In this essay, I first analyze the extension of hermeneutical interpretation in the Heideggerian sense to products of contemporary technology which are components of our “lifeworld”. Products of technology, such as airplanes, laptops, cellular phones, washing machines, or vacuum cleaners might be compared with what Heidegger calls the “Ready-to-hand” (das Zuhandene) with regard to utilitarian objects such as a hammer, planer, needle and door handle in Being and Time. Our life with our equipment, which represents the “Ready-to-hand” in Heidegger's sense (...) of the word, is determined by temporalization (Zeitigung) which cannot be separated and isolated from the wholeness of things in the world. In the second part of my paper, I explore the positive achievement of material hermeneutics (Don Ihde) with regard to its extension to technoscience and the discussion of how such hermeneutics can contribute to the preservation of our threatened lifeworld, but also to explore the possibilities of how technical inventions, medical innovations could improve our way of life. (shrink)

In the introduction to hisAllgemeine Psychopathologie, published in 1913, Karl Jaspers stated that psychology has little value for the psychopathologist because it focuses on all kinds of interesting matters, but not on normal psychic life. In this article we argue that today, in the year 2013, little has changed in this respect. During the past century, normal psychic life has rarely been a topic of research. Clinical psychology has focused primarily on studying three other topics: the mind-body problem, the methodological (...) debate and the psychotherapy debate. Due to this focus, our knowledge in the above-mentioned areas has increased significantly, but the issue raised by Karl Jaspers about normal psychic life has still not been addressed. In this article, we propose that normal psychic life should indeed become the new focus of clinical psychology. We illustrate the importance of this new focus with three examples from clinical psychology: the Global Assessment of Functioning scale, empathy and the emergence of positive psychology during the past decade. We then explore the efficacy of phenomenology for studying this normal psychic life, thereby discovering a useful epistemological basis in Husserl’s systematic phenomenology. Various phenomenological research methods are evaluated in the light of this systematic phenomenology. (shrink)

This essay is a response to proposals to integrate patient-subjective or idiographic data into future versions of nosologies such as the DSM and the ICD. It argues that a nosology is not a suitable vehicle for disseminating psychopathological-phenomenological research results throughout the field. Drawing on the work of Ludwig Binswanger, it examines, on the basis of four postulates, how he applies the Husserlian concept of intentionality in psychiatry and thus arrives at a psychopathological phenomenology. For each individual postulate, we then (...) look in depth at the implications for the current debate around DSM. The conclusion we come to is that, both because of the objective of phenomenological research and because of the complexity of the kind of information involved in findings based on that research, it is impossible to integrate these findings into a nosology without deviating from either them or the nosology itself. (shrink)

The response given to C.G. Hempel’s well-known challenge by Arthur Danto in his Analytical Philosophy of History of 1965 – that deductive-nomological and narrative explanations are logically compatible yet employ incommensurable schemata – is here investigated from a historical perspective. It is shown that the developmental trajectory that emerges from an analysis of Danto’s previous writings – including not only a forgotten paper of 1958 but also his PhD dissertation of 1952 – contains distinctive step-changes with publications of 1953 and (...) 1956 still prior to that of 1958–59 which enabled his subsequent discovery of narrative sentences. It is also argued that Danto’s developmental trajectory runs contrary to that presumed by some prominent commentators. Analytical History of Philosophy was not the midpoint of his ascent from mainstream philosopher of science to high priest of postmodern aesthetics, but represents a reasoned retreat from his early historical idealism. (shrink)

After identifying the discipline of psychology’s history of contributing pioneers and leaders to the field of race research, epistemological problems in empirical psychology are identified including an adherence to a naïve empiricist philosophy of science. The reconstruction focuses on the underdetermined relationship between data and interpretation. It is argued that empirical psychology works under a hermeneutic deficit and that this deficit leads to the advancement of interpretations regarding racialized groups that are detrimental to those groups. Because these interpretations are understood (...) as actions that bring harm to certain racialized groups, and because these actions are made in the name of science and knowledge, the term epistemological violence is applied. Reflections regarding the meanings and consequences of this term in empirical psychology and the human sciences are presented. (shrink)

Whether, and in what sense, research in phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology has—in addition to its descriptive and hermeneutic value—explanatory power is somewhat controversial. This paper shows why it is legitimate to recognize such explanatory power. To this end, the paper analyzes two central concerns underlying the debate about explanation in phenomenology: (a) the warning against reductionism, which is implicit in a conception of causal explanation exclusively based on models of natural/physical causation; and (b) the warning against top-down generalizations, which neglect (...) the specificity of the individual. While acknowledging that these two caveats express serious concerns regarding the debate on explanatory models, I show that phenomenology has the resources to respond to them. These can be found in analyses of different types of causation relating to different regions of reality and in the structure of explanatory models based on exemplarity. On the basis of these analyses, I defend a pluralist account vis-à-vis explanatory models. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of philosophers introduced the idea of philosophical research on cognition that could enter into competition with psychology, which was developing into an autonomous discipline at that time. In view of the problems of the traditional but still prevailing associationist theory, Ernst Cassirer demanded a more sophisticated theory that could explain the human ability to concentrate one's thoughts on a topic, such as a problem or a task. He presented a representational theory (...) of mind to explain this ability. This paper explicates the scope of this theory and Cassirer's idea of interdisciplinary cooperation between philosophers and psychologists. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the epistemic position of psychiatry between the science of general laws in relation to frequently encountered generality and the science of specific events which is directed towards the particular. In this respect the development of the dichotomy of nomothetic and idiographic methodology from its generally forgotten neo-Kantian origins is delineated within the context of a historical-philosophical analysis and then its incorporation into psychology and psychopathology is reconstructed. In the course of this analysis (...) and also in the discussion of the currently accepted theories of analytical philosophy and critical rationalism it becomes clear that, in spite of widespread current opinions to the contrary, individualizing concept formation is an indispensable element in the methodological inventory of psychiatric science. (shrink)

Hermeneutic phenomenology is a research method used in qualitative research in the fields of education and other human sciences, for example nursing science. It is a widely used method example in Scandinavia, and Van Manen is well known for his hermeneutic phenomenological method. In many studies the hermeneutic phenomenological method is inarticulate or ambiguous. Researchers generally lack a common understanding of what this method actually is. One reason for that is that the expression “hermeneutic phenomenological method” is contradiction in terms. (...) Hermeneutics and phenomenology have their own distinct history. Hermeneutics and phenomenology as philosophical disciplines have their own distinct aims and orientations. Hermeneutic is orientated to historical and relative meanings. Phenomenology in Husserlian sense is orientated to universal and absolute essences. Martin Heidegger connects hermeneutics and phenomenology in very sophisticated manner as hermeneutical phenomenology and he provides a very specific definition of his brand of phenomenology. For Heidegger, hermeneutical phenomenology is the research of the meaning of the Being as a fundamental ontology. However, this kind of phenomenology is of no use for educational qualitative research. (shrink)

Gadamer and Habermas both argue that some earlier theorists of interpretation in the human sciences, despite recognizing the meaningful character of social reality, still succumb to objectivism because they fail to conceive the relation of interpreters to their subjects in terms of cross-cultural normative “dialogue.” In particular, Gadamer and Habermas claim that the most prominent nineteenth-century philosopher of the human sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, fell prey to a misleading Cartesian outlook which sought to ground the objectivity of interpretation on complete transcendence (...) of the interpreter’s present cultural and historical situation. This article challenges Gadamer’s and Habermas’s claim by arguing that new research on nineteenth-century hermeneutic thought reveals Dilthey to be much more aware of the reflexive, present-centered nature of historical research than they maintain and further that their own “dialogical” model of interpretation suffers from notable obscurities which Dilthey’s work itself helps expose. (shrink)

Wilhelm Dilthey's late nineteenth-century doctrine of `re-experiencing' the thoughts and feelings of the actors whose lives the social scientist seeks to understand has been criticized by several commentators as entailing a `naïve empathy view of understanding' in which social scientists are said to transport themselves into other cultural contexts in a wholly uncritical, unreflective manner. This article challenges such criticisms by arguing that Dilthey's writings on hermeneutics amount to a highly sophisticated defence of the role of psychological feeling in understanding (...) that should still be of interest to contemporary social theorists. Beginning with a review of the reception of Dilthey's work by Max Weber and the Neo-Kantians, the article goes on to enumerate a number of significant parallels between Dilthey's insights and more recent approaches in social and cultural theory. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer niederländische Tierpsychologe Frederik J. J. Buytendijk (1887–1974) entwickelte in seinen Forschungen der 1920er und 1930er Jahre in Abgrenzung zum Behaviorismus eine antireduktionistische Zugangsweise auf Verhaltensexperimente. So bezog er in seinen Experimentalpraktiken explizit die subjektive Erfahrung des Versuchsleiters mit ein. Damit entwarf Buytendijk eine Wissenschaftstheorie, die methodologisch auf die Phänomenologie, Hermeneutik wie auf gestalttheoretische Ganzheitskonzepte zurückgriff, quantitative Datenerhebungen aber dennoch nicht aufgab. Vielmehr untersuchte Buytendijk auf der Grundlage des Biotheoretikers Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) in seinem physiologischen Institut in Groningen konkret (...) die These einer „Tier-Umwelt-Einheit“. Der vorliegende Beitrag ermittelt anhand der institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen und zweier Experimente (1924 und 1931), inwiefern Buytendijk seine Aussage, dass das Tier „mit und in seiner Umwelt geboren [ist]“, die zugleich sein wissenschaftsphilosophisches Konzept stützte, zu verifizieren wusste. Dass die Umwelt dem Tier ein Organ ist, ist bei Buytendijk dementsprechend nicht nur metaphorisch, sondern ganz real zu verstehen. (shrink)

In the interwar period, biologists employed a diverse set of holistic approaches that were connected to different research methodologies. Against this background, this article explores attempts in the 1920s and 1930s to negotiate quantitative and qualitative methods in the field of neurophysiology. It focuses on the work of two scientists on different sides of the Atlantic: the Dutch animal psychologist and physiologist Frederik J.J. Buytendijk and the American neuropsychologist Karl S. Lashley, specifically analyzing their critical correspondence, 1929–1932, on the problems (...) surrounding the term _intelligence._ It discusses the inexplicable anomalies in neurophysiology as well as the reliability of quantitative and qualitative methods. While in his laboratory work Lashley adhered to a strictly analytic approach, Buytendijk tried to combine quantitative methods with phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches. The starting point of their discussion is Lashley’s monograph on _Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence_ (1929) and the rat experiments discussed therein. Buytendijk questioned the viability of the maze-learning method and the use of statistics to test intelligence in animals; he reproduced Lashley’s experiments and then confronted Lashley with his critical findings. In addition to elucidating this exchange, this paper will, more generally, shed light on the nature of the disagreements and shared assumptions prevalent among interwar neurophysiologists. In turn, it contributes to historiographical debates on localization and functionalism and the discrepancy between analytic (quantitative) and interpretative (qualitative) approaches. (shrink)

Although Wilhelm Dilthey and Franz Brentano apparently were pursuing roughly the same objective—to offer a description of our mental functions and of their relations to objects—and both called their respective research programs ‘descriptive psychology’, they seem to have used the term to refer to two different methods of psychological research. In this article, I compare analyses of these differences. Against the reading of Orth but also against a possible application of recent relativist accounts of the epistemology of peer disagreement to (...) this case, I argue that their apparent shared objective is not enough to support an understanding of their views as two alternatives within a given historical or scientific context, or as a mutual peer disagreement. I show that the impression of a shared objective can be explained away as stemming from the influence of their teacher Adolf Trendelenburg, and I stress that the case of introspection strongly suggests that an account in terms of peer disagreement is not plausible. Finally, I conclude that the opposition between two traditions, Austrian philosophy and historicism, might be better suited to account for the dispute and its apparent common historical context. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article is written in the field of the philosophy of science. The aim is to express how painting and drawing can be used as part of a phenomenological research method. The painter or drawer is a visual researcher in the process of capturing a holistic and truthful experience of a cultural phenomenon. We will highlight the visual researcher process and how the experience of truth is known throughout this process. The paining and sketches, which we present in this (...) article, are part of a book, together with written narratives and pedagogical theory – on teaching as a phenomenon – called Lærerpraksis og Pedagogisk teori. The paintings and drawings present teaching in a way that complements and expands the written text. The sketches and painting of teaching attempt to establish the truth as unconcealment of a phenomenon. Our argumentation is based on the theories of Gadamer, Cassirer, Panofsky and Heidegger. Gadamer connects humanistic research with artistry and the experience of truth. Cassirer argues that the perception of a cultural phenomenon begins as a holistic understanding to bring forth the symbolic form or essence of the phenomenon. Panofsky transfers the theory of Cassirer into the field of painting. The concept of synthetic intuition is the intrinsic knowing of a painting, which corresponds to Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms. Heidegger’s theory explores how art unfolds and preserves the truth. We will argue that the connection between art and truth could bring forth important perspectives on phenomenological science and turn the research activity closer to an artistic form. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the different views of the founders of descriptive psychology in the 19th century about the meaning and purpose of this discipline and sketch a new plan for connecting descriptive psychology with the language-critical tradition of analytic philosophy. I will show that the goals Hermann Lotze, Franz Brentano, and Wilhelm Dilthey set for descriptive psychology were too lofty for different reasons. The common problem they faced was how to reconcile the ideal of autonomous philosophical knowledge with (...) the empirical relevance that descriptive psychology should have. Faced with this dilemma, I outline a new plan to conceive of descriptive psychology as a critical project aimed at overcoming the obstacles that language places in the way of our knowledge of mental phenomena. (shrink)

A sharp distinction between the notions of explanation and understanding is more than relevant for contemporary philosophy. However, it is difficult to understand the current state and prospects of this terminological distinction without considering its origins. The author finds such origins in the field of philosophy and methodology of science of the nineteenth century. One cannot grasp the meaning of explanation and understanding in philosophy without considering the ordinary meanings since both notions are also actively used in the ordinary language. (...) Hence, this paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, it investigates the meaning of explanation and understanding in everyday use. Secondly, it considers the origin of the distinction between the notions in philosophy. It is proven that the origin of the explanation in philosophy can be seen in Auguste Comte’s philosophy of science, namely in the first volume of The Course in Positive Philosophy published in 1830. There Comte introduces the notion of explanation in the context of the law of three stages, as well as the notion of positive explanation which makes positive knowledge or science different from the previous stages of knowledge. As for the origin of understanding in philosophy, it is found in Droysen’s philosophy of history, namely in The Outline of the Principles of History, where Droysen makes a distinction between understanding, which is used in history, and explanation that was discussed by Comte. Consequently, explanation and understanding, after being introduced to philosophy by Comte and Droysen, become the central notions of Dilthey’s well-known methodological distinction between natural sciences and humanities. Manuscript received 16.02.2020. (shrink)

Drawing upon Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological constitution of the Other through Einfülhung, I argue that the hierarchical distinction between higher and lower animals – which has been dismissed by Heidegger for being anthropocentric – must not be conceived as an objective distinction between “primitive” animals and “more evolved” ones, but rather corresponds to a phenomenological distinction between familiar and unfamiliar animals.

For many people, laypeople as well as animal scientists and philosophers, animal welfare involves animal feelings. Scientifically, however, animal feelings are problematic. In the concluding remarks of a conference about the welfare of domestic animals in 1994, for example, two questions for further research were proposed: (1) What is the nature of feelings? and (2) Why is it not possible to measure the occurrence of feelings in animals directly? This book intends to give a philosophical and scientific-theoretical answer to both (...) questions. The two questions are transformed into the following: (1) How can we conceptualize animal experiences such as feelings or emotions in a philosophically and theoretically sound way? and (2) Which method is appropriate to gain knowledge of animal experiences?These questions are answered first by examining two ethological animal welfare theories, namely that of Wiepkema and Toates and that of Dawkins. These theories have animal feelings of welfare as their subject matter. My conclusion after examining these welfare theories is that they do not conceptualize and obtain scientific knowledge of animal feelings at all. These theories only study animal behaviour and physical aspects of animals and assume that these aspects refer to animal feelings of welfare. Because they are applications of animal ethology, these theories stick to the natural-scientific method of research. The use of this method leads to two different conceptualizations of animal welfare feelings. The theory developed by Wiepkema and Toates conceives of animal feelings as unobservable, internal causes of animal behaviour. In Dakwins' theory, seen as a logical-behaviouristic theory, "animal feelings" are names for particular forms of law-governed animal behaviour. My comment on both theories is that animal experiences are solely theoretical concepts or designations. These ethologists simply assume rather than demonstrate that particular animal behaviour is caused by or associated with animal experiences.Wiepkema, Toates and Dawkins also acknowledge this. In order to say that animal behaviour refers to subjective animal feelings, they use the argument from analogy that states that because there are similarities between human and vertebrate animal behaviour and (neuro)physiological processes, it is plausible that animals have similar experiences as humans. However, like most animal welfare scientists, they correctly say that this is an unscientific argument. My final conclusion is that it is impossible to infer subjective animal experiences from objectively studied, physical and behavioural phenomena.This conclusion is in line with the main thesis of philosophical hermeneutics. This thesis states that subjects cannot be studied as such in a natural-scientific way because the concept of 'subject' demands a different, non-objectivating method of knowledge. Philosophical hermeneneutics can perhaps answer the question of a proper concept for subjective animal experience, although animals are not the explicit subject matter of this discipline.Two founding fathers of 20th Century hermeneutics, namely Dilthey and Gadamer, are studied concerning the concepts of 'subject' and 'experience'. My conclusion is that the subject-philosophy of these two philosophers is primarily a philosophy for human subjects, thereby more or less excluding the possibility for animal subjectivity. Since Gadamer does not consider animals linguistic beings, he seems to exclude animal experience. However, he opens up the way to a philosophy about animal experiences as bodily experiences. Dilthey, in his later writings, follows the same line of reasoning as Gadamer emphasizing the common, cultural-historical meaning of experiences and their expression and understanding, which is typically human. In his early writings, however, Dilthey underlines the individual, subjective aspects of experiences in humans and higher animals. Although he later does not reject this psychological foundation of experience, he simply fails to ask: what about animal experience? thereby evading the question of how we as cultural and historical humans can understand non-cultural and non-historical animal experience. The line of reasoning these two philosophers have in common is that they say: if animals have experiences, then these experiences must be similar to human experiences. Actually, their subject-philosophy is a philosophy of human subjectivity which can hardly cover animal experiences.Rather than trying to find a philosophical concept of human experience that can cover animal experience, a third possibility between human experience and the absence of experience is looked for. The philosophies of the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty and Plessner which emphasize the bodily character of human and animal experience offer this possibility.Merleau-Ponty's philosophical phenomenology seems to promise a conceptualization of bodily animal experiences. The conclusion of his analysis of human perceptions is that not the linguistic but the bodily way of human being is the foundation of human perceptions and experiences. He sees the human body as ambiguous: both physical and conscious (i.e., experiencing) and he assumes this philosophical analysis adequate to cover animal relationships with their environment. Inspired by the difference that Merleau-Ponty makes between the bodily comprehension of humans and the hermeneutic understanding of person, I propose the concept of the impersonal meaning of animal experience as an alternative of the personal, cultural and historical character of human experience.Because Merleau-Ponty repeatedly says that all living beings are intertwinings of physical body and consciousness, he seems to say that plants and micro-organisms are also experiencing beings, thereby making no distinction between animals and other non-human organisms.Plessner offers the required specification. He asserts that human as well as animal relationships to their environment are mediated by a self. To him, the human relationship to the environment is mediated by language, personality, culture and history. What Plessner calls a "double human self" - namely a bodily bound self and a reflective "I" - is the foundation of this relationship. He further states that human personality, culture and history give form to bodily experiences. Animals, by contrast, cannot distance themselves from their own body and bodily-bound self. Animals do not have the capacity of reflective, linguistic, personal or cultural-historical experience; they have only bodily and environmentally tied, here-and-now experiences. Thereby, Plessner provides an elaborated, philosophical concept of animal experience that is not similar to the concept of human experience.Buytendijk, who worked as an animal psychologist around the middle of this century, can be seen as applying Plessner's concept of bodily and environmentally tied animal experience to research. He fully adopted Plessner's philosophy of animals and humans and in his own animal experiments and in discussions of those performed by others, he adopts the view that animal behaviour is an expression of their experiences which are bound to the present Umwelt and bodily possibilities of the animals involved.When comparing the method that Buytendijk used with the hermeneutical and phenomenological method of understanding human experiences, one can see that:Unlike the meaning of human experiences, the meaning of animal experiences is not personal within a cultural-historical context. This is a vital, impersonal meaning that is bound to momentary bodily perceptions and actions in the present Umwelt.We can understand this meaning within a species-specific context.This species-specific context is not given beforehand as a standard for interpreting animal behaviour. We attain knowledge of this context by interpreting the meaning of expressions of particular animals of a species under various circumstances.Because animals, contrary to humans, are not open to others, we cannot share with them our knowledge of the meaning of their experiences.The conclusion of these comparisons is that our interpretation of the meaning of animal expressions always remains, conceptually and methodically, our human interpretation. Whether our interpretations of the meaning of animal expressions are more or less adequate depends on whether they meet the usual standards of hermeneutical understanding: coherence between interpretations and accordance with biological knowledge of the animals involved.Finally, two contemporary animal welfare debates are discussed. The first (a conference about welfare of domestic animals in 1994) is a philosophical and theoretical debate about the concept of animal welfare and the method for measuring it. The two main issues at that conference were: are feelings a fundamental aspect of animal welfare? and how can we measure animal welfare? The second question turned out to be the most important. Some participants said that feelings, although important, should not belong to the scientific concept of animal welfare because they cannot be measured; physical indicators of welfare are sufficient for speaking of welfare. Other participants held that we can indirectly know feelings by measuring physical and behavioural indicators. However, most of these indicators are the same as those used by animal welfare scientists who claim that they measure only the physical aspects of animal welfare, irrespective of associated animal feelings. Animal welfare scientists who stress feelings of welfare simply add that these observations refer to the animals' feelings of poor welfare. One participant of the conference argued that physical indicators of animal welfare cannot be used as indicators of feelings of welfare too; these feelings have to be demonstrated independently of physical indicators of welfare.In the second debate about welfare of farm mink, the validity of the argument that feelings have to be demonstrated independently has been exemplified. The question in this debate was whether some particular behaviour of farm mink, called "stereotypic behaviour", counted as expressions of poor welfare. All participants in this debate tried to demonstrate or contest this by means of natural-scientific experiments. A critical reading of this debate demonstrates that scientists only agree upon the designs and results of such experiments if they also agree upon the interpretation of the meaning of the animals' behaviour. Almost all the conclusions from experiments regarding mink's welfare can be contested from the point of view of another interpretation of the mink's behaviour. This debate shows the primacy of the interpretation of animal behaviour as an expression of experiences over results of natural- scientific experiments. This primacy requires an explicit method for interpreting animal behaviour in order to reach an agreement about various interpretations. The type of research into welfare of farm mink as used by one of the participants in this debate is considered as containing elements of such an interpretative method. Contrary to her own intention, the researcher does not see the mink's behaviour only as a causal effect of fulfilled or unfulfilled needs, but primarily as meaningful behaviour. By carefully looking at and comparing the form of the behaviour of farm mink and wild mink, she tries to interpret their behaviour. The aim of these interpretations is not to look into the animals' heads in order to see experiences as causes of animal behaviours. I state that the aim is to attain a coherence between the assumed meanings of various animal behaviours. This coherence provides us with a background for natural-scientific explanations of these behaviours, experimental results and other physical data.At the end of this book, the four principles of animal welfare research as an integration of interpretative and natural-scientific research are evaluated:In order to study animal welfare as subjective experience, a view is needed that conceptually and methodically maintains animal welfare as subjective experience. Saying that animal welfare is not only physical but primarily a matter of feelings, requires something other than physical measurements of welfare. The debate about farm mink shows that scientists studying animal welfare from a natural-scientific angle already take this view, albeit implicitly. The method developed above can make the interpretation of animal behaviour a matter on which ethologists and other animal scientists can attain an argumentative consensus.Although the concept of animal welfare is about what matters to the animal, the animal's point of view should be abandoned as the criterion of knowledge of animal experiences of welfare. Animals are not able to agree upon interpretations of their behaviour. Hence, these interpretations always remain human interpretations.The species-specificity of animal behaviour cannot function as the criterion of animal welfare. Whether a particular animal behaviour is species-specific or not depends on one's interpretations of various behaviours of animals of a certain species.Interpretations of animal behaviour as indications of good or poor animal welfare should not be in contradiction with natural-scientific research data that also refer to good or poor welfare. They should be brought into coherence with each other. Natural science studies the physical aspect and interpretative science the expressive aspect. These two types of research are not independent of each other; they both rely upon background knowledge regarding what counts as good or poor animal welfare. In some cases the results of both types of research can contradict and challenge each other. I argue that one cannot say beforehand which of these views is correct; this can only be decided upon by trying to attain a new consensus about interpretative and natural-scientific assessments of the animals' welfare. (shrink)

In the 19th century, "Psychophysical Parallelism" was the most popular solution of the mind-body problem among physiologists, psychologists and philosophers. (This is not to be mixed up with Leibnizian and other cases of "Cartesian" parallelism.) The fate of this non-Cartesian view, as founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner, is reviewed. It is shown that Feigl's "identity theory" eventually goes back to Alois Riehl who promoted a hybrid version of psychophysical parallelism and Kantian mind-body theory which was taken up by Feigl's teacher (...) Moritz Schlick. (shrink)