'...a challenging and useful book, both because it provokes a careful scrutiny of one's own basic ideas regarding evolutionary theory, and because it cuts across so many biological disciplines.' -The Quarterly Review of Biology 'In my view, this work exemplifies Theoretical Biology at its best...here is rampant speculation that is consistently based on cautious reasoning from the available data. Even more refreshing is the absence of sloganeering, grandstanding, and 'isms'.' -Biology and Philosophy 'Epigenetics is fundamental to understanding both development and (...) gene expression, and not surprisingly, evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated with its proper place in evolutionary theory...Enter Jablonka and Lamb, who provide a thoughtful review of the recent molecular literature and suggest a number of potential consequences.' -EvolutionSince first publication of this controversial book, much of the initial opposition to the ideas it contained has been replaced by a general, although often grudging, acceptance of them. Advances in knowledge, especially at the molecular level, have enhanced general awareness and interest in epigenetics and the evolution of systems that store and transmit information and put any of the authors' speculations on a more solid basis. This paperback edition contains a new Preface that sets out the major changes in the scientific world and in the authors' own thinking that have occurred since the book was published. A new Appendix provides a selected bibliography of the many books and articles about epigenetic inheritance and its role in evolution that have appeared since first publication. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn seinem Buch Einfache Formen entwickelt André Jolles in Auseinandersetzung mit Goethes Naturkunde die Vorstellung einer besonderen Zeitlichkeit der von ihm so genannten »Einfachen Formen«, die er als »Jedesmaligkeit« bezeichnet. Jolles greift damit den morphologischen Gedanken einer Vielgestaltigkeit von Form vor dem Hintergrund der sprachwissenschaftlichen Debatten seines politisierten akademischen Umfelds in Leipzig auf, das den Saussure’schen Systemgedanken der Sprache unter Rückbezug auf Wilhelm von Humboldt holistisch umdeuten wollte. Der Aufsatz verortet Jolles’ Überlegungen in der formorientierten Literatur- und Kulturtheorie der Zeit. (...) Anhand seiner Zeitbegriffe und seines Formkonzepts wird gezeigt, wie er die zeitgenössischen Ideen der Ganzheit und der Verzeitlichung von Form im Ausgang morphologischer Fragen auf eigenwillige Weise interpretierte.In his book Einfache Formen André Jolles develops the idea of a special temporality of so-called »simple forms«, which he calls »Jedesmaligkeit«, referencing Goethe’s reflections on the ›versatile forms‹ of nature. Jolles adopted the morphological idea of a versatility of form against the background of the linguistic debates of his politicized academic environment in Leipzig. In accordance with contemporary holistic thinking his colleagues reinterpreted Saussure’s idea that language is a system, drawing in particular on Wilhelm von Humboldt. The essay situates Jolles’ reflections in the form-oriented literary and cultural theory of the time. On the basis of his concepts of time and his thinking in terms of form, the article shows how he adapted the contemporary ideas of the wholeness and temporalization of form in an idiosyncratic way in the wake of morphological questions. (shrink)

When, if at all, can a federal political order expel a member state against its will? In political theory, expulsion has—unlike the scenario of secession as voluntary separation—so far received no...

A growing number of medical professionals claim a right of conscience, a right to refuse to perform any professional duty they deem immoral—and to do so with impunity. We argue that professionals do not have the unqualified right of conscience. At most they have a highly qualified right. We focus on the claims of pharmacists, since they are the professionals most commonly claiming this right.

In the modern age, the political secret has acquired a bad reputation. With modern democracy’s ideal of transparency, political secrecy is identified with political crime or corruption. The article argues that this repression of secrecy in modern democracies falls short of a substantial understanding of the structure and workings of political secrecy. By outlining a genealogy of political secrecy, it elucidates the logic as well as the blind spots of a current culture of secrecy. It focuses on two fundamental logics (...) of secrecy, deduced from the Latin terms ‘ arcanum’ and ‘ secretum’. Whereas the logic of arcanum regards secrecy as a legitimate dimension of government, a modern logic of secretum is marked by an inextricable dialectics between the withdrawal and communication of knowledge, between secrecy and publicity. Here, the secret is not so much a piece of withheld knowledge as a ‘secrecy effect’ that binds the realm of secrecy to the public sphere by a dialectics of permanent suspicion and scandal. Instead of falling into the trap of this ‘secrecy effect’ it is worth taking a closer look at the tradition of thought on the arcana imperii, from Tacitus to early modern doctrines of raison d’état to Carl Schmitt. What this tradition deals with is the functionality of secrecy and its complicated relation to the law. The arcana tradition elaborates the crucial point of secrecy: its potential, but also its profound ambivalence. Secrecy opens up a discretionary space of action exempt from the rule of law, and, according to Carl Schmitt, ignores the law so as to allow it to become effective. Secrecy serves to protect and stabilize the state, but at the same time it opens a space of exception from the rule of law that breeds violence, corruption and oppression. Instead of seeing secrecy as the opposite of a political culture of transparency, it is more productive to regard secrecy as transparency's complement – a counterpart, however, that is marked by the profound paradox of being both a consolidation of and a threat to democracy. (shrink)

The rediscovery in the mid-1970s of Ludwik Fleck's initially neglected monograph, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Wissenschaftlichen Tatsache, published in 1935 and translated in 1979 as Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, has resulted in extensive, still ongoing, secondary writings, mainly within the humanities. Fleck has been interpreted as furthering a relativistic conception of science. Nowadays, he is often viewed as an important contributor to contemporary sociology of science and a forerunner to Thomas Kuhn. Fleck's account of the Wassermann reaction, (...) which forms the basis of his epistemology, has been praised as developed by a scientist well acquainted with the field in question. Because of the scarcity of available material on Fleck, however, the question of his sources has remained an unsolved issue. In the present article, an alternative reading is suggested. By focusing on the scientific content of the monograph, mainly neglected in the modern interpretations of Fleck, and on the so far overlooked sources of his writings traced back to their German origin, a better understanding of Fleck's account of the Wassermann reaction can be given. The consequences of this alternative reading for the conception of Fleck's monograph and for the impetus of his mission are discussed. (shrink)

Contrasting two standard models of corporate responsibility—the so-called “collectivist” and “individualist” model—this essay proposes a third option, namely, a discursive conception of responsibility and examines whether and how this conception can be applied to the corporate level. It does so by taking a careful look at one of the preconditions of individual discursive responsibility, i.e. discursive practical reason, and discussing how corporate agents can meet this precondition. Building on this new concept, the essay also offers a novel approach to justifying (...) corporate responsibility by referring to an argument advanced by Rainer Forst stating that a fundamental human right to justification is the normative core of any kind of responsibility and combining it, in a second step, with an argument recently proposed by Philip Pettit and Christian List showing the impossibility of forming consistent group attitudes and beliefs as a function of the attitudes and beliefs of individual group members. Finally, this essay outlines certain preliminary conclusions about the incorporation of responsibility in a corporate context. (shrink)

In his theory of evolution, Darwin recognized that the conditions of life play a role in the generation of hereditary variations, as well as in their selection. However, as evolutionary theory was developed further, heredity became identified with genetics, and variation was seen in terms of combinations of randomly generated gene mutations. We argue that this view is now changing, because it is clear that a notion of hereditary variation that is based solely on randomly varying genes that are unaffected (...) by developmental conditions is an inadequate basis for evolutionary theories. Such a view not only fails to provide satisfying explanations of many evolutionary phenomena, it also makes assumptions that are not consistent with the data that are emerging from disciplines ranging from molecular biology to cultural studies. These data show that the genome is far more responsive to the environment than previously thought, and that not all transmissible variation is underlain by genetic differences. In Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005) we identify four types of inheritance (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbol-based), each of which can provide variations on which natural selection will act. Some of these variations arise in response to developmental conditions, so there are Lamarckian aspects to evolution. We argue that a better insight into evolutionary processes will result from recognizing that transmitted variations that are not based on DNA differences have played a role. This is particularly true for understanding the evolution of human behavior, where all four dimensions of heredity have been important. (shrink)

This paper revisits the scholarly controversy about the nature of persuasion in Plato's Laws. So far scholars have identified the nature of this persuasion in often conflicting ways, e.g. from 'lying propaganda' and 'enchantment' to 'sermon preaching' , or even as 'rational persuasion' . Rather than proposing yet another identification, this paper shows that the nature of the persuasion envisioned by the Athenian lawgiver becomes evident once the divergent scholarly views are brought together into one idea. The seed to this (...) reconciliation was contained in the debate all along but has not been sufficiently fore-grounded. A close examination makes evident why such persuasion appears to different readers to be of a vastly different nature. It employs, indeed, a variety of linguistic means geared towards a variety of different people at different times in their lives. (shrink)

This paper revisits the scholarly controversy about the nature of persuasion in Plato’s Laws. So far scholars have identified the nature of this persuasion in often conflicting ways, e.g. from ‘lying propaganda’ and ‘enchantment’ to ‘sermon preaching’, or even as ‘rational persuasion’. Rather than proposing yet another identification, this paper shows that the nature of the persuasion envisioned by the Athenian lawgiver becomes evident once the divergent scholarly views are brought together into one idea. The seed to this reconciliation was (...) contained in the debate all along but has not been sufficiently fore-grounded. A close examination makes evident why such persuasion appears to different readers to be of a vastly different nature. It employs, indeed, a variety of linguistic means geared towards a variety of different people at different times in their lives. (shrink)

This paper outlines Lévinas’ conception of responsibility as non-intentional relatedness to the Other, a conception he regards as constitutive of human subjectivity. In doing so, it uncovers parallels between Lévinas’ interpretation of Judaism and his philosophical works. In the latter, he develops his account of ethics as a critique of the philosophical tradition which risks, according to Lévinas, missing the fundamental ethical dimension of the human’s being. Finally, the paper explores the question of whether it is possible to draw on (...) Lévinas in order to develop an alternative approach to political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning Music:Embodied Experience in the Life-WorldEva Alerby and Cecilia FermIn the present age, which is often signified as post-modern or knowledge-intensive, the calls for learning echo loud. Discussions of learning, as well as teaching, permeate almost all levels and arenas of our society, and have a sure place in every-day conversation as well as scientific debate. The concept of learning can be understood and explained in many different ways. (...) Our intention in this article is to make visible and discuss how learning music can be understood and explained from a life-world approach.By life-world approach we mean that learning is constituted by the experiences that we are having in the world. From that perspective it can be seen as a process which leads to some kind of change, whose utmost purpose is—consciously or unconsciously—to create meaning and make managing the world possible. In addition, we stress that learning does not arise nor is formed in a vacuum, but instead is found in complex contexts. In turn this creates the necessity of making learning situated and contextualized.1How one understands how music is learned is consequently influenced not only by what fundamental assumptions one holds about learning but also by prevailing views of music. Furthermore, how musical ability is regarded and whether musicality is accepted as an emotional or cognitive phenomenon is also [End Page 177] important. Other assumptions that need to be considered are whether or not it is possible to divide musicality into smaller parts and if that is the case, what is the relationship between these parts. One further question that has to be illuminated is the question about biological and social influences on musicality.2 According to Sture Brändström,3 musicality is sometimes divided into two categories—absolute contra relativistic musicality. The first category implies that musicality is regarded as a native ability, already existing within the human being, an ability that some people have and others lack. The second category reflects an approach that assumes that musicality is something everybody can acquire, it can be learned and appropriated. We will return later to this issue.These questions reveal a dualistic approach, specifically: whether musicality is an emotional or a cognitive phenomenon, or absolute or relative, which in turn leads to the question of whether or not learning music is constituted within or outside the human being. To expose problems related to this dualistic approach in music education, we will examine musical learning using life-world phenomenology as a theoretical framework, a brief description of which follows.Phenomenology: A Way of ThinkingAt the turn into the twentieth century, the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), named his philosophical approach phenomenology, and with that the development of modern phenomenology began. Phenomenology is both a method and a way of thought.4 He distinguished the fundamental principle of phenomenology as—'back to the things themselves.' According to Husserl it is through experiences that we gain access to things themselves. The concept of experience was essential to his formulation, and it became a key signature for the whole of phenomenology. His starting-point was how the world is experienced in a subjective way, and the aim was to find a way to describe the meaning of these subjective experiences. In other words, phenomenology has been summarized as a description of how the world is experienced by the person in the world.Various thinkers have interpreted phenomenology in different ways. Jan Bengtsson5 emphasized that phenomenological method should be named in the plural as methods. The phenomenology of the life-world, which was developed as an alternative to the so-called epoché, the special method of transcendental phenomenology, is a philosophy of the life-world without transcendental reduction. It is the life-world that constitutes the basis of our lives. It is the everyday world of our experiences, which we take for granted and where we live our lives. In other words it is the life-world that constitutes people's being-in-the-world.6 Through our existence we experience the concrete world in all its complexity, which is both historically and contextually dependent. Consequently... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aesthetics and Humean Aesthetic Norms in the Novels of Jane AustenEva M. Dadlez (bio)IntroductionThe eighteenth century, Paul Oskar Kristeller tells us, in addition to crystallizing what we now call the fine arts, is also marked by an increased lay interest both in the arts and in criticism.1 Amateurs as well as philosophers ventured critical commentary on the arts. Talk concerning taste or beauty or the sublime was so much (...) a part of general discourse that even novelists of that era incorporated such subjects in their work. Henry Fielding "was able to construct a novel on the true and false sublime in art," according to Samuel Monk, "and to draw an analogy between the sublime in art and the sublime in character."2 So we shouldn't find it surprising that perspectives on aesthetics are sometimes presented in the novels of Jane Austen.3 This subject matter ranges from descriptions of skill in the execution and sensitivity in the appreciation of particular arts to general observations about beauty and taste and what is requisite for the apprehension of the former and the possession of the latter.Consider the following catalog of arts and beauties. Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, and Northanger Abbey contain many references to the beauties of nature, both cultivated and wild. Taste in music is a topic in Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, and Lady Susan. A taste for poetry and literature is the lot of the heroines of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, and Sense and Sensibility. Taste and talent for drawing is exhibited by characters in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Northanger Abbey. Both Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park contain discussions of the merits of effective reading, that is, reading well aloud. Mansfield Park even comments on [End Page 46] acting ability, albeit rather disapprovingly. More general reflections on taste and beauty, as well as their connection to morality, are equally typical.It is possible to venture several different arguments about the philosophical perspective into which such observations best fit. Kantian analyses have already been ventured in the literature. Anne Crippen Ruderman calls our attention to the Kantian flavor of the connection Austen draws between a sensitivity to natural beauty and one's moral disposition, for instance, and David Kaufman compares Austen to Kant, though primarily in regard to ethics.4 Nonetheless, in this article I will argue that the strongest correlations and correspondences are in fact between Austen's and Hume's positions on aesthetics. Evidence in support of a Kantian analysis will first be canvassed and later compared with claims in favor of a Humean alternative.I will establish that the positions on taste and beauty and delicacy that are explicitly stated in or can be inferred from Austen's novels fit a Humean model—and fit it with a fair degree of precision. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate a correspondence strong enough to serve as the staging area for the further speculations that constitute the second thesis of this article. A great deal has already been said by philosophers about the capacity of literature to elicit moral reactions from the reader. Fictions can present ethical endorsements and invite us to adopt ethical perspectives by making it true in the world of the work that some course of action is right or some character is laudable. They can do this not by telling us that an act is right or a person meritorious but by showing us the rightness of the action and the commendability of the individual—by asking us to imagine traits that call forth our own approval and commendation. I will contend that aesthetic norms can be treated in much the same way as moral norms. That is, I will claim that the fiction of Jane Austen, in addition to evidencing the conscription of a Humean aesthetic, so engages and educates us that we are led imaginatively to adopt certain aesthetic perspectives in the course of its contemplation: not just by being told what is aesthetically pleasing or commendable, but by being made to feel pleasure and to experience commendation; not just by being told what constitutes discriminating taste, but by being led... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 30, Number 2, November 2004, pp. 213-236 Pleased and Afflicted: Hume on the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure E. M. DADLEZ How fast can you run? As fast as a leopard. How fast are you going to run? A whistle sounds the order that sends Archie Hamilton and his comrades over the top of the trench to certain death. Racing to circumvent that order and arriving seconds (...) too late, Archie's friend Frank screams in rage and despair. Archie is cut down before he has run twenty yards. Peter Weir's film Gallipoli is a chronicle of the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of the first World War, but it is also a film about racing. Archie is trained by his uncle Jack to run "as fast as a leopard." The film begins as it ends, with Archie sprinting in response to a whistle. Frank is first shown racing after a train, along with friends who are on their way to enlist. Archie and Frank meet while competing in a race, they race in Cairo once they have enlisted, and they finally race death. From the beginning, Archie has been faster; even at the end he is the first to die. And from the beginning he has swept Frank along in his wake, encouraging him, pushing him, inspiring him, and helping him to positions for which he is inadequately qualified. In the end, Archie's compassion and kindness prompt a decision which has grim consequences both for himself and for hundreds of others. Knowing that his friend fears death in the trenches, Archie recommends Frank as a substitute for himself, a designated message runner. But Frank is not fast enough, and falls short by mere seconds which Archie would not have lost. This is what leads to the failure of the one real effort to countermand the fatal charge. E. M. Dadlez is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK 73034, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 214 E. M. Dadlez I am an emotional wreck by the time the movie is over, though I should admit that most of my tears are the result of sheer rage. Both my dogs exited the room in some haste once I began to shout at the television and the unpardonably dimwitted British officers who sat sipping tea at a comfortable distance as they gave the order for soldiers to commit suicide. But it isn't just the scope of the real human disaster, or the enormity of the blunder, or the pointlessness of the entire enterprise, or even my renewed conviction that stupidity is, in fact, evil, that is so unsettling. The film unnerves with respect to personal as well as global concerns, focusing attention on the chance of vanity's leading one to undertake responsibilities beyond one's competence, the possibility of advancement or security being achievable only at the expense of another, and the realization of how easy it might be to let those things happen. Gallipoli is a sad, disturbing film, and the spectator is grieved and disturbed in the course of watching it. Yet, having said that, I must own to having a copy in my possession, and to having watched it more than once. I recommend it to friends, offering to lend them my videotape. In fact, I press it on them. I say that it is a terrific, rewarding work which they should take the time to see. How is it that I can describe my experience of the film in such glowing terms and at the same time acknowledge the extreme distress I felt in the course of watching it? How can I reconcile the discordant aspects of my experience? David Hume explores some possible answers in his essay "Of Tragedy."1 He begins by calling attention to the paradox of tragic pleasure: It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror... and other passions, which are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle.... The whole art of the poet is employed in rousing and supporting the compassion and... (shrink)

Post- and decolonial theory have contested the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, hegemonic, or neocolonialist misconception. Does this imply that we should give up any idea of moral progress? This paper critically examines Allen Buchanan’s and Russell Powell’s book The Evolution of Moral Progress and their claim that there is still a need for a theory of moral progress. For Buchanan and Powell, such theory should allow and guide a better understanding of what moral progress consists of. Even (...) though they do not claim to already provide us with such a comprehensive theory of moral progress they aim to work out whether and how certain types of moral progress are possible and assess their limits. In doing so they mainly focus on improvements in terms of social participation as an uncontroversial type of moral progress. In the following, I will first discuss the characteristics of the authors’ notion of progress and then raise some critical concerns about the example they have chosen of the history of human rights as a history of progress and, particularly, about the history of the rights of people with disabilities. (shrink)

Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influence philosophical conceptions of cognitive disability by virtue of this experience is justified by an inextricable relationship between the personal, the political, and (...) the philosophical. If one grants that the “special relationship” between mother and child requires moral recognition, then I need first to make vivid the case that this relationship in the case of a child who lacks some “normal capacities” is indistinguishable from any mother‐child relationship. If this is so, then I believe I can make a case that has as its conclusion that the moral personhood of even the severely cognitively disabled must be granted. Moreover, such recognition, I argue, necessitates the recognition of others who bear no special relationships to the child. (shrink)

In The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt reads Hobbes’ Leviathan as a prefiguration of totalitarian politics. She does so in a unique manner, criticising not his overbearing sovereignty, but the incessant accumulation of power, which turns into an unstoppable process of destruction. Arendt claims that the ultimately self-annihilating accumulation of power is necessitated by bourgeois societies’ pursuit to increase property. This paper first clarifies the methodological assumptions which allow Arendt to read Hobbes’ theory as a clue to bourgeois history in (...) general. It then reconstructs her portrait of the “power-hungry individual” as a result rather than starting point of Hobbes’ political model, and examines her verdict that the Hobbesian sovereign is inherently unstable. With the help of passages contained only in the expanded German version of Origins, Arendt’s more familiar Luxemburgian critique of territorial expansiveness is completed by a Benjaminian analysis of the temporality of accumulation: colonial catastrophe.Dieser Aufsatz ist im Rahmen des durch Horizon 2020 finanzierten MSCA-Projekts PhantomAiD, EU-Fördernummer 896973, entstanden. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Silent Screams; Lily's StoryEva V. Regel"Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated, the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the scream, healing can begin."—Danielle Bernock, "Emerging Wings; A true story of Lies, Pain and the Love that Heals."Some patients stay with you long after they leave. (...) They appear in your mind when you walk by the hospital room they occupied or when someone mentions their name. There is [End Page 19] something about the narrative of their life and illness that makes you hold on to them. Lily is one such patient for me.Lily was a 45-year-old paraplegic woman who was well known to many providers in the hospital. She had a complex trauma history (childhood physical and sexual abuse, intimate partner violence, domestic violence), homelessness, and multiple psychiatric admissions. In addition, she had a complex medical history, including chronic pain issues and substance use disorder. Many providers considered her to be a "very difficult" or "challenging" patient because she would "dictate" her care, had low distress tolerance and would have explosive angry outbursts requiring frequent visits from Police and Security. To top it off, after months of a challenging stay on a unit, she would eventually leave against medical advice. Everyone involved in her care felt that discharge to a safe setting such as a skilled nursing facility would be her best option. Yet, she was a very "hard" sell to any facility because of her behavioral issues, relatively young age, extensive history of drug use, and medication non-compliance. Even though the unit I worked in was familiar with "difficult" patients like Lily, the floor staff was anxious and concerned about the effect Lily would have on patients, staff, and providers. The combined anticipatory anxiety worsened after we were told that Lily left against medical advice three days before her admission to our unit as a reaction to the staff's attempt to develop a behavioral plan.I remember the day I met Lily. I was working as the clinical social worker on the floor, helping patients with adjustment to coping with hospitalization, addressing mental health issues that usually exacerbate in the acute care setting, and providing support to the staff caring for a psychosocially complex patient population. It was the second day after Lily arrived on the floor, and Police and Security had already come up three times. As I walked out of another patient's room, a bedside nurse stopped me in the hallway. "Can you please talk to her? … Please, just talk to her, or sit with her. I just need a break. I have been in that room since I started my shift. I am exhausted." The nurse had an exasperated and pleading look, and even though I was rushing to a meeting, I decided to meet with Lily instead. When I walked into her room, I saw a thin, small-framed woman with brown hair pulled back into a tight bun. She had freckles peppered all over her round face, neck, and chest. Her features were delicate and small, and her almond-shaped green eyes were her most prominent feature. She was wearing a white tee and jeans. She was sitting in her wheelchair; her makeup bag was lying on the table next to her. I introduced myself and my role on the team, trying not to stumble under a very heavy glare. "Tell them to leave me alone. That nurse is always in my room. Spying. I might not be able to walk, but I can still use my hands. I can call if I need help."And so I did. And when I came back, Lily and I talked a little about her life. And the next day, we talked a little more. And then again. Lily was giving me small glimpses of who she was and the events in her life. Then, one day, in the middle of the conversation about her day and telling me how much she hated to be confined to her hospital room, she looked... (shrink)

Eva Brann, who has taught at St. John’s College, Annapolis, for sixty years, wrote these essays largely as clarifying incitements to students who were reading, or ought to have been reading, the works discussed. In her words: "The first essay looks at the 'Pre-Socratics' Heraclitus and Parmenides. They appear to be in radical opposition, but they are really doing the same, new thing: seeing the world as an intelligible whole. Both observe external nature, construing it in their minds—so, from the (...) outside in. The final essay again describes two ways of world-construing from the outside in—one by penetrating the surface of reality, the other by spinning a web of complexity over it. "The five essays in between focus on works by Kant and display the world as constituted from the human inside out. An appreciative review of the Critique of Pure Reason shows how Kant brilliantly justifies a science of nature by making nature itself the construct of our understanding. But he leads us to the abyss of more idealism; externality and realism escape him. The explication of his one absolute moral commandment similarly defines his morality entirely in terms divorced from objective good and concentrated on internal integrity. Finally, his huge unpublished legacy agonizes about bringing a god, first conceived as an inner need, into external existence.". (shrink)

The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, a rational agent will distribute their credence equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration. Despite its intuitive plausibility, PI famously falls prey to paradox, and so is widely rejected as a principle of ideal rationality. In this article, I present a novel rehabilitation of PI in terms of the epistemology of comparative confidence judgments. In particular, I consider two natural comparative reformulations of PI and argue that (...) while one of them prescribes the adoption of patently irrational epistemic states, the other provides a consistent formulation of PI that overcomes the most salient limitations of existing formulations. (shrink)

To no one will it be news that Socrates is a philosophos, a philosophical man, in the preprofessional sense, when the word was still fully felt as a modifying adjective and was not yet a noun denoting a member of an occupational category, such that philosophia, the love of wisdom, could pass into a dead metaphor. “Dead” metaphors are figures of speech whose figurativeness has been sedimented, covered over by the sands of time, so that their metaphorical force is no (...) longer visualized or felt in passing speech. Their desedimentation and revitalization can be a source of wicked fun; here’s an example: “A truck rear-ended him,” a case of usage-worn metonymy, a part-for-whole figure in which the passenger is said to be .. (shrink)

Verträgt sich Religion mit Aufklärung? Was für eine Rolle spielt die Theologie dabei? Kants Der Streit der Fakultäten kommt zu dem Schluss, dass der unendliche Streit um die Religion nicht zwangsläufig zum Problem für die Aufklärung werden muss, sondern seine Institutionalisierung die beste Hoffnung für Freiheit ist: Ohne Kritik kein Fortschritt, ohne Streit bloß Irrglaube. F.W.J. Schellings, Jacques Derridas und Judith Butlers Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Werk zeigen jedoch auch, dass dabei auch die Regeln des Streites strittig werden müssen: Wer legt (...) die Regeln fest? So wird die Kritik an Religion selbst zwangsläufig mit Kritik konfrontiert: Wer hat die Macht über den vernünftigen Diskurs? Eine antagonismustheoretische Perspektive auf dieses Problem zeigt: Aus Feinden können Gegner werden und aus Krieg Streit. Doch ob sich Fortschritt und Freiheit aus braven Debatten und Reformen oder als harter Kampf einstellt - oder eben überhaupt nicht - ist eine offene Frage. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 123 - 155 While there are old questions in research on Hobbes regarding which audience he addressed in each of his different works – e.g. there are speculations that _De Cive_ is addressed to scientists and _Leviathan_ to the English people – another question has rarely been discussed and only recently reconsidered: Might Hobbes have addressed different audiences also _within_ one and the same text, and if so, might he have intended to communicate (...) different messages to different readers? As ‘Straussian’ as this question might sound, it does not require us to impose external principles of hermeneutics on Hobbes’s texts. As this paper will argue, there is strong plausibility for the claim that Hobbes himself believes in the possibility and the necessity of ‘diversified communication’ or, to state it differently, to communicate different things to different people within one and the same text. By analysing Hobbes’s passion-grounded hermeneutics that is expressed both in Hobbes’s political writings and in his writings on science and on poetry, I show that it is very likely that Hobbes wrote ‘not all to all’ but instead designed different arguments for different people. Employing the heterogeneity principle in interpreting Hobbes’s texts might thus shed new light on some persistent puzzles of Hobbes’s political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mere ReadingEva T. H. BrannI recall reading in college, some half a century ago, that the first Queen Elizabeth once represented herself to her people as “mere English.” She meant that she was English pure and simple, nothing but English. I want to set out a way with books, primarily but not only those ranged under “literature,” that I think of as mere reading. Neither the phrase “mere reading” (...) or “mere close reading” is new with me, nor is the mode, and I do not imagine myself on a lonely quest for some lost hermeneutic Eden. Children and the literate public merely read all the time. So do scholars liberated from the professional impositions of graduate school; they have achieved what Thomas Mann calls “the second ingenuousness.” They have read the articles claiming that all books and all approaches to books are of necessity theoretically or ideologically skewed and that a job of rectification, thorough enough perhaps even to postpone the actual reading indefinitely, is a precondition of liberation from the author’s subtle or unconscious agenda. Yet they have liberated themselves from the liberators, well knowing that if it’s a gift to be simple, it is also an achievement.I am, therefore, far from thinking that facing a book simply—facing it without “confronting” it—is an obsolescent activity or that either the straight and trustful reading of books or the making of books that present themselves to be so read is in real danger. I no more fear an impending cultural Armageddon than I long for a past interpretational paradise. For one thing, this is a golden age for the English novel, the premier genre of the present. All the assimilated immigrants and quondam colonials, with their delight in the elegancies of mere high English and their loving mastery of its local varieties, are writing their way into the center of English novelistic literature. They seem quite [End Page 383] aware of all those “readings”—Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, etc. Nevertheless they write merrily on for an ingenuous yet discerning public.Consequently, the following baker’s dozen of preconditions and precepts are presented not with a sense of fending off impending doom, but for the pleasure of recognition they might give to those who have come to similar conclusions. In these pages I am apt to be preaching to the choir and, truth to tell, I feel no vocation to convert the unbelievers, the more so since I am convinced that it takes all kinds.1. The First-Person PluralThe coopting “we” is more insidiously imperial than ever was the regal first-person plural. Recall all the sentences in public intellectual speech that tell us what “we” all are thinking or are no longer permitted to think or are now required to think (or do) in matters intellectual in general and in matters interpretational in particular, by reason of our historical situation.When I read one of these dicta pushing and pulling me into my place in time or society, every aversive fiber tenses and signals “who ‘we’?—not me!” For the very thing said in our name to be needful may well be the thing most harmful and the impermissible move the one really required. It seems to me worth considering that in an analysis of “our historical situation” it might be the “our” that is the vitiating flaw.Precept: Don’t say “we” unless you have obtained consent. Try “I” or “some of us.” In particular, always qualify announcements of apocalypse so as to leave room for non-participants. This frame of mind is good for turning from sophisticated to mere reading.2. Critical SuperiorityJudges on their benches sit over the sinners arraigned before them, but that the critics in their studies should be above the writers who are their “subject” is plain comical. For one thing, judging is a social necessity, while criticizing is a discretionary activity; some of us could live without it. Some professors make students believe that criticism is work while writing is a self-indulgence that needs to be curbed. In truth, it is the other way around: the critic is parasitic on the writer; if nothing... (shrink)

It is important to understand the processes behind how and why individuals emerge as leaders, so that the best and most capable individuals may occupy leadership positions. So far, most literature in this area has focused on individual characteristics, such as personality or cognitive ability. While interactions between individuals and context do get research attention, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how the social context at work may help individuals to emerge as leaders. Such knowledge could make an important (...) contribution toward getting the most capable, rather than the most dominant or narcissistic individuals, into leadership positions. In the present work, we contribute toward closing this gap by testing a mediation chain linking a leader's leader self-awareness to a follower's leadership emergence with two time-lagged studies (nstudy1 = 449, nstudy2 = 355). We found that the leader's leader self-awareness was positively related to (a) the follower's leadership emergence and (b) the follower's nomination for promotion and that both relationships were serially mediated by the follower's self-leadership and the follower's leader self-efficacy. We critically discuss our findings and provide ideas for future research. (shrink)

Gegenstandes des Aufsatzes ist die gegenseitige Beeinflussung und Bezugnahme von Rudolf Carnap und Kurt Gödel in ihren jeweiligen Selbstzeugnissen während der 20er- bis 40er-Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts. Der Vergleicht bestätigt die bisherige Forschung, der zufolge Carnap auf Gödels Arbeiten der Jahre 1930 und 1931 einigen Einfluss hatte. Er zeigt darüber hinaus, dass die beiden sich größtenteils als mathematische Logiker wahrgenommen und rezipiert haben. Nach allem, was wir bisher wissen, bleibt das so hinsichtlich Carnaps Wertschätzung für Gödels Denken. Gödel wendet sich (...) hingegen Carnap ab 1934 auch als einem philosophischen Denker zu, dessen Philosophie eine gewisse Nähe zu der von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz aufweist, aber anders als letztere, von Gödel kritisch gesehen wird. (shrink)

Цель данного издания - познакомить широкий круг читателей с основными вехами жизни ученого, организатора, ее научными трудами, литературой о ней.

Modern science is so much specialised that it seems utopic to try to follow it all at once. This new book is aimed at crossing the gap between specialists and a common understanding of 'modern science'. It would seem desirable that all educated people would know something from the humanities, literature, art but also the newest developments of natural sciences. One aim of this book is to point out the main messages of certain scientific fields, and what is really new (...) and beyond the average educational level, in order to broaden our horizons. Therefore, at the end of the chapters each scientific field possible future contributions and and ethical concerns, if any, are elaborated. (shrink)

SummaryThis introductory article sketches out the evolution of the concept of sociability in moral and political debates from Grotius to the German Romantics, so as to elucidate the range and scope of the contributions to this special issue. The article argues that the concept of sociability serves as a bridge between moral theory, domestic politics and international relations, just as it also connects the jurisprudential mode of enquiry to subsequent Enlightenment enquiries into political economy, aesthetics, individual and collective moral psychology, (...) forms of government and philosophical history. Particular attention is paid to sociability's relationship to moral scepticism, and to its position between morality and anthropology. The article highlights the central role of Rousseau in radically reformulating the debate and in sparking new controversies up to the nineteenth century. (shrink)

The gestural repertoire of captive gorillas contains the so-called “hand-on“ (or “pat-off“) gesture in which one animals puts its flat hand on top of another's head, which often leads to cessation of the receiver's previous activity. We investigate the origins of this gesture and developmental aspects of gesture creation. We further analyze gesture form and use in relation to the age of the sender with special consideration of the reaction of the receiver to better explain the function of the hand-on. (...) The focus of the study is to compare this gesture across different age groups in gorillas in regard to both production and reception and to get insights into possible origins of the gesture. (shrink)

The gestural repertoire of captive gorillas contains the so-called “hand-on” gesture in which one animals puts its flat hand on top of another’s head, which often leads to cessation of the receiver’s previous activity. We investigate the origins of this gesture and developmental aspects of gesture creation. We further analyze gesture form and use in relation to the age of the sender with special consideration of the reaction of the receiver to better explain the function of the hand-on. The focus (...) of the study is to compare this gesture across different age groups in gorillas in regard to both production and reception and to get insights into possible origins of the gesture. (shrink)

I present two of Jacob Klein’s chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me: the enchanting (to me) contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. The first insight takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called DividedLine in Plato’s Republic. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associatedwith them called by Klein “image-recognition” (εἰκασία). The second discovery involves a (...) great complex of notions from which I will extract one main element:the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being. (shrink)

I present two of Jacob Klein’s chief discoveries from a perspective of peculiar fascination to me: the enchanting (to me) contemporaneous significance, the astounding prescience, and hence longevity, of his insights. The first insight takes off from an understanding of the lowest segment of the so-called DividedLine in Plato’s Republic. In this lowest segment are located the deficient beings called reflections, shadows, and images, and a type of apprehension associatedwith them called by Klein “image-recognition” (εἰκασία). The second discovery involves a (...) great complex of notions from which I will extract one main element:the analysis of what it means to be a number and what makes possible this kind of being, and, it turns out, all Being. (shrink)

There are two central distinctions upon which the present argument is predicated. First is the distinction between two correlative aspects of what is involved in a value-judgment or in an “experiencing” of value: actualized-value and value-ideal. This we find to be a distinction without which all attempt at clear talk about “value” is so hopelessly ambiguous as to be unintelligible. Second is the distinction between property-platonism and platonism-proper. After these two sets of distinctions have been explicated, our thesis will be (...) pursued: Moore is not a value-platonist-proper at all, because his famous “non-natural” property, goodness, is not a value-ideal. Moore is merely a value-property-platonist. (shrink)

Der Jesuit Erich Przywara (1889-1972) war in den 1920er Jahren ein gesuchter Redner und Autor. 1932 legte er die berühmte 'Analogia entis' vor. 1938-1940 erschien ein umfangreicher Kommentar der ignatianischen Exerzitien. Kommentierend wandte er sich auch biblischen Schriften zu. Die hier vorgelegte Studie wählt einen werkgenetischen Ansatz, um die tiefgreifenden Entwicklungen dieses facettenreichen Werkes zu analysieren. Im Fokus stehen Zusammenhänge und Umbrüche zwischen den religionsphilosophischen Perspektiven und dem theologischen Schrifttum unter Beachtung der ignatianischen Einflüsse. Zugleich erschliesst sich so das theologische (...) Schaffen Przywaras, das trotz seiner Originalität zu Unrecht wenig bekannt ist. Seine kreative Sprache schafft neue Zugänge zu wichtigen Themen ebenso wie zu biblischen Texten. Dargestellt werden andererseits die Grenzen seines typologisierenden Ansatzes, die nicht selten ungerechten Urteile über andere Positionen sowie das Problem einer sich apokalyptisch verdüsternden Geschichtsschau. Przywaras Denken ist - mit einem augustinischen Wort formuliert - unterwegs im 'Suchen, um zu finden, und finden, um zu suchen.'"-- Back cover. (shrink)

The paper deals with the question of religious tolerance in Europe’s past and present. Tolerance within Christianity (and within the other so called “Abrahamitic” or “Biblical” Religions) is one of the main points. However, the reader is also invited to take a brief look at Europe’s pre-christian past. To some extent, the religious situation of the Roman Empire in particular rather seems to resemble our own experiences with pluralistic societies in today’s Europe than medieval and early modern circumstances would do. (...) Even the ancient problems with “religious freedom” can be linked with modern counterparts. So this paper will avoid long retrospectives at the well known facts of Europe’s Christian past such as inquisition and European religious wars in order to deal with some more hidden perspectives of European religious his- tory, which were often obscured by the main historiographical narrative. (shrink)

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

The glaring lack of formal and informal caregivers in Germany has not only become apparent in hospitals and nursing homes but also in home care arrangements. One tension is particularly pertinent in such arrangements: a ‘family-oriented’ logic of the long-term care insurance and the individual wishes of those in need of care meet the actual possibilities of family carers. This care gap has been compensated for by 24-hour care workers, so-called ‘live-ins’, from Eastern Europe for some years. This contribution maps (...) the ‘live-ins’ situation comprehensively from an ethical perspective. Based on different constellations regarding the ‘live-ins’ status as a professional nurse or non-professional caregiver, which ethical principles and moral norms are affected by whom and potentially conflict with each other in such home care arrangements at a micro and meso level of care are outlined. Special attention is paid to the tension between self-care and care for others, and to questions of the shared responsibility in and social responsibility of those external services that are involved in home care in addition to the ‘live-in’. In order to uncover, understand and influence the current ethical problems, an ethical framework that considers both the divergent interests of all individuals involved in the home care arrangement and their mutual dependency and vulnerability is needed. (shrink)

An intensified discussion on the role of normative ideals has re-emerged in several debates in political philosophy. What is often referred to as “ideal theory,” represented by liberal egalitarians such as John Rawls, is under attack from those that stress that political philosophy at large should take much more seriously the nonideal circumstances consisting of relations of domination and power under which normative ideals, principles, and ideas are supposed to be applied. While the debate so far has mainly been preoccupied (...) with defending or rejecting ideal theory through a defense or rejection of a specific ideal theory, this paper instead focuses on a number of general philosophical concerns on which the critique relies. More specifically, it brings up for scrutiny, and ultimately rejects, three charges against ideal theory: the charge that ideal theory is not action-guiding, that ideal theory is impossible, and that ideal theory is distorting. By investigatingthese charges in tandem, the paper shows that the criticism against ideal theory is premised on assumptions about the relationships between thought and action and between concepts and the world for which there is little or no support. (shrink)

Although the discussion about feasibility in political theory is still in its infancy, some important progress has been made in the last years to advance our understanding. In this paper, we intend to make a contribution to this growing literature by investigating the proper place of feasibility considerations in political theory. A motivating force behind this study is a suspicion that many presumptions made about feasibility in several current debates—such as that between practice-independence and practice-dependence, ideal and non-ideal theory, and (...) political moralism and political realism—are too rigid and underestimate the numerous different ways in which feasibility concerns may enter into our theorizing. To chisel out this feasibility space, our aim is to suggest two metatheoretical constraints on normative political principles as intuitively plausible, the so-called ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’, through which we elucidate five central aspects for determining proper feasibility constraints of an account in political theory. (shrink)

Eva Picardi was one of the most influential Italian analytic philosophers of her generation. She taught for forty years at the University of Bologna, raising three generations of students. This volume presents a selection of Picardi's essays on Frege's philosophy of logic, language, and psychology. Together, these papers provide a close look at the milieu within which Frege operated, and serve to highlight the relevance of his work for contemporary debates, particularly in the philosophy of language. One strand in Picardi's (...) work on Frege concerns understanding and contextualizing Frege's anti-psychologism. Picardi contends that Frege was motivated by semantic considerations, much more so than by adherence to Kantian transcendentalism. Furthermore, Picardi draws on her deep knowledge of German, and the fact that she was a native speaker of Italian, to reconstruct the intricacies of Frege's relationship with other logicians of his time-both in Germany, like Kerry and Sigwart, and in Italy, like Peano and his school. Picardi's work shows how the historical and the theoretical, complement and enrich one another. (shrink)

In a previous article, we unpacked the so-called “ethics first premise”—the idea that ethics is “prior” to politics when theorizing political legitimacy— that is denied by political realists. We defended a “justificatory” reading of this premise, according to which political justification is irreducibly moral in the sense that moral values are among the values that ground political legitimacy. We called this the “necessity thesis.” In this paper we respond to two challenges that Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi raise against our (...) proposal. Their first claim is that our argument for the necessity thesis is question begging, since we assume rather than show that freedom and equality are moral values. The second claim is that Bernard Williams’s Basic Legitimacy Demand demonstrates the possibility of giving political legitimacy a non-moral foundation, since it allows for a distinction to be made between politics and sheer domination. We refute both claims. (shrink)

The question of what role social and political practices should play in the justification of normative principles has received renewed attention in post-millennium political philosophy. Several current debates express dissatisfaction with the methodology adopted in mainstream political theory, taking the form of a criticism of so-called ‘ideal theory’ from ‘non-ideal’ theory, of ‘practice-independent’ theory from ‘practice-dependent’ theory, and of ‘political moralism’ from ‘political realism’. While the problem of action-guidance lies at the heart of these concerns, the critics also share a (...) number of methodological assumptions. Above all, their methodology is practice-dependent in the sense that an existing practice is assumed to put substantial limitations on the appropriate normative principles for regulating it. In other words, we cannot formulate and justify an appropriate principle without first understanding the practice this principle is supposed to govern. The aim of this paper is to map out and analyze the common denominators of these debates with regard to methodological commitments. We will investigate how this practice-dependent method may be understood and motivated. In particular, we point to challenges that must be met in order for the position to remain both distinct and attractive. (shrink)

What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better (...) predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. (shrink)

Es ist ein zentrales Anliegen von Bildung, Sachverhalte aus verschiedenen Perspektiven zu sehen. Geht es um moralische Bildung, so ist der Wechsel der Perspektive speziell in der Goldenen Regel („Was du nicht willst, dass man dir tut, das füg auch keinem anderen zu“) das Mittel zur Erzeugung moralischer Sensibilität. Dieser Alltagsform der Erziehung steht nun die moderne Pädagogik gegenüber, die in institutionalisierter Form nicht allein mit alltagsmoralischen Formen des Appells arbeiten kann. Eva-Maria Kenngott analysiert die Verbindungslinien zwischen der Fähigkeit zur (...) Perspektivenübernahme und Moral. Klassische Methoden der Moralpädagogik und der interkulturellen Pädagogik werden auf ihren Umgang mit Perspektivenübernahme hin untersucht. (shrink)

Social evolution theory provides a wide array of successful evolutionary explanations for cooperative traits. However and surprisingly, a number of cases of unexplained cooperative behaviour remain. Shouldn’t they cast doubt on the relevance of the theory, or even disconfirm it? This depends on whether the theory is akin to a research programme such as adaptationism, or closer to a theory – a set of compatible, confirmable hypotheses. In order to find out, we focus on the two main tenets of social (...) evolution theory, namely reciprocity explanations and kin selection. Reciprocity-based explanations are extremely hard to confirm. This is due, first to the multiple realisability of explanatory processes, factors and strategies, despite apparent reasons to the contrary; second, to the high quantity, and limited availability of data needed to eliminate or back up such explanations. One of our target cases vividly illustrates these limitations. Moreover, kin selection, while relatively easy to disconfirm in particular cases, seems to enjoy a more limited explanatory scope than previously thought. Overall, social evolution theory turns out to be neither a research programme nor a theory, but a heterogeneous scientific entity, composed of parts that are amenable to confirmation and others barely so. (shrink)

Gaze following occurs automatically in social interactions, but the degree to which gaze is followed depends on whether an agent is perceived to have a mind, making its behavior socially more relevant for the interaction. Mind perception also modulates the attitudes we have towards others, and deter-mines the degree of empathy, prosociality and morality invested in social interactions. Seeing mind in others is not exclusive to human agents, but mind can also be ascribed to nonhuman agents like robots, as long (...) as their appearance and/or behavior allows them to be perceived as intentional beings. Previous studies have shown that human appearance and reliable behavior induce mind perception to robot agents, and positively affect attitudes and performance in human-robot interaction. What has not been investigated so far is whether different triggers of mind perception have an independent or interactive effect on attitudes and performance in human-robot interaction. We examine this question by manipulating agent appearance (human vs. robot) and behavior (reliable vs. random) within the same paradigm and examine how congruent (human/reliable vs. robot/random) versus incongruent (human/random vs. robot/reliable) combinations of these triggers affect performance (i.e., gaze fol-lowing) and attitudes (i.e., agent ratings) in human-robot interaction. The results show that both ap-pearance and behavior affect human-robot interaction but that the two triggers seem to operate in iso-lation, with appearance more strongly impacting attitudes, and behavior more strongly affecting per-formance. The implications of these findings for human-robot interaction are discussed. (shrink)