Jules Janssens a construit une œuvre importante, qui, pour de nombreux chercheurs, a ouvert des perspectives de recherches nouvelles et fécondes. Ses travaux ont fait date. Ils portent principalement sur la philosophie d'Avicenne, ses sources, ses rapports avec la pensée musulmane, son influence sur la théologie ash'arite (al-Ghazālī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī) et sa réception dans le monde latin. Pour lui rendre hommage, quatorze collègues et amis de renommée internationale se sont réunis pour poursuivre ses réflexions sur ces thèmes. L'ouvrage (...) qui en est issu offre un état des lieux de la recherche contemporaine sur Avicenne et sa postérité arabo-latine. (shrink)

In this paper I build a case for considering the pioneering behaviourist philosopher Grace de Laguna as one of the grandmothers of analytic philosophy. I argue against the ‘Great Men’ narrative of analytic philosophy as composed of Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein and their followers, and in favour of a more inclusive ‘movement’ narrative of analytic philosophy as a broad and varied movement with an anti-idealist and naturalistic orientation aimed at fitting around novel development in the sciences, including Einsteinian physics and psychology. (...) I compare de Laguna’s prescient early views to Whitehead’s; both share an anti-idealist but also anti-atomist solution to the problem of perception, and both oppose the bifurcation of nature, with de Laguna expressing these views before Whitehead did. I conclude that while both opposed the narrower project of logical atomism, both count as ancestors of the wider analytic movement. (shrink)

v. 1. Classical roots and medieval discussions -- v. 2. Renaissance controversis, later scholasticism, and the elimination of the intelligible species in modern philosophy.

This spectacular discovery attracted a lot of media attention. This edition will be published in Brill's Texts and Sources on Intellectual History (BSIH) in August.

While women philosophers are beginning to be rediscovered in the Early Modern period, they are conspicuously missing from later nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century histories of philosophy...

The relationship between Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity and Hendrik A. Lorentz’s ether theory is best understood in terms of competing interpretations of Lorentz invariance. In the 1890s, Lorentz proved and exploited the Lorentz invariance of Maxwell’s equations, the laws governing electromagnetic fields in the ether, with what he called the theorem of corresponding states. To account for the negative results of attempts to detect the earth’s motion through the ether, Lorentz, in effect, had to assume that the laws (...) governing the matter interacting with the fields are Lorentz invariant as well. This additional assumption can be seen as a generalization of the well-known contraction hypothesis. In Lorentz’s theory, it remained an unexplained coincidence that both the laws governing fields and the laws governing matter should be Lorentz invariant. In special relativity, by contrast, the Lorentz invariance of all physical laws directly reflects the Minkowski space-time structure posited by the theory. One can use this observation to produce a common-cause argument to show that the relativistic interpretation of Lorentz invariance is preferable to Lorentz’s interpretation. (shrink)

In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

This special issue brings together philosophical perspectives on the debate over cognitive ontology. We contextualize the papers in this issue by considering several different senses of the term “cognitive ontology” and linking those debates to traditional debates in philosophy of mind.

How do people interleave attention when multitasking? One dominant account is that the completion of a subtask serves as a cue to switch tasks. But what happens if switching solely at subtask boundaries led to poor performance? We report a study in which participants manually dialed a UK-style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle. If the driver were to exclusively return his or her attention to driving after completing a subtask (i.e., using the single break in the xxxxx-xxxxxx representational (...) structure of the number), then we would expect to see a relatively poor driving performance. In contrast, our results show that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary. A computational modeling analysis shows that drivers had to adopt this strategy to meet the required performance objective of maintaining an acceptable lateral position in the road while dialing. Taken together these results support the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that Hintikka's game theoreticalsemantics for Independence Friendly logic does not formalize theintuitions about independent choices; it rather is aformalization of imperfect information. Furthermore it is shownthat the logic has several remarkable properties (e.g.,renaming of bound variables is not allowed). An alternativesemantics is proposed which formalizes intuitions aboutindependence.

Robots are slowly, but certainly, entering people's professional and private lives. They require the attention of regulators due to the challenges they present to existing legal frameworks and the new legal and ethical questions they raise. This paper discusses four major regulatory dilemmas in the field of robotics: how to keep up with technological advances; how to strike a balance between stimulating innovation and the protection of fundamental rights and values; whether to affirm prevalent social norms or nudge social norms (...) in a different direction; and, how to balance effectiveness versus legitimacy in techno-regulation. The four dilemmas are each treated in the context of a particular modality of regulation: law, market, social norms, and technology as a regulatory tool; and for each, we focus on particular topics? such as liability, privacy, and autonomy? that often feature as the major issues requiring regulatory attention. The paper then highlights the role and potential of the European framework of rights and values, responsible research and innovation, smart regulation and soft law as means of dealing with the dilemmas. (shrink)

This paper discusses some aspects of the controversies regarding the operation of the agent intellect on sensory images. I selectively consider views developed between the 13th century and the beginning of the 17th century, focusing on positions which question the need for a (distinct) agent intellect or argue for its essential "inactivity" with respect to phantasms. My aim is to reveal limitations of the Peripatetical framework for analyzing and explaining the mechanisms involved in conceptual abstraction. The first section surveys developments (...) of Aristotelian noetics and abstraction in Ancient and Arabic philosophy. The second section presents a discussion of some "positive" accounts on abstraction and the agent intellect, and some "negative" accounts. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), the UK’s first female professor of philosophy, was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. Stebbing wrote the world’s first accessible book on the new polyadic logic and its philosophy. She made major contributions to the philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophical logic, critical thinking, and applied philosophy. Nonetheless she has remained largely neglected by historians of analytic philosophy. This Element provides a thorough yet accessible overview of Stebbing’s positive, original contributions, including her solution to the (...) paradox of analysis, her account of the relation of sense-data to physical objects, and her anti-idealist interpretation of the new Einsteinian physics. Stebbing’s innovative work in these and other areas helped move analytic philosophy from its early phase to its middle period. (shrink)

Patient-centered pharmacy practice involves increased pharmacist engagement in patient care. This increased involvement can sometimes require diverse decision-making when handling various situations, ranging from simple matters to major ethical dilemmas. There is literature about pharmacy ethics in developed Western countries. However, little is known about pharmacists’ practices in many developing countries. For example, there is a paucity of research conducted in the area of pharmacy ethics in Jordan. This study aimed to explore the manner in which ethical dilemmas were handled (...) by Jordanian pharmacists, the resources used and their attitudes towards them. Semi-structured, face to face interviews were carried out with 30 Jordanian registered pharmacists. The transcribed interviews were thematically analysed for emerging themes. Four major themes were identified: legal practice; familiarity with the code of ethics; personal judgement, cultural and religious values; and Experience. Findings showed that ethical decision-making in pharmacy practice in Jordan was decisively influenced by pharmacists’ personal moral values, legal requirements and managed by exercising common sense and experience. This pointed to gaps in Jordanian pharmacists’ understanding and application of basic principles of pharmacy ethics and highlighted the need for professional ethics training, incorporating pharmacy ethics courses in pharmacy undergraduate curricula, as well as professional development courses. This study highlighted that paternalism, personal values and legal obligations were major drivers influencing decision-making processes of Jordanian pharmacists. Findings also highlighted an inclination towards lack of respect for patient autonomy. This illuminated the need for increasing pharmacists’ literacy in professional ethics. (shrink)

Lo studio verte sulla terminologia avicenniana utilizzata per richiamare l'idea di «emanazione» e quella di «creazione». Il vocabolario avicenniano è comparato in particolare alla terminologia della Theologia Aristotelis.

The aim of this research was to gain insight into the experiences and perspectives of individual members of a Medical Research Ethics Committee regarding their individual roles and possible tensions within and between these roles. We conducted a qualitative interview study among members of a large MREC, supplemented by a focus group meeting. Respondents distinguish five roles: protector, facilitator, educator, advisor and assessor. Central to the role of protector is securing valid informed consent and a proper risk-benefit analysis. The role (...) of facilitator implies that respondents want to think along with and assist researchers in order to help medical science progress. As educators, the respondents want to raise ethical and methodological awareness of researchers. The role of advisor implies that respondents bring in their own expertise. The role of assessor points to contributing to the overall evaluation of the research proposal. Various tensions were identified within and between roles. Within the role of protector, a tension is experienced between paternalism and autonomy. Between the role of protector and facilitator tensions occur when the value of a study is questioned while risks and burdens for the subjects are negligible. Within the role of assessor, a tension is felt between the implicit nature of judgments and the need for more explicit formulations. Awareness of various roles and responsibilities may prevent one-sided views on MREC work, not only by members themselves, but also by researchers. Tensions within and between the roles require reflection by MREC members. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Analytic philosophy in the mid-twentieth century underwent a major change of direction when a prior consensus in favour of extensionalism and descriptivism made way for approaches using direct reference, the necessity of identity, and modal logic. All three were first defended, in the analytic tradition, by one woman, Ruth Barcan Marcus. But analytic philosophers now tend to credit them to Kripke, or Kripke and Carnap. I argue that seeing Barcan Marcus in her historical context – one dominated by extensionalism (...) and descriptivism – allows us to see how revolutionary she was, in her work and influence on others. I focus on her debate with Quine, who found himself retreating to softened, and more viable, versions of his anti-modal arguments as a result. I make the case that Barcan's formal logic was philosophically well-motivated, connected to her views on reference, and well-matched to her overall views on ontology. Her nominalism led her to reject posits which could not be directly observed and named, such as possibilia. She conceived of modal calculi as facilitating counterfactual discourse about actual existents. I conclude that her contributions ought to be recognized as the first of their kind. Barcan Marcus must be awarded a central place in the canon of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

There are two principles which bear the name Frege''sprinciple: the principle of compositionality, and the contextprinciple. The aim of this contribution is to investigate whether thisis justified: did Frege accept both principles at the same time, did hehold the one principle but not the other, or did he, at some moment,change his opinion? The conclusion is as follows. There is a developmentin Frege''s position. In the period of Grundlagen he followed to a strict form of contextuality. He repeatedcontextuality in later (...) writings, but became less strict. From 1914 on,pushed by the needs of research, he comes close to compositionality. Buthe could never make the final step toward compositionality forprincipled reasons, therefore he always would reject compositionality. (shrink)

Russell’s use of incomplete symbols constituted progress in philosophy. They allowed Russell to make true negative existential claims, like ‘the present King of France does not exist’, and to analyse away logical constructs like tables. Russell’s view rested on the availability of complete symbols, logically proper names, which single out objects which we know by acquaintance, which we are committed to, and to whose existence discourse about apparent complexes can be reduced. Susan Stebbing enthusiastically embraced incomplete symbols for use in (...) negative existentials and in her innovative theory of metaphysical analysis. Yet she also raised trenchant objections to Russell’s assumption that complete symbols are purely referring expressions, equivalent to mere demonstration or pointing. Stebbing thought it could not be assumed that analysis terminates in objects of acquaintance. In this chapter I lay out Stebbing’s arguments and argue that they bear a striking similarity to those made by Stebbing’s former college’s Mistress, Constance Jones, whose influence on Russell is now largely forgotten but worth recovering. Jones defended a sense-reference (signification-denotation) distinction before Frege. Russell’s objections to that distinction in ‘On Denoting’ appear to borrow from Jones’s presentation of it. In Russell and Jones’s 1911 exchange at the Aristotelian Society, Jones’s arguments that names have signification and are more than mere noises or shapes, and that unless both signification and denotation are taken into account, all identity statements reduce to the trivial ‘a=a’ form, foreshadow Stebbing’s later arguments against complete symbols. (shrink)

The use of coercive measures in the care for the addicted has changed over the past 20 years. Laws that have adopted the “dangerousness” criterion in order to secure patients’ rights to non-intervention are increasingly subjected to critique as many authors plead for wider dangerousness criteria. One of the most salient moral issues at stake is whether addicts who are at risk of causing danger to themselves should be involuntarily admitted and/or treated. In this article, it is argued that the (...) dilemma between coercion on the one hand and abandonment on the other cannot be analysed without differentiated perspectives on the key notions that are used in these debates. The ambiguity these notions carry within care practice indicates that the conflict between the prevention of danger and respect for autonomy is not as sharp as the legal systems seem to imply. Some coercive measures need not be interpreted as an infringement of autonomy—rather, they should be interpreted as a way to provide good care. (shrink)

In ordinary language, in the medical sciences, and in the overlap between them, we frequently make claims which imply that we might have had different gametic origins from the ones we actually have. Such statements seem intuitively true and coherent. But they counterfactually ascribe different DNA to their referents and therefore contradict material-origin essentialism, which Kripke and his followers argue is intuitively obvious. In this paper I argue, using examples from ordinary language and from philosophy of medicine and bioethics, that (...) statements which attribute alternative material origins to their referents are useful, common in political and medical reasoning, and in many cases best interpreted literally. So we must replace the doctrine of material-origin essentialism with one that can make sense of ordinary discourse and the language of the medical sciences. I propose an anti-essentialist account of such counterfactuals according to which individuals’ modal properties are relative to a given inquiry. (shrink)

“Special relativity killed the classical dream of using the energy-momentumvelocity relations as a means of probing the dynamical origins of [the mass of the electron]. The relations are purely kinematical” (Pais, 1982, 159). This perceptive comment comes from a section on the pre-relativistic notion of electromagnetic mass in ‘Subtle is the Lord . . . ’, Abraham Pais’ highly acclaimed biography of Albert Einstein. ‘Kinematical’ in this context means ‘independent of the details of the dynamics’. In this paper we examine (...) the classical dream referred to by Pais from the vantage point of relativistic continuum mechanics. (shrink)

During the 1890s, animal development became associated with glandular activity, with profound implications for pediatric nosology and treatment. The significance of this endocrinological turn of developmental physiology and pathophysiology in part hinges on an often-overlooked continuity with ubiquitous early modern medical thought concerning semen as a recrementitious (reabsorbed) nutrient or stimulant. Mid-19th-century interests in adult sexual physiology were increasingly nerve-centered and antihumoral. Scattered empirical, particularly veterinarian, interests in gonadal developmental functions failed to moderate these explanatory trends. While Brown-Séquard’s rejuvenation experiments (...) still offered no clear starting point for a developmental endocrinology, in 1892 Gaston Variot and Paul Bezançon more explicitly deduced a testicular developmental endocrinological function from various observations on testicular ectopy and a local form of animal “demi-castration.” Ensuing interest in the thyroid, the thymus and in the testicles led to various working conceptions of their respective and putatively reciprocal developmental properties, including the idea of a thyroid–testis axis. From 1896, the pubertal affliction of chlorosis became the subject of multiple opotherapeutic approaches, providing an experimental basis for theories of ovarian internal secretion. Polyglandular therapy, piloted for divergent developmental conditions, remained routine until the 1930s despite the biological inefficacy of many endocrine products. (shrink)

This paper is part II of a trilogy on the transition from classical particle mechanics to relativistic continuum mechanics that one of the authors is working on. The first part, on the Trouton experiment, was published in the Stachel festschrift (Janssen 2003). This paper focuses on the Lorentz-Poincaré electron, and, in particular, on the "Poincaré pressure" or "Poincaré stresses" introduced to stabilize the electron. It covers both the original argument by Poincaré (1906) and a modern relativistic argument for adding a (...) negative pressure term to the system's energy-momentum tensor inspired by the work of Laue (1911a, b). It highlights the importance of a paper by Lorentz (1899) in this context and of the "electromagnetic mechanics" of Abraham (1903). (shrink)

That Ibn Sīnā’s “Canon of medicine” figures among the major classics of the history of medicine is doubted by no serious historian of medicine, eastern or western, Islamic or non-Islamic alike. It is therefore all the more surprising that so far no serious critical edition of this text was available. Certainly, a first, very timid step toward a really critical edition was made at the Institute of the History of Medicine and Medical Research, under the direction of Hakeem Abdul Hameed. (...) It compared the four existing editions: Rome 1593; Būlāq 1877; Tehran 1878; and Lucknow 1905. In addition it used an ancient manuscript of Aya Sophia, dated 618, i. e. MS Aya Sophia 3686. With this new edition a further important step toward a full critical edition is made. Even if it is obvious that it does not yet present a “critical edition” in the full sense of the word, it has important merits. (shrink)

Doubts on Avicenna: A Study and Edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s Commentary on the Ishārāt. By Ayman Shihadeh. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, Texts and Studies, vol. 95. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. viii + 289. $126, €97.

Ibn Sina, long known in the West as Avicenna, was at the center of the school of Islamic philosophy that inherited and adapted Greek thinking from pre-Socratic to late Hellenic times, says Jansson. The 17 essays he has collected here discuss such aspects as his heritage in the Islamic world and the Latin West, the problem of human freedom, al-Gazzali and his use of Avicennian texts, and some elements of Avicennian influence on Henry of Ghent's psychology. One is published here (...) for the first time; the others are reproduced--with original page numbers--from publication since 1987, but mostly the late 1990s. (shrink)

The World of Image in Islamic Philosophy: Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, Shahrazūrī, and Beyond. By L. W. C. van Lit. Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Apocalypticism and Eschatology, vol. 2. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. viii + 278. $110, £75.

1.1. The two postulates of special relativity and the tension between them. When Einstein first presented what came to be known as special relativity, he based the theory on two postulates or principles, called the “relativity postulate” or “relativity principle” and the “light postulate.” Both postulates are supported by a wealth of experimental evidence. The combination of the two, however, appears to lead to contradictions. To avoid such contradictions, Einstein argued, we need to change some of our fundamental ideas about (...) space and time. Einstein formulated the relativity postulate as follows: “The same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good” (Einstein 1905r, 891). Such frames of reference are called inertial frames and an observer at rest in one of them is called an inertial observer. A few examples will suffice to understand both the concept of an inertial frame and the meaning of the relativity postulate. First consider a plane which starts out sitting on the tarmac, proceeds to fly through clear skies, and eventually hits turbulence. All the while a passenger is nursing a cup of coffee. Sipping coffee without spilling is easy during the smooth portion of the flight. This is because the laws governing the behavior of the coffee in the frame of reference of the plane flying at constant velocity are the same as in the frame of reference of the airport.1 In fact, these same laws hold in any frame moving uniformly (i.e., with constant velocity) with respect to the frame of the airport. Drinking coffee without spilling when the plane ride gets bumpy is much harder. The laws for the coffee in noninertial frames, such as the frame of a plane encountering turbulence, are more complicated than in inertial frames. As a second example consider a cruise ship that sets out from its port of origin, sails smoothly on a calm sea, and eventually is caught in a storm. All the while two passengers engage in a drawn-out tennis match on the ship’s upper deck.. (shrink)

In publications in 1914 and 1918, Einstein claimed that his new theory of gravity somehow relativizes the rotation of a body with respect to the distant stars and the acceleration of the traveler with respect to the stay-at-home in the twin paradox. What he showed was that phenomena seen as inertial effects in a space-time coordinate system in which the non-accelerating body is at rest can be seen as a combination of inertial and gravitational effects in a space-time coordinate system (...) in which the accelerating body is at rest. Two different relativity principles play a role in these accounts: the relativity of non-uniform motion, in the weak sense that the laws of physics are the same in the two space-time coordinate systems involved; what Einstein in 1920 called the relativity of the gravitational field, the notion that there is a unified inertio-gravitational field that splits differently into inertial and gravitational components in different coordinate systems. I provide a detailed reconstruction of Einstein's rather sketchy accounts of the twins and the bucket and examine the role of these two relativity principles. I argue that we can hold on to but that is either false or trivial. (shrink)