En el presente artículo se presenta una propuesta didáctica para tercer ciclo de educación primaria que se construye a partir de un Trabajo de Fin de Grado y que ha sido llevada a la práctica. La propuesta está relacionada con el aprendizaje de diferentes aspectos de las culturas griega, vikinga y egipcia. El objetivo central de este artículo es presentar una planificación didáctica para el aprendizaje de estas civilizaciones desde una perspectiva lúdica e innovadora en la cual se hace uso (...) de la realidad virtual y los videojuegos; incluyendo además los resultados más relevantes de su puesta en práctica. La metodología de la propuesta está basada en la gamificación y el aprendizaje basado en juegos (ABJ). La elección de esta metodología se sustenta en las facilidades que ofrecen tanto la expansión del desarrollo tecnológico como el uso de las aplicaciones (app) y videojuegos en la vida cotidiana de los estudiantes; apoyándose en estudios previos que muestran los beneficios del uso de estas tecnologías en enseñanza de las ciencias sociales y de la historia. La puesta en práctica se desarrolla a través de una secuencia de actividades que abarca varias sesiones y en las que, entre otras tareas, se hace uso de los videojuegos Assassin’s Creed: Discovery Tour, para tareas de exploración, y Minecraft Education Edition, para tareas de representación. En cuanto a los resultados de la puesta en práctica, la propuesta ha sido exitosa en su desarrollo, obteniéndose un alto grado de consecución de los objetivos didácticos propuestos y no encontrando dificultades graves durante el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. (shrink)

While the underrepresentation of women in the fast-growing STEM field of computer science (CS) has been much studied, no consensus exists on the key factors influencing this widening gender gap. Possible suspects include gender differences in aptitude, interest, and academic environment. Our study contributes to this literature by applying student engagement research to study the experiences of college students studying CS, to assess the degree to which differences in men and women’s engagement may help account for gender inequity in the (...) field. Specifically, we use the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to evaluate in real-time the engagement of college students during varied activities and environments. Over the course of a full week in fall semester and a full week in spring semester, 165 students majoring in CS at two Research I universities were “beeped” several times a day via a smartphone app prompting them to fill out a short questionnaire including open-ended and scaled items. These responses were paired with administrative and over two years of transcript data provided by their institutions. We used mean comparisons and logistic regression analysis to compare enrollment and persistence patterns among CS men and women. Results suggest that despite the obstacles associated with women’s underrepresentation in computer science, women are more likely to continue taking computer science courses when they felt challenged and skilled in their initial computer science classes. We discuss implications for further research. (shrink)

Psychological flexibility is a key concept of acceptation and commitment therapy. This factor has been linked with psychological wellbeing and associated factors, such as quality of life, in cancer patients. These and other positive results of acceptation and commitment therapy in cancer patients found in previous research could be enhanced by using mhealth tools. A three-arm randomized superiority clinical trial, with a pre-post-follow-up repeated measures intergroup design with a 1:1:1 allocation ratio is proposed. A hundred and twenty cancer patients will (...) be randomly assigned to one of the following interventions: face-to-face ACT + mobile application, face-to-face ACT, and Waitlist control group. The primary expected outcome is to observe significant improvements in psychological flexibility acceptance and action questionnaire- II in the face-to-face ACT + app group, after comparing baseline and post-treatment scores, and the scores will remain stable in the two assessment points, 3 and 6 months after the intervention. Secondary expected outcomes are significant increasing scores in quality of life and post-traumatic-growth, and significant decreasing scores in anxiety and depression, insomnia and fatigue at the same assessment points. Also, it is expected that the scores of this group will be higher than the scores of the face-to-face ACT group and the waitlist control group. This study aims to assess the efficacy of a combined intervention for psychological flexibility and associated symptoms in cancer patients. The results of this protocol may help to consider the use of acceptation and commitment therapy and mhealth applications in cancer settings as a valid therapeutic choice.Clinical Trial Registration[www.ClinicalTrials.gov], identifier [NCT05126823]. (shrink)

Lara Buchak sets out a new account of rational decision-making in the face of risk. She argues that the orthodox view is too narrow, and suggests an alternative, more permissive theory: one that allows individuals to pay attention to the worst-case or best-case scenario, and vindicates the ordinary decision-maker.

This paper provides an account of what it is to have faith in a proposition p, in both religious and mundane contexts. It is argued that faith in p doesn’t require adopting a degree of belief that isn’t supported by one’s evidence but rather it requires terminating one’s search for further evidence and acting on the supposition that p. It is then shown, by responding to a formal result due to I.J. Good, that doing so can be rational in a (...) number of circumstances. If expected utility theory is the correct account of practical rationality, then having faith can be both epistemically and practically rational if the costs associated with gathering further evidence or postponing the decision are high. If a more permissive framework is adopted, then having faith can be rational even when there are no costs associated with gathering further evidence. (shrink)

There are currently two robust traditions in philosophy dealing with doxastic attitudes: the tradition that is concerned primarily with all-or-nothing belief, and the tradition that is concerned primarily with degree of belief or credence. This paper concerns the relationship between belief and credence for a rational agent, and is directed at those who may have hoped that the notion of belief can either be reduced to credence or eliminated altogether when characterizing the norms governing ideally rational agents. It presents a (...) puzzle which lends support to two theses. First, that there is no formal reduction of a rational agent’s beliefs to her credences, because belief and credence are each responsive to different features of a body of evidence. Second, that if our traditional understanding of our practices of holding each other responsible is correct, then belief has a distinctive role to play, even for ideally rational agents, that cannot be played by credence. The question of which avenues remain for the credence-only theorist is considered. (shrink)

Faith is a central attitude in Christian religious practice. The problem of faith and reason is the problem of reconciling religious faith with the standards for our belief-forming practices in general (‘ordinary epistemic standards’). In order to see whether and when faith can be reconciled with ordinary epistemic standards, we first need to know what faith is. This chapter examines and catalogues views of propositional faith: faith that p. It is concerned with the epistemology of such faith: what cognitive attitudes (...) does such faith require, what epistemic norms govern these attitudes, and whether Christian faith can ever adhere to them. (shrink)

One phenomenon arising in epistemic life is allegiance to, and break from, a tradition. This phenomenon has three central features. First, individuals who adhere to a tradition seem to respond dogmatically to evidence against their tradition. Second, individuals from different traditions appear to see the same evidence differently. And third, conversion from one tradition to another appears to be different in kind from ordinary belief shift. This paper uses recent work on the nature and rationality of faith to show that (...) these features can all emerge from individuals acting rationally—in particular, from individuals rationally having faith in the core assumptions of their traditions. One upshot is that we don't need to employ the idea of incommensurability to explain these features. (shrink)

The ‘rollback argument,’ pioneered by Peter van Inwagen, purports to show that indeterminism in any form is incompatible with free will. The argument has two major premises: the first claims that certain facts about chances obtain in a certain kind of hypothetical situation, and the second that these facts entail that some actual act is not free. Since the publication of the rollback argument, the second claim has been vehemently debated, but everyone seems to have taken the first claim for (...) granted. Nevertheless, the first claim is totally unjustified. Even if we accept the second claim, therefore, the argument gives us no reason to think that free will and indeterminism are incompatible. Furthermore, seeing where the rollback argument goes wrong illuminates how a certain kind of incompatibilist, the ‘chance-incompatibilist,’ ought to think about free will and chance, and points to a possibility for free will that has remained largely unexplored. (shrink)

In “Can it be rational to have faith?”, it was argued that to have faith in some proposition consists, roughly speaking, in stopping one’s search for evidence and committing to act on that proposition without further evidence. That paper also outlined when and why stopping the search for evidence and acting is rationally required. Because the framework of that paper was that of formal decision theory, it primarily considered the relationship between faith and degrees of belief, rather than between faith (...) and belief full stop. This paper explores the relationship between rational faith and justified belief, by considering four prominent proposals about the relationship between belief and degrees of belief, and by examining what follows about faith and belief according to each of these proposals. It is argued that we cannot reach consensus concerning the relationship between faith and belief at present because of the more general epistemological lack of consensus over how belief relates to rationality: in particular, over how belief relates to the degrees of belief it is rational to have given one’s evidence. (shrink)

Decision theory has at its core a set of mathematical theorems that connect rational preferences to functions with certain structural properties. The components of these theorems, as well as their bearing on questions surrounding rationality, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Philosophy’s current interest in decision theory represents a convergence of two very different lines of thought, one concerned with the question of how one ought to act, and the other concerned with the question of what action consists (...) in and what it reveals about the actor’s mental states. As a result, the theory has come to have two different uses in philosophy, which we might call the normative use and the interpretive use. It also has a related use that is largely within the domain of psychology, the descriptive use. This essay examines the historical development of decision theory and its uses; the relationship between the norm of decision theory and the notion of rationality; and the interdependence of the uses of decision theory. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that faith is recalcitrant in the face of new evidence, but it is puzzling how such recalcitrance could be rational or laudable. I explain this aspect of faith and why faith is not only rational, but in addition serves an important purpose in human life. Because faith requires maintaining a commitment to act on the claim one has faith in, even in the face of counter-evidence, faith allows us to carry out long-term, risky projects that we (...) might otherwise abandon. Thus, faith allows us to maintain integrity over time. (shrink)

In the shift from the balance of nature to the flux of nature paradigm, the concept of resilience has gained great traction in ecology. While it has been suggested that the concept of resilience does not imply a genuine departure from the balance of nature paradigm, I shall argue against this stance. To do so, I first show that the balance of nature paradigm and the related conception of a single-state equilibrium relies on what Eliot Sober has named the “Natural (...) State Model (NSM)”, suggesting that the NSM has instead been dismissed in the flux of nature paradigm. I then focus on resilience as the main explanatory concept of the flux paradigm. After distinguishing between two main different understandings of “resilience”, namely engineering resilience and ecological resilience, I argue that the former is close to the concept of balance or stability and still part of the NSM, while the latter is not. Finally, I claim that ecological resilience is inconsistent with the NSM, concluding that this concept–being incompatible with the NSM–is not part of the balance of nature paradigm but rather a genuinely new explanatory tool. (shrink)

In the peer disagreement debate, three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one’s own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one’s opinion on important matters. I show that contrary to initial appearances, we can accept all three of these claims. Disagreement significantly shifts the balance of the evidence; but with respect to certain kinds of claims, one should nonetheless retain one’s beliefs. (...) And one should retain them even though these beliefs would not be supported by the new total evidence if one didn’t already hold them. (shrink)

The good of those who are worse off matters more to the overall good than the good of those who are better off does. But being worse off than one’s fellows is not itself bad; nor is inequality itself bad; nor do differences in well-being matter more when well-being is lower in an absolute sense. Instead, the good of the relatively worse-off weighs more heavily in the overall good than the good of the relatively better-off does, in virtue of the (...) fact that the former are relatively worse off. This paper articulates and defends the view just described. (shrink)

Suppose we want to do the most good we can with a particular sum of money, but we cannot be certain of the consequences of different ways of making use of it. This article explores how our attitudes towards risk and ambiguity bear on what we should do. It shows that risk-avoidance and ambiguity-aversion can each provide good reason to divide our money between various charitable organizations rather than to give it all to the most promising one. It also shows (...) how different attitudes towards risk and ambiguity affect whether we should give to an organization which does a small amount of good for certain or to one which does a large amount of good with some small or unknown probability. (shrink)

Medical stem cell research is currently the cause of much moral controversy. Those who would confer the same moral status to embryos as we do to humans consider that harvesting such embryonic cells entails sacrificing embryos. In this paper, the author analyses critically the arguments given for such a perspective. Finally, a theory of moral status is outlined that coherently and plausibly supports the use of embryonic stem cells in therapeutic research.

Some early phase clinical studies of candidate HIV cure and remission interventions appear to have adverse medical risk–benefit ratios for participants. Why, then, do people participate? And is it ethically permissible to allow them to participate? Recent work in decision theory sheds light on both of these questions, by casting doubt on the idea that rational individuals prefer choices that maximise expected utility, and therefore by casting doubt on the idea that researchers have an ethical obligation not to enrol participants (...) in studies with high risk–benefit ratios. This work supports the view that researchers should instead defer to the considered preferences of the participants themselves. This essay briefly explains this recent work, and then explores its application to these two questions in more detail. (shrink)

I have claimed that risk-weighted expected utility maximizers are rational, and that their preferences cannot be captured by expected utility theory. Richard Pettigrew and Rachael Briggs have recently challenged these claims. Both authors argue that only EU-maximizers are rational. In addition, Pettigrew argues that the preferences of REU-maximizers can indeed be captured by EU theory, and Briggs argues that REU-maximizers lose a valuable tool for simplifying their decision problems. I hold that their arguments do not succeed and that my original (...) claims still stand. However, their arguments do highlight some costs of REU theory. (shrink)

Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In _Narrating Evil_, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role (...) in helping societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible. In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined. The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. _Narrating Evil_ describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world. (shrink)

This essay argues that when setting climate policy, we should place more weight on worse possible consequences of a policy, while still placing some weight on better possible consequences. The argument proceeds by elucidating the range of attitudes people can take towards risk, how we must make choices for people when we don’t know their risk-attitudes, and the situation we are in with respect to climate policy and the consequences for future people. The result is an alternative to the Precautionary (...) Principle, an alternative that gives similar policy recommendations in many cases but is also sensitive to the costs of precautions. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether gathering additional evidence is always rationally required, both from the point of view of instrumental rationality and of epistemic rationality. It is shown that in certain situations, it is not instrumentally rational to look for more evidence before making a decision. These are situations in which the risk of “misleading” evidence – a concept that has both instrumental and epistemic senses – is not offset by the gains from the possibility of non-misleading evidence. (...) These situations also undermine a particular argument for the claim that it is epistemically rational to look for more evidence, though it is argued that the relationship between instrumental and epistemic rationality makes such arguments flawed to begin with. Furthermore, these situations show us that our epistemic and our practical goals sometimes point us in different directions, not merely because of our limited resources or because our desires are sometimes best served by being in particular epistemic states, but because of the nature of rational action. (shrink)

Individual differences in convergent and divergent thinking may uniquely explain variation in analogical reasoning ability. Across two studies we investigated the relative influences of divergent and convergent thinking as predictors of verbal analogy performance. Performance on both convergent thinking and divergent thinking uniquely predicted performance on both analogy selection and analogical generation tasks. Moreover, convergent and divergent thinking were predictive above and beyond creative behaviours in Study 1 and a composite measure of crystallised intelligence in Study 2. Verbal analogies in (...) Study 2 also varied in semantic distance, with results demonstrating divergent thinking as a stronger predictor of analogy generation for semantically far than for semantically near analogies. Results thus further illuminate the link between analogical reasoning and creative cognition by demonstrating convergent and di.. (shrink)

Certain ethical views hold that we should pay more attention, even exclusive attention, to the worst-case scenario. Prominent examples include Rawls's Difference Principle and the Precautionary Principle. These views can be anchored in formal principles of decision theory, in two different ways. On the one hand, they can rely on ambiguity-aversion: the idea that we cannot assign sharp probabilities to various scenarios, and that if we cannot assign sharp probabilities, we should decide pessimistically, as if the probabilities are unfavorable. On (...) the other hand, they can rely on risk-avoidance: the idea that we should pay more attention to worse scenarios, even when we can assign sharp probabilities. I distinguish these two foundations. I also show how they can be modified to support versions of these views that pay more but not exclusive attention to worst-case scenarios. Finally, I argue that risk-avoidance provides a superior foundation than ambiguity-aversion for the Difference Principle and the Precautionary Principle; in particular, it correctly identifies which ethical facts should matter to those who champion these principles. (shrink)

Does postulating skeptical theism undermine the claim that evil strongly confirms atheism over theism? According to Perrine and Wykstra, it does undermine the claim, because evil is no more likely on atheism than on skeptical theism. According to Draper, it does not undermine the claim, because evil is much more likely on atheism than on theism in general. I show that the probability facts alone do not resolve their disagreement, which ultimately rests on which updating procedure – conditionalizing or updating (...) on a conditional – fits both the evidence and how we ought to take that evidence into account. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 291-300, September 2022.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 291-300, September 2022.

This paper examines medical scientists’ accounts of their rediscoveries and reassessments of old materials. It looks at how historical patient files and brain samples of the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease became reused as scientific objects of inquiry in the 1990s, when a genetic neuropathologist from Munich and a psychiatrist from Frankfurt lead searches for left-overs of Alzheimer’s ‘founder cases’ from the 1900s. How and why did these researchers use historical methods, materials and narratives, and why did the biomedical community (...) cherish their findings as valuable scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease? The paper approaches these questions by analysing how researchers conceptualised ‘history’ while backtracking and reassessing clinical and histological materials from the past. It elucidates six ways of conceptualising history as a biomedical matter: scientific assessments of the past, i.e. natural scientific understandings of ‘historical facts’; history in biomedicine, e.g. uses of old histological collections in present day brain banks; provenance research, e.g. applying historical methods to ensure the authenticity of brain samples; technical biomedical history, e.g. reproducing original staining techniques to identify how old histological slides were made; founding traditions, i.e. references to historical objects and persons within founding stories of scientific communities; and priority debates, e.g. evaluating the role particular persons played in the discovery of a disease such as Alzheimer’s. Against this background, the paper concludes with how the various ways of using and understanding ‘history’ were put forward to re-present historic cases as ‘proto-types’ for studying Alzheimer’s disease in the present. (shrink)

Many accounts of faith hold that faith is deference to an authority about what to believe or what to do. I show that this kind of faith fits into a more general account of faith, the risky-commitment account. I further argue that it can be rational to defer to an authority even when the authority’s pronouncement goes against one’s own reasoning. Indeed, such deference is rational in typical cases in which individuals treat others as authorities.

I reply to two commentaries—one by Johanna Thoma and Jonathan Weisberg and one by James M. Joyce—concerning how risk-weighted expected utility theory handles the Allais preferences and Dutch books.

This paper examines medical scientists’ accounts of their rediscoveries and reassessments of old materials. It looks at how historical patient files and brain samples of the first cases of Alzheimer’s disease became reused as scientific objects of inquiry in the 1990s, when a genetic neuropathologist from Munich and a psychiatrist from Frankfurt lead searches for left-overs of Alzheimer’s ‘founder cases’ from the 1900s. How and why did these researchers use historical methods, materials and narratives, and why did the biomedical community (...) cherish their findings as valuable scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease? The paper approaches these questions by analysing how researchers conceptualised ‘history’ while backtracking and reassessing clinical and histological materials from the past. It elucidates six ways of conceptualising history as a biomedical matter: (1) scientific assessments of the past, i.e. natural scientific understandings of ‘historical facts’; (2) history in biomedicine, e.g. uses of old histological collections in present day brain banks; (3) provenance research, e.g. applying historical methods to ensure the authenticity of brain samples; (4) technical biomedical history, e.g. reproducing original staining techniques to identify how old histological slides were made; (5) founding traditions, i.e. references to historical objects and persons within founding stories of scientific communities; and (6) priority debates, e.g. evaluating the role particular persons played in the discovery of a disease such as Alzheimer’s. Against this background, the paper concludes with how the various ways of using and understanding ‘history’ were put forward to re-present historic cases as ‘proto-types’ for studying Alzheimer’s disease in the present. (shrink)

Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the political while revitalizing the very terms in which they are defined, María Pía Lara explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion. For Lara, secularization means three things: (...) the translation of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed and better enables societies (and individual political actors) to articulate meaning through action--that is, through the emergence of new concepts. These actions, Lara proves, radically transform our understanding of politics and the role of political agents and are further enhanced by challenging the structural dependence of politics on religious phenomena. (shrink)

Existing accounts of the early history of Alzheimer’s disease have focused on Alois Alzheimer’s (1864–1915) publications of two ‘peculiar cases’ of middle-aged patients who showed symptoms associated with senile dementia, and Emil Kraepelin’s (1856–1926) discussion of these and a few other cases under the newly introduced name of ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ in his Textbook of Psychiatry. This article questions the underpinnings of these accounts that rely mainly on publications and describe ‘presenility’ as a defining characteristic of the disease. Drawing on archival (...) research in the Munich psychiatric clinic, in which Alzheimer and Kraepelin practised, this article looks at the use of the category as a diagnostic label in practice. It argues that the first cases only got their exemplary status as key referents of Alzheimer’s disease in later readings of the original publications. In the 1900s, the published cases rather functioned as material to think about the limits of the category of senile dementia. The examination of paper technologies in the Munich psychiatric clinic reveals that the use of the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was not limited to patients of a certain age and did not exclude ‘senile’ cases. Moreover, the archival records reflect that many diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease were noted in the medical records as suspicions rather than conclusions. Against this background, the article argues that in theory and practice, Alzheimer’s disease was not treated as a well-defined disease entity in the Munich clinic, but as an exploratory category for the clinical and histopathological investigation of varieties of organic brain diseases. (shrink)

My book Risk and Rationality argues for a new alternative to the orthodox theory of rational decision-making. This alternative, risk-weighted expected utility maximization, holds that there are three important components involved in rational decision-making: utilities, probabilities, and risk-attitudes. This essay explains the basic outline of the theory and precisely how it differs from the orthodox theory. It also summarizes the main threads of argument in the book.

The orthodox theory of instrumental rationality, expected utility (EU) theory, severely restricts the way in which risk-considerations can figure into a rational individual's preferences. It is argued here that this is because EU theory neglects an important component of instrumental rationality. This paper presents a more general theory of decision-making, risk-weighted expected utility (REU) theory, of which expected utility maximization is a special case. According to REU theory, the weight that each outcome gets in decision-making is not the subjective probability (...) of that outcome; rather, the weight each outcome gets depends on both its subjective probability and its position in the gamble. Furthermore, the individual's utility function, her subjective probability function, and a function that measures her attitude towards risk can be separately derived from her preferences via a Representation Theorem. This theorem illuminates the role that each of these entities plays in preferences, and shows how REU theory explicates the components of instrumental rationality. (shrink)

In secondary literature, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is most commonly discussed within the context of Kant’s epistemology and the transcendental deduction, which was swiftly identified by the generation of young Kantians as a skeptical problem, i.e., the need to demonstrate that our a priori conditions of knowledge indeed determine their object. In this paper I argue that the central concern that motivates Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is better understood within the context of the question of unity of theoretical and practical reason with which Schelling (...) was familiar from his study of Kant’s third Critique. But unlike Kant, for whom the occurrences of beauty and organisms in the world exhibit a contingent harmony of nature with the demands of our rationality, Schelling demands a necessary correspondence between reason and nature. Schelling anchors the necessary correspondence between the self and nature in the claim that nature is not a dead object of self-consciousness, but that which is at the same time a subject and its own object. He takes the latter to be the essential characteristic of 'life'. Nature must not be conceived as a dead mechanism, but as a living organization and as an “analogue of reason” because to be one’s own subject and object defines both the spontaneity of self-consciousness and the spontaneity of self-determination. Thus, nature that is no longer represented mechanically, but as an “analogue of reason,” is nature that is necessarily amenable with both the minimal (i.e., cognitive) and final ends of our rationality (i.e., freedom). (shrink)