The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characteristics detailed below, are the main drivers of the ecological crisis and exacerbated trends already underway. Further, the planetary boundaries framework can support interpretations that do not solely emphasize technocratic operational approaches and costs, (...) but also assume that these alone can be the solution. (shrink)

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controversial process – based on normative judgments, ethical concerns, and socio-political struggles – it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation.

In this article, I highlight what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (re)conceptualisation of the plurality within identities implies for justice and education. Laclau and Mouffe (re)theorise the plurality of identities by framing and understanding identities within the wider theoretical context of discourse analysis and radical Democracy. I argue that the significance of this specific (re)theorisation of the plurality within identities for justice and education has not yet been tackled by the related educational-philosophical scholarship, not even by that which focuses on (...) Laclau and Mouffe. As a first step, I provide a brief overview of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and their approach to Democracy. Then, I show that, in their wider framework, one of the things that meaningfully connect discourse theory with radical Democracy is the theorisation of the plurality within identities. Finally, I suggest that acknowledging the plurality within any identity may offer important tools for expanding the scope of educational justice and for promoting justice in education. Amongst other things, by theoretically recognising the plurality and multi-dimensionality of collective identities, we obtain better insight into the pitfalls of homogenising identities and of cultivating reductive outlooks on identities in and through education, and encourage students’ critical thinking and self-reflective stances toward subjectivities. (shrink)

As the multiple issues of the digital public sphere threaten our democracies and the cohesion of our societies, most attempts for a betterment of the digital networks and platforms revolve around a risk-response approach. This paper takes the opposite approach and develops a positive definition of the ideal ethical public sphere, combining normative features with original taxonomies. In view of defining common standards for a healthy digital public sphere, this paper offers an interdisciplinary literature review, and original recommendations, before discussing (...) potential leverages for implementing these changes. The suggested ethical normative features derive from a positive approach to the digital public sphere, as ideal common standards. Sustained by the underlying assumption that the composite landscape of the media ecosystem and its different layers (networks, platforms, users) cannot be steered by government regulations alone, the normative (deontological) approach serves to understand and justify the need for a normative approach, to help envision new pathways for an ethical transformation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSocial constructionism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular, are well-known for their anti-essentialist understanding of identity. Hence these discourses have theoretically been utilized for understanding social identity construction and for deconstructing identities. However, I claim that social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory may have the as yet non-theorized operation of detecting and combating wholesale indictments of identities. This operation helps us diagnose how ethnic identity and affect become incriminated as supposedly inextricably intertwined with racism, (...) chauvinism and related pathologies. Yet interestingly, instead of unveiling and critiquing the new hegemony of blanket indictment of ethnic identity/affect, social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory have been used to incriminate identity as such. The present article interprets Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory against the grain to chastise the tendency to declare ethnic identity/affect as the new enemy. It shows how such new, hegemonic incrimination aspires to fill the empty signifier of peaceful coexistence with otherness, yet runs the risk of effacing otherness. The article concludes with an example of a reconstructive alternative. (shrink)

The visual public record of the early West represents a site of national, continental, hemispheric, and global configurations of territory, power, and imagination. The early photograph reproduces the contradictory encounters between industry, settlers, and Indigenous communities as a particular future is envisioned and contested. The transformative value of a photograph was quickly recognized for nation building and soon served a political purpose as its uses expanded from surveying lands to promoting population growth and tourism and to artistic expression. The early (...) uses on the frontier, however, created a secondary history: an alteric and alternative history of Indigenous Peoples through an oral storytelling with a perspective of difference in assimilation, disidentification, and resistance. Transcultural photography, however, is never neutral as participants come from different worlds to participate in a contested exchange. This article looks at photographic encounters between Red Cloud, Mathew Brady, and Alexander Gardener as they enact a mediation in international relations. (shrink)

Many utopian visions operate by scapegoating an Otherness. They blame an ‘enemy’ for an unbearable, dystopian current reality, holding the ‘enemy’ responsible for it or for obstructing the passage to a desired, new reality. Then they exclude (or even promise the elimination of) this ‘enemy’. Despite the renewed interest in utopias, such utopian frames remain theoretically neglected or, worse, they are considered typical of the logical structure of utopianism. This paper aims to show that this issue merits a different political-philosophical (...) attention. We begin with operations of utopian predicates in the relevant scholarship and distinguish them from the operations of the term ‘incriminatory’ that we are introducing. We term incriminatory the kind of utopian frame whose future-oriented, idealized and desired image is constructed in and through an incriminated ‘Other’. We indicate the re-conceptualizing merits of this new term and then we discuss the affirmative utopianism that does not incriminate a specific Other. Our main argument, which we deploy contra Yannis Stavrakakis’s position, is that utopias are not unavoidably or inherently incriminatory. (shrink)

Online controlled experiments, also known as A/B tests, have become ubiquitous. While many practical challenges in running experiments at scale have been thoroughly discussed, the ethical dimension of A/B testing has been neglected. This article fills this gap in the literature by introducing a new, soft ethics and governance framework that explicitly recognizes how the rise of an experimentation culture in industry settings brings not only unprecedented opportunities to businesses but also significant responsibilities. More precisely, the article (a) introduces a (...) set of principles to encourage ethical and responsible experimentation to protect users, customers, and society; (b) argues that ensuring compliance with the proposed principles is a complex challenge unlikely to be addressed by resorting to a one-solution response; (c) discusses the relevance and effectiveness of several mechanisms and policies in educating, governing, and incentivizing companies conducting online controlled experiments; and (d) offers a list of prompting questions specifically designed to help and empower practitioners by stimulating specific ethical deliberations and facilitating coordination among different groups of stakeholders. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre‐theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.

The quest for real democracy is one of the components of sustainable degrowth. But the incipient debate on democracy and degrowth suffers from general definitions and limited connections to political philosophy and democracy theory. This article offers a critical review of democracy theory within the degrowth literature, taking as its focal point a relevant debate between Serge Latouche and Takis Fotopoulos. We argue that the core of their contention can be traced back to the relationship between the concepts of democracy (...) and autonomy as defined by philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, which both authors and generally the degrowth movement consider as one of their theoretical reference points. We show how both Latouche and Fotopoulos hold a misconception of Castoriadis' notions of autonomy, the social imaginary and politics, which in turn limits their cognisance of democracy and hence confuses their debate concerning the possibilities for a degrowth transition within the confines of a liberal parliamentary democracy. With a clarified theoretical understanding of the interconnected democracy-autonomy assemble, we proceed to an evaluation of the revolutionary potential of the degrowth movement and to a better understanding of a possible relationship between democracy and degrowth. (shrink)

The impact of large digital corporations on our freedom is often lamented but rarely investigated systematically. This paper aims to fill this desideratum by focusing on the power of social media corporations and the freedom of their users. In order to analyze this relationship, I distinguish two forms of freedom and two corresponding forms of power. Social media corporations extend their users’ freedom of choice by providing many new options. This provision, however, comes with the domination by these corporations because (...) it is based on their power of uncontrolled interference. Users could escape this domination through exit. One reason why they do not choose this option is that they would lose the benefits associated with the network effects provided by social media services. A second reason is that the power of social media corporations runs so deep that they are able to manipulate the autonomous decision-making processes of their users. Users are provided with many new avenues for authentic self-presentation on social media. By using them, however, users need to conform to a web interface that is designed by corporations to undermine self-control. Through these two mechanisms, corporations are able to promote an interest in users to present themselves on their platforms. Insofar as this works, they secure the users’ compliance to their domination through subjectivation. This double conjunction of choice and domination, on the one hand, and autonomy and subjectivation, on the other, makes the case that the very power of corporate social media stems from their intrinsic connection to genuine practices of freedom. (shrink)

We aim to devise a Ramsey test analysis of actual causation. Our method is to define a strengthened Ramsey test for causal models. Unlike the accounts of Halpern and Pearl ([2005]) and Halpern ([2015]), the resulting analysis deals satisfactorily with both over- determination and conjunctive scenarios.

Sartre’s account of the emotions presupposes a conception of human nature that is never fully articulated. The paper aims to render such conception explicit and to argue that frustration occupies a foundational place in Sartre’s picture of affective existence.

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may lead (...) to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

Der Band bietet einen systematischen Überblick über das Verhältnis von Literatur und Philosophie. Philosophische, literarische und literaturwissenschaftliche Ansätze kommen gleichberechtigt zu Wort. Die Beiträge loten die Bedeutung von Literatur aus und präsentieren gattungstheoretische Überlegungen zu literarischen Formen der Philosophie. Studien über philosophierende Literatur und philosophische Reflexionen über Literatur beschließen den Band.

In this paper, we analyse actual causation in terms of production. The latter concept is made precise by a strengthened Ramsey Test semantics of conditionals: \ iff, after suspending judgement about A and C, C is believed in the course of assuming A. This test allows us to verify or falsify that an event brings about another event. Complementing the concept of production by a weak condition of difference-making gives rise to a full-fledged analysis of causation.

A new and comprehensive look at the reasons behind successful or failed nation building Nation Building presents bold new answers to an age-old question. Why is national integration achieved in some diverse countries, while others are destabilized by political inequality between ethnic groups, contentious politics, or even separatism and ethnic war? Traversing centuries and continents from early nineteenth-century Europe and Asia to Africa from the turn of the twenty-first century to today, Andreas Wimmer delves into the slow-moving forces that (...) encourage political alliances to stretch across ethnic divides and build national unity. Using datasets that cover the entire world and three pairs of case studies, Wimmer's theory of nation building focuses on slow-moving, generational processes: the spread of civil society organizations, linguistic assimilation, and the states' capacity to provide public goods. Wimmer contrasts Switzerland and Belgium to demonstrate how the early development of voluntary organizations enhanced nation building; he examines Botswana and Somalia to illustrate how providing public goods can bring diverse political constituencies together; and he shows that the differences between China and Russia indicate how a shared linguistic space may help build political alliances across ethnic boundaries. Wimmer then reveals, based on the statistical analysis of large-scale datasets, that these mechanisms are at work around the world and explain nation building better than competing arguments such as democratic governance or colonial legacies. He also shows that when political alliances crosscut ethnic divides and when most ethnic communities are represented at the highest levels of government, the general populace will identify with the nation and its symbols, further deepening national political integration. Offering a long-term historical perspective and global outlook, Nation Building sheds important new light on the challenges of political integration in diverse countries. (shrink)

Affirmative action is standardly pursued in relation to admissions to prestigious universities, in hiring for prestigious jobs, and when it comes to being elected to parliament. Central to these forms of affirmative action is that they have to do with competitive goods. A good is competitive when, if we improve A’s chances of getting the good, we reduce B’s chances of obtaining the good. I call this Competitive Affirmative Action. I distinguish this from Non-competitive Affirmative Action. The latter has to (...) do with non-competitive goods, e.g., being granted early parole or freedom from arbitrary arrest. I argue that some of the most prominent objections against affirmative action—in particular, the reverse discrimination objection and the merit objection—speak less against Non-competitive Affirmative Action. And that some of the most prominent arguments in favor of affirmative action, insofar as they justify Competitive Affirmative Action, also justify Non-competitive Affirmative Action. (shrink)

Als Philosoph steht Schleiermacher noch immer im Schatten seiner Zeitgenossen und auch seiner theologischen Werke. Das Buch will seinen eigenständigen Beitrag zur Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie sichtbar machen. Gefragt wird, worin das philosophische Gravitationszentrum der einschlägigen Texte, Entwürfe und Vorlesungen Schleiermachers besteht, mit welchen theoretischen Mitteln er dabei operiert und welche Stellung er in der philosophischen Bewegung seiner Zeit einnimmt. Als zentral erweist sich der Individualitätsgedanke, der aus einer eigenständigen, kritischen Aneignung Kants und Spinozas resultiert. Mit dieser Konzeption begegnet Schleiermacher Friedrich (...) Schlegel auf Augenhöhe und leistet einen eigenständigen Beitrag zur frühromantischen Philosophie, deren grundlegende Positionen er in seinen philosophischen Vorlesungen in Halle (1804-1806) und Berlin (seit 1808) kritisch durcharbeitet und systematisiert. Dies bringt Schleiermacher, wie schon den frühen Friedrich Schlegel, trotz aller gravierenden Unterschiede vielfach in die Nähe Hegels, so dass sich sein Verhältnis zu den philosophischen Zeitgenossen höchst komplex gestaltet. Schleiermacher erweist sich als eigenständiger Denker auf dem gemeinsamen Boden der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction:the European Union and the Law of Peoples The Argument of Law of Peoples Standards and Grounds for International Stability Human Rights in Federations The Argument of Law of Peoples for Inter‐people Inequality Distributive Justice in Federations Federal and Global Implications Toleration and Stability Reconsidered Acknowledgments Notes.

A growing number of consumer technology companies are aiming to convince older people that humanoid robots make helpful tools to support aging-in-place. As hybrid devices, socially assistive robots (SARs) are situated between health monitoring tools, familiar digital assistants, security aids, and more advanced AI-powered devices. Consequently, they implicate older people’s privacy in complex ways. Such devices are marketed to perform functions common to smart speakers (e.g., Amazon Echo) and smart home platforms (e.g., Google Home), while other functions are more specific (...) to older people, including health and safety monitoring and serving as companions to mitigate loneliness. Privacy is a key value central to debates about the ethics of using SARs in aged care, yet there has been very little interchange between these debates and the robust theoretical discussion in the legal literature about the future of privacy and AI governance. Drawing on two qualitative studies of older people’s views on consumer SARs, the paper contributes novel findings about older people’s thinking on privacy and data governance at the intersection of their experiences with present day digital technologies and projections for future AI systems, and places their views in dialogue with debates about the future of privacy protection and AI governance. (shrink)

Powers, capacities and dispositions (in what follows I will use these terms synonymously) have become prominent in recent debates in metaphysics, philosophy of science and other areas of philosophy. In this paper I will analyse in some detail a well-known argument from scientific practice to the existence of powers/capacities/dispositions. According to this argument the practice of extrapolating scientific knowledge from one kind of situation to a different kind of situation requires a specific interpretation of laws of nature, namely as attributing (...) dispositions to systems. My main interest will be to discuss what characteristics these dispositions need to have in order to account for the scientific practice in question. I will furthermore assess whether the introduction of dispositions in the context of the extrapolation argument can be described as a ‘revitalization’ or as a ‘return’ to those notions repudiated by early modern philosophers. More particularly I will argue for the following claims: I. In repudiating scholastic terminology, including substantial forms with their causal powers, post-cartesian philosophers focussed on a concept of causation that was much stronger than 21st century conceptions of causation. For this reason alone, whatever ‘causal’ is supposed to mean in today’s causal powers, embracing causal powers is not a simple return to a pre-cartesian notion. II. The dispositions presupposed in scientific practice need not (and should not) be construed in causal terms (whether strong or weak). III. While some early modern philosophers contrasted the characterisation of the natural world in terms of substantial forms (and their causal powers) on the one hand and a mathematical characterization on the other and suggested that these approaches are incompatible, the dispositions postulated by the extrapolation argument to account for scientific practice are themselves characterized in mathematical terms. More precisely: The behaviour the systems are disposed to display is – at least in physics – often characterized in mathematical terms. IV. The dispositions assumed in the law-statements in scientific practice are determinable rather than determinate properties. (shrink)

We put forth an analysis of causation. The analysis centers on the notion of a causal model that provides only partial information as to which events occur, but complete information about the dependences between the events. The basic idea is this: an event causes another just in case there is a causal model that is uninformative on both events and in which the first event makes a difference as to the occurrence of the other. We show that our analysis captures (...) more causal scenarios than the other counterfactual accounts to date. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl is regarded as the founder of transcendental phenomenology, one of the major traditions to emerge in twentieth-century philosophy. In this book Andrea Staiti unearths and examines the deep theoretical links between Husserl's phenomenology and the philosophical debates of his time, showing how his thought developed in response to the conflicting demands of Neo-Kantianism and life-philosophy. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel, as well as Husserl's writings on the natural and human (...) sciences that are not available in English translation, Staiti illuminates a crucial chapter in the history of twentieth-century philosophy and enriches our understanding of Husserl's thought. His book will interest scholars and students of Husserl, phenomenology, and twentieth-century philosophy more generally. (shrink)

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

The well-known formal semantics of conditionals due to Stalnaker Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, Oxford, 1968), Lewis, and Gärdenfors The logic and 1140 epistemology of scientific change, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978, Knowledge in flux, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988) all fail to distinguish between trivially and nontrivially true indicative conditionals. This problem has been addressed by Rott :345–370, 1986) in terms of a strengthened Ramsey Test. In this paper, we refine Rott’s strengthened Ramsey Test and the corresponding analysis of explanatory relations. We (...) show that our final analysis captures the presumed asymmetry between explanans and explanandum much better than Rott’s original analysis. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Vielfalt unterschiedlicher Gremien zur Ethikberatung entwickelt: vom Konsil mit einem einzelnen Berater bis zum Ethikkomitee. In dem Band werden die Ethikberatung, ihre Entwicklung und Anwendung, sowie die Gründung von Gremien in Krankenhäusern, Pflegeeinrichtungen, Hospizen und von niedergelassenen Ärzten anhand von Fallbeispielen erläutert. Dabei schlagen die Autoren eine Brücke zwischen traditioneller philosophischer Ethik und anwendungsbezogener klinischer Ethik. Auch rechtliche Fragen werden erörtert.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nihilism Skepticism Nihilism and Skepticism.

Epistemische Tugenden sind Eigenschaften des forschenden Subjekts, die in wissenschaftlichen Kulturen als Bedingung fur die Produktion, Vermittlung oder den Erwerb von Wissen angesehen werden. Sie lassen sich nicht auf ein abstraktes Sollen reduzieren, wie es oft von Ethikkommissionen oder politischen Bewegungen an die Wissenschaft herangetragen wird. Die methodische Erzeugung von Wissen ware kaum moglich, wenn es nicht erkenntnisfordernde Tugenden wie Geduld, Aufmerksamkeit, Genauigkeit, Intuition, Wahrhaftigkeit, Neugierde, Strenge oder Zuverlassigkeit gabe, die den an sich prekaren Erkenntnisprozess stabilisieren und in eine bestimmte (...) Richtung lenken. Die Beitrage dieses Sammelbandes befassen sich mit epistemischen Tugenden aus (wissenschafts-)historischer, philosophischer, medien- und literaturwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem Verhaltnis von wissenschaftlichen und soziokulturellen beziehungsweise moralischen Normen. Mit Beitragen von: Lorraine Daston, Martin Doll, Andreas Gelhard, Raymond Geuss, Ruben Hackler, Michael Hagner, Jens Kertscher, Markus Krajewski, Marcel Lepper, Martin Mulsow, Oliver Nievergelt, Tanja Paulitz, Robert Proctor, Katja Sabisch, Sandro Zanetti, Cornelia Zumbusch. (shrink)

This paper offers a theory of spatial indexicals like _here_ and _there_ on which such expressions are variables associated with presuppositional constraints on their values. I show how this view handles both referential and bound uses of these indexicals, and I propose an account of what counts as the location of the context on a given occasion. The latter is seen to explain a wide range of facts about what the spatial indexicals can refer to.

We define a formal semantics of conditionals based on _normatively ideal worlds_. Such worlds are described informally by Armgardt (Gabbay D, Magnani L, Park W, Pietarinen A-V (eds) Natural arguments: a tribute to john woods, College Publications, London, pp 699–708, 2018) to address well-known problems of the counterfactual approach to causation. Drawing on Armgardt’s proposal, we use iterated conditionals in order to analyse causal relations in scenarios of multi-agent interaction. This results in a refined counterfactual approach to causal responsibility in (...) legal contexts, which solves overdetermination problems in an intuitively accessible manner. (shrink)

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

This book explores the relationship between democracy and republicanism, and its consequences; and articulates new theoretical insights into connections between liberty, law and democratic politics.

Research on the ethics of algorithms has grown substantially over the past decade. Alongside the exponential development and application of machine learning algorithms, new ethical problems and solutions relating to their ubiquitous use in society have been proposed. This article builds on a review of the ethics of algorithms published in 2016, 2016). The goals are to contribute to the debate on the identification and analysis of the ethical implications of algorithms, to provide an updated analysis of epistemic and normative (...) concerns, and to offer actionable guidance for the governance of the design, development and deployment of algorithms. (shrink)

Affirmative action continues to divide. My aim in this paper is to present participants in the debate with a new distinction, namely one between negative and positive affirmative action. Whereas positive affirmative action has to do with certain goods, such as a place at a prestigious university or a job at a prestigious company, negative affirmative action has to do with certain bads, such as a firing or a sentence. I then argue that some of the most prominent arguments in (...) favor of affirmative action speak at least as much in favor of negative as positive affirmative action. At the same time, at least one of the most prominent arguments put forward against affirmative action speak less against negative affirmative action. Thus, the paper should redraw the battle lines in the affirmative action debate. (shrink)

El fenómeno originario de la pertenencia explicita uno de los problemas fundamentales de la tradición filosófica continental: la relación cuerpo-mundo. Dicha relación se ha construido tradicionalmente a partir de la propia mismidad del sujeto (Yo) o de su corporalidad, afirmando que es porque tengo un cuerpo que puedo decir que pertenezco a un mundo. Ante esta problemática se alza una fenomenología de la pertenencia propuesta por R. Barbaras, la cual expresa la necesidad de re-pensar la concepción de la subjetividad, así (...) como la necesidad de una inversión en la relación cuerpo-mundo a partir de la pertenencia al mundo del propio sujeto. Ahí es donde aparece el verdadero sentido y alcance ontológico de la experiencia del cuerpo puesto que tener un cuerpo no significa otra cosa más que pertenecer y la aparición sólo podrá darse desde dentro del mundo, a partir de nuestra inscripción en él. Así, la ecología corporal constituirá un ejemplo específico que muestra el alcance de dicha inversión y explicitará el parentesco ontológico entre el cuerpo y el mundo. (shrink)

Armstrong famously argued in favour of introducing totality facts in our ontology. Contrary to fully negative (absence) facts, totality facts yield a theory of “moderate” or “partial” negativity, which allegedly provides an elegant solution to the truthmaking problem of negative claims and, at the same time, avoids postulating (many) first-order absences. Friends of totality facts argue that partial negativity is (i) tolerable vis-à-vis the Eleatic principle qua mark of the real, and (ii) achieves a significant advantage in terms of ontological (...) parsimony. But are totality facts, which are partially negative, really more ontologically acceptable than fully negative facts? In this paper, we argue that, comparatively, the case for totality facts is weaker than commonly assumed and that, ultimately, the answer is negative. (shrink)

This article discusses Du Châtelet’s challenging claim that entertaining illusions, especially illusions of being esteemed by posterity, is conducive to happiness. It does so by taking a contextualizing approach, contrasting her views with some Epicurean aspects of the views on illusions and happiness in Bernard de Fontenelle and Julien Offray de La Mettrie. I will argue for three claims: (1) Du Châtelet’s comparison between self-related illusions and illusions in the theater is vulnerable to objections deriving from some distinctions that Fontenelle’s (...) poetics draws between the role of illusions in the theater and the role of illusions in real life. (2) Examining Fontenelle’s analysis of the detrimental effects of self-related illusions indicates several respects in which Du Châtelet has underestimated the ambivalent nature of illusions. (3) Du Châtelet’s view that illusions are akin to sensations that are favorable to us problematically generalizes La Mettrie’s insight that some acts of the imagination have a quasi-perceptual nature. (shrink)

This article analyzes the treatment of vegetative powers in Nicolaus Taurellus’s critical response to Andrea Cesalpino. Taurellus’s interest in this topic derives from larger metaphysical and theological concerns. His concern is that Cesalpino’s view that vegetative powers are due to a divine principle of activity inherent in natural particulars leads to a version of substance monism that is incompatible with the Christian doctrine of creation. Taurellus’s critique can best be understood within the context of his defense of an immaterialist account (...) of the basic constituents of reality, which is connected with an emergentist account of the origin of vegetative powers. (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance the (...) discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

"Klug werden heißt nach alledem, sich öffnen können für die Erfahrung der eigenen Möglichkeiten und der Bescheidung auf sie." Ein spannendes und flüssig geschriebenes Buch zum philosophischen Thema Klugheit. Die Analyse verschiedener Klugheitskonzepte von Aristoteles bis in die Neuzeit führt Andreas Luckner zu der Erkenntnis, dass Klugheit gerade für moralphilosophische Überlegungen relevant ist - im Gegensatz zur weit verbreiteten Auffassung, Klugheit stehe in Opposition zu moralischem Denken und Handeln. Pluspunkte besonders flüssig und lesbar geschrieben müheloser Einstieg in die Tiefen (...) der Problematik anhand anschaulicher Beispiele aus dem Alltag Entwurf eines modernen Klugheitsbegriffs auf der Basis von Orientierung und Vertrauen in der Begegnung mit der Welt. (shrink)