Il y a un peu plus d'un siècle, le 4 août 1879, Léon XIII publiait l'encyclique «Aeterni Patris», pour recommander à l'Église entière l'étude de saint Thomas d'Aquin, «inter Scholasticos Doctores omnium princeps et magister». Peu après, le 18 janvier 1880, le pape décidait par le motu proprio «Placere nobis» la mise en chantier d'une édition nouvelle des œuvres complètes de Thomas. Du point de vue du Magistère suprême, les doctrines du Venerabilis Doctor et Doctor Ecclesiae Thomas d'Aquin sont alors (...) et depuis plusieurs siècles, à l'abri de tout soupçon. (shrink)

In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten hat die Metapher in der Philosophie zunehmend Beachtung gefunden und wurde zu einem zentralen Thema, mit dem Kant sich in seiner kritischen Philosophie in Begriffen von Analogie und Symbolisierung beschäftigt. Sein Beitrag zur Entwicklung unseres Verständnisses der Rolle, die Bilder, Metaphern und Symbole in theoretischer und praktischer Hinsicht leisten, ist bedeutend; zudem ist Kant selber auch als Schöpfer von Metaphern weithin bekannt. Symbole, Analogien und ästhetische Ideen sind unleugbar metaphorische Verfahren, die eine ebenso grundlegende wie systematische (...) Funktion in Kants philosophischer Sprache einnehmen. – Dieser Sammelband ist das Ergebnis einer neueren Initiative seitens einer internationalen Gruppe von mit Kant befassten Philosophen und Kant-Spezialisten, um die Erforschung von Themen zu befördern, die noch nicht umfassend bearbeitet sind. Das trifft mit Sicherheit auf die „Metapher“-Thematik in Kants Philosophie zu, der der vorliegende Band gewidmet ist. (shrink)

Se concentrant sur les differences entre la constitution de l'objectivite dans la mecanique classique et dans la mecanique quantique, cet ouvrage explore les interpretations transcendantales de la theorie quantique standard. Patricia Kauark-Leite y examine les changements epistemologiques apportes par la physique quantique pour verifier si la philosophie transcendantale est toujours valide. Elle dresse un bilan des differentes approches transcendantales, montrant les modulations des principes a priori pour expliquer le probleme de l'objectivation en mecanique quantique. En conclusion, l'auteur defend et adopte (...) une interpretation pragmatique transcendantale, dont la tache principale est de donner une justification philosophique a la dimension necessairement intersubjective de l'objectivite quantique. (shrink)

For courses in European Intellectual History. An exploration of the major issues in thought -- from the French Revolution to Structuralism and beyond.

This volume describes the current "main contenders," including neo-Piagetian, neo-connectionist, neo-innatist and sociocultural models.

_The VaKE Handbook: Theory and Practice of Values and Knowledge Education_ presents a theoretical model and many examples in various fields of education and training for the realization of the principle "Values without knowledge are blind, while knowledge without values is irresponsible".

Une approche philosophique de la prière à des fins politiques est possible dans le cas où les deux substantifs sont mis en relais inconditionnel. Le premier élément responsable de cette filature des liens c’est la présence de l’autre. Prier et faire de la politique sont deux activités humaines trop humaines qui exigent l’ouverture à l’autre, pour l’autre comme pour l’édification de sa propre identité individuelle et collective. Comme les rites et les cultes, la liturgie, notamment la prière collective, a un (...) effet thérapeutique, et pédagogique, disons didactique et sociopolitique. Elle calme les esprits, la volonté, apaise l’angoisse et solidifie les liens sociaux. L'Eglise, par exemple, est née du rassemblement du peuple de Dieu en prière et c'est dans son sein que toute célébration liturgique trouve perpétuellement son accomplissement aussi bien que sa régénération dans l’invocation du nom du Christ-Vérité, Rédempteur, Fondateur, Roi et Prêtre. La présente étude sur « Vérité et Royauté » focalise l’attention sur l’essence même du politique qui se nourrit du religieux tout en lui fournissant gloire, pouvoir et moyens d’existence. (shrink)

Salvando el victimismo tradicional que impera en el discurso de muchos países que no logran alcanzar un desarrollo económico óptimo, pero sin despreciar la validez de sus argumentos, César A. Hidalgo propone en su libro El triunfo de la información. La evolución del orden: de los átomos a las moléculas un nuevo enfoque de crecimiento económico basado en la capacidad de construir realidad a través de la cooperación y la imaginación —cristales de imaginación solidificada— y no en la posibilidad individual (...) de comprar, consumir, vender o producir. Partiendo de ese punto de vista, Hidalgo sugiere la complejidad económica como el principal motor del desarrollo de las economías modernas y, por ende, de las sociedades del siglo xx. La clave no se halla tanto en los factores de producción tradicionales, sino en la información que una sociedad concreta —personas, grupos, empresas e instituciones— es capaz de procesar y compartir a través de redes para generar conocimiento y knowhow productivo. (shrink)

Introduction to Engineering Ethics provides the background for discussion of the basic issues in engineering ethics. Emphasis is given to the moral problems engineers face in the corporate setting. It places those issues within a philosophical framework, and it seems to exhibit both their social importance and their intellectual challenge. The primary goal is to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues. As per new ABET (...) 2000 guidelines, more and more introductory engineering courses cover engineering ethics as part of their instruction. Students preparing to function within the engineering profession need to be introduced to the basic issues in engineering ethics. This book places those issues within a wider philosophical framework than has been customary in the past and aims to stimulate critical and responsible reflection on the moral issues surrounding engineering practice and to provide the conceptual tools necessary for pursuing those issues. (shrink)

The experimental philosophy movement advocates the use of empirical methods in philosophy. The methods most often discussed and in fact employed in experimental philosophy are appropriated from the experimental paradigm in psychology. But there is a variety of other (at least partly) empirical methods from various disciplines that are and others that could be used in philosophy. The paper explores the application of corpus analysis to philosophical issues. Although the method is well established in linguistics, there are only a few (...) tentative attempts of philosophers to utilise it. Examples are introduced and the merit of corpus analysis is compared to that of using general internet search engines and questionnaires for similar purposes. (shrink)

What does it mean to ‘calculate’—today? The pause introduced by the dash in this question marks the inescapable necessity of historicizing the problem of calculation. In his provocative essay, ‘Toward a Critique of the Ineffectual: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Construction of an Action without Ends’, Dimitris Vardoulakis proposes a philosophical and political programme in order to counter the negative effects of ‘Heidegger’s mistake’ (the conflation of causality and instrumentality through a mistranslation of Aristotle) that has led to the (...) theoretical fetishization of the ‘ineffectual’ (action without ends) in continental philosophy. In his conclusion, Vardoulakis advocates for a return to a politics and ethics of practical judgment that avoids the twin pitfalls of asserting either the impossibility or the absolute possibility of calculation. As he puts it, we need to acknowledge today ‘the exigency to calculate in the face of the provisional ends of instrumentality, or to perform the judgment that the Greeks called phronesis’ [2022: 244]. This is why we should keep in mind that Heidegger’s critique of technology in the 1950s was articulated in the context of the early Cold War, atomic warfare, and the rise of cybernetics. But, as many have recently argued, in the age of so-called ‘Big Data’, neoliberal rationality has increasingly replaced the epistemology of ‘causality’ with epistemologies of ‘correlation’: the algorithmic calculation of probabilistic relations between clusters of variables (based on information harvested by digital technologies designed for the total surveillance of human life). As Chris Anderson notoriously announced in his 2008 editorial, ‘The End of Theory’, ‘correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all’. He calls this epistemology ‘dimensionally agnostic statistics’ (the amount of data available can no longer be visualized in its totality). This worldview, however, functions as a basic attack on one of the fundamental (and still often repeated) ground-truths of modern science: correlation is not causation. As Anderson puts it: ‘There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough”’. In other words, the stakes of Vardoulakis’s argument must be tested against the rise of this neoliberal elimination of causality from corporate epistemologies that has led to an inversion of the terms of the Heideggerian critique of technology: as it turns out, technology has produced an ideology of pure instrumentality without causation. Today, there are only ends without causes. (shrink)

In order to be able to raise the question of the “world” today in an effective way, we have to reactivate the Goethean categories of Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz for a critique of our own historical moment. We need to understand the phenomenon of Weltschmerz as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. Going beyond the context of the original formulation of these categories, we could argue that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges every time the ideological constitution (...) of the world threatens to fail. Today, we live in an age of a generalised state of cultural disorientation that has produced its own Weltliteratur, which includes a wide range of discourses about the “world” – from officially endorsed theories of economic globalisation, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmental protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical conspiracy theories. Yet, an anxiety concerning the impossibility of world-formation in general is also recorded in these documents. In order to be able to capture our contemporary Weltschmerz, the article turns to the young Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the task of this age is to produce an “objective” Weltschmerz. However, the most effective tools to conceptualise this objective Weltschmerz come from the traditions of philosophical acosmism. It is a notable philosophical development of our times that some elements of the acosmic tradition have recently resurfaced in speculative realism. Thus, speculative realism could be described as a possible site of our contemporary Weltschmerz: its acosmic metaphysics is repeatedly tamed by a mournful longing for the world. (shrink)

In _Professionals’ Ethos and Education for Responsibility,_ Alfred Weinberger, Horst Biedermann, Jean-Luc Patry and Sieglinde Weyringer offer insights into different concepts and applications of professionals’ ethos focusing on teachers’ ethos.

We investigate strong versions of enumeration reducibility, the most important one being s-reducibility. We prove that every countable distributive lattice is embeddable into the local structure $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ of the s-degrees. However, $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ is not distributive. We show that on $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ sets s-reducibility coincides with its finite branch version; the same holds of e-reducibility. We prove some density results for $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ . In particular $L(\mathfrak D_s)$ is upwards dense. Among the results about reducibilities that are stronger than s-reducibility, (...) we show that the structure of the $\Delta^{0}_{2}$ bs-degrees is dense. Many of these results on s-reducibility yield interesting corollaries for Q-reducibility as well. (shrink)

Although postmodernist thought has become prominent in some educational circles, its influence on science education has until recently been rather minor. This paper examines the proposal of Michalinos Zembylas, published earlier in this journal, that Lyotardian postmodernism should be applied to science educational reform in order to achieve the much sought after positive transformation. As a preliminary to this examination several critical points are raised about Lyotard's philosophy of education and philosophy of science which serve to challenge and undermine Zembylas’ (...) project. Subsequently, the three main theses of Lyotard that Zembylas considers beneficial and wishes to transpose onto science classrooms and pedagogy are scrutinized and found to be more of a hindrance than a help to curriculum reformers. (shrink)

Study, with reference to New England, 1830-1860.

To obtain reliable results, some psychological experiments need to involve the deception of human subjects. This contradicts the ethical principle of autonomy and the process of informed consent that is required to ensure the subjects’ autonomy. Some solutions to this dilemma have been proposed, but all of them have drawbacks. As solution I propose a procedure that combines proxy consent and prior consent.

To obtain reliable results, some psychological experiments need to involve the deception of human subjects. This contradicts the ethical principle of autonomy and the process of informed consent that is required to ensure the subjects’ autonomy. Some solutions to this dilemma have been proposed, but all of them have drawbacks. As solution I propose a procedure that combines proxy consent and prior consent.

Experimental studies of speech production involving compensations for auditory and somatosensory perturbations and adaptation after training suggest that both types of sensory information are considered to plan and monitor speech production. Interestingly, individual sensory preferences have been observed in this context: subjects who compensate less for somatosensory perturbations compensate more for auditory perturbations, and \textit{vice versa}. We propose to integrate this sensory preference phenomenon in a model of speech motor planning using a probabilistic model in which speech units are characterized (...) both in auditory and somatosensory terms. Sensory preference is implemented in the model according to two approaches. In the first approach, which is often used in motor control models accounting for sensory integration, sensory preference is attributed to the relative precision (i.e., inverse of the variance) of the sensory characterization of the speech motor goals associated with phonological units (which are phonemes in the context of this paper). In the second, ``more original’’ variant, sensory preference is implemented by modulating the sensitivity of the comparison between the predicted sensory consequences of motor commands and the sensory characterizations of the phonemes. We present simulation results using these two variants, in the context of the adaptation to an auditory perturbation, implemented in a 2-dimensional biomechanical model of the tongue. Simulation results show that both variants lead to qualitatively similar results. Distinguishing them experimentally would require precise analyses of partial compensation patterns. However, the second proposed variant implements sensory preference without changing the sensory characterizations of the phonemes. This dissociates sensory preference and sensory characterizations of the phonemes, and makes the account of sensory preference more flexible. Indeed, in the second variant the sensory characterizations of the phonemes can remain stable, when sensory preference varies as a response to cognitive or attentional control. This opens new perspectives for capturing speech production variability associated with aging, disorders and speaking conditions. (shrink)