Intuition has increasingly been considered as a legitimate foundation for decision-making, and the concept has started to find its way into military doctrines as a supplement to traditional decision-making procedures, primarily in time-constrained situations. Yet, absent inside the military realm is a critical and level-headed discussion of the ethical implications of intuitive behaviour, understood as an immediate and situational response with no recourse to thoughtful or deliberate activity. In this article the author turns to phenomenological philosophy, and in particular to (...) the works of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, to elaborate on the ethical implications and consequences of intuitive behaviour. Dreyfus and Dreyfus understand moral behaviour as a skill, and as such they claim that it is possible to develop this capability through practice. They even claim that intuitive behaviour is the hallmark of the way experts respond to situations. The article seeks to investigate if the prerequisites for development of experience-based intuition are fulfilled inside the frames of military operations. The possible implications and consequences of utilizing such a capability are also emphasized. The article's empirical materials are qualitative and build mainly upon extracted information from interviews and informal conversations with Norwegian soldiers and officers serving in Afghanistan under ISAF's Regional Command North in 2007 and 2008. (shrink)

This new edition of Aristotle s De interpretatione provides an improved text compared to the 1949 Oxford edition, based upon an evaluation of the seven earliest surviving medieval manuscripts as well as many translations and commentaries from late antiquity. A text-critical apparatus provides information about the different readings.".

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions (...) or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. (shrink)

Professionals have a role obligation to satisfy certain standards when performing their work. However, as professionals, can they perform morally praiseworthy acts that are not within the scope of duty? According to applied professional ethics, the answer is yes, whereas some theoretical accounts of supererogation deny this possibility. I examine and ultimately reject two very different theoretical accounts that deny professional supererogation. First, a recent interpretation of Aristotle uses examples from the professional context to illustrate that the moral category of (...) supererogation is not needed to describe heroic acts. Second, David Heyd’s account of supererogation argues that the category applies to natural duties alone and not to professional as professionals. Contrary to these claims, I argue that it is not only conceptually coherent to allow for the possibility of going beyond the call of duty but also morally important for assessments of responsibility and blame in professional life. (shrink)

Global climate change is likely to become a major cause of future migration. Small Island States are particularly vulnerable since territorial destruction caused by sea level rise poses a threat to their entire existence. This raises important issues concerning state sovereignty and self-determination. Is it possible for a state to remain self-determining even if it lacks a stable population residing on a specific territory? It has been suggested that migrants from disappearing Small Island States could continue to exercise sovereign control (...) over their abandoned territory. Such an arrangement would allow them to retain a measure of self-determination. The question posed in this paper is whether this ?deterritorialized state proposal? is conceptually plausible and normatively acceptable. It is argued that the proposal is conceptually plausible if we adopt a gradual understanding of ?self-determination?, but that its normative acceptability is weak even if it is supplemented with compensatory measures. (shrink)

What drives moral revolutions like the legal abolition of slavery and women’s right to vote? The importance of having an answer to this question lies in the hope of it being able to help us create moral progress in the future. This can be changing harmful practices and traditions like honour killing, child marriage, genital mutilation and political corruption. Furthermore, a wrong or insufficient picture of the dynamics of change, held by e.g. politicians or NGOs and incorporated into laws and (...) institutions, can lead to misfired inventions, wasted resources and possibly human harm. If we lack conceptual clarity and empirical insights, we will have trouble making good decisions. However, before answering the above question we need to consider what answering it entails. This article therefore discusses which form an understanding of the dynamics of moral revolutions should take in order to best help us create progress. I do so by critically investigating one currently dominant way of approaching this issue, namely the idea that we should produce a general explanatory theory of the fundamental dynamics of change. In order to expose the problems in this approach, I engage with a contemporary example of it, namely Appiah’s work on moral revolutions, and demonstrate that honour codes cannot have the explanatory role, which Appiah claims for them. The article concludes by pointing to alternative models of understanding the dynamics of moral revolutions and changes. (shrink)

St. Thomas’s commentary on the Book of Psalms, known as the Postilla super Psalmos, gives us a privileged insight into the mind and heart of a Dominican friar and theologian at work and at prayer. In this contribution I will elucidate these claims on the basis of elements found in his commentary and in particular in the areas of prayer and the liturgy, Christ, Mary and the Church, Sin and Mercy and Contemplation and Preaching.

Engaging Anthropology takes an unflinching look at why the discipline has not gained the popularity and respect it deserves in the twenty-first century.While showcasing the intellectual power of discipline, Eriksen takes the anthropological community to task for its unwillingness to engage more proactively with the media in a wide range of current debates, from immigrant issues to biotechnology. Eriksen argues that anthropology needs to rediscover the art of narrative and abandon arid analysis and, more provocatively, anthropologists need to (...) lose their fear of plunging into the vexed issues modern societies present. (shrink)

ULRICH NORTMANN, Modale Syllogismen, mögliche Welten, Essentialismus. Eine Analyse der aristotelischen Modallogik (Perspektiven der Analytischen Philosophie/ Perspectives in Analytical Philosophy, vol. 9). Berlin and New York:Walter de Gruyter, 1996. x +427 pp. DM 260.00 (for members of the Society for Analytical Philosophy DM 98.00). ISBN 3-1 1-014660-6.

The present article is devoted to the second part of chapter 10 of Aristotle’s De interpretatione (20 a 16-40), which mainly deals with the logical relations between statements whose predicate is finite (i. e., of the affirmative form “is P”) and statements whose predicate is infinite (i. e., of the negative form “is not-P”). I attempt to show that this part of the chapter contains both a section the text of which is corrupt (20 a 20-23) and a section which (...) is misplaced (20 a 37-40). In the former section the likely false reading of the manuscripts τῇ δὲ … ἡ ἀντι- κειμένη ὅτι … (“while from ‘…’ the opposite [statement follows] that …”) should be corrected into ἡ δὲ … τῇ ἀντικειμένῃ ὅτι … (“while ‘…’ [follows] from the opposite [statement] that …”), and the latter section should be placed immediately after the former, with which it is intimately connected. (shrink)

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

The passage 18a34-⁠b5 of Aristotle’s famous sea-battle chapter has often been misunderstood. My aim is to show, firstly, that Aristotle in this passage attempts to prove that the unrestricted validity of the Principle of Bivalence entails, in the case of singular statements, the validity of the Principle of Truth-value Distribution for the contradictory pairs they are members of. According to the latter principle either the affirmative member of a contradictory pair of statements must be true and the negative false or (...) vice versa. Secondly, I want to show what consequences the correct understanding of the passage in question has for the understanding of the introductory passage of the chapter (18a28-⁠33) and for the dispute over whether Aristotle exempts singular statements about contingent future events from the domain of the Principle of Bivalence. The thesis, advanced by some modern interpreters, that Aristotle refrains from doing so even though he exempts the contradictory pairs such statements are members of from the domain of the Principle of Truth-value Distribution will be rebutted as resulting from a fallacious line of reasoning. (shrink)

Recently Carrie S. Jenkins formulated an epistemology of mathematics, or rather arithmetic, respecting apriorism, empiricism, and realism. Central is an idea of concept grounding. The adequacy of this idea has been questioned e.g. concerning the grounding of the mathematically central concept of set (or class), and of composite concepts. In this paper we present a view of concept formation in mathematics, based on ideas from Carnap, leading to modifications of Jenkins’s epistemology that may solve some problematic issues with her ideas. (...) But we also present some further problems with her view, concerning the role of proof for mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

This article develops a eudaimonistic account of professional virtue. Using the case of teaching, the article argues that professional virtue requires that role holders care about the ends of their work. Care is understood in terms of an investment of the self. Virtuous role holders are invested in their practice in a way that makes professional excellence part of their own good. Failure to care about the ends of professional practice reveals a lack of appreciation of the value of professional (...) work. This ‘investment view’ is contrasted with the currently popular ‘key goods view’, which claims that professional virtues require a profession-specific teleological structure. Unlike ordinary virtues, which are governed by eudaimonia or human flourishing, professional virtues are allegedly derived from professional ends, like health or education. The article argues that this delivers an unconvincing criterion for determining the merits of character traits. (shrink)

Tekster til Buddhismen. Selected and translated by Frede Möller-Kristensen. Gyldendal, Copenhagen 1980. 104 pp. Illustrated. D.Kr.68.50.

In this introduction to Nehemiah Grew's seminal 17th-century publication The Anatomy of Plants (1682), we discuss the various influences on and impacts of Grew's innovative approach to studying plant life. We offer a review of the current literature on Grew and argue for the importance of his work in its contribution to fields ranging from microscopy to agriculture and from comparative anatomy to scientific illustration. The articles included in this special issue on “The Making of The Anatomy of Plants” are (...) also introduced. We make a case for Grew as a figure of great interest and relevance in our contemporary moment; as plant studies have taken hold in the humanities, historical narratives in the history of science are expanding to include more of the life sciences—a field that, as we show, Grew actively promoted and participated in throughout his tenure at the Royal Society. (shrink)

This article examines the early modern household's importance for producing experimental knowledge through an examination of the Halifax household of Margery and Henry Power. While Henry Power has been studied as a natural philosopher within the male-dominated intellectual circles of Cambridge and London, the epistemic labour of his wife, Margery Power, has hitherto been overlooked. From the 1650s, this couple worked in tandem to enhance their understanding of the vegetable world through various paper technologies, from books, paper slips and recipe (...) notebooks to Margery's drawing album and Henry's published Experimental Philosophy. Focusing on Margery's practice of hand-colouring flower books, her copied and original drawings of flowers and her experimental production of ink, we argue that Margery's sensibility towards colour was crucial to Henry's microscopic observations of plants. Even if Margery's sophisticated knowledge of plants never left the household, we argue that her contribution was nevertheless crucial to the observation and representation of plants within the community of experimental philosophy. In this way, our article highlights the importance of female artists within the history of scientific observation, the use of books and paperwork in the botanical disciplines, and the relationship between household science and experimental philosophy. (shrink)