Following Mayr (1961) evolutionary biologists often maintain that the hallmark of biology is its evolutionary perspective. In this view, biologists distinguish themselves from other natural scientists by their emphasis on why-questions. Why-questions are legitimate in biology but not in other natural sciences because of the selective character of the process by means of which living objects acquire their characteristics. For that reason, why-questions should be answered in terms of natural selection. Functional biology is seen as a reductionist science that applies (...) physics and chemistry to answer how-questions but lacks a biological point of view of its own. In this paper I dispute this image of functional biology. A close look at the kinds of issues studied in biology and at the way in which these issues are studied shows that functional biology employs a distinctive biological perspective that is not rooted in selection. This functional perspective is characterized by its concern with the requirements of the life-state and the way in which these are met. (shrink)

In this meticulous study, Wouter Hanegraaff examines the structure, themes, and development of Emanuel Swedenborg's massive work _Secrets of Heaven_, published between 1749 and 1756. Written as a work of biblical exegesis, Swedenborg also interpolated material on his visionary experiences, which have long fascinated readers. In the second part of the study, Dr. Hanegraaff examines the contemporary reception of the multi-volume work, particularly the critical reactions of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. He finds that Swedenborg's biblical exegesis, so (...) important in his divine calling, was largely ignored in favor of the mystical experiences. (shrink)

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

I argue that there are at least four different ways in which the term ‘function’ is used in connection with the study of living organisms, namely: function as activity, function as biological role, function as biological advantage, and function as selected effect. Notion refers to what an item does by itself; refers to the contribution of an item or activity to a complex activity or capacity of an organism; refers to the value for the organism of an item having a (...) certain character rather than another; refers to the way in which a trait acquired and has maintained its current share in the population. The recognition of a separate notion of function as biological advantage solves the problem of the indeterminate reference situation that has been raised against a counterfactual analysis of function, and emphasizes the importance of counterfactual comparison in the explanatory practice of organismal biology. This reveals a neglected problem in the philosophy of biology, namely that of accounting for the insights provided by counterfactual comparison. (shrink)

"Absolute Beginners" is a multi-approach study of the founding role of the Absolute as the very beginning of knowledge in medieval philosophy (Henry of Ghent, Richard Conington), the subject being addressed from historical, methodological, ...

Nel XIII sec., il dibattito su Dio come primum cognitum si sviluppò all'interno della tradizione agostiniana anche attraverso la mediazione di Avicenna, per poi essere decisamente attaccato da Tommaso. La prima metà dello studio verte sulla posizione di Guiberto, esposta nel suo Rudimentum doctrinae, dove il problema è inquadrato all'interno della dottrina agostinana dell'illuminazione, e rapportato alla tesi bonaventuriana. La seconda parte è invece centrata sulla confutazione tomista, desunta principalmente dal prologo e dal trattato Super librum Boetii De trinitate. Nelle (...) conclusioni l'A. ribadisce, tra l'altro, la posizione intermedia presente nella Summa fratris Alexandri. (shrink)

If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts (...) about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions. (shrink)

Despite the Aristotelian renaissance in the philosophy of education, the development of virtue has not received much attention. This is unfortunate, because an attempt to draft an Aristotelian model of moral development can help philosophers to evaluate the contribution Aristotelian virtue ethics can make to our understanding of moral development, provide psychologists with a potentially richer account of morality and its development, and help educators to understand the developmental phase people are in. In the article, it is argued that the (...) Aristotelian categories of the ‘morally indifferent’, ‘un-self-controlled’, ‘self-controlled’ and ‘properly virtuous’ can be interpreted as the successive stages or levels of a comprehensive developmental model. For each stage, it will be made clear whether people are committed to virtue, whether they act virtuously or not, whether they act with pleasure or pain, and which desires and reasons they have for acting. The article closes with suggestions about what needs to be done if the proposed Aristotelian account of moral development is to become psychologically more realistic and educationally useful. (shrink)

Fictional realists maintain that fictional characters are part of the world’s ontology. In an influential article, Anthony Everett argues that the fictional realist is thereby committing herself to problematic entities. Among these are entities that are indeterminately identical. Recently, Ross Cameron and Richard Woodward have answered Everett’s worry using the same strategy. They argue that the fictional realist can bypass the problematic identities by contending that they are merely semantically indeterminate. This paper concisely surveys Everett’s original argument, Cameron’s and Woodward’s (...) responses, and then argues that the strategy employed by Cameron and Woodward fails to satisfactorily answer Everett’s worries. (shrink)

Wouter Van Haaften; The Justification of Conceptual Development Claims, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 51–70, https.

This book provides a novel formulation and defence of moral error theory. It also provides a novel solution to the so-called now what question; viz., the question what we should do with our moral thought and talk after moral error theory. The novel formulation of moral error theory uses pragmatic presupposition rather than conceptual entailment to argue that moral judgments carry a non-negotiable commitment to categorical moral reasons. The new answer to the now what question is pragmatic presupposition substitutionism: we (...) should substitute our current moral judgments, which pragmatically presuppose the existence of categorical moral reasons with ‘schmoral’ judgments that pragmatically presuppose the existence of a specific class of prudential reasons. These are prudential reasons that, when we act on them, contribute to the satisfaction of what the author calls ‘the fundamental desire’; namely, the desire to live in a world with mutually beneficial cooperation. (shrink)

Full virtue and practical wisdom comprise the end of neo-Aristotelian moral development, but wisdom cannot be cultivated straight away through arguments and teaching. Wisdom is integrated with, and builds upon, habituation: the acquisition of virtuous character traits through the repeated practice of corresponding virtuous actions. Habit formation equips people with a taste for, and commitment to, the good life; furthermore it provides one with discriminatory and reflective capacities to know how to act in particular circumstances. Unfortunately, habituation is often understood (...) primarily as a method suitable only for children. This article examines whether Aristotle limited habituation to children and, if not, what the relationship between habituation and wisdom beyond childhood might look like. This article concludes that wisdom-guided habituation is also possible for adults who continue and confirm their already established virtuous habits. The implications of this for professional moral education are subsequently discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I consider whether there is a measure of coherence that could be rightly claimed to generalize the notion of logical equivalence. I show that Fitelson’s (2003) proposal to that effect encounters some serious difficulties. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that no mutual-support measure could ever be suitable for the formalization of coherence as generalized logical equivalence. Instead, it appears that the only plausible candidate for such a measure is one of relative overlap. The measure I propose (...) in this paper is quite similar to Olsson’s (2002) proposal but differs from it by not being susceptible to the type of counterexample that Bovens and Hartmann (2003) have devised against it. (shrink)

Although climate change jeopardizes the fundamental human rights of current as well as future people, current actions and ambitions to tackle it are inadequate. There are two prominent explanations for this motivational gap in the climate ethics literature. The first maintains that our conventional moral judgement system is not well equipped to identify a complex problem such as climate change as an important moral problem. The second explanation refers to people’s reluctance to change their behaviour and the temptation to shirk (...) responsibility. We argue that both factors are at play in the motivational gap and that they are complemented by crucial moral psychological insights regarding moral disengagement, which enables emitters to dissociate self-condemnation from harmful conduct. In this way, emitters are able to maintain their profligate, consumptive lifestyle, even though this conflicts with their moral standards with respect to climate change. We provide some illustrations of how strategies of moral disengagement are deployed in climate change and discuss the relationship between the explanations for the motivational gap and moral disengagement. On the basis of this explanatory framework, we submit that there are three pathways to tackle the motivational gap and moral disengagement in climate change: making climate change more salient to emitters and affirming their self-efficacy; reconsidering the self-interested motives that necessitate moral disengagement; and tackling moral disengagement directly. (shrink)

Abating the threat climate change poses to the lives of future people clearly challenges our development models. The 2011 Human Devel- opment Report rightly focuses on the integral links between sustainability and equity. However, the human development and capabilities approach emphasizes the expansion of people’s capabilities simpliciter, which is ques- tionable in view of environmental sustainability. We argue that capabilities should be defined as triadic relations between an agent, constraints and poss- ible functionings. This triadic syntax particularly applies to climate (...) change: since people’s lives and capabilities are dependent on the environment, sus- tainable human development should also include constraining human activi- ties in order to prevent losses in future people’s well-being due to the adverse effects of exacerbated climate change. On this basis, we will advocate that the goals of sustainable human development should be informed by a fra- mework that consists of enhancing capabilities up to a threshold level, as well as constraining the functionings beyond this threshold in terms of their green- house gas emissions. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relation between philosophy and madness. It is often assumed that madness has to be suppressed, excluded, or conquered before a philosophically sensible text, logical argument, or world of meaning can appear. I argue, instead, that a certain concept of madness, when grafted on phenomenological psychiatry and philosophical mysticism, is intrinsically related to the project of philosophy. With the help of experiences of madness as presented in psychiatry and articulated in mad autobiographical reports, including my (...) own, I will show that philosophy and madness are in closer connection than is commonly assumed. In the introduction, I refer to some superficial... (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

Comenius (1592 - 1670) war ein großer Europäer, ein kreativer Metaphysiker und überzeugter, aber nicht indoktrinierender Theologe, ein Pädagoge, der zugleich ein begnadeter Praktiker war, ein Politiktheoretiker, ein Literat und Linguist auf hohem Niveau. Der Wunsch, Gewalt von den Dingen fernzuhalten, stammt von ihm. Er wird verständlich, wenn man sich klar macht, dass Comenius „pansophisch“ (allumfassend) gedacht hat: Die Gewalt gegen die Dinge spiegelt die Gewalt gegen die Menschen, und beides muss aufhören. Die vorliegende Publikation zeigt eine fremde Welt, die (...) doch in unserer Zeit angesichts der Globalisierung aller Lebensbereiche wieder von großer Aktualität ist. Comenius fostered pansophic, all-encompassing thinking in philosophy, theology, history, politics and education. That is why today, in an age of increased globalisation, his works are the subject of renewed interest. Twenty-nine authors from eight countries, dedicated to this task, develop the picture of a great European thinker. (shrink)

There are various ways to describe the transformation that metaphysics underwent in the Middle Ages. One way is to describe this transformation as the purging of all theological reminiscences from ontology, which took place — whether induced by the presence of a theology of revelation in the Latin West, or not — in the 13th and 14th century. Another way is to describe it as the rise of a transcendental philosophy in the first part of the 13th century, a doctrine (...) of the properties of being as being that transcend the Aristotelian categories; this transcendental philosophy would develop, with Kant, into the system of apriori knowledge of objects. A third way to describe the transformation of metaphysics in the Middle Ages is closely related: as the development of metaphysics into a supertranscendental science. (shrink)

If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We point to various ways in which the advocates of (...) a coherence theory of justification may attempt to divert the threat of these results. (shrink)

It is well known that Carnap, early in his philosophical career, took most of metaphysics to consist of meaningless pseudostatements. In contrast to this meaning-theoretic critique of metaphysics, we develop what we take to be Carnap’s later value-based critique. We argue that this later critique is forceful against several central contemporary metaphysical debates, its origin in the principle of tolerance notwithstanding.

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the (...) response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3,386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end. (shrink)

This paper evaluates Kuipers' account of functional explanation in biology in view of an example of such an explanation taken from real biology. The example is the explanation of why electric fishes swim backwards (Lannoo and Lannoo 1993). Kuipers' account depicts the answer to a request for functional explanation as consisting only of statements that articulate a certain kind of consequence. It is argued that such an account fails to do justice to the main insight provided by the example explanation, (...) namely the insight into why backwards swimming is needed by fishes that locate their food by means of an electric radar. The paper sketches an improved account that does justice to this kind of insight. It is argued that this account is consistent with and complementary to Kuipers' insight that function attributions are established by means of a process of hypothetico-deductive reasoning guided by a heuristic principle. (shrink)

\noindent\textbf{Introduction} Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring about change. TCPR faces two challenges: how to derive meaningful change processes from texts, and secondly, how to assess these complex, varied and multi-layered processes? We advocate the use text mining and multi-level (...) models (MLMs): the former offers tools and methods to discovers patterns in texts; the latter can analyse these change processes as outcomes that vary at multiple levels. \noindent\textbf{Method} We (re-)used the data from \cite{Lamers2015} because it includes outcomes and the complete online intervention for clients with mild depressive symptoms. We used text mining to obtain basic text-variables from e-mails, that we analysed through MLMs. \noindent\textbf{Results} We found that we could relate outcomes of interventions to variables containing text-information. We conclude that we can indeed bridge text mining and MLMs for TCPR as it was possible to relate text-information (obtained through text mining) to multi-levelled TCPR outcomes (using a MLM). \noindent\textbf{Discussion} Text mining can be helpful to obtain change processes, which is also the main challenge for TCPR. We showed how MLMs and text mining can be combined, but our proposition leaves open how to obtain the most relevant textual operationalization of TCPR concepts. That requires interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion. The future does look bright: based on our proof-of-concept study we conclude that MLMs and text mining can indeed advance TCPR. (shrink)

Edition de la question 6 du deuxième Quodlibet du carme anglais Robert de Walsingham. Le texte présente la première critique dans l’école des Carmes d’Oxford de la doctrine de Dieu comme premier connu de Richard de Conington.

I critically discuss two kinds of argument in favour of ontological pluralism and argue that they fail to show that ways of being are explanatorily fruitful.

Bovens and Hartmann propose to analyze coherence as a confidence-boosting property. On the basis of this idea, they construct a new probabilistic theory of coherence. In this paper, I will attempt to show that the resulting measure of coherence clashes with some of the intuitions that motivate it. Also, I will try to show that this clash is not due to the view on coherence as a confidence-boosting property or to the general features of the model that Bovens and Hartmann (...) use to analyze coherence. It will turn out that there is at least one other measure that is similarly based on the concept of a confidence-boosting property, but does not have the same counterintuitive results. (shrink)

Climate change and other contemporary harms are often depicted as New Harms because they seem to constitute unprecedented challenges. This New Harms Discourse rests on two important premises, both of which we criticise on empirical grounds. First, we argue that the Premise of changed conditions of human interaction—according to which the conditions regarding whom people affect have changed recently and which emphasises the difference with past conditions of human interaction—risks obfuscating how humanity’s current predicament is merely the transient result of (...) long-term, gradual processes and developments. Second, we dispute the Premise that New Harms have certain features that render them new and argue that New Harms share characteristics with other harms. On the basis of these premises, the New Harms Discourse concludes that climate change is a unique social challenge that requires radically new moral thinking, but we argue that this Uniqueness Myth distracts attention from the valuable lessons we can draw from humanity’s successes and failures in dealing with past harms. We will illustrate how action to tackle climate change and other complex, systemic harms can be informed by the interdisciplinary study of historic harms. We will argue that rejecting the New Harms Discourse is not only empirically justified, it also gives cause for optimism, because it opens up the possibility to draw upon the past to face problems in the present and future. (shrink)