Courtroom talk in child custody interrogations recurrently features contrasting event descriptions about ‘what happened’, as well as contrasting person descriptions. This case study – from a large set of audio-recorded courtroom examinations – documents how social workers’ contrasting narrative versions about alleged domestic violence are related to divergent problem formulations. Blame-account sequences feature descriptions of a particular event as violent or nonviolent and descriptions of a new partner as ‘non-adult’ or merely as ‘impulsive’ but ‘concerned’. Other contrasting person descriptions feature (...) a target child either as ‘normal’ or as someone who ‘has a diagnosis’. This involves categorizations of the particular child either as a victim or as someone ‘with a diagnosis’, two contrasting accounts that provide divergent explanatory formulations of what the overall problem is. Ultimately, divergent testimonies also reflect how social accounts in court reflect both mitigated/aggravated descriptions of violence and divergent accounts of parents’ and children’s agency and accountability. (shrink)

This study explores how disciplinary humor is deployed to shape and reshape social order in inter-generational encounters. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of staff–resident encounters at a treatment home for boys, focusing on sequential patterns in the local design of jokes and teasing, analyzing language and multimodal interaction in detail. It was found that staff and boys recurrently laughed together and teased each other by invoking local hierarchical positions such as child–adult. The intrinsic ambiguity of humor and teasing (...) allowed staff members to engage in temporary breaches of social order, while simultaneously enforcing local rules of conduct. Similarly, the boys would joke with the staff, exaggerating or transgressing institutional and generational divides. But ultimately, the joking could also be seen to remind the participants of the very hierarchies that separate staff from residents and men from boys, or adults from children. (shrink)

A well-known theory about under which circumstances a statement is true in a fiction is The Reality Principle, which originate in the work of David Lewis: (RP) Where p1... pn are the primary fictional truths of a fiction F , it is true in F that q iff the following holds: were p1 ... pn the case, q would have been the case (Walton 1990: 44). RP has been subjected to a number of counterexamples, up to a point where, in (...) the words of Stacie Friend “it is widely recognized that the Reality Principle […] cannot be a universal inference rule for implied story-truths” (Friend 2017: 33). This chapter argues that the strength of these counterexamples is widely overestimated, and that they do not, on closer scrutiny, constitute reasons for rejecting RP. (shrink)

§1. Iterated Gödelian extensions of theories. The idea of iterating ad infinitum the operation of extending a theory T by adding as a new axiom a Gödel sentence for T, or equivalently a formalization of “T is consistent”, thus obtaining an infinite sequence of theories, arose naturally when Godel's incompleteness theorem first appeared, and occurs today to many non-specialists when they ponder the theorem. In the logical literature this idea has been thoroughly explored through two main approaches. One is that (...) initiated by Turing in his “ordinal logics” and taken very much further in Feferman's work on transfinite progressions, which also introduced the more general study of extensions by reflection principles, of which consistency statements are a special case. This approach starts from an assignment of theories to ordinal notations, and extracts sequences of theories through a suitable choice of a path in the set of ordinal notations. The second approach, illustrated in particular by the work of Schmerl and Beklemishev, starts instead from a suitably well-behaved primitive recursive well-ordering, which is used to define a sequence of theories. This second approach has led to precise results about the relative proof-theoretical strength of sequences of theories obtained by iterating different reflection principles. The Turing-Feferman approach, on the other hand, lends itself well to an investigation in qualitative and philosophical terms of the relevance of such iterated reflection extensions to mathematical knowledge, in particular because of two developments associated with this approach. (shrink)

The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the (...) senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires. (shrink)

In this contribution we take a look at the development of environmental concern and mobility behavior of the population in Germany and Switzerland. The proportion of survey participants who express concern about the state of the natural environment is high in both countries. However, this proportion did not increase during the last two decades despite the ongoing public debate about environmental issues. At the same time the demand for private transportation did increase in Germany by almost 20% (in Switzerland by (...) 2.5%). However, fuel consumption per capita decreased in Germany by 6.5% and in Switzerland by 2.2%. Our time series analyses of these trends suggest that this reduction is due to the price increase of gasoline which was substantial in both countries and not due to any change in attitudes. We argue that further price increases are appropriate means to reduce fuel consumption. However, our analyses also show that the price elasticity for fuel is low. (shrink)

This important new book by one of the world's leading political theorists boldly questions the moral justification for organizing our world as a territorial states-system and proposes major changes to states' sovereign powers.

This important new work surveys the source and ramifications of the famed Nuremburg Code -- recognized around the world as one of the cornerstones of modern bioethics.

Erarbeitet von Dominik Balg, Anne Burkard, Henning Franzen, Aenna Frottier, David Lanius, David Löwenstein, Hanna Lucks, Kirsten Meyer, Donata Romizi, Katharina Schulz, Stefanie Thiele und Annett Wienmeister. -/- Die Entwicklung argumentativer Fähigkeiten ist ein zentrales Ziel des Ethik- und Philosophieunterrichts, ja überhaupt ein zentrales Bildungsziel. Wie aber kann das gelingen? In vielen verfügbaren Unterrichtsmaterialien werden argumentative Fähigkeiten eher vorausgesetzt als systematisch gefördert. Auch curriculare Vorgaben bleiben zumeist sehr unspezifisch. Lehrpersonen werden so weitgehend allein gelassen mit der Aufgabe, Lernende beim Erwerb (...) argumentativer Fähigkeiten zu fördern. Die vorliegende Aufgabensammlung soll dazu beitragen, diese Lücke zu schließen. Sie bietet Lehrpersonen reichhaltige Materialien für die spiralcurricular angelegte, systematische Förderung argumentativer Fähigkeit anhand exemplarischer Inhalte. Orientiert an klaren fachlichen Standards finden sich hier Aufgaben auf vier Niveaustufen, jeweils in Verbindung mit übersichtlichen Merkblättern. Die Aufgaben der beiden unteren Niveaustufen lassen sich bereits für jüngere Lernende der Sekundarstufe einsetzen, Aufgaben der obersten Niveaustufe richten sich an Lernende von Abschlussklassen oder der Studieneingangsphase. Für die Hand der Lehrpersonen werden die Aufgaben und Merkblätter durch fachliche und didaktische Kommentare sowie Lösungshinweise ergänzt. (shrink)

This book surveys research in quantification starting with the foundational work in the 1970s. It paints a vivid picture of generalized quantifiers and Boolean semantics. It explains how the discovery of diverse scope behavior in the 1990s transformed the view of quantification, and how the study of the internal composition of quantifiers has become central in recent years. It presents different approaches to the same problems, and links modern logic and formal semantics to advances in generative syntax. A unique feature (...) of the book is that it systematically brings cross-linguistic data to bear on the theoretical issues, discussing French, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Russian, Japanese, Telugu (Dravidian), and Shupamem (Grassfield Bantu), and pointing to formal semantic literature involving quantification in around thirty languages. -- -/- 1. What this book is about and how to use it; 2. Generalized quantifiers and their elements: operators and their scopes; 3. Generalized quantifiers in non-nominal domains; 4. Some empirically significant properties of quantifiers and determiners; 5. Potential challenges for generalized quantifiers; 6. Scope is not uniform and not a primitive; 7. Existential scope versus distributive scope; 8. Distributivity and scope; 9. Bare numeral indefinites; 10. Modified numerals; 11. Clause-internal scopal diversity; 12. Towards a compositional semantics of quantifier words. (shrink)

Wie verändern sich Mensch und Körper durch Technik? Und welches Menschenverständnis vertritt der Transhumanismus? Anna Puzio befasst sich in der ersten philosophischen Studie zur Anthropologie des Transhumanismus mit führenden Personen des Feldes, u. a. mit Nick Bostrom, David Pearce und Natasha Vita-More. Neben Körperoptimierung und Medizintechnologien beleuchtet sie auch Alltagstechnologien wie Wearables. Dabei entwickelt sie einen neuen Ansatz zur Technikanthropologie und ein neues inklusives Menschen- und Körperverständnis im Anschluss an Donna Haraway und den Kritischen Posthumanismus im amerikanischen Raum.

ABSTRACTEvaluative aesthetic discourse communicates that the speaker has had first-hand experience of what is talked about. If you call a book bewitching, it will be assumed that you have read the book. If you say that a building is beautiful, it will be assumed that you have had some visual experience with it. According to an influential view, this is because knowledge is a norm for assertion, and aesthetic knowledge requires first-hand experience. This paper criticizes this view and argues for (...) an alternative view, according to which aesthetic discourse expresses affective states of mind, analogously to how assertions express beliefs. It is because these affective states require first-hand experience that aesthetic discourse communicates that such acquaintance is at hand. The paper furthermore argues that the lack of an experience requirement for aesthetic belief ascriptions constitutes a problem for the kind of expressivist who claims that evaluative belief states are covert non-cognitive states. (shrink)

In recent literature many theorists, including Eklund (2011), endorse or express sympathy towards the view that the evaluative content of thick terms is not asserted with utterances of sentences containing them but rather part of their secondary content. In this article we discuss a number of features of thick terms which speak against this view. We further argue that these features are not shared by another, recently much-discussed, class of hybrid evaluative terms, so-called slurs, and that the evaluative contents of (...) these might thus very well be secondary. (shrink)

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of being in (...) the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity:?? It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by ‘find’-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. (shrink)

Difficulty is often treated as blame-mitigating, and even exculpating. But on some occasions difficulty seems to have little or no bearing on our assessments of moral responsibility, and can even exacerbate it. In this paper, I argue that the relevance (and irrelevance) of difficulty with regard to assessments of moral responsibility is best understood via Quality of Will accounts. I look at various ways of characterising difficulty – including via sacrifice, effort, skill and ‘trying’ – and set out to demonstrate (...) that these factors are only blame-mitigating where, and to the extent that, they complicate ascriptions of insufficient concern. Matters become more complex, however, when we turn to difficult circumstances that seem to generate such objectionable attitudes. This is arguably the case with epistemic difficulty and certain instances of moral ignorance. Here I argue that certain difficult circumstances diminish the sense in which false moral beliefs are genuinely revelatory of the agents who hold them. In particular, I draw on the distinction between difficulty that generates objectionable attitudes, and objectionable attitudes that generate difficulty. I argue that the former, but not the latter, can plausibly be viewed as blame mitigating, and that this would apply to (limited) cases of moral ignorance. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore and discuss the use of the concept of being affected in biomedical decision making processes in Germany. The corresponding German term ‘Betroffenheit’ characterizes on the one hand a relation between a state of affairs and a person and on the other an emotional reaction that involves feelings like concern and empathy with the suffering of others. An example for the increasing relevance of being affected is the postulation of the participation of people with disabilities and (...) chronic or acute diseases in the discourse, as partly realized in the German National Ethics Council or the Federal Joint Committee. Nevertheless, not only on the political level, the resistance against the participation of affected people is still strong; the academic debate seems to be cross-grained, too. Against this background, we explore the meaning and argumentative role of the concept of being affected as it is used by affected and lay people themselves. Our analysis is based on four focus group discussions in which lay people, patients and relatives of patients discuss their attitudes towards biomedical interventions such as organ transplantation and genetic testing. This setting allows for a comparison of how affected and non-affected people are concerned and deliberate about medical opportunities, but also of how they position themselves as being affected or non-affected with respect to (scientific) knowledge and morality. On this basis, we discuss the normative relevance of being affected for the justification of political participation. (shrink)

Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is (...) made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”. (shrink)

One of David Rosenthal’s many important contributions to the philosophy of mind was his clear and unshirking account of introspection. Here we argue that while there is a kind of introspection (we call it “reflective introspection”) that Rosenthal’s account may be structurally fit to accommodate, there is also a second kind (“primitive introspection”) that his account cannot recover. We introduce Rosenthal’s account of introspection in §1, present the case for the psychological reality of primitive introspection in §2, and argue that (...) Rosenthal’s account lacks the resources to accommodate it in §3. (shrink)

Grounding theorists insist that grounding and explanation are intimately related. This claim could be understood as saying either that grounding ‘inherits’ its properties from explanation or it could be interpreted as saying that grounding plays an important—possibly an indispensable—role in metaphysical explanation. Or both. I argue that saying that grounding ‘inherits’ its properties from explanation can only be justified if grounding is explanatory by nature, but that this view is untenable. We ought therefore to be ‘separatists’ and view grounding and (...) explanation as distinct. As it turns out, though, once grounding has been in this sense distinguished from the explanation it backs, the view that the role grounding plays in explanation justifies its introduction ends up in serious trouble. I conclude that the role grounding plays in explanation does not justify attributing to grounding whatever nature we think it has, and it most likely does not give us any special reason to think grounding exists. (shrink)

Consider the opening sentence of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. By writing this sentence, Tolkien is making a fictional statement. There are two influential views of the nature of such statements. On the pretense view, fictional discourse amounts to pretend assertions. Since the author is not really asserting, but merely pretending, a statement such as Tolkien’s is devoid of illocutionary force altogether. By contrast, on the alternative make-believe view, fictional discourse prescribes that (...) the reader make-believe the content of the statement. In this paper, we argue that neither of these views is satisfactory. They both fail to distinguish the linguistic act of creating the fiction, for instance Tolkien writing the sentence above, from the linguistic act of reciting it, such as reading The Hobbit out loud for your children. As an alternative to these views, we propose that the essential feature of the author’s speech act is its productive character, that it makes some state of affairs obtain in the fiction. Tolkien’s statement, we argue, has the illocutionary force of a declaration. (shrink)

Domain extension in mathematics occurs whenever a given mathematical domain is augmented so as to include new elements. Manders argues that the advantages of important cases of domain extension are captured by the model-theoretic notions of existential closure and model completion. In the specific case of domain extension via ideal elements, I argue, Manders’s proposed explanation does not suffice. I then develop and formalize a different approach to domain extension based on Dedekind’s Habilitationsrede, to which Manders’s account is compared. I (...) conclude with an examination of three possible stances towards extensions via ideal elements. (shrink)

It has been argued that moral assertions involve the possession, on the part of the speaker, of appropriate non-cognitive attitudes. Thus, uttering ‘murder is wrong’ invites an inference that the speaker disapproves of murder. In this paper, we present the result of 4 empirical studies concerning this phenomenon. We assess the acceptability of constructions in which that inference is explicitly canceled, such as ‘murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it’; and we compare them to similar constructions involving ‘think’ (...) instead of ‘disapprove’—that is, Moore paradoxes (‘murder is wrong but I don’t think that it is wrong’). Our results indicate that the former type of constructions are largely infelicitous, although not as infelicitous as their Moorean counterparts. (shrink)

This book offers a scientific whistleblower’s perspective on current implementation of federal research misconduct regulations. It provides a narrative of general interest that relates current cases of research ethics to philosophical, historical and sociological accounts of fraud in scientific research. The evidence presented suggests that the problems of falsification and fabrication remain as great as ever, but hidden because the current system puts universities in charge of investigations and permits them to use confidentiality regulations to hide the outcomes of investigations. (...) The book documents the significant conflict of interest that arises because federal regulation gives universities the responsibility to conduct investigations of their own faculty with severely limited oversight. The book is intended for young research scientists or anyone who wishes to understand the challenges faced by scientists in the workplace today. The central thread in the book is an exclusive account of an experienced research scientist who was the first to expose the facts that led to the longest running research misconduct investigation in the history of the National Science Foundation. (shrink)

The study aims at exposing Meinong's ideas that may be of interest to analytic philosophers. It contains all the basic information concerning Meinong's theory of objects with a special focus upon 'objectives', which are Meinong's propositions. Meinong's theory of meaning and his epistemological views are discussed in detail. An outline of his conception of truth, which is classified as firmly realistic, is followed by a review of the critical works touching upon Meinong's epistemological ideas. Finally, Meinong's theory of objects is (...) presented as inspiring the development of Meinongian logics, with his Aussersein as the prototype of an all-inclusive semantic domain. The issues considered include reference of terms and sentences as well as the general features of a Meinongian-style semantics. (shrink)

Within debates concerning responsibility for ignorance the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is often treated as crucial. Many prominent accounts hold that while factual ignorance routinely exculpates, moral ignorance never does so. The view that there is an in-principle distinction between moral and factual ignorance has been referred to as the “Asymmetry Thesis.” This view stands in opposition to the “Parity Thesis,” which holds that moral and factual ignorance are in-principle similar. The Parity Thesis has been closely aligned with (...) volitionist accounts of moral responsibility, whereas the Asymmetry Thesis has been closely aligned with Quality of Will accounts. Two central questions are at work here: how ignorance excuses, and whether it excuses in the same way for both moral and factual ignorance. I will argue that these questions have often been confused in the present debate, and once we have distinguished more clearly between them, it seems that Quality of Will accounts are compatible with the Parity Thesis. And more generally: that the distinction between moral and factual ignorance is far less important in debates about responsibility for ignorance than it has often appeared. (shrink)

Many people share the intuition that by turning to works of literature something can be learned about the world. One way to explain the epistemic access to the world that fictional literature provides is by comparing it to thought experiments. Both? thought experiments and works of fiction? might be seen as imaginative exercises which help to find out what would or could happen if certain conditions were met. This comparison of fictional literature with thought experiments provides the point of departure (...) for the contributions in our volume. It contributes to the discussion of an approach that has quite recently entered the field of the philosophy of literature. (shrink)

Modifying the descriptive and theoretical generalizations of Relativized Minimality, we argue that a significant subset of weak island violations arise when an extracted phrase should scope over some intervener but is unable to. Harmless interveners seem harmless because they can support an alternative reading. This paper focuses on why certain wh-phrases are poor wide scope takers, and offers an algebraic perspective on scope interaction. Each scopal element SE is associated with certain operations (e.g., not with complements). When a wh-phrase scopes (...) over some SE, the operations associated with that SE are performed in its denotation domain. The requisite operations may or may not be available in a domain, however. We present an empirical analysis of a variety of wh-phrases. It is argued that the wh-phrases that escape all weak islands (i.e., can scope over any intervener) are those that range over individuals, the reason being that all Boolean operations are defined for their domain. Collectives, manners, amounts, numbers, etc. all denote in domains with fewer operations and are thus selectively sensitive to scopal interveners—a “semantic relativized minimality effect”. (shrink)

This chapter argues that human and animal minds indeed depend on a collection of domain-specific, task-specific, and encapsulated cognitive systems: on a set of cognitive ‘modules’ in Fodor's sense. It also argues that human and animal minds are endowed with domain-general, central systems that orchestrate the information delivered by core knowledge systems. The chapter begins by reviewing the literature on spatial reorientation in animals and in young children, arguing that spatial reorientation bears the hallmarks of core knowledge and of modularity. (...) It then considers studies of older children and adults, arguing that human spatial representations change qualitatively over development and show capacities not found in any other species. Finally, it presents two new experiments that investigate the role of emerging spatial language in uniquely human navigation performance. (shrink)

Democratic innovations have been widely presented by both academics and practitioners as a potential remedy to the crisis of representative democracy. Many argue that deliberation should play a pivotal role in these innovations, fostering greater citizen participation and political influence. However, it remains unclear how digitalization affects the quality of deliberation—whether digital democratic innovations (DDIs) undermine or enhance deliberation. This paper takes an inductive approach in political theory to critically examine three features of online deliberation that matter for deliberative democracy: (...) scale, transparency, and the facilitation of equality. It argues that the enhancement of equality should be given special attention when designing and implementing deliberative DDIs. Equality is a basic democratic value that is crucial for the intrinsic quality of deliberation. One way of enhancing equality through digital deliberative practices is via AI facilitation, which can assist human facilitators and help mitigate power dynamics, often present in non-digital settings. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, virtual and augmented reality, (semi-)autonomous ve- hicles, autoregulatory weapon systems, enhancement, reproductive technologies and human- oid robotics – these technologies (and many others) are no longer speculative visions of the future; they have already found their way into our lives or are on the verge of a breakthrough. These rapid technological developments awaken a need for orientation: what distinguishes hu- man from machine and human intelligence from artificial intelligence, how far should the body be allowed to (...) be changed and what are the dangers and opportunities presented by these technologies? Many of these questions are also addressed to theology. For example, questions about the image of humanity, the understanding of creation, the ethics of technological body interventions or the moral status of robots. What does theology have to say about these technological developments? It is the right time for theology to scientifically explore tech- nologization and AI and to formulate answers. As technology changes the various areas of human life, society and the world around us, the places and topics of theology are also undergoing transformation. Puzio, Anna: Theology Meets AI: Examining Perspectives, Tasks, and Theses on the Intersection of Technology and Religion. In: Puzio, Anna/Kunkel, Nicole/Klinge, Hendrik (Hg.): Alexa, How Do You Feel About Religion? Theological Approaches to Technology and Artificial Intelligence (Theology and AI 1). Darmstadt: wbg 2023, S. 29–41. DOI: 10.53186/1030373. (shrink)

The treatise attempts to approach and deal with some of the most fundamental problems facing anyone who wishes to uphold some version of the so-called theory of tropes. Three assumptions serve as a basis for the investigation: tropes exist, only tropes exist, and a one-category trope-theory along these lines should be developed so that the tropes it postulates are able to serve as truth-makers for all kinds of atomic propositions. Provided that these assumptions are accepted, it is found that the (...) trope-theorist will have to deal with two important problems. First, some atomic propositions seem to require universal truth-makers. Second, some atomic propositions seem to require concrete truth-makers. As tropes are abstract particulars, it follows that the trope-theorist, in order to fulfil assumption, must provide an account of exactly how he or she could construct universality and concreteness from his or her basic stock of tropes. In the treatise such constructions are attempted and some basic problems with such constructions are revealed. Although these problems are serious enough it is argued that it is nevertheless possible to deal with these basic issues while staying squarely within the boundaries of a one-category trope-ontology. (shrink)

Kann der christliche Glaube an Gott in einer der Freiheit verpflichteten Moderne bedeutsam sein? Wie kann man von Gott sprechen unter dem Anspruch der Autonomie der Vernunft? Die Studie gibt darauf eine Antwort mittels einer Analyse der genealogischen Rekonstruktionen von Moderne, wie sie die Philosophen Hermann Krings und Herbert Schnädelbach vorgelegt haben. Dabei zeigt sich, dass es innertheologische Momente waren, die am Ende des Spätmittelalters die Moderne freigesetzt haben. So lässt sich die Moderne als eine Epoche begreifen, in der der (...) Glaube nochmals radikalisiert hermeneutisch erschlossen werden kann." --provided by publisher, back cover. (shrink)

Whatever societies accept as "knowledge" is embedded in specific epistemological, political and economic power relations. How is knowledge produced and functionalized? What is the difference between knowledge and the sciences? Can there be science without universal truth claims? Questions like these, all of them highly relevant, are discussed in twelve essays from the perspective of Sociology, Law, Cultural Studies and the Humanities.

Jones recognizes the existence of “primitives of conceptual structures,” out of which “local representations of kinship are constructed.” NSM semantics has identified these primitives through a cross-linguistic search for lexical universals (“NSM” stands for Natural Semantic Metalanguage and also for the corresponding linguistic theory). These empirical universals provide, I argue, a better bridge between cognitive anthropology and evolutionary psychology than the abstract constructs of OT, with dubious claim to conceptual reality.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 crisis has introduced a variety of stressors, while simultaneously decreasing the availability of strategies to cope with stress. In this context, it could be useful to understand issues that people find most concerning and ways in which they cope with stress. In this study, we explored these questions with a sample of graduate and professional students.MethodUsing open-ended assessments, we asked participants to identify their biggest challenge or concern, their most effective way of handling stress, and their most common (...) way of handling stress. We applied thematic analysis and evaluated whether participants’ strategies corresponded with evidence-based practices.ResultsParticipants frequently reported top problems relating to productivity, physical health, and emotional health. Distraction was the most frequently classified common strategy, whereas behavioral activation was the most frequently identified effective strategy. Participants who reported a common strategy classified as an EBP reported lower depressive and anxiety symptoms. In contrast, there was no evidence of an association between symptom levels and whether or not participants’ effective strategy was an EBP. Participants who reported the same strategy as both their common and effective strategy reported lower depressive symptoms than those whose common and effective strategies were different.ConclusionOur findings highlight stressors that students are experiencing and ways they are coping during the COVID-19 crisis. We discuss how these findings can inform mental health promotion efforts and future research on coping with stressors. (shrink)

Ways of Scope Taking is concerned with syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of scope. Its starting point is the well-known but often neglected fact that different types of quantifiers interact differently with each other and other operators. The theoretical examination of significant bodies of data, both old and novel, leads to two central claims. (1) Scope is a by-product of a set of distinct Logical Form processes; each quantifier participates in those that suit its particular features. (2) Scope interaction is (...) further constrained by the semantics of the interacting operators. The arguments are developed using Minimalist syntax, Generalized Quantify theory, Discourse Representation Theory, and algebraic semantics. The contributors (Beghelli, Ben-Shalom, Doetjes, Farkas, Gutiérrez Rexach, Honcoop, Stabler, Stowell, Szabolcsi and Zwarts) make tightly related theoretical assumptions and focus on related empirical phenomena, which include the direct and inverse scope of quantifiers, distributivity, negation, modal and intensional contexts, weak islands, event-related readings, interrogatives, wh/quantifier interactions, and Hungarian syntax. An introduction to the formal semantics background is provided. Audience: Linguists, philosophers, computational and psycholinguists; advanced undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in these fields. (shrink)

Do the new sciences of well-being provide knowledge that respects the nature of well-being? This book written from the perspective of philosophy of science articulates how this field can speak to well-being proper and can do so in a way that respects the demands of objectivity and measurement.

Trope theory is the view that the world is a world of abstract particular qualities. But if all there is are tropes, how do we account for the truth of propositions ostensibly made true by some concrete particular? A common answer is that concrete particulars are nothing but tropes in compresence. This answer seems vulnerable to an argument (first presented by F. H. Bradley) according to which any attempt to account for the nature of relations will end up either in (...) contradiction, nonsense, or will lead to a vicious infinite regress. I investigate Bradley’s argument and claim that it fails to prove what it sets out to. It fails, I argue, because it does not take all the different ways in which relation and relata may depend on one another into account. If relations are entities that are distinct from yet essentially dependent upon their relata, the Bradleyan problem is solved. We are then free to say that tropes in compresence are what make true propositions ostensibly made true by concrete particulars. (shrink)

American healthcare -- Bioterror and bioart -- State of emergency -- Licensed to torture -- Hunger strikes -- War -- Cancer -- Drug dealing -- Toxic tinkering -- Abortion -- Culture of death -- Patient safety -- Global health -- Statue of security -- Pandemic fear -- Bioidentifiers -- Genetic genocide.

Extensively investigated in the field of psychology, psychiatry, education, and social policy, self-esteem has been comparatively under-researched in philosophy. However, a number of theories and notions relevant to the understanding of self-esteem and related experiences have been put forward in both classical and contemporary phenomenology of emotion. Drawing upon this body of research, in this chapter I will present a phenomenological account of self-esteem. First, I will suggest that this is best understood as a particular kind of background affective orientation, (...) and, more specifically, as a narratively shaped “existential feeling”. I will then move to explore the relevance of such an account for the philosophical understanding of pride, embarrassment, and shyness, thus providing an example of the influence exerted by self-esteem on other self-related affects and traits. (shrink)

Section 1 provides a brief summary of the pair-list literature singling out some points that are particularly relevant for the coming discussion. -/- Section 2 shows that the dilemma of quantifi cation versus domain restriction arises only in extensional complement interrogatives. In matrix questions and in intensional complements only universals support pairlist readings, whence the simplest domain restriction treatment suffices. Related data including conjunction, disjunction, and cumulative readings are discussed -/- Section 3 argues that in the case of extensional complements (...) the domain restriction treatment is inadequate for at least two independent reasons. One has to do with the fact that not only upward monotonic quantifi ers support pairlist readings, and the other with the derivation of apparent scope out readings. The reasoning is supplemented with some discussion of the semantic properties of layered quantifi ers.  The above will establish the need for quantifi cation, so the question arises how the objections explicitly enlisted in the literature against quantifi cation can be answered. Section 4 considers the de dicto reading of the quantifi er s restriction, quanti cational variability, and the absence of pairlist readings with whether questions, and argues that they need not militate against the quanti ficational analysis. -/- Section 5 summarizes the emergent proposal -/- Finally, section 6 discusses the signifi cance of the above findings for the behavior of weak islands. (shrink)

This commentary offers a linguistic perspective on “pride”. On the basis of a semantic analysis it demonstrates that the interpretation of pride put forward by Tracy, Shariff, and Cheng (2010) is Anglocentric and is consistent with the contemporary use of the English word pride. It compares the English concept of pride with the Russian concept of gordit’sja and demonstrates their differences. It calls for a psychological account of “pride” free from an ethnocentric bias.