This study focuses on the question of how Muslim chaplains can, through their interventions, exert an influence on the situation of refugees, characterised by vulnerability and loss of home. Based on definitions in social work and anthropology studies, home can be conceptualised as a key anthropological need, comprised of spatial, temporal, relational and spiritual dimensions. Referring to an empirical study on asylum chaplaincy in Switzerland, this study analyses how five Muslim chaplains accompany refugees, how their styles of chaplaincy differ in (...) practice and what effects their interventions have. These empirical results are then brought into conversation with a theoretical framework, to explore the connections between counselling and vulnerability. While it could be argued that referring to the vulnerable situation of refugees reinforces an image of passivity, the co-construction of a home represents a collaborative effort and empowers refugees by mobilising both forces and resources. Chaplains, in particular, can contribute to the relational and spiritual dimensions of home. For refugees, articulating their religious concerns and working together with Muslim chaplains, means they can address the limits of the existing asylum system and demand recognition of cultural diversity. (shrink)

Abstract The specter of the ?group mind? or ?collective subject? plays a crucial and fateful role in the current debate on collective intentionality. Fear of the group mind is one important reason why philosophers of collective intentionality resort to individualism. It is argued here that this measure taken against the group mind is as unnecessary as it is detrimental to our understanding of what it means to share an intention. A non-individualistic concept of shared intentionality does not necessarily have to (...) get stuck with some collectivist super-agent. Rather, the specter of the group mind arises from a deep-seated ?Cartesian? preconception concerning intentionality, which we should try to overcome. *I am greatly indebted to Raimo Tuomela for his comments. Also, I wish to thank Michael Bratman, Fabienne Peter, Richard Raatzsch and Katrin Meyer. (shrink)

How can we study bounded rationality? We answer this question by proposing rational task analysis —a systematic approach that prevents experimental researchers from drawing premature conclusions regarding the rationality of agents. RTA is a methodology and perspective that is anchored in the notion of bounded rationality and aids in the unbiased interpretation of results and the design of more conclusive experimental paradigms. RTA focuses on concrete tasks as the primary interface between agents and environments and requires explicating essential task elements, (...) specifying rational norms, and bracketing the range of possible performance, before contrasting various benchmarks with actual performance. After describing RTA’s core components we illustrate its use in three case studies that examine human memory updating, multitasking behavior, and melioration. We discuss RTA’s characteristic elements and limitations by comparing it to related approaches. We conclude that RTA provides a useful tool to render the study of bounded rationality more transparent and less prone to theoretical confusion. (shrink)

The concept of experience by John Dewey revisited: conceiving, feeling and “enliving”. Dewey takes a few steps towards a differentiation of the concept of experience, such as the distinction between primary and secondary experience, or between ordinary (partial, raw, primitive) experience and complete, aesthetic experience. However, he does not provide a systematic elaboration of these distinctions. In the present text, a differentiation of Dewey’s concept of experience is proposed in terms of feeling, “enliving” (a neologism proposed in this paper) and (...) conceiving. Feeling refers to the basic mode of experience where action, emotion, cognition and communication constitute an original unity. Enliving, aesthetic experience, constitutes the lifeworld, as a person-in-world experience. Even though enliving is holistic and relational, a certain distance emerges between action, emotion and cognition which allows contemplation and choice. Conceiving, on the other hand, refers to the isolating and abstracting understanding of the world with even greater distance between action, emotion and cognition. Such a differentiation provides a clearer understanding of the scope of education. It avoids the risks of regressive tendencies in the concept of experience, and it helps to include conceiving within the realm of experience. (shrink)

Hansjörg Hohr; Illusion—How Friedrich Schiller Can Cast Light on Bildung, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 36, Issue 3, 16 December 2002, Pages 487–50.

In this paper, I propose an existentialist-phenomenological model that conceives of mental illness through the terminology of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In particular, the concepts of existentiality, disturbance and the relation between ‘being-with’ and ‘the one’, will be implemented in order to reconstruct the experience of mental illness. The proposed model understands mental illness as a disturbance of a person’s existentiality. More precisely, mental illness is conceptualized as the disturbance of a person’s existential structure, the process of which leads to (...) a becoming explicit of the otherwise implicit dynamical structure that constitutes a person’s experience. In particular, the existential component of ‘being-with’ comes to play a central role in the disturbance of existentiality, thus, I will claim, that it enables a person’s structure of experience to be ‘open for normativity’. By adopting a pragmatist stance on Heideggerian phenomenology, the suggested model proves compatible with naturalist and normativist theories of mental illness while still offering a phenomenological description of the phenomenon. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

I will argue that the cognitive-linguistic enterprise should step up its efforts to embrace the social and pragmatic dimensions of language. This claim will be derived from a survey of the premises and promise of the cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of language and be defended in more detail on logical and empirical grounds. Key elements of a usage-based emergentist socio-cognitive approach known as Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2014, 2015) will be presented in order to demonstrate how social and pragmatic (...) aspects can be integrated and operationalized in a cognitive-linguistic framework. (shrink)

Joining insights from social science and philosophy, this book offers a nuanced view on the discourse of evil, which has been on the rise in the West in recent years. Exploring the famous 'Pear Theft' episode in St Augustine's Confessions, it looks beyond the theological implications of the event to focus instead on the secular insights that it offers when the event is placed in the context of social thought. With attention to Augustine's lengthy reflections on a seemingly marginal episode, (...) the author contends that it is possible to discern the elements of a convincing account of intentional evil action, the Pear Theft representing a case of joint radical improvisation that lacks collective deliberation. As such, a new perspective emerges on familiar and more intuitive forms of evil in joint action that involve group identification and institutional action. Evil in Joint Action will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and philosophy with interests in ethics, collective action and concepts of evil. (shrink)

In this text, features of fiction are discussed as to their ability for handling cultural diversity in cosmopolitan education. The argument is developed in two steps. First, the biblical story about the construction of the the tower of Babel is analyzed and discussed with respect to what is says about diversity and how it says it. In a second step, aspects of art are gathered from various sources, Aristotle, Cassirer, Gadamer, Langer, Kant, Rorty, in order to define the communicative possibilieties (...) of art with respect to cosmopolitan education. (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish three claims, which I label individual intentional autonomy, individual intentional autarky, and intentional individualism. The autonomy claim is that under normal circumstances, each individual's behavior has to be interpreted as his or her own action. The autarky claim is that the intentional interpretation of an individual's behavior has to bottom out in that individual's own volitions, or pro-attitudes. The individualism claim is weaker, arguing that any interpretation of an individual's behavior has to be given in (...) terms of individual intentional states. I argue that individual intentional autonomy implies neither individual intentional autarky, nor intentional individualism, with which it is usually lumped together. I further argue that this insight is the key to an adequate view of an important class of actions, i.e., plural actions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers definitions of racism which emphasise its behavioural, motivational, and cognitive features. The behavioural definition (‘the failure to give equal consideration, based on the fact of race alone’) is rejected, primarily due to its inability to distinguish between ‘true’and ‘ordinary’racism. It is the former which is morally most objectionable — and which identifies the essence of the racist attitude and belief. The central part of the essay argues in favour of the motivational approach to the definition (‘the (...) infliction of unequal consideration, motivated by the desire to dominate, based on race alone’) and clarifies the way in which racism, thus understood, conflicts with the principle of human equality. Finally, the cognitivist definition (‘unequal consideration, out of a belief in the inferiority of another race’) is also rejected, despite its intuitive appeal. The overall discussion has important implications for moral philosophy. It is shown both that the principle of human equality does not strictly imply equal consideration, and that one may violate the principle of equal perception, yet not deny the principle which, from the perspective of this argument, is the more fundamental element in the principle of human equality, the principle of equal human worth. (shrink)

It has been claimed in the literature that collective intentionality and group attitudes presuppose some “sense of ‘us’” among the participants (other labels sometimes used are “sense of community,” “communal awareness,” “shared point of view,” or “we-perspective”). While this seems plausible enough on an intuitive level, little attention has been paid so far to the question of what the nature and role of this mysterious “sense of ‘us’” might be. This paper states (and argues for) the following five claims: (1) (...) it is neither the case that the sense in question has the community (or “us”) in its content or as its object nor does the attitude in question presuppose a preexistent community (or “us”) as its subject. (2) The “sense of ‘us’” is plural pre-reflective self-awareness. (3) Plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the individual mind. (4) The most important conceptions of plural subjects, collective persons, or group agents in the current literature fail to recognize the nature and role of plural self-awareness, and therefore fall short in important respects. (5) In spite of the striking similarities between the plural and the singular mind, there are important differences to consider. The authority of the singular first person point of view has no equivalent in the plural case. (shrink)

To analyze the task of mental arithmetic with external representations in different number systems we model algorithms for addition and multiplication with Arabic and Roman numerals. This demonstrates that Roman numerals are not only informationally equivalent to Arabic ones but also computationally similar—a claim that is widely disputed. An analysis of our models' elementary processing steps reveals intricate tradeoffs between problem representation, algorithm, and interactive resources. Our simulations allow for a more nuanced view of the received wisdom on Roman numerals. (...) While symbolic computation with Roman numerals requires fewer internal resources than with Arabic ones, the large number of needed symbols inflates the number of external processing steps. (shrink)

This volume outlines a model of language that can be characterized as functionalist, usage-based, dynamic, and complex-adaptive. The core idea is that linguistic structure is not stable and uniform, but continually refreshed by the interaction between three components: usage, the communicative activities of speakers; conventionalization, the social processes triggered by these activities and feeding back into them; and entrenchment, the individual cognitive processes that are also linked to these activities in a feedback loop. Hans-Joerg Schmid explains how this multiple (...) feedback system works by extending his Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model, showing how the linguistic system is created, sustained, and continually adapted by the ongoing interaction between usage, conventionalization, and entrenchment. Fulfilling the promise of usage-based accounts, the model explains how exactly usage is transformed into collective and individual grammar and how these two grammars in turn feed back into usage.0The book is exceptionally broad in scope, with insights from a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines. It provides a coherent account of the role of multiple factors that influence language structure, variation, and change, including frequency, economy, identity, multilingualism, and language contact. (shrink)

Cognition is both empowered and limited by representations. The matrix lens model explicates tasks that are based on frequency counts, conditional probabilities, and binary contingencies in a general fashion. Based on a structural analysis of such tasks, the model links several problems and semantic domains and provides a new perspective on representational accounts of cognition that recognizes representational isomorphs as opportunities, rather than as problems. The shared structural construct of a 2 × 2 matrix supports a set of generic tasks (...) and semantic mappings that provide a unifying framework for understanding problems and defining scientific measures. Our model's key explanatory mechanism is the adoption of particular perspectives on a 2 × 2 matrix that categorizes the frequency counts of cases by some condition, treatment, risk, or outcome factor. By the selective steps of filtering, framing, and focusing on specific aspects, the measures used in various semantic domains negotiate distinct trade-offs between abstraction and specialization. As a consequence, the transparent communication of such measures must explicate the perspectives encapsulated in their derivation. To demonstrate the explanatory scope of our model, we use it to clarify theoretical debates on biases and facilitation effects in Bayesian reasoning and to integrate the scientific measures from various semantic domains within a unifying framework. A better understanding of problem structures, representational transparency, and the role of perspectives in the scientific process yields both theoretical insights and practical applications. (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to examine this claim, and to place it in the wider context of recent epistemological debates about the role of sociality in knowledge acquisition.

Met als uitgangspunt de theorie en wijsbegeerte van het wettenrecht wordt een inzicht gegeven in de ontwikkeling van recht en staat in de 20e eeuw.

This paper examines and compares the ways in which intentions of the singular kind and the plural kind are subjective. Are intentions of the plural kind ours in the same way intentions of the singular kind are mine? Starting with the singular case, it is argued that “I intend” is subjective in virtue of self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is special in that it is self-identifying, self-validating, self-committing, and self-authorizing. Moving to the plural form, it is argued that in spite of apparent differences, (...) attitudes of the form “we intend” are subjective in the same way. The self-knowledge at work here is plural rather than singular. This supports a plural subject account of collective intentionality. It is argued that the worries sometimes raised in the literature against the metaphysical “spookiness” of plural subjects are due to a fundamental misconception of the way in which attitudes of either kind –singular and plural – are subjective. (shrink)

Thought about scientific models and modelling practices in the sciences has a long tradition. It has recently been argued that this practice of science also exists in metaphysics. In this paper, I show that this view has two significant historical forerunners: Hans Vaihinger and Salomon Maimon. Vaihinger provided what is today often seen as the starting point of the contemporary debate on scientific models as fictions. He argued that fictions can be equally useful in the sciences as in metaphysics. However, (...) Vaihinger‘s position is problematic. Firstly, he mainly credits Kant for providing the first comprehensive account of the method of fictions in the sciences. I will argue that contrary to his claims, it was Maimon – whom Vaihinger only mentions in passing – who first adapted Kant‘s doctrine of ideas to serve the purposes of a fictionalist agenda. I will show that Maimon‘s account of scientific fictions already contains many of the features which Vaihinger claims to have discovered himself. Secondly, Vaihinger’s failure to distinguish between the use of fictions in the sciences and metaphysics creates a problem for some types of metaphysical fictions. I show that Maimon‘s account of metaphysical fictions identifies and avoids this problem. (shrink)

Considering Ethics in Dance, Theatre and PerformanceBannonFionaPalgrave Macmillan. 2018. pp. xxi + 250. £59.99.

Schmid analyzes the historical and recent controversies over language in the U.S., comparing it to two official multilingual societies: Canada and Switzerland. She also examines how people of different language communities co-exist in, or are divided by, a political community.

Dieses Buch bietet eine gründliche Einführung in die Religionsphilosophie von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Der Autor diskutiert Jacobi's Ansichten über Glauben, Vernunft und Selbstbewusstsein und zeigt, wie diese Ansichten zu einer grundlegenden Neudefinition von Religion und Philosophie führten. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United (...) States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Über vierzig Jahre hat Schleiermacher regelmäßig gepredigt. Die dritte Abteilung der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe dokumentiert diese Tätigkeit in vierzehn Bänden. Der vorliegende Band enthält 84 Predigten aus den Jahren 1830 und 1831, von denen 31 hier zum ersten Mal überhaupt, 9 weitere in bislang nicht publizierten Textfassungen veröffentlicht werden.

_Climbing - Philosophy for Everyone_ presents a collection of intellectually stimulating new essays that address the philosophical issues relating to risk, ethics, and other aspects of climbing that are of interest to everyone from novice climbers to seasoned mountaineers. Represents the first collection of essays to exclusively address the many philosophical aspects of climbing Includes essays that challenge commonly accepted views of climbing and climbing ethics Written accessibly, this book will appeal to everyone from novice climbers to seasoned mountaineers Includes (...) a foreword written by Hans Florine Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, 2010. (shrink)