BackgroundKnowledge about the psychosocial experiences of sick-listed workers in the first months of sick leave is sparse even though early interventions are recommended. The aim of this study was to explore psychosocial experiences of being on sick leave and thoughts about returning to work after 8–12 weeks of sickness absence.MethodsSixteen individuals at 9–13 weeks of sick leave participated in semi-structured individual interviews. Data was analyzed through Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method.ResultsThree themes emerged: energy depleted, losing normal life, searching for a solution. (...) A combination of health, work, and family challenges contributed to being drained of energy, which affected both work- and non-work roles. Being on sick leave led to a loss of social arenas and their identity as a contributing member of society. Participants required assistance to find solutions toward returning to work.ConclusionEven in this early stage of long-term sick leave, sick listed workers faced complex challenges in multiple domains. Continuing sick leave was experienced as necessary but may challenge personal identity and social life. Those not finding solutions may benefit from additional early follow-up that examine work-related, social and personal factors that influence return to work. (shrink)

BackgroundWe review original papers on ovarian-hormone status in two areas of emotional processing: facial emotion recognition and emotional memory. Ovarian-hormone status is operationalized by the levels of the steroid sex hormones 17β-estradiol and progesterone, fluctuating over the natural menstrual cycle and suppressed under oral contraceptive use. We extend previous reviews addressing single areas of emotional processing. Moreover, we systematically examine the role of stimulus features such as emotion type or stimulus valence and aim at elucidating factors that reconcile the inconsistent (...) results.MethodsWe followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines and included papers published until September 2020 indexed in PubMed and Web of Science databases. Search terms were MeSH terms AND AND with representing our separately searched areas, resulting in, and. To be included, articles had to be written and published in English, examine healthy, non-pregnant adult women in their reproductive age, and measure or at least estimate levels of E2 and P4. In PubMed, the search was limited to humans and to the search term present in the title or abstract.ResultsFeatures of the provided stimulus material constitute a relevant influence that interacts with E2- and P4-related ovarian-hormone status. For instance, recognition of basic emotions appears to be more related to P4- than E2-levels. Quite consistent, OC intake was accompanied by impaired recognition accuracy of basic and also complex emotions, although not in a recent large-sample study assessing complex emotions. Memory recall of negative content was mainly enhanced by P4, especially after having been stressed.Discussion and ConclusionWe document the methodological diversity in the field, presumably contributing to the heterogeneity of results. More studies explicitly contrasting the early follicular phase, mid-cycle phase, mid-luteal, and OC intake while standardizing tasks are needed. Research would take advantage of using within-subject designs and accounting for the recognition of complex emotions. (shrink)

Living donation provides important access to organ transplantation, which is the optimal therapy for patients with end-stage liver or kidney failure. Paired exchanges have facilitated thousands of kidney transplants and enable transplantation when the donor and recipient are incompatible. However, frequently willing and otherwise healthy donors have contraindications to the donation of the organ that their recipient needs. Trans-organ paired exchanges would enable a donor associated with a kidney recipient to donate a lobe of liver and a donor associated with (...) a liver recipient to donate a kidney. This article explores some of the ethical concerns that trans-organ exchange might encounter including unbalanced donor risks, the validity of informed consent, and effects on deceased organ donation. (shrink)

Psychophysical experiments have demonstrated large and highly systematic perceptual distortions of tactile space. Such a space can be referred to our experience of the spatial organisation of objects, at representational level, through touch, in analogy with the familiar concept of visual space. We investigated the neural basis of tactile space by analysing activity patterns induced by tactile stimulation of nine points on a 3 × 3 square grid on the hand dorsum using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We used a searchlight (...) approach within pre-defined regions of interests to compute the pairwise Euclidean distances between the activity patterns elicited by tactile stimulation. Then, we used multidimensional scaling to reconstruct tactile space at the neural level and compare it with skin space at the perceptual level. Our reconstructions of the shape of skin space in contralateral primary somatosensory and motor cortices reveal that it is distorted in a way that matches the perceptual shape of skin space. This suggests that early sensorimotor areas critically contribute to the distorted internal representation of tactile space on the hand dorsum. (shrink)

Tactile distance perception is believed to require that immediate afferent signals be referenced to a stored representation of body size and shape (the body model). For this ability, recent studies have reported that the stored body representations involved are highly distorted, at least in the case of the hand, with the hand dorsum represented as wider and squatter than it actually is. Here, we aim to define the neural basis of this phenomenon. In a behavioural experiment participants estimated the distance (...) between touches on two points by adjusting the length of a visually-presented line on the screen. The technique of multidensional scaling (MDS) was used to reconstruct a perceptual map of tactile space. Analysis of spatial distortion using Procrustes alignment showed that maps were stretched in the mediolateral hand axis. In order to determine the neural correlates of these body distortions, we performed an fMRI study. For each participant, we used a searchlight pattern classifier with Euclidean distance on pre-defined regions of interests (ROIs). In order to relate the representations between the different points and to computational models, we compare response-pattern dissimilarity matrices in these ROIs. Similar to the behavioural experiment, we used MDS to reconstruct maps of the neural representation of tactile space using the values from the dissimilarities matrices. We were able to reconstruct the perceptual map of tactile space in the contralateral primary somatosensory and motor cortices. This suggests that these areas are critical to generate the tactile representations of the dorsum of the hand. (shrink)

We examined the neural basis of tactile distance perception by analyzing activity patterns induced by tactile stimulation of nine points on a 3 x 3 square grid on the hand dorsum using functional magnetic resonance (fMRI). We used a searchlight approach within pre-defined regions of interests (ROIs) to compute the pairwise Euclidean distances between the activity patterns elicited by tactile stimulation. Then, we used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to reconstruct skin space at the neural level and compare it with skin space (...) at the perceptual level. Our reconstructions of the shape of skin space in contralateral primary somatosensory (SI) and motor (M1) cortices reveal that it is distorted in a way that matches the perceptual shape of skin space. This suggests that early sensorimotor areas are critical to processing tactile distance perception. (shrink)

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

This volume is an act of talking back, of talking heresy. To reclaim the term “realism,” to maintain the epistemic significance of identity, to defend any version of identity politics today is to swim upstream of strong academic currents in feminist theory, literary theory, and cultural studies. It is to risk, even to invite, a dismissal as naive, uninformed, theoretically unsophisticated. And it is a risk taken here by people already at risk in the academy, already assumed more often than (...) not to be uninformed and undereducated precisely because of their real identities. Of course, identity is today a growth industry in the academy, across the humanities and social sciences, influencing even law and communication studies. The constitutive power of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and other forms of identity has, finally, suddenly, been recognized as a relevant aspect of almost all projects of inquiry. However, as I shall discuss in this essay, simultaneous to this academic commodification of identity is an increasing tendency to view identity as politically and metaphysically problematic, some have even said pathological. So on the one hand the theoretical relevance of identities has become visible, while on the other hand many theorists are troubled by the implications of the claim that identity makes a difference. Increasingly, then, the attachment to identity has become suspect. If identity has become suspect, identity politics has been prosecuted, tried, and sentenced to death. To espouse identity politics in the academy today risks being viewed as a member of the Flat-Earth Society. Like “essentialism,” identity politics has become the shibboleth of cultural studies and social theory, and denouncing it has become the litmus test of academic respectability, political acceptability, and even a necessity for the very right to be heard. In contrast, there has been a noticeable thaw regarding the term essentialism. What was once perfunctorily denounced at the start of every paper in feminist theory has recently been tentatively examined by a few theorists for possible signs of validity.. (shrink)

I consider the question of how literally one can construe the “gauge argument,” which is the canonical means of understanding the putatively central import of local gauge symmetry principles for fundamental physics. As I argue, the gauge argument must be afforded a heuristic reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects a deep “logic of nature” must, for numerous reasons I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt.

In this paper I make a preliminary analysis of Western (or global North) discourses on sexual violence, focusing on the important concepts of “consent” and “victim.” The concept of “consent” is widely used to determine whether sexual violence has occurred, and it is the focal point of debates over the legitimacy of statutory offenses and over the way we characterize sex work done under conditions involving economic desperation. The concept of “victim” is shunned by many feminists and nonfeminists alike for (...) its apparent eclipse of agency. Putting these concepts into a global framework sheds light on their limitations. Bringing in the debate over the concept “honor crime” reveals contrasting assumptions about the nature of sexual violence. The comparative analysis used in this paper shows how we can avoid universalizing from specific frameworks, but also how we can learn from the discourses elsewhere toward developing an account of commonalities across contexts. Ultimately I argue that in applications to sexual violence, “consent” has intrinsic limitations, “victim” has context-based dangers, and “honor crime” makes both correct as well as incorrect assumptions. (shrink)

The term verificationism is used in two different ways: the first is in relation to the verification principle of meaning, which we usually and rightly associate with the logical empiricists, although, as we now know, it derives in reality from Wittgenstein, and the second is in relation to the theory of meaning for intuitionistic logic that has been developed, beginning of course with Brouwer, Heyting and Kolmogorov in the twenties and early thirties, but in much more detail lately, particularly in (...) connection with intuitionistic type theory. It is therefore very natural to ask how these two forms of verificationism are related to one another: was the verificationism that we had in the thirties a kind of forerunner of what we have now, or was it something entirely different? I would like to discuss this question by considering a very particular problem, which was at the heart of Schlick’s interests, namely, the problem whether there might exist undecidable propositions or, if you prefer, unsolvable problems or unanswerable questions: it is merely a matter of wording which of these terms you choose. As I said, it is a problem which was at the heart of Schlick’s interests: it is explicitly discussed already in his early, programmatic paper Die Wende in der Philosophie in the first volume of Erkenntnis from 1930, and there is a short late paper, which has precisely Unanswerable Questions? as its title, from 1935, and he discussed it on several occasions in between also. (shrink)

The rejection of a “characterless” moral self is central to some of Bernard Williams’ most important contributions to philosophy. By the time of Truth and Truthfulness, he works instead with a model of the self constituted and stabilized out of more primitive materials through deliberation and in concert with others that takes inspiration from Diderot. Although this view of the self raises some difficult questions, it serves as a useful starting point for thinking about the process of developing an authentic (...) moral point of view in the context of contemporary living. In what follows, I begin to fill out and extend this picture of the self and its related notion of authenticity by exploring some of the “technologies of the self” at play in Rachel Cusk’s recent work (primarily, the Outline trilogy, Coventry, Second Place, and “The Stuntman”) that ask us to rethink the possibility and importance of stability; seek a way of constituting oneself and one’s values outside the confining structures of traditional narrative (focusing instead on a framework that might be provided by the visual arts); and give a different role to the sort of internalized other Williams sees as being at work in the mechanisms of shame. (shrink)

The orthodox view on higher education financing is that students should bear some of the costs of attending and, where necessary, meet that cost through debt financing. New economic realties, including protracted economic slowdown and increasing austerity of the state with respect to the public funding of goods and services has meant that the same generation who have to borrow the most in order to attend face significantly fewer employment prospects upon graduation. In this context, is the current approach of (...) shifting the costs of post-secondary education from the general public to individual students justified? Most debate on the issue has focused on the demands of distributive justice within the modern higher education system and on the whole accepts the idea that students ought to pay. I argue that distributive arguments alone are insufficient because they tacitly endorse the provision of higher education as being much like a consumer's choice. As an alternative, I explore the place and importance of higher education in supporting personal autonomy as a central liberal democratic value. I then argue that debt financing of higher education places unreasonable constraints on student's choices with respect to the kind of democratic citizens that they would otherwise aspire to be. This constraint has negative implications for the wellbeing of individual students and the larger society. (shrink)

I define ecosabotage and relate this definition to several well-known analyses of civil disobedience. I show that ecosabotage cannot be reduced to a form of civil disobedience unless the definition of civil disobedience is expanded. I suggest that ecosabotage and civil disobedience are special cases of the more general concept of conscientious wrongdoing. Although ecosabotage cannot be considered a form of civil disobedience on the basis of the standard analysis of this concept, the civil disobedience literature can provide important insights (...) into the justification of ecosabotage. First, traditional appeals to a higher law in justifying ecosabotage are no more successful than they are in justifying civil disobedience. Second, utilitarian justifications of ecosabotage are promising. At present there is no apriori reason tosuppose that some acts of ecosabotage could not be justified on utilitarian grounds, although such ecosaboteurs as Dave Foreman have not provided a full justification of its use in concrete cases. (shrink)

I will discuss Fields Outline of a Theory of Truth. I will point out important properties of Kripkeleast fixed points constructions and theory. I do this not to demean Field’s superb work on truth but rather to suggest that there may be no really satisfactory conditional connective for languages containing their own truth predicates.

For years, phenomenological psychiatry has proposed that distortions of the temporal structure of consciousness contribute to the abnormal experiences described before schizophrenia emerges, and may relate to basic disturbances in consciousness of the self. However, considering that temporality refers mainly to an implicit aspect of our relationship with the world, disturbances in the temporal structure of consciousness remain difficult to access. Nonetheless, previous studies have shown a correlation between self disorders and the automatic ability to expect an event in time, (...) suggesting timing is a key issue for the psychopathology of schizophrenia. Timing disorders may represent a target for cognitive remediation, but this requires that disorders can be demonstrated at an individual level. Since cognitive impairments in patients with schizophrenia are discrete, and there is no standardized timing exploration, we focused on timing impairments suggested to be related to self disorders. We present the case report of AF, a 22 year old man suffering from schizophrenia, with no antipsychotic intake. Although AF shows few positive and negative symptoms and has a normal neurocognitive assessment, he shows a high level of disturbance of Minimal Self Disorders (SDs) (assessed with the EASE scale). Moreover, AF has a rare ability to describe his self and time difficulties. An objective assessment of timing ability (variable foreperiod task) confirmed that AF had temporal impairments similar to those previously described in patients, i.e., a preserved ability to distinguish time intervals, but a difficulty to benefit from the passage of time to expect a visual stimulus. He presents additional difficulties in benefitting from temporal cues and adapting to changes in time delays. The impairments were ample enough to yield significant effects with analyses at the individual level. Although causal relationships between subjective and objective impairments cannot be established, the results show that exploring timing deficits at the individual level is possible in patients with schizophrenia. Besides, the results are consistent with hypotheses relating minimal self disorders (SDs) to timing difficulties. They suggest that both subjective and objective timing investigations should be developed further so that their use at an individual level can be generalized in clinical practice. (shrink)

La meva intenció en les pàgines següents és analitzar la teoria del llenguatge que es troba en el Cràtil de Plató. D'una banda, s'analitza la concepció del significat de les paraules quePlató sembla defensar en aquest diàleg; de l'altra, s'ocupa del problema dels orígens delllenguatge. Aquestes qüestions s'estudien en relació amb la perspectiva ontològica i epistemològicade Plató: essencialisme, teoria de la reminiscència i les tesis dels sofistes sobre laimpossibilitat de parlar amb falsedat. La conclusió és que en el Cràtil podem (...) trobar ja la preparació de la teoria del llenguatge que Plató necessitarà per a la seva ulterior teoria de les idees. (shrink)

Wayne Norman argues that there should be more similarity or unity between the justifications for markets and the extra-legal norms that apply to market agents. I question two aspects of his claim. First, why does Norman refer to this view as a view about the self-regulation of market agents? Agents could self-regulate with many different norms, not necessarily norms informed by the justifications for markets. Second, asking for more similarity might create problems in terms of the liberty of market agents (...) to pursue other morally relevant objectives. How are we to balance these other relevant objectives and the objectives of markets? (shrink)

ABSTRACT Serene Khader’s effort to develop a decolonized approach to transnational feminism takes a helpfully nonideal approach. Much of decolonial theory has criticized universalism in order to espouse pluralism. Khader attempts to develop a form of minimalist universalism compatible with a significant dose of pluralism in regard to how we understand liberation from gender-based forms of oppression, and she effectively shows how the nonideal, meliorative approach can do this. I address three issues here: (1) the serious challenge her universalist account (...) poses to critical theory and some other trends in continental philosophy; (2) the persuasive analysis of, approach to, and critique that she makes of ‘gender role eliminativism’ and (3) the epistemic and dialogic questions left remaining in her defense of feminist universalism, in relation to who can theoretically formulate the universal. (shrink)

Aristotle's discussion of relatives in the Categories presented its eleventh- and twelfth-century readers with many puzzles. Their attempt to solve these puzzles and to develop a coherent account of the category led around the beginning of the twelfth century to the invention of relations as items which stand to relatives as qualities stand to qualified substances. In this paper, I first discuss the details of Aristotle's accounts of relatives and the related category of ‘situation’ and Boethius' commentary on them. I (...) then examine some of the earliest mediaeval commentaries on the Categories showing how the notion of relation, and in particular of individual relations, was developed. I conclude by showing how Peter Abaelard's treatment of relations in his Dialectica was part of an ongoing and sophisticated debate over the nature of relations. (shrink)

There is little debate regarding the acceptability of providing medical care to restore physical or mental health that has deteriorated below what is considered typical due to disease or disorder (i.e., providing “treatment”—for example, administering psychostimulant medication to sustain attention in the case of attention deficit disorder). When asked whether a healthy individual may undergo the same intervention for the purpose of enhancing their capacities (i.e., “enhancement”—for example, use of a psychostimulant as a “study drug”), people often express greater hesitation. (...) Building on prior research in moral philosophy and cognitive science, in this work, we ask why people draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement. In two experiments, we provide evidence that the accessibility of health-related interventions determines their perceived descriptive or statistical normality (Experiment 1), and that gains in descriptive normality for such interventions weaken the moral distinction between treatment and enhancement (Experiment 2). In short, our findings suggest that the tendency to draw a moral distinction between treatment and enhancement is driven, in part, by assumptions about descriptive abnormality; and raise the possibility that normalizing novel biomedical interventions by promoting access could undermine people’s selective opposition toward enhancement, rendering it morally comparable to treatment. (shrink)

In this article I consider a two-page autobiographical recount which appears at the end of Nelson Mandela's book Long Walk to Freedom as a summary of his life and what he has learned from it. My aim is to illustrate the role of a detailed analysis of single texts in the field of discourse analysis, as opposed to studies of selected variables across a corpus of texts. The analysis is conducted within the general theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, with (...) special attention to transitivity, mood, theme, grammatical metaphor, lexical relations, conjunction, tense, phase, process type, hierarchy of periodicity, polarity, continuity, elaboration, extension and the analysis of images in multimodal text. Through these procedures I show the way in which Mandela reconciles the linear unfolding of his life history with the deepening understanding of freedom that gives meaning to his life - by means of a spiral texture which returns again and again to the meaning of freedom at different levels of abstraction. The effect, I think, is inspirational - with no tinge of bitterness or betrayal; rather a message of hope and wisdom - grace personified. The approach exemplifies a positive style of discourse analysis that focuses on hope and change, by way of complementing the deconstructive exposé associated with critical discourse analysis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Allegory and the Spaces of LoveOscar Martín (bio)Writing about Spanish sentimental fiction from 1450 to 1550 is not an easy task, as we are discussing a genre with a difficult theoretical configuration. The investigation of sentimental fiction, however, has been sorting out the classifications that applied to a hodgepodge of works previously labeled as “sentimental novel” (“novela sentimental”). This label, once attached uncritically to a bunch of heterogeneous texts (...) that shared such intangibles as “loving focus” or “prevalence of psychological description over narratives,” has been applied more consistently nowaday, thanks in part to the scholarly efforts started in the 1980s like those of Martínez Jiménez and Muñoz Marquina (1982), and Martínez Latre (1989).1 Using some of these research efforts, Alan Deyermond has codified the genre accurately:Brevity; focus on psychological interest over external action; a tragic vision of love; autobiography (first-person narration or a narrator as a character) and the insertion of letters or poems (or, often, both) into the narration.[77]2Within this scholarly categorization, Regula Rohland de Langbehn has been pivotal in offering—first in 1986, and more recently in 1999—a threefold scheme in the development of the genre she labels as “sentimental novel”: a first group chronologically of the genre would be represented by Siervo libre de amor and Sátira de felice e infelice vida, both works marked by the influence of cancionero poetry—specially in the allegorical structuring and in the characterization of love, and by other subjects being limited to an abstract and general analysis of emotions. Both works also present a debate over the moral value of love. A second group would gravitate around Triste deleytacion and the works of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores, works that show a wider range of topics and the impact of a broader generic textuality like cancionero poetry and such chivalric novels as Tirant. Finally, she distinguishes a third group whose main characteristic is the imprint of Celestina’s influence on both the narrative surface and its thematic approach. In the same vein, Vicenta Blay Manzanera has taken up this threefold scheme, dividing the genre into “the creation of the paradigm” (“la creación del paradigma”) the climactic stage, and the downfall and disarticulation of the narrative sentimental system” (“la fase climática” and “el tercero la fase de declive o desintegración del paradigma”) [“La conciencia genérica” 221]. [End Page 132]Just as Rohland de Langbehn’s works had at least settled down the arguments about the existence of a sentimental novelistic genre, however, medieval Hispanic scholarship has been shaken by an entrenched debate over not only the identification of this genre (novel or fiction) but whether the genre even existed at all. It was Antonio Cortijo Ocaña who, while editing a critical cluster in La Corónica on sentimental fiction, opened the door to some scholars such as Weissberger who voiced their skepticism over the generic nature of sentimental prose, a skepticism already present in an innovative volume published by Gwara and Gerli in 1997. This skeptical position was also supported by Cortijo Ocaña himself, who in 2001 published a monumental work in which, although using the generic term as a departure point, he ended up suggesting the difficulty of defining it, therefore jettisoning it. This position in turn was contested by Rohland de Langbehn, who in 2002 defended the validity of both the existence of a genre and its name novela sentimental, a position that has sparked a new round of replies in a La Corónica forum in 2003.In this debate, I would join today’s minority position on the existence of a sentimental genre, because, as I explained in my 2001 review of Rohland de Langbehn’s book and as I find convincingly argued in her 2002 contribution, there are internal traits within sentimental fictional texts that do not appear together in other sentimental generic texts [139]. In addition, once we take into account the obvious intertextuality of those sentimental texts, as Blay Manzanera has shown [“La conciencia genérica”], and the overutilization of central motifs in the configuration of love’s debate, we... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.1 (2004) 1-13 [Access article in PDF] Ambiguities of the Prisca Sapientia in Late Renaissance Humanism Martin Mulsow University of Munich The wisdom of the ancients, says Marsilio Ficino, was a pious philosophy.1 Born among the Egyptians with Hermes Trismegistus—and, according to Ficino's later writings, concurrently among the Persians with Zoroaster—it was raised by the Thracians under Orpheus and Aglaophemus. It later (...) matured under Pythagoras among the Greeks and Italians and culminated in Plato. As is well known, this genealogy was not merely a historical thesis for Ficino and his followers but also a program for revival, a utopia achieved through restoration. For the assertion of a concordance between these early philosophies and their accordance with Christianity—in the sense of a Christian Platonism—implied the synthesis of fragementary philosophemes into a fully developed doctrine in the service of a uniform and timely philosophia pia.This program was formulated in a variety of ways during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with differing protagonists and with diverse aims. Thus one could supplement the genealogy in a cabalist vein, introduce biblical characters such as Solomon or Moses, or (as was done by Bruno) use it to contest Christian doctrine. The genealogy could be read as culminating in various notable modern figures such as for example, Paracelsus. Aristotle could be included or excluded from it, depending on whether one wanted to assimilate the Aristotelian tradition or to distance oneself from it; and one could leave the end [End Page 1] of this genealogical lineage open in order to exhort the necessity of a scientific and moral reform.Here, however, we shall be occupied with the question of what became of this program during the late Renaissance, when two developments took place simultaneously: on the one hand, the utopia of the prisca sapientia set about to conquer the field formerly reserved to the Aristotelians, namely, natural philosophy; on the other hand, the first doubts arose about the overall validity of the historical-philological foundation of the program, especially the dating of the works of Hermes Trismegistus. The latter began with the publication of the first part of Patrizi's Discussiones peripateticae in 1571,which aimed to rehabilitate, contrary to Aristotle's critique, old presocratic natural philosophies, and in so doing it cleared the way for interpreting the latest advancements in non-Aristotelian natural sciences as resumptions of these very philosophies.2 This initiated a period of complex interaction between late humanist philology, innovative natural science, and speculative metaphysics.This phase, however, not only entailed the grand synthesizing endeavors that one finds in Patrizi's Nova de universis philosophia;it also introduced historical critique—no doubt provoked by Patrizi—of the Hermetic prisca sapientia, understood in Frances Yates's sense, which was performed in careful detail long before Casaubon at the end of the Renaissance.3 Further, it was a phase characterized by an attempt to reevaluate Aristotelian philosophy against its opponents, which paradoxically was also motivated by Patrizi yet which managed to keep the venture open to "esoteric" depths. All of these developments were intertwined, and each effected the articulation of encyclopedic projects at the beginning of the seventeenth century. On the basis of manuscripts, letters, and some neglected texts, I want to introduce two such countercurrents, which illustrate how the migration of arguments from one cultural context to another can lead to wholly divergent and unexpected results. Moreover, these results show the diverse consequences that a prisca sapientia-utopia could have for different visions of encyclopedic scholarship.I. In the bookshop of Paolo Meietti in Padua, Teodoro Angelucci and Antonio Persio met accidentally on an autumn day in 1558. Meietti was the publisher of Angelucci's medical textbook as well as of texts by Patrizi and his [End Page 2] colleague Giannini, and it is possible that Persio was out to discuss publishing possibilities for his forthcoming manuscript De natura ignis. In any case, they were there for business-related matters, so it was quite natural for Persio to... (shrink)

La meva intenció en les pàgines següents és analitzar la teoria del llenguatge que es troba en el Cràtil de Plató. D'una banda, s'analitza la concepció del significat de les paraules quePlató sembla defensar en aquest diàleg; de l'altra, s'ocupa del problema dels orígens delllenguatge. Aquestes qüestions s'estudien en relació amb la perspectiva ontològica i epistemològicade Plató: essencialisme, teoria de la reminiscència i les tesis dels sofistes sobre laimpossibilitat de parlar amb falsedat. La conclusió és que en el Cràtil podem (...) trobar ja la preparació de la teoria del llenguatge que Plató necessitarà per a la seva ulterior teoria de les idees. (shrink)

Most readers of Habermas would not classify him as an existential thinker. The view of Habermas as a philosopher in German Idealist and Critical traditions from Kant to Hegel and Marx to the Frankfurt School prevails among Continental as much as among analytic philosophers. And the mainstream Anglo-American reception of his work and politics is shaped by the approaches of formal analysis rather than those of existential and social phenomenology or even current American pragmatism. One may argue that both these (...) readings eclipse richer existential dimensions of a thinker who challenges the notorious methodological and political splits among analytic, Continental and pragmatist orientations. I argue that Habermas’ critical relation to Heidegger’s a historical history of Being and his misguided political career cannot explain a competing narrative of his own affirmative appropriation of existential-ethical dimensions of thought and activism. Second, if one sets in the foreground this competing narrative, there emerges a weak thesis, whether or not a plausible complementarity between the communications critical social theory and concrete existential categories can be established. Third, one may inquire further into a stronger thesis whether or not this link must be developed in order to render Habermas’ own theory of a communicatively competent self sufficiently concrete and critical. (shrink)

I compare the discussion on exclusivism in religion to the discussion on exclusivism in general. With defenders of religious exclusivism, such as Plantinga, I argue that it is a subset of general exclusivism and is as little blameworthy as the latter is. This explains why defenders of religious exclusivism are right in assuming that the burden of proof is on the shoulders of the critics of exclusivism. Yet, this answer solves only part of the problem. It answers only the first (...) order question of whether it is legitimate to hold exclusivist truth claims in religion. It does not answer the second order question of how, in what spirit, they should be held. I argue that there are contexts in which exclusivist truth claims should be held in a humble fashion, for example contexts in which (cognitive) ambiguity reigns. If they are held in those contexts in an overconfident fashion, they are epistemically and/or morally blameworthy. Since religion is characterized by a measure of (cognitive) ambiguity, exclusivist religious truth claims should be held in a humble fashion. They are thus blameworthy if held in an overconfident fashion. Yet, if held in a modest spirit, there is nothing wrong with religious exclusivism. (shrink)

Peters' account of the moral life and the conception of practical reason that informed it reflects a sophisticated moral universalism. However, attempts to extend a similarly sophisticated universalism into our understanding of education are not as well received. Yet, such a project is of clear contemporary relevance given the pressure put on educational institutions to achieve certain ends. If we can show that education entails standards that are not entirely contingent upon current interests, we would have a framework that all (...) institutions seriously claiming to be involved in the enterprise would have to acknowledge. In this paper I argue that a reconstruction of the relationship between Peters' work in philosophical ethics and his conceptual analysis may go some way in showing how one can speak of education in universalistic terms. Accordingly, although many of the criticisms laid at Peters' feet are of merit, they overshadow more potentially useful interpretive moves. Finally, I show how a change in the focus of Peters' account of education and practical reason more generally can provide important resources for engaging in a more plausible exploration of universalistic themes in education. (shrink)

Adversarial scheme points to situations of rivalry like auctions, public tendering, sports competitions, elections or trials. Thomas Pogge suggested that these schemes have great advantage: they force agents to reveal their full performance. But they also incentivize agents to manipulate the rules. In other schemes with incentives, he also suggests, agents can easily downplay their performance, but won’t engage in rule manipulation to the same extent. In this paper, I will argue that adversarial schemes and other schemes with incentives advantages (...) or disadvantages do not map from one to the other as Pogge suggests. Performance-downplaying also takes place in adversarial schemes, as well as in other schemes with incentives also lead to rule manipulation. I will also argue that there are genuine differences between these two types of schemes. Adversarial schemes have three unique advantages: first, they may be more effective in producing motivational improvements at a lower cost, second, they may lead to an automatic optimization of performances and, third, they may produce unique system benefits. In order to produce these advantages, we must design adversarial schemes properly and use them in the right situation. (shrink)

In this paper I make a preliminary analysis of Western (or global North) discourses on sexual violence, focusing on the important concepts of “consent” and “victim.” The concept of “consent” is widely used to determine whether sexual violence has occurred, and it is the focal point of debates over the legitimacy of statutory offenses and over the way we characterize sex work done under conditions involving economic desperation. The concept of “victim” is shunned by many feminists and nonfeminists alike for (...) its apparent eclipse of agency. Putting these concepts into a global framework sheds light on their limitations. Bringing in the debate over the concept “honor crime” reveals contrasting assumptions about the nature of sexual violence. The comparative analysis used in this paper shows how we can avoid universalizing from specific frameworks, but also how we can learn from the discourses elsewhere toward developing an account of commonalities across contexts. Ultimately I argue that in applications to sexual violence, “consent” has intrinsic limitations, “victim” has context-based dangers, and “honor crime” makes both correct as well as incorrect assumptions. (shrink)

My thesis is that there is a deep, intractable difference, not between history and science per se, but between paradigmatically central kinds of historical interpretations-call them humanistic historical interpretations-and theories of any sort that are characteristic of the physical sciences. The difference is that unlike theories in the physical sciences, good humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning. I use the controversy provoked by Gordon Wood's recent reinterpretation of the American Revolution to illustrate and substantiate this thesis. I also (...) use it to support the claim that unless one attends to the ways in which humanistic historical interpretations reveal subjectivity, agency, and meaning one has no hope whatsoever of getting the epistemology of historical studies right. (shrink)

In this paper I describe the context and goals of Francisco Vallés' In IV librum Meteorologicorum commentaria. Vallés' work stands as a landmark because it interprets a work of Aristotle's natural philosophy specifically for medical doctors and medical theory. Vallés' commentary is representative of new understandings of Galenic-Hippocratic medi-cine that emerged as a result of expanding textual knowledge. These approaches are evident in a number of sixteenth-century commentaries on Meteorologica IV; in particular the works of Pietro Pomponazzi, Lodovico Boccadiferro, Jacob (...) Schegk, and Francesco Vimercati. Vallés' conviction that Meteorologica IV is relevant to medical knowledge depends on his understanding of Aristotle's theory of homeomerous substances and their relation to composite substances. The application of Meteorologica IV to medical topics became commonplace in the following years, and this Aristotelian book became widely known as a bridge between natural philosophy and medicine. (shrink)

I review Adrian Moore’s lucid account of Fichte’s contribution to the Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. I support Moore’s contention that Fichte should indeed be considered a metaphysician, but I propose an adjustment to Moore’s interpretation, guided by Fichte’s own claim that the infinite I is an unattainable ideal, rather than a fact about the constitution of reality as it actually is. The resulting position embeds Fichte’s metaphysics firmly within his ethics and politics. In reconstructing Fichte’s position I demonstrate the centrality (...) of work in Fichte’s proposed resolution of Kant’s third antinomy. (shrink)

I argue that Gale’s brilliant critique of theistic arguments is a major contribution to the philosophy of religion that can instruct atheologians and theologians for decades to come. However, his unargued appeal to faith, his reliance on the vague properties of being eminently worthy of worship and being supremely great, his failure to come to grips with the atheological implications of maintaining that God cannot know what He will decide, and the incompleteness of his critique of atheological arguments seriously weaken (...) his tacit case against rational atheism and his acceptance of fideism. I see his use of informal polls regarding modal intuitionsas a first important step to a more rigorous approach. (shrink)

Heidegger: Bibliography of addresses and courses he took and taught: German and English / By Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Copyright ©Daniel Fidel Ferrer, 2022. All rights reserved. Copyright materials. Request permission for use from Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. CC BY-NC-ND. Imprint 1.0. March 2022. Pages 1-49. -/- 1. Heidegger, Martin, -- 1889-1976. 2. Heidegger, Martin, -- 1889-1976 -- Indexes. 4). Metaphysics. 5). Philosophy, German. 6). Philosophy, German – Greek influences. 7). Ontology. I. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-. Language: English (Preface (...) and Introduction). Includes many bibliographical references in German and English. Bibliography some of the standalone address (es) – Vortrag. -/- Table of Contents Motto (page 3) Introduction (pages 4-6) Heidegger about the nature of Teaching (pages 7-8) Some general examples about Heidegger’s courses (The Tour) (pages 9-10). Bibliography Master List (pages 11-14) Martin Heidegger Courses taken and teachers (pages 15-25) Other Heidegger documents (pages 26-27) Martin Heidegger Sound Recordings (pages 28-29) After GA 102. “Megiston" and "Grundworte” (pages 30) Heidegger Addresses --- Vorträge (pages 31-47) End quotes (pages 48-49) -/- . (shrink)

In this discussion piece we address how the UK government has attempted to manage public expectations of a proposed biometric identity scheme by focussing attention on the handheld, i.e., the ID card. We suggest that this strategy of expectations management seeks to downplay the complexity and uncertainty surrounding this high-technological initiative, necessitating the selective use of expertise for the purpose of furthering government objectives. In this process, government often relegates counterexpertise, if not dismissing it outright, thereby greatly politicizing the policy (...) deliberation process. We argue that this manoeuvring by government spells trouble for both democratic deliberation on the issue of biometric identification in the UK and, more generally, expertise-based policy making in related technological ventures. (shrink)