Traditionally, philosophers of mind have been guided by a brainbound approach: the mind, whatever it turns out to be, will be related to or identical with the brain. The body, under this approach, plays a merely instrumental role — it is what keeps the brain alive and healthy. Over the past few decades there has been increasing resistance to the brainbound approach, and a strongly supported push for taking a non-brainbound approach: the body is not merely instrumental, but in many (...) ways constitutive of the mind — the mind, whatever it turns out to be, is bodily in many fundamental respects. Thus, in explaining the mind, we must consider not only brain states, but also wider bodily processes. What those wider bodily processes are, and how they constitute certain mental states, are the key questions that we now face as non-brainbound philosophers of mind. -/- One avenue of investigation that many have taken in view to answering these two questions has been to look at bodily awareness and its relation to our sense of self. How does our body, and our awareness of our body more specifically, constitute our sense of self and our subjective experience of the world. A clear way of investigating this last question is to turn to pathological cases of body awareness, e.g. body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is an interesting case. The DSM-5 distinguishes anorexia nervosa from body dysmorphic disorder — the former is classified as an eating disorder, while the latter is classified as a mental disorder. As I will explore in this chapter, this very manner of distinguishing among such pathologies admits of a traditional brainbound approach to separating the mind/brain from the body. Here I shall consider how a non-brainbound approach might give us different, and perhaps even better insight into cases such as anorexia nervosa, and I shall, conversely, consider how such body awareness disorders might serve to further strengthen the view that the right approach to understanding the mind is the non-brainbound approach. (shrink)

Rational addiction theories illustrate how absurd choice theories in economics get taken seriously as possibly true explanations and tools for welfare analysis despite being poorly interpreted, empirically unfalsifiable, and based on wildly inaccurate assumptions selectively justified by ad-hoc stories. The lack of transparency introduced by poorly anchored mathematical models, the psychological persuasiveness of stories, and the way the profession neglects relevant issues are suggested as explanations for how what we perhaps should see as displays of technical skill and ingenuity are (...) allowed to blur the lines between science and games. (shrink)

We argue that deliberative decision-making that is inclusive, transparent and accountable can contribute to more trustworthy and legitimate decisions on difficult ethical questions and political trade-offs during the pandemic and beyond.

Counterfactual reasoning has always played a role in human life. We ask questions like, “Could it have been different?,” “Under which conditions might/would it have been different?,” and “What would have happened if …?” If we do not find an answer, i.e., what we accept as an answer, we may start reasoning. Reasoning means introducing new information or assumptions, new questions, new answers to new questions, and so on. From a formal point of view, reasoning may be compared with moving (...) stepwise toward a destination in a path system without ever achieving an overview of the system. Seen in this way, reasoning is an activity with its own rationale, which must be studied from the agent’s own perspective. This paper explores the following query: Which conditions are necessarily fulfilled when the act of posing a specific question, or of introducing a particular piece of information or assumption, etc., may count as a step toward the answer to the initial question? (shrink)

Research on bodily awareness has focused on body illusions with an aim to explore the possible dissociation of our bodily awareness from our own body. It has provided insights into how our sensory modalities shape our sense of embodiment, and it has raised important questions regarding the malleability of our sense of ownership over our own body. The issue, however, is that this research fails to consider an important distinction in how we experience our body. There are indeed two ways (...) in which we can be aware of our body: via observational awareness, which involves attending to the body as an object, and via non-observational awareness, where the body is given as the subject of experience and does not involve attention. The research to date has focused on the former—observational bodily awareness—and has left the latter—non-observational bodily awareness—in the dark. This is detrimental to ever formulating a complete account of how we are aware of our body. It is understandable, however, because of the inherent problem in studying non-observational bodily awareness: how would you instruct subjects to report on their unattended bodily awareness? In view to resolving this problem, I propose here a working hypothesis on the basis of research on interoception and the rubber hand illusion, and on the effect of meditation on awareness and attention. This working hypothesis can show us a way to begin studying non-observational bodily awareness, and finally build a complete theory of bodily awareness. (shrink)

Experiential consciousness is characterized by subjectivity: There is something it is like to be a subject of experience – a first-personal perspective, a what-it-is-like-for-me. In this paper I defend two proposals. First, I contend that to understand the subjectivity of consciousness we must turn to the subject: we are embodied sub- jects of experience. Thus, I argue, the subjectivity of experiential consciousness should be understood as a bodily subjectivity. Sec- ond, if we take this approach, I propose that we can (...) finally begin to explain the structure of experiential consciousness as subjective by looking at certain bodily processes in particular interoception. (shrink)

This study examines the value of literary interpretation. A case is argued on the basis of the possibility of literary works being understood as 'about' diverse 'themes'. The process of understanding literature, it is argued, inevitably involves the concerns and the personal and historical situatedness of the interpreter. In the performance history of Shakespeare's The Tempest we see clearly how the thematic focus and the representation of the elements of the work changes, sometimes radically, over time. An interpretation of The (...) Tempest with an emphasis on today's concerns is the basis for a discussion which shows the interdependence of the questions of why literary works have survived as valued objects of attention over time, and how literature can matter to the reader. Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics shows, in its emphasis on the historical situatedness of understanding, how the reader'S situation and concerns feeds into the process of making sense of literary works and thereby makes literary interpretation interact with the life of the interpreter. 'Themes', or what the work is seen to 'be about', is central to the process of literary interpretation. This, in particular, is where literature has its openness to accommodate application to diverse concerns and situations. To remedy the deficiency of Gadamer's hermeneutics on this point, the role of themes in literary interpretation is first illustrated by an interpretation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and then analyzed. The study argues that while different literary interpreters may have different purposes, for their procedures to constitute interpretations three criteria need to be observed. In having to reach an equilibrium between the requirements of faithfulness to the literary work on the one hand, and the understanding of it through one's own situation and concerns on the other, the process of literary interpretation makes a valuable contribution to understanding. (shrink)

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that operates as an independent currency. This paper is a philosophical investigation of the ontological constitution of Bitcoin. Using Slavoj Žižek’s ontological triad of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, the paper distinguishes between three ideal typical theories of money: commodity theory, fiat theory, and credit theory. The constitution of Bitcoin is analysed by comparing the currency to each of these ideal types. It is argued that Bitcoin is commodity money without gold, (...) fiat money without a state, and credit money without debt. In conclusion, it is suggested that Bitcoin poses an ideological challenge to conventional forms of money in so far as it not only provokes sedimented beliefs about money but also exposes the forms of exploitation, risk and even violence inherent in the existing system of state authorized credit money. (shrink)

When a person has an intuition, it seems to her that things are certain ways; to many it seems that torturing the innocent for fun is wrong, for example. When a person has an intuition, there is also something particular it is like to be her: intuitions have a characteristic phenomenal character. This article asks how the phenomenal character of intuition is related to two core core questions in the philosophy of intuition, namely: Is intuition a source of justification and (...) knowledge? and What are intuitions?. (shrink)

Nonclassical theories of truth have in common that they reject principles of classical logic to accommodate an unrestricted truth predicate. However, different nonclassical strategies give up different classical principles. The paper discusses one criterion we might use in theory choice when considering nonclassical rivals: the maxim of minimal mutilation.

Aesthetic Expertise, Ole Martin Skilleås explains what aesthetic expertise is, what it's used for, how it manifests across diverse roles within aesthetic practices, and why we should want access to it to live our aesthetic lives to the full.

Logic isn’t special. Its theories are continuous with science; its method continuous with scientific method. Logic isn’t a priori, nor are its truths analytic truths. Logical theories are revisable, and if they are revised, they are revised on the same grounds as scientific theories. These are the tenets of anti-exceptionalism about logic. The position is most famously defended by Quine, but has more recent advocates in Maddy, Priest, Russell, and Williamson. Although these authors agree on many methodological issues about logic, (...) they disagree about which logic anti-exceptionalism supports. Williamson uses an anti-exceptionalist argument to defend classical logic, while Priest claims that his anti-exceptionalism supports nonclassical logic. This paper argues that the disagreement is due to a difference in how the parties understand logical theories. Once we reject Williamson’s deflationary account of logical theories, the argument for classical logic is undercut. Instead an alternative account of logical theories is offered, on which logical pluralism is a plausible supplement to anti-exceptionalism. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the Quinean view that logical theories have no special epistemological status, in particular, they are not self-evident or justified a priori. Instead, logical theories are continuous with scientific theories, and knowledge about logic is as hard-earned as knowledge of physics, economics, and chemistry. Once we reject apriorism about logic, however, we need an alternative account of how logical theories are justified and revised. A number of authors have recently argued that logical theories are justified by abductive (...) argument (e.g. Gillian Russell, Graham Priest, Timothy Williamson). This paper explores one crucial question about the abductive strategy: what counts as evidence for a logical theory? I develop three accounts of evidential confirmation that an anti-exceptionalist can accept: (1) intuitions about validity, (2) the Quine-Williamson account, and (3) indispensability arguments. I argue, against the received view, that none of the evidential sources support classical logic. (shrink)

This paper presents a typology of human actions, based on Aristotle’s kinesis–energeia dichotomy and on a formal elaboration (with some refinement) of the Vendler–Kenny classificatory schemes for action types (or action verbs). The types introduced are defined throughout by inferential criteria, in terms of what here are referred to as “modal-temporal expressions” (‘MT-terms’). Examples of familiar categories analysed in this way are production and maintenance, but the procedure is meant to offer a basis for defining various other commonsense categories. Among (...) the more theoretical categories introduced are “Aristotelian projects”, i.e. actions defined in terms of Aristotle’s conceptions of movement/change, as well as “abstract projects”, in which the agent ensures that something changes from not being a fact to being a fact, and “conditional agency”, which involves actions that are to be performed when/if certain conditions come to be fulfilled. A category like “starting an action” is itself inferentially defined here in MT-terms, and so, inter alia, are proceeding with, finishing, stopping and interrupting an action. There is also a demonstration of how actions of one type may be converted into those of other types, where this is a matter of the way they are “seen” or described. There is also an implication to the effect that some of these distinctions may be useful for formulating certain critical insights regarding modern life. (shrink)

Our emotional states affect how we perceive the world. If I am stressed, annoyed, or irritated, I might experience the sound of children laughing and screaming as they play around the house in a negative manner — it is unpleasant, loud, piercing, and so on. Yet, if I’m in a relaxed, happy, loving mood, the very same sounds might be experienced as pleasant, playful, warm, and so on. The sounds being made by the children are the same in both cases, (...) but how they are experienced differs. The auditory experience is affected by the emotional state that I am in. I perceive the sounds differently depending on how I’m feeling. Although this might at first seem to be a trivial observation, it certainly is not. We take for granted that our perceptual experiences give rise to justified beliefs and knowledge. Thus, if my perceptual experience of an object can differ based on my emotional state, and I take my perceptual experience to justify my beliefs and even lead to knowledge, then we might have a problem. If emotions — which are not fixed and in large part uncontrolled — affect our ability to accurately perceive the world, then they may undermine the justified beliefs and knowledge gained on the basis of our perceptual experience of the world. My goal here is to explore this potential problem. -/- I consider how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities — audition, gustation olfaction, and so on. I take the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body — interoception — the potential epistemological difficulties remain: how can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience. As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as I argue, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, I propose that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to answer two interrelated questions about pleasures and pains: (i) The question of unity: Do all pleasures share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pleasures, and do all pains share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pains? (ii) The question of commensurability: Are all pleasures and pains rankable on a single, quantitative hedonic scale? I argue that our intuitions draw us in opposing directions: (...) On the one hand, pleasures and pains seem unified and commensurable; on the other hand, they do not. I further argue that neither intuition can be abandoned, and examine three different paths to reconciliation. The first two are response theory and split experience theory. Both of these, I argue, are unsuccessful. A third path, however—which I label “dimensionalism” —succeeds. Dimensionalism is the theory that pleasure and pain have the ontological status as opposite sides of a hedonic dimension along which experiences vary. This view has earlier been suggested by C. D. Broad, Karl Duncker, Shelly Kagan, and John Searle, but it has not been worked out in detail. In this paper I work out the dimensionalist view in some detail, defend it, and explain how it solves the problem of the unity and commensurability of pleasures and pains. (shrink)

In bilateral systems for classical logic, assertion and denial occur as primitive signs on formulas. Such systems lend themselves to an inferentialist story about how truth-conditional content of connectives can be determined by inference rules. In particular, for classical logic there is a bilateral proof system which has a property that Carnap in 1943 called categoricity. We show that categorical systems can be given for any finite many-valued logic using $n$-sided sequent calculus. These systems are understood as a further development (...) of bilateralism—call it multilateralism. The overarching idea is that multilateral proof systems can incorporate the logic of a variety of denial speech acts. So against Frege we say that denial is not the negation of assertion and, with Mark Twain, that denial is more than a river in Egypt. (shrink)

This book opens a new field within business science: management philosophy. This discipline gives a thorough and critical foundation of a theory of management and leadership beyond any talk of "value-based" management, and "ethical accounting". It presents an uncompromising picture of the real leader through a set of leadership virtues, focusing on human duties, not on human rights. The book demonstrates that only through philosophy it is possible to establish a genuine science of management, overcoming the pressures of functionalism, opportunism (...) and pragmaticism, inherent in the hyper-modern corporation shaped by high-tech and information advantages. (shrink)

To understand how dialogue has become increasingly important to leadership, this book explores the notion of the protreptic.

The Buddhist philosopher Dignaga (around 500 CE) centers his philosophy of language on the theorem of verbal meaning as "exclusion of other referents" (anyapoha). This is the topic of the fifth chapter in his summarizing last work, the Pramanasamuccayavrtti. Since a word tells its hearer something about the object to which it refers in the same way that a logical reason tells its observer something about the object of which it is a property, Dignaga's apoha thesis is a crucial complement (...) to his theory of inference. The original Sanskrit text of this work is no longer extant. Except for a few Sanskrit fragments and two highly problematic Tibetan translations it is only the since recently available unique Sanskrit manuscript of the mid-8th century CE commentary, the Pramanasamuccayatika, by Jinendrabuddhi that allows for a faithful English translation. Jinendrabuddhi's text has been used throughout and, in parts, critically edited for the first time. On the basis of these sources it was possible to provide the translation with a restoration as far as possible of the original Sanskrit text of Dignaga's work. In his introduction, Pind surveys his methodology, discusses the sources, the context and historical position, and the character of this chapter, and he also deals with Jinendrabuddhi's commentary, his sources and its restoration. Moreover, he presents the essential features of the apoha thesis in detail. The translation of this rather difficult text is richly annotated and provides all philological information in support of the text's restoration as well as extensive explanations and discussions of the content. It is in the notes that Pind provides the background of Indian grammatical analysis and theory (Bhartrhari and others) and documents the context of the rival philosophical traditions such as those of the Nyaya and Mimasa. Pind is also particularly aware of the influences on Jinendrabuddhi's interpretation that derive from Dharmakirti's interpretation of Dignaga's tenets and consistently analyses the differences occurring. Several appendices conclude this study by presenting a number of notes separated because of their size. After Richard Hayes' study and translation of the first part of this chapter (1988), this is the first comprehensive presentation of Dignaga's philosophy of language. (shrink)

This paper asks how anti-nuclear activists form collectives that are able to act collectively. It argues that shared interests and collective identities only insufficiently explain the emergence of collective action. Alternatively, the paper investigates meeting talk of German anti-nuclear groups where activists discuss proposals for collective action. Based on audio recordings, a sequential analysis of activists’ deliberations traces the transformation of vague ideas into concrete and collectively agreed to proposals. It is shown how the process by which activists reach a (...) common understanding about a particular protest activity—as something that is being talked about here and now—and the process of becoming an acting collectivity—a group that is ready to carry out this protest activity in the future—are interdependent. Activists make use of “indexicality” to introduce specifically vague proposals, enabling others to respond and contribute to the emerging proposal while group agency is suspended. At first, the authorship of proposals is minimized. Step by step, vague proposals are specified by meeting participants until a “change in footing” marks group consensus. While the group emerges as the author and principal of proposals through this process, the paper shows that implementation relies on individual principals again who take responsibility during and after the meeting. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat do we disagree about when we disagree about logic? On the face of it, classical and nonclassical logicians disagree about the laws of logic and the nature of logical properties. Yet, s...

"The nature of intuition and its relation to other mental faculties, particularly perception, is one of the most hotly contested debates in philosophy of mind and psychology. Do intuitions justify belief or merely dispositions to believe? Is intuition a mental state with distinctive phenomenal qualities and if so, how do these differ from normal perceptual states? Drawing on the most recent philosophical research on intuition and perception, Ole Koksvik defends the idea that intuition not only justifies belief but can play (...) a much wider role in our everyday epistemic lives than previously thought. Arguing that intuitional experience is similar to perceptual experience he develops a novel view of intuition as conscious experience. His argument involves both a close description of the kind of experience that intuition is and a defence of intuition against criticism from experimental philosophy. The picture that emerges defends intuitions not because they can be found to be true or false but because they permit us to consider the world as it is might otherwise be and are continuous with the rest of general human inquiry"--. (shrink)

Logical pluralism has been in vogue since JC Beall and Greg Restall 2006 articulated and defended a new pluralist thesis. Recent criticisms such as Priest 2006a and Field 2009 have suggested that there is a relationship between their type of logical pluralism and the meaning-variance thesis for logic. This is the claim, often associated with Quine 1970, that a change of logic entails a change of meaning. Here we explore the connection between logical pluralism and meaning-variance, both in general and (...) for Beall and Restall's theory specifically. We argue that contrary to what Beall and Restall claim, their type of pluralism is wedded to meaning-variance. We then develop an alternative form of logical pluralism that circumvents at least some forms of meaning-variance. (shrink)

Our emotional states affect how we perceive the world. If I am stressed, annoyed, or irritated, I might experience the sound of children laughing and screaming as they play around the house in a negative manner — it is unpleasant, loud, piercing, and so on. Yet, if I’m in a relaxed, happy, loving mood, the very same sounds might be experienced as pleasant, playful, warm, and so on. The sounds being made by the children are the same in both cases, (...) but how they are experienced differs. The auditory experience is affected by the emotional state that I am in. I perceive the sounds differently depending on how I’m feeling. Although this might at first seem to be a trivial observation, it certainly is not. We take for granted that our perceptual experiences give rise to justified beliefs and knowledge. Thus, if my perceptual experience of an object can differ based on my emotional state, and I take my perceptual experience to justify my beliefs and even lead to knowledge, then we might have a problem. If emotions — which are not fixed and in large part uncontrolled — affect our ability to accurately perceive the world, then they may undermine the justified beliefs and knowledge gained on the basis of our perceptual experience of the world. My goal here is to explore this potential problem. -/- I consider how we might understand the effect that emotions have on the justification of our perceptual beliefs about the world, beliefs that we acquire from a variety of sensory modalities — audition, gustation olfaction, and so on. I take the problem to be associated with one of two forms of perceptual influence: penetration or multisensory integration. In any given perceptual moment there are multiple sensory modalities and mental states at play, each affecting the overall experience. Whether we understand the influence of emotion on perception as a form of non-perceptual penetration or a form of non-visual sensory perception of the inner body — interoception — the potential epistemological difficulties remain: how can we be said to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge on the basis of such influenced perceptual experience. As has been the norm, only the five exteroceptive senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taste and touch are typically discussed in the context of sensory perception. However, as I argue, there is strong reason to accept the claim that emotional experience is a form of interoception, and that interoception ought to be considered when discussing sensory perception. In this way, then, I propose that clarifying the role played by interoception in sense perception across modalities is necessary if we are to make progress on the epistemological problems at hand. (shrink)

In some philosophical arguments an important role is played by the claim that certain situations differ from each other with respect to phenomenology. One class of such arguments are minimal pair arguments. These have been used to argue that there is cognitive phenomenology, that high-level properties are represented in perceptual experience, that understanding has phenomenology, and more. I argue that facts about our mental lives systematically block such arguments, reply to a range of objections, and apply my critique to some (...) examples from the literature. (shrink)

In this thesis I seek to advance our understanding of what intuitions are. I argue that intuitions are experiences of a certain kind. In particular, they are experiences with representational content, and with a certain phenomenal character. -/- In Chapter 1 I identify our target and provide some important reliminaries. Intuitions are mental states, but which ones? Giving examples helps: a person has an intuition when it seems to her that torturing the innocent is wrong, or that if something is (...) red it is coloured. We can also provide an initial characterisation of the state by saying that it has representational content, often causes belief, and appears to justify belief. In addition, there is something it is like to have an intuition: intuition has a certain phenomenal character. -/- Some argue that intuition does not explain anything which cannot be explained by other mental states. One version of this view takes intuition to reduce to belief. In Chapter 2 I argue that this entails that agents are rationally criticisable in situations where we know they are not, and that such views are therefore untenable. A parallel argument shows that the corresponding approach to perception fails. This suggests a similarity in nature: both intuition and perception are experiences. -/- Others take intuition to reduce to a disposition to have a belief. In Chapter 3 I consider a line of argument against such views, find it unsuccessful, and present two new arguments. One is likely to be dialectically ineffective. The other suffers no such weakness: it shows that the proposed reduction fails. As before, the argument also applies to perception, and suggests that intuition and perception are both experiences. -/- In the remainder of the thesis I develop an account of intuition as an experience. I distinguish between content-specific and attitude-specific phenomenology, and argue that intuition lacks the former (Chapter 4), but has the latter (Chapter 5). This allows us to say what intuition is: it is is an experience with representational content and with attitude-specific phenomenology of a certain kind. -/- In Chapter 6 I put this account of intuition to use. When a person has a perceptual or intuitional experience, I argue that simply having the experience is what makes the subject justified in believing what the experience represents. Moreover, what explains that intuition and perception can justify belief in this way is precisely their phenomenal character. (shrink)

The paper is a contribution to current debates about conspiracy theories within philosophy and cultural studies. Wittgenstein’s understanding of language is invoked to analyse the epistemological effects of designating particular questions and explanations as a ‘conspiracy theory’. It is demonstrated how such a designation relegates these questions and explanations beyond the realm of meaningful discourse. In addition, Agamben’s concept of sovereignty is applied to explore the political effects of using the concept of conspiracy theory. The exceptional epistemological status assigned to (...) alleged conspiracy theories within our prevalent paradigms of knowledge and truth is compared to the exceptional legal status assigned to individuals accused of terrorism under the War on Terror. The paper concludes by discussing the relation between conspiracy theory and ‘the paranoid style’ in contemporary politics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of the school strikes for climate, initiated in August 2018 by the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, soon to become a global social movement involving hundreds of thousands of students. I examine 10 speeches of Thunberg as recontextualizations of environmental ethical values that have been formulated within the context of United Nations. With this approach, guided by an ethical and educational interest grounded in moral education, and informed by conceptions of (...) Seyla Benhabib, this paper demonstrates how students become democratic citizens appropriating the concern for future generations as a cosmopolitan claim in a resistance to exclusions from current politics. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss education in a time in the history when the human impact on Earth is massive and pervasive, with devastating consequences on the conditions for life. Within various academic fields, this era is increasingly distinguished as the Anthropocene. The term highlights the new, dominant position of the human species in Earth’s history, but is contentious, hiding as much as it reveals. Humanity is surely not one, but many, participating in a complex web of relations constituted by (...) other species and the material world. Moreover, the Anthropocene is also a time of global corporate capitalism, when the magnitude and the consequences of human activities are unequally distributed among humans and more-than humans alike. The ethical and political dimensions involved in this determine the reflections in this article. Specifically, I examine Wolfgang Klafki’s educational theory as an expression of and a response to the Anthropocene. Klafki is a salient contributor to the rethinking of North European general didactics in the 20th century, in which Bildung, formations of the self, plays a key role. In Klafki’s later works, epochal key problems are integrated in his concept of Bildung, addressing environmental crisis, social inequity, and threats to peace on Earth, in a global outlook that transcends Bildung’s traditionally national scope. At the same time, Klafki’s educational response expresses an anthropocentric outlook, which calls for rethinking. In such a rethinking I suggest to see the mediating element of the common, crucial in Klafki’s Bildung theory, not as limited to human interests but as including concerns for life on Earth, and to conceive of historical situatedness as an aspect of the commonality of Bildung. (shrink)

Papers in philosophical bioethics often discuss unrealistic scenarios and defend controversial views. Why is that, and what is this kind of work good for? My aim in the first part of this paper is to specify how philosophical bioethics relates to other types of work in bioethics, and to explain the role of the unrealistic scenarios and the controversial views. In the second part, I propose three strategies for doing research in philosophical bioethics that makes a valuable contribution to the (...) bioethics community at large. (shrink)

The thesis is that question or ”questioning” is a form of life and as such a precondition for the grammatical category. If I am going out and need my coat but cannot find it, then it is a question where my coat is, before – and even independently of whether – I ask it. It is a mode of a situation or of being in a situation so-and-so. Incidentally, the original meaning of ‘question’ (lat. ‘questio’) is not the linguistic one, (...) but “agenda” (“matter”, “issue”). Cf. “To be or not to be, that is the question”: that is what matters. A question may even characterise a historical epoch. What are the questions of our time – asked as well as unasked? (shrink)