In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ossian and the Invention of Textual HistoryKristine Louise HaugenIt is now controversial to call James Macpherson a forger or the poems of Ossian a hoax. 1 Encouraged by Derick Thomson’s 1952 demonstration that Macpherson’s Ossian indeed echoes authentic Gaelic verse, 2 a group of critics has undertaken to “rehabilitate” Macpherson, not least through a new critical edition of Ossian’s poems and related texts. 3 The edition makes it easier (...) than before to encounter Ossian directly:Morna, thou fairest of women, daughter of Cormac-Carbre? [sic] why in the circle of stones, in the cave of the rock, alone? The stream murmureth hoarsely. The blast groaneth in the aged tree. The lake is troubled before thee.... But thou art like snow on the heath. Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold on the top of Cromleach.... Thy arms, as two white pillars in the hall of Fingal. 4The authentic source of this passage seems to be the eighteenth-century commonplace that the savage and uneducated delight in figurative language, especially similes and metaphors—a commonplace enunciated often in the writings [End Page 309] of Hugh Blair, a literary critic deeply interested in Macpherson’s Ossianic productions. 5 As Harold Weinbrot and others suggest, the Ossian poems were celebrated largely because they confirmed readers’ most picturesque preconceptions about the “infancy of mankind.” 6There was room for disagreement. Many influential litterati were convinced of the poems’ antiquity, among them Goethe, Herder, Cesarotti, and a host of Scottish intellectuals. 7 But there were also detractors, mainly English—for example, Dr. Johnson and Edward Gibbon—although David Hume soon joined the skeptics, and the Scotsman Malcolm Laing issued the most crushing attack in the exchange several decades after Ossian’s first appearance in 1760. 8 The Ossian poems served a potent mixture of scholarly and political concerns, of which some were new but some were venerable. With a subtle but important shift in balance, the same mixture underlay the willingness of the most prominent eighteenth-century critics to discredit problematic texts and textual myths, even at the cost of an apparent reduction in historical knowledge. 9 For all parties Macpherson’s Ossian invited not only aesthetic delectation, but sustained thought about the relationship between early poetry and history and the value of early texts for reconstructing the past. [End Page 310]The question of British origins had preoccupied seventeenth-century antiquaries for a number of reasons, including Polydore Vergil’s unflattering Anglica Historia (first published 1546). 10 In the campaign to establish respectable national roots the Celtic druids had quickly become a kind of favorite example; they were presented early and often as heroes of British culture. The druids and their associates the bards had been described in their French setting by classical authors; William Camden, John Selden, and others transferred them easily to Celtic Britain. It was then straightforward to suggest further that the British Celts were the first discoverers of writing and philosophy, or at least discoverers concurrent with the ancient Hebrews, or both, this theory having been elaborated for the French Celts through Annius of Viterbo’s historical forgeries of 1498 and Annius’s French partisans. 11In fact this theory placed England at a disadvantage as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales had the more convincing joint claim to Celtic ancestry. Individual claims for Scotland and Ireland were frequently heard as well. The text most relevant to Ossian was the deist John Toland’s 1726 history of the druids, in which Toland both satirized the eighteenth-century clergy and argued that the ancient Celts of France and Scotland were colonists from Ireland—the original home of druidism, learning, and Toland. 12 In Toland’s version the theory made much of certain unpublished Irish manuscripts, supposedly dating from Cicero’s day and written in the “native” Irish alphabet. St. Patrick had burned hundreds of druidical religious books when he arrived in Ireland—proof that the Celts had a written language—but the bardic histories, couched in rugged verse, had escaped the evangelist’s flames. 13 Clearly, any respectable reply would need to draw on ancient manuscripts too.Even for readers unfamiliar with Toland, Macpherson’s texts... (shrink)

A volume of papers inspired by the work of George E. Smith on confirmation and evidence in advanced science—from Newton's gravitation theory to the physics of molecules.

This chapter looks at Euler’s relation to Newton, and at his role in the rise of ‘Newtonian’ mechanics. It aims to give a sense of Newton’s complicated legacy for Enlightenment science, and to raise awareness that some key ‘Newtonian’ results really come from Euler.

Craig Callender, Jonathan Cohen and Markus Schrenk have recently argued for an amended version of the best system account of laws – the better best system account (BBSA). This account of lawhood is supposed to account for laws in the special sciences, among other desiderata. Unlike David Lewis's original best system account of laws, the BBSA does not rely on a privileged class of natural predicates, in terms of which the best system is formulated. According to the BBSA, a contingently (...) true generalization is a law of a special science S iff the generalization is an axiom (or a theorem) of the best system relative to the set of predicates used by special science S. We argue that the BBSA is, at best, an incomplete theory of special science laws, as it does not account for typical features of special science laws, such as attached ceteris paribus conditions and the idealized character of law statements in these disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article offers a re-contextualization of the Positivism Dispute between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in the German sociological profession between 1954 and 1970. Investigating the reasons why the German Sociological Association convened in Tübingen in October 1961, it assigns a more peripheral role to Karl Popper and this now famous seminar. Focusing instead on the debate among German sociologists from the mid-1950s which prompted the convention of the seminar and the invitation for Popper to speak, the (...) article maintains that philosophy of history was the central concern of the Positivism Dispute. In this debate, members of the Frankfurt School emphasized contingency in history and society, while sociologists such as René König, Helmut Schelsky, Ralf Dahrendorf, and Arnold Gehlen advocated sociology as the empirical study of ‘given’ social facts. By doing so the article questions the narrative of the Positivism Dispute advanced by Karl Popper and some of his followers, as well as interpretations which have focused on debates during the aftermath of the Tübingen seminar in the 1960s. (shrink)

Patients in nursing homes sometimes give accounts of episodes in which they feel their autonomy and/or self-respect are violated as a result of the care they receive from nursing staff. In these ethically difficult care situations nurses use strategies such as negotiation, explanation and, in some cases, restraint. This study investigates how nurses apply these strategies to resolve ethical dilemmas in such a way that patients experience respect rather than violation. Critical issues that will be discussed include the definition of (...) ethically difficult care situations in nursing homes and the identification of strategies for resolving such situations. Examples of the use of three strategies are presented. The use of negotiation, restraint and explanation are discussed in order to ensure respect for patients’ autonomy and thus to optimize health care outcomes. (shrink)

In climate science, observational gridded climate datasets that are based on in situ measurements serve as evidence for scientific claims and they are used to both calibrate and evaluate models. However, datasets only represent selected aspects of the real world, so when they are used for a specific purpose they can be a source of uncertainty. Here, we present a framework for understanding this uncertainty of observational datasets which distinguishes three general sources of uncertainty: (1) uncertainty that arises during the (...) generation of the dataset; (2) uncertainty due to biased samples; and (3) uncertainty that arises due to the choice of abstract properties, such as resolution and metric. Based on this framework, we identify four different types of dataset ensembles — parametric, structural, resampling, and property ensembles—as tools to understand and assess uncertainties arising from the use of datasets for a specific purpose. We advocate for a more systematic generation of dataset ensembles by using these sorts of tools. Finally, we discuss the use of dataset ensembles in climate model evaluation. We argue that a more systematic understanding and assessment of dataset uncertainty is needed to allow for a more reliable uncertainty assessment in the context of model evaluation. The more systematic use of such a framework would be beneficial for both scientific reasoning and scientific policy advice based on climate datasets. (shrink)

Studying women farmers who are equal to men in their formal status, this article explores the extent to which women's entry into a male occupation challenges the existing gender system. Our analysis shows that young women farmers represent a change toward a new work role for women in farming. They have become similar to men farmers in many important aspects of farming such as vocational training, technological know-how, and union membership; however, important aspects of the existing gender system are being (...) preserved. Young women farmers still have the main responsibility for domestic work; their income from farming is less important for the household than their husband's; and, compared to men farmers, their farm income is less. There is no indication that young women farmers challenge the masculinist way of farming. (shrink)

Much early modern metaphysics grew with an eye to the new science of its time, but few figures took it as seriously as Emilie du Châtelet. Happily, her oeuvre is now attracting close, renewed attention, and so the time is ripe for looking into her metaphysical foundation for empirical theory. Accordingly, I move here to do just that. I establish two conclusions. First, du Châtelet's basic metaphysics is a robust realism. Idealist strands, while they exist, are confined to non-basic regimes. (...) Second, her substance realism seems internally coherent, so her foundational project appears successful.I have two aims in this paper. Historically, I show that du Châtelet's main source of inspiration was Christian... (shrink)

This paper studies definability within the theory of institutions, a version of abstract model theory that emerged in computing science studies of software specification and semantics. We generalise the concept of definability to arbitrary logics, formalised as institutions, and we develop three general definability results. One generalises the classical Beth theorem by relying on the interpolation properties of the institution. Another relies on a meta Birkhoff axiomatizability property of the institution and constitutes a source for many new actual definability results, (...) including definability in (fragments of) classical model theory. The third one gives a set of sufficient conditions for 'borrowing' definability properties from another institution via an 'adequate' encoding between institutions. The power of our general definability results is illustrated with several applications to (many-sorted) classical model theory and partial algebra, leading for example to definability results for (quasi-)varieties of models or partial algebras. Many other applications are expected for the multitude of logical systems formalised as institutions from computing science and logic. (shrink)

My thesis in this paper is: the modern concept of laws of motion—qua dynamical laws—emerges in 18th-century mechanics. The driving factor for it was the need to extend mechanics beyond the centroid theories of the late-1600s. The enabling result behind it was the rise of differential equations. -/- In consequence, by the mid-1700s we see a deep shift in the form and status of laws of motion. The shift is among the critical inflection points where early modern mechanics turns into (...) classical mechanics as we know it. Previously, laws of motion had been channels for truth and reference into mechanics. By 1750, the laws lose these features. Instead, now they just assert equalities between functions; and serve just to entail (differential) equations of motion for particular mechanical setups. This creates two philosophical problems. First, it’s unclear what counts as evidence for the laws of motion in the Enlightenment. Second, it’s a mystery whether these laws retain any notion of causality. That subverts the early-modern dictum that physics is a science of causes. (shrink)

Introduction : reinterpreting landscapes in an evolving world -- The pastoral tradition as inherited motives -- From classical pastorals to pastoral landscapes : rebirth of the landscape idea through analytical narration -- Instances of pastoral motivation in contemporary landscape analytical practice -- Articulating analytical narratives of contemporary pastoral landscapes -- The landscape analyst's pastoral action.

"One of the few direct solutions that Nietzsche gives for the overcoming of nihilism is the facing of the thought of eternal recurrence. Being the heaviest of all thoughts, it may seem that through Heidegger’s filter it will become a sort of metaphysical concept, but his analysis may at least help us see it as an axis around which thought can pivot, at least for a moment. Kundera sees the contradiction between lightness and weight as the most problematic of all, (...) as it is difficult to see the burden as something positive when emancipation seems to always be an attempt to achieve total freedom, a search for lightness. We argue that “the heavy thought” makes us confront fatalism and affirm freedom, while lightness makes freedom by becoming impossible. The eternal recurrence is the idea that offers motivation to intervene in the chain of determinations and to influence them decisively. Keywords: eternal recurrence, lightness, weight, freedom, being, becoming. ". (shrink)

This paper examines the origin, range and meaning of the Principle of Action and Reaction in Kant’s mechanics. On the received view, it is a version of Newton’s Third Law. I argue that Kant meant his principle as foundation for a Leibnizian mechanics. To find a ‘Newtonian’ law of action and reaction, we must look to Kant’s ‘dynamics,’ or theory of matter. I begin, in part I, by noting marked differences between Newton’s and Kant’s laws of action and reaction. I (...) argue that these are explainable by Kant’s allegiance to a Leibnizian mechanics. I show (in part II) that Leibniz too had a model of action and reaction, at odds with Newton’s. Then I reconstruct how Jakob Hermann and Christian Wolff received Leibniz’s model. I present (in Part III) Kant’s early law of action and reaction for mechanics. I show that he devised it so as to solve extant problems in the Hermann-Wolff account. I reconstruct Kant’s views on ‘mechanical’ action and reaction in the 1780s, and highlight strong continuities with his earlier, pre-Critical stance. I use these continuities, and Kant’s earlier engagement with post-Leibnizians, to explain the un-Newtonian features of his law of action and reaction. (shrink)

A naturalistic scheme of primitive conceptual representations is proposed using the statistical measure of mutual information. It is argued that a concept represents, not the class of objects that caused its tokening, but the class of objects that is most likely to have caused it (had it been tokened), as specified by the statistical measure of mutual information. This solves the problem of misrepresentation which plagues causal accounts, by taking the representation relation to be determined via ordinal relationships between conditional (...) probabilities. The scheme can deal with statistical biases and does not rely on arbitrary criteria. Implications for the theory of meaning and semantic content are addressed. (shrink)

Alberto Giubilini: The ethics of vaccination.

ABSTRACTFreethought was a transnational movement that developed particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, spreading across Europe and other world regions and promoting new models for society. The present article proposes an investigation of the contours and developments of the freethought movement in Romania before World War I. This is an important area of research given that most analyses performed to date have considered only the Western world and not the Eastern European context.Our intention is to elucidate to (...) what extent the European models influenced this movement and to uncover their impact on the Romanian society of the time. The paper highlights the criticisms of the clerics upon freethought, showing that the development of this current in Romania as a national movement represented not simply imitation of the European models, but an adaptation of those models to Romanian realities. The Romanian freethinkers can be seen trying to develop some of the most radical ideas of those times, in connection with the European trends. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I will investigate the compatibility of different metaphysics of time with the powers view. At first sight, it seems natural to combine some sort of powers ontology with a dy...

This article introduces the concept of spiritual intelligence in terms of a natural human ability to take a different perspective on reality rather than an extraordinary ability to engage with a different/supernatural reality. From a cognitive perspective, spiritual intelligence entails a re‐balancing of the two main modes of human cognition, with a prioritization of the holistic‐intuitive mind over the conceptual one. From the psychological and phenomenological perspectives, it involves a different kind of engagement with information: slower, more participatory, less objectifying, (...) and not focused entirely on problem solving. The article ends with a reflection on the theological implications of the proposed model and how such an account of spiritual intelligence as knowing differently might relate to theological anthropology and the theology of the spirit and the spiritual. (shrink)

Accountability for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its societal challenges is undetermined, and it is unclear whether business or society should carry these responsibilities. Despite severe criticism from some, many organizations continue to invest in and promote CSR. The purpose of this multiple-case study was to increase the understanding of the phenomenon from the perspective of a purposeful sample of participants who contribute to CSR execution and who were representatives of the 10 organizations identified as active promoters. The participant corporations (...) (case studies), in Europe and North America, were mainly in the telecommunications industry. Study data came from 11 face-to-face, semistructured interviews with chief executive officers (CEOs) and other CSR key participants, a review of corporate archival records, and a review of other sources regarding the effective implementation of CSR in these organizations. The conceptual framework consisted of Carroll’s constructs of CSR based on economic, legal, social, and discretionary elements. The constant comparative method was used to analyze the interview data and identify factors leading corporations to continue to engage in CSR. These factors were economic, social impact, legal compliance, or good reputation, sponsored by transformational or adaptive leaderships and endorsed by visionary CEOs. The findings may enlighten and motivate other organizations to engage in CSR programs and connect stakeholders’ contribution to a broadened positive social change. (shrink)

This book investigates the relationship between poetry and ontology in the works of Martin Heidegger. It explains the way in which Heidegger’s dialogue with poetry forms an essential step on the path of overcoming metaphysics and thinking the openness of presence. Heidegger’s engagement with poetry is an important moment in the development of his philosophy—or rather thinking of Being. Being speaks itself poetically in his view. Rather than a logician or a thinker, Being is the first poet.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

In “The Immorality of Horror Films,” philosopher and film scholar Gianluca Di Muzio proposes an analytic argument that aims to prove horror narratives, particularly slashers, unethical. His Argument from Reactive Attitudes contests slashers encourage pleasurable responses towards depictions of torture and death, which is possible only by suspending compassionate reactions. Doing so degrades sympathy and empathy, causing desensitization. This article will argue Di Muzio’s ARA, while valuable to discussion of art horror and morbidity, fails to meet its intended aim. The (...) ARA contains structural flaws in its logic, compounded by reliance on insufficient evidence. Additionally, Di Muzio does not adequately consider or rebut prominent aesthetic concerns, including ontological and moral distance of representations. Lastly, the argument utilizes a flawed classificatory schema that undermines its primary goal. Even narrowly confined to slashers, the ARA cannot explain alternative reasons for engaging with horror, nor does it account for those nuanced slasher works designed to foster compassion. The project concludes by offering a modified ARA with greater potential to accurately analyze the interrelation between art horror and morality. (shrink)

Much scholarship has claimed the physics of Emilie du Châtelet’s treatise, Institutions de physique, is Newtonian. I argue against that idea. To do so, I distinguish three strands of meaning for the category ‘Newtonian science,’ and I examine her book against them. I conclude that her physics is not Newtonian in any useful or informative sense. To capture what is specific about it, we need better interpretive categories.

Applying machine learning algorithms to automatically infer relationships between concepts from large-scale collections of documents presents a unique opportunity to investigate at scale how human semantic knowledge is organized, how people use it to make fundamental judgments (“How similar are cats and bears?”), and how these judgments depend on the features that describe concepts (e.g., size, furriness). However, efforts to date have exhibited a substantial discrepancy between algorithm predictions and human empirical judgments. Here, we introduce a novel approach to generating (...) embeddings for this purpose motivated by the idea that semantic context plays a critical role in human judgment. We leverage this idea by constraining the topic or domain from which documents used for generating embeddings are drawn (e.g., referring to the natural world vs. transportation apparatus). Specifically, we trained state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms using contextually-constrained text corpora (domain-specific subsets of Wikipedia articles, 50+ million words each) and showed that this procedure greatly improved predictions of empirical similarity judgments and feature ratings of contextually relevant concepts. Furthermore, we describe a novel, computationally tractable method for improving predictions of contextually-unconstrained embedding models based on dimensionality reduction of their internal representation to a small number of contextually relevant semantic features. By improving the correspondence between predictions derived automatically by machine learning methods using vast amounts of data and more limited, but direct empirical measurements of human judgments, our approach may help leverage the availability of online corpora to better understand the structure of human semantic representations and how people make judgments based on those. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Engagement with artificial intelligence (AI) can be highly beneficial for theology. This article maps the landscape of the various ways such engagement can occur. It begins by outlining the opportunities and limitations of computational theology before diving into speculative territory by imagining how robot theologians might think of divine revelation. The topic of AI and imago Dei is then reviewed, illustrating several ways AI can inform theological anthropology. The article concludes with a more speculative take on the possible implications of (...) AI for divine infinity, incarnation, theodicy, and demonic intelligence. (shrink)

An important personality of the Swedish cultural space and of the world diplomatic space, Dag Hammarskjöld, left to posterity, besides his literary works, his economic and diplomatic contributions, the most important spiritual autobiography from the Swedish protestant space of the 20th century. Discovered shortly after his death and published by his disciples in 1963 in an English version in London, Markings presents the struggle of the author with himself, illustrated in a great diversity of styles, from haiku poems to short (...) meditations, pastels, biblical exegeses and so on. Apart from the description of his spiritual life, his relationship with God, or his conception of spiritual issues, the work also contains some interesting references to aspects of political theology. These aspects represent the subject of our research. After a short presentation of his life and activity and of the influence of his family on his education, we will try to present the way in which aspects of political theology are emphasised in the aforementioned work and which are some important elements of the author’s conception of this subject. In this respect, we will resort not only to his spiritual autobiography, but also to the most important writings about him, published by specialists in diplomacy, literature and politics. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find theologians who wrote about his spiritual autobiography. Therefore, one of the main strengths of this research will be the fact that it presents a theological approach to Dag Hammarskjöld. (shrink)