Verslag van een eeuwenlange strijd tussen geloof en rede in Nederland via portretten van denkers en beschrijvingen van geestelijke stromingen die hebben bijgedragen tot de ontwikkeling van een humanistische levensbeschouwing.

Montaigne en de twijfel.--Van Calvijn tot Colijn.--Spinoza en het atheïsme.--Diderot en de lust der zinnen.--Feuerbach, de Antichrist.--Stirner en het soevereine ik.--Schopenhauer contra Jehova.--Nietzsche, de joden en de Duitsers.--Bakoenin, de wilde storm.--Ibsen en het anarchisme.--Multatuli, een verlicht despoot.--Tolstoi en de gehate staat.

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

Irad Kimhi considers the conundrum, first addressed by Parmenides, of how negative facts can be the case and be thought, to be the puzzle that philosophy has been working to solve since Plato and Aristotle and wants to do his part by criticizing Frege's dissociation of sense and force and developing a more Aristotelian account of judgment. Michael Della Rocca considers the conundrum a hopeless aporia that we must avoid by embracing Parmenides' radical monism of being and in a recent (...) article (“Parmenides' insight and the possibility of logic”) aims to show that Kimhi is confronted with exactly the kind of insoluble difficulties that he that finds in Frege. The present article agrees with Kimhi that we can think about what is not the case, although thinking reaches all the way to what IS the case. But Della Rocca is right that Kimhi cannot explain by virtue of what we are able to do this. The counter‐proposal says: (1) Thinking reaches to being in that we have learned to read things in the intersubjective spatial field of consciousness as model tokens of singular propositions about them. (2) Negation can be thought of because thinking has its very origin in absolute, non‐well‐founded negation. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore how the history of images and conceptual metaphors resulting from them that we use in educational reflections are formed regardless of if they are problematized in practical life. Insight into history shows how these images are shaped not only by our own experiences and by the context of our lives, but also by the history of such images, which are unconsciously inscribed in our metaphorical speech through so called “residues of meaning”. The (...) paper clarifies this, using the examples of alimentary images, that are a transition from nutrix (wet nurse) to nutritor (teacher). The text offers selected examples of consideration of alimentary images. These are among the most primitive and therefore the deepest images of human experience. This history is an example of a cultural line that goes from ancient educational imagination to the more recent forms of such images, even if always with different accents. (shrink)

This paper discusses the impact of East Asian philosophical ideas on the origins and development of martial arts. The article argues that the ideas of Daoist philosophy were developed into ‘soft styles’ or ‘internal schools’ that are based on the doctrine of ‘wuwei’ (action through non-action, effortless action) which follows the path of Yin. These styles are in opposition to ‘external’ or ‘hard styles’ of martial arts that follow the path of Yang. Daoist philosophy of ‘ziran’ (naturalness, spontaneity) influenced ‘animal’ (...) or ‘imitation styles’ and the paradigm of natural, unplanned, and unforced combat movements. The influence of Buddhism on martial arts is found in techniques of mental tranquillity training for the extreme conditions of combat. The work also shows the significance of Confucianism for the formation of a code of honor for warriors, which includes the ethics of duty and respect. (shrink)

In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the (...) species. Yet neither of these assumptions is justified. In many psychological and behavioural domains, cultural variation begets cognitive variation, and WEIRD samples are recurrently shown to be outliers. In the years since the article was published, attention has focused on the implications this has for research on extant human populations. Here we extend those implications to the study of ancient _H. sapiens_, their hominin forebears, and cousin lineages. We assess a range of characteristic arguments and key studies in the cognitive archaeology literature, identifying issues stemming from the problem of sample diversity. We then look at how worrying the problem is, and consider some conditions under which inferences to ancient populations via cognitive models might be provisionally justified. (shrink)

Watsuji Tetsurô is famous for having constructed a systematic socio-political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought, in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory (...) of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine-tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non-duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities. (shrink)

The use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is based on a (...) misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward’s notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history. (shrink)

Hyperpolitics and Political Commitment in the Twenty-First Century What do the January 6th invasion of the Capitol and the anti-racist demonstrations of mid-2020 have in common? Both birthed some of the largest protest movements in American history, but also diminished rapidly after their initial, pre-revolutionary peak. This article reads the recent political sequence through the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’. In contrast to previous types of post-politics or mass politics, ‘hyperpolitics’ stands for a distinctly novel mode of political commitment characteristic of the (...) 2010s, in which a formerly apolitical public sphere finds itself intensely repoliticized, imposing itself on other domains such as the private, cultural, or economic. The return in question yet also runs across parameters that are more low-cost, low-entry, and low-duration than previous twentieth-century types, in stark contrast Max Weber’s typology of politics as the ‘slow boring of hard boards.’. (shrink)

This paper takes a stand on Hamblin semantics and its relation to the semantics-to-pragmatics interface. Biased questions, where the speaker finds one of the options more likely and expects the confirmation that p is true, raise a concern about the limits of Hamblin semantics. I argue that biased questions have modified Hamblin semantics, while unbiased questions have unconstrained Hamblin semantics. The optional bias feature explains compositionally. It is triggered by likelihood presuppositions ranging Hamblin sets and highlighting the preferred alternative(s). Biased (...) effects are exceptionally possible in alternative and wh-questions, but only in polar questions, they can be encoded lexically and grammatically. I argue that Hamblin semantics covers all core types of questions, while some of its applications for non-questions are problematic. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)

The dependency of a speech recognition system on the accent of a user leads to the variation in its performance, as the people from different backgrounds have different accents. Accent labeling and conversion have been reported as a prospective solution for the challenges faced in language learning and various other voice-based advents. In the English TTS system, the accent labeling of unregistered words is another very important link besides the phonetic conversion. Since the importance of the primary stress is much (...) greater than that of the secondary stress, and the primary stress is easier to call than the secondary stress, the labeling of the primary stress is separated from the secondary stress. In this work, the labeling of primary accents uses a labeling algorithm that combines morphological rules and machine learning; the labeling of secondary accents is done entirely through machine learning algorithms. After 10 rounds of cross-validation, the average tagging accuracy rate of primary stress was 94%, the average tagging accuracy rate of secondary stress was 94%, and the total tagging accuracy rate was 83.6%. This perceptual study separates the labeling of primary and secondary accents providing the promising outcomes. (shrink)

Sustainability is currently the term dominating environmental policy. Its extensive political diffusion is in stark contrast, however, to the extent to which there is agreement over its meaning. Its ability to motivate is not in question, but a certain scepticism surrounds its ideological content. Since ideological terms have no objective basis, it is therefore important for the purposes of environmental policy to establish whether such scepticism is justified.

Eliade and the Doctrine of Mystic Lights Eliade believed that in every religion there are reports about an experience of mystic light. Furthermore, all such reports mention that the person who experienced the light subsequently underwent a deep transformation of her or his spirit and began a new life, the life of a holy man or homo religiosus, which is identical – in its purest form – with the life of a mystic. A clear example of one such transformation is (...) Saul turning into Paul. But a closer analysis indicates, says the Author, that these changes can be of two kinds. They either come suddenly to an unsuspecting and unprepared individual, and that was the case of Saul, or they are a result of concentrated spiritual training, and such a case was described by Gregory Palamas. The former transformation leads to a religious conversion, the latter is the beginning of a new, mystic life. The Author argues that these forms of experience are seeing without using eyes, and as such, they may have served as a paradigm of vivid mental understanding. He quotes Plato and Heidegger to support these views. (shrink)

I argue that the two criteria traditionally identified as jointly sufficient for voluntary behavior according to Aristotle require qualification. Without such qualification, they admit troubling exceptions. Through minding these difficult examples, I conclude that a third condition mentioned by Aristotle – the eph' hēmin – is key to qualifying the original two criteria. What is eph' hēmin is that which is efficiently caused by appetite and teleologically caused by reason such that the agent could have, in theory, acted differently. I (...) propose that praise and blame are justified only when 1: the behavior is voluntary and 2: the agent is susceptible to the positive influences of appropriate praise and blame to help form, improve, or strengthen a good character. Through concentrating on the agent's affectability in morally salient situations, we may better understand the qualified criteria's role in voluntary human behavior in general. (shrink)

abstract David Boonin, in his A Defense of Abortion, argues that abortions that involve killing the foetus are morally permissible, even if granting for the sake of argument that the foetus has a right to life. His primary argument is an argument by analogy to a 'trolley case'. I offer two lines of counterargument to his argument by analogy. First, I argue that Boonin's analogy between his trolley case and a normal unwanted pregnancy does not hold. I revise his trolley (...) case in light of my objections. Second, I argue that Boonin's arguments for the permissibility of killing, when applied to this revised trolley case — and by extension, typical unwanted pregnancies — do not succeed in justifying killing. (shrink)

La obra americana de la baronesa de Wilson es un buen ejemlo para estudiar cómo en el siglo XIX se vive la "batalla" por los "modelos de mundo", fruto del encuentro entre las viejas representaciones de lo americano nacidas de las crónicas y aquellas nuevas producidas por la ideología criolla.Este artículo trabaja las nociones de modelo mundo y modelización de la Crítica como sabotaje (Asensi) ejemplificadas sobre este corpues textual. El modo en que la mujer es representada en este contexto (...) es también decisivo. (shrink)

Charles R. Kesler, an eminent scholar and prodigious editor, has exerted a profound influence on the study of American politics and the practice of American conservatism. A precocious high-school student, he impressed a visiting William F. Buckley Jr. who, before becoming a life-long friend, wrote him a recommendation letter to Yale. Kesler asked for another--to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD under the legendary professor Harvey C. Mansfield. An early passion for political journalism, played out (...) largely on the pages of National Review, led Kesler to author an NR cover story on his third great influence, Harry V. Jaffa. Kesler became a faculty colleague of Jaffa's at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and is perhaps best known as the editorial helmsman of the Claremont Review of Books. The author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism and Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, Kesler also co-edited (with William F. Buckley Jr.) Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edited volume of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling edition version in the country. In this volume, Kesler's students, friends, and colleagues commemorate his four-decade career as a teacher, mentor, and scholar. (shrink)

Includes the whole of the First Part of the Summa Theologica. Pegis's revision and correction of the English Dominican Translation renders Aquinas' technical terminology consistently as it conveys the directness and simplicity of Aquinas' writing; the Introduction, notes, and index aim at giving the text its proper historical setting, and the reader the means of studying St. Thomas within that setting.

Constructibility and complexity play central roles in recent research in computer science, mathematics and physics. For example, scientists are investigating the complexity of computer programs, constructive proofs in mathematics and the randomness of physical processes. But there are different approaches to the explication of these concepts. This volume presents important research on the state of this discussion, especially as it refers to quantum mechanics. This `foundational debate' in computer science, mathematics and physics was already fully developed in 1930 in the (...) Vienna Circle. A special section is devoted to its real founder Hans Hahn, referring to his contribution to the history and philosophy of science. The documentation section presents articles on the early Philipp Frank and on the Vienna Circle in exile. Reviews cover important recent literature on logical empiricism and related topics. (shrink)

Since Hobbes' Leviathan was published in 1651, the 'problem of order' has been known for some time. Despite this long gestation period for social theory even today we do not have a universally agreed upon answer to this 'problem'. One of the reasons behind this lacuna may be the overly dispersed work being done in the economic and sociological traditions. Whereas one tradition favours 'collective action' as a central answer, the other thinks of the problem itself being dissolved by the (...) acceptance of 'socialized man'. Here, an attempt is made to offer the phenomenon of 'cooperation' as a promising middle ground for both traditions. To underline the importance of cooperation as an elementary social activity, first, cooperation is shown as working in tandem with its rival 'competition'. Secondly, several conceptual analyses of what is included in collective action and cooperation are offered. These analyses, thirdly, are deepened by an overview of the motivational bases potentially advancing cooperation. Overall, an awareness of the self-creating character of cooperation is explored, and put forward as the most feasible way of answering the classical problem of order. (shrink)