Filosofische verkenning van het karakter van de altijddurende zoektocht van de mens naar waarheid.

In Belgium, as in most countries, each Minister or Secretary is assisted by a limited number of trusted collaborators who constitute the Ministerial Office.The article is an attempt to shed a light on the Chief Ministerial Officer who is the closest collaborator of the Minister.In order to show the role of the Chief Ministerial Officer, the article first describes the tasks, powers and composition of the Ministerial Office to proceed to a more extensive analysis of the functions, the appointment of (...) the Chief Ministerial Officer, and the question whether he can exercise executive power.The most important tasks of the Chief Ministerial Officer are: organization and coordination of the Office and its activities, acting as a «Liaison-Officer» with the Minister, passing on of information, exercising of a form of internal, political and administrative control.The article closes with some more personal remarks, pointing out a few guidelines which a Chief Ministerial Office, should keep in mind. (shrink)

In this study, an attempt is made to understand why Burke at the same time refers to the natural law and to the principle of inheritance as moral standards for the human will. Indeed, the latter principle implies reverence to a particular tradition, whereas natural law is a universal standard, binding all people. First, the meaning of the principle of inheritance in Burke's critique of the French Revolution is explained, and next the conception of the natural law he implicitly adopts. (...) In the latter, the close link between the doctrine of the natural law and the doctrine of prudence deserves our particular attention. It is the task of prudence to give concrete form to the natural law in a way of life and a constitution, by adapting it to the concrete circumstances of a particular society. For Burke, however, this adaptation is the work of the practical reason of many generations and many individuals. Man's individual reason is too limited to invent a good social order. The latter is rather the unintended consequence of a process of bargaining and accommodation. It is thus wise and natural for Burke that people bend their eyes to the tradition as to an instantiation of the natural law. In normal circumstances, individuals do not need to appeal immediately to the principles of natural law. In the next section then, it is shown that it is Burke's conception of Providence which enables him to believe that the tradition represents here and now the natural law. Moreover, the practical substitution of the natural law by the principle of inheritance affects Burke's understanding of prudence. Prudence no longer receives its moral direction in the first place from the natural affections but from the prejudices. The habituation to a way of life and culture provides people with a practical knowledge of what is good here and now. They learn to act in a habitual manner without needing an abstract and universal theory. According to Burke, only 'narrative discourses', interpreting and articulating the 'spirit' of the constitution can have some meaning for the practical direction of our lives. The study ends in an interrogation of this last point. Doesn't a community ever need a universal and abstract theory in order to go on living as a moral community ? And what can it expect from such a moral, c.q. political theory? (shrink)

The article gives a review of inedited sources dealing with the Belgian contribution to European integration in the years 1945-1955. Such sources are kept in the Algemeen Rijksarchief, in the Parliament, various ministerial departments, the Navorsings- en Studiecentrum voor de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, study centres of the major political parties, a number of non-governmental organizations as well as the private archives of a number of politicians.

Bundel filosofische voordrachten over de object-kenmerken van voorwerpen van esthetisch welgevallen.

We propose a pragmatist account of value change that helps to understand how and why values sometimes change due to technological developments. Inspired by John Dewey’s writings on value, we propose to understand values as evaluative devices that carry over from earlier experiences and that are to some extent shared in society. We discuss the various functions that values fulfil in moral inquiry and propose a conceptual framework that helps to understand value change as the interaction between three manifestations of (...) value distinguished by Dewey, i.e., “immediate value,” “values as the result of inquiry” and “generalized values.” We show how this framework helps to distinguish three types of value change: value dynamism, value adaptation, and value emergence, and we illustrate these with examples from the domain of technology. We argue that our account helps to better understand how technology may induce value change, namely through the creation of what Dewey calls indeterminate situations, and we show how our account can integrate several insights on moral change offered by other authors. (shrink)

Samenvatting van de grote wijsgerige systemen van Plato tot en met Hegel, gevolgd door een kritische analyse van de metafysica als uitingsvorm van westers intellectualisme.

Onderzoek naar idealisme en betrokkenheid onder de Nederlandse bevolking.

The debate following Berlin's famous lecture Two Concepts of Liberty circled around the opposition between negative and positive liberty. Berlin delivered his lecture during the period of the Cold War. Therefore it not only provoked a very technical debate within analytic philosophy on the concept of liberty but also contained an important butdebatable political message: those who endorse positive liberty should be conscious of the fact that the logic of positive liberty leads, if not necessarily at least easily to despotism, (...) paternalism and even totalitarianism. It is no unimportant question then to ask whether no conception of political society can be developed which, without denying pluralism and negative liberty, would show that virtue and law are part of freedom, that freedom entails the exercise of certain actions without this leading up to the imposition of one conception of the good. In this article there is shown in what sense the republican or neo-roman vision of civil liberty can fulfil this requirement. The analysis of the different components of the republican conception of freedom shows that republicanism distinguishes itself from liberalism not so much by the defence of different institutions but by a different legitimation of them which ultimately has its origin in taking serious the proper finality of political society, in taking serious, as the Ancients did, the political and not only social nature of man. (shrink)

This article exposes comparable social mechanisms that have generated the social construction of threatening immigrants in Europe in the thirties and in the eighties. The analysis is building on Bourdieu 's theory of the construction of social space and the genesis of social groups. This semiotic-praxiological approach is used to explain why the specific historical and socio-economical conditions in the thirties and eighties have lead to the construction of Jews and Muslims as threatening immigrants. Our discussion focuses on the exemplary (...) caseof the 'migrant problem' in historical and actual political discourse in Flanders. Where at the end of the thirties the notion 'immigrant' referred exclusively to Jews, in the eighties it is used for Turkish and Maroccan 'guestworkers'. In spite of the specific historical and social situation of Jewish and Muslim immigrants parallel social mechanisms and discourses emerge in the redrawing of the social space by creating 'theatening' immigrants/strangers. These mechanisms are a religious anti Judaism/anti-Islamism, rapid social economie change fueling an economical argumented antiJew/anti-muslim and racism legitimized by an internationally disseminated ethno-nationalism. (shrink)

As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call the (...) figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions. (shrink)

‘Vandaag ga je toch niet hardlopen, met zo'n rotweer?’ Vraag van een collega aan een andere collega. ‘Natuurlijk wel,’ klonk het antwoord. ‘Net met dit regenweer vind ik het heerlijk om er eens tegenaan te gaan.’ Dat antwoord beviel me wel. Vorige winter heb ik het nog zo vaak mogen meemaken tijdens het fietsen. Een geselende wind, ijskoude regendruppels, opspattende modder: bij het begin van een trainingsrit roept dat vraagtekens op naar de zin van dit gedoe. Dat duurt hooguit een (...) uur. Dan worden je twijfels overstemd door wat je lichaam je zeer nadrukkelijk influistert: dit is genieten. Van binnen in je lijf lijken allerlei explosieve stofjes naar buiten te willen. Lijden als springstof. Een klein beetje doodgaan om je springlevend te voelen. Duursporters kennen die wijsheid van het lichaam. (shrink)

In dit boek neemt de Tsjechisch-Nederlandse geleerde Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) een centrale plaats in. Met zijn filosofie en onderwijsleer wilde hij de menselijkheid in de samenleving bevorderen. Hij kwam ervoor op dat mensen met verschillende levensbeschouwelijke visies konden samenwerken om dit doel te helpen realiseren. Ook komen rozenkruisers en vrijmetselaars aan de orde, die reeds in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw van zich lieten horen. Anders dan de kerken deden, manifesteerden zij een onafhankelijkheid van denken en een streven naar (...) meer menselijkheid in de cultuur.0In hun denken en spreken spelen ook de ideeën van Comenius een rol, direct of indirect, kritisch ondervragend of opbouwend, maar altijd inspirerend. (shrink)

In this paper we report on our experiences with using network analysis to discern and analyse ethical issues in research into, and the development of, a new wastewater treatment technology. Using network analysis, we preliminarily interpreted some of our observations in a Group Decision Room session where we invited important stakeholders to think about the risks of this new technology. We show how a network approach is useful for understanding the observations, and suggests some relevant ethical issues. We argue that (...) a network approach is also useful for ethical analysis of issues in other fields of research and development. The abandoning of the overarching rationality assumption, which is central to network approaches, does not have to lead to ethical relativism. (shrink)

Peterson's objection to my proposal to treat new technologies as social experiments seems straightforward. Doing so would replace the old question ‘Is technology X ethically acceptable?’ (Let us ca...

Featuring a unique systematic approach to dealing with ethical problems known as the 'ethical cycle, ' the book utilizes an abundance of real-life case studies ...