Versuche zur Bestimmung der Abhängigkeit der Unterschiedsschwelle einer geometrischen Grössendimension von der Intensität bei verschiedener schwacher, nahe der absoluten Intensitätsschwelle liegender Lichter. Im Gegensatz zu den komplizierten Formeln, die die Abhängigkeit bei höheren Lichtintensitäten dargeben, gilt nahe der Minimalschwelle der Intensität ein bilinearer Ausdruck der Invarianz des Produkts der Reizunterschiedsschwelle der Grössendimension und der Lichtintensität . Die Bedeutung des Befundes im Zusammenhang mit früheren ähnlichen Ergebnissen wird besprochen.Experiments on determination of the difference threshold of visual size using different, weak lights, (...) near the absolute intensity threshold, are presented. Contrary to the complicated formulae obtained when the light is bright, near the minimal intensity threshold a simple bilinear equation holds true: the product of the stimulus threshold of visual size and the intensity threshold is found to be invariant. The significance of the findings are discussed in connection with similar, previous results.Des expériences pour déterminer le seuil spatial différentiel , en utilisant différentes lumières faibles, à la limite du seuil de l'intensité absolue, sont exposées. Contrairement aux formules compliquées qu'onn obtient avec des lumières intenses, près du seuil minime de l'intensité, une simple expression bilinéaire est valable: le produit du seuil spatial et du seuil de l'intensité est invariable. La signification de ce fait est discutée, en même temps que des résultats analogues antérieurs. (shrink)

Contextualist accounts of aesthetic predicates have difficulties explaining why we feel that speakers are disagreeing when they make true and compatible but superficially contradictory aesthetic judgments. One possible way to account for the disagreement is hybrid expressivism, which holds that the disagreement happens at the level of pragmatically conveyed, clashing contents about the speakers’ conative states. Marques defends such a strategy, combining dispositionalism about value, contextualism, and hybrid expressivism. This paper critically evaluates the plausibility of the suggested pragmatic mechanisms in (...) conveying the kind of contents Marques takes to explain disagreements. The positive part suggests an alternative account of how aesthetic judgments are sources of information about speakers’ conative aesthetic states. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should (...) be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice, not power, that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era. (shrink)

Attributing moral responsibility to an agent requires that the agent is a capable member of a moral community. Capable members of a moral community are often thought of as moral reasoners (or moral persons) and, thus, to attribute moral responsibility to collective agents would require showing that they are capable of moral reasoning. It is argued here that those theories that understand collective reasoning and collective moral agency in terms of collective decision-making and commitment – as is arguably the case (...) with Christian List and Philip Pettit’s theory of group agency – face the so-called “problem of the first belief” that threatens to make moral reasoning impossible for group agents. This paper introduces three possible solutions to the problem and discusses the effects that these solutions have in regard to the possibility of attributing moral responsibility to groups. (shrink)

This volume presents new essays on the theory and practice of recognition. In order to retain its overall plausibility as a critical social theory, contemporary recognition theory needs to be able to successfully combine theory with real-life perspectives, in both contemporary and historical contexts. Contemporary recognition theory has developed into an established and active multidisciplinary research programme. The chapters in this volume have two main purposes. First, they engage in theoretical development of the contemporary theories of recognition. The theoretical chapters (...) explore the conceptual histories and the environments of recognition, as well as the connection between recognition and authenticity, emancipation, and social ontology. Second, they connect the theoretical insights of contemporary recognition with analyses of contemporary and historical social practices. These chapters explore themes such as populism and polarization, models of harmful invisibilization and social ignorance, the problem of evil and suffering, and social justice phenomena such as the #MeToo movement. The Theory and Practice of Recognition will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, social ontology, political theory, and sociology. (shrink)

This paper argues that the proponents of epistemological scientism must take some stand on scientific methodology. The supporters of scientism cannot simply defer to the social organisation of science because the social processes themselves must meet some methodological criteria. Among such criteria is epistemic evaluability, which demands intersubjective access to reasons. We derive twelve theses outlining some implications of epistemic evaluability. Evaluability can support weak and broad variants of epistemological scientism, which state that sciences, broadly construed, are the best sources (...) of knowledge or some other epistemic goods. Since humanities and social sciences produce epistemically evaluable results, narrow types of scientism that take only natural sciences as sources of knowledge require additional argumentation in their support. Strong scientism, which takes sciences as the only source of knowledge, also needs to appeal to some further principles since evaluability is not an all-or-nothing affair. (shrink)

This article combines the neo-Hegelian theory of recognition with an analysis of social pathologies to show how the populist formulations of political goals in struggles for recognition are – despite their potential positive motivating force – socially pathological. The concept of recognition, combined with the idea of social pathologies, can thus be used to introduce normative considerations into the populism analysis. In this article it is argued that, although populism is useful in the sense that it aims to ameliorate real (...) experienced lack of recognition through fostering political movements, it is also harmful. The simplified populist representations of collective identities are often guilty of essentializing and reifying identities. Furthermore, populist identities are also harmful for the populists themselves as the simplified view is applied also to oneself. This article claims that these dynamics can be understood as an obstruction of discursive identity-formation. From the perspective developed, populism leads to the lack of genuine mutual recognition between those who struggle to get their identities affirmed. (shrink)

In this chapter we examine Moti Mizrahi’s claim that philosophers’ opposition of scientism is founded on their worry that scientism poses “a threat to the soul or essence of philosophy as an a priori discipline”. We find Mizrahi’s methodology for testing this thesis wanting. We offer an alternative hypothesis for the increased resistance of scientism: the antipathy started as a reaction to the New Atheist movement. We also consider two varieties of weak scientism, narrow and broad, and argue that narrow (...) versions of scientism draw unnatural and unfounded distinctions within science. Mizrahi belongs somewhere between these two types, but he commits the same mistakes as proponents of the narrow variety. We demonstrate that Mizrahi’s defence of weak scientism is problematic, once again, due to methodological reasons. As an alternative, we propose that weak scientism should be based on epistemic opportunism. Epistemic opportunism explains the success of science with scientists’ willingness to adopt any methods that demonstrably work. We also show how opportunistic scientism can avoid charges of triviality. (shrink)

This paper reviews how research on the demarcation problem has developed, starting from Popper’s criterion of falsifiability and ending with recent naturalistically oriented approaches. The main differences between traditional and contemporary approaches to the problem are explicated in terms of six postulates called the traditional assumptions. It is argued that all of the assumptions can be dismissed without giving up on the demarcation problem and that doing so might benefit further discussions on pseudoscience. Four present-day research movements on evaluating the (...) boundaries of science are introduced: (1) philosophy of pseudoscience, (2) social epistemology of dissent, (3) agnotology, and (4) evaluation of expertise. Researchers working within these areas have abandoned some or all traditional assumptions. (shrink)

Recent epistemology of modality has seen a growing trend towards metaphysics-first approaches. Contrastingly, this paper offers a more philosophically modest account of justifying modal claims, focusing on the practices of scientific modal inferences. Two ways of making such inferences are identified and analyzed: actualist-manipulationist modality and relative modality. In AM, what is observed to be or not to be the case in actuality or under manipulations, allows us to make modal inferences. AM-based inferences are fallible, but the same holds for (...) practically all empirical inquiry. In RM, modal inferences are evaluated relative to what is kept fixed in a system, like a theory or a model. RM-based inferences are more certain but framework-dependent. While elements from both AM and RM can be found in some existing accounts of modality, it is worth highlighting them in their own right and isolating their features for closer scrutiny. This helps to establish their relevant epistemologies that are free from some strong philosophical assumptions often attached to them in the literature. We close by showing how combining these two routes amounts to a view that accounts for a rich variety of modal inferences in science. (shrink)

In God Emperor of Dune, Leto II explains to Moneo why people destroyed thinking machines in the Butlerian Jihad: "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." The Orange Catholic Bible (OCB), the key religious text in the Dune universe, forbids the creation of machines that imitate human thinking: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." The OCB focuses on human mental (...) abilities – especially computation, reason, and logic – that have a status that machines should not emulate. In Frank Herbert's universe, divine imitation and creation are presented in conflicting ways: on the one hand, they are strictly prohibited, on the other, they are aspirations for key characters. Mentats replace machines by use of hard, cold, logical thinking and reasoning with machine‐like efficiency. (shrink)

The growing use of automated decision-making (ADM) systems in the public sector and the need to control these has raised many legal questions in academic research and in policymaking. One of the timely means of legal control is accountability, which traditionally includes the ability to impose sanctions on the violator as one dimension. Even though many risks regarding the use of ADM have been noted and there is a common will to promote the safety of these systems, the relevance of (...) the safety research has been discussed little in this context. In this article, I evaluate regulating accountability over the use of ADM in the public sector in relation to the findings of safety research. I conducted the study by focusing on ongoing regulatory projects regarding ADM, the Finnish ADM legislation draft and the EU proposal for the AI Act. The critical question raised in the article is what the role of sanctions is. I ask if official accountability could mean more of an opportunity to learn from mistakes, share knowledge and compensate for harm instead of control via sanctions. (shrink)

This entry discusses three forms of politics of recognition: politics of universalism, affirmative identity politics and deconstructive politics of difference. It examines the constitutive, causally formative, and normative role that recognition has for the relevant senses of universal standing, particular identity, and difference in these approaches.

We review some of the major accounts in the current epistemology of modality and identify some shared issues that plague all of them. In order to provide insight into the nature of modal statements in science, philosophy, and beyond, a satisfactory epistemology of modality would need to be suitably applicable to practical and theoretical contexts by limited beings. However, many epistemologies of modality seem to work only when we have access to the kind of knowledge that is at least currently (...) beyond our reach. Or, in the extreme case, it is argued that even if we knew all the relevant information about the respective domain – or even the entire state of the world – there would still remain a special class of modal truths that would be left unaccounted for. Neither picture bodes well for practical applicability, nor for the philosophical justification of these epistemologies. This is especially the case as we hold that one of the main motivations for modal inquiry typically arises in cases of imperfect information and limited cognitive resources. We close by providing a partial remedy to the situation by suggesting an overall framework of relative modality (RM) that can be used to both unify some existing modal epistemologies and, at the same time, make them more metaphysically modest. (shrink)

We introduce a new approach to the model theory of metric structures by defining the notion of a metric abstract elementary class (MAEC) closely resembling the notion of an abstract elementary class. Further we define the framework of a homogeneous MAEC were we additionally assume the existence of arbitrarily large models, joint embedding, amalgamation, homogeneity and a property which we call the perturbation property. We also assume that the Löwenheim-Skolem number, which in this setting refers to the density character of (...) the set instead of the cardinality, is ${\aleph_0}$ . In these settings we prove an analogue of Morley’s categoricity transfer theorem. We also give concrete examples of homogeneous MAECs. (shrink)

Filosofian piirissä on viime aikoina käyty intensiivistä keskustelua metafysiikan naturalisoinnista ja tieteellisen metafysiikan mahdollisuudesta. Yksi tämän keskustelun keskeisistä teoksista on James Ladymanin ja Don Rossin (sekä osin John Collierin ja David Spurrettin) kirjoittama Every Thing Must Go (2007). Tässä kirjassa Ladyman ja Ross puolustavat, omien sanojensa mukaan, neopositivistista skientismiä. Heidän ohjelmansa on skientistinen, koska Ladymanin ja Rossin mukaan tiede on ainoa tapa tutkia todellisuutta objektiivisesti. Neopositivismi ilmenee puolestaan siinä, että heidän ohjelmansa tukeutuu eräänlaiseen verifikaatioperiaatteeseen. Ladymanin ja Rossin verifikaatioperiaate ei kuitenkaan (...) perustu, toisin kuin aiempien positivistien vastaava, kielelliseen merkitykseen tai suoriin havaintoihin vaan tiedeyhteisöön. Tiedeyhteisö päättää, mitkä kysymykset ja teoriat ovat tutkimisen arvoisia. Ladyman ja Ross esittelevät kirjassaan kaksi metafyysistä ohjelmaa: negatiivisen ja positiivisen. Toisaalta he pyrkivät kritisoimaan analyyttistä metafysiikkaa, jota he pitävät liiaksi irtautuneena nykytieteestä, ja toisaalta antamaan oman naturalistisen metafysiikkansa. Pyrimme tässä artikkelissa osoittamaan, että Ladymanin ja Rossin positiivinen ohjelma on jännitteessä, tai jopa ristiriidassa, heidän negatiivisen ohjelmansa kanssa. Tämä näkyy Ladymanin ja Rossin sitoutumisesta modaalirealismiin ja siinä, miten he yrittävät oikeuttaa sitoumuksensa. Jännitteen vuoksi Ladymanin ja Rossin on luovuttava joko modaalirealismista tai metafysiikalle antamistaan tiukoista vaatimuksista. (shrink)

This article provides an in-depth analysis of a conversational exchange initiated by a customer’s price question in real-life business-to-business sales encounters. The analysis focusses on when the customer requests a price, what that implies as well as how the price discussion is conducted. Marketing literature usually considers product/service price to be an obstacle that the salesperson needs to overcome; we demonstrate that the price question is a positive signal for the salesperson. By requesting the price, the customer claims sufficient understanding (...) of the offer, recognition of the service value and a readiness to move to the next phase in the meeting. The salesperson initiates an insert expansion to tailor the price to her or his customer and then informs the price in an expanded clausal response to build customer value. The conversation analytic study was based on a dataset of 13 video-recorded B2B sales meetings in Finland. (shrink)

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary (...) and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy. (shrink)

In a 1911 research manuscript, Husserl puts forth an idea that resembles Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment presented in the 1970s. In this paper, I study Husserl’s “Twin Earth” passage and assess various readings of it to determine whether Husserl is better understood as an internalist or an externalist. I define internalism as the view that content depends solely on internal factors to the subject, whereas I distinguish between two versions of externalism: weak externalism, according to which content can also (...) depend on other subjects’ conceptions, and strong externalism, which maintains that content can also depend on the real world. Only strong externalism maintains what McGinn calls “the philosophical significance of externalism” because it entails realism about the world. I argue that Husserl is better understood as an externalist when it comes to the “Twin Earth” passage, but the more precise question regarding weak and strong externalism requires further evidence. This additional evidence concerns Husserl’s concepts of the identity of sense (Sinnesidentität) and worldly meaning (weltlicher Sinn). In evaluating externalist Husserl interpretations, I classify Smith’s externalist interpretation as weak, whereas I take Crowell’s externalist interpretation to be ambivalent. Crowell’s excellent but somewhat embryonic interpretation leaves the dependence relation between content and the real world ambiguous. I clarify this relation by assessing McGinn’s argument for the philosophical significance of externalism from the Husserlian viewpoint. Although this study is historical, it also serves a systematic purpose because the externalist interpretation of Husserl calls into question central issues in phenomenology and externalism. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a special issue on recognition and democracy. We outline the constitutive and enabling relations between democracy and recognition. We distinguish between pre-political and political forms of identity and recognition, between horizontal and vertical forms of recognition, and between democratic and other ways or arranging the vertical and horizontal aspects of political life. We also distinguish between the roles of a subject and a co-author of law. The intruduction also includes an overview of the individual articles (...) in this special issue. The issue tries to fill some theoretical gaps in theories of democracy and recognition, with a special emphasis on feminist politics. (shrink)

Yleensä Wienin piirin loogista empirismiä kannattaneet filosofit mielletään antirealisteiksi. Tässä artikkelissa kuitenkin argumentoidaan, että piirin johtohahmo Moritz Schlick oli eräänlainen realisti myös nykystandardien valossa. Näin ollen – niin yllättävältä kuin se kuulostaakin – positivismi ja realismi ovat yhteensovitettavissa. Schlick tosin erotti kannattamansa empiirisen realismin jyrkästi metafyysisestä realismista, jota hän piti merkityksettömänä. Schlickin realismin esittelyn lisäksi artikkelissa tarkastellaan yleisellä tasolla hänen epistemologiaansa, kielifilosofiaansa ja metafysiikan kritiikkiään. Tekstissä pohditaan myös Schlickin suosiman realismin asemaa ja relevanssia nykyisessä realismikeskustelussa.

This paper draws from two central intuitions that characterize modern western societies. The first is the normative claim that our identities should be recognized in an authentic way. The second intuition is that our common matters are best organized through democratic decision-making and democratic institutions. It is argued here that while deliberative democracy is a promising candidate for just organization of recognition relationships, it cannot fulfil its promise if recognition is understood either as recognition of ‘authentic’ collective identities or as (...) recognition of too atomistic or individualized subjects. If deliberative democracy is to be understood as successfully providing authentic recognition of individual identities, it requires a specific understanding of how individuals’ recognition needs and desires are collectively and institutionally constituted. Furthermore, it is argued that even if deliberative democracy can provide the necessary circumstances for individual self-realization, it comes with homogenizing tendencies and cannot fully avoid the problems of multiculturalism. (shrink)

Since the groundbreaking work by Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth in the early 1990s, there has undeniably been greater interest in the concept of recognition in critical social theory, social philosophy, and the politics of identity. Perhaps this is because ‘everyone cares about recognition’ . At least, this is what Cillian McBride claims in his book, Recognition, which is one of the more recent publications in Polity’s Key Concepts series.While everyone might care about recognition, it is not entirely clear what (...) it is that they care about. The usage of the term in the current literature varies from Taylor’s cultural recognition, where the emphasis is on valuing particular identities and traditions, to Honneth’s anthropological recognition that is more centered on personhood and the development of healthy self-relations through our relations to others. From these two strands, McBride takes there to be a shared underlying Hegelian intuition that humans are social beings whose self-un .. (shrink)

This book offers an updated and comprehensive phenomenology of norms and normativity. It is the first volume that systematically tackles both the normativity of experiencing and various experiences of norms. Part I begins with a discussion of the methodological resources that phenomenology offers for the critique of epistemological, social and cultural norms. It argues that these resources are powerful and have largely been neglected in contemporary philosophy as well as social and human sciences. The second part deepens the discussion by (...) studying the existential and moral-philosophical foundations of practical normativity. It takes on the task of illuminating the origins of normativity and offers phenomenological alternatives to the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian approaches that dominate contemporary debates on the sources of normativity. The final part proceeds from practical normativity to the analysis of the guiding powers of values, perceptual norms, instincts and drives. These are different forms of intentionality that in various manners contribute to the constitution of human practices. By clarifying their divergences and their interrelations, the volume demonstrates that normativity is not one phenomenon but a complex set of various phenomena, with multiple origins and sources. Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on issues of normativity in phenomenology, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. (shrink)

“Deconstruction is justice”. How are we to understand this striking and extraordinary sentence Jacques Derrida has written? Whose justice? Which deconstruction? The article asks these questions by thinking the continuity and discontinuity between Jewish, especially rabbinic, thinking and Derrida's writing. The article approaches Derrida's ethico-legal thinking through the tradition of Judaismby putting the sentence ``deconstructionis justice'' on the stage of the Jewish jurisprudence, which may be revealed as utmost important in relation to deconstructibility of law and undeconstructibility of justice. The (...) main question is, how Derridashares the tradition of Judaism. If deconstructive legal studies promises to take justice seriously then it have to understand Derridean deconstruction of law being “based” on the double tradition of the philosophico-phenomenological and Abrahamic thinking. The article concentrates on the Abrahamic tradition in Derrida's thinking. The first part of the article asks after the mystical foundation of law and its relationship to the writing of law. The second one asks the principle of justice. The third part addresses the problem of the time of justice and its relationship to messianism. All in all, the article traces through the writing, principle, and time ofjustice possible chiasmas of Derrida and the Jewish jurisprudence. (shrink)

One of the key concepts of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is the noema. Husserl uses the concept to denote the aspect of what is intended in experience as it remains within the transcendental domain of inquiry after the phenomenological reduction. Despite such seeming simplicity, Husserl’s discussion of the noema is ambiguous to the extent that it has sparked a wide-ranging debate in the secondary literature. The gist of the dispute concerns the question about the relation between the noema and the (...) object: whether the noema is content, ontologically distinct from the object, or the object itself just considered differently in philosophical reflection. In this paper, I propose an interpretation that aims to reconcile two opposing positions of this debate (the so-called West and East Coast interpretations). The impetus for the reconciliation stems from the fact that both interpretations seem to be correct while they also suffer from their own shortcomings. I propose the reconciliation by applying a distinction Husserl makes between two areas of phenomenological investigation, neutralized pure phenomenology and non-neutralized phenomenology of reason. Having clarified the distinction between them, I suggest that both competing interpretations can be partially correct when reserved for the aspect of the noema in either of the two areas of phenomenological investigation. Finally, I show how this proposal could aid in resolving issues in the recent discussion concerning Husserl’s noema and the internalism–externalism debate in philosophy of mind. (shrink)

How Moderate Relativists Should Explain the Appearance of Disagreements About Taste Moderate relativists such as Kölbel and Lasersohn have motivated the semantic framework by arguing that unlike contextualism, it can explain why there appear to be disagreements of taste. The solution relies on the relativist notion of a proposition whose truth depends on a judge parameter. This notion coupled with the view that contradicting propositions create an appearance of disagreement allegedly enables them to secure the right predictions. This paper questions (...) the argumentative strategy by showing that there are no basis to infer pragmatic data from formal semantics. I then present a way to understand the relativist framework from the point of view of mental representation. The view put forward explains the missing relation between the semantic framework and pragmatics, and predicts why there is an appearance of disagreements about taste. (shrink)

Bringing together philosophical, political, and psychoanalytical perspectives, in analysing both the concept and the phenomenon of evil, the contributors to..

_Law and Evil_ opens, expands and deepens our understanding of the phenomenon of evil by addressing the theoretical relationship between this phenomenon and law. Hannah Arendt said 'the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe'. This statement is, unfortunately, more than valid in the contemporary world: not only in the events of war, crimes against humanity, terror, repression, criminality, violence, torture, human trafficking, and so on; but also as evil is used rhetorically to (...) condemn these acts, to categorise their perpetrators, and to justify forcible measures, both in international and domestic politics and law. But what is evil? Evil as a concept is too often taken as something that is self-evident, something that is always already defined. Taking Kant’s concept of radical evil as a starting point, this volume counters such a tendency. Bringing together philosophical, political, and psychoanalytical perspectives, in analysing both the concept and the phenomenon of evil, the contributors to this volume offer a rich and thoroughgoing analysis of the multifaceted phenomenon of evil and its relationship to law. (shrink)

This work sets out to demonstrate the inadequacy of current legal paradigms in explaining the phenomena of fragmentation through conceptions of modern law. It also addresses the possibility of legal and ethical alternativesand political counterstrategies.

In Westworld, humans are masters and androids are enslaved to work according to their programmers’ whims. One of the biggest reasons for the mistreatment of androids in Westworld is the prevailing attitude that even though they skillfully imitate human life, androids are nothing more than programmed automatons. Without self‐consciousness, the androids just cannot be conscious of any harm done to them or of any suffering they incur. The performative view brings the social roots of personhood into focus better than the (...) capacity view. On a closer look, the struggles that the androids of Westworld are going through take two distinct forms. First, they struggle to be included in the sphere of recognized persons. Second, they struggle for a change in the conditions of personhood. In a broader perspective, the problem in Westworld lies within the social setting that focuses on the origin of the agent. (shrink)

William Ockham joins the general view that in its natural capacities, the intellectual soul of Christ is nobler than any other human being’s soul, but he does not think that Christ is omniscient or omnipotent in his human nature. Despite this, Ockham genuinely believes that Christ did not sin during his earthly life. He did not have any intrinsically sinful acts which are acts of the will, nor even acts that can be extrinsically sinful, such as acts of the sensory (...) appetite like the desire to fornicate. Furthermore, Christ did not have the tinder of sin which inclines ordinary human beings to commit sinful acts. Christ had, instead, a kind of inner rebellion against reason and will. His sensory acts, such as feeling hungry, thirsty, and tired were not always in accordance with his reason and will. As viator, Christ had the greatest possible amount of delight. Since God miraculously prevented the sadness-excluding effect of beatitude and delight in his soul, there was at the same time sadness in him. In hea... (shrink)

This paper argues that the main global critiques of scientism lose their punch because they rely on an uncharitable definition of their target. It focuses on epistemological scientism and divides it into four categories in terms of how strong (science is the only source of knowledge) or weak (science is the best source of knowledge) and how narrow (only natural sciences) or broad (all sciences or at least not only the natural sciences) they are. Two central arguments against scientism, the (...) (false) dilemma and self‐referential incoherence, are analysed. Of the four types of epistemological scientism, three can deal with these counterarguments by utilizing two methodological principles: epistemic evaluability of reliability and epistemic opportunism. One hopes that these considerations will steer the discussion on scientism to more fruitful pastures in the future. For example, there are interesting methodological considerations concerning what evaluability or reliability and epistemic opportunism entail. (shrink)