Concept and interpretation are key philosophical terms that have played a major part in shaping modern thinking from the beginning of the modern age through post-modernity. The papers in this volume examine the historical dimensions of concept and interpretation as an approach, method, and thinking process, and also inquire critically about their relevance today, thereby taking general inventory of thinking in the modern age.

We introduce a bimodal epistemic logic intended to capture knowledge as truth in all epistemically alternative states and belief as a generalised ‘majority’ quantifier, interpreted as truth in most of the epistemically alternative states. This doxastic interpretation is of interest in knowledge-representation applications and it also holds an independent philosophical and technical appeal. The logic comprises an epistemic modal operator, a doxastic modal operator of consistent and complete belief and ‘bridge’ axioms which relate knowledge to belief. To capture the notion (...) of a ‘majority’ we use the ‘large sets’ introduced independently by K. Schlechta and V. Jauregui, augmented with a requirement of completeness, which furnishes a ‘weak ultrafilter’ concept. We provide semantics in the form of possible-worlds frames, properly blending relational semantics with a version of general Scott–Montague frames and we obtain soundness and completeness results. We examine the validity of certain epistemic principles discussed in the literature, in particular some of the ‘bridge’ axioms discussed by W. Lenzen and R. Stalnaker, as well as the ‘paradox of the perfect believer’, which is not a theorem of. (shrink)

Introductory: Perspectives on Reality and "The World" in the Realism Debate One of the "characteristic parameters" dividing up analytical and Continental philosophizing is the interpretation of the concepts of "reality" and "the world". The paper offers an analysis of this characteristic parameter with regard to the relations between epistemologically centred and hermeneutically oriented doctrines of realism.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper proposes a methodological synthesis in order to study multimodal media discourse and argumentation in the context of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. It follows the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, integrating this with argumentation studies, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of inference. Our data come from the Greek newspapers Kathimerini and Ta Nea. We contend that the proposed methodological synergy enables scrutiny of (a) racist conceptualizations cultivated by the representation of migrants and refugees in (...) headlines and photographs in newspaper articles along with (b) the argumentative potential that is implicitly sustained in these multimodal representations. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

In this article, moving from being to becoming, we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end we draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition. The former allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the (...) collective transformation of the world. We do not consider these processes as sequentially linked, but rather as a dialectic between the collective and the individual. This leads us to the suggestion of the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Subsequently, we describe concrete means for empirically testing our proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. Taken together, we suggest that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. Such an approach, we believe, could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Kant regarded ecosphere as having the highest degree of beauty, as opposed to other aesthetical objects such as painting, sculpture, buildings, and we could infer, the built environment. His arguments hinges heavily on his transcendental philosophy, where he stressed that pure beauty could only be achieved through disinterested judgement, without concept, and others. Though his proposition for ecosphere is valid, it could not be used to justify other cases, such as determining the degree of beauty of the built environment. (...) Thus, a modified version of Kant's aesthetics needs to be adopted, as it opens space for the built environment. This research uses Kant's overarching aesthetical arguments to justify the degree of beauty of the built environment. It is found that the built environment could have similar, if not same to, the degree of beauty of ecosphere by way of bioregionalism and ecomimicry, where the totality of the built environment encompases the natural law of local environment, making its degree of beauty as high as ecosphere. Keywords: bioregionalism, ecomimicry, the built environment, ecosphere, degree of beauty ABSTRAK Kant memandang tinggi atas lingkungan alam dan menobatkannya sebagai derajat keindahan tertinggi bila dibandingkan dengan objek estetis lainnya seperti lukisan, patung, gedung, dan kita dapat inferensikan, lingkungan buatan manusia. Argumen dia terjangkar kepada pemikiran transendentalnya, di mana keindahan murni hanya dapat didapatkan melalui penilaian tanpa ketertarikan, tanpa konsep, dan lain-lain. Walaupun proposisinya terhadap lingkungan alam valid, kita tidak dapat menggunakannya untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan manusia. Dengan itu, sebuah modifikasi dari pemikiran Kant diperlukan untuk dapat menilai lingkungan buatan manusia. Penelitian ini menggunakan teori estetika Kant untuk menjustifikasi derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan alam. Dipertahankan bahwa lingkungan buatan manusia memiliki derajat keindahan yang sangat mendekati, bahkan sama, dengan lingkungan buatan alam jika, dan hanya jika, lingkungan buatan tersebut mengadopsi konsep bioregionalisme dan ecomimicry, di mana totalitas dari lingkungan buatan manusia mencakupi hukum alam yang terdapat di daerah lokal, meningkatkan derajat keindahan lingkungan buatan tersebut. Keywords: bioregionalisme, ecomimicry, lingkungan buatan manusia, lingkungan alam, derajat keindahan. (shrink)

Thinking through other minds creatively situates the free-energy principle within real-life cultural processes, thereby enriching both sociocultural theories and Bayesian accounts of cognition. Here, shifting the attention from thinking-through to becoming-with, we suggest complementing such an account by focusing on the empirical, computational, and conceptual investigation of the multiscale dynamics of social interaction.

I examine a major objection to the mechanistic view of concrete computation, stemming from an apparent tension between the abstract nature of computational explanation and the tenets of the mechanistic framework: while computational explanation is medium-independent, the mechanistic framework insists on the importance of providing some degree of structural detail about the systems target of the explanation. I show that a common reply to the objection, i.e. that mechanistic explanation of computational systems involves only weak structural constraints, is not enough (...) to save the standard mechanistic view of computation—it trivialises the appeal to mechanism, and thus makes the account collapse into a purely functional view. I claim, however, that the objection can be put to rest once the account is appropriately amended: computational individuation is indeed functional, while mechanistic explanation plays a role in accounting for computational implementation. Since individuation and implementation are crucial elements in a satisfying account of computation in physical systems, mechanism keeps its central importance in the theory of concrete computation. Finally, I argue that my version of the mechanistic view helps to provide a convincing reply to a powerful objection against non-semantic theories of concrete computation: the argument from the multiplicity of computations. (shrink)

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its (...) Other puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

Debate on the nature of representation in cognitive systems tends to oscillate between robustly realist views and various anti‐realist options. I defend an alternative view, deflationary realism, which sees cognitive representation as an offshoot of the extended application to cognitive systems of an explanatory model whose primary domain is public representation use. This extended application, justified by a common explanatory target, embodies idealisations, partial mismatches between model and reality. By seeing representation as part of an idealised model, deflationary realism avoids (...) the problems with robust realist views, while keeping allegiance to realism. (shrink)

Through accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s views of linguistic expression and understanding, and by tracing the evolution of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Language offers a comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language.

Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the (...) other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by "economics imperialism". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future. (shrink)

Business Efficiency and Ethics presents both the theory of business efficiency and ethics, and a wealth of case studies based on practical experience. This unique perspective offers a framework for identifying this behaviour and reestablishing appropriate business behavior standards.

The author reflects on the future of Catholic health care by looking at the essays in this volume by Dennis Brodeur, Clarke E. Cochran, and Christopher J. Kauffman. The author argues that (1) Roman Catholic teaching on the Trinity is defective, yielding an inadequate model of society, (2) Roman Catholic teaching on the Incarnation is defective, yielding an impoverished understanding of the “sacramental,” and (3) the institutional orientation of Roman Catholicism combined with the lack of true sacramental vision makes it (...) nearly impossible for Roman Catholic theory to criticize the current structure of health care financing. (shrink)

The rhetoric of the social model of disability is presented, and its basic claims are critiqued. Proponents of the social model use the distinction between impairment and disability to reduce disabilities to a single social dimension—social oppression. They downplay the role of biological and mental conditions in the lives of disabled people. Consequences of denying biological and mental realities involving disabilities are discussed. People will benefit most by recognizing both the biological and the social dimensions of disabilities.

In the literature on the nature and role of cognitive representation, three positions are taken across the conceptual landscape: robust realism, primitivism, and eliminativism. Recently, a fourth alternative that tries to avoid the shortcomings of traditional views has been proposed: content pragmatism. My aim is to defend pragmatism about content against some recent objections moved against the view. According to these objections, content pragmatism fails to capture the role played by representation in the cognitive sciences; and/or is an unstable view (...) that ends up collapsing into one of the traditional alternatives. I argue that those arguments fail. I show that content pragmatism has as much claim to descriptive adequacy as the traditional theories. Moreover, I defend the robustness of the view by arguing that it does not collapse into any of the traditional positions. Content pragmatism therefore offers a valid and coherent account of the nature of representational content. (shrink)

Scholarly discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics tend to focus on his philosophy of painting. By contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to his philosophy of literature. However, he also draws significant conclusions from his work on literary expression. As I will argue, these reflections inform at least two important positions of his later thought. First, Merleau-Ponty’s account of “indirect” literary language led him to develop a hybrid view of phenomenological expression, on which expression is both creative and descriptive. Second, a (...) study of literature furnished him with the resources to develop a novel account of phenomenological “essences”, which holds that essences are revisable explanations of first-order experience. Both results have been overlooked by commentators. They demonstrate the systematic import of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of literature and language, and amount to a qualified extension of a basic Husserlian position. (shrink)

I argue that Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego draws on Kant's theory of spontaneity to articulate its metaphysical account of consciousness's mode of being, to defend its phenomenological description of the intentional structure of self‐consciousness, and to diagnose the errors that motivate views of consciousness qua person or substance. In addition to highlighting an overlooked dimension of Sartre's early relation to Kant, this interpretation offers a fresh account of how Sartre's argument for the primacy of pre‐personal consciousness works, and brings (...) the extent of his proximity to idealist models of mind into greater relief. It also affords Sartre the resources to respond to criticisms that his account of self‐consciousness relies on a spurious distinction and that his view of freedom cannot explain how consciousness is conditioned by its world. (shrink)

This chapter reconstructs Dufrenne’s phenomenological interpretation of the aesthetic attitude. I argue that Dufrenne develops a fecund alternative to competing formulations, advances an innovative proposal for how artworks are perceived on their own terms, and undercuts the claim that a reliance on the subject-object frame- work in aesthetics entails a commitment to ‘subjectivism.’ On Dufrenne’s view, the aesthetic attitude is an intentional stance toward a special category of perceived object, which is defined by a ‘purposive’ mode of appearance. Whereas aesthetic (...) attitude theorists argue that a subjective ability to attend disinterestedly to objects is a sufficient condition for aesthetic experience, Dufrenne locates decisive condi- tions for aesthetic experience in the object-term. This innovative approach develops a novel take on the aesthetic attitude, blunts the edge of aesthetic anti-subjectivist arguments, advances an original interpretation of Kant’s relevance for phenomeno- logical aesthetics, and offers a plausible philosophical account of art’s objectivity and world-disclosive power. (shrink)

Computational perspectivalism has been recently proposed as an alternative to mainstream accounts of physical computation, and especially to the teleologically-based mechanistic view. It takes physical computation to be partly dependent on explanatory perspectives and eschews appeal to teleology in helping individuate computational systems. I assess several varieties of computational perspectivalism, showing that they either collapse into existing non-perspectival views or end up with unsatisfactory or implausible accounts of physical computation. Computational perspectivalism fails, therefore, to be a compelling alternative to perspective-independent (...) theories of computation in physical systems. I conclude that a teleologically-based, non-perspectival mechanistic account of physical computation is to be preferred. 1Introduction 2The Mechanistic View of Computation 2.1Teleological functions and meeting the desiderata 3Varieties of Perspectivalism 4Computational Perspectivalism 4.1Computational perspectivalism and pancomputationalism 4.2Computational perspectivalism and miscomputation 5The Varieties of Computational Perspectivalism Assessed 5.1Innocuous computational perspectivalism 5.2Non-innocuous computational perspectivalism 5.2.1Computational instrumentalism 5.2.2Ontic perspectivalism 6Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

In der Wissenschaft spielen Visualisierungen eine immer wichtigere Rolle. Sie sind zum einen Gegenstand der Forschung und zum anderen unverzichtbares Hilfsmittel bei der Präsentation und Distribution von Forschungsergebnissen. Beides stellt neue Anforderungen an den Wissenschaftler und seine praktische wie auch theoretische Arbeit und lässt nach einer kritischen Reflexion dieses Bildhandelns fragen. Was zeigen uns MRT-Bilder in der Medizin wirklich? Wie hat die Weiterentwicklung der Mikroskopie-Technologie unsere Vorstellung von der menschlichen Zelle verändert? Welche Rolle können Bilder bei der Vermittlung von Wissen (...) im didaktischen Kontext spielen? Zeigen uns Visualisierungen die Wirklichkeit? Oder sind sie bloß ein weiterer Anhaltspunkt für die soziale Konstruktion wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis? Kann es eine Logik der Bilder geben? In welchen Begriffen reden wir über Bilder? Ziel des Sammelbandes Visualisierung und Erkenntnis. Bildverstehen und Bildverwenden in Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften ist es, die Forschung mit und an Visualisierungen in den Einzelwissenschaften auf eine reflektierte Basis zu stellen. Zu diesem Zweck werden nicht nur die wissenschafts- und erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen und Herausforderungen beleuchtet, die die Verwendung von Visualisierungen mit sich bringt, sondern auch die Rolle der Visualisierungen im konkreten Anwendungsfall betrachtet. Der Band lässt dabei Geistes- und Naturwissenschaftler, Theoretiker und Praktiker in einen Dialog über den gemeinsamen Forschungsgegenstand treten. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to bring the legal status of third-country citizens closer to that of member states, as a different special regime according to the relative agreements concluded for certain categories of foreigners without disregarding the value of some elements of fact, such as residence, family ties, performance of specific economic activities or interests of international politics for respect of these obligations, with the not always uniform content that the union evidently had to entrust to member states (...) a union of intent through “supervision" as well as the interpretation carried out by The Court of Justice of the European Union which has strongly reduced state's competences aiming at a European integration still in progress and especially after Brexit. (shrink)

Placing the notion of sin in the context of a meontic account of evil, and emphasizing the effect of sin on the sinner himself, this commentary exposes the insufficiency of restricting oneself to human efforts at atonement, and of thus underemphasizing the role of Christ. Collange’s claim that the teaching of “predestination” is rooted in Paul and that the doctrine of merits and indulgences is rooted in Augustine is criticized, and Luther’s “forensic” understanding is linked with Augustine, rather than with (...) Paul. Collange’s reduction of the concern for holiness to respect and trust is contrasted with holiness’s essential context of loving unification with God. The commentary closes by exposing the unsatisfactory scantiness of Collange’s treatment of cloning, health-care economy, and of the evils of life. (shrink)

The subject of this article is the concept of natural liberation in classical Sāṃkhya. On the basis of the Sāṃkhyakārikā by Īśvarakṛṣṇa and its traditional commentaries, I will attempt to demonstrate that liberation from suffering in Sāṃkhya is not the result of rational inquiry—the prevailing view among contemporary scholars. The Sāṃkhya does not necessarily prescribe yogic practice as argued by other scholars. Instead, I will defend a position expressed by K.C. Bhattacharyya and Frank R. Podgorski, according to which liberation in (...) classical Sāṃkhya is a natural and spontaneous process of suffering transforming into its own cure. I will argue that although traditional authorities may disagree over the form the liberating process takes on the phenomenal level, there is a general agreement that the natural forces are the primary drives and agents of liberation. (shrink)