The nature of architecture Building Architecture and Religion The sense of the past Following the example of antiquity.

"Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting."--BOOK JACKET.

At first sight, classical architecture, with its continuous revivals and reworking of the forms of Greek and Roman building, would appear to offer a privileged field in which to apply Warburg's central notion of the survival of classical forms and his view of art history's unfolding as a process of remembrance. Yet Warburg himself did not write on architecture. The topic has also largely vanished from the pages of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, though in the past (...) the journal has been the venue for influential publications on classical architecture. By comparing two Warburg circle publications from 1949 — Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower's British Art and the Mediterranean World and Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism — this article shows that architectural history of this kind, developed in the context of the Warburg Institute, is connected not only to Aby Warburg's ideas on Nachleben der Antike and Mnemosyne, but also to the organization and holdings of the Warburg Institute Library. Working in the Warburg Library gives architectural historians the intellectual space to think about architecture in terms of design issues, but moreover as an actor shaping society and culture. This article concludes that Warburg's thought offers important, and thus far hardly explored, starting points for new investigations of the built classical heritage. (shrink)

The display of artefacts always implies an external mediation that influences, and often codifies, the reception of the exhibits. Objects are manipulated, restored, appropriated, staged, in short displayed, through various representational strategies that include pedestals, labels, and showcases. These elements, that we could define as parerga, are often ignored because of their utilitarian function. Yet, they play an important role in the history of the artefacts and define the setting in which the objects can exert their agency. They not only (...) shape their meaning, but also determine the effect that these artefacts have on their viewers. Framing devices create the conditions for interactions between the individual and the object to take place. This publication aims to explore the relation between artefacts and viewers as they are manifested in framing devices, and to develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the power of objects on display. (shrink)

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a change in the perception of the arts and of philosophy. In the arts this transition occurred around 1800, with, for instance, the breakdown of Vitruvianism in architecture, while in philosophy the foundationalism of which Descartes and Spinoza were paradigmatic representatives, which presumed that philosophy and the sciences possessed a method of ensuring the demonstration of truths, was undermined by the idea, asserted by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, that there exist alternative styles of enquiry among (...) which a choice is open. The essays in this book examine the circumstances, features, and consequences of this historical transition, exploring in particular new aspects and instances of the inter-relatedness of content and its formal representation in both the arts and philosophy. (shrink)

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a change in the perception of the arts and of philosophy. In the arts this transition occurred around 1800, with, for instance, the breakdown of Vitruvianism in architecture, while in philosophy the foundationalism of which Descartes and Spinoza were paradigmatic representatives, which presumed that philosophy and the sciences possessed a method of ensuring the demonstration of truths, was undermined by the idea, asserted by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, that there exist alternative styles of enquiry among (...) which a choice is open. The essays in this book examine the circumstances, features, and consequences of this historical transition, exploring in particular new aspects and instances of the inter-relatedness of content and its formal representation in both the arts and philosophy. (shrink)

This article seeks to interpret the phrase Πάτερ, ημων ο εν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς in the invocation of the Lord’s Prayer in the light of Ewe-Ghanaian cosmology. The article employs a combination of the historical-critical and indigenous mother tongue biblical hermeneutical approaches to explore the implication of the invocation for Ewe-Ghanaian Christian spirituality today. The article firstly discusses the various theological and hermeneutical positions of the invocation in dialogue with Ewe-Ghanaian concept of God and the plurality of his dwelling place. The (...) article argues that Matthew’s use of οὐρανοῖς to suggest a plurality in God’s dwelling place resonates with Ewe cosmology, where it is believed that there are seven states of existence and that Mawugã, the Supreme Being, dwells in the first – the absolute state. Thus God exists in ‘seven heavens’ in Ewe cosmology, with the highest heaven being the eternal state of abode. On the other hand, the inclusive interpretation of the fatherhood of God in Ewe cosmology is discontinuous with the exclusive interpretation in the works of the church fathers such as Cyprian, Origen, Gregory of Nissa, Augustine and Clement of Alexandria. This hermeneutical position, the article observes, was responsible for the theological tensions that characterised the encounter between missionary Christianity and Ewe indigenous religion in the middle of the 19th century. However, the introduction of social services as evangelisation strategy, the legacy of the Ewe Bible and liturgy and the handing over of the Ewe church to the indigenous coworkers may have contributed to a large extent in ensuring religious tolerance among followers of the two religions. Today, Ewe-Ghanaian popular Christianity has shifted from its apologetic stance to a more liberal stance and employs indigenous religious and cultural categories in theologising.Contribution: Matthew’s rendition of the invocation of the Lord’s Prayer in the context of Ewe-Ghanaian cosmology is the focus of this article. The article forms part of the researcher’s contribution to the academic knowledge on the Lord’s Prayer and inspires the use of mother tongue biblical hermeneutics in the development of theological materials for the Ewe-Ghanaian Christian communities in Ghana and Togo. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how inference to the best explanation (IBE) works in engineering science, focussing on the context of malfunction explanation. While IBE has gotten a lot of attention in the philosophy of science literature, few, if any, philosophical work has focussed on IBE in engineering science practice. We first show that IBE in engineering science has a similar structure as IBE in other scientific domains in the sense that in both settings IBE hinges on the weighing of (...) explanatory virtues. We then proceed to show that, due to the intimate connection between explanation and redesign in engineering science, there is a further engineering domain-specific virtue in terms of which engineering malfunction explanations are evaluated, viz. the virtue of redesign utility. This virtue entails that the explanatory information offered by a malfunction explanation should be instrumental in predicting counterfactual dependencies in redesigned systems. We illustrate and elaborate these points in terms of a number of engineering examples, focussing in particular on the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447. Our extension of analyses of IBE and explanation to engineering science practice offers new insights by identifying a new explanatory virtue in malfunction explanation: redesign utility. (shrink)

Our lives are increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, and with new technology, new ethical problems emerge. The academic field that addresses these problems—which we tentatively call ‘digital ethics’—can be an important intellectual resource for policy making and regulation. This is why it is important to understand how the new ethical challenges of a digital society are being met by academic research. We have undertaken a scientometric analysis to arrive at a better understanding of the nature, scope and dynamics of (...) the field of digital ethics. Our approach in this paper shows how the field of digital ethics is distributed over various academic disciplines. By first having experts select a collection of keywords central to digital ethics, we have generated a dataset of articles discussing these issues. This approach allows us to generate a scientometric visualisation of the field of digital ethics, without being constrained by any preconceived definitions of academic disciplines. We have first of all found that the number of publications pertaining to digital ethics is exponentially increasing. We furthermore established that whereas one may expect digital ethics to be a species of ethics, we in fact found that the various questions pertaining to digital ethics are predominantly being discussed in computer science, law and biomedical science. It is in these fields, more than in the independent field of ethics, that ethical discourse is being developed around concrete and often technical issues. Moreover, it appears that some important ethical values are very prominent in one field (e.g., autonomy in medical science), while being almost absent in others. We conclude that to get a thorough understanding of, and grip on, all the hard ethical questions of a digital society, ethicists, policy makers and legal scholars will need to familiarize themselves with the concrete and practical work that is being done across a range of different scientific fields to deal with these questions. (shrink)

This book discusses the relationship between the philosophy of science and philosophy of engineering, and demonstrates how philosophers of engineering design as well as design researchers can benefit from the conceptual toolkit that the philosophy of science has to offer. In this regard, it employs conceptual tools from the philosophical literature on scientific explanation to address key issues in engineering design and philosophy of engineering design. Specifically, the book focuses on assessing the explanatory value of function ascriptions used in engineering (...) design and philosophy of technical functions; on elaborating the structure of explanation in engineering design; on assessing the role and value of design representations in engineering design and philosophy thereof; and on elaborating means for the testing of design methods. Presenting a novel and effective approach to tackling key issues in the field, philosophers of engineering and design alike will greatly benefit from this book. (shrink)

In this paper I address the current debate on ontic versus epistemic conceptualizations of mechanistic explanation in the mechanisms literature. Illari recently argued that good explanations are subject to both ontic and epistemic constraints: they must describe mechanisms in the world in such fashion that they provide understanding of their workings. Elaborating upon Illari’s ‘integration’ account, I argue that causal role function discovery of mechanisms and their components is an epistemic prerequisite for achieving these two aims. This analysis extends Illari’s (...) account in important ways, putting more pressure on ontic readings of mechanistic explanation and providing an answer to the question how ontic and epistemic constraints on mechanistic explanation are related. I argue these point in terms of cases on memory research drawn from neuroscience and research on extinct neurogenetic mechanisms from early nervous systems biology. (shrink)

The concept of technical function is a key concept to describe technical artifacts and artifacts-to-be-designed. Engineers often give such descriptions in terms of functional decomposition models, which represent relationships between functions and sets of other functions. Despite the importance of the concept of function there is no consensus among engineers about its meaning. Models of functional decomposition are likewise conceptually divergent. Although this conceptual diversity hampers information exchange between engineers, they accept and maintain it. Engineers do not, by and large, (...) engage in a focused debate to establish commonly shared functional conceptualizations. This contrasts with science where both debates on the adequacy of key conceptualizations and convergence toward shared conceptualizations are common. This book investigates the side-by-side usage of different functional decomposition models in engineering. It explains this phenomenon by applying and extending the analysis of theory choice in terms of methodological incommensurability to engineering functional decomposition, rather than to science. This analysis shows that engineers’ usage of competing functional decomposition models is rational from a practical point of view. This book furthermore investigates the communication problems that the side-by-side usage of different models engenders and presents a strategy that supports the exchange and re-use of functional information between engineers. (shrink)

In this paper I apply the mechanistic account of explanation to engineering science. I discuss two ways in which this extension offers further development of the mechanistic view. First, functional individuation of mechanisms in engineering science proceeds by means of two distinct sub types of role function, behavior function and effect function, rather than role function simpliciter. Second, it offers refined assessment of the explanatory power of mechanistic explanations. It is argued that in the context of malfunction explanations of technical (...) systems, two key desiderata for mechanistic explanations, ‘completeness and specificity’ and ‘abstraction’, pull in opposite directions. I elaborate a novel explanatory desideratum to accommodate this explanatory context, dubbed ‘local specificity and global abstraction’, and further argue that it also holds for mechanistic explanations of malfunctions in the biological domain. The overall result is empirically-informed understanding of mechanistic explanation in engineering science, thus contributing to the ongoing project of understanding mechanistic explanation in novel or relatively unexplored domains. I illustrate these claims in terms of reverse engineering and malfunction explanations in engineering science. (shrink)

Current philosophical theorizing about technical functions is mainly focused on specifying conditions under which agents are justified in ascribing functions to technical artifacts. Yet, assessing the precise explanatory relevance of such function ascriptions is, by and large, a neglected topic in the philosophy of technical artifacts and technical functions. We assess the explanatory utility of ascriptions of technical functions in the following three explanation-seeking contexts: why was artifact x produced?, why does artifact x not have the expected capacity to ϕ?, (...) how does artifact x realize its capacity to ϕ? We argue that while function ascriptions serve a mere heuristic role in the first context, they have substantial explanatory leverage in the second and third context. In addition, we assess the relevance of function ascriptions in the context of engineering redesign. Here, function ascriptions also play a relevant role: they enable normative statements of the sort that component b functions better than component a. We unpack these claims by considering philosophical theories of technical functions, in particular the ICE theory, and engineering work on function ascription and explanation. We close the paper by relating our analysis to current debates on the explanatory power of mechanistic vis-à-vis functional explanations. (shrink)

The parables of Jesus: Allegories or symbols of social transformation? This article reflects on a possible methodology that can be used to interpret the parables of Jesus preserved in the Synoptics (and the Gospel of Thomas). It is argued that the available versions of the parables of Jesus have already been allegorised, and that this should be taken into consideration when the extant versions of parables are interpreted as parables of the historical Jesus. The parables should also, as far as (...) possible, be interpreted against the social realia evoked by the parables. In this endeavour, Roman-Egypt inscriptions and papyri are in most cases the only sources available. The article concludes with a few examples, illustrating the possibilities of interpretation when the proposed methodology is applied. (shrink)

This paper inquires into the nature of intertheoretic relations between psychology and neuroscience. This relationship has been characterized by some as one in which psychological explanations eventually will fall away as otiose, overthrown completely by neurobiological ones. Against this view it will be argued that it squares poorly with scientific practices and empirical developments in the cognitive neurosciences. We analyse a case from research on visual perception, which suggests a much more subtle and complex interplay between psychology and neuroscience than (...) a complete take-over of the former by the latter. In the case of vision, cross-theory influences between psychology and neuroscience go back and forth, resulting in refinement in both disciplines.We interpret this case study as showing that:(1) Mutual co-evolution of psychological and neurobiological theories, exemplifying persisting top-down influences from psychology, is a more empirically adequate way to describe psychoneural theory relations than a view on co-evolution, favoured by reductionists, which regards the cross-theory contributions from psychology as merely heuristically useful with no enduring influence on neurobiological theorizing;(2) In research on vision, discovering (or hypothesizing) the neural basis of functions vindicates psychological approaches, it does not eliminate them;(3) Current work on vision shows that many perceptual phenomena must be understood in terms of dynamical interactions between an observer and his/her environment. Therefore, we argue that internalist characterizations of the visual system must be supplemented with externalist accounts that address these reciprocal observer-environment interactions involved in vision. Such processes seem quite different from (internal) cellular and molecular ones, and as such seem to lie outside the scope of neuroscientific inquiry. We conclude that psychoneural reduction or elimination is implausible as a meta-theoretical prediction of theory choice in empirical work. Instead, this case study of vision shows that both psychology and neuroscience contribute to, and complement one another in the study of visual perception. 1. Psychoneural reductionism1.1Introduction1.2New Wave Reductionism1.3NWR and psychology: three characteristics of psychoneural reductionism1.4NWR and the problem of mutual feedback1.4.1The ‘Mere Heuristics’ claim1.4.2The disappearance of psychology as an irrelevant historical accident1.5Summary: three claims of NWR on psychoneural reduction2. Vision: a case study2.1Introduction2.1.1Three opposing claims2.1.2Psychology and neuroscience of vision: the orthodoxy2.2Testing claim 1: vanishing heuristics or persisting influences?2.2.1From what and where to perception and action2.2.2Real co-evolution: more than vanishing heuristics2.2.3First moral2.3Testing claim 2: replacement or vindication?2.3.1Perception and action revisited: mapping approaches on systems2.3.2Vindicating psychological approaches2.3.3Second moral2.4Testing claim 3: equipotent image or explanatory loss?2.4.1Perception and action extended: including the environment2.4.2Distinguishing levels, widening explanations2.4.3Third moral3. Conclusion: three morals. (shrink)

Ethnicity reasoning offers one way of looking at social identity in the letter to the Hebrews. The context of socio-economic abuse and hardships of the audience creates a situation in which ethnicity in social identity becomes an important issue for the author of Hebrews to address. This article is a social-scientific study which explores how the author establishes the ethnic identity of the audience as people of God. While this ethnic identity indicates the more privileged position the readers occupy in (...) relation to the benefits of God accessible to them, it also provides the author with the appropriate social institutions and scripts by which his demand for appropriate response to God and the Christian group becomes appreciable and compelling. The article involves the definition of social-scientific criticism, ethnicity and social identity, and discusses the social context of the letter to the Hebrews. It then explains how some social scripts within specific ethnic institutions give meaning to the demands the author makes from his readers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper I offer an interventionist perspective on the explanatory structure and explanatory power of dynamical models in cognitive science: I argue that some “pure” dynamical models – ones that do not refer to mechanisms at all – in cognitive science are “contextualized causal models” and that this explanatory structure gives such models genuine explanatory power. I contrast this view with several other perspectives on the explanatory power of “pure” dynamical models. One of the main results is that dynamical (...) models need not refer to underlying mechanisms in order to be explanatory. I defend and illustrate this position in terms of dynamical models of the A-not-B error in developmental psychology as elaborated by Thelen and colleagues, and dynamical models of unintentional interpersonal coordination developed by Richardson and colleagues. (shrink)

Many readings of the Parable of the Labourers in the vineyard want to treat the owner as representing God. Knowledge of actual agricultural practices relating to the management of vineyards suggest, on the contrary, that the details of the parable obstruct an easy identification of the owner with God, and that he displays unusual behaviour not only by paying all the labourers the same wage, but by his very intervention in the hiring process. The conclusion reached is that the parable (...) constructs the vineyard owner, typically one of the nouveau riche who lived in cities, not only as a ‘good employer’ but also, contrary to expectation, as a patron who intervened well beyond the strict norms of economic exchange. (shrink)