This paper is a discussion of Michael Thau's interesting critique in Chapter 2 of Consciousness and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, of the common view that beliefs are internal states.

This article offers a critical reflection of Lizal’isidinga laKho (hymn 116) and Wazidala iinto zonke (hymn 16) written by Tiyo Soga and recorded in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) hymnal book. From the perspective of black theology of liberation (BTL), I historicise and contextualise hymn 116 and hymn 16 to debunk the argument that Tiyo Soga was alien to the lives, experiences of suffering and pain of his people. The article posits that hymn 116 and hymn 16 are (...) black spirituals that articulate the contexts Soga found himself as a black person during the times of the frontier wars. Therefore, utilising blackness as a heuristic approach, I argue that the songs do not just historicise the experiences of black people in the times of the frontier wars, but they are prayers and/or laments from Soga that ask God to spare the lives, the culture, and value systems of black people in a world that seeks the destruction of their being, history, and culture. The songs emphasise the black struggle for justice and liberation encouraging black people never to succumb to the definitions given to them by those who seek the destruction of black personhood. The article locates Soga within the frontier wars to illustrate his own experiences as black person, then examines and presents Lizal’isidinga laKho, Wazidala iinto zonke as black spirituals born in a time of war to give hope to those who have been conquered and subjugated in the unjust wars of colonisation. Hymns 116 and 16 contribute to the decolonial turn discourse –unthinking of the west – because they emphasise the black struggle for liberation and justice.Contribution: The contribution of this article is its focus on the way in which the intersection of religious studies, social sciences, and humanities generates an interdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

SUMMARYHistorians of historiography have recently adopted the language of ‘epistemic virtues’ to refer to character traits believed to be conducive to good historical scholarship. While ‘epistemic virtues’ is a modern philosophical concept, virtues such as ‘objectivity’, ‘meticulousness’ and ‘carefulness’ historically also served as actors' categories. Especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historians frequently used virtue language to describe what it took to be a ‘good’, ‘reliable’ or ‘professional’ scholar. Based on three European case studies—the German historian Georg (...) Waitz, his French pupil Gabriel Monod and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne —this article argues that such virtues cannot neatly be classified as ‘epistemic’ ones. For what is characteristic about virtue language in historical scholarship around 1900 is an overlap or entanglement of epistemic, moral and political connotations. The virtues embodied by, or attributed to, Waitz, Monod and Pirenne were almost invariably aimed at epistemic, moral and political goods at once, though not always to the same degrees. Consequently, if ‘epistemic virtues’ is going to be a helpful category, it must not be interpreted in a strong sense, but in a weak one. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between the attractiveness of political parties and the younger generation. A recent survey of the attitudes of 15 to 25 year-olds revealed that young people are both interested in political issues and willing to assume responsibility through participation. Due to the increasing individualisation in our society, the offers of political organisations must match the needs of the younger generation. Lesser options should be developed that offer a multitude of opportunities in different spheres of participation, (...) and these options must be carried into the relevant media of young people with sufficient information. An instrument in the form of an evaluation model is offered to the political organisations to help them excercise control. (shrink)

This article aims to understand what role Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement, and the Soweto Uprising, played in Christian activism between the early 1970s and late 1980s. The question is: did the Black Consciousness Movement and the Soweto Uprising influence Christian activists to engage differently with notions such as reconciliation during the struggle against apartheid? The article revisits the actions and thinking of Christian activists before 1994 to understand some of their views on reconciliation, but most importantly, to (...) understand their interactions, engagement with the Black Consciousness Movement and the Soweto Uprising. The article focuses on some of the church leaders and liberation theologians who were inspired and encouraged by Black Consciousness movements, including Allan Boesak and Desmond Tutu. To revisit their thinking and actions, in the heart of the struggle against apartheid, may help us understand current struggles on reconciliation, particularly in connection with the new generation of activists known as the Fallists. We may discover that the new generation is opening ‘old or new’ debates around reconciliation in South Africa. (shrink)

This article aims to respond to Vuyani Vellem’s challenge to black theology of liberation to ‘think beyond rethinking and repeating its tried and tested ways of responding to black pain caused by racism and colonialism’. Vellem argued that ‘BTL needs to unthink the west by focusing on and retaining African spirituality as a cognitive spirituality’ for the liberation of black people in South Africa. This article argues that Ubuntu is the spirituality of liberation that BTL needs to advance as one (...) of its interlocutors. This research work will consult the literature emerging from African philosophy, ethics, spirituality and BTL arguing that Ubuntu is an indigenous philosophy, spirituality that continues to exist in the languages and culture of the Abantu speaking people. This article is dedicated to the memory of Vellem as a BTL scholar and a faithful believer of the liberative paradigms of BTL.Contribution: The scholarly contribution of this article is its focus on the systematic and practical reflection, within a paradigm in which the intersection of religious studies, social sciences and humanities generate an interdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

Block's cases of superblindsight, the pneumatic drill, and the Sperling experiments do not show that P-consciousness and Aconsciousness can come apart. On certain tendentious but not implausible construals of the concepts of P- and A-consciousness, they refer to the same psychological phenomenon.

Regular musical activity as a complex multimodal lifestyle activity is proposed to be protective against age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. This cross-sectional study investigated the association and interplay between musical instrument playing during life, multi-domain cognitive abilities and brain morphology in older adults from the DZNE-Longitudinal Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Study study. Participants reporting having played a musical instrument across three life periods were compared to controls without a history of musical instrument playing, well-matched for reserve proxies of education, (...) intelligence, socioeconomic status and physical activity. Participants with musical activity outperformed controls in global cognition, working memory, executive functions, language, and visuospatial abilities, with no effects seen for learning and memory. The musically active group had greater gray matter volume in the somatosensory area, but did not differ from controls in higher-order frontal, temporal, or hippocampal volumes. However, the association between gray matter volume in distributed frontal-to-temporal regions and cognitive abilities was enhanced in participants with musical activity compared to controls. We show that playing a musical instrument during life relates to better late-life cognitive abilities and greater brain capacities in OA. Musical activity may serve as a multimodal enrichment strategy that could help preserve cognitive and brain health in late life. Longitudinal and interventional studies are needed to support this notion. (shrink)

Text se zabývá Latourovým pojetím překladu. Poukazuje na některé epistemologické problémy, které vyplývají ze zohledňování překladu jako předmětu zájmu. Tyto problémy lze redukovat na otázku, zda se na výsledné podobě překladu podílí jen poznávající subjekt, nebo také studovaná skutečnost. Podle způsobu řešení této otázky lze rozlišit mezi lingvistickým a nelingvistickým přístupem. Latourovu snahu o systematičtější vymezení překladu lze chápat jako odklon od lingvistické tradice ve prospěch nelingvistických forem podílejících se na vymezení programu epistemologického obratu. V textu jsou v tomto směru (...) diskutovány především problémy redukcionismu, asymetrie, zobecněné symetrie, aktérství a role badatele ve výzkumném procesu. V Latourově perspektivě tento proces není záležitostí fakticity, nýbrž ontologické politiky, v níž dochází k vyjednávání o tom, co činí svět reálným. (shrink)

The article provides a tentative reading of Hegel’s police as a concept that constitutes a crucial test for the rationality of Hegel’s state and that actually played a very important role in the formation of his model of rationality. It starts by considering some significant changes in Hegel’s approach to the subject in the Jena period, especially in reference to Fichte and Spinoza; then, it presents Hegel’s conception of the police as the interface of the universal in his mature political (...) philosophy, together with his treatment of the disturbing problem of poverty and the rabble; and to conclude, it adds some general remarks on Hegel’s police, then and now. (shrink)

Rabble, it is commonly argued, indicates one of the very few places in Hegel's system where he produced an inevitable contradiction that he was, however, unable to “sublate.” In this paper, I purport to prove this narrative wrong. Relying on a close reading of Hegel's reasoning in his book and his lectures on the philosophy of right, I first attempt to determine what the problem of rabble consists in: I demonstrate that Hegel was perfectly aware of the mechanism of necessary (...) impoverishment in (unrestricted) civil society, and that in his view the poor were actually justified in developing a rabble mentality. I then show, on the one hand, that civil society was from the very beginning conceived as self-sublating, and on the other, that Hegel was, at least in principle, able to find a solution for the rabble: the state. (shrink)

Maxwell's equations are formulated as a relativistic “Schrödinger-like equation” for a single photon of a given helicity. The probability density of the photon satisfies an equation of continuity. The energy eigenvalue problem gives both positive and negative energies. The Feynman concept of antiparticles is applied here to show that the negative-energy states going backward in time (t → −t) give antiphoton states, which are photon states with the opposite helicity. For a given mode, properties of a photon, such as energy, (...) linear momentum, total angular momentum, orbital angular momentum, and spin are equivalent in both classical electromagnetic field theory and quantum theory. The single-photon Schrödinger equation is field (or “second”) quantized in a gauge-invariant way to obtain the quantum field theory of many photons. This approach treats the quantization of electromagnetic radiation in a way that parallels the quantization of material particles and, thus, provides a unified treatment. (shrink)

Nach einleitender Darstellung der Grundstruktur des Nihilismus-Vorwurfs, den Jacobi an die Philosophie als Unternehmen des reflexiven Erkennens machte, wird in dem Aufsatze die große Bedeutung dieser Diskussion für die Bildung der Hegelschen Philosophie, vor allem in Beziehung auf Schelling dargelegt. Sich an Schelling anlehnend versuchte Hegel in den ersten Jenaer Jahren das Nichts, in dem die Reflexionsphilosophie enden sollte, als notwendige Folge einer willkürlichen Absolutisierung der endlichen Reflexion zu lesen und es durch ihre immanente Selbstvernichtung zu überwinden. Doch fand er (...) dieses Modell schon bald unzureichend, weil das absolute Nichts darin objektiv unbestimmt und subjektiv bloß versichernd bleibt. So stellte er die Aufgabe der Philosophie als Gleichnis des spekulativen Karfreitags, wo der Begriff durch das absolute Leiden beide Forderungen entsprechend erfüllen soll. Anschließend werden einige Folgen angeführt, die die Nihilismus-Problematik in Hegels späteren Werken hinterließ, z. B. in dem Begriffe der absoluten Reflexion, und die auch für heutige philosophische Diskussionen von Belang sein können. (shrink)

The field of metacognition, richly sampled in the book under review, is recognized as an important and growing branch of psychology. However, the field stands in need of a general theory that (1) provides a unified framework for understanding the variety of metacognitive processes, (2) articulates the relation between metacognition and consciousness, and (3) tells us something about the form of meta-level representations and their relations to object-level representations. It is argued that the higher-order thought theory of consciousness supplies us (...) with the rudiments of a theory that meets these desiderata and integrates the principal findings reported in this collection. (shrink)

According to a model of inter-theoretic relations advocated by Patricia S. Churchland, psychology will need to revise its theories so as to fit them for "smooth reduction" to the neurosciences, and this will lead to the elimination of reference to intentional contents from psychology. It is argued that this model is ambiguous; on one reading it is empirically implausible, on the other its methodology is confused. The connectionist program NETtalk, far from exemplifying the model as Churchland claims, suggests a theoretical (...) rationale for employing relations to intentional contents in psychology. (shrink)

This text deals with convergence and divergence in relation to the formation of images of inhumanity in Slovak Roma settlements. Slovak media, social networks, and television reports often contain negative images emphasizing the Roma’s backwardness, irrationality, superstition, and cruelty, and aiming to highlight their inhumanity. This approach has become prevalent even among official state authorities such as the police of the Slovak Republic, shaping the perception of the Roma as monsters. It represents a mobilization strategy that connects and disconnects various (...) disciplinary apparatuses, forming concrete images of monsters. By examining moments of convergence and divergence, which mainly focus on the killing and consumption of canines, the text clarifies the social and material ordering that contributes to the particular arrangement of significance used by the Slovak media and other officials. (shrink)

The paper provides a modest reading of Hegel?s treatment of self-consciousness in his Phenomenology of Spirit and tries to present it as an integral part of the overall project of the experience of consciousness leading from understanding to reason. Its immediate objective is, it is argued, to think the independence and dependence, that is the pure and empirical I within the same unity of self-consciousness. This implies a double movement of finding a proper existence for the pure I and at (...) the same time a breaking down of the empirical I?s attachment to particularity. It is argued that the Hegelian struggle for recognition intends to show how the access to reason demands the subject?s renunciation of its attachment to particularity, that is to sacrifice not only its bare life but every thing indeed, including its particular identity, and yet, to go on living. nema. (shrink)

Consciousness has been defined as that annoying period between naps, and this grumpy definition may not be wholly facetious, if Michael Tye's latest book is right. Tye's main goal here is to develop a theory of the phenomenal unity of experience at a time, and its diachronic analog, the moment-to-moment continuity of one's experiential stream from the time one wakes up to the time consciousness lapses.

To say that S's belief or action is rational is to say, according to Foley, that from a certain belief perspective it appears to satisfy certain of S's goals. This approach is firmly teleological in character, and does not take "rules" or "virtues" of rationality to be fundamental. Precisely which belief perspective, and which of S's goals, are relevant here? We should acknowledge many notions of rationality, says Foley, depending on how we fix these parameters. We might take all of (...) S's goals to be relevant, or perhaps only S's desire to have accurate and comprehensive beliefs. And we might take as relevant the belief perspective of experts in S's community, or that of an objectively knowledgeable observer, or that of S alone were S to be deeply reflective. (shrink)

In her recent article “The Ontology of Social Groups”, Thomasson (Synthese 196:4829–4845, 2019) argues that social groups can be characterized in terms of the norms that surround them. We show that according to Thomasson’s normativity-based criterion, the dead constitute a social group, since there are widespread and well-defined social norms as to how to treat the dead, such as the norm expressed in the title (“Speak no ill of the dead”). We argue that the example of the dead must not (...) be interpreted as a counterexample to this criterion, and that, rather, there are good reasons to think of the dead as a genuine social group. Furthermore, the dead as a social group exist, regardless of whether or not the dead (i.e. the members of this social group) exist as persons. This view is clearly incompatible with the idea that social groups can be explained by citing features of their members, which is why we take the case of the dead to pose a challenge for the thesis of individualism. We consider the ontological implications of this example and suggest that social groups ought to be seen as reifications of social norms. Another implication of taking the dead to be a social group is that the presence of external norms is sufficient for the existence of a social group, and therefore internal norms are not necessary. We defend this implication against some potential theoretical and moral problems. (shrink)