The majority of Dutch physicians feel pressure when dealing with a request for euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. This study aimed to explore the content of this pressure as experienced by general practitioners. We conducted semistructured in-depth interviews with 15 Dutch GPs, focusing on actual cases. The interviews were transcribed and analysed with use of the framework method. Six categories of pressure GPs experienced in dealing with EAS requests were revealed: emotional blackmail, control and direction by others, doubts about fulfilling the (...) criteria, counterpressure by patient’s relatives, time pressure around referred patients and organisational pressure. We conclude that the pressure can be attributable to the patient–physician relationship and/or the relationship between the physician and the patient’s relative, the inherent complexity of the decision itself and the circumstances under which the decision has to be made. To prevent physicians to cross their personal boundaries in dealing with EAS request all these different sources of pressure will have to be taken into account. (shrink)

This article reviews the Dutch societal debate on euthanasia/assisted suicide in dementia cases, specifically Alzheimer's disease. It discusses the ethical and practical dilemmas created by euthanasia requests in advance directives and the related inconsistencies in the Dutch legal regulations regarding euthanasia/assisted suicide. After an initial focus on euthanasia in advanced dementia, the actual debate concentrates on making euthanasia/assisted suicide possible in the very early stages of dementia. A review of the few known cases of assisted suicide of people with so-called (...) early dementia raises the question why requests for euthanasia/assisted suicide from patients in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease are virtually non-existent. In response to this question two explanations are offered. It is concluded that, in addition to a moral discussion on the limits of anticipatory choices, there is an urgent need to develop research into the patient's perspective with regard to medical treatment and care-giving in dementia, including end-of-life care. (shrink)

This article reviews the Dutch societal debate on euthanasia/assisted suicide in dementia cases, specifically Alzheimer's disease. It discusses the ethical and practical dilemmas created by euthanasia requests in advance directives and the related inconsistencies in the Dutch legal regulations regarding euthanasia/assisted suicide. After an initial focus on euthanasia in advanced dementia, the actual debate concentrates on making euthanasia/assisted suicide possible in the very early stages of dementia. A review of the few known cases of assisted suicide of people with so-called (...) early dementia raises the question why requests for euthanasia/assisted suicide from patients in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease are virtually non-existent. In response to this question two explanations are offered. It is concluded that, in addition to a moral discussion on the limits of anticipatory choices, there is an urgent need to develop research into the patient's perspective with regard to medical treatment and care-giving in dementia, including end-of-life care. (shrink)

Resumo Não há dúvida que tanto Kant como Hegel viram os seus respectivos trabalhos, como contribuições para aquilo que consideravam ser a “metafísica”. No entanto, a autora argumenta, que isto só deve ser compreendido, tendo presente, as concepções de metafísica de cada um dos autores. A autora, começando pela distinção implícita entre metafísica geral e metafísica especial na Crítica da Razão Pura, argumenta que Kant, Fichte, Schelling e Hegel comprometeram-se com uma investigação que, até essa altura, era do domínio da (...) metafísica geral. A autora, concentrando-se na noção de sistema de razão pura, tal como aludido na Crítica da Razão Pura, mostra, que os sucessores de Kant, interpretaram erroneamente a distinção kantiana entre crítica e sistema, o que permitiu elaborarem um sistema completo de razão pura, contrário àquilo que era intenção de Kant. Palavras-chave : Fichte, Hegel, idealismo alemão, Kant, metafísica, sistemaThere is no doubt that both Kant and Hegel saw their work as contributions to what they considered metaphysics proper. Yet what they meant by this, I argue, can only be understood by taking into account their own conception of metaphysics. Starting from Kant’s implicit distinction between general metaphysics and special metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason, I argue that Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel engaged in the investigation that used to be carried out in general metaphysics. Focusing on the notion of a system of pure reason intimated in the Critique of Pure Reason, I show, moreover, that Kant’s successors, while misinterpreting the Kantian distinction between critique and system, elaborated a method that made it possible to produce a complete system of pure reason, albeit one that differed from the system Kant had in mind. Keywords : Fichte, german idealism, Hegel, Kant, metaphysics, system. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the conceptual problems arising when using network analysis in person- centered care (PCC) in psychiatry. Personalized network models are potentially helpful tools for PCC, but we argue that using them in psychiatric practice raises boundary problems, i.e., problems in demarcating what should and should not be included in the model, which may limit their ability to provide clinically-relevant knowledge. Models can have explanatory and representational boundaries, among others. We argue that we can make more explicit (...) what kind of questions personalized network models can address in PCC, given their representational and explanatory boundaries, using perspectival reasoning. (shrink)

Syltern et al. (2022) propose a new approach to decision-making at the limit of viability: by default, intensive care will be initiated for every infant born in “the gray zone” of viability. This w...

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought. One bears the belief-relation to a thought-content T just (...) in case one (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a certain sentence S of one’s language of thought that satisfies what T encodes, which in turn requires that S’s non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantical relations to items specified by T. Since these items may include other senses as well as ordinary objects, beliefs of arbitrary complexity are automatically accommodated. Within the framework of the formal ontology, a context-dependent compositional semantics is then provided for a fragment of regimented English capable of formulating ascriptions of belief—a semantics that treats substitutional opacity as a genuine semantic datum. Finally, the resulting picture of belief and its attribution is defended by showing how it solves standard puzzles, avoids objections to rival accounts, and satisfies certain adequacy conditions not fulfilled by traditional theories. Along the way, clarification and defense is offered for the ingredient conception of object-dependent senses, and it is shown how adoption of the language of thought hypothesis permits Bertrand Russell’s obscure doctrine of logical forms to be understood in a way that not only vindicates his Multiple Relation theory of de re belief but also reveals the connection between these logical forms and thought-contents. (shrink)

This paper articulates a formal theory of belief incorporating three key theses: (1) belief is a dyadic relation between an agent and a property; (2) this property is not the belief's truth condition (i.e., the intuitively self-ascribed property which the agent must exemplify for the belief to be true) but is instead a certain abstract property (a "thought-content") which contains a way of thinking of that truth condition; (3) for an agent a to have a belief "about" such-and-such items it (...) is necessary that a possesses a language of thought, $M_{a}$ , and that a (is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms a sentence of $M_{a}$ in which there are terms that denote those objects. Employing an extended version of E. Zalta's system ILAO, the proffered theory locates thought-contents within a typed hierarchy of "senses" and their "modes of presentation", the provisional definitions of which (suppressing complications added later to accommodate the contents of beliefs about beliefs) are as follows. A mode of presentation of e is a ternary relation of the sort [λxyz z is a name in $M_{y}$ that denotes x, and $D_{e}yz$ ] in which $D_{e}$ is an e-determiner - a relation between agents and their mental expressions imposing a syntactico-semantic condition sufficient for such an expression to denote e therein. A sense of an entity e is an abstract property that "contains" a mode of presentation $R_{e}$ of e by dint of encoding its property-reduct [λx(∃y)(∃z) $R_{e}xyz$ ]. In particular, a thought-content is a sense T of an ordinary first-order property P containing a mode of presentation whose P-determiner $D_{P}$ is such that, for any y and z, $D_{P}yz$ entails that z is a λ-abstract [λv S] of $M_{y}$ in which S is a sentence whose non-logical parts stand in appropriate semantic relations to the constituents of T's (some of which may themselves be senses). Where $I_{a}$ is agent a's dedicated self-demonstrative and |T| is the mode of presentation contained in a thought-content T, the belief relation itself is then characterized as obtaining between a and T iff a( is disposed as one who) inwardly affirms the substitution instance $S(I_{a}/v)$ of a sentence S in $M_{a}$ such that |T|(P, a, [λv S]). The aforementioned "constituents" and "appropriate semantic relations" are formally characterized so as to permit a system of canonical descriptions for thought-contents of arbitrary complexity. These canonical descriptions are then employed to chart the nature and interrelations of belief de re, de dicto and de se and to identify the source of opacity in belief ascription. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungWährend eines Abendessens in einem amerikanischen Restaurant wurde eine Gruppe von christlichen Ethikern, von denen einige Lutheraner waren, von einer jungen Frau angesprochen. Als sie hörte, welchen Beruf die Gruppe ausübte, antwortete sie: »Ich bin eine Lutheranerin – daher habe ich zu christlicher Ethik nichts zu sagen.« Dieser Artikel versucht herauszufinden, in welcher Hinsicht die Frau Recht gehabt haben könnte. Ich argumentiere dafür, dass zu dem Bereich des »Ethischen« zumindest drei Charakteristika gehören: Universalität, Normativität, und ein Verweis auf einen Begriff (...) des höchsten Gutes . Anschließend wird dafür argumentiert, dass eine der Konsequenzen aus Luthers Verweis auf Gott als höchstes Gut darin besteht, dass der sogenannte politische Gebrauch des Gesetzes zugleich ausgeprägt ethisch und christlich ist. Sein christliches Element besteht jedoch weniger in der Bestimmung derjenigen Werte, deren Realisierung angestrebt werden sollen, also im Feld der normativen Ethik, da das Gesetz in seiner politischen Interpretation allen Menschen, Gläubigen und Nicht-Gläubigen gleichermaßen, bekannt ist und auf alle angewandet werden kann. Der Beitrag des Christentums für die Ethik liegt vielmehr auf zwei anderen Ebenen: zum einen auf einer metaethischen Ebene ; und zum zweiten, aufgrund von Luthers Betonung der menschlichen Freiheit als Konsequenz der Versöhnung, auf der Ebene der Realisation des Guten. Abschließend wird argumentiert, dass Luthers theologischer Gebrauch des Gesetzes ebenso wie seine Lehre von der menschlichen Freiheit kaum als Ethik begriffen werden können, da die Charakteristika der Universalität und der Normativität fehlen. Einige mögen dies als eine Schwäche ansehen, aber die Kritik könnte auch in die entgegengesetzte Richtung gewendet werden: denn für Luther gehört mehr zum guten Leben als Normativität und Universalität allein.SummaryWhile having dinner in an American restaurant, a group of Christian ethicists, some of whom were Lutherans, were addressed by a woman. Upon hearing the profession of the group, she replied, “Well, I'm a Lutheran, so I don't know anything about Christian Ethics.” This article intends to explore in what sense the woman might have been correct. In order to do this, I argue that the realm of “the ethical” comprises at least three characteristics: universalisability, prescriptivity, and a reference to a conception of the highest good . After this, it is argued that, as a consequence of Luther's reference to God as the highest good, the so-called political use of the law can be seen as strongly ethical and Christian at the same time. The Christian element lies, however, not so much in the designation of what values ought to be pursued, i. e., in the field of normative ethics, since the law in its political interpretation may be known by, and is applicable, to all people, believers and nonbelievers alike. Rather, the contribution of Christianity to ethics lies on two other levels of ethics: first, on the level of metaethics ; and, second, because of Luther's stress on human freedom as a consequence of salvation, on the level of the realisation of the good. Finally, it is argued that Luther's theological use of the law as well as his doctrine of human freedom can hardly be conceived as ethics, due to the absence of the characteristics of universalisability and prescriptivity. By some, this may be considered as a flaw, but the criticism might also go in the other direction: to Luther, there is more to the good life than prescriptivity and universalisability alone. (shrink)

O escopo central do artigo converge na análise e problematização das relações entre colonialismo e masculinidade na produção literário-intelectual do romancista H. Rider Haggard, com destaque para seu romance Marie. A narrativa literária cinge elementos da ficção e realidade ao narrar eventos do passado sul-africano, em especial o Great Trek, período de migrações e deslocamentos de colonos bôeres na década de 1830. No cerne de um contexto imaginado com as marcas da violência e do martírio, Haggard retrata a formação de (...) seu protagonista, o caçador Allan Quatermain, de modo a promover figurações de virilidade e heroísmo que atuam como respostas ao que muitos de seus contemporâneos sentem e ressentem como crises da masculinidade no fin-de-siècle.The South African Question: Literature, Colonialism and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard’s Marie The central scope of the article converges in the analysis and problematization of relations between colonialism and masculinity in H. Rider Haggard’s literary and intellectual production, with emphasis in his romance Marie. The literary narrative deals with elements of fiction and reality by narrating events from South African past, especially the Great Trek, a period of migrations and displacements of Boer colonists during the 1830s. At the heart of a context imagined with violence and martyrdom, Haggard depicts the formation of his protagonist, the hunter Allan Quatermain, in order to promote virility and heroism, which act as answers to what many of his contemporaries feel and resent as crises of masculinity in the fin-de-siècle. Resumen La cuestión sudafricana: literatura, colonialismo y masculinidades en Marie, de H. Rider Haggard La meta central del artículo converge en la análisis y problematización de las relaciones entre colonialismo y masculinidad en la producción literario-intelectual del novelista H. Rider Haggard, con destaque para su romance Marie. La narrativa literaria establece una relación entre elementos de ficción y realidad al narrar eventos del pasado sudafricano, en especial el Great Trek, período de migraciones y desplazamientos de colonos bôeres en la década de 1830. En el corazón de un contexto imaginado con las marcas de la violencia y el el martirio, Haggard retrata la formación de su protagonista, el cazador Allan Quatermain, para promover imágenes de virilidad y heroísmo que actúan como respuestas a lo que muchos de sus contemporáneos sienten y resienten como crisis de la masculinidad en el fin-de-siècle. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays in ethics and the philosophy of religion contributed by former students and colleagues of Professor W. Harry Jellema to honor his 70th birthday and his retirement from Calvin College. The essays are quite diverse but uniformly worthwhile. They are nicely balanced between such traditional approaches as in Veatch's "For a Renewal of an Old Departure in Ethics" and Parker's "Traditional Reason and Modern Reason," contemporary analytic approaches as in Plantinga's "Necessary Being" and Brouwer's "A (...) Restricted Motive Theory of Ethics," and historical studies such as Stob's "The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards" and De Boer's "First Steps in Mysticism." The quality and seriousness of the collection as a whole appropriately honors a man who has been one of the most devoted and effective teachers in the American philosophic community for the past fifty years.—W. G. E. (shrink)

This excellent work defends the radical nature of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology from those who want to turn it into a kind of realism. The influence of such "revisionists" "is so strong at present that the historical Husserl threatens to vanish from sight completely". Husserl, de Boer insists, eventually defined consciousness as absolute being which constitutes the world within itself. "Husserl’s entire development becomes incomprehensible when this idealism is denied". According to de Boer, Franz Brentano convinced the young Husserl (...) that the aim of philosophy was to find a way of anchoring norms in the face of relativism and historicism. Brentano sought to use scientific methodology to found a descriptive psychology which could in turn form the basis for normative sciences. Like Brentano, Husserl was taken with the idea of developing a "rigorous science" of consciousness which would help provide rational a priori values in the face of the irrational world-views so prevalent in the first part of the century. Husserl’s turn away from his early empiricism and naturalism and his eventual adoption of transcendental idealism follows from his attempt to solve three problems in Brentano’s work: 1) the relation between things in themselves and the immanent intentional object; 2) the method for founding a priori truths; 3) the naturalistic attitude inherent in Brentano’s view that positivistic-genetic psychology and phenomenological psychology have equal value in the study of consciousness. Husserl solved the second problem with the notion of the intuition of essences. He solved the first and third problems with the discovery of transcendental idealism in 1908. De Boer maintains that the denial of the thing in itself, which is still presupposed in the naturalistic standpoint operating in Logische Untersuchungen, "is the most important step of all in Husserl’s development". The notion of the thing in itself is common to the naturalistic-dogmatic belief that on the one hand there is a realm of objects independent of consciousness and that on the other hand there is consciousness which has some experience of those objects. In LU, Husserl simply suspended the question of the relation of the thing in itself to consciousness because he still regarded the latter as a kind of island within the "real" world, to which natural science alone has direct access. Despite the fact that LU rejected the naturalizing of ideas, LU continued to regard consciousness in a naturalistic way. Only the "Copernican revolution" of transcendental idealism enabled Husserl to see that the foundation of all being is absolute mind or consciousness. Because consciousness "constitutes" reality in a creative and productive sense, there is no point in speaking of a "thing in itself." Husserl’s transcendental reduction does not deny "reality," but merely rejects the naturalistic tendency to absolutize it. (shrink)

Science is highly dependent on the technologies needed to observe scientific objects. In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of instruments in scientific practice, focusing on the cognitive neurosciences. He argues for an understanding of scientific instruments as mediating technology.

English summary: In this volume, Jan-Hendryk de Boer investigates the upheaval in the world of scholars in the Roman-German Empire at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. He shows how during this time hegemonic humanism developed as a new discursive formation. This re-organised the humanistic movement as well as its relationship to scholasticism and ultimately the place of humanism in the scholarly world as a whole. After humanistic ideas were initially taken on board as (...) being relatively unproblematic, the representatives of hegemonic humanism, such as poets, grammarians and philologists, claimed that they alone were in possession of useful skills and relevant knowledge. In a cultural transfer of the corresponding developments in Italy, a scholastic-humanist antagonism was generated that is still reflected in today's research. German description: Jan-Hendryk de Boer untersucht in dieser Studie den Umbruch in der Gelehrtenwelt des romisch-deutschen Reichs am Ende des 15. und zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts. Er zeigt, wie sich in diesem Zeitraum der hegemoniale Humanismus als eine neue diskursive Formation ausbildete. Diese organisierte die humanistische Bewegung wie auch deren Verhaltnis zur Scholastik und schliesslich den Ort des Humanismus in der Gelehrtenwelt insgesamt um. Nachdem humanistische Ideen zunachst relativ problemlos Aufnahme gefunden hatten, beanspruchten die Vertreter des hegemonialen Humanismus als Dichter, Grammatiker und Philologen fur sich allein, uber nutzliche Fertigkeiten und relevantes Wissen zu verfugen. In einem Kulturtransfer der entsprechenden italienischen Entwicklungen wurde so ein scholastisch-humanistischer Antagonismus erzeugt, der bis in die heutige Forschung nachwirkt. (shrink)

Aristotle's highly influential work on the soul, entitled De anima, formed part of the core curriculum of medieval universities and was discussed intensively. It covers a range of topics in philosophical psychology, such as the relationship between mind and body and the nature of abstract thought. However, there is a key difference in scope between the so-called "science of the soul," based on Aristotle, and modern philosophical psychology. This book starts from a basic premise accepted by all medieval commentators, namely (...) that the science of the soul studies not just human beings but all living beings. As such, its methodology and approach must also apply to plants and animals. The Science of the Soul discusses how philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to Pierre d'Ailly dealt with the difficult task of giving a unified account of life and traces the various stages in the transformation of the science of the soul between 1260 and 1360. The emerging picture is that of a gradual disruption of the unified approach to the soul, which will ultimately lead to the emergence of psychology as a separate discipline. (shrink)

"Recent years have seen a growing interest among scholars of 18th-century German philosophy in the period between Wolff and Kant. This book challenges traditional interpretations of this period that focus largely on post-Leibnizian rationalism and, accordingly, on a depreciation of the contribution of the senses to knowledge about the world and the self. It addresses the divergent ways in which eighteenth-century German philosophers reconceived the notion and role of experience in their efforts to identify, defend, and contest the contribution of (...) foundational a priori principles and empirical data to the various branches of metaphysics, the natural sciences, and emerging disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. The chapters are organized according to the four major schools that defined the various phases of German Enlightenment philosophy: Wolff and Wolffianism, Eclecticism and Populärphilosophie, the Berlin Academy, and Kant. Each chapter is devoted to one or more philosophers, several of whom are seriously under investigated or even unknown outside small circles of specialists. By framing the period in terms of the notion of experience, this book presents a more nuanced understanding of the German reception of British and French ideas and theories, dismisses the prevailing view that German philosophy was largely isolated from European debates, introduces a number of relatively unknown, but highly relevant philosophers and developments to non-specialized scholars, and contributes to a better understanding of the richness and complexity of the German Enlightenment"--. (shrink)

In this article I aim to clarify the nature of Kant’s transformation of rationalist metaphysics into a science by focusing on his conception of transcendental reflection. The aim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued, consists primarily in liberating the productive strand of former general metaphysics – its reflection on the a priori elements of all knowledge – from the uncritical application of these elements to all things (within general metaphysics itself) and to things that can only be (...) thought (in special metaphysics). After considering Kant’s conception of metaphysics and his various uses of the term ‘transcendental’ I closely examine his account of logical and transcendental reflection in the section entitled ‘On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’. Whereas commentators generally attribute the activity called transcendental reflection to Kant alone, I contend, first, that Kant regarded philosophy as such to rely on a mode of transcendental reflection and, second, that the critical mode of transcendental reflection enacted in the Critique itself yields insight into the reason why our a priori knowledge is limited to the realm of possible objects. This is illustrated by outlining the difference between Kant’s and Leibniz’ employment of the concepts of reflection. (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. While ‘being there for you’, partners take care (...) of each other in mutually dependent ways. While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)

Does philosophical critique have a future? What are its possibilities, limits, and presuppositions? Bringing together outstanding scholars from various traditions, this collection of essays is the first to examine the forms of critique that have shaped modern and contemporary continental thought. Through critical analyses of key texts by, among others, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, and Rancière, it traces the way critique has time and again geared itself towards new cultural, social, and political problems, shedding those of its (...) assumptions no longer deemed tenable. It is our hope that the many voices of critique that arise from the present volume will produce effects – new doubts, new insights, new challenges, or new resources – that none could have achieved on their own. (shrink)

This paper offers a two dimensional variation of Standard Deontic Logic SDL, which we call 2SDL. Using 2SDL we can show that we can overcome many of the difficulties that SDL has in representing linguistic sets of Contrary-to-Duties (known as paradoxes) including the Chisholm, Ross, Good Samaritan and Forrester paradoxes. We note that many dimensional logics have been around since 1947, and so 2SDL could have been presented already in the 1970s. Better late than never! As a detailed case study (...) illustrating the power of 2SDL, we examine the system DL of Deontic Logic of Andrew Jones and Ingmar Pörn offered in 1985 to solve the Chisholm paradox of Contrary to Duties. The critical examination is done using logics and methods available in 1985 and solutions are proposed using what was available in 1985. (shrink)

This paper offers a two dimensional variation of Standard Deontic Logic SDL, which we call 2SDL. Using 2SDL we can show that we can overcome many of the difficulties that SDL has in representing linguistic sets of Contrary-to-Duties (known as paradoxes) including the Chisholm, Ross, Good Samaritan and Forrester paradoxes. We note that many dimensional logics have been around since 1947, and so 2SDL could have been presented already in the 1970s. Better late than never! As a detailed case study (...) illustrating the power of 2SDL, we examine the system DL of Deontic Logic of Andrew Jones and Ingmar Pörn offered in 1985 to solve the Chisholm paradox of Contrary to Duties. The critical examination is done using logics and methods available in 1985 and solutions are proposed using what was available in 1985. (shrink)

The problem of cooperation for rational actors comprises two sub problems: the problem of the intentional object (under what description does each actor perceive the situation?) and the problem of common knowledge for finite minds (how much belief iteration is required?). I will argue that subdoxastic signalling can solve the problem of the intentional object as long as this is confined to a simple coordination problem. In a more complex environment like an assurance game signals may become unreliable. Mutual beliefs (...) can then bolster the earlier attained equilibrium. I will first address these two problems by means of an example, in order to draw some more general lessons about combining evolutionary theory and rationality later on. (shrink)