Max Bense gilt als Vorreiter der Computerkunst und der Technikphilosophie und war ein engagierter Förderer von Kunst und Literatur, Promotor interdisziplinären Denkens und politischer Provokateur. Häufig ist es bei der Auseinandersetzung mit Bense jedoch bei diesen Etikettierungen geblieben. Der Sammelband nimmt daher eine konzertierte Neuaufnahme der Diskussion von Max Benses Arbeiten aus literaturwissenschaftlicher, philosophie- und wissenschaftshistorischer sowie aus medien- und ästhetiktheoretischer Perspektive vor. Er versammelt Beiträge zu Themenkomplexen wie der Semiotik, Technikphilosophie, experimentellen Poesie und Ästhetiktheorie, zu Benses lokalen und internationalen (...) Kontakten und Netzwerken sowie zu seinem publizistischen Verhalten im Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit. (shrink)

Gender ideology has quickly developed as a response to fostering human rights, especially in the case of gender equality. Gender policy thus became a political and ideological instrument that subjects human rights to another contest – a new form of crusade pursued by anti-gender movements which advocate traditional and conservative ideologies against gender equality and gender theories. In this paper, we seek to track and map the recent development of anti-gender movements and their mobilisation. We apply critical discourse analysis to (...) several doctrines of antigenderism in order to understand the global popularity and mass appeal of these movements. (shrink)

This book argues for the real possibility of an amelioration of an individual's life within the parameters of available resources, against all odds, or rather in spite of the odds, and against unfavorable economic and political conditions.

This book shows how much and in what sense values are related to powers and powers are related to values in American pragmatism. The proposed re-reading of American pragmatism will facilitate a novel understanding of it as a philosophical movement and, by showing its truly humanistic, democratic, and pro-social character, the stronger impetus for current rethinking of values is being provided.

Renewing the deontology tradition of moral obligation requires, especially in relation to catastrophe and disaster, a broader methodological perspective which would enable deontology to transcend its own limits. The demand for pluralistic research approaches brings with challenging requirements that have to be considered when shaping a hybrid moral theory that incorporates a proactive approach. The personalist approach to the individual, based on the principles of integrity, responsibility and solidarity and seeking the wellbeing of a person, may prove inspirational in shaping (...) such a proactive approach. (shrink)

Current debates in food aesthetics are moving away from a focus on whether food is art, and worries about the subjectivity and objectivity of taste, and towards questions about food's aesthetic properties, the cultural and social significance of food, our modes of aesthetic engagement with food, and issues involving cultural appropriation and the authenticity of dishes.

A standard view in philosophy is that knowledge entails justification. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. We argue that this admirable and striking research suffers from an important limitation: participants were asked about knowledge but not justification. Thus it is possible that people attributed knowledge partly because they thought the belief was justified. Perhaps though, if given the opportunity, people would deny justification while still attributing knowledge. It is also possible that earlier findings were due to perspective taking. This paper reports (...) further research that directly addresses these questions. Our findings support the hypothesis that knowledge entails justification on the ordinary view. (shrink)

Although self‐testing apps, a form of mobile health (mHealth) apps, are often marketed as empowering, it is not obvious how exactly they can empower their users—and in which sense of the word. In this article, I discuss two conceptualisations of empowerment as polar opposites—one in health promotion/mHealth and one in feminist theory—and demonstrate how both their applications to individually used self‐testing apps run into problems. The first, prevalent in health promotion and mHealth, focuses on internal states and understands empowerment as (...) an individual process. However, this version of empowerment has been accused of paternalism and responsibilisation. The second, feminist version considers structural conditions and foregrounds collective, political change, whose realisation is not obviously attainable for an individually used app. By pointing out the flaws of the positions that focus on either internal states or external conditions, and by engaging with theory from critical phenomenology, I argue that the interplay between them is where empowerment can take place. I propose to formulate empowerment in phenomenological terms as a shift in being‐in‐the‐world and discuss how this conceptualisation of empowerment would avoid the criticism of previous empowerment narratives while being realisable by self‐testing apps. (shrink)

Wie bedeutsam ist die Unterscheidung zwischen den Philosophien von Leibniz und Wolff? Was hat Leibniz' China-Bild fur Folgen? Welchen Einfluss hatte die Theodizee-Rezeption auf die Ubersetzung der Wertheimer Bibel?

Die Leibniz-Rezeption ist vielfaltig, komplex, schwer uberschaubar; spezielle Untersuchungen eher selten. Dabei gibt es zahlreiche Fragen, deren Beantwortung fur die Philosophie- und Religionsgeschichte interessant ist: Welche Rolle spielte Leibniz als Vermittler zwischen den christlichen Konfessionen? Wie bedeutsam ist die Unterscheidung zwischen den Philosophien von Leibniz und Wolff? Was hat Leibniz' China-Bild fur Folgen? Welchen Einfluss hatte die Theodizee-Rezeption auf die Ubersetzung der Wertheimer Bibel? Was trug zur Popularisierung, was zur Banalisierung Leibnizens bei, wie wurden philosophische Sprache und die deutsche Klassik (...) durch ihn gepragt? Inwieweit hat Kant Leibniz' Philosophie missverstanden? Welche Wirkung hat Leibniz' Metaphysik auf Schelling und Krause? Wie gut kann Schopenhauer seine pessimistische Weltsicht gegen Leibniz rechtfertigen? Wie urteilt Feuerbach uber Leibniz? Renommierte Leibniz- und Idealismus-Forscher haben sich getroffen, um diesen und anderen spannenden Fragen nachzugehen. Entstanden ist ein wertvoller Einblick in das breite Spektrum der Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte der Philosophie von G.W. Leibniz im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. (shrink)

In the present paper an interpretation of the political dimension of pragmatic aesthetic reflection is proposed. The interconnection between politics and aesthetics in three classic American pragmatists: William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is evoked. The author claims that by emphasizing the role of democratic values in philosophy and life, the classic American pragmatists encroach upon the field of the arts and aesthetics. Their emphasis put upon individual activity, free expression of thoughts, plurality of the (...) forms of expression, and acceptance of criticism as a tool helping create better solutions in human cooperation can easily be converted into the postulates about the character of the artistic principles and of the nature of the aesthetic norms and values. (shrink)

In the present paper, the author looks at the political dimension of some trends in the visual arts within twentieth-century avant-garde groups (cubism, expressionism, fauvism, Dada, abstractionism, surrealism) through George Santayana’s idea of vital liberty. Santayana accused the avant-gardists of social and political escapism, and of becoming unintentionally involved in secondary issues. In his view, the emphasis they placed on the medium (or diverse media) and on treating it as an aim in itself, not, as it should be, as a (...) transmitter through which a stimulating relationship with the environment can be had, was accompanied by a focus on fragments of life and on parts of existence, and, on the other hand, by a de facto rejection of ontology and cosmology as being crucial to understanding life and the place of human beings in the universe. The avant-gardists became involved in political life by responding excessively to the events of the time, instead of to the everlasting problems that are the human lot. (shrink)

John Lachs has been one of the most interesting American philosophers for nearly sixty years. His philosophical, educational, and public activity has been an attempt to show the relevance of philosophy to life. This is the first book dedicated to his thought.

According to a consensus view in philosophy, “deciding” and “intending” are synonymous expressions. Researchers have recently challenged this view with the discovery of a counterexample in which ordinary speakers attribute deciding without intending. The aim of this paper is to investigate the strengths and limits of this discovery. The result of this investigation revealed that the evidence challenging the consensus view is strong. We replicate the initial finding against consensus and extend it by utilizing several new measures, materials, and procedures. (...) Together this evidence strongly suggests that “deciding” is not synonymous with “intending” in ordinary language and that the consensus view should be rejected. (shrink)

A professora Pórcia Guimarães Alves teve formação educacional diferenciada e, concluindo o ensino superior, continuou sua formação com cursos e encontros científicos no Brasil e em outros países. Durante as viagens, trocava missivas com seus familiares, que foram mantidas em arquivo pessoal em plástico denominado “Cartas enviadas ao meu pai”. Procurou-se analisar: qual a escrita de si de Pórcia contida nas cartas trocadas com seus familiares entre 1946 e 1958? Listaram-se os objetivos específicos: mapear os familiares mencionados nas cartas; analisar (...) a materialidade do suporte epistolar procurando aspectos subjetivos em seus registros autobiográficos; e identificar temas narrados nessa escrita. (shrink)

The book presents five philosophical and axiological studies devoted to the relationship between aesthetics and politics. It shows this relationship throughout the works of some avant-gardists, pragmatists, and postmodernists. It is also a voice in the discussion about the meaning of the fine arts and aesthetics in the context of the political aims and norms. This voice claims that the political dimension of art and aesthetics should be studied much more seriously than it has been till today, and needs more (...) courageous re-interpretations and re-readings. (shrink)

_Practicing Philosophy as Experiencing Life: Essays on American Pragmatism_ is a collection of essays by top international experts on American philosophy who study pragmatism in the context of a philosophy of life.

The article argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgement. We suspend judgement not only privatively, that is, because we lack evidence, but also positively, that is, because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgement: suspension is more than the rational fallback position in cases of insufficient evidence. The article applies the distinction to recent discussions about the role of suspension for inquiry, Turri's puzzle about withholding, and formal representations of suspension.

This volume is composed of extended versions of selected papers presented at an international conference held in June 2011 at Opole University—the seventh in a series of annual American and European Values conferences organized by the Institute of Philosophy, Opole University, Poland. The papers were written independently with no prior guidelines other than the obvious need to address some aspect of George Herbert Mead’s work. While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context (...) in which that work was carried out, these papers have brought that work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy. There is good reason to classify Mead as one of the original classical American pragmatists (along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey) and consequently as a major figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his thought has been marginalized for the most part, at least in academic philosophy. It is our intention to help recuperate Mead’s reputation among a broader audience by providing a small corpus of significant contemporary scholarship on some key aspects of his thought. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an account of the wrong that is done to women when everyday people fail to believe allegations of sexual assault made by women. I argue that an everyday person wrongs both the accuser and women causally distant from the accuser when they fail to believe the accuser’s allegation. First, I argue that there are responses that we, as everyday members of society, owe to victims of sexual assault. A condition enabling everyday people to respond in (...) the way owed to victims is that they have an outright belief that the accuser was assaulted. Actively suspending judgement about whether a crime occurred is in tension with the ability to respond to the victim in a way that supports and validates them. When an everyday person fails to have an outright belief in the truth of an allegation, they wrong the accuser because they risk failing to satisfy the conditions enabling them to fulfill their obligation to her. Second, I argue that everyday people wrong women who are causally distant from the accuser because in our social context, women are often treated in particular ways – especially in the sexual domain – because they are women. As a result, when women hear that an everyday person fails to believe a particular allegation, they easily project themselves into the accuser’s position and reasonably worry that if they were to be assaulted, they too would be met with doubt and disbelief by the people in their community. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a systematic classification of emotions which can also characterize their nature. The first challenge we address is the submission of clear criteria for a theory of emotions that determine which mental phenomena are emotions and which are not. We suggest that emotions as a subclass of mental states are determined by their functional roles. The second and main challenge is the presentation of a classification and theory of emotions that can account for (...) all existing varieties. We argue that we must classify emotions according to four developmental stages: 1. pre-emotions as unfocussed expressive emotion states, 2. basic emotions, 3. primary cognitive emotions, and 4. secondary cognitive emotions. We suggest four types of basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sadness) which are systematically differentiated into a diversity of more complex emotions during emotional development. The classification distinguishes between basic and non-basic emotions and our multi-factorial account considers cognitive, experiential, physiological and behavioral parameters as relevant for constituting an emotion. However, each emotion type is constituted by a typical pattern according to which some features may be more significant than others. Emotions differ strongly where these patterns of features are concerned, while their essential functional roles are the same. We argue that emotions form a unified ontological category that is coherent and can be well defined by their characteristic functional roles. Our account of emotions is supported by data from developmental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and sociology. (shrink)

Is there anything wrong with publishing philosophical work which one does not believe (publishing without belief, henceforth referred to as ‘PWB’)? I argue that there is not: the practice isn’t intrinsically wrong, nor is there a compelling consequentialist argument against it. Therefore, the philosophical community should neither proscribe nor sanction it. The paper proceeds as follows. First, I’ll clarify and motivate the problem, using both hypothetical examples and a recent real-world case. Next, I’ll look at arguments that there is something (...) wrong with PWB, and show that none is sound. Then, I’ll give some reasons for thinking a norm against PWB is detrimental to the profession. Do I believe these arguments? If I’m right, it shouldn’t matter. (shrink)

Previous research suggested a role of gaze in preference formation, not merely as an expression of preference, but also as a causal influence. According to the gaze cascade hypothesis, the longer subjects look at an item, the more likely they are to develop a preference for it. However, to date the connection between viewing and liking has been investigated predominately with self-paced viewing conditions in which the subjects were required to select certain items from simultaneously presented stimuli on the basis (...) of perceived visual attractiveness. Such conditions might promote a default, but non-mandatory connection between viewing and liking. To explore whether the connection is separable, we examined the evaluative processing of single naturalistic food images in a 2 x 2 design, conducted completely within subjects, in which we varied both the type of exposure (self-paced versus time-controlled) and the type of evaluation (non-exclusive versus exclusive). In the self-paced exclusive evaluation, longer viewing was associated with a higher likelihood of a positive evaluation. However, in the self-paced non-exclusive evaluation, the trend reversed such that longer viewing durations were associated with lesser ratings. Furthermore, in the time-controlled tasks, both with non-exclusive and exclusive evaluation, there was no significant relationship between the viewing duration and the evaluation. The overall pattern of results was consistent for viewing times measured in terms of exposure duration (i.e., the duration of stimulus presentation on the screen) and in terms of actual gaze duration (i.e., the amount of time the subject effectively gazed at the stimulus on the screen). The data indicated that viewing does not intrinsically lead to a higher evaluation when evaluating single food images; instead, the relationship between viewing duration and evaluation depends on the type of task. We suggest that self-determination of exposure duration may be a prerequisite for any influence from viewing time on evaluative processing, regardless of whether the influence is facilitative. Moreover, the purported facilitative link between viewing and liking appears to be limited to exclusive evaluation, when only a restricted number of items can be included in a chosen set. (shrink)

Empowerment, an already central concept in public health, has gained additional relevance through the expansion of mobile health (mHealth). Especially direct-to-consumer self-testing app companies mobilise the term to advertise their products, which allow users to self-test for various medical conditions independent of healthcare professionals. This article first demonstrates the absence of empowerment conceptualisations in the context of self-testing apps by engaging with empowerment literature. It then contrasts the service these apps provide with two widely cited empowerment definitions by the WHO, (...) which describe the term as a process that, broadly, leads to knowledge and control of health decisions. We conclude that self-testing apps can only partly empower their users, as they, we argue, do not provide the type of knowledge and control the WHO definitions describe. More importantly, we observe that this shortcoming stems from the fact that in the literature on mHealth and in self-testing marketing, empowerment is understood as a goal rather than a process. This characterises a shift in the meaning of empowerment in the context of self-testing and mHealth, one that reveals a lack of awareness for relational and contextual factors that contribute to empowerment. We argue that returning to a process-understanding of empowerment helps to identify these apps’ deficits, and we conclude the article by briefly suggesting several strategies to increase self-testing apps’ empowerment function. (shrink)

Recent empirical studies have established that disgust plays a role in moral judgment. The normative significance of this discovery remains an object of philosophical contention, however; ‘disgust skeptics’ such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that disgust is a distorting influence on moral judgment and has no legitimate role to play in assessments of moral wrongness. I argue, pace Nussbaum, that disgust’s role in the moral domain parallels its role in the physical domain. Just as physical disgust tracks physical contamination and (...) pollution, so moral disgust tracks social contamination. I begin by examining the arguments for skepticism about disgust and show that these arguments threaten to overgeneralize and lead to a widespread skepticism about the justifiability of our moral judgments. I then look at the positive arguments for according disgust a role in moral judgment, and suggest that disgust tracks invisible social contagions in much the same way as it tracks invisible physical contagions, thereby serving as a defense against the threat of socio-moral contamination. (shrink)

Theories in both contemporary psychotherapy and ancient philosophy associate deprivation with wrongdoing and suffering, but operate with different understandings of deprivation. The article will focus on two concepts of deprivation, one psychological and the other one ontological, as advanced by Bowlby in attachment theory, and Augustine of Hippo. In attachment theory deprivation is something one suffers as a result of the others’ actions ; it has neuropsychological effects, it relates to violent behaviour later in life, and it is therapeutically treated (...) mainly by emotional sensory work directed at attaining self-regulation. Understanding deprivation as Augustine does introduces a distinctive philosophical view on formation and can inform a type of reflective-behavioural work centred on forming impaired volitional and emotional capacities, and on reclaiming agency and responsibility both for what can be called self-deprivation and for ways to counter deprivation in offenders and victims. (shrink)

Self-transcendence has been characterized as a decrease in self-saliency (ego disillusionment) and increased connection, and has been growing in research interest in the past decade. Several measures have been developed and published with some degree of psychometric validity and reliability. However, to date, there has been no review systematically describing, contrasting, and evaluating the different methodological approaches toward measuring self-transcendence including questionnaires, neurological and physiological measures, and qualitative methods. To address this gap, we conducted a review to describe existing methods (...) of measuring self-transcendence, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these methods, and discuss research avenues to advance assessment of self-transcendence, including recommendations for suitability of methods given research contexts. (shrink)

Regulatory agencies vary widely in their classification of FMT, with significant impact on patient access. This article conducts a global survey of national regulations and collates existing FMT classification statuses, ultimately suggesting that the human cell and tissue product designation best fits FMT's characteristics and that definitional objectives to that classification may be overcome.

Contrary to the contemporary view that negation is a logical operation that modifies the mere content of a thought or judgment, but not the act of thinking or judging it, Kant maintains that negation is an act of logical apperception through which I exclude a thought or judgment from what ‘I think.’ In this paper, I argue against two interpretations of Kant’s account of logical negation. According to the first, negation is a subjective psychological act of excluding an erroneous judgment. (...) Against this, I will show that for Kant, negation is an operation of logical, not empirical apperception. The second interpretation views logical negation as an objective representation either of a relation of opposition or of non-being. I argue that, on the contrary, the logical function of negation is merely formal, not material, and therefore does not have semantic content. The paper’s final section develops a positive conception of logical negation as a formal function of judging. (shrink)

This paper offers a defense of ‘publishing without belief’ (PWB) – the view that authors are not required to believe what they publish. I address objections to the view ranging from outright denial and advocacy of a belief norm for publication, to a modified version that allows for some cases of PWB but not others. I reject these modifications. In doing so, I offer both an alternative story about the motivations for PWB and a diagnosis of the disagreement over its (...) permissibility. The original defense focused on consequentialist reasons for allowing PWB, offering mostly defensive arguments against potential criticisms. But I argue that once we shift our focus to the reasons why authors might be prone to PWB, we see a difference in two types of motivation: whereas I imagine PWB as arising from underconfident agents, critics point to cagey or nefarious authorial practices, or authors’ failure to clarify their own degrees of belief. Underlying the debate over norms of philosophical publishing, we find two different conceptions of philosophy itself. (shrink)

The philosophical debate over disgust and its role in moral discourse has focused on disgust’s epistemic status: can disgust justify judgments of moral wrongness? Or is it misplaced in the moral domain—irrelevant at best, positively distorting at worst? Correspondingly, empirical research into disgust has focused on its role as a cause or amplifier of moral judgment, seeking to establish how and when disgust either causes us to morally condemn actions, or strengthens our pre-existing tendencies to condemn certain actions. Both of (...) these approaches to disgust are based on a set of assumptions that I call, in what follows, the evidential model of disgust. This paper proposes an alternative model, which I call the response model. Instead of looking at disgust as a cause and justification of judgments of moral wrongness, I will argue that disgust is better understood as a response to wrongness. More precisely, I argue that disgust is a response to norm violations, and that it is a fitting response insofar as norm violations are potentially contagious and therefore pose a threat to the stability and maintenance of norms. (shrink)

One striking observation in the history of rational choice models is that those models have not only been used in economics but spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. How do such model transfers proceed? By closely studying the early efforts to transfer such models by William Riker – a major protagonist in pushing the adoption of game theoretic models in political science – this article examines the transfer process as one of ‘translation’ by which abstract and mathematical rational (...) choice models were constructed and modified such that they applied to a specific target system in a new domain. In this paper, we argue that to overcome a set of challenges that hampered the straightforward transfer of game theoretic models into political science, Riker complemented theoretical and conceptual modifications of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s game schemes with the use of narratives to turn them into applicable and testable models. As such, those narratives played a crucial role in enabling their transfer and ultimately facilitated the applicability of game theoretic models in political science. (shrink)