Phenomenology has been adapted for use in qualitative health research, where it’s often used as a method for conducting interviews and analyzing interview data. But how can phenomenologists study subjects who cannot accurately reflect upon or report their own experiences, for instance, because of a psychiatric or neurological disorder? For conditions like these, qualitative researchers may gain more insight by conducting observational studies in lieu of, or in conjunction with, interviews. In this article, we introduce a phenomenological approach to conducting (...) this kind of observational research. The approach relies on conceptual grounding to focus a study on specific aspects of the participants’ experiences. Moreover, the approach maintains the openness to novel discoveries that qualitative research requires while also providing a structured framework for data collection and analysis. To illustrate its practical application, we use examples of hemispatial neglect—a neurologic disorder in which patients characteristically lack awareness of their own illness and bodily capacities. However, the approach that we describe can be applied more broadly to the study of complex illness experiences and other experiential alterations. (shrink)

These new studies of Wittgenstein's Tractatus represent a significant step beyond recent polemical debate.

We argue that the trend toward providing users with feasible and actionable explanations of AI decisions—known as recourse explanations—comes with ethical downsides. Specifically, we argue that recourse explanations face several conceptual pitfalls and can lead to problematic explanation hacking, which undermines their ethical status. As an alternative, we advocate that explanations of AI decisions should aim at understanding.

Descriptive accounts of the nature of explanation in neuroscience and the global goals of such explanation have recently proliferated in the philosophy of neuroscience and with them new understandings of the experimental practices of neuroscientists have emerged. In this paper, I consider two models of such practices; one that takes them to be reductive; another that takes them to be integrative. I investigate those areas of the neuroscience of learning and memory from which the examples used to substantiate these models (...) are culled, and argue that the multiplicity of experimental protocols used in these research areas presents specific challenges for both models. In my view, these challenges have been overlooked largely because philosophers have hitherto failed to pay sufficient attention to fundamental features of experimental practice. I demonstrate that when we do pay attention to such features, evidence for reduction and integrative unity in neuroscience is simply not borne out. I end by suggesting some new directions for the philosophy of neuroscience that pertain to taking a closer look at the nature of neuroscientific experiments. (shrink)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was the most outstanding philosopher that emerged from the tumultuous period of change in Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution. His ideas concerning change exerted a powerful influence on generations of thinkers and activists, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Whilst there are many books and articles on Hegel there are scant few that are accessible to those unfamiliar with philosophy. This book provides an introduction to Hegel for those who are unfamiliar with him. (...) It examines three key areas of his philosophy--his understanding of alientation, his philosophy of history and the concept of dialectics - and the application and development of his method and analysis by Marx and Engels."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This book engages Christian love theologies, feminist economics, and political theory to identify elements of a Christian ethic of dependent care relations.

_Ways of Being in the World_ is an anthology of the Indigenous philosophical thought of communities across Turtle Island, offering readings on a variety of topics spanning many times and geographic locations. It was created especially to meet the needs of instructors who want to add Indigenous philosophy to their courses but are unsure where to begin—as well as for students, Indigenous or otherwise, who wish to broaden their horizons with materials not found in the typical philosophy course. This collection (...) is an invitation to embark on a relationship with Indigenous peoples through the introduction of their unique philosophies. (shrink)

In this chapter I investigate the kinds of changes that psychiatric kinds undergo when they become explanatory targets of areas of sciences that are not “mature” and are in the early stages of discovering mechanisms. The two areas of science that are the targets of my analysis are cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology.

Many French-speaking approaches to argumentation are deeply rooted in a linguistic background. Hence, they “naturally” tend to adopt a descriptive stance on argumentation. This is why the issue of “the virtues of argumentation”—and, specifically, the question of what makes an argument virtuous—is not central to them. The argumentative norms issue nevertheless can-not be discarded, as it obviously is crucial to arguers themselves: the latter often behave as if they were invested with some kind of argumentative policing duty when involved in (...) dissensual exchanges. We describe several researches developing a descriptive approach to such ordinary argumentative policing: we claim that the virtues of argumentation may be an issue even for an amoral analyst. We will connect this issue with linguistic remarks on the lexicon of refutation in English and in French. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of an account of explanatory integration that claims that explanations of cognitive capacities by functional analyses and mechanistic explanations can be seamlessly integrated. It is shown that achieving such explanatory integration requires that the terms designating cognitive capacities in the two forms of explanation are stable but that experimental practice in the mind-brain sciences currently is not directed at achieving such stability. A positive proposal for changing experimental practice so as to promote such stability is (...) put forward and its implications for explanatory integration are briefly considered. (shrink)

Chenwei Nie ([22]) argues against a Maherian one-factor approach to explaining delusion. We argue that his objections fail. They are largely based on a mistaken understanding of the approach (as committed to the claim that anomalous experience is sufficient for delusion). Where they are not so based, they instead rest on misinterpretation of recent defences of the position, and an underestimation of the resources available to the one-factor theory.

When the University of Halle-Wittenberg founded the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research into the European Enlightenment in 1993, it was following the destiny of its history as a centre of the Early Enlightenment in Germany which affected the whole of Europe and as one of the moving forces behind the Anthropological Turn. Research foci of the Centre have been and are Enlightenment anthropology, Enlightenment in the reference field of early modem esotericism, university history, philanthropism and the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-W rlitz; (...) more recent emphasis has been on the Early Enlightenment as a field of experimentation and the foundation of cultural models for the Modern Age. The results of this research have been published since Autumn 1995 in the Centres' research publications series entitled University of Halle Series on the European Enlightenment. In addition, there have been relevant works produced outside the Centre. Two to four volumes are published annually (monographs, collected volumes, commentaries on sources). (shrink)

Der Begriff des Lebewesens ist einer der Grundbegriffe unserer Alltagsontologie. Die Biologie ist zwar die Wissenschaft von den lebenden Wesen, nicht aber davon, was ein Lebewesen ist. Diese Frage ist vielmehr metaphysischer Natur. Die Autorin untersucht grundlegend den ontologischen Status von Lebewesen. Sie wendet sich gegen die cartesianische Auffassung von Lebewesen als Körpern und argumentiert statt dessen für eine am aristotelischen Substanzbegriff orientierte Auffassung. Dafür verteidigt sie zunächst die allgemeine Kategorie der Kontinuanten (der "fortdauernden" Gegenstände) gegenüber prozessontologischen Einwänden, um dann (...) zu zeigen, warum Lebewesen keine Dinge sind, sondern eine eigene Kategorie von Kontinuanten bilden. (shrink)

We live in a fragmented environment where spatial information is scattered across rooms, streets, neighborhoods, and cities. To point out the direction to a currently non-visible location or to find novel shortcuts across previously untraveled terrain we need to rely on our spatial memory by piecing the experienced fragments together in our head. This thesis is concerned with the question of how our spatial memory for navigable space (also called survey knowledge) is structured. Two major theoretical approaches are contrasted. Euclidean (...) map approaches assume that spatial locations are represented in a map-like, globally embedded, Euclidean format. Enriched graph approaches propose a partitioned, unit-wise representation of places connected in a network. In four consecutive studies participants learned spatial relations between objects spread across virtual environments and solved survey tasks afterward (e.g., pointing to object locations from memory). The observed effects imply that our memory of navigable space is stored in the format of an Enriched graph, a network of local places connected by directed links, without the necessity of a global calibration. Survey estimates seem to be constructed incrementally along the memorized connectivity and are generally transient. Additionally, a general reference direction can be acquired, a main direction that is propagated across a sub-group of multiple local places (i.e., a region) or that can cover the entire environment. Taken together, our representation of navigable space seems to be best described as an impossible puzzle where the memorized pieces and connections do not necessarily match up on a global scale. (shrink)

This article argues that history played a larger role in the thought of Gottlob Frege than has usually been acknowledged. Frege’s logical writings frequently employed statements about the past as examples that included references to historical persons. Frege also described history as a science and argued that historical propositions could support valid inferences and reliably identify historical persons and events. But Frege’s eternalist theory of reference, designed primarily for formal concepts and objects, struggled to accommodate such propositions. Identifying an objective (...) referent for the subjectivity of historical actors was particularly problematic. The article suggests that Frege’s writings are interesting for the philosopher of history for at least two reasons: first, his work is clarificatory when considering the key features that historical propositions must have to count as objective knowledge, and second, it foreshadowed the issues with historicity that analytical philosophy experienced in the twentieth century. It concludes that the problems Frege raised exposed the need for a new concept of inter-subjectivity to replace his own Platonic foundation for objectivity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article describes the conceptualizations of the term kairos, generally taken to mean “the opportune moment,” by Isocrates. Though Isocrates was instrumental in developing kairos as a “quasi-technical” concept within the rhetorical art, his use of the word was highly nuanced and could be applied in one of three poles of meaning: (1) “circumstances”; (2) notions of the “appropriate”; and (3) “opportunity,” an orientation of elements within a particular moment that either supplies or shuts off a path toward a (...) strategic outcome. Furthermore, over half of Isocrates’s eighty-five uses of the term and its variants have little to do with rhetorical theory per se but are simply incidental modifiers of matters under discussion. Accordingly, though kairos is an important term of art for Isocrates, only nuanced reading of the context can reveal his meaning for any given use of the word. (shrink)

Neuroscience is a laboratory-based science that spans multiple levels of analysis from molecular genetics to behavior. At every level of analysis experiments are designed in order to answer empirical questions about phenomena of interest. Understanding the nature and structure of experimentation in neuroscience is fundamental for assessing the quality of the evidence produced by such experiments and the kinds of claims that are warranted by the data. This article provides a general conceptual framework for thinking about evidence and experimentation in (...) neuroscience with a particular focus on two research areas: cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology. (shrink)

Introduction: contemporary conditions and diagrammatic trajectory -- From joy to the gap: the accessing of the infinite by the finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson) -- The care of the self versus the ethics of desire: two diagrams of the production of subjectivity (and of the subject's relation to truth) (Foucault versus Lacan) -- The aesthetic paradigm: from the folding of the finite-infinite relation to schizoanalytic metamodelisation (to biopolitics) (Guattari) -- The strange temporality of the subject: life in-between the infinite and the (...) finite (Deleuze contra Badiou) -- Desiring-machines, chaoids, probeheads: towards a speculative production of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari) -- Conclusion: composite diagram and relations of adjacency. (shrink)

In this paper, we are interested in the effects of institutional context on public attitudes towards climate policies, where institutions are defined as the conventions, norms and formally sanctioned rules of any given society. Building on a 2014 survey experiment, we conducted thirty qualitative interviews with car-owners in Oslo, Norway, to investigate the ways in which institutional context and political-value orientation affect public attitudes towards emissions policies. One context (presented as a text treatment) highlighted individual rationality, emphasising the ways in (...) which local pollution impacts the individual citizen; the other highlighted social rationality, emphasising the wider significance of carbon emissions and global responsibility for climate change. We analysed the effects of these contexts on attitudes, finding that institutional context influenced individuals' perspectives as well as their attitudes towards climate policies. Groups with different value orientations differed in terms of their evaluations but not their interpretations of these contexts. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that scientific practice in the neurosciences of cognition is not conducive to the discovery of natural kinds of cognitive capacities. The “neurosciences of cognition” include cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology, two research areas that aim to understand how the brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. Some philosophers of neuroscience have claimed that explanatory progress in these research areas ultimately will result in the discovery of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive capacities. Once such mechanistic understanding (...) is achieved, cognitive capacities purportedly will be relegated into natural kind categories that correspond to real divisions in the causal structure of the world. I provide reasons here, however, in support of the claim that the neurosciences of cognition currently are not on a trajectory for discovering natural kinds. As I explain, this has to do with how mechanistic explanations of cognitive capacities are developed. Mechanistic explanations and the kinds they explain are abstract representational byproducts of the conceptual, experimental and integrative practices of neuroscientists. If these practices are not coordinated towards developing mechanistic explanations that mirror the causal structure of the world, then natural kinds of cognitive capacities will not be discovered. I provide reasons to think that such coordination is currently lacking in the neurosciences of cognition and indicate where changes in these practices appropriate to the natural kinds ideal would be required if achieving this ideal is indeed the goal. However, I suggest that an evaluation of current practices in these research areas is suggestive that discovering natural kinds of cognitive capacities is not the goal. (shrink)

Academic barbarism : practice and transmission -- Academic barbarism, universities and inequality -- Academic barbarism and the literature of concealment : Roberto Bolaño and W.G. Sebald -- Aaron Swartz, new technologies and the myth of open access -- Academic barbarism and the Asian university : the case of Hong Kong.

Does philosophy have a timeless essence? Are the writings that have come down to us over the centuries from philosophers of genius mere souvenirs from a bygone era? Or are their thoughts still eminently worth examining with care? Modern Challenges to Past Philosophy argues pondering past philosophy with modern problems in mind is worth the effort, even though earlier works are uninformed by modern science and lack some of tools of modern analysis. The great texts defamiliarize our world and offer (...) solutions to crucial questions often forgotten as we fixate on current philosophical trends. Modern Challenges is no appeal to a return to a golden past but a study designed to show how and why understanding earlier works of some of the most penetrating minds ever to ponder eternally valid questions can contribute to a renewal of our own culture. (shrink)

ArgumentContrary to common portrayals of social Darwinism as a transference of laissez-faire values, the widely read evolutionism of Japan's foremost Darwinist of the early twentieth-century, Oka Asajirō (1868–1944), reflects a statist outlook that regards capitalism as the beginning of the nation's degeneration. The evolutionary theory of orthogenesis that Oka employed in his 1910 essay, “The Future of Humankind,” links him to a pre-Darwinian idealist tradition that depicted the state as an organism that develops through life-cycle stages. For Oka, laissez-faire capitalism (...) marked the moment when the state began to decline toward extinction due to the orthogenetic overdevelopment of hitherto subordinate individual egos. Because conservative bureaucrat-intellectuals had been drawing upon this same organicist-developmental tradition since the 1880s in an attempt to forestall the social ills of industrialism, Oka's call for statist measures, including eugenics, to lessen and delay the atomizing, enervating, and corrupting influence of capitalism articulated the political vision of officialdom. Statist evolutionism, not social Darwinism, might be the term that best describes Oka's approach. (shrink)

This contribution presents an adult education workshop implemented in the field of early childhood education. One of the specificities of education and care practices lies in the competences of the professionals to give a central role to the detailed observation of situations, in order to adjust their modalities of action. How can such observational work be developed and transformed? A participatory research-training approach aims to support the co-construction of an analytical view on observable phenomena in the course of interactions. In (...) a perspective of interactional analysis, it focuses on the modalities that favor the construction of such an analytical posture. (shrink)

Notre Dame Philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have gone deep with that work in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course GOD AND THE GOOD LIFE, in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to tackle such issues as what justifies your beliefs, whether you should practice a religion, and what sacrifices you should make for others--as well as to investigate what (...) Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Murdoch have to say about how to live well. Sullivan and Blaschko teach us how to reason through real-world case studies by doing the timeless work of philosophy like escaping our own caves, learning to doubt everything, asking strong questions, grasping our own purpose, and wrestling with the problem of evil and the existence of God. For at least the past 2500 years philosophers have taught that goal-seeking is an essential part of what it is to be human--and crucially that we could find our own good life by asking better questions. Their virtue ethics approach resonates profoundly in our own moment. Philosophers know that our "good life plan" is one that we as individuals need to be constantly and actively writing. In that work, we can achieve some meaningful control even if the world keeps throwing surprises our way. THE GOOD LIFE is a winning guide to tackling the big questions of being human with the wisdom of the ages. (shrink)

This book highlights the importance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings on psychology and psychological phenomena for the historical development of contemporary psychology. It presents an insightful assessment of the philosopher’s work, particularly his later writings, which draws on key interpretations that have informed our understanding of metapsychological and psychological issues. Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in Psychology engages with both critics and followers of the philosopher’s work to demonstrate its enduring relevance to psychology today. Sullivan presents a novel examination of Wittgenstein’s later writings (...) by providing historical detail about the uptake, understanding and use of Wittgenstein’s remarks and method in psychology and related areas of social science, examining persistent sources of conceptual confusion and showing how to apply his insights in investigations of collectives, social life, emotions, subjectivity, and development. In doing so, he reveals the value for psychologists in adopting a philosophical method of conceptual investigation to work through and become more reflexive about prominent theories, methods, therapies and practices in their respective, multiple fields and thereby create a resource for future theoretical, empirical and applied psychologists. This work will be of particular relevance to students and academics engaged in the history of psychology and to practitioners interested in understanding the continued importance of Wittgenstein’s work within the practices of psychology. (shrink)

During the last decades several tools have been developed to anticipate the future impact of new and emerging technologies. Many of these focus on ‘hard,’ quantifiable impacts, investigating how novel technologies may affect health, environment and safety. Much less attention is paid to what might be called ‘soft’ impacts: the way technology influences, for example, the distribution of social roles and responsibilities, moral norms and values, or identities. Several types of technology assessment and of scenario studies can be used to (...) anticipate such soft impacts. We argue, however, that these methods do not recognize the dynamic character of morality and its interaction with technology. As a result, they miss an important opportunity to broaden the scope of social and political deliberation on new and emerging technologies.In this paper we outline a framework for building scenarios that enhance the techno-moral imagination by anticipating how technology, morality and their interaction might evolve. To show what kind of product might result from this framework, a scenario is presented as an exemplar. This scenario focuses on developments in biomedical nanotechnology and the moral regime of experimenting with human beings. Finally, the merits and limitations of our framework and the resulting type of scenarios are discussed. (shrink)

Starting with Goffman and ending with Foucault -- The spacetimeplace "thing" -- Time goes vertical; space yields in -- What Marx brought in from the cold : reproduction -- Bringing in the body -- Bring in geography.

Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from certain (...) despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket. (shrink)

One might be inclined to assume, given the mouse donning its cover, that the behavior of interest in Nicole Nelson's book Model Behavior (2018) is that of organisms like mice that are widely used as “stand-ins” for investigating the causes of human behavior. Instead, Nelson's ethnographic study focuses on the strategies adopted by a community of rodent behavioral researchers to identify and respond to epistemic challenges they face in using mice as models to understand the causes of disordered human behaviors (...) associated with mental illness. Although Nelson never explicitly describes the knowledge production activities in which her behavioral geneticist research subjects engage as “exemplary”, the question of whether or not these activities constitute “model behavior(s)”—generalizable norms for engaging in scientific research—is one of the many thought-provoking questions raised by her book. As a philosopher of science interested in this question, I take it up here. (shrink)

This comprehensive exploration of Thomas Aquinas's theology of habit takes habits in general as a prism for understanding human action and its influences and provides a unique synthesis of Thomistic virtue theory, modern science of habits, and best practices for eliminating bad habits and living good habits.