This collection of new essays locates Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae in the medieval context of Latin learning and vernacular translations. The first part is devoted to the Latin commentary tradition, while the other parts explore the vernacular traditions.

Over the last twenty years, in all of these neighbouring fields, modal systems have been developed that we call multi-dimensional. (Our definition of multi ...

All too often in contemporary discourse, we hear about science overstepping its proper limits—about its brazenness, arrogance, and intellectual imperialism. The problem, critics say, is scientism: the privileging of science over all other ways of knowing. Science, they warn, cannot do or explain everything, no matter what some enthusiasts believe. In Science Unlimited?, noted philosophers of science Maarten Boudry and Massimo Pigliucci gather a diverse group of scientists, science communicators, and philosophers of science to explore the limits of science (...) and this alleged threat of scientism. In this wide-ranging collection, contributors ask whether the term scientism in fact (or in belief) captures an interesting and important intellectual stance, and whether it is something that should alarm us. Is scientism a well-developed position about the superiority of science over all other modes of human inquiry? Or is it more a form of excessive confidence, an uncritical attitude of glowing admiration? What, if any, are its dangers? Are fears that science will marginalize the humanities and eradicate the human subject—that it will explain away emotion, free will, consciousness, and the mystery of existence—justified? Does science need to be reined in before it drives out all other disciplines and ways of knowing? Both rigorous and balanced, Science Unlimited? interrogates our use of a term that is now all but ubiquitous in a wide variety of contexts and debates. Bringing together scientists and philosophers, both friends and foes of scientism, it is a conversation long overdue. (shrink)

This article argues that there is much more continuity in Hobbes’s thinking on the church and religion than critics have recognized. I consider three issues which have been taken as prime illustrations of Hobbes’s alleged ‘new departure’ in the Leviathan: the nature and fate of the soul; the character of magic and revelation; and church-state relations. I show that in particular Richard Tuck’s interpretation of Hobbes’s intellecual development is mistaken. There is no ‘fundamental reversal’ or ‘new direction’ in Hobbes’s position, (...) but rather a development and an extension of a line of thinking which is already clearly visible in the earlier works. (shrink)

Rudolph Agricola’s De inventione dialectica has rightly been regarded as the most original and influential textbook on argumentation, reading, writing, and communication in the Renaissance. At the heart of his treatment are the topics ( loci ), such as definition, genus, species, place, whole, parts, similars, and so on. While their function in Agricola’s system is argumentative and rhetorical, the roots of the topics are metaphysical, as Agricola himself explicitly acknowledges. It has led scholars to characterize Agricola as a realist (...) or even an extreme realist. This article studies two little treatises on universals by Agricola that throw further light on his realism. It is suggested that they could be viewed as an early step in his long-term project of revising and re-organizing the systems of topics as he encountered them in Aristotle, Cicero, and Boethius. The article offers a close analysis of the treatises, suggesting that Agricola’s realism owes a (general) debt to the school of the Scotists. In both earlier and later work Agricola emphasizes the common aspects of things that enable us to categorize and talk about things without denying their fundamental unicity and individuality. An edition of Agricola’s second treatise on universals—a reply to a critic—is added. (shrink)

Decision making in noisy and changing environments requires a fine balance between exploiting knowledge about good courses of action and exploring the environment in order to improve upon this knowledge. We present an experiment on a restless bandit task in which participants made repeated choices between options for which the average rewards changed over time. Comparing a number of computational models of participants’ behavior in this task, we find evidence that a substantial number of them balanced exploration and exploitation by (...) considering the probability that an option offers the maximum reward out of all the available options. (shrink)

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In this challenging essay, Maarten Doorman argues that in art, belief in progress is still relevant, if not essential. The radical freedoms of postmodernism, he claims, have had a crippling effect on art, leaving it in danger of becoming meaningless. Art can only acquire meaning through context the concept of progress, then, is ideal as the primary criterion for establishing that context. The history of art, in fact, can be seen as a process of constant accumulation, works of art (...) commenting on one another and enriching one another's meanings. It is these complex interrelationships and the progress they create in both art and its observers that Doorman, in a display of great philosophical erudition, defends. (shrink)

The ‘European Space of Higher Education’ could be mapped as an infrastructure for entrepreneurship and a place where the distinction between the social and the economic becomes obsolete. Using Foucault's understanding of biopolitics and discussing the analyses of Agamben and Negri/Hardt it is argued that the actual governmental configuration, i.e. the economisation of the social, also has a biopolitical dimension. Focusing on the intersection between a politicisation and economisation of human life allows us to discuss a kind of ‘bio‐economisation’ , (...) a regime of economic terror and learning as investment. Finally it is argued how fostering learning, i.e. fostering life could turn into ‘let die’ and even into ‘make die’. (shrink)

Moving images of animals have been popular from the beginning of the medium of film and fascinate us from childhood, and they show the cultural image that exists in a (human) society of (other) animals. This essay outlines how Disney rose to prominence in the first half of the 20th century by strongly humanizing (or anthropomorphizing) animals in his animated films and not taking them very seriously as animals. In the second half of that century, the BBC had great success (...) with nature series in which, on the contrary, scientific distance and the differences between humans and animals (‘anthropo-denial’) were central, and animals were seen primarily as objects. In recent decades, new insights into biology on the one hand and technological innovations in the media on the other have led to more diverse and ambivalent animal images. These reflect a growing awareness of the similarities between humans and other animals, with films and TV series using new images and stories to enable viewers to empathize with non-human living beings. (shrink)

Relationalism maintains that perceptual experience involves, as part of its nature, a distinctive kind of conscious perceptual relation between a subject of experience and an object of experience. Together with the claim that perceptual experience is presentational, relationalism is widely believed to be a core aspect of the naive realist outlook on perception. This is a mistake. I argue that naive realism about perception can be upheld without a commitment to relationalism.

In this paper, we present our Construction Grammar account of light verb constructions in the Indo-Aryan language Odia. These light verb constructions are asymmetric complex verb predicates that combine a main verb with a light verb. While the LVs are form-identical with a lexical verb, they are “light” because they have lost their lexical content as well as their argument structure. We argue that LV constructions present a coherent system: they all modulate the interpretation of the event encoded by the (...) main verb by adding a particular aspectual profile on the event and some of these light verbs further add a mirative interpretation. The present paper focuses on this subset of “aspectuo-mirative LVs” which can be characterised as non-parasitic expressions of mirativity; in particular, it presents new work on the light verb -uʈh ‘-rise’ that combines a profile on ONSET with mirativity. The constructional view that we present here offers an account of light verbs that is both descriptively and theoretically innovative. Its descriptive value resides in its systematic and fine-grained corpus-based analysis of the formal and semantic features of LVs beyond what is found in the existing literature. The theoretical contribution of our paper not only resides in offering a better understanding of the status of LVs in the grammar, but by situating the semantic value of some of these in the complex category of mirativity, it offers a more unified answer of quite disparate observations in the literature. Finally, we also address the question of whether this mirative value of the aspectuo-mirative LVs is semantic or pragmatic. As we will show, such a strict dichotomy cannot be maintained, which gives further support for a constructional approach. (shrink)

The article discusses 15th-century humanist Giovanni Pontano. Particular focus is given to his philosophical views on the origin of language, its impact on everyday life, and grammar. According to the author, Pontano brought forward ideas on the social uses of language which scholars have usually attributed to the later Enlightenment period. It is suggested that Renaissance humanism may be more important to philosophical history than previously thought. Details related to Pontano's views on semantic precision and the affective, active, and social (...) roles of language are also presented. (shrink)

Schools and classrooms, as well as the work place and the Internet, are considered today as learning environments . People are regarded as learners and the main target of school education has become 'learning' pupils and students how to learn. The roles of teachers and lecturers are redefined as instructors, designers of (powerful) learning environments and facilitators or coaches of learning processes. The aim of this paper is to argue that the current self-understanding in terms of learning environments is not (...) merely about a renewal of our vocabulary, but an indication of a far more general transformation of the world of education. It is argued that the current self-understanding in terms of 'learning environments' and 'learners' indicates a shift in our experience of time and place; a shift from (modern) historical self-understanding towards (post-modern) environmental self-understanding. The essay draws upon Foucauldian concepts in order to map the modern organisation of time and space in 'schools'. This past organisation is confronted with the current organisation of time and space in 'learning environments'. By contrasting both maps the paper focuses on the main characteristics of the current experience of time and space, that is, 'environmental self-understanding', and explores in the final section the dark side of this self-understanding. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often assume that mirror reflections are optical illusions. According to many authors, what we see in a mirror appears to be behind it. I discuss two strategies to resist this piece of dogma. As I will show, the conviction that mirror reflections are illusions is rooted in a confused conception of the relations between location, direction, and visibility. This conception is unacceptable to those who take seriously the way in which mirrors contribute to our experience of the (...) world. My argument may be read as an advertisement of the neglected field of philosophical catoptrics, the philosophical study of the optical properties of mirrors. It enables us to recast familiar issues in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Which language should philosophers use: technical or common language? In a book as important for intellectual historians as it is for philosophers, Lodi Nauta addresses a vital question which still has resonance today: is the discipline of philosophy assisted or disadvantaged by employing a special vocabulary? By the Middle Ages philosophy had become a highly technical discipline, with its own lexicon and methods. The Renaissance humanist critique of this specialised language has been dismissed as philosophically superficial, but the author (...) demonstrates that it makes a crucial point: it is through the misuse of language that philosophical problems arise. He charts the influence of this critique on early modern philosophers, including Hobbes and Locke, and shows how it led to the downfall of medieval Aristotelianism and the gradual democratization of language and knowledge. His book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the transition from medieval to modern philosophy. (shrink)

Part of the distinction between artefacts, objects made by humans for particular purposes, and natural objects is that artefacts are subject to normative judgements. A drill, say, can be a good drill or a poor drill, it can function well or correctly or it can malfunction. In this paper I investigate how such judgements fit into the domain of the normative in general and what the grounds for their normativity are. Taking as a starting point a general characterization of normativity (...) proposed by Dancy, I argue how statements such as ‘this is a good drill’ or ‘this drill is malfunctioning’ can be seen to express normative facts, or the content of normative statements. What they say is that a user who has a desire to achieve a particular relevant outcome has a reason to use, or not to use, the artefact in question. Next this analysis is extended to show that not just statements that say that an artefact performs its function well or poorly, but all statements that ascribe a function to an artefact can be seen as expressing a normative fact. On this approach the normativity of artefacts is analyzed in terms of reasons on grounds of practical, and to a lesser extent theoretical, rationality. I close by investigating briefly to what extent reasons on moral grounds are, in the analysis adopted here, involved in the normativity of artefacts.Keywords: Artefact; Normativity; Instrumental reason; Practical rationality; Function; Use. (shrink)

This article seeks to locate Vives's work in the tradition of humanist thought that criticized the linguistic and philosophical abstraction of the scholastics. After discussing Vives's views on language and knowledge as functions of man’s biological nature, the article argues that for Vives the topics, as seats of argumentation, are a reflection of the ontological order and as such an instrument and heuristic aid for the human mind. They form a grid through which knowledge can be acquired and arguments be (...) formulated. The topics bridge the world of (unknown) essences and man’s epistemic categories. (shrink)

What sets the practice of rigorously tested, sound science apart from pseudoscience? In this volume, the contributors seek to answer this question, known to philosophers of science as “the demarcation problem.” This issue has a long history in philosophy, stretching as far back as the early twentieth century and the work of Karl Popper. But by the late 1980s, scholars in the field began to treat the demarcation problem as impossible to solve and futile to ponder. However, the essays that (...) Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry have assembled in this volume make a rousing case for the unequivocal importance of reflecting on the separation between pseudoscience and sound science. (shrink)

Sober has reconstructed the biological design argument in the framework of likelihoodism, purporting to demonstrate that it is defective for intrinsic reasons. We argue that Sober’s restriction on the introduction of auxiliary hypotheses is too restrictive, as it commits him to rejecting types of everyday reasoning that are clearly valid. Our account shows that the design argument fails, not because it is intrinsically untestable but because it clashes with the empirical evidence and fails to satisfy certain theoretical desiderata (in particular, (...) unification). Likewise, Sober’s critique of the arguments from imperfections and from evil against design is off the mark. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the elements which characterize a research attitude and approach introduced by Michel Foucault and further developed as ‘studies of governmentality’ into a sub‐discipline of the humanities during the past decade, including also applications in the field of education. The paper recalls Foucault's introduction of the notion of ‘governmentality’ and its relation to the ‘mapping of the present’ and sketches briefly the way in which the studies of governmentality have been elaborated in general and in (...) the context of research in education more particularly. It indicates how the studies of governmentality can be related to a cartography of the learning society, a cartography which helps us to get lost and to liberate our view. (shrink)

One way to address such questions about artifact kinds is to look for clues in the available literature on parallel questions that have been posed with respect to kinds in the natural domain. Philosophers have long been concerned with the ...