In a world undergoing rapid, large-scale technological change, the phenomenon of technosocial disruption is receiving increasing scholarly and societal attention. While the phenomenon is most actively delineated in philosophy of technology, it is also receiving growing attention within a different area of philosophy, namely the so-called “4E Cognition” approach to philosophy of mind. Despite this shared interest in technosocial disruption, there is relatively little exchange between the theorizing going on in these two different areas of philosophy. One of our paper's (...) two main aims is programmatic: to motivate the fruitfulness of such an exchange. We do this by turning to a specific case of technosocial disruption, namely Teenage Cancel Culture [TCC]. TCC cannot be disentangled from the introduction of social media platforms [SMPs] into modern day social life. Hence, we will speak of SMP-Afforded TCC. SPM-afforded TCC is a phenomenon fretted over by societal actors but strikingly ignored in academic research. In our effort to narrow this knowledge gap, we analyze SMP-afforded TCC from a perspective of technosocial disruption enriched by insights from 4E-Cognition. This brings out a specific worry about the role of SMPs in the social lives of teenagers. We argue that SMP-afforded TCC disrupts the social relational domains within which teenagers develop, maintain, and express their precarious social identities, by creating social affordances that are hostile to healthy risky interpersonal identity-exploration. As such, SMP-afforded TCC not only cancels particular individuals for particular acts; it may also pre-emptively cancel a certain way of being a social self, namely a healthy social risk-taker. We conclude the paper by proposing several potential routes for mitigating the perniciously disruptive effects of SMP-afforded TCC and identifying future areas for research. (shrink)

Janette Dinishak’s work has helped shed critical light on the scientifically questionable and ethically troubling tendency in psychology and philosophy of mind to theorize autistic people as deficient empathizers. In a recently published reply on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Dinishak (2024) brings her important perspective on this topic to bear on our paper “AAC Technology, Autism, and the Empathic Turn” (2022). Dinishak is largely sympathetic to our view while also raising a number of rich and thoughtful philosophical (...) questions. Since each of these questions is capable of jumpstarting a lengthy exchange, we focus our response on those questions that, we hope, are particularly fruitful for advancing further conversation. With this aim in mind, we also engage with some of Dinishak’s own insights from her 2016 chapter “Empathy, Like-mindedness, and Autism.” … [please read below the rest of the article]. (shrink)

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose ways of learning and making sense of the world may not be best supported through these traditional forms of pedagogy. As we discuss in this chapter, we, as engineering ethics educators, (...) designed and implemented a new engineering ethics exercise with which we aimed to promote inclusivity at the levels of form and content. At the content level, students were invited to critically engage with inclusivity-undermining ableist assumptions in technology development. This took shape, at the form level, through a hands-on ‘material tinkering’ workshop in which students collaboratively and creatively altered (or ‘hacked’) artifacts used in contexts of disability and healthcare, so as to operationalize values of inclusivity and accessibility. Our hunch was that this hands-on tinkering workshop would simultaneously encourage a meaningful way of engagement with these ethical issues and values, while also enacting a more inclusive learning environment by enriching the range of pedagogical activities and learning formats available to our students.As we aim to show in this chapter, we believe this hunch largely panned out – though there are clear areas for future improvement pertaining to the pilot exercise itself and the research we conducted on the exercise. We begin by offering a description of our tinkering exercise. We discuss the exercise’s source of inspiration (Sect. 16.2.1) and its implementation (Sect. 16.2.2), which is visually captured via photographic documentation. We then discuss (Sect. 16.3) how we utilized a triangulated research method to assess the pedagogical value of the exercise. After we discuss our findings, we conclude by identifying areas for future improvement (Sect. 16.4). (shrink)

Over the course of the past few decades 4E approaches that theorize cognition and agency as embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive have garnered growing support from figures working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Correspondingly, there has been a rising interest in the wider conceptual and practical implications of 4E views. Several proposals have for instance been made regarding 4E’s bearing on ethical theory, 505–526, 2009; Cash, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 645–671 2010). In this paper I contribute (...) to this trend by critically examining the enactive contribution made by Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, 505–526 and by laying the foundations for an alternative enactive approach. Building off recent enactive approaches to social interaction, Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, maintain that many of our actions and intentions “and in particular the ethical significance of what we do and mean” are “emergent from the interactions in which we participate”. Taking this seriously, they argue, entails a radical shift away from moral theory’s traditional emphasis on individual or personal responsibility. I challenge their suggestion that accepting a broadly enactive 4E approach to cognition and agency entails the kind of wholesale shift they propose. To make my case I start by revisiting some of the general theoretical commitments characteristic of enactivism, including some relevant insights that can be gathered from Vasudevi Reddy’s broadly enactive approach to developmental psychology. After that I examine both the arguments internal to Colombetti and Torrance’s proposal and, in an effort to sketch the beginnings of an alternative view, I draw some connections between enactivism, the ethics of care and P.F. Strawson’s work on personal responsibility. I believe that a consideration of the commonalities but also the differences between these views helps advance the important conversation concerning the link between enactivism and questions of personal responsibility in ethical theory that Colombetti and Torrance have undeniably helped jumpstart. (shrink)

Online therapy sessions and other forms of digital mental health services (DMH) have seen a sharp spike in new users since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having little access to their social networks and support systems, people have had to turn to digital tools and spaces to cope with their experiences of anxiety and loss. With no clear end to the pandemic in sight, many of us are likely to remain reliant upon DMH for the foreseeable future. As such, (...) it is important to articulate some of the specific ways in which the pandemic is affecting our self and world-relation, such that we can identify how DMH services are best able to accommodate some of the newly emerging needs of their users. In this paper I will identify a specific type of loss brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and present it as an important concept for DMH. I refer to this loss as loss of perceptual world-familiarity. Loss of perceptual world-familiarity entails a breakdown in the ongoing effortless responsiveness to our perceptual environment that characterizes much of our everyday lives. To cash this out I will turn to insights from the phenomenological tradition. Initially, my project is descriptive. I aim to bring out how loss of perceptual world-familiarity is a distinctive form of loss that is deeply pervasive yet easily overlooked-hence the relevance of explicating it for DMH purposes. But I will also venture into the space of the normative, offering some reasons for seeing perceptual world-familiarity as a component of well-being. I conclude the paper with a discussion of how loss of perceptual world-familiarity affects the therapeutic setting now that most if not all therapeutic interactions have transitioned to online spaces and I explore the potential to augment these spaces with social interaction technologies. Throughout, my discussion aims to do justice to the reality that perceptual world-familiarity is not an evenly distributed phenomenon, that factors like disability, gender and race affect its robustness, and that this ought to be reckoned with when seeking to incorporate the phenomenon into or mitigate it through DMH services. (shrink)

Augmentative and Alternative Communication Technology [AAC Tech] is a relatively young, multidisciplinary field aimed at developing technologies for people who are unable to use their natural speaking voice due to congenital or acquired disability. In this paper, we take a look at the role of AAC Tech in promoting an ‘empathic turn’ in the perception of non-speaking autistic persons. By the empathic turn we mean the turn towards a recognition of non-speaking autistic people as persons whose ways of engaging the (...) world and expressing themselves are indicative of psychologically rich and intrinsically meaningful experiential lives. We first identify two ways in which AAC Tech contributes positively to this development. We then discuss how AAC Tech can simultaneously undermine genuine empathic communication between autistic persons and typically developed communicators (or neurotypicals). To mitigate this concern, we suggest the AAC field should incorporate philosophical insights from Design for Emotions and enactive embodied cognitive science into its R&D practices. To make our proposal concrete, we home in on stimming as an autistic form of bodily expressivity that can play an important role in empathic communicative exchanges between autistic persons and neurotypicals and that could be facilitated in AAC Tech designed for autistic people. (shrink)

In this paper I home in on an ethical phenomenon that is powerfully elucidated by means of enactive resources but that has, to my knowledge, not yet been explicitly addressed in the literature. The phenomenon in question concerns what I will term the paradox of moral perception, which, to be clear, does not refer to a logical but to a phenomenological-practical paradoxicality. Specifically, I have in mind the seemingly contradictory phenomenon that perceiving persons as moral subjects is at once incredibly (...) easy and incredibly difficult; it is something we do nearly effortlessly and successfully all the time without giving it much thought and it is something that often requires effort and that we fail at all the time. As I will argue, enactivism offers distinctive resources for explaining the paradoxical nature of moral perception. These resources, moreover, bring out two important dimensions of ethical life that are frequently overlooked in contemporary ethical theory: namely the embodied and socio-technical environment-embedded dimensions of moral perception and moral visibility. As I make my argument, I will be connecting enactivism with insights from David Hume’s and Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy as well as insights from the field of Epistemic Injustice. As such, I aim to situate enactivism within the larger theoretical ethical landscape; showing connections with existing ethical theories and identifying some of the ways in which enactivism offers unique contributions to our understanding of ethical life. While doing so, I will furthermore introduce two forms of moral misperception: particular moral misperception and categorial moral misperception. (shrink)

It is crucial for engineers to anticipate the socio-ethical impacts of emerging technologies. Such acts of anticipation are thoroughly normative and should be cultivated in engineering ethics education. In this paper we ask: ‘ how do we anticipate the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies responsibly? ’ And ‘ how can such responsible anticipation be taught? ’ We o ff er a conceptual answer, building upon the framework of Responsible Innovation and its four core practices: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness. We (...) forge a more explicit link between the practices of anticipation, reflexivity, and inclusion, while also enriching them with insights from disability studies, STS, design theory, and philosophy. On this basis we present responsible anticipation as an activity of reflective problem framing grounded in epistemic humility. Via the RI-practice of responsiveness we present responsible anticipation as a creative approach to engineering ethics, offering engineering students a critical yet productive perspective on how ethics may inform innovation. (shrink)

While the design of sex robots is still in the early stages, the social implications of the potential proliferation of sex robots into our lives has been heavily debated by activists and scholars from various disciplines. What is missing in the current debate on sex robots and their potential impact on human social relations is a targeted look at the boundedness and bodily expressivity typically characteristic of humans, the role that these dimensions of human embodiment play in enabling reciprocal human (...) interactions, and the manner in which this contrasts with sex robot-human interactions. Through a fine-grained discussion of these themes, rooted in fruitful but largely untapped resources from the field of enactive embodied cognition, we explore the unique embodiment of sex robots. We argue that the embodiment of the sex robot is constituted by what we term restricted expressivity and a lack of bodily boundedness and that this is the locus of negative but also potentially positive implications. We discuss the possible benefits that these two dimensions of embodiment may have for people within a specific demographic, namely some persons on the autism spectrum. Our preliminary conclusion—that the benefits and the downsides of sex robots reside in the same capability of the robot, its restricted expressivity and lack of bodily boundedness as we call it—demands we take stock of future developments in the design of sex robot embodiment. Given the importance of evidence-based research pertaining to sex robots in particular, as reinforced by Nature for drawing correlations and making claims, the analysis is intended to set the stage for future research. -/- . (shrink)

While 4E approaches to cognition are increasingly introduced in educational contexts, little has been said about how 4E commitments can inform pedagogy aimed at fostering ethical competencies. Here, we evaluate a 4E-inspired ethics exercise that we developed at a technical university to enliven the moral imagination of engineering students. Our students participated in an interactive tinkering workshop, during which they materially redesigned a healthcare artifact. The aim of the workshop was twofold. Firstly, we wanted students to experience how material choices (...) at the levels of design and functionality can enable morally significant reimaginings of the affordances commonly associated with existing artifacts. We term this type of reimagining world-directed moral imagination. Secondly, through the design process, we wanted students to robustly place themselves in the lived embodied perspectives of (potential) users of their selected artifacts. We term this person-directed moral imagination. While student testimonies about the exercise indicate that both their world-directed and person-directed moral imagination were enlivened, we note that the fostering of robust person-directed moral imagination proved challenging. Using 4E insights, we diagnose this challenge and ask how it might be overcome. To this end, we engage extensively with a recent 4E-informed critique of person-directed moral imagination, raised by Clavel Vázquez and Clavel-Vázquez (2023). They argue that person-directed moral imagination is profoundly limited, if not fundamentally misguided, particularly when exercised in contexts marked by emphatic embodied situated difference between the imaginer and the imagined. Building upon insights from both the 4E field and testimonies from critical disability studies, we argue that, while their critique is valuable, it ultimately goes too far. We conclude that a 4E approach can take on board recent 4E warnings regarding the limits of person-directed moral imagination while contributing positively to the development of moral imagination in engineering ethics education. (shrink)

A growing body of literature in the field of embodied situated cognition is drawing attention to the hostile ways in which our environments can be constructed, with detrimental effects on people’s ability to flourish as environmentally situated beings. This paper contributes to this body of research, focusing on a specific area of concern. Specifically, I argue that a very particular problematic quasi-Cartesian picture of the human body, the human mind, what it means for these to function well, and the role (...) of technology in promoting such functioning, animate our Western sociotechnical imagination. This picture, I show, shapes the sociotechnical niches we inhabit in an _ableist_ manner, perniciously legislating which body-minds have access to a rich world of affordances and are seen as agential and valuable. Because the ableist quasi-Cartesian commitments animating our Western sociotechnical imagination are problematic and pervasive, I argue that exposing and reimagining these commitments should be a prime focal point of those working at the intersection of science, technology, and human values. I present insights from enactive 4E cognition and critical disability studies as fruitful resources for such much-needed reimagining. I also make the case, more provocatively but also more tentatively, that the ableist view of bodily and minded well- functioning animating our Cartesian Western sociotechnical imagination is not only damaging to embodied minds who deviate from the presumed norm, creating inaccessible worlds for some of us; it is in fact a threat to human and planetary flourishing at large. (shrink)

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose ways of learning and making sense of the world may not be best supported through these traditional forms of pedagogy. As we discuss in this chapter, we, as engineering ethics educators, (...) designed and implemented a new engineering ethics exercise with which we aimed to promote inclusivity at the levels of form and content. At the content level, students were invited to critically engage with inclusivity-undermining ableist assumptions in technology development. This took shape, at the formal level, through a hands-on ‘material tinkering’ workshop in which students collaboratively and creatively altered (or ‘hacked’) artifacts used in contexts of disability and healthcare, so as to operationalize values of inclusivity and accessibility. Our hunch was that this hands-on tinkering workshop would simultaneously encourage a meaningful way of engagement with these ethical issues and values, while also enacting a more inclusive learning environment by enriching the range of pedagogical activities and learning formats available to our students. As we aim to show in this chapter, we believe this hunch largely panned out - though there are clear areas for future improvement pertaining to the pilot exercise itself and the research we conducted on the exercise. We begin by offering a description of our tinkering exercise. We discuss the exercise’s source of inspiration (2.1) and its implementation (2.2), which is visually captured via photographic documentation. We then discuss (3) how we utilized a triangulated research method to assess the pedagogical value of the exercise. After we discuss our findings, we conclude by identifying areas for future improvement (4). (shrink)

Moral (or ethical) sensitivity is widely viewed as a foundational learning goal in engineering ethics education. We have argued in this paper is that this view of moral sensitivity cannot be readily transported from the nursing context to the engineering context on the basis of a care-analogy. The particularized care characteristic of the nursing context is decisively different from the generalized and universalized forms of care characteristic of the engineering context. Through a focus on care and maintenance, the engineering student’s (...) moral sensitivity can be refined, opening up a perceptual awakening and affectivity towards the complex nature of the engineer’s Other. This awakening is in part promoted through an understanding of the ideology of neutrality as a moment in the history engineering. Becoming aware of this ideology as an ideology can then be seen as an activity of dividing loyalties that allows for a reflexive and critical view of the biases and presuppositions inherited within the world of engineering. This process of deepening the engineering student’s moral sensitivity is perhaps as much a process of the student becoming aware of her professional world, how it shapes her understanding of herself, and what it means to be a good engineer. (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.

Care ethics has been advanced as a suitable framework for evaluating the ethical significance of assistive robotics. One of the most prominent care ethical contributions to the ethical assessment of assistive robots comes through the work of Aimee Van Wynsberghe, who has developed the Care-Centred Value-Sensitive Design framework (CCVSD) in order to incorporate care values into the design of assistive robots. Building upon the care ethics work of Joan Tronto, CCVSD has been able to highlight a number of ways in (...) which care practices can undergo significant ethical transformations upon the introduction of assistive robots. In this paper, we too build upon the work of Tronto in an effort to enrich the CCVSD framework. Combining insights from Tronto’s work with the sociological concept of _emotional labor_, we argue that CCVSD remains underdeveloped with respect to the impact robots may have on the emotional labor required by paid care workers. Emotional labor consists of the managing of emotions and of emotional bonding, both of which signify a demanding yet potentially fulfilling dimension of paid care work. Because of the conditions in which care labor is performed nowadays, emotional labor is also susceptible to exploitation. While CCVSD can acknowledge some manifestations of unrecognized emotional labor in care delivery, it remains limited in capturing the structural conditions that fuel this vulnerability to exploitation. We propose that the idea of _privileged irresponsibility,_ coined by Tronto, helps to understand how the exploitation of emotional labor can be prone to happen in roboticized care practices. (shrink)

The neurodiversity movement has called for a rethinking of autistic mindedness. It rejects the commonplace tendency to theorize autism by foregrounding a set of deficiencies in behavioural, cognitive, and affective areas. Instead, the idea is, our conception of autistic mindedness ought to foreground that autistic persons, often in virtue of their autism, experience the world in manners that can be immensely meaningful to themselves and to human society at large. In this paper I presuppose that the idea of neurodiversity is (...) worth taking seriously and I explore to what extent it can be accommodated within a 4E cognition framework by scrutinizing two 4E approaches to autistic mindedness: Shaun Gallagher's interactionism (2004; 2008) and Hanne De Jaegher's autopoietic enactivism (2013). Although these accounts share a number of theoretical commitments, they are also marked by different points of emphasis. Though seemingly innocuous, I show that these differences end up having a significant impact on how autistic mindedness is brought in view and how, correspondingly, the idea of neurodiversity can get a foothold. (shrink)

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach developed at TU Delft is deeply informed by the research of the Section, which is centered around Responsible Research and Innovation, Design for Values, and Risk Ethics. These theoretical (...) approaches are premised on the notion that technologies are inherently value-laden, and as such contain the possibility of fostering or hindering moral values. Each of these approaches encourages students to take a proactive attitude with respect to their projects and profession, thinking creatively about – and taking responsibility for – how to both prevent harm and do good via the technologies they help develop. To explain how this is put into practice, this paper sketches a brief history of ethics teaching at TU Delft, outlines current activities, and presents future plans for Bachelor and Master’s level engineering ethics education at TU Delft. (shrink)

The key to action control is one’s ability to adequately predict the consequences of one’s actions. Predictive processing theories assume that forward models enable rapid “preplay” to assess the match between predicted and intended action effects. Here we propose the novel hypothesis that “reading” another’s action intentions requires a rich forward model of that agent’s action. Such a forward model can be obtained and enriched through learning by either practice or simulation. Based on this notion, we ran a series of (...) studies on soccer goalkeepers and novices, who predicted the intended direction of penalties being kicked at them in a computerized penalty-reading task. In line with hypotheses, extensive practice in penalty kicking improved performance in penalty reading among goalkeepers who had extensive prior experience in penalty blocking but not in penalty kicking. A robust benefit in penalty reading did not result from practice in kinesthetic motor imagery of penalty kicking in novice participants. To test whether goalkeepers actually use such penalty-kicking imagery in penalty reading, we trained a machine-learning classifier on multivariate fMRI activity patterns to distinguish motor-imagery-related from attention-related strategies during a penalty-imagery training task. We then applied that classifier to fMRI data related to a separate penalty-reading task and showed that 2/3 of all correctly read penalty kicks were classified as engaging the motor-imagery circuit rather than merely the attention circuit. This study provides initial evidence that, in order to read our opponent’s action intention, it helps to observe their action kinematics, and use our own forward model to predict the sensory consequences of “our” penalty kick if we were to produce these action kinematics ourselves. In sum, it takes practice as a penalty kicker to become a penalty killer. (shrink)

A great deal of philosophy of mind in the modern era has been driven by an intense aversion to Cartesian dualism. In the 1950s, materialists claimed to have succeeded once and for all in exorcising the Cartesian ghost by identifying the mind with the brain. In subsequent decades, cognitive science put scientific meat on this metaphysical skeleton by explicating mental processes as digital computation implemented in the brain's hardware.

Peter van Inwagen, author of the classic book An Essay on Free Will, has established himself over the last forty years as a leading figure in the philosophical debate about the problem of free will. This volume presents eleven influential essays from throughout his career, as well as two new and previously unpublished essays, 'The Problem of Fr** W*ll' and 'Ability'. The essays include discussions of determinism, moral responsibility, 'Frankfurt counterexamples', the meaning of 'the ability to do otherwise', and the (...) very definition of free will, as well as critiques of writings on the topic by Daniel Dennett and David Lewis. An introduction by the author discusses the history of his thinking about free will. The volume will be a valuable resource for those looking to engage with van Inwagen's significant contributions to this perennially important topic. (shrink)

Keuze van artikelen uit het werk van de Vlaamse filosoof over wetenschap, milieu, en medische en biologische ethiek.

Gathered together here are the fundamental texts of the great classical period in modern logic. A complete translation of Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift--which opened a great epoch in the history of logic by fully presenting propositional calculus and quantification theory--begins the volume, which concludes with papers by Herbrand and by Gödel.

Some examples suggest that religious credences respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those (...) credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Walton's theory of make-believe. (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach is traditionally regarded as a significant but transitional figure in the development of nineteenth-century German thought. Readings of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity tend to focus on those features which made it seem liberating to the Young Hegelians: namely, its criticism of reification as abstraction, and its interpretation of religion as alienation. In this book, Van Harvey claims that this is a limited and inadequate view of Feuerbach's work, especially of his critique of religion. The author argues that (...) Feuerbach's philosophical development led him to a much more complex and interesting theory of religion which he expounded in works which have been virtually ignored hitherto. By exploring these works, Harvey gives them a significant contemporary re-statement, and brings Feuerbach into conversation with a number of modern theorists of religion. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false ES-CO X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In this paper we study the Kantian conception of punishment in the Metaphysics of Morals. We look at Foucault’s reformulation of the right to punish which is mostly a critique of the kantian conception. Then we introduce the conception of restorative justice grounded on the social ideal of recognition, which corrects certain aspects of the Kantian conception, but gives to justice its status of an institution rather than being a critique (...) of it. (shrink)

The Calvinist minister Godfried Udemans is generally considered to be one of the more important seventeenth-century theologians from the province of Zeeland. He specialized in writings for a broader public, including, in particular, publications on ethical and religious codes in trade and seafaring. Of his various writings on moral theology, 't Geestelyck roer van 't coopmans schip, first published in 1638, is the most important.The Spiritual helm appeared in print some thirty years after Grotius occupied himself with De jure praedae (...) , but Udemans had already begun articulating his thoughts in 1608. It is instructive to examine the ethical writings of a contemporary of Grotius. It has been claimed that in the early modern period, Calvinism, especially in its English Puritan variety, did much to propagate the medieval traditions of holy war that to all appearances had been laid to rest by Spanish theoreticians during the sixteenth-century Renaissance. In this article, I examine the extent to which Udemans draws upon religion as a means of legitimizing violence on behalf of secular political authorities such as the prince , and, more in particular, the Dutch East India Company and West India Company . If Udemans is representative of the religious tradition to which he reckoned himself, holy war thought did not figure prominently in Dutch Calvinism. (shrink)

We present a new English translation of L.E.J. Brouwer's paper ‘De onbetrouwbaarheid der logische principes’ of 1908, together with a philosophical and historical introduction. In this paper Brouwer for the first time objected to the idea that the Principle of the Excluded Middle is valid. We discuss the circumstances under which the manuscript was submitted and accepted, Brouwer's ideas on the principle of the excluded middle, its consistency and partial validity, and his argument against the possibility of absolutely undecidable propositions. (...) We note that principled objections to the general excluded middle similar to Brouwer's had been advanced in print by Jules Molk two years before. Finally, we discuss the influence on George Griss' negationless mathematics. (shrink)

Here are some things we understand, at least pretty well: planetary orbits, cell division, rainbows, electrical conductivity. Here are some things we don’t understand at all: conscious awareness, knowledge, free will, understanding things. That is, we are, as a species, pretty good at mathematics and science and no good at all at philosophy. Why is this?

Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can (...) acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to reflect on a specific question or choice, use diverse input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and argue for their standpoints. (shrink)

This paper starts out with a theoretical argument, based on panel data, that public mood in general and societal pessimism in particular should be measured from an explicitly temporal perspective. Next, based on a survey among more than 200 Japanese students and a wide array of existing data sources in three different languages and covering several decades it is shown that public mood in three quite different countries – first and foremost Japan, but also the United States and The Netherlands (...) – is quite apprehensive. In all these three countries societal pessimism can be observed during the past quarter century. Finally, utilizing a MDSD approach a few possible tentative explanations for this observed pessimism are sought. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The NetherlandsVolume 17, Issue 3PEPIJN VAN HOUWELINGEN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000177Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The NetherlandsVolume 17, Issue 3PEPIJN VAN HOUWELINGEN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000177Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The NetherlandsVolume 17, Issue 3PEPIJN VAN HOUWELINGEN DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1468109916000177Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

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)