Aristocracy -- Body and family -- Gender and memory -- Wisdom and heresy -- In the holy places -- Modernities.

This interdisciplinary study introduces readers to Friedrich Schleiermacher's diverse pathways of reflection and creative practice that are related to the field of translation. By drawing attention to Schleiermacher's various writings on a range of subjects (including philology, criticism, hermeneutics, dialectics, rhetoric and religion), the author makes it clear that the frequently cited lecture Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (On the Different Methods of Translating) represents but a fraction of Schleiermacher's contributions to modern-day insights into translation. The analysis of Schleiermacher's (...) various pathways of reflection on translation presented in this book leads to the conclusion that translation is part of the essence of the world, as it is a fundamental tool of our cognition and a foundation of our existence. In Schleiermacher's works, transfer, translation, mediation, and communication underpin our very existence in the world and our self-awareness. At the same time, they represent fundamental categories for a project that focuses on the consolidation and assimilation - through translation - of that which is foreign, different, diverse. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary study introduces readers to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s diverse pathways of reflection and creative practice that are related to the field of translation. By drawing attention to Schleiermacher’s various writings on a range of subjects (including philology, criticism, hermeneutics, dialectics, rhetoric and religion), the author makes it clear that the frequently cited lecture Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens (On the Different Methods of Translating) represents but a fraction of Schleiermacher’s contributions to modern-day insights into translation. The analysis of Schleiermacher’s (...) various pathways of reflection on translation presented in this book leads to the conclusion that translation is part of the essence of the world, as it is a fundamental tool of our cognition and a foundation of our existence. In Schleiermacher’s works, transfer, translation, mediation, and communication underpin our very existence in the world and our self-awareness. At the same time, they represent fundamental categories for a project that focuses on the consolidation and assimilation – through translation – of that which is foreign, different, diverse. (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)

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with (...) the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development. (shrink)

The aim of this research was to examine the impact of two specific negative emotions of anger and fear on intergroup attitudes. In Study 1 we measured emotions of anger and fear and in Study 2 we evoked these emotions incidentally, that is independently of any intergroup context. In both studies we measured attitudes towards the ingroup and the outgroup.We expected that fear would lead to more positive ingroup attitudes and anger to more negative outgroup attitudes. The results of the (...) correlational study confirmed the predictions regarding anger and decreased outgroup evaluations, and the experimental study revealed that fear enhanced positivity towards the ingroup, but anger increased negativity towards the outgroup. The impact of fear and anger on social attitudes in the specific context of a negatively self-stereotyped ingroup is discussed. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, the philosophy of biology has emerged from the shadow of the philosophy of physics to become a respectable and thriving philosophical subdiscipline. The authors take a fresh look at the life sciences and the philosophy of biology from a strictly realist and emergentist-naturalist perspective. They outline a unified and science-oriented philosophical framework that enables the clarification of many foundational and philosophical issues in biology. This book will be of interest both to life scientists and philosophers.

We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then, we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher’s view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second factor in the (...) aetiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows. But we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Research on culture would be enriched by studying the connection between gender and peer relations. Cultures vary in the roles, privileges, opportunities and rights that are ascribed to females and males. They are known to differ also in the degree to which females and males interact with each other. Although the preference for same-gender peers has been observed across multiple cultural contexts, the degree of this segregation between females and males varies. We argue that variability in the interactional divide between (...) females and males is an important cultural construct that is likely to account for diversity in developmental processes and outcomes. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event.

What exactly is hope and how does it influence our decisions? In How We Hope, Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. Martin develops this original perspective on hope--what she calls the "incorporation analysis"--in contrast to the two dominant philosophical (...) conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centered views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it. In exploring how hope influences our decisions, she establishes that it is not always a positive motivational force and can render us complacent. She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope. When we place normative hope in people, we relate to them as responsible agents and aspire for them to overcome challenges arising from situation or character. Demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation, How We Hope offers an original, sustained look at a largely neglected topic in philosophy. (shrink)

A ‘lottery belief’ is a belief that a particular ticket has lost a large, fair lottery, based on nothing more than the odds against it winning. The lottery paradox brings out a tension between the idea that lottery beliefs are justified and the idea that that one can always justifiably believe the deductive consequences of things that one justifiably believes – what is sometimes called the principle of closure. Many philosophers have treated the lottery paradox as an argument against the (...) second idea – but I make a case here that it is the first idea that should be given up. As I shall show, there are a number of independent arguments for denying that lottery beliefs are justified. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th Century. A major figure in the development of phenomenology, his work also profoundly influenced many of the intellectual movements that followed in his wake, from Sartre's Existentialism to Derrida's deconstructionism. Towards the Definition of Philosophy brings together two seminal lectures that mark a breakthrough moment in Heidegger's thought and introduces the major themes that he would develop in his opus Being and Time.

In the present study the impact of need for cognitive closure manipulations via time pressure and explicit closure goal activation on executive control was investigated. Although there is some evidence that NFC, measured as an individual variable, is related to better performing in attentional tasks involving executive control, these results have never been validated across different manipulations of NFC. Thus, in the present study we induced NFC via internal and external time pressure and tested the impact of these manipulations on (...) the performance in tasks that measure executive control, i.e., the Stroop and switching tasks. The results revealed that induced high NFC, indeed boosted performance in executive control tasks. Moreover, there was no difference in the effect of both NFC manipulations on task performance. The implications regarding the role of executive control and specific NFC manipulations in social cognition are discussed. (shrink)

A landmark discussion between two great thinkers, vital to an understanding of twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual history.

This paper proposes a view of time that takes passage to be the most basic temporal notion, instead of the usual A-theoretic and B-theoretic notions, and explores how we should think of a world that exhibits such a genuine temporal passage. It will be argued that an objective passage of time can only be made sense of from an atemporal point of view and only when it is able to constitute a genuine change of objects across time. This requires that (...) passage can flip one fact into a contrary fact, even though neither side of the temporal passage is privileged over the other. We can make sense of this if the world is inherently perspectival. Such an inherently perspectival world is characterized by fragmentalism, a view that has been introduced by Fine in his ‘Tense and Reality’ (2005). Unlike Fine's tense-theoretic fragmentalism though, the proposed view will be a fragmentalist view based in a primitive notion of passage. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation presents crucial elements for understanding Heidegger's thinking from 1936 to 1940. Heidegger offers a radically different reading of a text that he had read decades earlier, showing how his relationship with Nietzche's has changed, as well as how his understandings of the differences between animals and humans, temporality and history, and the Western philosophical tradition developed. With his new reading, Heidegger delineates three Nietzschean modes of history, which should be understood as grounded in (...) the structure of temporality or historicity and also offers a metaphysical determination of life and the essence of humankind. Ullrich Hasse and Mark Sinclair offer a clear and accessible translation despite the fragmentary and disjointed quality of the original lecture notes that comprise this text. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

The Liar paradox arises when we consider a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. If such self-referential sentences exist? and examples like?This sentence is not true? certainly suggest this?, then our logic and standard notion of truth allow to infer a contradiction: The Liar sentence is true and not true. What has gone wrong? Must we revise our notion of truth and our logic? Or can we dispel the common conviction that there are such self-referential sentences? (...) The present study explores the second path.0After comparing the Liar reasoning in formal and informal logic and showing that there are no Gödelian Liar sentences, the study moves on from the semantics of self-reference to the metaphysics of expressions and proposes a novel solution to the Liar paradox: Meaningful expressions are distinct from their syntactic bases and exist only relative to contexts. Detailed semantico-metaphysical arguments show that in this dynamic setting, an object can be referred to only after it has started to exist. Hence the circular reference needed in the Liar paradox cannot occur, after all. As this solution is contextualist, it evades the expressibility problems of other proposals. (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) ist einer der wichtigsten amerikanischen Philosophen der Gegenwart, der die analytische Philosophie sowohl geprägt als auch maßgeblich zu ihrer Kritik beigetragen und damit die Wiederentdeckung des Pragmatismus vorangetrieben hat. In diesem Handbuch werden alle wichtigen Aspekte seines Lebens und seiner philosophischen Arbeit dargestellt und einer wissenschaftlichen Diskussion unterzogen.

The concept of Islamic economics as a coherent economic and financial system basically does not exist. Some authors take it, however, for simplicity, under-standing by this description any entities and legal regulations, mainly in the financial markets, driven – either declaratively or in fact – on the principles derived from religious precepts of Islam. The emphasis is put on so-called inter-est-free banking, which involves the concept of usury (riba). By referring to the essence of Islamic economics, the author shows the (...) dif-ferences and similarities between "interest-free" Islamic banking and conven-tional banking (Western-style). It turns out that the differences are almost exclu-sively at the level of declarations and similarities that arise from attempts to circumvent religious regulations, as in the riba, are much more numerous than it might seem. They result from the need to fuse Islamic finances with global fi-nancial markets, which at least at the point of contact eliminates the capability of maintaining the autonomy of the local banking system. In addition, interest-free Islamic banking development meets an obstacle in the shape of the market pres-ence of conventional banks, which are its natural ideological competition. Thus, although the Islamic Development Bank estimates the size of the market of the Islamic system of financial services in 2015 at between 2 to 8 trillion dollars, one seems to be entitled to conclude that, in practice, between Islamic economics and capitalist economies of the West, at least in terms of banking services, the dif-ferences are purely semantic, and both Western and Islamic deposit, credit and investment products are in fact identical. (shrink)

Islam as both religion and socioeconomic system is based on five main pillars, that is – five basic acts considered mandatory by Muslims, summarized in the hadith of Gabriel. One of them is zakāt (almsgiving), i.e. giving 2.5% of one’s wealth to the poor and needy. In contrary to Christian religion, where question of charity is rather of a voluntary matter, the role of zakāt in Islam is much more rigidly described. Almsgiving is considered as a duty of a pious (...) Muslim towards the poor. Thus in Islamic economy, strongly based on Islam principles given by Allah to Muhammad, zakāt is imposed by law and is not considered a charity but duty rather. The notion of zakāt is mentioned in Qur-an over a 100 times, solely or in conjunction with other commandments. On a basis that zakāt is to be paid as a part of total wealth exceeding given minimum wealth (nisab) it is then justifiable to say that zakāt is principally a tax. A role of this essay is to shed some light on a utilisation and role of zakāt in Islamic economies in socioeconomic context, with an example of Islamic Republic of Pakistan, where in 1980 the Zakāt Ordinance was imposed. The concept of zakāt is present in many Islamic countries, but its nature varies, being dependent from the interpretation of religious law in a given country. Everywhere though, its social role as an important tool maintaining social justice is strongly expressed. Of course zakāt system also has its drawbacks and is subjected to much criticism. The article aims to present both advantages and negative aspects of zakāt. (shrink)

The Routledge International Handbook of Neuroaesthetics is an authoritative reference work that provides the reader with a wide-ranging introduction to this exciting new scientific discipline. The book brings together leading international academics to offer a well-balanced overview of this burgeoning field while addressing two questions central to the field; how the brain computes aesthetic appreciation for sensory objects, and how is art created and experienced.

Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes--good and bad--are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and bestselling author Martin Rees argues that humanity's prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow. The future of humanity is bound to the (...) future of science and hinges on how successfully we harness technological advances to address our challenges. If we are to use science to solve our problems while avoiding its dystopian risks, we must think rationally, globally, collectively, and optimistically about the long term. Advances in biotechnology, cybertechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence--if pursued and applied wisely--could empower us to boost the developing and developed world and overcome the threats humanity faces on Earth, from climate change to nuclear war. At the same time, further advances in space science will allow humans to explore the solar system and beyond with robots and AI. But there is no "Plan B" for Earth--no viable alternative within reach if we do not care for our home planet. Rich with fascinating insights into cutting-edge science and technology, this accessible book will captivate anyone who wants to understand the critical issues that will define the future of humanity on Earth and beyond."-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Material from this paper appears in Chap. 7 of my book Reason and Being, but there is also stuff here that isn't in the book. In particular, it discusses the claims that, for Spinoza, conceiving implies explaining and that existence is identical to or reducible to conceivability. So, if you're interested in those issues, this paper might be worth a read.

Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the Universe or its initial state this becomes a particularly pressing issue. How to assess the probability of the Universe as a whole is empirically ambiguous, since we can examine only part of a single realisation of the system under investigation: at some point, data will (...) run out. We review the basics of applying Bayesian statistical explanation to the Universe as a whole. We argue that a conventional Bayesian approach to model inference generally fails in such circumstances, and cannot resolve, e.g., the so-called 'measure problem' in inflationary cosmology. Implicit and non-empirical valuations inevitably enter model assessment in these cases. This undermines the possibility to perform Bayesian model comparison. One must therefore either stay silent, or pursue a more general form of systematic and rational model assessment. We outline a generalised axiological Bayesian model inference framework, based on mathematical lattices. This extends inference based on empirical data (evidence) to additionally consider the properties of model structure (elegance) and model possibility space (beneficence). We propose this as a natural and theoretically well-motivated framework for introducing an explicit, rational approach to theoretical model prejudice and inference beyond data. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental – the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states are determined by one’s (...) internal physical state. In order to know that something is the case it is not, in general, enough for one’s internal physical state to be a certain way – the wider world must also be a certain way. If we accept that knowledge is a mental state, we must give up internalism. One might think that this is no cost, since much recent work in the philosophy of mind has, in any case, converged on the view that internalism is false. This thought, though, is too quick. As I will argue here, the claim that knowledge is a mental state would take us to a view much further from internalism than anything philosophers of mind have converged upon. (shrink)