Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 2, Page 140-165, Spring 2023.

Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible (...) to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

This article traces the development of how the early Heidegger tried to integrate the structures of social life into phenomenological ontology. Firstly, I argue that Heidegger's analysis of the three elements of the lifeworld—the with-world (Mitwelt), the environing world (Umwelt), and the self-world (Selbstwelt)—is ambiguous, because it shifts between defining sociality as a domain of entities and a mode of appearance. This is untenable because the social as a mode of appearance constantly overflows the definition as a domain by implicating (...) social structures in phenomenological explications of entities that, formally, belong to other domains. Secondly, I argue that Heidegger realized this and subsequently changed his terminology from Mitwelt to Mitsein in order to avoid confusing the mode of appearance with the innerworldly entities. The systematic consequence of this line of argument is that the object of social ontology must be the world as such rather than a particular domain. Lastly, I respond to the common worry that this position is unable to explain the significance of interpersonal encounters by arguing that the world not only makes the appearance of others possible but also that the world is itself at stake in these encounters. (shrink)

This article provides a detailed analysis of the function of the notion of _Volk_ in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. At first glance, this term is an appeal to the revolutionary masses of the National Socialist revolution in a way that demarcates a distinction between the rootedness of the German People and the rootlessness of the modern rabble. But this distinction is not a sufficient explanation of Heidegger’s position, because Heidegger simultaneously seems to hold that even the Germans are characterized by _a (...) lack of identity_. What is required is a further appropriation of the proper. My suggestion is that this logic of the _Volk_ is not only useful for understanding Heidegger’s thought during the war, but also an indication of what happened after he lost faith in the National Socialist movement and thus had to make the _lack of the People_ the basis of his thought. (shrink)

In Derrida’s reflection on hospitality, the figures of Oedipus and Antigone play a decisive role. Derrida describes Oedipus as being anomos, an outlaw, since he transgresses the established nomos. According to Derrida, both Oedipus and Antigone are involved an unsolvable tension between conditional and unconditional hospitality. A closer look at Sophocles’ Antigone, however, fits poorly with this understanding of the relation between hospitality and the nomos. Arguing against Derrida, I propose a phenomenological reading of Antigone’s actions as an attempt to (...) disclose her suffering with the community. In this way, she demands hospitality not for herself nor for her infinitely removed father but for the world disclosure that she embodies. Within this phenomenological framework, hospitality is not caught in an aporia between the general and the singular, the conditional and the unconditional; rather, it constitutes a site of dispute between conflicting configurations of the shared world. (shrink)

This article argues that Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of kairos and messianic time are essentially to be understood in terms of experience. This becomes clear when we identify the methodological similarities between Agamben’s reading of Paulus in The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s lectures on Paulus from 1920-21: the doctrine of kairology is different from any eschatology, insofar as it involves an instantaneous modulation of our factical conditions, rather than a removal of them to come. In this way, I argue that (...) Agamben echoes Heidegger’s conception of formal indication and enactment-sense. But whereas Heidegger understood this modulation as an anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein identifies itself with its calling, Agamben emphasizes the very impossibility of such an identification. This is indeed a decisive difference between Agamben and Heidegger. I show, however, that Agamben phrases this difference in a language that recalls Heidegger’s thought, thus implicitly suggesting that the emancipatory potential of his philosophy is to be understood as the experiential enactment of an impotentiality that undermines any factical condition and any social identity. (shrink)

Heidegger is often criticised for having next to nothing to say about human sociality. Yet, his work provides neglected resources for understanding the nature of social life. Drawing on his celebrated philosophy of mind and philosophy of action, the book systematically reconstructs Heidegger’s social ontology. It argues that Heidegger’s famous claim that human mindedness and agency is constitutively being-in-the-world implies that we can only understand others, do things with others, and form lasting groups with others if we pre-reflectively correlate their (...) behaviour with our own projects and the world that lies between us. Drawing on both his published texts, lecture courses, and notebooks, the book puts Heidegger into dialogue with contemporary debates on social cognition, collective intentionality, and social normativity, while also reassessing the significance of his account of authenticity and criticising his affiliation with Nazism. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is an essential contribution to contemporary phenomenology and social ontology. (shrink)

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are (...) shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger's by R. Matthew ShockeyNicolai KnudsenR. Matthew Shockey. The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger's Being and Time. New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 224. Hardcover, $160.00.In this rich and ambitious book, R. Matthew Shockey controversially claims that Heidegger's Being and Time (SZ) is an heir to the rationalism of Descartes and Kant. To show this, Shockey develops a provocative account (...) of phenomenological ontology as the normatively inert outcome of reflective and imaginative philosophical self-questioning.Four questions of an increasingly higher order frame the book (2–6): (1) How shall I live? (2) What is it to be the kind of being who can and must ask "how shall I live?" (3) What unity is there to the various ways in which things are taken to be? (4) Why should we pursue metaphysics and ontology? Chapters 1–6 reconstruct Heidegger's answers to the second- and third-order questions, while chapter 7 relates them back to the questions of the first- and fourth-order.The key claim is that Heidegger was a "Kantian Cartesian." Shockey, however, admits that Heidegger was not "driven by a need to refute skepticism, a proponent of a worldly subjectivism, a representationalist epistemologist, or a substance dualist" (9). Rather, the claim is that Heidegger follows Kant and Descartes in believing, first, that ontology must identify a form of "a priori knowledge" as the basis of intelligibility and, second, that ontological inquiry requires a deliberate, reflective, and self-questioning method.The argument rests on a reconstruction of the published parts of SZ as involving a series of meditative steps that are supposed to take us from the analytic of Dasein (the second-order question) to the meaning of being (the third-order question). Chapter 1 explains why the Seinsfrage (the third-order question) requires the analytic of Dasein (the second-order question) and argues that ontology requires that we abstract from all our ontical characteristics (i.e. all the things that make me, me and you, you) insofar as the aim of ontology is to identify the "bounds" that are shared by any ontological inquirer (47). This, Shockey claims, makes Heidegger's existential analytics critical in a roughly Kantian way and meditational in a roughly Cartesian way (31, 47).Chapter 2 follows the analysis of worldhood and being-with in introducing us to three regions of entities that we are not: the ready-to-hand, the present-at-hand, and other Dasein. The next chapters turn away from our understanding of "outward" entities and initiates a series of "inward" meditative steps supposed to clarify the unitary and a priori basis rendering [End Page 718] these regions intelligible. Chapter 3 analyzes the first meditative step, namely, Heidegger's account of being-in and the trinity of understanding, discourse, and self-finding that constitute the structure of care. Chapter 4 shows, in a second step, that the care structure is unified by originary temporality. Originary temporality is, Shockey argues, the necessary temporal form that Dasein spontaneously gives to itself.Heidegger abandoned the SZ project at this point, but Shockey ambitiously undertakes to complete it by showing, in chapter 5, how Heidegger found a final meditative step in Kant's concept of imagination. On Heidegger's controversial interpretation of Kant, the imagination is the common root of understanding and sensibility and, importantly, an anticipation of his own concept of originary temporality. Imagination, Shockey explains, is the general capacity for "making present that which is absent" (141). Based on this argument, Shockey concludes that "in doing ontology, we imagine ourselves imagining being" (148).Having reconstructed the final and missing meditative step, Shockey in chapter 6 presents what he thinks would have been the story of the unwritten (or discarded) division 3 of SZ, namely, that Descartes and Kant, when read as ontologists rather than epistemologists, were right in claiming that the unity of being is located in our a priori ontological (self-) understanding, although they failed to realize that this unity is imaginative and temporal rather than substantial or logical and that the a priori basis for intelligibility opens up several distinct regions of... (shrink)

There is considerable evidence that listeners’ understanding of a spoken sentence need not always follow from a full analysis of the words and syntax of the utterance. Rather, listeners may instead conduct a superficial analysis, sampling some words and using presumed plausibility to arrive at an understanding of the sentence meaning. Because this latter strategy occurs more often for sentences with complex syntax that place a heavier processing burden on the listener than sentences with simpler syntax, shallow processing may represent (...) a resource conserving strategy reflected in reduced processing effort. This factor may be even more important for older adults who as a group are known to have more limited working memory resources. In the present experiment, 40 older adults and 20 younger adults were tested for comprehension of plausible and implausible sentences with a simpler subject-relative embedded clause structure or a more complex object-relative embedded clause structure. Dilation of the pupil of the eye was recorded as an index of processing effort. Results confirmed greater comprehension accuracy for plausible than implausible sentences, and for sentences with simpler than more complex syntax, with both effects amplified for the older adults. Analysis of peak pupil dilations for implausible sentences revealed a complex three-way interaction between age, syntactic complexity, and plausibility. Results are discussed in terms of models of sentence comprehension, and pupillometry as an index of intentional task engagement. (shrink)

Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways (...) to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements. (shrink)

A more ethical economic system is now possible, one that rectifies the crisis spots of our current downturn while balancing the injustices of extreme poverty and wealth. Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, a scholar and an entrepreneur, outline the shape such an economy might take, identifying its origins in innovations already existent in our production, valuation, and distribution systems. Much like nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, philosophers, bankers, artisans, and social organizers who planned a course for modern capitalism that was more economically (...) efficient and ethically desirable, we now have a chance to construct new instruments, institutions, and infrastructure to reverse the trajectory of a quickly deteriorating economic environment. Considering a multitude of emerging phenomena, Arvidsson and Peitersen show wealth creation can be the result of a new kind of social production, and the motivation of continuous capital accumulation can exist in tandem with a new desire to maximize our social impact. Arvidsson and Peitersen argue that financial markets could become a central arena in which diverse ethical concerns are integrated into tangible economic valuations. They suggest that such a common standard has already emerged and that this process is linked to the spread of social media, making it possible to capture the sentiment of value to most people. They ultimately recommend how to build upon these developments to initiate a radical democratization of economic systems and the value decisions they generate. (shrink)

Nicolai Bachman explores the key principles and concepts of yoga philosophy through the Yoga Sutras offering an opportunity to learn and practice the sutras in Sanskrit, revealing the essence of yoga philosophy. The Yoga Sutras is a comprehensive and modern approach to working with Patanjali's seminal text for guidance and inspiration on your own journey toward clarity and happiness.

Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one’s children. On the surface, dad jokes are puns that are characterized by only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, which makes them lame and unfunny. Only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, however, is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, which makes dad jokes a type of anti-humor. Fathers may in turn seek to embarrass their children by purposively violating the (...) norms of joke-telling in this way, thus weaponizing the lame pun against their children as a type of good-natured teasing. Given their personality profile, it makes sense that fathers should be particularly prone to weap­onize dad jokes teasingly against their children like this, with the phenomenon bearing an illuminating resemblance to the rough-and-tumble play that fathers have engaged their children in since before the dawn of our species. (shrink)

RésuméL'idée d'un “monde des images” situé quelque part entre les mondes immatériel et matériel est un pivot de la spéculation eschatologique dans l'Islam médiéval tardif. Comme cela a déjà été reconnu, le concept a été inauguré par al-Suhrawardī. Cependant, ses fondements plus proprement philosophiques et en particulier la notion d'images “suspendues” – des images dotées d'un statut en quelque manière objectif plutôt que purement mental ou subjectif – méritent d’être davantage clarifiés; et c'est ce que cet article entend faire. Puisque (...) le concept de “formes suspendues”, tout en étant appliqué par al-Suhrawardī à des questions eschatologiques dans le dernier traité de sa Philosophie de l'illumination, apparaît pour la première fois dans une discussion sur la vision spéculaire, j'examine assez en détail la conception avicennienne de la vision spéculaire telle qu'elle est présentée dans le Shifāʾ, ouvrage contre lequel al-Suhrawardī réagit. J'entreprends ensuite une reconstruction détaillée de deux paragraphes de la Philosophie de l'illumination en accordant une attention particulière à la question du statut ontologique des images “suspendues” ou “auto-subsistantes” ainsi qu’à l'idée selon laquelle les miroirs servent non pas de lieux dans lesquels les images résideraient, mais de lieux où elles deviennent manifestes. (shrink)

Before WW2 Danish geologists had found traces of uranium in Greenland. But being squeezed from both sides in the escalating Cold War between East and West, in the first decade after WW2 the Danish government did not support expeditions to explore Greenland's potential uranium deposits. The situation changed abruptly after President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace address in December 1953, as a result of which a Danish Atomic Energy Commission (AEK) was set up in early 1955. Besides building a large atomic (...) energy research facility (Risø) one of AEK's first initiatives was to support big scale uranium expeditions to South-West Greenland. The ultimate goal for the leaders of AEK was to liberate Denmark from its dependence on imported fossil fuels by developing Danish nuclear reactors, fuelled by natural uranium from Greenland. In the late 1960s, after more than a decade of uranium explorations, this was still a goal, albeit much more long term. For many reasons the hunt for uranium in Greenland after WW2 was unsuccessful, but the main ones were Danish sovereignty concerns, techno-scientific nationalism and devastating institutional clashes of interests. The present paper will explore these problems. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 3 Seiten: 272-301.

This essay reviews two recent volumes containing editions of important early quranic codices. One of these is the so-called Sanaa Palimpsest, whose lower text at present remains our only known material witness to a recension of the quranic text that is different from the canonical one; the other is the Codex Amrensis. The essay devotes particular attention to the question of the textual relationship between the Quran’s standard text and that documented by the lower layer of the Sanaa Palimpsest, and (...) to Asma Hilali’s claim that the Sanaa Palimpsest never constituted a full quranic codex but only “a collection of disparate leaves.”. (shrink)

This article proposes to interpret Surah 97 based on research undertaken in the framework of the Corpus Coranicum project. The first part scrutinizes Christopn Luxenberg’s seriously flawed argument that Surah 97 can be understood as a Qur’anic hymn on the Nativity of Jesus if some of its key expressions are read against the semantic background of Syriac, while the remainder of the article endeavours to develop a more tenable understanding of the text. This involves an attempt to date Surah 97 (...) relative to other Qur’anic texts and to detect possible additions to it. In addition, the article discusses the meaning and reference of its most central term, laylat al-qadr. Finally, special attention is given to the question whether the text might not, in spite of the circularity of Luxenberg’s reading, contain implicit references to the Nativity. (shrink)

What is commonly referred to as the Adoption Problem is a challenge to the idea that the principles of logic can be rationally revised. The argument is based on a reconstruction of unpublished work by Saul Kripke. As the reconstruction has it, Kripke extends the scope of Willard van Orman Quine's regress argument against conventionalism to the possibility of adopting new logical principles. In this paper we want to discuss the scope of this challenge. Are all revisions of logic subject (...) to the Adoption Problem? If not, are there significant cases of logical revision that are subject to the Adoption Problem? We will argue that both questions should be answered negatively. (shrink)

We discuss the principles for a primitive, object-linguistic notion of consequence proposed by ) that yield a version of Curry’s paradox. We propose and study several strategies to weaken these principles and overcome paradox: all these strategies are based on the intuition that the object-linguistic consequence predicate internalizes whichever meta-linguistic notion of consequence we accept in the first place. To these solutions will correspond different conceptions of consequence. In one possible reading of these principles, they give rise to a notion (...) of logical consequence: we study the corresponding theory of validity by showing that it is conservative over a wide range of base theories: this result is achieved via a well-behaved form of local reduction. The theory of logical consequence is based on a restriction of the introduction rule for the consequence predicate. To unrestrictedly maintain this principle, we develop a conception of object-linguistic consequence, which we call grounded consequence, that displays a restriction of the structural rule of reflexivity. This construction is obtained by generalizing Saul Kripke’s inductive theory of truth. Grounded validity will be shown to satisfy several desirable principles for a naïve, self-applicable notion of consequence. (shrink)

Children, because of age-related reasons, are a vulnerable population, and protecting their health is a social, scientific and emotional priority. The increased susceptibility of children and fetuses to environmental agents has been widely discussed by the scientific community. Children may experience different levels of chemical exposure than adults, and their sensitivity to chemical toxicities may be increased or decreased in comparison with adults. Such considerations also apply to unborn and newborn children. Therefore, research on children is necessary in both clinical (...) and environmental fields, to provide age-specific relevant data regarding the efficacy and safety of medical treatments, and regarding the assessment of risk from unintended environmental exposure. In this context, the stakeholders are many, including children and their parents, physicians and public health researchers, and the society as a whole, with its ethical, regulatory, administrative and political components. The important ethical issues are information of participants and consent to participate. Follow-up and protection of data should be discussed in the context of biobanks, where children obtain individual rights when they become adults. It is important to realise that there are highly variable practices within European countries, which may have, in the past, led to differences in practical aspects of research in children. A number of recommendations are provided for research with children and environmental health. Environmental research with children should be scientifically justified, with sound research questions and valid study protocols of sufficient statistical power, ensuring the autonomy of the child and his/her family at the time of the study and later in life, if data and samples are used for follow-up studies. When children are enrolled, we recommend a consent dyad, including parental informed consent and the child’s assent and/or informed consent from older minors. For evaluation of the studies including children, a paediatrician should always be involved in the research ethics committee. (shrink)

Children, because of age-related reasons, are a vulnerable population, and protecting their health is a social, scientific and emotional priority. The increased susceptibility of children and fetuses to environmental agents has been widely discussed by the scientific community. Children may experience different levels of chemical exposure than adults, and their sensitivity to chemical toxicities may be increased or decreased in comparison with adults. Such considerations also apply to unborn and newborn children. Therefore, research on children is necessary in both clinical (...) and environmental fields, to provide age-specific relevant data regarding the efficacy and safety of medical treatments, and regarding the assessment of risk from unintended environmental exposure. In this context, the stakeholders are many, including children and their parents, physicians and public health researchers, and the society as a whole, with its ethical, regulatory, administrative and political components. The important ethical issues are information of participants and consent to participate. Follow-up and protection of data should be discussed in the context of biobanks, where children obtain individual rights when they become adults. It is important to realise that there are highly variable practices within European countries, which may have, in the past, led to differences in practical aspects of research in children. A number of recommendations are provided for research with children and environmental health. Environmental research with children should be scientifically justified, with sound research questions and valid study protocols of sufficient statistical power, ensuring the autonomy of the child and his/her family at the time of the study and later in life, if data and samples are used for follow-up studies. When children are enrolled, we recommend a consent dyad, including parental informed consent and the child’s assent and/or informed consent from older minors. For evaluation of the studies including children, a paediatrician should always be involved in the research ethics committee. (shrink)

Gers (Biol Philos, 2011) provides a positive and constructive view of the project to generalise Darwinian principles in Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen’s Darwin’s Conjecture. We note considerable overlap with his work and ours, and also with important recent work of Godfrey-Smith ( 2009 ), which Gers cites extensively. But we also note that there are differences in research objectives between Gers and Godfrey-Smith, on the one hand, and ourselves, on the other. Gers and Godfrey-Smith focus on the elucidation of (...) the most general principles possible. Our aim is to derive principles that are sufficiently abstract to span the natural and human social worlds, and then add additional principles to help understand the Darwinian evolution of human society. Furthermore, Gers and Godfrey-Smith critique a replicator concept that is different from ours. Once these points are made apparent, the criticisms are essentially disabled, and we end up in a position with different but complementary and overlapping research projects. (shrink)

A more ethical economic system is now possible, one that rectifies the crisis spots of our current downturn while balancing the injustices of extreme poverty and wealth. Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, a scholar and an entrepreneur, outline the shape such an economy might take, identifying its origins in innovations already existent in our production, valuation, and distribution systems. Much like nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, philosophers, bankers, artisans, and social organizers who planned a course for modern capitalism that was more economically (...) efficient and ethically desirable, we now have a chance to construct new instruments, institutions, and infrastructure to reverse the trajectory of a quickly deteriorating economic environment. Considering a multitude of emerging phenomena, Arvidsson and Peitersen show wealth creation can be the result of a new kind of social production, and the motivation of continuous capital accumulation can exist in tandem with a new desire to maximize our social impact. Arvidsson and Peitersen argue that financial markets could become a central arena in which diverse ethical concerns are integrated into tangible economic valuations. They suggest that such a common standard has already emerged and that this process is linked to the spread of social media, making it possible to capture the sentiment of value to most people. They ultimately recommend how to build upon these developments to initiate a radical democratization of economic systems and the value decisions they generate. (shrink)

As a response to the semantic and logical paradoxes, theorists often reject some principles of classical logic. However, classical logic is entangled with mathematics, and giving up mathematics is too high a price to pay, even for nonclassical theorists. The so-called recapture theorems come to the rescue. When reasoning with concepts such as truth/class membership/property instantiation, if ones is interested in consequences of the theory that only contain mathematical vocabulary, nothing is lost by reasoning in the nonclassical framework. It is (...) shown that this claim is highly misleading, if not simply false. Under natural assumptions, recapture claims are incorrect. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in evolutionary economics since the 1980s, a unified theoretical approach has so far been lacking. Methodological and ontological discussions within evolutionary economics have attempted to understand and help rectify this failure, but have revealed in turn further differences of perspective. One aim of this article is to show how different approaches relate to different levels of abstraction. A second purpose is to show that generalized Darwinism is some way from the most abstract level, and illustrates how it (...) may be used to move towards more specific theoretical applications. Nevertheless, there is a long way to go before these become more evident. (shrink)