Datafication of social life affects what society regards as knowledge. Jasanoff’s regimes of sight framework provides three ideal-type models of authorised knowing in environmental data practice. This paper applies Jasanoff's framework for analysing intelligence practice through an exploratory empirical study of crime and intelligence practitioners in a selection of police services in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. The paper argues that the ‘view from somewhere’ captures the essence of existing police intelligence practices in the four countries but (...) the ‘view from nowhere’ is emerging as a possible future for police intelligence – an approach promoted by technology companies and supported mainly by police leaders and managers. The paper investigates the challenges and limits of a shift by police from VFS to VFN in the production of intelligence; the challenges are primarily political, which threaten the dominance of police contextual knowledge over ‘scientific’ knowledge. These political challenges also have symbolic and material implications. The paper concludes that, because of these challenges, a complete shift from VFS to VFN is not likely to happen. At best the two models might co-exist with the latter subordinate to the imperatives of the former, resulting in further tension between sworn officers and civilians, organisational inertia, as well as technologies that may be under-utilised or abandoned. (shrink)

Written by five scholars whose expertise extends across the disciplines of biblical, historical, systematic, and philosophical theology, this is a careful and ...

Charles Sanders Peirce has been characterized as the greatest American philosophic genius. He is the creator of pragmatism and one of the founders of modern logic. James, Royce, Schroder, and Dewey have acknowledged their great indebtedness to him. A laboratory scientist, he made notable contributions to geodesy, astronomy, psychology, induction, probability, and scientific method. He introduced into modern philosophy the doctrine of scholastic realism, developed the concepts of chance, continuity, and objective law, and showed the philosophical significance of the (...) theory of signs and mathematical logic. The present series is the first published edition of his systematic works. (shrink)

The popular media has repeatedly pointed to pride as one of the key factors motivating leaders to behave unethically. However, given the devastating consequences that leader unethical behavior may have, a more scientific account of the role of pride is warranted. The present study differentiates between authentic and hubristic pride and assesses its impact on leader ethical behavior, while taking into consideration the extent to which leaders find it important to their self-concept to be a moral person. In two experiments (...) we found that with higher levels of moral identity, authentically proud leaders are more likely to engage in ethical behavior than hubristically proud leaders, and that this effect is mediated by leaders’ motivation to act selflessly. A field survey among organizational leaders corroborated that moral identity may bring the positive effect of authentic pride and the negative effect of hubristic pride on leader ethical behavior to the forefront. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman (...) Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period. (shrink)

Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to appreciate (...) the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. It argues that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. The essay shows that the view has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration. (shrink)

This article aims to further test the cognitive claims of the so-called subjectivity account of causal events and their linguistic markers, causal connectives. We took Mandarin Chinese, a language that is typologically completely different from the usual western languages, as a case to provide evidence for this subjectivity account. Complementary to the commonly used corpora analyses, we employed crowdsourcing to tap native speakers’ intuitions about causal coherence, focusing on four result connectives kějiàn ‘therefore’, suǒyǐ ‘so’, yīncǐ ‘so/for this reason’ and (...) yúshì ‘thereupon/as a result’. The analysis shows systematic differences regarding the use of connectives in relations that differ in terms of subjectivity, demonstrating that native speakers make use of subjectivity to encode and decode different types of causal relations in discourse. Moreover, our study evidences that a comprehensive model of subjectivity should include the epistemic dimension of certainty about the subjectivity scale that might be indicated by other linguistic elements. In-depth analyses of the test items revealed that the presence/absence of modality words in the result segments are related to different preferential patterns for the connectives. There is a trade-off between the epistemic dimension of certainty and the expression of subjectivity in the four connectives involved. (shrink)

Theoretical methods for empirical state determination of entangled two-level systems are analyzed in relation to information theory. We show that hidden variable theories would lead to a Shannon index of correlation between the entangled subsystems which is larger than that predicted by quantum mechanics. Canonical representations which have maximal correlations are treated by the use of Schmidt and Hilbert-Schmidt decomposition of the entangled states, including especially the Bohm singlet state and the GHZ entangled states. We show that quantum mechanics does (...) not violate locality, but does violate realism. (shrink)

Sociocultural Issues in Physical Education: Case Studies for Teachers helps teachers increase their sociocultural awareness and knowledge in order to consider how students’ experiences are shaped in and through physical education classes. This book is especially useful as a professional development and academic tool.

In this article, I address two objections developed by Kingma against Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health, the objections that choice of reference classes renders the theory both circular and problematically value-laden. These objections not only apply to the bio-statistical theory of health but also to other naturalistic theories, like the dispositional theory of health. I present three rejoinders. First, I argue that the circularity objection arises from excessive methodological demands. Second, I argue that naturalists can resist the normativist claim that (...) health and pathology are differentiated on the basis of personal or cultural values. Finally, I show that it is possible to justify choices between rival theories of health without the interference of evaluative commitments. With these rejoinders, I conclude that the bio-statistical theory, as well as other naturalistic theories of health utilizing reference classes, is not undermined by Kingma’s arguments. (shrink)

Why do physicians who've taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the body have (...) been used to "cure" dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions rountinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the "abnormality" of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look "normal," thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harrassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy. Synthesizing a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity. (shrink)

Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are due (...) to Halpern & Pearl. Yet all of them ignore Pearl’s first strategy, and the second strategy taken by itself is unable to deliver a consensus. This paper offers a way out by going back to the first strategy: it offers six formal definitions of causal sufficiency and two interpretations of necessity. Combining the two gives twelve new definitions of actual causation. Several interesting results about these definitions and their relation to the various Halpern & Pearl definitions are presented. Afterwards the second strategy is evaluated as well. In order to maximize neutrality, the paper relies mostly on the examples and intuitions of Halpern & Pearl. One definition comes out as being superior to all others, and is therefore suggested as a new definition of actual causation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that current attempts at classifying life–mind continuity (LMC) feature several important ambiguities. We can resolve these ambiguities by distinguishing between the extensional, categorical, and systematic relationships that LMC might encompass. In Sect. 1, I begin by introducing the notion of LMC and the theory behind it. In Sect. 2, I show how different ideas of mind shape different approaches to continuity and how to achieve its aim. In Sect. 3, I canvas various canonical formulations and (...) classifications of LMC; I then demonstrate that they retain important ambiguities. Section 4 builds on this by arguing that we must conceive of the extensional and categorical aspects of continuity independently. In Sect. 5, I show further that current literature has underexplored multiple systematic aspects of continuity. I then take a constructive approach in Sect. 6 by providing a classification model for LMC based on extensional and categorical commitments. Here, I comment on aspects of the thesis omitted from the model but essential for a full classification and thorough comparison between various approaches to LMC. All of these arguments lay the foundation for more exhaustively classifying accounts of LMC. (shrink)

Historical reconstructions of the effects of the intellectual migration are typically informed by one of two conflicting narratives. Some scholars argue that refugee philosophers, in particular the logical positivists, contributed to the demise of distinctly American schools of thought. Others reject this ‘eclipse view’ and argue that postwar analytic philosophy can best be characterized as a synthesis of American and positivist views. This paper studies the fate of one of the most influential schools of U.S. philosophy—Columbia naturalism—and argues that both (...) narratives are part of a larger story. First, I reconstruct the rise of the Columbia school, focusing on its naturalist analyses of science, morality, and religion as well as its contributions to the history of ideas. Next, I trace some of the naturalists’ contacts with German philosophers and show that they encountered a strong bifurcation between historical and scientific philosophy in their discussions. I argue that a similar distinction gradually infected debates between naturalists, eventually resulting in a split within the Columbia school itself. The historically-oriented naturalists, I argue, were overshadowed by the analytic movement, whereas the science-minded naturalists were able to incorporate the views of the émigrés, thereby developing the tradition in new directions. (shrink)

A satisfactory account of the nature of health is important for a wide range of theoretical and practical reasons. No theory offered in the literature thus far has been able to meet all the desiderata for an adequate theory of health. This article introduces a new theory of health, according to which health is best defined in terms of dispositions at the level of the organism as a whole. After outlining the main features of the account and providing formal definitions (...) of ‘health’, ‘healthy’, and ‘healthier than’, I present the main strengths of the proposed account. I argue that the proposed dispositional theory accounts for all paradigm cases of health and pathology, that it circumvents a number of problems faced by rival theories, and that it makes for a naturalistic theory of health with a rigorous metaphysical underpinning. 1Introduction 2The Dispositional Account 3Further Specification of the Dispositional Account 3.1Reference classes 3.2Comparison classes 3.3Which dispositions? 4Advantages of the Dispositional view 5Three Objections and Replies 5.1Objection 1: Counter-examples 5.2Objection 2: Issues with holism 5.3Objection 3: Expediting medicalization 6Final Remarks. (shrink)

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

Robert Sinclair’s *Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction* persuasively argues that Quine’s epistemology was deeply influenced by C. I. Lewis’s pragmatism. Sinclair’s account raises the question why Quine himself frequently downplayed Lewis’s influence. Looking back, Quine has always said that Rudolf Carnap was his “greatest teacher” and that his 1933 meeting with the German philosopher was his “first experience of sustained intellectual engagement with anyone of an older generation” (1970, 41; 1985, 97-8, my emphasis). Quine’s autobiographies contain only a (...) handful of biographical references to Lewis and he regularly soft-pedaled the latter’s influence in private correspondence. In this note, I discuss some archival evidence that helps us better understand Quine’s reluctance to acknowledge Lewis’s influence. I contextualize the relation between Lewis and Quine and argue that the latter viewed his teacher as a retrograde force in modern epistemology, impeding the more rigorous approach that Carnap had been developing in Europe. Next, I briefly discuss Lewis’s contribution to the development of scientific philosophy in the United States and argue that Quine underestimated his teacher’s role in this process. In doing so, I hope to show that Quine’s zealous commitment to Carnap’s approach negatively affected his assessment of Lewis’s influence, thereby supplementing Sinclair’s praiseworthy reconstruction with an explanation of why Quine himself underestimated Lewis’s role. (shrink)

Carnap and Quine first met in the 1932-33 academic year, when the latter, fresh out of graduate school, visited the key centers of mathematical logic in Europe. In the months that Carnap was finishing his Logische Syntax der Sprache, Quine spent five weeks in Prague, where they discussed the manuscript “as it issued from Ina Carnap’s typewriter”. The philosophical friendship that emerged in these weeks would have a tremendous impact on the course of analytic philosophy. Not only did the meetings (...) effectively turn Quine into Carnap's disciple, they also paved the way for their seminal debates about meaning, language, and ontology---the very discussions that would change the course of analytic philosophy in the decades after the Second World War. -/- Yet surprisingly little is known about these first meetings. Although Quine has often acknowledged the impact of his Prague visit, there appears to be little information about these first encounters, except for the fact that the Quines “were overwhelmed by the kindness of the Carnaps” and that it was Quine’s “most notable experience of being intellectually fired by a living teacher”. Neither their correspondence nor their autobiographies offer a detailed account of these meetings. In this paper, I shed new light on Carnap’s and Quine’s first encounters by examining a set of previously unexplored material from their personal and academic archives. Why did Quine decide to visit Carnap? What did they discuss? And in what ways did the meetings affect Quine’s philosophical development? In what follows, I address these questions by means of a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s year in Europe based on a range of letters, notes, and reports from the early 1930s. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Australia and Colombia, this collection of essays uses the workings of the human nervous system to illustrate concepts of culture.

The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that (...) it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the (...) world and the analyst. That the world is parsed in any way among events and objects, perceivers and worlds, etc., reflects equally features of certain real or possible perspectives on the world and features of the world itself. In section 1, I begin by contending that, contrary to the apparent expectations of some in the field, the bare existence of affordances is surely quite uncontroversial. In section 2, I argue that the most reasonable approach to foundational ontology is a relativistic one. In section 3, I address the claim that affordances must be ontologically complemented by effectivities for the sake of completeness, and I shall argue against that claim on grounds that I take to reflect some of Gibson's most important insights. This work will help to clarify the way affordances are to be used in the fourth and final section, where I argue that ontological work, even within special sciences, should not be merely "regional," and that the most attractive general approach to ontological questions is one that is based on affordances, rather than upon things, events, surfaces, and the like. (shrink)

Susanne K. Langer is best known as a philosopher of culture and student of Ernst Cassirer. In this chapter, however, I argue that this standard picture ignores her contributions to the development of analytic philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. I reconstruct the reception of Langer’s first book *The Practice of Philosophy*—arguably the first sustained defense of analytic philosophy by an American philosopher—and describe how prominent European philosophers of science such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Herbert Feigl viewed her (...) as one of the most important allies in the United States. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to Langer’s best-selling *Philosophy in a New Key* and reconstruct her attempts to broaden the scope of the, by then, rapidly growing U.S. analytic movement. I argue that her book anticipated various developments in analytic philosophy but was largely ignored by her former colleagues. I end the chapter by offering some clues as to why New Key did not incite the same laudatory responses from analytic philosophers as her earlier work. (shrink)

The present article reviews modern research on the psychology of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation determines the offset of emotional responding and is thus distinct from emotional sensitivity, which determines the onset of emotional responding. Among the most viable categories for classifying emotion-regulation strategies are the targets and functions of emotion regulation. The emotion-generating systems that are targeted in emotion regulation include attention, knowledge, and bodily responses. The functions of emotion regulation include satisfying hedonic needs, supporting specific goal pursuits, and facilitating (...) the global personality system. Emotion-regulation strategies are classified in terms of their targets and functions and relevant empirical work is reviewed. Throughout this review, emotion regulation emerges as one of the most far-ranging and influential processes at the interface of cognition and emotion. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to plumb the conventions which exist at a specific historical moment in both the aesthetic and scientific spheres. I will assume the existence of a web of conventions within the world of the aesthetic—conventions which have elsewhere been admirably illustrated—but will depart from the norm by examining the synchronic existence of another series of conventions, those of medicine. I do not mean in any way to accord special status to medical conventions. Indeed, the world is (...) full of overlapping and intertwined systems of conventions, of which the medical and the aesthetic are but two. Medicine offers an especially interesting source of conventions since we do tend to give medical conventions special “scientific” status as opposed to the “subjective” status of the aesthetic conventions. But medical icons are no more “real” than “aesthetic” ones. Like aesthetic icons, medical icons may iconographic in that they represent these realities in a manner determined by the historical position of the observers, their relationship to their own time, and to the history of the conventions which they employ. Medicine uses its categories to structure an image of the diversity of mankind; it is as much at the mercy of the needs of any age to comprehend this infinite diversity as any other system which organizes our perception of the world. The power of medicine, at least in the nineteenth century, lies in the rise of the status of science. He conventions of medicine infiltrate other seemingly closed iconographic systems precisely because of this status. In examining the conventions of medicine employed in other areas, we must not forget this power.One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity captured in the iconography of the nineteenth century is the linkage of two seemingly unrelated female images—the icon of the Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. In the course of the nineteenth century, the female Hottentot comes to represent the black female in nuce, and the prostitute to represent the sexualized woman. Both of these categories represent the creation of classes which correspondingly represent very specific qualities. While the number of terms describing the various categories of the prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century, all were used to label the sexualized woman. Likewise, while many groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of the black, especially the black female. Both concepts fulfilled an iconographic function in the perception and the representation of the world. How these two concepts were associated provides a case study for the investigation of patterns of conventions, without any limitation on the “value” of one pattern over another. Sander L. Gilman is professor of Humane Studies in the Department of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies and professor of Psychiatry in the Cornell Medical College, Cornell University. He is the author or editor of numerous studies of European cultural history with a focus on the history of stereotypes. In addition, he has coedited Degeneration with J. E. Chamberlin. His study Jewish Self-Hatred is forthcoming. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the (...) Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)

: The proposal that care ethic(s) (CE) be subsumed under the framework of virtue ethic(s) (VE) is both promising and problematic for feminists. Although some attempts to construe care as a virtue are more commendable than others, they cannot duplicate a freestanding feminist CE. Sander-Staudt recommends a model of theoretical collaboration between VE and CE that retains their comprehensiveness, allows CE to enhance VE as well as be enhanced by it, and leaves CE open to other collaborations.

In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic principles, and construct a definition of causation that satisfies them. We define the concepts of counterfactual dependence and production, and put (...) forward principles such that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, whereas production is an insufficient but necessary condition. The resulting definition of causation is a suitable compromise between dependence and production. Every principle is introduced by means of a paradigmatic example of causation. We illustrate some of the benefits of our approach with two examples that have spelled trouble for other accounts. We make all of this formally precise using structural equations, which we extend with a timing over all events. (shrink)

The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature”, “F-implicature”, “CI”, “Class B” or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

The debate about "race" and "intelligence" seems to be never ending. The "special nature" of the intelligence ascribed to "Jews" has recently reappeared in an essay by one of the authors of the notorious study of race and intelligence - The Bell Curve . How this debate is constructed and what its implications are for the reappearance of "race" as a category in medical and biological science is at the core of this present essay.

in april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...) obtaining the endowed chair at Harvard's department of philosophy, the former taking up the position at Harvard's psychology department.2Besides these biographical parallels, there also... (shrink)

In the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second World War, a small number of European philosophers of science emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the (...) impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of science as a subtler alternative. (shrink)

Beckers & Vennekens recently proposed a definition of actual causation that is based on certain plausible principles, thereby allowing the debate on causation to shift away from its heavy focus on examples towards a more systematic analysis. This paper contributes to that analysis in two ways. First, I show that their definition is in fact a formalization of Wright’s famous NESS definition of causation combined with a counterfactual difference-making condition. This means that their definition integrates two highly influential approaches to (...) causation that are claimed to stand in opposition to each other. Second, I modify their definition to offer a substantial improvement: I weaken their difference-making condition in such a way that it avoids their problematic analysis of cases of preemption. The resulting Counterfactual NESS definition of causation forms a natural compromise between counterfactual approaches and the NESS approach. (shrink)

In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U. S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. This two-part paper reconstructs Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and (...) institutions, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. This first part reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. I describe Carnap’s first substantive contacts with American philosophers as well as the events leading up to his decision to emigrate. In addition, I argue that some of Carnap’s work from the mid-1930s—in particular “Testability and Meaning”—can be better understood if we take into account his attempts to correct the American narrative about logical positivism and his increasingly desperate efforts to find a position in the United States. (shrink)

Die klassische Basis des Bewusstseins ist unzureichend, um seine gesamte Spannbreite zu erfassen: das Gruppenbewusstsein auf der natürlichen Basis der Energie, das Wir-Subjekt und das Historische Subjekt. Die sich ergebenden Beziehungen sind vor allem polar zu begreifen, ihre Logik entfaltet sich bis in das Problem der modernen Antinomien.