming guide with brief introductions on methods in analytic philosophy by experts on the relevant topics. With sections on: formal methods, argumentation, inferential methods, thought experiments, intuition, ordinary language philosophy, conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering, naturalism, analytic feminism, experimental philosophy, and progress and disagreement in philosophy.

In this paper I offer an analysis, reconstruction and defense of Locke's account of personal identity. I begin with a detailed analysis of Locke's use of the term 'conscious' in its historical context. This term, which plays a central role in Locke's theory, had senses in the seventeenth century which it does not have today. In the light of this analysis, an interpretation of continuity of consciousness as the ancestral of memory is given. It is argued that this interpretation of (...) Locke's theory of personal identity does not involve an ontological commitment to immaterial substances, and Locke is defended against the historically important criticisms of Butler and Reid. In the conclusion I suggest that the account of the individuation of persons implicit in Locke's discussion of personal identity is similar to the account of contextual individuation given by Hintikka. (shrink)

Mémoire de Mons. Lange contre cette philosophie -- Réponse préliminaire d'un auteur anonimeà ce mémoire -- Sommaire de la réponse de Mr. Wolf mȩme avec un avis au lecteur de l'histoire de ce nouveau différend.

'Philosophische Anthropologie' meint in dieser Studie nicht eine philosophische Subdisziplin, sondern eine besondere Theorierichtung in der deutschsprachigen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Namen Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Erich Rothacker, Arnold Gehlen, Adolf Portmann u.v.a. mehr verbunden ist. Der erste Teil erzählt die verwickelte, teils abenteuerliche Entstehungs-, Aufstiegs- und Entfaltungsgeschichte dieser Denkergruppe von 1919 bis 1975 - einschließlich ihrer beachtlichen Wirkungsgeschichte in verschiedenen Disziplinen wie der Soziologie, Psychologie, Biologie und der Philosophie selbst. Im zweiten Teil wird der philosophische Identitätskern (...) dieser Philosophischen Anthropologie als Denkansatz präzisiert. (shrink)

In this paper, I am going to offer a reconstruction of a challenge to intuition-based armchair philosophy that has been put forward by experimental philosophers of a restrictionist stripe, which I will call the 'master argument'. I will then discuss a number of popular objections to this argument and explain why they either fail to cast doubt on its first, empirical premise or do not go deep enough to make for a lasting rebuttal. Next, I will consider two more promising (...) objections, the grounding objection and the expertise objection, which aim at the second, epistemic premise of the argument. Against this background, I will then suggest what I call 'conservative restrictionism' as the most reasonable default reaction to the experimentalist challenge, which is a combination of the two views of local restrictionism and methodological conservativism. (shrink)

In this paper, we first briefly survey the main responses to the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to the method of cases, given the common assumption that the latter is crucially based on intuitive judgments about cases. Second, we discuss two of the most popular responses in more detail: the expertise defense and the mischaracterization objection. Our take on the expertise defense is that the available empirical data do not support the claim that professional philosophers enjoy relevant expertise in their (...) intuitive judgments about cases. In contrast, the mischaracterization objection seems considerably more promising than its largely negative reception has suggested. We argue that the burden of proof is thus on philosophers who still hold that the method of cases crucially relies on intuitive judgments about cases. Finally, we discuss whether conceptual engineering provides an alternative to the method of cases in light of the challenge from experimental philosophy. We argue that this is not clearly the case, because conceptual engineering also requires descriptive information about the concepts it aims to improve. However, its primarily normative perspective on our concepts makes it largely orthogonal to the challenge from experimental philosophy, and it can also benefit from the empirical methods of the latter. (shrink)

The extent to which machine metaphors are used in synthetic biology is striking. These metaphors contain a specific perspective on organisms as well as on scientific and technological progress. Expressions such as “genetically engineered machine”, “genetic circuit”, and “platform organism”, taken from the realms of electronic engineering, car manufacturing, and information technology, highlight specific aspects of the functioning of living beings while at the same time hiding others, such as evolutionary change and interdependencies in ecosystems. Since these latter aspects are (...) relevant for, for example, risk evaluation of uncontained uses of synthetic organisms, it is ethically imperative to resist the thrust of machine metaphors in this respect. In addition, from the perspective of the machine metaphor viewing an entity as a moral agent or patient becomes dubious. If one were to regard living beings, including humans, as machines, it becomes difficult to justify ascriptions of moral status. Finally, the machine metaphor reinforces beliefs in the potential of synthetic biology to play a decisive role in solving societal problems, and downplays the role of alternative technological, and social and political measures. (shrink)

'Philosophische Anthropologie' meint in dieser Studie nicht eine philosophische Subdisziplin, sondern eine besondere Theorierichtung in der deutschsprachigen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, die mit den Namen Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Erich Rothacker, Arnold Gehlen, Adolf Portmann u.v.a. mehr verbunden ist. Der erste Teil erzählt die verwickelte, teils abenteuerliche Entstehungs-, Aufstiegs- und Entfaltungsgeschichte dieser Denkergruppe von 1919 bis 1975 - einschließlich ihrer beachtlichen Wirkungsgeschichte in verschiedenen Disziplinen wie der Soziologie, Psychologie, Biologie und der Philosophie selbst. Im zweiten Teil wird der philosophische Identitätskern (...) dieser Philosophischen Anthropologie als Denkansatz präzisiert. (shrink)

Algorithmic predictions are promising for insurance companies to develop personalized risk models for determining premiums. In this context, issues of fairness, discrimination, and social injustice might arise: Algorithms for estimating the risk based on personal data may be biased towards specific social groups, leading to systematic disadvantages for those groups. Personalized premiums may thus lead to discrimination and social injustice. It is well known from many application fields that such biases occur frequently and naturally when prediction models are applied to (...) people unless special efforts are made to avoid them. Insurance is no exception. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of algorithmic fairness in the case of insurance premiums. We ask what “fairness” might mean in this context and how the fairness of a premium system can be measured. For this, we apply the established fairness frameworks of the fair machine learning literature to the case of insurance premiums and show which of the existing fairness criteria can be applied to assess the fairness of insurance premiums. We argue that two of the often-discussed group fairness criteria, independence (also called statistical parity or demographic parity) and separation (also known as equalized odds), are not normatively appropriate for insurance premiums. Instead, we propose the sufficiency criterion (also known as well-calibration) as a morally defensible alternative that allows us to test for systematic biases in premiums towards certain groups based on the risk they bring to the pool. In addition, we clarify the connection between group fairness and different degrees of personalization. Our findings enable insurers to assess the fairness properties of their risk models, helping them avoid reputation damage resulting from potentially unfair and discriminatory premium systems. (shrink)

“Philosophical Anthropology,” which is reconstructed here, does not deal with anthropology as a philosophical subdiscipline but rather as a particular philosophical approach within twentieth-century German philosophy, connected with thinkers such as Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen. This paper attempts a more precise description of the core identity of Philosophical Anthropology as a paradigm, observes the differences between the authors within the paradigm, and differentiates the paradigm as a whole from other twentieth-century philosophical approaches, such as transcendental philosophy, evolutionary (...) theory or naturalism, existentialism, and hermeneutic philosophy. In determining the human being as “excentric positionality,” Philosophical Anthropology arrives at unique categorical intertwinings between the biological, social and cultural sciences. (shrink)

Although there is a consensus among philosophers of mathematics and mathematicians that mathematical explanations exist, only a few authors have proposed accounts of explanation in mathematics. These accounts fit into the unificationist or top-down approach to explanation. We argue that these models can be complemented by a bottom-up approach to explanation in mathematics. We introduce the mechanistic model of explanation in science and discuss the possibility of using this model in mathematics, arguing that using it does not presuppose a Platonist (...) view of mathematics and allows one to gain insight into why a theorem is true by answering what-if-things-had-been-different questions. (shrink)

What are consequential world problems? As “grand societal challenges”, one might define them as problems that affect a large number of people, perhaps even the entire planet, including problems such as climate change, distributive justice, world peace, world nutrition, clean air and clean water, access to education, and many more. The “Sustainable Development Goals”, compiled by the United Nations, represent a collection of such global problems. From my point of view, these problems can be seen as complex. Such complex problems (...) are characterized by the complexity, connectivity, dynamics, intransparency, and polytely of their underlying systems. These attributes require special competencies for dealing with the uncertainties of the given domains, e.g., critical thinking. My position is that it is not IQ, but complex problem-solving competencies for dealing with complex and dynamic situations, that is important for handling consequential global problems. These problems require system competencies, i.e., competencies that go beyond analytical intelligence, and comprise systems understanding as well as systems control. Complex problem-solving is more than analytic intelligence. (shrink)

The notion of the highest good used to occupy a primary role in ethical theorising, but has largely disappeared from the contemporary landscape. The notion was central to both Aristotle's and Kant's ethical theories, however--a surprising observation given that their approaches to ethics are commonly conceived as being diametrically opposed. The essays in this collection provide a comprehensive treatment of the highest good in Aristotle and Kant and show that, even though there are important differences in terms of content, there (...) are also important similarities in terms of the structural features of Aristotle's and Kant's value theories. By carefully analysing Aristotle's and Kant's theories of the highest good, a team of experts in the field shed light on their respective ethical theories and highlight the richness, complexity, and fruitfulness of the notion of the highest good. (shrink)

BackgroundHealthcare is permeated by phenomena of vulnerability and their ethical significance. Nonetheless, application of this concept in healthcare ethics today is largely confined to clinical research. Approaches that further elaborate the concept in order to make it suitable for healthcare as a whole thus deserve renewed attention.MethodsConceptual analysis.ResultsTaking up the task to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole involves two challenges. Firstly, starting from the concept as it used in research ethics, a more detailed (...) characterization and systematization of the different realms of human abilities and the various ways in which these realms contain vulnerability is to be established. Secondly, at the same time, the sought-after concept of vulnerability should avoid picturing the relation between healthcare recipient and provider as a relation between a dependent individual in need and another individual capable of providing all the help necessary. An adequate concept of vulnerability should enable one to understand when and in which respects care providers may be vulnerable as well. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to meet both of these challenges.ConclusionsPhilosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole. They come with a price, though. While the ethical role of vulnerability in medical ethics usually is to signify states of affairs that are to be diminished or overcome, philosophical accounts introduce forms of vulnerability that are regarded as valuable. Further analyzing and systematizing forms and degrees of vulnerability thus comprises the task to distinguish between amounts and types of vulnerability that can count as valuable, and amounts and types of vulnerability that are to be alleviated. (shrink)

Healthcare is permeated by phenomena of vulnerability and their ethical significance. Nonetheless, application of this concept in healthcare ethics today is largely confined to clinical research. Approaches that further elaborate the concept in order to make it suitable for healthcare as a whole thus deserve renewed attention. Conceptual analysis. Taking up the task to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole involves two challenges. Firstly, starting from the concept as it used in research ethics, a (...) more detailed characterization and systematization of the different realms of human abilities and the various ways in which these realms contain vulnerability is to be established. Secondly, at the same time, the sought-after concept of vulnerability should avoid picturing the relation between healthcare recipient and provider as a relation between a dependent individual in need and another individual capable of providing all the help necessary. An adequate concept of vulnerability should enable one to understand when and in which respects care providers may be vulnerable as well. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to meet both of these challenges. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole. They come with a price, though. While the ethical role of vulnerability in medical ethics usually is to signify states of affairs that are to be diminished or overcome, philosophical accounts introduce forms of vulnerability that are regarded as valuable. Further analyzing and systematizing forms and degrees of vulnerability thus comprises the task to distinguish between amounts and types of vulnerability that can count as valuable, and amounts and types of vulnerability that are to be alleviated. (shrink)

The present article asks what lessons the empirical case of institutional change in post-Soviet Russia yields for the recent research on ideas and institutions. Its main point is that in post-Soviet Russia a clash between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic background ideas led to an ideational division among the elite of the country that became a main obstacle to the provision of coherent economic reforms. This story stands in some contrast to much of the newer literature on ideas and (...) institutions, which tends to see critical junctures as leading from one equilibrium to another. I argue that tensions between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic backgrounds are likely to occur in other cases of far-reaching processes of institutional change based on Western ideas but taking place beyond the realm of Western, industrialized countries. Therefore, I argue, some general lessons on the interplay between ideas and institutions might be drawn from this case study. (shrink)

Functioning markets require a state that will enforce property rights; contracts mediated by money; and the prevalence of a certain type of morality that prevents people from cheating in complex exchange relationships. Monetary exchange abstracts from the personal loyalties that bind small groups together, but at the same time it creates an overarching commitment to norms that bind people more loosely in national societies—as long as monetary exchanges are enforced by the state. In the Soviet Union, conversely, the abolition of (...) money as a universal medium of exchange led both to a deterioration of the norms of impersonal morality and to a loss of state capacity. The state lost control of the economy to informal, personally binding economic networks, and it lost its monopoly on violence in competition with sub-state, personal enforcers of impersonal economic commitments between these networks. Thus, capitalism can be seen as diverting people from norms of loyalty to the members of the relatively small groups of which they are a part toward loyalty to the abstract norms that make it possible for anonymous people to deal with each other reliably. (shrink)

Functioning markets require a state that will enforce property rights; contracts mediated by money; and the prevalence of a certain type of morality that prevents people from cheating in complex exchange relationships. Monetary exchange abstracts from the personal loyalties that bind small groups together, but at the same time it creates an overarching commitment to norms that bind people more loosely in national societies—as long as monetary exchanges are enforced by the state. In the Soviet Union, conversely, the abolition of (...) money as a universal medium of exchange led both to a deterioration of the norms of impersonal morality and to a loss of state capacity. The state lost control of the economy to informal, personally binding economic networks, and it lost its monopoly on violence in competition with sub-state, personal enforcers of impersonal economic commitments between these networks. Thus, capitalism can be seen as diverting people from norms of loyalty to the members of the relatively small groups of which they are a part toward loyalty to the abstract norms that make it possible for anonymous people to deal with each other reliably. (shrink)

Two crucial questions, if unanswered, impede our understanding of Aristotle’s account of pleasure inenx.4-5: What are the activities that pleasure is said to complete? In virtue of what does pleasurealwaysaccompany these activities? The answers fall in place if we read Aristotle as responding to the Delian challenge that the finest, best and most pleasant are not united in one and the same thing. I propose an ‘ethical’ reading ofenx.4 according to which the best activities in question are those integral to (...) the exercise of virtue. (shrink)