The alien invasive Red King Crab in the Barents Sea represents both a threat, via ecosystem impacts, and a gain as a revenue source from food sales. Uncertainties exist regarding the ecological impacts but debate in Norway has also emphasised the economic benefits to marginalised fisher communities. This paper reports on a Q-methodology study involving key stakeholders to probe the extent to which divisions exist between different groups. While divisions are indeed found and two groupings identified, these are not as (...) clear as suggested by the lines typically portrayed in the media and elsewhere –, i.e. economic gains versus ecological preservation. Stakeholder groups reported here generally agreed that biodiversity concerns should be central and that further invasion was undesirable due to potential impacts on ecosystem services. (shrink)

Arthur Falk has proposed a new construal of faith according to which it is not a mere species of belief, but has essential components in action. This twist on faith promises to resurrect Pascal’s Wager, making faith compatible with reason by believing as the scientist but acting as the theist. I argue that Falk’s proposal leaves religious faith in no better shape; in particular, it merely reframes the question in terms of rational desires rather than rational beliefs.

Empathy is a psychologically significant phenomenon. It plays a key role in the development of the self, sociality, and prosocial behaviour. The term empathy originated in 19th-century aesthetics, where the concept was seen as an explanation for aesthetic experience. Despite renewed interest in the relation between empathy and aesthetic experiences, investigations into how empathy shapes experiences of art are still scarce. Given this situation, we ask the following three questions: What does one experience when experiencing a work of art empathetically? (...) What is given during such moments? How is consciousness structured in aesthetic empathetic experience? To answer these questions, we analysed five different experiences with visual art using a phenomenological psychological methodology. We found that a complexity of psychologically significant meaning arises from the empathic experience of art. The core aspects of this meaning are captured in a structure incorporating experience of a foreign subjective sense, reliving and affective adherence, interiorisation, pleasure in sharing, and affective understanding. Based on this structure, we argue that aesthetic empathy features a sense of otherness to a degree not previously recognised and that aesthetic empathy is an inherently intersubjective experience in which the spectator is invited to participate and share feelings expressed in the work of art in moments of aesthetic presence. (shrink)

Falk Wunderlich präsentiert einen grundlegend neuen Ansatz zum Verständnis der Kant'schen Bewusstseinstheorie. Im ersten Teil bietet er eine detaillierte Rekonstruktion der bewusstseinstheoretischen Diskussionen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die Rekonstruktion des Geflechts von Diskussionen, in dessen Kontext sich Kants Überlegungen bewegen. Auf diese zeitgenössischen Debatten werden im zweiten Teil Kants bewusstseinstheoretische Ansätze bezogen. Der Autor vertritt die These, dass Kant die zeitgenössischen Standardansichten über Bewusstsein, Apperzeption und Selbstbewusstsein entgegen dem Anschein nur einschränkt modifiziert und ihre begrifflichen Grundlagen (...) beibehält. Schließlich wird vor dem Hintergrund dieser Kontextualisierung eine alternative Interpretation der transzendentalen Deduktion entwickelt. (shrink)

A number of authors have recently developed and defended various versions of ‘normative essentialism’ about the mental, i.e. the claim that propositional attitudes are constitutively or essentially governed by normative principles. I present two arguments to the effect that this claim cannot be right. First, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional attitude ascriptions would require non-normative justification, but since this is not a requirement of folk-psychology, propositional attitudes cannot be essentially normative. Second, if propositional attitudes were essentially normative, propositional (...) attitude ascriptions could not support normative rationality judgments, which would remove the central appeal of normative essentialism. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been recognised as a challenge to responsibility. Much of this discourse has been framed around robots, such as autonomous weapons or self-driving cars, where we arguably lack control over a machine’s behaviour and therefore struggle to identify an agent that can be held accountable. However, most of today’s AI is based on machine-learning technology that does not act on its own, but rather serves as a decision-support tool, automatically analysing data to help human agents make (...) better decisions. I argue that decision-support tools pose a challenge to responsibility that goes beyond the familiar problem of finding someone to blame or punish for the behaviour of agent-like systems. Namely, they pose a problem for what we might call “decision ownership”: they make it difficult to identify human agents to whom we can attribute value-judgements that are reflected in decisions. Drawing on recent philosophical literature on responsibility and its various facets, I argue that this is primarily a problem of attributability rather than of accountability. This particular responsibility problem comes in different forms and degrees, most obviously when an AI provides direct recommendations for actions, but also, less obviously, when it provides mere descriptive information on the basis of which a decision is made. (shrink)

For at least three decades, philosophers have argued that general causation and causal explanation are contrastive in nature. When we seek a causal explanation of some particular event, we are usually interested in knowing why that event happened rather than some other specified event. And general causal claims, which state that certain event types cause certain other event types, seem to make sense only if appropriate contrasts to the types of events acting as cause and effect are specified. In recent (...) years, philosophers have extended the contrastive theory of causation to encompass singular causation as well. In this article, I argue that this extension of the theory was a mistake. Although general causation and causal explanation may well be contrastive in nature, singular causation is not. (shrink)

Out of Time by Baron, Miller and Tallant (henceforth BMT) is a contribution to the analytic philosophy of time. In this monograph, BMT argue that time might not exist, and that (therefore) our conc...

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

Sports referees are not always as unbiased or impartial as they ideally should be. Studies have shown, for example, that in their decisions, referees seem to be biased against people of different r...

Does transparency in doxastic deliberation entail a constitutive norm of correctness governing belief, as Shah and Velleman argue? No, because this presupposes an implausibly strong relation between normative judgements and motivation from such judgements, ignores our interest in truth, and cannot explain why we pay different attention to how much justification we have for our beliefs in different contexts. An alternative account of transparency is available: transparency can be explained by the aim one necessarily adopts in deliberating about whether to (...) believe that p. To show this, I reconsider the role of the concept of belief in doxastic deliberation, and I defuse 'the teleologian's dilemma'. (shrink)

Observation of Reality and Theory Creation in Panagiotis Kondylis’ Thought In the first part of the paper the authors present an outline of the Polish perception of thoughts and ideas of Panagiotis Kondylis which has started to develop only recently. This is followed by demonstrating major issues present in the output of this Greek philosopher who was strongly linked both with Greece and with Germany. The paper closes with a discussion of Kondylis’ concept of theory creation demonstrated in his work (...) entitled Theorie des Krieges. Clausewitz – Marx – Engels – Lenin which was published in Stuttgart in 1998. Although the very foundation of his ideas is the theory of war by Carl von Clausewitz whom Kondylis perceived as a conceptual soul mate, the discussion per se is of a more universal nature and may pertain to the essence of developing any theory. The paper is to help the Polish reader to understand the ideas and thoughts of Kondylis, and thus to facilitate the perception of translations of his texts that were published in Studies in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper the cosmological argument of Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz is revisited. We propose an interpretation of the argument as being an argument based on the structure of the logical space of all abstract facts. For this we view Leibnizian philosophy as providing a picture theory of language. This structure is given by the metaphysical foundations of Leibnizian philosophy: Leibniz’s theory of truth in the form of praedicatum inesse subiecto, the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the distinction between necessary and contingent (...) facts. The theory of truth is interpreted as being provided by a formal calculus of abstract concepts in the sense of Edward Zalta. The other metaphysical requirements are also briefly discussed. Using these the structure on logical space is realised by an antisymmetric, transitive relation which admits arbitrary joins. Such a relation must admit a minimum, which is interpreted as the existence of God. This interpretation entails the difficulties of explicating existence in Leibniz’s metaphysics, which are also discussed. (shrink)

Discrimination is usually thought of in terms of socially salient groups, such as race or gender. Some scholars argue that the rise of algorithmic decision‐making poses a challenge to this notion. Algorithms are not bound by a social view of the world. Therefore, they may not only inherit pre‐existing social biases and injustices but may also discriminate based on entirely new categories that have little or no meaning to humans at all, such as ‘being born on a Tuesday’. Should this (...) prospect change how we theorize about discrimination, and should we protect these algorithmic groups, as some have suggested? I argue that the phenomenon is adequately described as ‘discrimination’ when a group is systematically disadvantaged. At present, we lack information about whether any algorithmic group meets this criterion, so it is difficult to protect such groups. Instead, we should prevent algorithms from disproportionately disadvantaging certain individuals, and I outline strategies for doing so. (shrink)

Rather than the standard American story of an increasingly triumphant march of scientific inquiry towards structural phonology, Women, Language and Linguistics reveals linguistics where its purpose was communication; the appeal of languages lay in their diversity; and the authority of language lay in its speakers and writers. Julia S Falk explores the vital part which women have played in preserving a linguistics based on the reality and experience of language; this book finally brings to light a neglected perspective for (...) those working in linguistics and the history of linguistics. (shrink)

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to (...) explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (shrink)

Background Nurses frequently face situations in their daily practice that are ethically difficult to handle and can lead to moral distress. Objective This study aimed to explore the phenomenon of moral distress and describe its work-related predictors and individual consequences for home-care nurses in Germany. Research design A cross-sectional design was employed. The moral distress scale and the COPSOQ III-questionnaire were used within the framework of an online survey conducted among home-care nurses in Germany. Frequency analyses, multiple linear and logistic (...) regressions, and Rasch analyses were performed. Participants and research context The invitation to participate was sent to every German home-care service ( n = 16,608). Ethical considerations The study was approved by the Data Protection Office and Ethics Committee of the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Results A total of 976 home-care nurses participated in this study. Job characteristics, such as high emotional demands, frequent work-life-conflicts, low influence at work, and low social support, were associated with higher disturbance caused by moral distress in home-care nurses. Organizational characteristics of home-care services, such as time margin with patients, predicted moral distress. High disturbance levels due to moral distress predicted higher burnout, worse state of health, and the intention to leave the job and the profession, but did not predict sickness absence. Conclusions To prevent home-care nurses from experiencing severe consequences of moral distress, adequate interventions should be developed. Home-care services ought to consider family friendly shifts, provide social support, such as opportunities for exchange within the team, and facilitate coping with emotional demands. Sufficient time for patient care must be scheduled and short-term takeover of unknown tours should be prevented. There is a need to develop and evaluate additional interventions aimed at reducing moral distress, specifically in the home-care nursing sector. (shrink)

A popular account of epistemic justification holds that justification, in essence, aims at truth. An influential objection against this account points out that it is committed to holding that only true beliefs could be justified, which most epistemologists regard as sufficient reason to reject the account. In this paper I defend the view that epistemic justification aims at truth, not by denying that it is committed to epistemic justification being factive, but by showing that, when we focus on the relevant (...) sense of ‘justification’, it isn’t in fact possible for a belief to be at once justified and false. To this end, I consider and reject three popular intuitions speaking in favor of the possibility of justified false beliefs, and show that a factive account of epistemic justification is less detrimental to our normal belief forming practices than often supposed. (shrink)

Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames is (...) developed. The frame model can be extended to account for typicality effects. Applying the paradigm of object-related neural synchronization, furthermore, a biologically motivated model for the cortical implementation of frames is developed. Cortically distributed synchronization patterns may be regarded as the fingerprints of concepts. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also (...) explored whether this new account threatens the anti- luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti- luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility. (shrink)

This book contends that the forces of late modernism are being caught between a capital-driven globalization and a territorially rooted revival of tribalism and ultra-nationalism.

In this paper I propose a teleological account of epistemic reasons. In recent years, the main challenge for any such account has been to explicate a sense in which epistemic reasons depend on the value of epistemic properties. I argue that while epistemic reasons do not directly depend on the value of epistemic properties, they depend on a different class of reasons which are value based in a direct sense, namely reasons to form beliefs about certain propositions or subject matters. (...) In short, S has an epistemic reason to believe that p if and only if S is such that if S has reason to form a belief about p, then S ought to believe that p. I then propose a teleological explanation of this relationship. It is also shown how the proposal can avoid various subsidiary objections commonly thought to riddle the teleological account. (shrink)

One would hardly be a human being if the good of others, or of society at large, could not weigh with one as a cogent reason for doing what will promote goodness. So one has not fully learned about living like a rational and moral being unless one has learned to appreciate that one ought to do things out of regard for others, and not only out of regard for oneself. In the first place, not everything done for oneself is (...) done for reasons of prudence. That one ought to insure one's house, save for one's old age, not put all one's money into one venture, are precepts of prudence. But it is not a precept of prudence, though it may be a good precept that someone ought to undergo a dangerous operation as a long shot to restoring his health rather than linger under a disability forever after. (shrink)

A regularity theory of causation analyses type-level causation in terms of Boolean difference-making. The essential ingredient that helps this theoretical framework overcome the problems of Hume’s and Mill’s classical accounts is a principle of non-redundancy: only Boolean dependency structures from which no elements can be eliminated track causation. The first part of this article argues that the recent regularity-theoretic literature has not consistently implemented this principle, for it disregarded an important type of redundancies: structural redundancies. Moreover, it is shown that (...) a regularity theory needs to be underwritten by a hitherto neglected metaphysical background assumption stipulating that the world’s causal makeup is not ambiguous. Against that background, the second part then develops a new regularity theory that does justice to all types of redundancies and, thereby, provides the first all-inclusive notion of Boolean difference-making. (shrink)

The theory of belief, according to which believing that p essentially involves having as an aim or purpose to believe that p truly, has recently been criticised on the grounds that the putative aim of belief does not interact with the wider aims of believers in the ways we should expect of genuine aims. I argue that this objection to the aim theory fails. When we consider a wider range of deliberative contexts concerning beliefs, it becomes obvious that the aim (...) of belief can interact with and be weighed against the wider aims of agents in the ways required for it to be a genuine aim. (shrink)

Background Moral distress is a far-reaching problem for nurses in different settings as it threatens their health. Aim This study examined which situations lead to moral distress in home-care nursing, how and with which consequences home-care nurses experience moral distress, and how they cope with morally stressful situations and the resulting moral distress. Research design A qualitative interview study with reflexive thematic analysis was used. Participants and research context We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 home-care nurses in Germany. Ethical considerations (...) The study was approved by the Data Protection Office and Ethics Committee of the German Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Findings Twenty (14 female and 6 male) home-care nurses were interviewed between April and August 2023 at their chosen location. The situations leading to moral distress were inadequate care of the person in need of care, not being able to protect one’s health, extended responsibility for the entire care arrangement, work–privacy conflicts, and conflicts between the understanding of care or professional ethics and the performance and billing system. The nurses experienced moral distress as they worked alone and provided care in the patient’s territory. Short- and long-term strains with destructive cognitions, negative emotions, physical symptoms, and health consequences were reported. They faced challenges in coping with moral distress on institutional and individual levels. Conclusions In cases of tension between the service and billing system and the understanding of these nurses’ care services, moral distress is unavoidable. Alternative forms of organization and billing modalities, such as payment by time and the expansion and refinancing of service, should be implemented. The latter relates to systematic case and ethics meetings. Further, a transfer of medical activities, such as the prescription of wound material to registered nurses, could prevent morally stressful situations and improve patients’ quality of care. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Priestley’s complex views on the essence of God in connection with his materialism, elaborated in the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777/ 1782). This issue is crucial if one wishes to get a clear idea of what Priestley’s materialism amounts to; whether it is mainly a thesis about the material grounds of the human mind (“psychological materialism”), or a more far-reaching one about what kind of substances exist in the world (a version of “ontological materialism”). (...) The claim that God may be material allows for the most radical version of ontological materialism according to which everything in the world is material, without altogether denying that God exists. In fact, Priestley considers and partially defends at least three different views on the potential materiality of God: (1) an agnostic stance that is his official view, (2) materialism about God based on his own theory of matter, and (3) “gross” materialism about God. The aim of the paper is to analyze these three views, in particular concerning what kind of materialism they support and whether they can contribute to the consistent Christian materialism Priestley envisaged. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Glauben und Denken kann als Angelpunkt und Motor der neuzeitlichen Geschichte begriffen werden. Walter Falks Werk zeigt in singulärer Weise, auf welchen teilweise verdrängten Fundamenten der wissenschaftliche Fortschrittsglaube beruhte und bietet eine kritische Analyse der 'Legitimität der Neuzeit', die ebenbürtig neben den großen Arbeiten von Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault oder Joachim Ritter bestehen kann. Walter Falk geht anhand der Metapher von der Weltmaschine, die sich seit 1770 in verschiedenen Texten und in Modifikationen findet, der Fortschrittsgeschichte und (...) ihrer Kritiker nach. So entwirft er, vor dem Hintergrund einer neuartigen Epochendeutung ein geistesgeschichtliches Panorama, das von Comte und Schlegel und Kleist bis zu Kafka und Heidegger reicht. Das Buch zeigt vor dem Hintergrund der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, wie die Gestalt des personalen Gottes in den großen geistes- und naturwissenschaftlichen Innovationsschüben der Moderne zunehmend wieder in den Blick genommen wurde. Dabei erfahren die Ansätze von Foucault, Konrad Lorenz oder René Girard eine eigenwillige und profilierte, Natur- und Kulturwissenschaften innovativ miteinander verbindende Deutung. Das eigentliche Interesse des Buches ist aber nicht historischer Natur. Falk demonstriert eindrucksvoll, wie Glauben und Denken in der Gegenwart zugleich differenziert und integriert werden müssen, um auf der Höhe der Moderne wieder fruchtbar in ein Gespräch kommen zu können. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Esteban Céspedes (2015) seeks to defend the contrastive account of singular causation from my criticisms (Steglich-Petersen 2012). Céspedes objects to my argument on three counts: (1) it is circular in presupposing a principle that it seeks to establish; (2) that same principle is false; and (3) even if the principle were true, it would not speak against the contrastive account. In this note I argue that all three objections are unconvincing.

Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...) surface, they do so in harmony. Recently, however, Jane Friedman (2020) has pointed out that they are in tension with each other. In this paper, I aim to resolve this tension by showing that reasons for acts of inquiry – zetetic reasons – and epistemic reasons for belief can both be understood as flowing from the same general normative principle: the transmission principle for instrumental reasons. The resulting account is a version of epistemic instrumentalism that offers an attractive unity between zetetic and epistemic normativity. (shrink)

This article provides a spatial analysis of the conceptual framework of fluid dynamics during the nineteenth century, focusing on the transition from the Euler equation to the Navier–Stokes equation. A dynamic version of Peter Gärdenfors's theory of conceptual spaces is applied which distinguishes changes of five types: addition and deletion of special laws; change of metric; change in importance; change in separability; addition and deletion of dimensions. The case instantiates all types but the deletion of dimensions. We also provide a (...) new view upon limiting case reduction at the conceptual level that clarifies the relation between the predecessor and successor conceptual framework. The nineteenth-century development of fluid dynamics is argued to be an instance of normal science development. (shrink)