The article refers to a long-standing dispute over the relations between the two orders of study of Plato’s dialogues in the Prologue of Albinus (Ch. V and Ch. VI, respectively). The dominant solu- tions are identified: 1) the acceptance of the first curriculum as «for amateurs» and the second curriculum as «for professional platonists» (J. Freudenthal, O. Nüsser, J. Mansfeld); 2) the treat- ment of the first course as a short introduction to the second (B. Reis). On the grounds of (...) the obvious weaknesses of both positions and the lack of textual evidence, a change of perspective is suggested. The author argues that there was no need to coordinate these curricula, since the second curriculum was the only one that Albinus promoted, and the first, which focused on a non-exist- ent «ideal student», served as a «model». In addition, the author proves that Albinus did not offer for study the entire Plato’s dialogues, but only seven of these dialogues in the 5 stages of the second curriculum. (shrink)

Anesthesia research has focused on showing learning in the absence of awareness for good practical reasons. Crucially, continued learning during otherwise clinically adequate anesthesia may affect patients’ well-being on recovery. Theoretically, preserved perceptual priming during anesthesia offers a useful starting point for consciousness research by determining the limits of memory function during minimal consciousness. The big question for consciousness research is not to demonstrate absolutely unconscious processing, but rather to map out the cognitive and neurobiological processes that enable conscious (...) experience itself. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen and J. Raz object that Constructivism is incoherent because it crucially deploys unconstructed elements in the structure of justification. This paper offers a response on behalf of constructivism, by reassessing the role of such unconstructed elements. First, it argues that a shared conception of rational agency works as a starting point for the justification, but it does not play a foundational role. Second, it accounts for the unconstructed norms that constrains the activity of construction as constitutive (...) norms. Finally, on this basis, it draws a contrast between constructivist and foundational methods of ethics, such as deontology and teleology. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

In this reply, we wish to defend our original position and address several of the points raised by two excellent responses. The first response questions the relevance of the notion of ‘serious’ within the context of human germline genome modification. We argue that the ‘serious’ factor is relevant and that there is a need for medical and social lenses to delineate the limits of acceptability and initial permissible applications of HGGM. In this way, ‘serious’ acts as a starting (...) point for further discussions and debates on the acceptability of the potential clinical translation of HGGM. Therefore, there is a pressing need to clarify its scope, from a regulatory perspective, so as to prevent individuals from using HGGM for non-therapeutic or enhancement purposes. The second response criticizes the narrow interpretation of the objectivist approach and the apparent bias towards material innovations when discussing the right to benefit from scientific advancements. As an in-depth discussion of the objectivist and constructivist approaches was beyond the scope of our original paper, we chose to focus on one specific objectivist account, one which focuses on biological and scientific facts. We agree, however, with the critique that material innovations should not be the sole focus of the right to benefit from scientific advancements, which also incorporates freedom of scientific research and access to scientific knowledge scientific freedom and knowledge, including the influence of these on ethical thinking and cultures. (shrink)

The famous mid-20th century debate between Patrick Devlin and Herbert Hart about the relationship between law and morality addressed the limits of the criminal law in the context of a proposal by the Wolfenden Committee to decriminalize male homosexual activity in private. The original exchanges and subsequent contributions to the debate have been significantly constrained by the terms in which the debate was framed: a focus on criminal law in general and sexual offences in particular; a preoccupation with the so-called (...) “harm principle,” a sharp delineation of the realms of law and morality, and a static conception of the relationship between them. This article explores the limitations imposed by these various starting-points and argues for a holistic and symbiotic understanding of the relationship between law and morality. (shrink)

This paper examines some neglected Chrysippean fragments on insecure apprehension (κατάληψις). First, I present Chrysippus’ account of how non-Sages can begin to fortify their insecure apprehension and upgrade it into knowledge (ἐπιστήμη). Next, I reconstruct Chrysippus’ explanation of how sophisms and counter-arguments lead one to abandon one’s insecure apprehension. One such counter-argument originates in the sceptical Academy and targets the Stoic claim that insecure apprehension can be acquired on the basis of custom (συνήθεια). I show how Chrysippus could defend the (...) possibility of custom-based apprehension, while also denying that there is custom-based knowledge. (shrink)

This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised. Scholarly responses to post-truth have not fully addressed these entanglements, treating them either as something to be morally condemned or as accusations against which scholars have to defend themselves (for having somehow contributed to it). Aiming for wider problematisations, the authors of this book use post-truth to (...) open scholarly and societal assumptions to critical scrutiny. Contributions are both conceptual and empirical, dealing with topics such as: the role of truth in public; deep penetrations of ICTs into main societal institutions; the politics of time in neoliberalism; shifting boundaries between fact - value, politics - science, nature - culture; and the importance of critique for public truth-telling. Case studies range from the politics of nuclear power and election meddling in the UK, over smart technologies and techno-regulation in Europe, to renewables in Australia. The book ends where the Corona story begins: as intensifications of Modernity's complex dynamics, requiring new starting points for critique. (shrink)

The subject of Cumming’s large and dense book is dialectic as it developed in the existentialist tradition. Hegel is rightfully a background figure as it is Hegelian dialectic which sets the stage for the subsequent attacks and modifications upon it. The foreground and most dealt with figure in Starting Point is Søren Kierkegaard. Indeed, in one respect, one might well characterize this book primarily as an examination of Kierkegaardian dialectic as the source of and focus of most of the (...) existentialist movement. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on “diffraction.” This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or “new materialist.”. (shrink)

The famous mid-20th century debate between Patrick Devlin and Herbert Hart about the relationship between law and morality addressed the limits of the criminal law in the context of a proposal by the Wolfenden Committee to decriminalize male homosexual activity in private. The original exchanges and subsequent contributions to the debate have been significantly constrained by the terms in which the debate was framed: a focus on criminal law in general and sexual offences in particular; a preoccupation with the so-called (...) “harm principle,” a sharp delineation of the realms of law and morality, and a static conception of the relationship between them. This article explores the limitations imposed by these various starting-points and argues for a holistic and symbiotic understanding of the relationship between law and morality. (shrink)

Plotinus treats certain pre‑philosophical concepts as reliable or promising starting‑points for philosophical study. This article studies the way in which he, in the act of philosophizing, conceives of the passage from an unclear understanding, a kind of pre‑concept, to a better, philosophical conception. What are the sources of this passage? What is the role of data given by sense‑perception? In what way are innate conceptual and cognitive capacities involved? It will be argued that the methodology suggested is a (...) Platonic version of the Stoic appeal to common notions (koinai ennoia). Moreover, Plotinus seems to maintain several features of the empirical original. The concepts discussed are not primarily introspected or intuited, but seem to result from both experience and from innate tendencies. The bottom‑up approach of scrutinizing the combination of inquiries in the Enneads (and in a commentary of Proclus) and the methodological remarks made within these same inquiries, exposes, further, an interesting list of concepts significant for the Neoplatonic theory‑building : freedom, oneness, time and eternity, as well as good and evil. (shrink)

What methodological approaches do research programs use to investigate the world? Elisabeth Lloyd’s Logic of Research Questions (LRQ) characterizes such approaches in terms of the questions that the researchers ask and causal factors they consider. She uses the Logic of Research Questions Framework to criticize adaptationist programs in evolutionary biology for dogmatically assuming selection explanations of the traits of organisms. I argue that Lloyd’s general criticism of methodological adaptationism is an artefact of the impoverished LRQ. My Ordered Factors Proposal extends (...) the LRQ to characterize approaches with sequences of questions and factors. I highlight the importance that ordering one’s investigation plays in approaches at the level of adaptationism by analyzing two research programs in community ecology: competitionists and neutralists. Competitionists and neutralists take opposed starting points and use explanatory and developmental heuristics to consider more factors in due time. On the Ordered Factors Proposal, these approaches are not only the ecological factors they are open to considering but also the order in which they will consider them. My disagreement with Lloyd’s over how to characterize methodological approaches reflects different views about methodological monism and pluralism. (shrink)

After a year at Brandeis I was hired by MIT, and then I realized for the first time that there was a struggle and that I was on the losing end of it. The people there, particularly Judith Thomson, who is still at MIT, called Continental philosophy “stone-age philosophy,” and wouldn’t let me teach in the graduate program at all, because they thought that it would just corrupt the students and waste their time. I did feel a little unhappy because (...) I wasn’t allowed to teach graduate students, but not very, because I had never taught graduate students, so I didn’t think I had to, and I was still feeling grateful that I could teach philosophy anywhere at all. And I had Todes to talk to, and he was writing his brilliant thesis. (shrink)

Responds to the reply by L. T. Hoshmand and J. Martin to S. C. Yanchar and K. B. Kristensen's comments on Hoshmand and Martin's proposal for a naturalistic epistemological approach to psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin argue that in Yanchar and Kristensen's stance toward some aspects of their proposal, they have attributed to Hoshmand and Martin a relationship between theory, method, and data that they do not hold. According to Hoshmand and Martin, in making their case Yanchar and Kristensen have (...) objected to empirical means of evaluation, and essentially undermined their own argument. The authors clarify their position by responding to these claims. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Abstract In Eudemian Ethics 8.2, Aristotle posits god as the starting-point of non-rational desire (particularly for the naturally fortunate), thought, and deliberation. The questions that dominate the literature are: To what does `god' refer? Is it some divine-like entity in the soul that produces thoughts and desires or is it Aristotle's prime mover? And how does god operate as the starting-point of these activities? By providing a careful reconstruction of the context in which god is evoked, I argue (...) against the popular deflationary reading of `god', showing why Aristotle's prime mover must be the end of these natural activities, and how it serves as a final cause for the rational and desirative parts of the soul. I contend that EE 8.2 provides evidence against the traditional notion that god operates as a final cause by drawing natural potentialities to their completion, and suggests instead that it serves as a final cause by entering into the explanation of natures and natural activities as their ultimate end. (shrink)

The paper raises two questions, which seem central to understanding Kant's transcendental epistemology in the first Critique. First, Kant claims that the conditions for the possibility of experience are also conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience (A158/B197). Here the notion of an object is not conceived from the divine standpoint ('the view from nowhere') and is in some sense relativized to experience. But in what sense? Is the notion of an object relativized to one specific kind of (...) experience, human experience? Or is it relativized only to any possible experience? Second, in what sense is Kant's transcendental epistemology a priori? Is it a priori in the strong sense that its starting-point - the notion of experience in the question 'How is experience possible?' - is a priori? Or is it a priori only in the weak sense that, while the notion of experience is obtained empirically, a priori reasoning is required to establish how experience is possible? It has recently been argued (by Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology) that (a) the results that Kant wants to establish transcenden-tally about objects are relative to one specific kind of experience, human experience, and (b) Kant's transcendental epistemology is a priori only in the weak sense that the reasoning is a priori, while the starting-point is empirical. These claims are indeed crucial to Kitcher's overall aim of naturalizing Kant's transcendental epistemology. The aim of the paper is to resist both claims. I argue that Kant's notion of an object of experience is the notion of an object of any possible experience, not the notion of an object of one specific kind of experience, human experience. It follows, I argue, that Kant's transcendental epistemology is a priori in the strong sense that its starting-point is a priori. If we deny strong apriority, we fail to account for Kant's move from the nature of experience to the nature of empirical reality: empirical reality as such, not empirical reality as experienced by a particular variety of creatures capable of experience. The upshot is that, for better or worse, Kant's transcendental epistemology cannot be naturalized. (shrink)

Though scholars of Chinese Theology have expanded the inter-religious dialogue between Christian theology and traditional Chinese philosophy and culture from Neo-Confucianism to other fields such as Taoism, the dialogue with Chinese Buddhism, especially Chan Buddhism, has not been carried out yet. This article mainly reflects on the starting point of Leung In-sing’s Chinese Theology through the perspective of Dharma as Nonduality in Chan. Firstly, it briefly outlines the background and basic ideas of Chinese Theology formulated by Leung In- sing, (...) focusing on discussing the two fundamental theological categories: “Relationship” and “Rapport.” Then, it annotates and analyzes Huineng’s“Dharma as Nonduality.”Finally, from the perspective of Huineng, it rethinks the starting point of Chinese Theology itself and proposes further research questions. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of Susan Fainstein's "The Just City". The review points out some weaknesses of Fainstein's three-dimensional account of justice, because the dimension of equity dominates over those of democracy and diversity. Moreover, the reasons for focusing on the just city instead of the good city are questioned. The review discusses two further important issues emerging from Fainstein's book: 1) the ethos of planners and, more generally, the role of experts in policy making; 2) the (...) use of case studies in applied ethics. (shrink)

RESUMEN: El presente artículo se centra en algunos de los aspectos centrales de la concepción heideggeriana de la indicación formal. Como es sabido, el filósofo toma como punto de partida en una de las más tempranas exposiciones de este metaconcepto, una explicación delimitativa frente a otras operaciones conceptuales. Se revisará críticamente la explicación que Heidegger hace de la generalización a diferencia de la formalización, destacando especialmente que no se trata aquí de una mera distinción entre generalización y formalización, sino de (...) una estructura de fundamentación. En segundo lugar se argumenta que la crítica de Heidegger no se dirige directamente contra la formalización, sino contra el contexto metódico al cual sirve. Por último, a modo de conclusión, se intenta mostrar que para Heidegger concebir la indicación formal como principio de la investigación fenomenológica, supone que ella es, por vía negativa, una radicalización de la tendencia a lo formal. ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to focus on central aspects of Heidegger's conception of the formal indication. An early Heideggerian exposition of this meta-concept take as starting point a differentiation from others conceptual operations. First, it will be critical discuss the exposition of the generalization. The main point is that the distinction of generalization and formalization is rather a foundational structure than a simple difference. This premise leads to the view that the Heidegger's critical attempt is not addressed to the formalization as such, but rather to the methodological context to which the formalization serves. Finally, based on this, it will be claimed that is a necessary condition for the determination of the formal indication as a methodological principle of the phenomenological investigation, that this meta-concept is a radical tendency toward the formal. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been with us for many years, and yet grasping phenomenology remains a difficult task. Heidegger, too, experienced this difficulty and devoted much of his teaching to the challenge of working phenomenologically. This article draws on aspects of Heidegger’s commentary in progressing the teaching and learning of phenomenology, especially as this pertains to research in fields such as education. Central to this task is elucidation of what I believe to be the most important feature of phenomenology—what Heidegger referred to (...) as the ‘starting point’ of phenomenology. I have written this article in the manner of a phenomenological workshop with the intention of inviting the reader to engage experientially with this starting point. (shrink)

Background: Since presenteeism is related to numerous negative health and work-related effects, measures are required to reduce it. There are initial indications that how an organization deals with health has a decisive influence on employees’ presenteeism behavior.Aims: The concept of health-promoting collaboration was developed on the basis of these indications. As an extension of healthy leadership it includes not only the leader but also co-workers. In modern forms of collaboration, leaders cannot be assigned sole responsibility for employees’ health, since the (...) leader is often hardly visible or there is no longer a clear leader. The study examines the concept of health-promoting collaboration in relation to presenteeism. Relationships between health-promoting collaboration, well-being and work ability are also in focus, regarding presenteeism as a mediator.Methods: The data comprise the findings of a quantitative survey of 308 employees at a German university of applied sciences. Correlation and mediator analyses were conducted.Results: The results show a significant negative relationship between health-promoting collaboration and presenteeism. Significant positive relationships were found between health-promoting collaboration and both well-being and work ability. Presenteeism was identified as a mediator of these relationships.Conclusion: The relevance of health-promoting collaboration in reducing presenteeism was demonstrated and various starting points for practice were proposed. Future studies should investigate further this newly developed concept in relation to presenteeism. (shrink)

Are there any theoretical resources – conceptual, lexical or argumentative ones – in the interdisciplinary debate on the evolutionary origins of the arts that can help us go beyond the traditional autonomistic conception of art, in favour of a more continuist and inclusive interpretation of human artistic practices? The paper examines the different voices in the debate, against the background of a cultural naturalist attitude inspired by John Dewey, by focusing on those contributions which can be interpreted in non-reductionist, anti-foundationalist (...) and pluralistic terms. What are particularly valuable are those positions emphasizing the phatic, communicative dimension of artifying behaviours in connection with the acute structural exposure of human organisms to their natural and naturally social environment. (shrink)