Introduces contemporary American philosophy of technology through six of its leading figures. The six American philosophers of technology whose work is profiled in this clear and concise introduction to the field—Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, and Langdon Winner—represent a new, empirical direction in the philosophical study of technology that has developed mainly in North America. In place of the grand philosophical schemes of the classical generation of European philosophers of technology, the contemporary American generation addresses (...) concrete technological practices and the co-evolution of technology and society in modern culture. Six Dutch philosophers associated with Twente University survey and critique the full scope and development of their American colleagues’ work, often illustrating shifts from earlier to more recent interests. Individual chapters focus on Borgmann’s engagement with technology and everyday life; Dreyfus’s work on the limits of artificial intelligence; Feenberg’s perspectives on the cultural and social possibilities opened by technologies; Haraway’s conception of the cyborg and its attendant blurring of boundaries; Ihde’s explorations of the place of technology in the lifeworld; and Winner’s fascination with the moral and political implications of modern technologies. American Philosophy of Technology offers an insightful and readable introduction to this new and distinctly American philosophical turn. Contributors are Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, René Munnik, Martijntje Smits, Pieter Tijmes, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. (shrink)

Dynamic Epistemic Logic is the logic of knowledge change. This book provides various logics to support such formal specifications, including proof systems. Concrete examples and epistemic puzzles enliven the exposition. The book also offers exercises with answers. It is suitable for graduate courses in logic. Many examples, exercises, and thorough completeness proofs and expressivity results are included. A companion web page offers slides for lecturers and exams for further practice.

Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the (...) distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Hans Albert is the leading critical rationalist in the German-speaking world and the main critic of the hermeneutic tradition. He is well-known for applying the idea of critical reason to various kinds of human practice, including economics, politics, and law. But he has also improved on Popper's methodology by introducing the idea of rational heuristics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on epistemology, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of law. Most (...) of Albert's works have not been available in English. It is enormously useful to have these articles collected in a single volume. (shrink)

Rahat Naqvi and Hans Smits' edited collection, "Thinking about and Enacting Curriculum in 'Frames of War'" is centered on the theme of how the current global order creates precarious conditions for human life. The contributors respond to the challenges Judith Butler posed about the fragility of life and questions about how we apprehend, and take up ethically, our responsibilities for those who are considered "Other." The overarching objective of the book is the meaning of a call to ethics, and (...) how discussion of framing and frames is a provocation to think about our responsibilities as curriculum scholars and practitioners"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Many attempts have been made to provide Quantum Field Theory with conceptually clear and mathematically rigorous foundations; remarkable examples are the Bohmian and the algebraic perspectives respectively. In this essay we introduce the dissipative approach to QFT, a new alternative formulation of the theory explaining the phenomena of particle creation and annihilation starting from nonequilibrium thermodynamics. It is shown that DQFT presents a rigorous mathematical structure, and a clear particle ontology, taking the best from the mentioned perspectives. Finally, after the (...) discussion of its principal implications and consequences, we compare it with the main Bohmian QFTs implementing a particle ontology. (shrink)

Arbitrary public announcement logic ) reasons about how the knowledge of a set of agents changes after true public announcements and after arbitrary announcements of true epistemic formulas. We consider a variant of arbitrary public announcement logic called positive arbitrary public announcement logic ), which restricts arbitrary public announcements to announcement of positive formulas. Positive formulas prohibit statements about the ignorance of agents. The positive formulas correspond to the universal fragment in first-order logic. As two successive announcements of positive formulas (...) need not correspond to the announcement of a positive formula, \ is rather different from \. We show that \ is more expressive than public announcement logic \, and that \ is incomparable with \. We also provide a sound and complete infinitary axiomatisation. (shrink)

If one takes seriously the idea that a scientific language must be extensional, and accepts Quine’s notion of truth-value-related extensionality, and also recognizes that a scientific language must allow for singular terms that do not refer to existing objects, then there is a problem, since this combination of assumptions must be inconsistent. I will argue for a particular solution to the problem, namely, changing what is meant by the word ‘extensionality’, so that it would not be the truth-value that had (...) to be preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions, but the state of affairs that the sentence described. The question is whether or not elementary sentences containing empty singular terms, such as ‘Vulcan rotates’, are extensional in the substitutivity sense. Five conditions are specified under which extensionality in the substitutivity sense of such sentences can be secured. It is demonstrated that such sentences are state-of-affairs-as-extension-related extensional. This implies that such sentences are also truth-value-related extensional in Quine’s sense, but not truth-value-as-extension-related extensional. (shrink)

Coalition announcement logic is one of the family of the logics of quantified announcements. It allows us to reason about what a coalition of agents can achieve by making announcements in the setting where the anti-coalition may have an announcement of their own to preclude the former from reaching its epistemic goals. In this paper, we describe a PSPACE-complete model checking algorithm for CAL that produces winning strategies for coalitions. The algorithm is implemented in a proof-of-concept model checker.

In recent years, the relation between studying and learning has been a topic of debate. This article is mainly interested in a concept of study practices, conceived of as practices that are strongly engaged with issues of living together in a superdiverse city. Such practices firstly require to think the relation between studying and learning in other-than-oppositional terms, and secondly, to raise questions concerning the political role of education. The aim of the article is double in that it wants to (...) further elaborate the concept of study practices in relation to a concrete practice on the one hand, and, on the other, that it has the objective to rethink in educational terms the notion of solidarity—deeply entwined with matters of living together in superdiversity. These aims are pursued based on an analysis of the study practice of System_D, a film festival in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Brussels, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway. (shrink)

Dieser Band enthält eine Auswahl aus dem großen Bestand an Briefen, die Hans Albert zu Religionsfragen und zur Theologiekritik geschrieben hat. Er gibt neue und überraschende Einblicke in seinen Gedankenaustausch mit renommierten Theologen, Religionsphilosophen und dem Religionskritiker Karlheinz Deschner. Diese Korrespondenz gibt auch Auskunft über biographisch-historische Hintergründe, über die Entwicklung von Alberts Denken sowie über die Rezeption seiner Auffassungen und seine lebhafte Beteiligung an theologischen Auseinandersetzungen. Der von Albert vertretene Kritische Rationalismus ist mit der Forderung nach kritisch-rationaler Prüfung von (...) Überzeugungen aller Art, mit der Zurückweisung der verschiedenen Formen von Rechtfertigungszusammenhängen und mit der Kritik an Immunisierungsstrategien nicht nur eine Herausforderung für die Theologie, sondern auch für eine mit dem christlichen Glauben zu vereinbarende Philosophie. (shrink)

Inhalt: I. AUSEINANDERSETZUNG MIT GRUNDPOSITIONEN DER KRITISCHEN GESELLSCHAFTSTHEORIE DER FRANKFURTER SCHULE. Hans ALBERT: Dialektische Denkwege. Jürgen Habermas und der Kritische Rationalismus. William D. FUSFIELD: Some Pseudoscientific Features of Transcendental-Pragmatic Grounding Projects. Evelyn GRÖBL-STEINBACH: Reflektierte versus naive Aufklärung? Kritische Theorie und Kritischer Rationalismus - Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme. Kurt SALAMUN: Befriedetes Dasein und offene Gesellschaft. Gesellschaftliche Zielvorstellungen in Kritischer Theorie und Kritischem Rationalismus. II. DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM UND DIE KONZEPTION DER OFFENEN GESELLSCHAFT. Volker GADENNE: Ist der Leib-Seele-Dualismus widerlegt? Arpad SÖLTER: Der europäische (...) Sonderweg zur offenen Gesellschaft. Miroslav PROKOPIJEVIC: Justice in the "Open Society". Wojciech DOMALEWSKI: Zwei Toleranzbegriffe. III. VON DER TOTALITÄREN DER OFFENEN GESELLSCHAFT IN DER EHEMALIGEN SOZIALISTISCHEN LÄNDERN. Dieter WITTRICH: Alltagserfahrung als Politikum. Dariusz ALEKSANDROWICZ: Die sich öffnende Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde. Andreas PICKEL: Schocktherapie als rationale Reformstrategie? Eine Kritik der theoretischen Grundlagen radikaler Marktkonzepte und ein Plädoyer für Reformgradualismus. IV. METHODISCHE PROBLEME DER GESELLSCHAFTSWISSENSCHAFTEN. Herbert KEUTH: Sozialwissenschaften, Werturteile und Verantwortung. Michael SCHMID: Die Logik institutioneller Analyse aus der Sicht des Kritischen Rationalismus. Peter V. ZIMA: Framework ist kein Mythos. Zu Karl R. Poppers Thesen über wissenschaftliche Kommunikation. (shrink)

We propose communication pattern logic. A communication pattern describes how processes or agents inform each other, independently of the information content. The full-information protocol in distributed computing is the special case wherein all agents inform each other. We study this protocol in distributed computing models where communication might fail: an agent is certain about the messages it receives, but it may be uncertain about the messages other agents have received. In a dynamic epistemic logic with distributed knowledge and with modalities (...) for communication patterns, the latter are interpreted by updating Kripke models. We propose an axiomatization of communication pattern logic, and we show that collective bisimilarity (comparing models on their distributed knowledge) is preserved when updating models with communication patterns. We can also interpret communication patterns by updating simplicial complexes, a well-known topological framework for distributed computing. We show that the different semantics correspond, and propose collective bisimulation between simplicial complexes. (shrink)

Presents theses about the history of linguistics, from John Locke to Ferdinand de Saussure, and reflects on language generally in the period from the 17th to the 19th century.

Die folgende Untersuchung ist eine Antwort auf die Frage nach dem Ort des 'Irrationalisten' Johann Gottfried Herder innerhalb des Kontinuums der Aufklärung. Aus dem Inhalt: I. Ästhetik als Desiderat der Gnoseologie A. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz B. Christian Wolff C. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten II. Herders Ästhetik-Kritik A. Herders Kritik der Philosophie der "Wortwelten" B. Herders Auseinandersetzung mit Baumgarten III. Herders Ästhetik-Entwurf A. Zum Konzept der Prägnanz B. Haptik und Skulptur, Optik und Malerei C. Poesie - Phantasie und Dichtungsvermögen IV. Herders Entwurf (...) einer Geschichtsphilosophie A. Der Status der Geschichtsphilosophie B. Aisthesis und Geschichte. (shrink)

"L'un des aspects les plus intrigants de l'œuvre de Michel Foucault réside dans son intérêt tardif pour la pensée antique, plus spécialement pour la culture grecque et son héritage romain qu'on peut faire remonter à ses recherches ayant mené, à partir de 1976, à son Histoire de la sexualité. Du fait même de l'infléchissement que connut alors sa pensée, Foucault fut à même d'établir des liens à tous égards originaux et même surprenants entre la pensée antique et la réflexion moderne. (...) En le lisant, c'est une tradition de près de 2500 ans qui s'offre désormais à notre regard. Que nous apprend, sur notre histoire, le fait de mettre en parallèle les propos de Socrate et ceux de Kant? À quoi peut servir l'interrogation menée sur la sexualité antique, si ce n'est peut-être à la « dépsychologiser », la « dépathologiser », la « détaxonomiser », et ainsi la « désenclaver » de ses classifications ultérieures? Que nous enseigne le fait d'entendre par « modernité » non plus une « époque » particulière de l'histoire, mais une manière d'être des individus, une certaine attitude adoptée, « ce que les Grecs, souligne Foucault, appelaient un ' éthos ' »? De quelle manière, finalement, l'esprit critique moderne s'éclaire-t-il de l'esprit critique antique? Les études ici rassemblées posent ces questions à Foucault, avec Foucault et parfois aussi contre Foucault, en écho toujours à ce « courage de la vérité » dont il incarna si splendidement l'exemple."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has confronted us with constantly new challenges. We need to browse new inventories of scientific knowledge to reflect on previous experiences and thus facilitate societal learning. In line with the first volume on the COVID-19 pandemic in this series, contributions from different disciplines and fields of practice create an awareness of the complexity of this crisis and help us to understand the diversity of challenges it poses. The first part focuses on philosophical, sociological and psychological problem (...) diagnoses, the second on reactive strategies in the fields of medicine, nursing care, the economy and law. After taking a look at religious contexts and fields of practice, leading experts from the healthcare sector share their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. With contributions by Mahmoud Abdallah, Désirée Amschl-Strablegg, Cornelia Baptist-Kröpfl, Herbert Beiglböck, Ulrike Berdnik, Alois Birklbauer, Anneliese Derkits, Reinhold Esterbauer, Franziska Grossschädl, Katharina Heimerl, Andreas Heller, Marie-Christin Hinteregger, Hartmann Jörg Hohensinner, Elisabeth Horvath, Isabella Jonveaux, Anna-Christina Kainradl, Ulla Kriebernegg, Wolfgang Kröll, Ulrike Kylianek, Martin M. Lintner, Saskia Löser, Christa Lohrmann, Sandra Müller, Gerold Muhri, Manfred Novak, Sabine Petritsch, Eva Peyker, Michaela Pfadenhauer, Barbara Pichler, Johann Platzer, Lisa Pongratz, Maria Puntigam, Elisabeth Reitinger, Hans-Walter Ruckenbauer, Hellmut Samonigg, Walter Schaupp, Georg Tafner, Christa Tax, Wolfgang Toller and Jürgen Wallner. (shrink)

Religious Faith and Criticism of Religion of Enlightenment. Restrictions of the Use of Reason in the Light of Critical Philosophy. In the this paper I analyse the present problem situation of the christian faith with respect to the assumption of the existence of God and the role of Jesus and I criticize the problem-solutions offered by Bultmann, Ratzinger, Küng and Habermas. I try to show that all these solutions imply a similar arbitrary restriction of the use of reason.

Talk of ‘brains deciding’, ‘brains inferring’ or ‘brains perceiving’ is common in contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience. A number of authors (most notably Peter Hacker and Maxwell Bennett) argue that such talk commits a category mistake; deciding, making inferences or perceiving are abilities properly ascribed to humans and not to human subsystems or subparts. Here I will argue that ascribing such properties to human brains or cognitive systems within the brain is proper. I will argue that ‘inferring’ or ‘perceiving’ are (...) best conceptualized as functional terms. Since most functions we know of are multiply realizable, this opens the door for atypical inferences and perceptions that can be ascribed to various organisms and their subsystems. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to some criticisms raised in Evan Fales’ review of my book The Epistemology of Spirit Beliefs that was published in this journal. The points I will address are the following: (i) Fales’ complaint about unclarity in my epistemological position, (ii) his complaint about my insufficient presentation of alternative explanations, and (iii) his complaint about my use of the terms ‘naturalism’ and ‘naturalistic explanation’.

In “Pain,” Hans-Georg Gadamer offers several reflections on the experience of pain and its importance for both modern medicine and hermeneutic thought. Having already celebrated his 100th birthday at the time of this lecture, Gadamer speaks of his own experience with polio and the pains of old age, and the influence that his friend and physician, Paul Vogler, had on his approach to the treatment of pain. In the year 2000, Gadamer is concerned with the dominance of technology and (...) chemical “pain management” in the professional medical community, which has largely forgotten the more natural or traditional healing methods in approaching pain and recovery. In light of this, what is crucial for Gadamer is that individuals approach the challenges of pain by taking an active part in their own recovery. For Gadamer, hermeneutics speaks to these encounters with pain and recovery as decisive for human life and understanding. (shrink)

In 1890 C. S. Peirce wrote a review of A. C. Fraser’s recent book on Locke, published to coincide with the bicentennial of Locke’s Essay. Peirce remarked that “Locke’s grand work was substantially this: Men must think for themselves, and genuine thought is an act of perception…. We cannot fail to acknowledge a superior element of truth in the practicality of Locke’s thought, which on the whole should place him nearly upon a level with Descartes.” This estimate of Locke was (...) not the common opinion in England during the nineteenth century. This opinion was reflected in Fraser’s book which, Peirce remarked, could not “be said to be a sympathetic account of [Locke]. The biographer seems to see no charm in his hero, and is perpetually speaking of his want of imagination; which only means he was not given to unpractical dreaming.” Locke had his knowledgeable critics and defenders—for instance Dugald Stewart and John Stuart Mill—but the common opinion ranged from extreme hostility and contempt to condescending criticism of isolated minor points. His style was deplored, his philosophy was called unoriginal and a mere unacknowledged plagiarism of Gassendi and Hobbes; he was said to have so thoroughly misunderstood Descartes that he had merely repeated him with new errors; he was said to owe his philosophical reputation entirely to his advocacy of the popular argument for political freedom or merely to the intellectual circumstances of his time; he was held accountable for Condillac’s rejection of reflection and reason; he was knocked down with a few bare sentences loosely drawn from Leibniz; he was said to have made the mind a puny, passive, mechanical thing. He was called a sensualist, a materialist, a sceptic, an atheist, and a utilitarian though at the same time—and not without contradiction—he was generally, especially by his critics, styled a “great lover of truth,” a plain and simple, well-meaning and religious man. To the nineteenth century Locke meant the Essay, and the history of the Essay was in large measure the history of modern thought, of the eighteenth century. Precisely for this reason there was something nearly sinister about him, in spite of his good personal character. “Locke, himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay, religious man,” said Carlyle, “had paved the way for banishing religion from the world.”. (shrink)

In this paper we study changes of beliefs in a ranking-theoretic setting using non-extremal implausibility thresholds for belief. We represent implausibilities as ranks and introduce natural rank changes subject to a minimal change criterion. We show that many of the traditional AGM postulates for revision and contraction are preserved, except for the postulate of Preservation which is invalid. The diagnosis for belief contraction is similar, but not exactly the same. We demonstrate that the one-shot versions of both revision and contraction (...) can be represented as revisions based on semiorders, but in two subtly different ways. We provide sets of postulates that are sound and complete in the sense that they allow us to prove representation theorems. We show that, and explain why, the classical duality between revision and contraction, as exhibited by the Levi and Harper identities, is partly broken by threshold-based belief changes. We also study the logic of iterated threshold-based revision and contraction. The traditional Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision continue to hold, as well as two additional postulates that characterize ranking-based revision as a restricted `improvement' operator. We investigate the dual notion of iterated threshold-based belief contraction and provide a new set of postulates for it, characterizing contraction as a restricted 'degrading' operator. (shrink)

This study investigates bath the relationship between evaluation of personality traits of party-leaders and party identification, and the evaluation of personality traits as a determinant of voting behaviour. One month before the Belgian national elections of November 81 201 voters evaluate personality traits of four welt known leaders of the main Flemish political parties.Factor analysis indicated three main dimensions in the evaluation of personality traits of politicians : reliability, expertness and self-control. The personality profiles of every party-leader were quite similar (...) when comparing the profiles of groups of subjects with different party preferences. However, subjects who identificated with a certain party rated the party-leader of this party more favorable on all personality traits than did subjects who identificated with another party. These discrepancies in favorableness were rather small for expertness and selfcontrol, but big for reliability and attractiveness. Analysing determinants of voting behaviour we differentiated four types of voters. Convinced voters were determined mainly by party preference and political views. Policyoriented and routine-voters taak into account in the first instance their political views and secondly their party preference. Personality traits of party-leaders functioned as the main determinant only for the voting behaviour of our indifferent subjects. Between these personality traits, mainly the evaluation of expertness had predictive power. (shrink)

Our review of the literature shows that only a minority of youngsters shifts to a more extreme political position because of their experience with unemployment. Unemployment deepens the political apathy of the majority of the youngsters. Unemployment isolates youngsters, so they cannot develop any involvement in polities. The"learned-helplessness" experience of unemployment also contributes to their political apathy.In 1985, 536 employed and 220 unemployed were surveyed on their political, socio-economical and religious attitudes, and their voting behaviour. Because the majority of the (...) respondents were militants of the Christian Labour Movement, we expected the unemployed to shift to the left, rather than to become politically apathetic. The results confirm this hypothesis : the unemployed described themselves as "center left", were more radical on socio-economical issues and favored a more leftist vote that the employed. Surprisingly, the unemployed were also more sceptical about religion and more permissive in sexual ethics. (shrink)

Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, first published in French in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, represented in its time a radical departure from the dominant conception of the mind as a reservoir of innately given ideas. Descartes had held that knowledge must rest on ideas; Condillac turned this upside down by arguing that speech and words are the origin of mental life and knowledge. He argued, further, that language has its origin in human interaction (...) and in our natural capacity to react spontaneously and instinctively to the expression of emotions and states of mind in others. The importance of this pointedly anti-Cartesian view, and its relevance to both aesthetics and epistemology, were quickly understood, and Condillac's work influenced many later philosophers including Herder, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. His conception also anticipated Wittgenstein's view of language, its usage, and its relation to mind and thought. (shrink)

Condillac's Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, first published in French in 1746 and offered here in a new translation, represented in its time a radical departure from the dominant conception of the mind as a reservoir of innately given ideas. Descartes had held that knowledge must rest on ideas; Condillac turned this upside down by arguing that speech and words are the origin of mental life and knowledge. He argued, further, that language has its origin in human interaction (...) and in our natural capacity to react spontaneously and instinctively to the expression of emotions and states of mind in others. The importance of this pointedly anti-Cartesian view, and its relevance to both aesthetics and epistemology, were quickly understood, and Condillac's work influenced many later philosophers including Herder, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. His conception also anticipated Wittgenstein's view of language, its usage, and its relation to mind and thought. (shrink)