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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. 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. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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)

“The primary purpose of this book has been to provide a single source of containing the basic information about systematic and theoretical psychology which any student of psychology should have. It is mainly directed at the senior undergraduate major and the beginning of the graduate student.”-Publisher.

This essay concerns the multiple faces of science in ethical environmental decision-making. Environmental crises pose existential threats to human and non-human life. Science is essential to any meaningful response to these crises, but science as it is conventionally understood and practiced is not adequate to the task. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour in his 2013 Gifford Lectures on ―Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature,‖1 I will critique this understanding and practice in relation to four (...) faces of science - capacity builder, informer and guide, philosophy, and institution—and propose reforms. (shrink)

The Best Trick to Teach Critical Thinking. How philosophy of science and magic make young people resilient to nonsense. In a world of ‘alternative facts’ and fact-free opinions, all readily available through the internet, young people can easily fall prey to nonsense, thus running the risk to act on false information. Critical thinking is usually seen as a remedy against accepting and acting on such falsehoods. Under a pragmatist-naturalist interpretation of science, critical thinking is synonymous with scientific inquiry. Magic tricks (...) in the classroom seem to trigger, in an attractive and accessible way, the scientific process of inquiry in students. Two examples are discussed. Provisional results look promising enough to further explore the use of magic tricks in the classroom to train critical thinking in young people. (shrink)

This collection of papers, celebrating the contributions of Swedish logician Dag Prawitz to Proof Theory, has been assembled from those presented at the Natural Deduction conference organized in Rio de Janeiro to honour his seminal research. Dag Prawitz’s work forms the basis of intuitionistic type theory and his inversion principle constitutes the foundation of most modern accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in Logic, Linguistics and Theoretical Computer Science.

The professionalisation of care has resulted in ever increasing specialisation, use of technical innovations and informatisation. This has had consequences for the level and way of involvement of the care provider vis-à-vis the patient. The result has been growing alienation on the part of the patient and flight into non-classical medicine, as well as frustration on the part of medical personnel, likewise with respect to the reactions of patients.A solution is usually sought in more communication. This might be styled the (...) professional answer to alienation and frustration, whereby ‘the human factor’, it is hoped, can be better accounted for. Enhanced communication implies two elements: 1) to better cater for the feelings of patients by trained communicators, i.e. more openness, more client satisfaction; 2) to better take into account patient rights and to actually implement them.The question is whether measures in terms of communication, geared at enhancing client satisfaction and the implementation of patient rights, are the real answer to the above mentioned alienation and frustration. Perhaps the trouble has deeper reasons and requires taking other dimensions into account such as decency and human dignity, which cannot be captured simply in terms of satisfaction and rights.This would mean that the answer must be sought at a deeper level than communication. This level might be called ‘conversation’ . In the second part of the paper, the possible relationship between care and conversation will be briefly analysed. (shrink)

Utopias are much more prone to realization than people would have thought possible, according to Berdiaeff. In the twentieth century, we have witnessed realized totalitarian utopias (such as the ‘really existing socialism’ in East Germany). In the twenty-first century, late modern, capitalist society seems well under way towards the construction of another kind of realized utopianism. Recent developments in today’s health care system (changes in the very meaning of health and care, in medicine and nursing, and even in the ethics (...) of care) all point in the same direction: the growing hold of the utopian mind (the expression is Kolnai’s) on crucial aspects of human life and society. Must we not agree with Berdiaeff that insight in the new ‘realized’ utopianism should induce us to dream ‘of a non-utopian society less “perfect”, but more free’? (shrink)

t. 1. La déduction transcendentale avant la Critique de la raison pure.--t. 2. La déduction transcendentale de 1781 jusqu'à la deuxième édition de la Critique de la raison pure (1887).--t. 3. La déduction transcendentale de 1787 jusqu'à l'Opus postumum.

De bijdragen in deze bundel zijn een uitwerking van een symposium over Erasmus (1467/69-1536), georganiseerd door Driestar hogeschool naar aanleiding van zijn vijfhonderd jaar geleden verschenen Griekse editie van het Nieuwe Testament. Deze Bijbeltekst gold eeuwenlang als de standaard. Verschillende vertalingen zijn hierop gebaseerd, waaronder de Statenvertaling. Erasmus hield zich verder intensief bezig met de vraag hoe de religieuze verdeeldheid kon worden opgeheven. Zijn opvattingen over opvoeding en onderwijs blijken ook invloedrijk onder gereformeerde pedagogen in de zeventiende eeuw. De auteurs (...) illustreren niet alleen Erasmus? veelzijdigheid en zijn betekenis als christenhumanist, maar schenken ook aandacht aan zijn onderbelicht gebleven invloed binnen de protestants-christelijke traditie. (shrink)

This article contains a reply to Guido Vanheeswijck’s critical study of my book Vloeibare waarden. Politiek, zorg en onderwijs in de laatmoderne tijd. I respond to his criticisms on the following topics: what is behind the liquidity of values; conservatism and the sacred; autonomy and the transcendence of values. The discussion also contains insights relevant to these topics from the work of Leszek Kolakowki.

Postmodernism in philosophy holds that traditional philosophy has come (or should come) to an end, and that it must be succeeded by something else, such as “thinking” (Heidegger), empirical science (Quine), linguistic therapy (Wittgenstein), or an “attempt to prevent the conversation of the West from attaining the secure path of science” (Rorty). Clearly, the claim to be postmodern presupposes a view of traditional philosophy, of its characteristics, and of its genesis. In this essay, such a view will be developed, and (...) its consequences for our conception of philosophy will be discussed. The view defended here is different from those of Heidegger and Rorty. For ease of exposition the discussion will refer to Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (shrink)

The uniform halting problem (UH) can be stated as follows:Give a decision procedure which for any given Turing machine (TM) will decide whether or not it has an immortal instantaneous description (ID).An ID is called immortal if it has no terminal successor. As it is generally the case in the literature (see e.g. Minsky [4, p. 118]) we assume that in an ID the tape must be blank except for some finite number of squares. If we remove this restriction the (...) UH becomes the immortality problem (IP). (shrink)

An efficient method of value assessment of a set of exchangeable alternatives A = a1,a2, ? ,an is presented. It particularly applies to situations where certain preferences may be easily evaluated or are already known, while other binary comparisons may not at once be available. Further applications are to ranking partial tournaments and the emergence and the characterisation of organisational hierarchy. By sequentially performing transitively efficient assessments of uncompared pairs, an initial weakly acyclical preference structure in A is transformed into (...) an ordering of A in echelons. We call these nicely surveyable preference structures echelon orders. Theoretical properties of echelon orders are investigated, including a characterisation and a numerical representation. (shrink)

La montée des populismes ramène à l’avant-plan une question souvent négligée : la colère politique pousse-t-elle à l’action ou à l’inaction? Plus fondamentalement, nous cherchons ici à savoir si la propension à l’engagement politique est plus grande lorsqu’elle s’adosse au cynisme ou, au contraire, lorsqu’elle s’adosse au pragmatisme. L’analyse est menée sur deux fronts, l’un empirique, l’autre théorique. Dans le premier cas, la European Social Survey sert de corpus, avec plus de 100 000 répondants, répartis dans 12 pays, sur une (...) période de douze ans. L’analyse théorique s’appuie sur les réflexions de William James et de John Dewey, deux fondateurs du pragmatisme moderne. Ce double effort tend à corroborer l’approche pragmatique, à disqualifier radicalement l’approche cynique et, par ricochet, à s’interroger sur le rôle la colère citoyenne comme levier pour l’action. (shrink)

Books and articles are written with titles like The Last Professors and The End of the University. Of course these headings should not be taken literally. What they indicate are deep changes in the nature of the university and in the understanding of what is a professor. They also demonstrate a profound malaise, especially - but not only-among academics in the Humanities. In this brief paper an attempt is made to understand what is happening. Universities have been changing from institutions (...) dedicated to specific "ends in themselves" into organizations geared towards the production of specific forms of outcome or product. Professors have become professionals in the service of such organizations. It is argued that these changes produce effects which pervert the internal aims of university teaching and research. They originate in a wider cultural, quasi-religious belief in mastery and control. (shrink)

According to many scientists and philosophers, recent biotechnological discoveries and advances lead inescapably to the new, fundamental question: why consider the existing nature of man as untouchable, as sacred? Whereas the general public feels fear and outrage at the very thought of the creation of 'monsters', leading bioethicists find all this talk about the sacredness of human nature unacceptable or prejudiced. It is argued here that an answer to the question "is the existing human nature sacred?" cannot be given unless (...) another question is answered first: "why preserve our ethical way of life ?" In the remaining part of this paper, the desire to transcend existing human nature is understood by linking it to two different forms of dissatisfaction with the human way of life: it can find its origin either in the unwillingness to accept certain 'lotteries' producing all kinds of unequality among people, or in the desire to willingly lose oneself in a game of endless genetic experimentation. (shrink)