When collective decisions should be made democratically, which people form the relevant demos? Many theorists think this question is an embarrassment to democratic theory: because any decision about who forms the demos must be made democratically by the right demos, which itself must be democratically constituted and so on ad infinitum; and because neither the concept of democracy, nor our reasons for caring about democracy, determine who should form the demos. Having distinguished between these three versions of the demos problem, (...) we argue that each of them can be solved. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 395-408, September 2022.

Concentrating upon applications that are most relevant to modern physics, this valuable book surveys variational principles and examines their relationship to dynamics and quantum theory. Stressing the history and theory of these mathematical concepts rather than the mechanics, the authors provide many insights into the development of quantum mechanics and present much hard-to-find material in a remarkably lucid, compact form. After summarizing the historical background from Pythagoras to Francis Bacon, Professors Yourgrau and Mandelstram cover Fermat's principle of least time, the (...) principle of least action of Maupertuis, development of this principle by Euler and Lagrange, and the equations of Lagrange and Hamilton. Equipped by this thorough preparation to treat variational principles in general, they proceed to derive Hamilton's principle, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation, and Hamilton's canonical equations. An investigation of electrodynamics in Hamiltonian form covers next, followed by a resume of variational principles in classical dynamics. The authors then launch into an analysis of their most significant topics: the relation between variational principles and wave mechanics, and the principles of Feynman and Schwinger in quantum mechanics. Two concluding chapters extend the discussion to hydrodynamics and natural philosophy. Professional physicists, mathematicians, and advanced students with a strong mathematical background will find this stimulating volume invaluable reading. Extremely popular in its hardcover edition, this volume will find even wider appreciation in its first fine inexpensive paperbound edition. (shrink)

Analogical reasoning addresses the question how evidence from various phenomena can be combined and made relevant for theory development and prediction. In the first part of my contribution, I review some influential accounts of analogical reasoning, both historical and contemporary, focusing in particular on Keynes, Carnap, Hesse, and more recently Bartha. In the second part, I sketch a general framework. To this purpose, a distinction between a predictive and a conceptual type of analogical reasoning is introduced. I then take up (...) a common intuition according to which analogical inferences hold if the differences between source and target concern only irrelevant circumstances. I attempt to make this idea more precise by addressing possible objections and in particular by specifying a notion of causal irrelevance based on difference making in homogeneous contexts. (shrink)

SummaryA simple and precise definition is offered of “term t of theory T being T‐theoretical” which can be applied to any formalized theory. The definition is in line with and emends traditional accounts of theoreticity. Its adequacy is demonstrated by application to three examples: exchange economics, classical mechanics and collision mechanics.

The paper takes an expressivistic perspective, i.e., it takes conditionals of all sorts to primarily express conditional beliefs. Therefore it is based on what it takes to be the best account of conditional belief, namely ranking theory. It proposes not to start looking at the bewildering linguistic phenomenology, but first to systematically study the various options of expressing features of conditional belief. Those options by far transcend the Ramsey test and include relevancies of various kinds and in particular the so-called (...) “circumstances are such that” reading, under which also all conditionals representing causal relations can be subsumed. In this way a unifying perspective on the many kinds of conditionals is offered. The final section explains the considerable extent to which truth conditions for conditionals, which may seem lost in the expressivistic or epistemic perspective, may be recovered. (shrink)

This book has been accepted at the University of Copenhagen for a public defence as a Dr Phil dissertation.

The paper displays the similarity between the theory of probabilistic causation developed by Glymour et al. since 1983 and mine developed since 1976: the core of both is that causal graphs are Bayesian nets. The similarity extends to the treatment of actions or interventions in the two theories. But there is also a crucial difference. Glymour et al. take causal dependencies as primitive and argue them to behave like Bayesian nets under wide circumstances. By contrast, I argue the behavior of (...) Bayesian nets to be ultimately the defining characteristic of causal dependence. (shrink)

The paper proposes two principles of coherence (thus taking up work started in Spohn (1991) "A Reason for Explanation: Explanations Provide Stable Reasons"). The latter indeed serves as a weak, but precise explication of the notion of coherence as it is used in the current epistemological discussion. After discussing their epistemological setting, the paper considers four ways of establishing these principles. They may be inferred neither from enumerative induction, nor from the nature of propositions as objects of belief, nor in (...) a Kantian way from self-consciousness. Rather, I propose a fairly rigorous way to infer them from an even more fundamental rationality principle of non-dogmatism and an elementary theory of perception. (shrink)

In his contribution to this special issue, Almaas is keen to distinguish the individual streams of consciousness from 'pure awareness'. Since the existence of the former is presumably quite uncontroversial in present-day philosophy, I wish to concentrate on the latter, in particular on Almaas's claim that pure awareness is non-individual and ultimately it is 'the true owner of all experiences of all streams'. In my contribution, I wish to make plausible, by a philosophical reflection on the puzzling nature of the (...) I, that the ultimate subject of experience is indeed not the individual but 'the pure ego of the universe'. (shrink)

According to an influential account of standing, hypocritical blamers lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norm etc. which they invoke. Nevertheless, the commitment account has the wrong shape for it to explain why hypocrites lack standing to blame. Building on the lessons of that critique I propose a novel account of what undermines standing to blame – the comparative fairness account. This differs from the commitment account and the other prominent account of why (...) hypocrites lack standing to blame offered in the literature: the moral equality account. Finally, I observe that, intuitively, lack of commitment undermines standing to blame and that many hypocrites might lack standing for that reason also. Moreover, typically the hypocrite's failure to address their own faults is a feature in virtue of which, other things being equal, the hypocrite is less committed to the norm in question. These two observations provide the basis for an error theory of the commitment account's appeal, despite its inability to explain why, qua hypocritical blamer, one lacks standing to blame. (shrink)

Der Unterricht in Medizinethik soll Medizinstudierenden die Grundlagen dafür vermitteln, in ihrer zukünftigen ärztlichen Tätigkeit gute Entscheidungen treffen zu können. Im Rahmen einer Panelstudie wird derzeit die Entwicklung moralischer Positionen, medizinethischer Kenntnisse und Motivationen von Medizinstudierenden der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München über den Verlauf des Studiums untersucht. Für die Datenerhebung wurde ein Fragebogen entwickelt, der medizinethische Positionen und Kenntnisse sowie Motivationen erfasst. Im Wintersemester 2009/10 wurde die erste Querschnittsuntersuchung mit Studierenden im 1., 3. und 8. Semester sowie im Praktischen Jahr durchgeführt. Die (...) Mehrzahl der Befragten verfügte über einen geringen Kenntnisstand in verschiedenen Themenbereichen des Unterrichtsfachs GTE. Rechtliche Grundlagen und praktische Umsetzung von Therapiebegrenzungsmaßnahmen waren bis ins PJ-Semester vielen Studierenden nicht bekannt. Im Verlauf des Studiums veränderten sich die Motivationen weg von der Motivation, Menschen helfen zu wollen, hin zu Wissenserwerb und dem Ergreifen eines sicheren Berufs. Obwohl viele Befragte ein hohes Interesse an medizinethischen Fragestellungen und Unterricht im Bereich GTE angaben, zeigte sich kein nachhaltiger Zuwachs an medizinethischen Kenntnissen im Laufe des Studiums. In der Zusammenschau werfen die Ergebnisse die Frage auf, inwieweit verschiedene Ausbildungskonzepte Einfluss auf die individuelle ethische Entwicklung Medizinstudierender nehmen können. Eine Untersuchung dieser Fragestellung bleibt Gegenstand weitergehender Forschung. (shrink)

This book is a critical examination of Michel Foucault's relation to ancient Greek thought, in particular his famous analysis of Greek history of sexuality. Wolfgang Detel offers a new understanding of Foucault's theories of power and knowledge based on modern analytical theories of science and concepts of power. He offers a fresh and complex reading of the texts which Foucault discusses, covering topics such as Aristotle's ethics and theory of sex, Hippocratic diatetics, the earliest treatises on economics, and Plato's (...) theory of love. The result is a philosophically rich and probing critique of Foucault's later writings, and a persuasive account of the relation between ethics, power and knowledge in classical antiquity. His book will have a wide appeal to readers interested in Foucault and in Greek thought and culture. (shrink)

This paper is the most complete presentation of my views on deterministic causation. It develops the deterministic theory in perfect parallel to my theory of probabilistic causation and thus unites the two aspects. It also argues that the theory presented is superior to all regularity and all counterfactual theories of causation.

ABSTRACT ‘You may have beer or wine’ suggests that you may have beer and you may have wine. Following Klinedinst, I argue that this ‘free choice’ effect is a special kind of scalar implicature, arising from the application of an unspecific predicate to a plurality (of worlds). I show that the implicature can be derived from general norms of cooperative communication, without postulating new grammatical rules or hidden lexical items. The derivation calls for an extension to the classical neo-Gricean model. (...) I give independent arguments for this extension. (shrink)

This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually considered the less valuable the farther in the future they are obtained. The utilities of those things are discounted at a certain rate. The paper presents a novel normative argument for exponential discount rates, whatever their empirical adequacy. It proposes to take indexical utility seriously, i.e. utilities referring to indexical propositions (that speak of ‘I’, ‘now’, etc.) as opposed to non-indexical propositions. Economic focus is only (...) on the latter, while the former are neglected. The potential ignorance of when is now generates a difference between indexical and non-indexical utility that can be exploited for a novel argument in favour of exponential discount rates. (shrink)

The paper argues that a prevalent conception of power in the educational sciences is detrimental to pedagogy both as a field of practice and as a discipline and inept as a scientific concept from an epistemological standpoint. The designation of this power concept as ‘aethereal’ can provide the education theoretical discourses with a means to analyze and criticize positions and arguments that have undermined the autonomy of education since the establishment of Foucauldian thinking in the educational sciences. First, this article (...) argues that the pedagogical notion of the educable child depends on the concepts of individuality, plasticity, and autonomy within the framework of a negative ontology. Second, it problematizes the effects of the substitution of these concepts in the postmodern power-critical educational sciences for pedagogy in general and the child as its key concept in particular. The politicized child is conceived of as subjugated, passive, vulnerable, and what is crucial: as a thing-like, i.e. pedagogically ineducable but only powerfully moldable identity. Third, it analyses the philosophical basis of this shift towards the politicization of the child by introducing the concept of ‘aethereal power’. The article concludes with a sociological reflection on the societal dimension of this fundamental transformation of education and hints at the emerging post-critical pedagogy as a possible remedy. (shrink)

It was in February 1935 that Lévi-Strauss went to Brazil to teach sociology at the newly founded University of São Paolo. In the stimulating atmosphere of the city soon he struck up a friendship with the founders of Brazilian modernism, in particular with Mário de Andrade, the central figure of the avant-garde movement, who helped the young researcher to finance his expeditions into the Mato Grosso and the Amazon Rainforest. Twenty years later Lévi-Strauss wrote about this period in Brazil, after (...) having encountered other cultures and having made other experiences. The highly reflexive narrative of Tristes Tropiques contains most of the topics which return in his later works and about which the authors of this volume have pondered from different perspectives. This introductory text reconstructs the principal stages of Lévi-Strauss’ enterprises in Brazil and illustrates how his departure for the New World became the start of a great career. (shrink)