Through philosophical reasoning, this article will argue for two theses, which function as two sides of the same coin. The first thesis is that Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), as a science and in addition to numerous concrete individual studies, must work self-reflexively on a common and tentatively formal theory of ESD. The first substantive section of the article attempts to justify why ESD is a highly complex science that is anything but easy to work on. I will try to (...) justify this second thesis by reflecting, even if only by example, on the question of why, how and with what objectives the addressees of ESD pedagogy are to be educated.Critical questions in respect of the scientific discourse on ESD will substantiate the second thesis. Simultaneously, I aim to argue that to work self-reflexivel y on a common and tentatively formal theory of ESD is necessary for the systematic and scientific development of the discipline, and that only self-critical and systematic ESD research can provide precise knowledge on how ESD, as a pedagogical practice, can unfold its potential for the designated and desired transformation. (shrink)

Kant is generally conceived to have offered little attention to the fact that we experience the world in and through our bodies. This book argues that this standard image of the great German philosopher is radically wrong. Not only does Kant - throughout his career and in works published before and after the Critique of pure reason - reflect constantly upon the fact that human life is embodied, but the Critique of pure reason itself may be read as a critical (...) reflection aimed at exploring some significant philosophical implications of this fact. Bringing this aspect of Kant's philosophy into focus is important, not only because it sheds new light on our understanding of Kant's work, but also because it is relevant to contemporary discussions in philosophy about embodiment, learning and practice. By taking his philosophy of embodiment into account, the author makes Kant stand out as a true contemporary in new and unexpected ways. (shrink)

There is an argument (first presented by Fitch), which tries to show by formal means that the anti-realistic thesis that every truth might possibly be known, is equivalent to the unacceptable thesis that every truth is actually known (at some time in the past, present or future). First, the argument is presented and some proposals for the solution of Fitch's Paradox are briefly discussed. Then, by using Wehmeier's modal logic with subjunctive marks (S5*), it is shown how the derivation can (...) be blocked if one respects adequately the distinction between the indicative and the subjunctive mood. Essentially, this proposal amounts to the one by Edgington which was formulated with the help of the actuality-operator. Finally it is shown how the criticisms by Williamson against Edgington can be answered by the formulation of a new conception of possible knowledge that \alpha (thereby \alpha being in the indicative mood and thus referring to the actual world). This conception is based on the concept of same de re knowledge in different possible worlds. (shrink)

This paper examines the thoughts and early career of the astrophysicist and cosmologist E. A. Milne. Although Milne only turned to cosmology in 1932, many of the ideas that characterised his heterodox system of world physics can be traced back to his works from the 1920s. Contrary to what has been stated in the literature, we argue that Milne was familiar with and interested in cosmology even before 1932. The relationship between mathematics and physics, an important topic in Milne's cosmophysics, (...) was the subject of an unpublished paper he gave in 1922. We place the paper in its historical context and comment on its relevance for Milne's later work. An annotated transcript of the address is included as an accompanying paper under the title 'The Relations of Mathematics to Science'. (shrink)

Dialogical logic is a game-theoretical approach to logic. Logic is studied with the help of certain games, which can be thought of as idealized argumentations. Two players, the Proponent, who puts forward the initial thesis and tries to defend it, and the Opponent, who tries to attack the Proponent’s thesis, alternately utter argumentative moves according to certain rules. For a long time the dialogical approach had been worked out only for classical and intuitionistic logic. The seven papers of this dissertation (...) show that this narrowness was uncalled for. The initial paper presents an overview and serves as an introduction to the other papers. Those papers are related by one central theme. As each of them presents dialogical formulations of a different non-classical logic, they show that dialogical logic constitutes a powerful and flexible general framework for the development and study of various logical formalisms and combinations thereof. As such it is especially attractive to logical pluralists that reject the idea of “the single correct logic”. The collection contains treatments of free logic, modal logic, relevance logic, connexive logic, linear logic, and multi-valued logic. (shrink)

In dominant discourses, migrants are mostly perceived as either victims or villains but rarely as political subjects and democratic constituents. Challenging this view, the aim of the article is to rethink democracy with respect to migration struggles. I argue that movements of migration are not only consistent with democracy but also provide a decisive impetus for actualizing democratic principles in the context of debates about the crisis of representation and post-democracy. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar and (...) Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I develop a theory of radical democracy as practice, which, starting from the proposed notion of ‘democratic difference’, goes beyond the fixation on democratic regimes and focuses on contentious practices of enacting democratic principles. I articulate these theoretical concepts by analysing how refugees in Germany have managed to break out of a marginalized position and have challenged their denial of rights through a protest march. (shrink)

In his Doctrine of Right, Immanuel Kant calls Moses Mendelssohn, the towering figure of the German and the Jewish Enlightenment, a ‘Rechtsforscher’—a legal scholar. Yet not only Kant, but numerous scholars of Natural law in the 18th and 19th centuries refer to and reflect on the juridical aspects of Mendelssohn’s work, in particular his thoughts on the law of contract. In this article, I hope to shed some light on this hitherto rather unexplored facet of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre. Mendelssohn develops his (...) theory of contract from the starting point of the officium amoris: the unenforceable ‘duty of love’ to exercise beneficence. Mendelssohn’s theory knows nothing yet of the modern contrast between altruism, distributive justice and ‘freedom of contract’. By exploring Mendelssohn’s theory, we will thus be able to catch a glimpse of the birth pangs of the modern Western discourse on the ‘freedom of contract’, which formed the backdrop as well as the jumping-off point of the development of a ‘liberal’ will theory of contract. Since this ‘liberal’ model is still the paradigm of how contract is mostly perceived today, Mendelssohn’s theory also exemplifies the possibility of an alternative to our own conceptualizations of contract that inescapably shape the way we think. (shrink)

This volume offers a critical analysis and illustration of the challenges and promises of ‘stateless’ law thought, pedagogy and approaches to governance - that is, understanding and conceptualizing law in a post-national condition. Confronting the ‘transnational challenge’ posed to the traditional theoretical and institutional structures that underlie the teaching and study of law in the university, the book brings new insight to the ongoing and crucial conversation about the future shape of legal scholarship, education and practice that is emblematic of (...) the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

This is the second of two voumes designed to document a trend in Norwegian philosophy away from the empirical semantics represented by Arne Naess towards a more pragmatic and transcendental perspective. A number of the contributed essays examine the controversy between Wittgenstein and the philosophies of Habermas and Apel.

Summary Cosmology has always been different from other areas of the natural sciences. Although an observationally supported standard model of the universe emerged in the 1960s, more speculative models and conceptions continued to attract attention. During the last decade, ideas of multiple universes (the ‘multiverse’) based on anthropic reasoning have become very popular among cosmologists and theoretical physicists. This had led to a major debate within the scientific community of the epistemic standards of modern cosmology. Is the multiverse a scientific (...) hypothesis, or is it rather a philosophical speculation disguised as science? This paper offers a review of the recent and still ongoing controversy concerning the multiverse, emphasizing its foundational nature and relation to philosophical issues. It also compares the multiverse controversy to some earlier episodes in the history of twentieth-century cosmology when particular theories and approaches came under attack for betraying the ideals of proper science. (shrink)

Telegraphy, the distant ancestor of Internet and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), was invented by Samuel Morse in 1838. One year later, William Grove invented the fuel cell. Although numerous highly successful innovations stemming from telegraphy may be observed, the development of fuel cells has been insignificant, slow, and erratic and has not yet resulted in notable positive socioeconomic effects. By comparing the modern development of fuel cells and hydrogen technology, that is, a potential radical innovation in energy generation, (...) with some aspects related to the evolution of two highly successful radical innovations, Internet and GSM, the author focuses on the role of innovation regimes and policy in a sectorial system of innovations perspective. In the slow pace in fuel cells and hydrogen technology development, two factors seem to interact negatively: weak and fragmented innovation regimes in the energy sector and the current hegemony of market-oriented R&D policies. (shrink)

While Karl Popper’s philosophy of science has only few followers among modern philosophers, it is easily the view of science with the biggest impact on practicing scientists. According to Peter Medawar, Nobel laureate and eminent physiologist, Popper was the greatest authority ever on the scientific method. He praised the “great strength of Karl Popper’s conception of the scientific process,” a main reason for the praise being “that it is realistic—it gives a pretty fair picture of what goes on in real (...) life laboratories” (Medawar 1990, p. 100). Either explicitly or (more often) implicitly, many scientists subscribe to some version of simplified Popperianism, usually by adopting the demarcation criterion that a .. (shrink)

The story of superheavy elements - those at the very end of the periodic table - is not well known outside the community of heavy-ion physicists and nuclear chemists. But it is a most interesting story which deserves to be known also to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and indeed to the general public. This is what the present work aims at. It tells the story or rather parts of the story, of how physicists and chemists created elements heavier (...) than uranium or searched for them in nature. And it does so with an emphasis on the frequent discovery and naming disputes concerning the synthesis of very heavy elements. Moreover, it calls attention to the criteria which scientists have adopted for what it means to have discovered a new element. In this branch of modern science it may be more appropriate to speak of creation instead of discovery. The work will be of interest to scientists as well as to scholars studying modern science from a meta-perspective. (shrink)

Trust between a patient and a medical doctor is normally both justified and taken for granted, but sometimes it may need to be negotiated. In this paper I will present how trust can be interpreted as both an explicit and implicit phenomenon, drawing on literature from the social sciences and philosophy. The distinction between explicit and implicit interpretations of trust will be used to address problems that may arise in clinical consultations. Negotiating trust in any way very easily brings distrust (...) into a situation, but sometimes this can be helpful for building a more functional patient-doctor relationship. (shrink)

The Scandinavian working-life tradition is founded on ideas and values similar to the model of conductivity. However, although the Scandinavian working-life tradition is pragmatic and consensus seeking the model of conductivity is stringent following its principles. The pragmatic approach, here represented by the Danish program of “the developmental work,” has made it difficult to follow the vision of the program (to improve working conditions and at the same time meet social and environmental needs). Instead, the program has mainly targeted organizational (...) development in established companies, accepting the existing principles of wealth creation. The model of conductivity can strength the visions behind the pragmatic approach by its conceptualization of an alternative creation of wealth related to opportunities in current working life: a creation of wealth based on skill, creativity and networking among employees across the borders of the organizations and released from the language of management. (shrink)

Juslin & Vll (J&V) have suggested a promising theoretical framework for understanding musical emotions. However, the way they classify the hypothetical underlying psychological mechanisms suffers from certain weaknesses, both in principle and when it comes to details. It is proposed that the authors consider incorporating ideas from a recent dissertation that has advanced another multimechanism theory of musical emotions.

This paper is an argument to the effect that a certain view about mental representing, together with some very liberal constraints on the brain as a dynamic system, entails that the organism will tend to form adaptive mental representations of its environment. To show this, it will first be argued that although mental representing is a common thing indeed, representationalism, in the most important sense of that term (indirect representationalism), is false. Three different views about pictorial thinking (mental imagery, intuitive (...) representing) are then contrasted, two of which are tied to this brand of representationalism and one of which is not. The latter view, versions of which have sometimes been presented as ”simulation” theories of imagery, is here generalised to cover all kinds of mental representation. Two models of the brain are then presented in which learning of adaptive representations follows from this theory together with certain biologically plausible constraints. (shrink)

Poster presented at the conference "Toward a Science of Consciousness" , Tucson, Arizona, April 10-15, 2000.

It is often stated that the image of the world which our senses present to us contradicts the scientific worldview in important respects. I challenge this position through a number of arguments centered on the nature of perception and of perceived qualities.

This paper first advances and discusses the hypothesis that so-called “iconic” or (for the auditory sphere) “echoic” memory is actually a form of perception of the past. Such perception is made possible by parallel inputs with differential delays which feed independently into the sensorium. This hypothesis goes well together with a set of related psychological and phenomenological facts, as for example: Sperling’s results about the visual sensory buffer, the facts that we seem to see movement and hear temporal Gestalts, and (...) the fact that we sometimes seem to hear sounds only after they have stopped. In it most simple form, and formulated in the somewhat misleading information processing idiom, my hypothesis says that each one of a number of parallel input lines with different delays feeds into a spatially separate sensory unit. The set of such units then holds information about the immediate past in what one might call a “chronotopic” sensory map. This contrasts with the idea (common in sensory buffer theory) that the received sensory information is kept (while possibly decaying) in the same unit for some time after it occurred. The hypothesis also contradicts the theory that all sensory information passes through the same unit but is then successively passed through a unidirectional chain of separate units, where the past experiences then become represented (the shift register hypothesis). The main advantage of my theory, beside the natural explanations it offers for the above-mentioned kind of phenomena, is that it postulates a parallel – and therefore robust – rather than a serial mechanism for the registering of temporal information. It can of course easily be modified to fit more complex models of the sensory cerebral code(s) as well as of the chronotopic representation as such. -/- In the second part of my poster, I advance a corresponding hypothesis for those motor commands which control brief movements. At closer inspection, most socalled “ballistic” movements do not seem to be truly ballistic (in the sense in which the movement of a cannonball is so) since the brain must exert some kind of feedforward control over the later part of their trajectory. I suggest that this control is at least sometimes realized by means of differentially delayed output from a chronotopic representation of successive segments of the movement. Not only could this be a biologically natural way of ensuring efficient adaptability of the movement; the hypothesis also explains the not uncommon experience of “seeing the whole movement laid out in advance” when it is initiated. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est de montrer comment les logiques dites multivalentes peuvent être formulées dans le cadre de la logique dialogique. Pour formuler les règles de particule pour ces logiques on introduit l’idée de différents modes d’assertion. En donnant ensuite les règles de particule et les règles structurelles appropriées, on peut reconstruire dialogiquement les systèmes standards de logiques multivalentes. Cela est fait explicitement pour la logique `a trois valeurs de Łukasiewicz (L3c). En remplaçant la règle structurelle classique par (...) sa contrepartie intuitionniste on obtient des versions intuitionnistes de systèmes multivalents (par exemple L3i). Les systèmes dialogiques multivalents L3c et L3i sont illustrés par quelques exemples et pour conclure on formule les tableaux stratégiques correspondants. (shrink)

This text provides a comprehensive analysis of historical archives, letters, and primary sources to offer unique insight into how Fröbel's pedagogy of kindergarten and play has been understood, interpreted, and modified throughout history and in particular, as a consequence of it's adoption in the US. Tracing the development, modification, and global spread of the kindergarten movement, this volume demonstrates the far-reaching impacts of Fröbel's work, and asks how far contemporary understandings of the kindergarten pedagogy reflect the educationalist's original intentions. Recognizing (...) that Fröbel's pedagogy has at times been simplified or misunderstood, the book tackles issues caused by translation, or transfer to non-German speaking countries such as the US, and so demonstrates how and why contemporary research and Froebelian practice is in the danger of diverging from the original ideas expressed in Fröbel's work. By returning to original documents produced by Fröbel, Wasmuth traces various interpretations, and explains how and why some of these understandings established themselves in the context of US Early Childhood Education, whilst others did not. This insightful text will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics, professionals and policy makers in the fields of early childhood education, history of education, Philosophy of Education and Teacher Education. (shrink)

Summary The emergence of quantum theory in the early decades of the twentieth century was accompanied by a wide range of popular science books, all of which presented in words, and a few in images, new scientific ideas about the structure of the atom. The work of physicists such as Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr, among others, was pivotal to the so-called planetary model of the atom, which, still today, is used in popular accounts and in science textbooks. In an (...) attempt to add to our knowledge about the popular trajectory of the new atomic physics, this paper examines one book in particular, co-authored by Danish science writer Helge Holst and Dutch physicist and close collaborator of Niels Bohr, Hendrik A. Kramers. Translated from Danish into four European languages, the book not only explained contemporary ideas about the quantum atom, but also discussed unresolved problems. Moreover, the book was quite explicit in identifying the quantum atom with the atom as described by Bohr's theory. We argue that Kramers and Holst's book, along with other ‘atomic books’, was a useful tool for physicists and science popularisers in trying to understand the new quantum physics. (shrink)