A frequentist confidence interval can be constructed by inverting a hypothesis test, such that the interval contains only parameter values that would not have been rejected by the test. We show how a similar definition can be employed to construct a Bayesian support interval. Consistent with Carnap’s theory of corroboration, the support interval contains only parameter values that receive at least some minimum amount of support from the data. The support interval is not subject to Lindley’s paradox and provides an (...) evidence-based perspective on inference that differs from the belief-based perspective that forms the basis of the standard Bayesian credible interval. (shrink)

My primary aim in this article is to provide a philosophical account of the unity of hallucinations, which can capture both perceptual hallucinations (which are subjectively indistinguishable from perceptions) and non-perceptual hallucinations (all others). Besides, I also mean to clarify further the division of labour and the nature of the collaboration between philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Assuming that the epistemic conception of hallucinations put forward by M. G. F. Martin and others is largely on the right track, I will (...) focus on two main tasks: (a) to provide a satisfactory phenomenology of the subjective character of perceptions and perceptual hallucinations and (b) to redress the philosophers’ neglect of non-perceptual hallucinations. More specifically, I intend to apply one of the central tenets of the epistemic conception—that hallucinations can and should be positively characterised in terms of their phenomenological connections to perceptions—to non-perceptual hallucinations as well. That is, I will try to show that we can positively specify the class of non-perceptual hallucinations by reference to the distinctive ways in which we first-personally experience them and perceptions in consciousness. The task of saying more about their underlying third-personal nature may then be left to the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

In his paper, The Transparency of Experience, M.G.F. Martin has put forward a well- known – though not always equally well understood – argument for the disjunctivist, and against the intentional, approach to perceptual experiences. In this article, I intend to do four things: (i) to present the details of Martin’s complex argument; (ii) to defend its soundness against orthodox intentionalism; (iii) to show how Martin’s argument speaks as much in favour of experiential intentionalism as it speaks in favour of (...) disjunctivism; and (iv) to argue that there is a related reason to prefer experiential intentionalism over Martin’s version of disjunctivism. (shrink)

A frequentist confidence interval can be constructed by inverting a hypothesis test, such that the interval contains only parameter values that would not have been rejected by the test. We show how a similar definition can be employed to construct a Bayesian support interval. Consistent with Carnap’s theory of corroboration, the support interval contains only parameter values that receive at least some minimum amount of support from the data. The support interval is not subject to Lindley’s paradox and provides an (...) evidence-based perspective on inference that differs from the belief-based perspective that forms the basis of the standard Bayesian credible interval. (shrink)

The progress of electronic health technologies and biobanks holds enormous promise for efficient research. Evidence shows that studies based on sharing and secondary use of data/samples have the potential to significantly advance medical knowledge. However, sharing of such resources for international collaboration is hampered by the lack of clarity about ethical and legal requirements for transfer of data and samples across international borders. Here, the International Clinical Trial Center Network reports the legal and ethical requirements governing data and sample exchange (...) across four continents. The most recurring requirement is ethical approval, whereas only in specific conditions approval of national health authorities is required. Informed consent is not required in all sharing situations. However, waiver of informed consent is only allowed in certain countries/regions and under certain circumstances. The current legal and ethical landscape appears to be very complex and under constant evolution. Regulations differ between countries/regions and are often incomplete, leading to uncertainty. With this work, ICN illuminates the unmet need for a single international collaborative framework to facilitate DSE. Harmonising requirements for global DSE will reduce inefficiency and waste in research. There are many challenges to realising this ambitious vision, including inconsistent terminology and definitions, and heterogeneous and dynamic legal constraints. Here, we identify areas of agreement and significant difference as a necessary first step towards facilitating international collaboration. We propose the establishment of a working group to continue the comparison across jurisdictions, create a standardised glossary and define a set of basic principles and fundamental requirements for DSE. (shrink)

In his paper, The Transparency of Experience, M.G.F. Martin has put forward a well- known – though not always equally well understood – argument for the disjunctivist, and against the intentional, approach to perceptual experiences. In this article, I intend to do four things: (i) to present the details of Martin’s complex argument; (ii) to defend its soundness against orthodox intentionalism; (iii) to show how Martin’s argument speaks as much in favour of experiential intentionalism as it speaks in favour of (...) disjunctivism; and (iv) to argue that there is a related reason to prefer experiential intentionalism over Martin’s version of disjunctivism. (shrink)

Este manuscrito pretende plantear dos ideas: la primera problematiza el origen de la universidad en tanto creación humana en sentido pragmático (Kant, 1800), para luego abordarlo en perspectiva histórica desde tres momentos: Medieval, Clásico y Ancestral, retomando autores como Rashdal (1895), Haskings (1923), Ureña (1919), Ribeiro (1971) y Dussel (2004); posteriormente se plantea el origen de la universidad más allá de su historicidad, en el interior del ser humano como cultivo de la virtud y el conocimiento poiesis en Platón (380 (...) a.C/1999). La segunda idea implica comprender que desde su origen la universidad como politeia desde la apropiación de algunos planteamientos aristotélicos (s,f/1883) y arendtianos (1997), ha posibilitado pensarse como un escenario de movilización social o continuidad del orden social establecido, donde se reflexiona críticamente en la necesidad de actualización de la universidad entre poiesis y politeia como potencia para recuperar su sentido primigenio, en tanto actitud que brota del interior del ser humano. (shrink)

In this paper, I would like to put forward the claim that, at least in some central cases, visualising consists literally in imagining seeing. The first section of my paper is concerned with a defence of the specific argument for this claim that M. G. F. Martin presents in his paper 'The Transparency of Experience' (Martin 2002). This argument has been often misunderstood (or ignored), and it is worthwhile to discuss it in detail and to illus­trate what its precise nature (...) is and why I take it to be sound. In the second section, I present a second and independent argument for the claim that visualising is imagining seeing, which is not to be found in Martin's writings, despite some crucial similarities with his own argument ‒ notably in the focus on the subjective aspects of visual experience. The last section deals with a particular objection to the idea that imagining takes perception as its direct object and says a bit more about how best to understand this claim. (shrink)

A generation ago Moses Finley said that the councils and the assemblies in the Homeric poems were not genuine deliberative bodies but looser, less productive gatherings. Finley and others regarded these bodies as transitional, so that regular councils and assemblies appear only later, in systems like those identified with Lycurgus and Solon. In recent years scholars have returned to an older view that Homeric deliberative bodies were well enough organized to make decisions, even if leaders or dissenters could undermine these (...) decisions. Differences between councils, on the one hand, and assemblies, on the other, have not been prominent in this scholarship. The noteworthy exception is Fabian Schulz's 2011 dissertation on parallels between Homeric councils and the Spartan Gerousia, in which he draws several comparisons between βουλαί and ἀγοραί. (shrink)

The history of democracy is increasingly understood as not only the recovery of its practices and conceptualisations but also of its signifiers. In order to grasp the transition of the word “democracy” from a reviled to a revered term in Britain, this article focuses on socialist uses of the democratic idiom during the 1880s. Across a study of socialist publications, speeches and newspapers, three different uses of “democracy” emerge. First, the word could mean a political ideal to be materialised, through (...) universal suffrage but more widely by means of popular and direct control of Parliament. Second, the term was seen as a dangerous illusion that cast a veil over capitalist oppression. Third, “democracy” could denote a political reality already present in Britain, which needed to be reflected in the economic sphere. Although sometimes diverging, these uses can be linked to three important socialist organisations: the Social Democratic Federation (S.D.F.), the Socialist League (S.L.) and the Fabian Society (F.S.). Recovering these distinctive uses illuminates the relationship between “democracy” and “socialism” and offers a key with which to understand our current political landscape. (shrink)

This volume presents, for the first time, an assemblage of contributions on the philosophical dimensions of the impersonal, the multiplicity of its linguistic, social, scientific, religious and artistic perspectives, as well as initial approaches to its unified definition. Linguistic and logical impersonality The “It" in K. Kraus “Impersonality” in the subject and in events The impersonal ontology of H. Rombach Levinas on the “Il y a” Organisation in non-egological consciousness The witness of consciousness in the Vedānta traditions Anonymous self-consciousness G. (...) Deleuzes figures of the impersonal The impersonal in G. Agamben's Philosophy Formal and collective thought in Spinoza Cusanus and the person as stake in the game of life Impersonal subjectivity and the comedy of solipsism Dimensions of the impersonal in T. Nagel, E. Husserl and H. Plessner On the figure of the impersonal in the Anthropocene Language and mask in F. Nietzsche Theodoros Terzopoulos on impersonality and theatre With contributions by Michael Astroh, Eric Ebner, Eric Eggert, Rolf Elberfeld, Katrin Felgenhauer, Ralf Gisinger, Annika Hand, Stefan Lang, Robert Lehmann, Enrico Müller, Daniel Neumann, Frank Raddatz, Christian Rößner, Thomas Schmaus, Fabian Strobel and Theodoros Terzopoulos. (shrink)

In a recent paper, María Pía Méndez (2022) offers an epistemic critique of epistocracy according to which the sort of politically well-informed but homogenous groups of citizens that would be empowered under epistocracy would lack reliable access to information about the preferences of less informed citizens. Specifically, they would lack access to such citizens’ preferences regarding the form that policies ought to take—that is, how these policies ought to be implemented. Arguing that this so-called Information Gap Problem militates against epistocracy, (...) Méndez instead recommends that we respond to problems created by widespread voter ignorance by improving the flow of information between political actors by adopting some participatory democratic institutions. In this paper I argue that the severity of the Information Gap Problem for epistocracy is overstated. After first sketching some background (Section 1), I argue that it is hard to see why information about citizens’ preferences for the form that policies ought to take is important enough that the expected costs of epistocracy outweigh its expected benefits if it selectively empowers people who lack access to such information (Section 2). Moreover, different forms of epistocracy are less threatened by the Information Gap Problem, assuming it is indeed a problem. For some forms of epistocracy, it may be no problem whatsoever. However, I conclude by suggesting that Méndez touches upon some more serious problems for epistocracy (Section 3). First, even setting aside the Information Gap Problem, there are open questions about the possible epistemic inferiority of epistocracy relative to democracy. Second, more comprehensive accounts of political competence that move beyond the possession of sufficient levels of political information are much harder to reliably test for, thus complicating the task of devising effective epistocratic selection mechanisms. Lastly, epistocracy arguably creates a serious risk of abuse that may outweigh any other benefits it brings. More research is needed to determine how (and whether) epistocrats can respond to such challenges. (shrink)

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judgments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people’s judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the (...) situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N = 1000) and norms of proper functioning (N = 3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed. (shrink)

When seriously ill patients reach the end of the standard treatment trajectory for their condition, they may qualify for the use of unapproved, investigational drugs regulated via expanded access programs. In medical-ethical discourse, it is often argued that expanded access to investigational drugs raises ‘false hope’ among patients and is therefore undesirable. We set out to investigate what is meant by the false hope argument in this discourse. In this paper, we identify and analyze five versions of the false hope (...) argument which we call: (1) the limited chance at benefit argument, (2) the side effects outweighing benefits argument, (3) the opportunity costs argument, (4) the impossibility of making informed decisions argument, and (5) the difficulty of gaining access argument. We argue that the majority of these five versions do not provide normative ground for disqualifying patients’ hopes as false. Only when hope is rooted in a mistaken belief, for example, about the likelihood of benefits or chances on medical risks, or when hope is directed at something that cannot possibly be obtained, should it be considered false. If patients are adequately informed about their odds of obtaining medical benefit, however small, and about the risks associated with an investigational treatment, it is unjustified to consider patients’ hopes to be false, and hence, to deny them access to investigational drug based on that argument. (shrink)

Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and gender politics (...) in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)

In a lengthy article E. Scerri and J. Worrall put forward the case for a novel ‘accommodationist’ version of the events surrounding the development of Mendeleef's Periodic Table 1869–1899. However these authors lay undue stress on the fact that President of the Royal Society of London Spottiswoode made absolutely no mention of Mendeleef's famous predictions in the Davy Medal eulogy in 1883 and undue stress on the fact that Cleve's classic 1879 Scandium paper contained an acknowledgement of Mendeleef's prior prediction (...) of eka-boron.They also fail to analyse in any detail the so-called ‘rare earth problem’ which, in the opinion of this author, causes problems for their account but not for a predictivist account. (shrink)

The genesis of Feynman's original approach to QED is reviewed. The main ideas of his original presentation at the Pocono Conference are discussed and compared with the ones involved in his action-at-distance formulation of classical electrodynamics. The role of the de Sitter group in Feynman's visualization of space-time processes is emphasized.

Religion in Multidisciplinary Perspective provides the first comprehensive treatment of the work of Wesley J. Wildman, one of the most inventive thinkers in the field of religious studies. Scholars with expertise in philosophical, theological, and scientific approaches to the study of religion offer critical and constructive engagements with Wildman's astonishingly creative and integrative oeuvre. The essays address themes that will be of interest to those concerned with the current state of scholarship on religion from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, (...) theology, ethics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and others. The volume concludes with a response by Wildman"-- Back ocover. (shrink)