Departing from Pierre Bayle's discussion of Spinoza in the entry 'Japan' in his Dictionaire, this article discusses how debates about the Far East functioned as a foil for the polemics generated by the Radical Enlightement. The central point of investigation is a debate between Gerard Vossius and Georg Hornius, integrating three main issues where ideas about the East challenged accepted European authority: sacred history, republicanism, and natural philosophy. The article demonstrates that the onset of radicalism involved a plethora of old, (...) new and exotic ideas, from logic to linguistics and Hermeticism, before crystallizing into the scientific and political notions now associated with modernity. (shrink)

In order to contain public care expenditure, policymakers in the Netherlands have over the last decades formulated in ever more stringent ways what ought to be expected from spouses, partners, and family members with regard to care for dependent relatives. The current Dutch coalition cabinet plans to shift the principal responsibility for nonmedical care, including demanding forms of care such as long-term personal care, to individuals and families. I argue that these policy developments imply cost redistribution rather than cost containment (...) and that this redistribution is disadvantageous for women. (shrink)

Thinking out of habit: an embodied perspective In the second half of the twentieth century, habit had received little attention in the cognitive sciences and philosophy of cognition. This despite the extensive theoretical attention habit received in phenomenology and pragmatism. This is because due to influence of behaviorism and the cognitivist revolution, habit was reduced to mechanical stimulus-response reaction that is learned through drill and repetition, and therefore habit cannot be considered intelligent. In this article I argue that a richer (...) and more accurate notion of habit is possible through an embodied vision of cognition, namely enactivism and ecological psychology. This means that we can consider habit as intelligent without equating habit with reflective thought. Such a notion is possible because both enactivism and ecological psychology have their conceptual roots in pragmatism and phenomenology. Secondly, an embodied vison of cognition can describe how our habits are formed from sensorimotor contingencies and are self-organizing patterns of behavior in interaction with an environment. This can be described through the metaphor of ‘laying down a path’, whereby taking a shortcut across a field of grass a path is formed, which enables walking across the field of grass. Laying down a path is more than a metaphor, but also an example of the sociomaterial dimension of habit. Habits are always formed in an interaction between an organism and an environment that is, in our case both material and social. (shrink)

This article is about the logic of the concept of "coherence" as used by historians to justify an argument. Despite its effectiveness in historical arguments, coherence is problematic for epistemologists and some theorists of history. The main purpose of this paper is to present some insights that bear upon the logical status of coherence. As will be demonstrated, this will also shed some light on the allegedly dubious epistemological position of coherence. In general I will argue that, logically seen, coherence (...) is a property of a set of related beliefs which makes it possible to justify a choice out of different factually justifiable interpretations. Coherence disambiguates vague or ambiguous observations. As words lose their vagueness or ambiguity in contexts, so do contexts disambiguate historical facts. My argument will be based on some relatively recent findings about the cognitive processes underlying vision and reading. Research in the field of text linguistics is used to show what kinds of relationship exist between historical representations that might be considered to cohere. (shrink)

Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a significant figure in nineteenth-century logic was firmly established when the philosopher and historian of philosophy William Warren Bartley, III published Dodgson's ?lost? book of logic, Part II of Symbolic Logic, in 1977. Bartley's commentary and annotations confirm that Dodgson was a superb technical innovator. In this paper, I closely examine Dodgson's methods and their evolution in the two parts of Symbolic Logic to clarify and justify Bartley's claims. Then, using more recent publications and unpublished (...) letters, I argue that Dodgson approached the elimination problem in class logic differently than his contemporaries, and in doing so, anticipated several important concepts and techniques in automated deductive reasoning. These materials also provide additional insight into his reasons for writing this book. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

The debate between the amodal and the grounded views of cognition seems to be stuck. Their only substantial disagreement is about the vehicle or format of concepts. Amodal theorists reject the grounded claim that concepts are couched in the same modality-specific format as representations in sensory systems. The problem is that there is no clear characterization of format or its neural correlate. In order to make the disagreement empirically meaningful and move forward in the discussion we need a neurocognitive criterion (...) for representational format. I argue that efficient coding models in computational neuroscience can be used to characterize modal codes: These are codes which satisfy special informational demands imposed by sensory tasks. Additionally, I examine recent studies on neural coding and argue that although they do not provide conclusive evidence for either the grounded or the amodal views, they can be used to determine what predictions these approaches can make and what experimental and theoretical developments would be required to settle the debate. (shrink)

An English double-embedded relative clause from which the middle verb is omitted can often be processed more easily than its grammatical counterpart, a phenomenon known as the grammaticality illusion. This effect has been found to be reversed in German, suggesting that the illusion is language specific rather than a consequence of universal working memory constraints. We present results from three self-paced reading experiments which show that Dutch native speakers also do not show the grammaticality illusion in Dutch, whereas both German (...) and Dutch native speakers do show the illusion when reading English sentences. These findings provide evidence against working memory constraints as an explanation for the observed effect in English. We propose an alternative account based on the statistical patterns of the languages involved. In support of this alternative, a single recurrent neural network model that is trained on both Dutch and English sentences is shown to predict the cross-linguistic difference in the grammaticality effect. (shrink)

While scientific inquiry crucially relies on the extraction of patterns from data, we still have a far from perfect understanding of the metaphysics of patterns—and, in particular, of what makes a pattern real. In this paper we derive a criterion of real-patternhood from the notion of conditional Kolmogorov complexity. The resulting account belongs to the philosophical tradition, initiated by Dennett :27–51, 1991), that links real-patternhood to data compressibility, but is simpler and formally more perspicuous than other proposals previously defended in (...) the literature. It also successfully enforces a non-redundancy principle, suggested by Ladyman and Ross, that aims to exclude from real-patternhood those patterns that can be ignored without loss of information about the target dataset, and which their own account fails to enforce. (shrink)

John Venn and Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) created systems of logic diagrams capable of representing classes (sets) and their relations in the form of propositions. Each is a proof method for syllogisms, and Carroll's is a sound and complete system. For a large number of sets, Carroll diagrams are easier to draw because of their self-similarity and algorithmic construction. This regularity makes it easier to locate and thereby to erase cells corresponding with classes destroyed by the premises of an (...) argument, a particularly difficult task in Venn diagrams for more than four sets. Carroll diagrams can represent existential propositions easily, so they are capable of clearly representing more complex problems than Venn's system can. Finally, both Carroll and Venn diagrams are maximal, in the sense that no additional logic information like inclusive disjunctions is able to be represented by them. Carroll's logic diagrams and logic trees constitute his visual logic system. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Cet article a pour but principal d’analyser la nature de l’utopie. Une fois posé un cadre conceptuel, on se penche, à l’aide d’exemples précis, sur ses figures narratives et descriptives en rapport avec le mythe et l’idéologie dans les champs de la philosophie, de la sociologie et de l’anthropologie. Appréhendée dans sa double acception contradictoire, à la fois comme cité du bonheur et de la perfection « Eu-topos » et/ou cité de nulle part « Ou-topos » selon Thomas (1517), l’utopie (...) révèle d’emblée cette intelligence du double sens. (shrink)

One of the most prominent ethical concerns regarding emerging neurotechnologies is mental privacy. This is the idea that we should have control over access to our neural data and to the information about our mental processes and states that can be obtained by analyzing it. A key issue is whether this information needs more stringent protection than other kinds of personal information. I will articulate and support the view, underlying recent regulatory frameworks, that mental privacy requires a special treatment because (...) of its relation to relevant aspects of personal identity. It has been suggested that this approach could be supported by the idea that mental privacy constitutes a fundamental psychological dimension of privacy. The connection between this psychological view of privacy and identity can be traced back to Irwin Altman’s idea that privacy is an interpersonal boundary regulation process. However, it is not clear whether this notion of privacy can be associated with a conception of identity that is relevant in contemporary neuroethics. I will suggest that the narrative and relational approach to identity, a prominent view in recent ethical discussions of neurotechnology, lines up with key aspects of Altman’s proposal. I suggest that if mental privacy is an essential component of identity, the latter could be affected by technological mind-reading. (shrink)

Although it has been argued that mechanistic explanation is compatible with abstraction, there are still doubts about whether mechanism can account for the explanatory power of significant abstract models in computational neuroscience. Chirimuuta has recently claimed that models describing canonical neural computations must be evaluated using a non-mechanistic framework. I defend two claims regarding these models. First, I argue that their prevailing neurocognitive interpretation is mechanistic. Additionally, a criterion recently proposed by Levy and Bechtel to legitimize mechanistic abstract models, and (...) also a criterion proposed by Chirimuuta herself aimed to distinguish between causal and non-causal explanation, can be employed to show why these models are explanatory only under this interpretation. Second, I argue that mechanism is able to account for the special epistemic achievement implied by CNC models. Canonical neural components contribute to an integrated understanding of different cognitive functions. They make it possible for us to explain these functions by describing different mechanisms constituted by common basic components arranged in different ways. (shrink)

A study of what Descartes calls émotions in his Passions of the Soul suggests that, rather than just a theory of passions—as Descartes himself explicitly claims to be proposing—he was in practice putting forward a more comprehensive theory of passions-émotions, a unified theory which would be closer to what today should properly be called Descartes’ theory of emotions. I try here to make explicit the grounds of this unity by showing that émotions both fit within the functional account Descartes attributes (...) to what he calls passions; and complement the intentionality of passions by expanding it to new objects. In order to show this I offer also a tentative distinction, functionally and intentionally, between passions and émotions in general, on one hand, and, on the other, between the two apparent types of émotions Descartes refers to in the treatise—interior or internal [intérieure] and intellectual [intellectuelle] émotions. (shrink)

It has been argued that the approximate number system (ANS) constitutes a problem for the grounded approach to cognition because it implies that some conceptual tasks are performed by non-perceptual systems. The ANS is considered non-perceptual mainly because it processes stimuli from different modalities. Jones (2015) has recently argued that this system has many features (such as being modular) which are characteristic of sensory systems. Additionally, he affirms that traditional sensory systems also process inputs from different modalities. This suggests that (...) the ANS is a perceptual system and therefore it is not problematic for the grounded view. In this paper, I defend the amodal approach to the ANS against these two arguments. In the first place, perceptual systems do not possess the properties attributed to the ANS and therefore these properties do not imply that the ANS is perceptual. In the second place, I will propose that a sensory system only needs to be dedicated to process modality-specific information, which is consistent with responding to inputs from different modalities. I argue that the cross-modal responses exhibited by traditional sensory systems are consistent with modality-specific information whereas some responses exhibited by the ANS are not. (shrink)

In 1930, Johann von Neumann, together with Rudolf Carnap and Arend Heyting, participated in a conference held in Königsberg, called “Second Seminar on the Epistemology of Exact Sciences”. The idea behind the reunion of these three researchers was to compose a fairly faithful picture of the three main foundational programs of mathematics at the time: formalism, logicism, and intuitionism. The main objective of this paper is to propose an analysis of the text “The Formalist Foundation of Mathematics” presented by von (...) Neumann in this conference. We show how, from von Neumann's perspective, the problem of the consistency of mathematical theories results from the transformation of a genuinely philosophical question into a genuinely logical-mathematical question and how a proof of consistency could be seen as the solution to the foundational problem. In the final part of the text, we present some considerations about Gerhard Gentzen’s consistency proofs and their importance to contemporary proof theory. (shrink)

En este artículo proponemos que el examen del concepto de demostración de Oswaldo Chateaubriand en los capítulos 19, 20 y 21 de la Parte II de Logical Forms incluye aspectos retóricos y dialécticos .In this paper we argue that Oswaldo Chateaubriand’s conception of proof, in chapters 19, 20, and 21 of Part II of Logical Forms, incorporates rhetorical aspects , and dialectical aspects.

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Dominic McIver Lopes’ Four Arts of Photography and Diarmuid Costello’s On Photography: A Philosophical Inquiry examine the state of the art in analytic philosophy of photography and present a new approach to the study of the medium. As opposed to the orthodox and prevalent view, which emphasizes its epistemic capacities, the new theory reconsiders the nature of photography, and redirects focus towards the aesthetic potential of the medium. This symposium comprises two papers that critically examine central questions addressed in the (...) two books, with responses by the two authors in defence of their respective positions. (shrink)

Si prescindiéramos de la composición acto-potencial entre «essentia» y «esse» en la línea del ente creado, necesariamente nos veríamos arrojados al monismo spinozista, esto es, a admitir que solamente hay una substancia (a) única, (b) infinita, (c) increada, (d) necesariamente existente, (e) acto puro, (f) identificada, en último término, con la misma substancia de Dios. En el capítulo LII del segundo libro de la Summa contra gentiles, Santo Tomás obtiene esos atributos divinos a partir de siete argumentos que tienen como (...) objetivo probar que, en el caso que no se aceptara la diferencia real entre essentia y esse en el ente finito —tanto material como inmaterial—, necesariamente deberíamos reconocer que sólo hay una substancia con los seis atributos anteriormente mencionados (cada argumento da lugar a un atributo distinto, exceptuando los dos primeros que desembocan en el mismo, a saber, el de la unicidad). En el artículo presente, siguiendo la interpretación de Norberto del Prado, nos proponemos exponer cómo puede refutarse el monismo spinozista desde la doctrina de Santo Tomás en dos etapas: la primera viene representada por el ya citado capítulo de la Summa contra gentes; la segunda, por la cuarta vía (Summa Theologiae, I, q.2, a.3). (shrink)