This work is for scholars, researchers and students in history and philosophy of science focusing on Logical Empiricism and analytic philosophy (of science). It provides historical and systematic research and deals with the influence and impact of the Vienna Circle/Logical Empiricism on today's philosophy of science. It also explores the intellectual context of this scientific philosophy and focuses on main figures and peripheral adherents.

For Descartes, knowledge exists as ideas in the mind that represent the world. In a radical critique, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor argue that knowledge consists of much more than the representations we formulate in our minds. They affirm our direct contact with reality—both the physical and the social world—and our shared understanding of it.

Dit boek is een hommage aan de filosoof Hubert Dethier (°21 juli 1933), die we zeker in de rij kunnen plaatsen van denkers als Jaap Kruithof, Hans Achterhuis en Etienne Vermeersch. Deze hommage is geen chronologische biografie. Het is daarentegen wel een verhaal waarin het leven van Hubert Dethier verweven wordt met de geschiedenis van zijn denken. Een denken dat zich situeert in de tweede helft van de vorige eeuw en het begin van de huidige eeuw en zich (...) moeiteloos projecteert naar de toekomst. Ontegensprekelijk een woelige en gewelddadige periode, maar ook een tijdgewricht van hoop en verwachting van het “nieuwe”.0. (shrink)

Religiose Vielfalt ist nicht erst eine Erscheinung der "westlichen Moderne". Vielmehr existierten schon in fruhen Zeiten und an verschiedenen Orten der Welt oft mehrere Religionen nebeneinander, sei es dass diese unterschiedlichen Ursprungs waren oder sich aufgrund divergierender Auffassungen der religiosen Akteure innerhalb einer gemeinsamen Tradition ausdifferenzierten. Nicht immer war und ist diese Koexistenz eine friedliche. Die Religion der anderen wird haufig als "deviant" wahrgenommen oder gar als "nonkonformistisch" stigmatisiert und sanktioniert, bis hin zur physischen Vernichtung der "Devianten". Im vorliegenden Band (...) gehen vierzehn ausgewiesene Wissenschaftler_innen aus den Fachgebieten Religionswissenschaft, Soziologie, Sinologie und Judaistik aus ihrer jeweiligen fachlichen Perspektive und anhand diverser Fallbeispiele aus Geschichte und Gegenwart der Frage nach, unter welchen Umstanden, aus welchen Grunden und mit welchen Folgen religiose Pluralitat als Problem wahrgenommen wird. Das Buch verbindet so systematische Fragestellungen mit empirischen Fallbeispielen und liefert damit eine ausgezeichnete Grundlage fur die Erforschung des gesellschaftlichen Umgangs mit religioser Pluralitat. (shrink)

A Critique of Artificial Reason Hubert L. Dreyfus . HUBERT L. DREYFUS What Computers Still Can't Do Thi s One XZKQ-GSY-8KDG What. WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO Front Cover.

The debate on the a fortiori and the universal that took place between April 1914 and April 1919 in the journal Mind has a double interest for argumentation theorists. First, the discussion is an example of a philosophical polylogue that exhibits the characteristics of a quasi-engaged dialogue (Blair Blair, J. A. (2012 [1998]). “The Limits of the Dialogue Model of Argument”. Argumentation 12, pp. 325–339. Reprinted in J.A. Blair, Groundwork in the Theory of Argumentation, pp. 231–244. Dordrecht: Springer, 2012.), confirming (...) Blair’s hypothesis that journal papers and scholarly monographs can be analyzed as turns in non-engaged or quasi-engaged dialogues. It could be said that philosophical argumentation is dialectical but not dialogical. Second, the debate is a discussion in argumentation theory. Generalism in the theory of argument claims that the very possibility of arguing depends on a suitable supply of general rules that specify what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from what kinds of data, while particularism denies this. Although the terminology may be alien, I will also show that the debate on the a fortiori and the universal was a debate on generalism and particularism. (shrink)

Parfois déconsidérée, au cours du XXe siècle, parce que pensée comme la simple écume de processus historiques et sociaux plus profonds, la notion d'événement semble avoir, depuis, bénéficié d'un évident retour en grâce au sein des sciences humaines et sociales - en histoire et en philosophie au premier chef, mais aussi en sociologie, en anthropologie, en linguistique ou en psychanalyse. La référence à l'événement, très utilisée aujourd'hui, donne cependant lieu à des investissements multiples, suppose différentes manières d'articuler le temps et (...) l'histoire, met en jeu des conceptions non équivalentes de la subjectivité, et sous-tend des compréhensions de la rationalité très diverses. Mobilisant tour à tour les analyses de Fernand Braudel et de Reinhart Koselleck, de Jacques Rancière et de Michel Foucault, d'Henri Bergson et de Gilles Deleuze, de Walter Benjamin et d'Hannah Arendt, de Sigmund Freud et de Claude Lévi-Strauss, les essais qui composent ce volume explorent la cartographie complexe et variée des questionnements que la notion contribue à faire émerger et à nourrir."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I was so impressed that I immediately switched majors from ungrounded physics to grounded philosophy.

Human intuition and perception are basic and essential phenomena of consciousness. As such, they will never be replicated by computers. This is the challenging notion of Hubert Dreyfus, Ph. D., archcritic of the artificial intelligence establishment. It's important to emphasize that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible, only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead, he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being in (...) the world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. This helps to explain the practical problems in implementing artificial intelligence algorithms. (shrink)

Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence.

Philosophers now seem to agree that frequentism is an untenable strategy to explain the meaning of probabilities. Nevertheless, I want to revive frequentism, and I will do so by grounding probabilities on typicality in the same way as the thermodynamic arrow of time can be grounded on typicality within statistical mechanics. This account, which I will call typicality frequentism, will evade the major criticisms raised against previous forms of frequentism. In this theory, probabilities arise within a physical theory from statistical (...) behavior of almost all initial conditions. The main advantage of typicality frequentism is that it shows which kinds of probabilities (that also have empirical relevance) can be derived from physics. Although one cannot recover all probability talk in this account, this is rather a virtue than a vice, because it shows which types of probabilities can in fact arise from physics and which types need to be explained in different ways, thereby opening the path for a pluralistic account of probabilities. (shrink)

_Internet_ is een van de eerste boeken waarin het filosofische inzicht -van Plato tot Kierkegaard - betrokken wordt op het debat over de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van het internet. Dreyfus laat zien dat de onstoffelijke, 'vrij zwevende' websurfer zijn oorsprong vindt in Descartes' scheiding van geest en lichaam, en hoe Kierkegaards inzichten in de opkomst van het moderne leespubliek vooruitlopen op de nieuwsgierige, maar elk risico vermijdende internet-junkie. Uitgaande van recente onderzoeken naar het isolement dat veel internetgebruikers ervaren, toont Dreyfus (...) aan hoe het internet, door zijn nadruk op privé-ervaringen, gebruikers berooft van wezenlijke, belichaamde vermogens zoals vertrouwen, stemmingen en betrokkenheid bij met anderen gedeelde lokale aangelegenheden. _Internet_ is verplichte kost voor iedereen die on line is en is geïnteressseerd in onze plaats in de 'e-revolutie'. (shrink)

Our contemporary nihilism -- Homer's polytheism -- From Aeschylus to Augustine : monotheism on the rise -- From Dante to Kant : the attractions and dangers of autonomy -- Fanaticism, polytheism, and Melville's "evil art" -- David Foster Wallace's nihilism -- Conclusion : lives worth living in a secular age.

Towards the end of his life, Bataille became increasingly fascinated by prehistoric culture. His analysis of the Lascaux cave frames it as the symbolic site of our birth, envisioning in its art the final step to anthropogenesis: we, as a species, became human once we began smearing pigment on cave walls. Bataille’s account of this dual birth of art and humanity is neither an ode to our rational mind nor to our capacity for aesthetic contemplation. Rather, the murals adorning the (...) cave would be the result of primordial ecstatic experiences. For Bataille, art ties in with excess: an activity devoid of use-value rising above necessity or instinct. Lascaux becomes the scene of a primordial crime against utility. Bataille’s cave stands as a counterargument to the enlightenment’s fixation on progress and productivity. The decades since, have seen our obsession with productivity grow even more pervasive. This paper explores the constellation of excessive behaviours which Bataille presents as key to the birth of art and, through an autoethnographic study, asks whether, and how, this ‘spectrum of excess’ is still relevant to artists today. (shrink)

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the -background practices- of a culture - the practices that shape (...) and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals. (shrink)

This book is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole. To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method - "interpretative analytics" - capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent (...) validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition. (shrink)

L'idée que comprendre permet de prévoir est une idée moderne. Elle est fondée sur la découverte, que le monde physique obéit à des lois (Galilée, et surtout Newton). Elle a mis fin à la pensée magique, et elle est à la base de la révolution scientifique et du monde moderne. Or nous assistons à la dissociation de ces deux choses. D'une part, on réalise par exemple que les lois mathématiques de certains phénomènes, mêmes parfaitement connues, sont si sensibles à la (...) moindre imprécision dans les données que cela rend la prévision impossible en pratique. C'est le fameux "effet papillon" : un battement d'ailes à Rio pourrait être la cause d'une tornade au Texas. D'un autre côté, la puissance des big data rendrait inutile, selon certains essayistes et quelques scientifiques, le raisonnement théorique. On n'aurait plus besoin de comprendre les causalités puisque la corrélation suffirait. Un retour au CASSINI Moyen Age en somme, aux recettes qui ont marché, mais avec des données des millions de fois plus nombreuses. En termes économiques, on a découvert avec la révolution scientifique qu'une explication théorique coûtait moins cher que certaines observations : Newton avait prévu l'aplatissement de la Terre sans qu'on ait besoin d'aller voir aux pôles ; aujourd'hui grâce à la rapidité des ordinateurs et des réseaux, les termes de la comparaison s'inversent. A ceci, Hubert Krivine répond notamment que les big data et l'intelligence artificielle qui se fonde sur elles sont conservatrices, et que si elles conviennent aux assureurs, elles ne peuvent pas prévoir des choses nouvelles et extraordinaires. Les ordinateurs composent aujourd'hui sur demande du Mozart ou des ballades celtiques, aucun n'invente de musique nouvelle. Ils conduisent des voitures, mais aucun n'explique le mystère de la "matière noire". La machine peut aider l'homme, elle ne le remplacera pas. (shrink)

It is generally argued that if the wave-function in the de Broglie–Bohm theory is a physical field, it must be a field in configuration space. Nevertheless, it is possible to interpret the wave-function as a multi-field in three-dimensional space. This approach hasn’t received the attention yet it really deserves. The aim of this paper is threefold: first, we show that the wave-function is naturally and straightforwardly construed as a multi-field; second, we show why this interpretation is superior to other interpretations (...) discussed in the literature; third, we clarify common misconceptions. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

A remarkable turnaround by a leader with a remarkable philosophy: Find your noble purpose. Put people at the center. Unleash human magic. "It was Fall in Minnesota. It was getting cold and we were supposed to die." This is how Hubert Joly describes the early, dark days as CEO of Best Buy, a job most thought he was crazy to accept. Amazon was tearing a disruptive path through retail, but in the face of that existential threat Joly did something (...) remarkable: he saved Best Buy and remade it into a thriving company rated as one of the most desirable businesses to work for. Having recently stepped down as Chairman and CEO, Joly is ready to share the leadership principles that underpinned the resurgence of Best Buy and that he believes are at the heart of business: pursue a noble purpose, put people at the center, unleash human magic, and treat profit as an outcome. There was a time when many would call this a soft philosophy. But times are changing. Best Buy and 180 other companies signed the momentous Business Roundtable statement in support of stakeholder capitalism. The Covid-19 pandemic further pushed many businesses to lead from a place of purpose and with humanity. The changes underway are not a revolt, but a revolution. And Joly provides concrete advice on how to implement principles that can serve as beacons for the next era of capitalism. Joly himself was transformed from a hard-charging, deeply analytical McKinsey consultant to a leader who believes in what he calls human magic. He will share how so much of what he initially learned about management is either dated, incomplete, or simply wrong-including how to turn around a business, develop and implement a strategy, mobilize an organization, and what it takes to be a great leader. The leadership principles Joly lays out worked at Best Buy. They can also contribute to the necessary re-foundation of business and capitalism around purpose and humanity. (shrink)