Bohr’s atomic model is one of the better known examples of empirically successful, albeit inconsistent, theoretical schemes in the history of physics. For this reason, many philosophers use this model to illustrate their position for the occurrence and the function of inconsistency in science. In this paper, I proceed to a critical comparison of the structure and the aims of Bohr’s research program – the starting point of which was the formulation of his model – with some of its contemporary (...) philosophical readings. My study comes to conclude that the attempt of certain philosophers to accommodate Bohr’s model to a form of paraconsistent logic obliterates essential aspects of scientists' actual practice and reasoning. (shrink)

In conventional quantum mechanics, complementarity appears as a remarkable but somewhat useless consequence of the formalism. On the contrary, in Bohr’s view, his notion of complementarity – what I call Bohr’s complementarity – apart from offering a consistent interpretation of QM, was setting the requirement for a ‘thorough revision’ of our common attitude towards ‘physical reality’ and was teaching an ‘epistemological lesson’ transcending the domain of physical sciences. In the present paper, the discussion on the internal rationale of Bohr’s thought (...) from a contemporary philosophical viewpoint permits me to argue that BC stems from a realistic standpoint which starts by accepting an ontology compatible with the non-separable structure of quantum formalism and comes to recognize the necessity of largely revising the epistemological ideas of traditional scientific realism. In this respect, I propose an elaborated form of BC which recognizes the participation of the human perspective in the content of knowledge and, on this basis, attempts to ground scientific objectivity on the notions of ‘perspectival contextuality’ and ‘perspectival plurality’ which integrate reductionistic and holistic epistemological demands in a realistic worldview. The epistemology delineated here creates, I claim, a promising epistemological bridge between physical sciences and humanities. (shrink)

We believe that physics education has to meet today’s requirement for a qualitative approach to Quantum Mechanics (QM) worldview. An effective answer to the corresponding instructional problem might allow the basic ideas of QM to be accessed atan early stage of physics education. This paper presents part of a project that aims at introducing a sufficient, simple, and relevant teaching approach towards QM into in-/preservice teacher education, i.e., at providing teachers with the indispensable scientific knowledge and epistemological base needed for (...) a reform of science education along the aforementioned line. The investigation of teacher–learners’ (t-ls’) initial knowledge indicated that their main misconceptions appear to be the result of their pre-/in university traditional instruction, which causes the overlapping/mix-up of the conceptual frameworks of Classical Physics (CP) and QM. Assuming that these misconceptions form by nature epistemological obstacles to the acquisition of QM knowledge, the educational strategy proposed here aims at leading t-ls to form a conceptual structure that includes CP and QM as two totally independent conceptual systems. Accepting, furthermore, that the complete distinction of these systems demands a radical reconstruction of t-ls’ initial knowledge, we present here an instructional model that bases the required reconstruction on the juxtaposition of two models that constitute the signal point of twentieth century’s “paradigm shift”: (a) Bohr’s semiclassical atom model, and (b) the model of the atom accepted by modern physics theory. (shrink)

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

Resumo: Nossa intenção, neste artigo, é apresentar uma leitura da narrativa hesiódica da criação de Pandora, a primeira mulher, analisando sob quais aspectos aparecem, na poesia arcaica grega, os traços míticos relacionados ao feminino que Simone de Beauvoir mapeia na segunda e na terceira parte do primeiro volume de O Segundo Sexo, intituladas História e Os Mitos. O que de próprio à condição feminina ocidental é atribuído à mulher desde Hesíodo e como? A leitura que faremos segue a estratégia (...) do “releasing” (libertação) de autoras feministas, como Vered Kenaan, em Pandora´s Sense. Trata-se de libertar a imagem da primeira mulher da sua conotação negativa e das consequências opressoras que dela decorrem e mostrar como a narrativa grega sobre a criação de Pandora apresenta traços de ambiguidade e indeterminação próprias à condição humana em geral, conforme Beauvoir apresenta em Por uma moral da ambiguidade, traços que a tradição patriarcal revestiu de fantasias e atribuiu exclusivamente à mulher ou responsabilizou-a por eles. Vale ressaltar que não se trata de descobrir, sob o olhar masculino sobre a mulher, uma verdade mais fundamental, uma natureza do feminino. Mas de, compreendendo a construção da condição feminina de subjugo, encontrar na imagem da mulher,potências que nos permitirão transformá-la. (shrink)

Skeptical theism is a leading response to the evidential argument from evil against the existence of God. Skeptical theists attempt to block the inference from the existence of inscrutable evils to gratuitous evils by insisting that given our cognitive limitations, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were God-justifying reasons we can’t think of. A well-known objection to skeptical theism is that it opens up a skeptical Pandora’s box, generating implausibly wide-ranging forms of skepticism, including skepticism about the external world (...) and past. This paper looks at several responses to this Pandora’s box objection, including a popular response devised by Beaudoin and Bergmann. I find that all of the examined responses fail. It appears the Pandora’s box objection to skeptical theism still stands. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the role of moral principles, specifically the Fundamental Principles of Olympism, in the judgements of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on matters of performance enhancement. The article begins with two pairs of distinctions, that between moral judgements and morally-laden judgements, and that between the moral judgement of cases and the ethical environment of a society. The article is concerned with working through the implications of those distinctions in the context of the IOC's judgements on performance (...) enhancement. The article favours a particularist account of the moral judgement of cases, while preserving a place for meaningful general moral statements as contributions to the ethical environment of a society, but not as general action-guiding statements or principles that can be applied to judgements in specific cases. The article illustrates the implications of this conclusion in the context of the decision-making of the IOC on performance enhancement (the case of Alain Baxter is considered). It is argued that there is a danger of the decision-making of the IOC suffering deep confusion over the difference between general and particular statements, the nature of reasons and the logic of what it is to apply a general action-guiding statement. (shrink)

I argue that Alvin Plantinga’s theory of warrant is plausible and that, contrary to the Pandora’s Box objection, there are certain serious world religions that cannot successfully use Plantinga’s epistemology to demonstrate that their beliefs could be warranted in the same way that Christian belief can be warranted. In arguing for, I deploy Ernest Sosa’s Swampman case to show that Plantinga’s proper function condition is a necessary condition for warrant. I then engage three objections to Plantinga’s theory of warrant, (...) each of which attempts to demonstrate that his conditions for warrant are neither necessary nor sufficient. Having defended the plausibility of Plantinga’s theory of warrant, I present and expand his key arguments to the effect that naturalism cannot make use of it. These arguments provide the conceptual tools that are needed to argue for : that there are certain world religions that cannot legitimately use Plantinga’s theory of warrant to demonstrate that their beliefs could be warranted in the same way that Christian belief can be warranted. (shrink)

The first important reaction in favor of generic criticism here was that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians, whose feisty polemics against the "New" critics must have seemed, in the 1940s and 1950s, like voices crying in the wilderness. The popularity of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism—also ostensibly based upon Aristotle's example—won the concept of genre broader support. And today, if the books covering my desk are anything to go by, genre criticism has emerged in force. The flood has brought forth historical (...) studies of Renaissance genres, analyses of traditional genres like the picaresque or of new ones like "the fantastic," ambivalently generic essays in "thematics," efforts to systemize the genres of narrative fiction, and even attempt, through the philosophic analysis of dozens of generic systems, to go "beyond genre." Indeed, the late sixties spawned a journal entitled Genre entirely devoted to theoretical and practical criticism employing the concept. David H. Richter is the author of a forthcoming book: Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, and an article on Jerzy Kosinski. He is assistant professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. (shrink)

In Hesiod’s legendary account of how humans came to be, two extrahuman characters, Prometheus and Pandora, play decisive roles. Both figures intercede and intervene in man’s world and indeed inaugurate the series of events that culminates in the becoming human of man.1 Although neither Prometheus nor Pandora is human, they both participate actively in human life, and through their respective actions the race of men becomes not only alienated from the realm of gods and animals but also from (...) its own prior, prelapsarian existence. The irrevocable and irreducibly self- alienated and internally contradictory status of the human emerges as a direct consequence of the actions of these two “extrahuman” figures. These two .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:610 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Raina J. León Pandora’s Box Opens and Terence Crutcher Dies Raina J. León Fresh from the bath, my husband comes nude, beard trimmed, still glistening and pinked. He shares the fullness of his skin, freckles and moles in their constellations. What little fat on his lank jiggles, begs for pinch as he turns to the closet to dig. I (...) am encapsulated by covers. No sleep for hours since I woke to watch the video I couldn’t with him awake. How I watched it, over and over, and knew this might be how I die: a broken-down car, my hands up, helicopters above with a man saying, a real bad dude, must be, and then shot, because Terence is me, like Sandy and Aisha... because just that day, earlier, I was transformed into child, questioned on the body of my work, made invisible and hypervisible, bleeding shadow for another’s feet. One leads to another in a mass of entangled links. Now, he moves. He does not feel the cold I dread out there where reality gnashes. Raina J. León 611 Inside the cocoon, the smell of last night’s tremble sweat, I can imagine entrance into another dreaming, breathe in and out our twining. He slips on boxers, then soft cotton shirt, then jeans. All black, his style. In my mourning, I call him close, and he comes to bed. With his body, he creates another womb as suddenly the weeping starts, says, when you are ready, tell me, because he doesn’t know how the world turns, yet in that moment, there is a hope.... (shrink)

The public sphere is the site where the collective will of the people is formed. The thesis is that to the extent that the people are constructed as entities that pre-exist their collective will, the public sphere contributes to fostering the evil among a people and between the people. This is discussed using the cases of nationalism, sovereigntism and populism. The narrative of Pandora’s box provides the analytical leverage for retelling the theory of the public sphere. The story is (...) that after the evils escaped Pandora’s box, hope remained. This leads to two propositions: hope as preventing the closing off of the future of a people and hope as fostering collective learning processes that rectify the evils. These propositions provide the ground for a critical theory of the public sphere in which the force of the better argument is insufficient to explain the capability of a people to rectify the bad. It is a theory in which social relations matter that turn individuals into a people beyond national, statist or populist containers, making a people that is open to define and redefine itself in collective learning processes. (shrink)

El presente artículo está dedicado al trabajo de Hans-Georg Gadamer titulado “Prometeo y Pandora”, publicado originalmente en español en 1949 en el volumen Goethe. 1749 - 28 de agosto – 1949, editado por la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Cuyo, Argentina. En primer lugar, se ofrece una introducción en la que se presenta el contexto original histórico-intelectual de su edición, traducción y publicación, los antecedentes filosóficos del texto dentro de la obra de Gadamer (conferencias y (...) artículos previos sobre el tema), una presentación breve de las fuentes y de los temas que trata el texto, así como una serie de aclaraciones sobre las correcciones que se realizaron para esta edición crítica. En segundo lugar, se ofrece una nueva edición de “Prometeo y Pandora”. Este ensayo es uno de los dos primeros trabajos de Gadamer que fueron traducidos al castellano y, a su vez, una de las primeras traducciones de las producciones de Gadamer a una lengua extranjera. //--// The following investigation focuses on the article of Hans-Georg Gadamer entitled “Prometheus and Pandora”, originally published in Spanish in 1949, in the book: "Goethe. 1749 – 28th August – 1949", edited by the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Cuyo, Argentina. Firstly, an introduction is offered in which is presented the original historical-intellectual context of its edition, translation and publication, the philosophical background of the text within Gadamer’s work (conferences and previous articles on the subject), a brief description of the sources and topics encompassed in the text, as well as a series of clarifications on the corrections made for the current critical edition. This essay is one of the first two works by Gadamer that were translated into Spanish and, in turn, one of the first translations of Gadamer's productions into a foreign language. (shrink)

The article seeks to consider the relationship between hope and utopianism by looking at the ancient Greek myth of Pandora's Box, with its enigmatic figure of hope. It begins by considering Hesiod's influential formulation of the myth, before examining a range of modern interpretations in which diverse conceptions of hope are to be found. Using the work of Spinoza, Hume and Day an alternative conception of hope is proposed that conjoins hope with fear. This is followed by an exploration (...) of the utopian, using this time another figure associated with the myth, Prometheus. An attempt is then made to differentiate the frequently conflated concepts of hope and the utopian. Finally, in the spirit of recent post-secularism, the two concepts are brought to bear on the nature of religion. (shrink)

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs), are quite complex in terms of organizational structure, diversity at the workplace, as well as motivational mechanisms and values rationality. Nevertheless, from an Organizational Psychology perspective, the systematic analysis of this context is scarce in the literature, particularly regarding conflicts. This qualitative study analyzes types, prevalence and consequences of conflicts in a large NPO organization considering as theoretical framework several consolidated Organizational Psychology theories: Conflict Theory, Social Comparison Theory and the Equity Theory. Conflicts were analyzed taking into (...) account volunteers’ perspective, who has been consistently protagonist on NPOs research, but also considering paid staff’s perspective, as one of the main stakeholders in these organizations, whose relative power has increase in the past decade due the professionalization of the NPO’s sector. Results confirmed the existence of four types of conflicts: task, process, status and relationship conflicts. Relationship conflict is the least reported type, revealing the protection factor that values and engagement with a social aim have on this organizational context. The most relevant finding is the strong difference between paid staff and volunteers in conflict perceptions, showing paid staff, overall, higher levels of conflicts than volunteers. Findings also show stronger negative consequences for paid staff compared to volunteers. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

O objetivo do presente artigo é propor uma interpretação da filosofia sartriana para pensar o nossoatual contexto de isolamento, pandemia e agravamento de diferentes crises. Pretendo fazer isso pormeio de dois conceitos cunhados a partir do exame das obras Bariona, Cahiers pour une morale eCritique de la raison dialectique, são eles: esperança existencialista e solidariedade construída.

While the activity of imagination is present in much writing about environmental ethics, little direct attention has been given to clarifying its role. Both its significant presence and provocative theoretical work showing the central role of imagination in ethics suggest a need for discussion of its contributions. Environmental ethicists especially should attend to imagination because of the pervasive influence of metaphorical constructs of nature and because imaginative work is required to even partially envision the perspective of a nonhuman being. Without (...) clear awareness of the limits of contemporary Western metaphoric constructs of nature, environmental ethicists may overlook or even contribute to the cultural extinction of ideas of nature present in the imaginative visions of indigenous cultures. In this article, I briefly review the reasons why the dominant Western philosophical tradition ranks imagination below the power of abstract reasoning, survey contemporary ideas about the role of imagination in ethics, and consider the implications of these ideas for environmental ethics. The work of imaginative empathy in constructing what might be the experience of nonhuman beings, the role of diverse metaphors and symbols in understanding nature, and the process of envisioning the possible future are developed as three central contributions of imagination to environmental ethics. Imaginative work is not peripheral, butcomplementary to the work of reason in shaping an environmental ethic. (shrink)

What have the following in common: Epimetheus, Paris, Anchises, and the suitors of Penelope? The ready answer might be that it must have something to do with women, for it requires no great thought to see that the attractions of femininity proved the undoing of three of them, while for Anchises life was never to be the same again after his encounter with Aphrodite. But suppose we add to our first group such figures as Zeus, Priam, Polynices, and Eumaeus? The (...) fates of all these characters as they, appear at certain points in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and others give expression i to a network of interrelated sexual and economic anxieties that seem to underlie a { great deal of what the Archaic poets say about the female sex. In this article I 1 propose to explore a particular part of that network, which I have called the ? ‘Pandora complex’, since it is Hesiod′s version of the Pandora myth which provides the classic statement of the male dilemma over women, poised between the conflicting desires for sexual gratification and domestic stability.1. (shrink)

The number of publications that highlight the influence of visions and futuristic narratives on the development of emerging technologies increases. Toolboxes such as “Hermeneutical Technology Assessment” and “Vision Assessment” provide methodological considerations on how to assess techno-futuristic narratives, their proponents, and their impact on technological development. Because of their contributions to the technoscientific discourse, a special responsibility for technological processes is attributed to the “visioneers” of such narratives. While such a claim naturally follows from an agential role in a process, (...) it is not clear whether visioneers should be held responsible. Some problems of this attribution will be addressed in the present paper. Particularly the following questions will be considered: Which role does autonomy play for responsibility? Is causation sufficient for the attribution of responsibility? Which role do intentions and alternatives play for the responsibility of visioneers? These questions will be discussed against the backdrop of contemporary approaches to the responsibility of visioneering and classic philosophical works in the field. Furthermore, the problem of accountability will be considered. Socio-technical systems are highly complex, which makes it hard to trace back the origins of particular developments. It will be argued that it is currently unreasonable to give visioneers the status of an important player. The article will shed light on the several dimensions of responsibility and provide a more nuanced understanding of responsibility in the context of new and emerging technologies. (shrink)

Experience and research teach us that hope, optimism and faith are crucial aspects in how a person deals with a medical situation. One ancient source of wisdom which deals with Hope – the myth of Pandora – can be interpreted in different ways, pointing to different aspects of the way hope influences the human experience. In this paper I will try to demonstrate and discuss how this pertains to medical-psychology work with patients: A short case description will be brought (...) to demonstrate the complexity of the work of hope in (difficult) medical situations. The therapeutic work in these situations will be discussed. (shrink)

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, (...) with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof's analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems. This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

Furthering our project of applying Plantinga’s epistemology to different world religions, we do a comparative study of Mormonism and Vaiśeṣika Hinduism and analyze whether they can utilize Plantinga’s epistemology in order to claim that their beliefs about God if true are probably warranted. Specifically, we argue that they cannot, as ultimately they are unable to account for the preconditions needed to make for an intelligible cognitive design plan, due to either affirming an infinite regress when it comes to the designers (...) of our cognitive faculties or affirming an infinite number of cosmological cycles in which our faculties are formed. (shrink)