2021 June - 28 articles
This paper naturalizes inductive inference by showing how scientific knowledge of real mechanisms provides large benefits to it. I show how knowledge about mechanisms contributes to generalization, inference to the best explanation, causal inference,...
In this contribution, I discuss some less well-known premodern and early modern antecedents of Spinoza’s concepts and claims in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. On the one hand, I will argue, Spinoza’s notion of prophecy owes more to Moses Maimoni...
A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a...
This article is intended to provide a review of some modifications to the Drake equation, a 1961 concept presented by Frank Drake to determine the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations able to communicate. A reduced version of the Drake equation...
Despite a decade of diversity policy plans, a wave of student rallies has ignited debates across western European university campuses. We observe these debates from a situated call for anti-racism in Belgian higher education institutions, and critica...
It has been argued that the most impactful choice an individual could make, with respect to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, is to have fewer children. This paper brings up a related aspect of individuals’ reproductive choices that has been negle...
Educational assessments, specifically standardized and normalized exams, owe most of their foundations to psychological test theory in psychometrics. While the theoretical assumptions of these practices are widespread and relatively uncontroversial i...
This article offers an overview of Marilena Chaui’s reading of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP). Chaui has published numerous books and essays on Baruch Spinoza. Her two-volume study The Nerve of Reality is the culmination of a decades-long e...
The Blochian concept of cipher is discussed in some detail with a view to possible developments in the modern philosophy of nature. Parallels and differences are listed as to the Idealistic tradition in Germany preceding Bloch’s approach. It is found...
The details of abiogenesis, to date, remain a matter of debate and constitute a key mystery in science and philosophy. The prevailing scientific hypothesis implies an evolutionary process of increasing complexity on Earth starting from (self-) replic...
In the form of a case study and based upon novel material about the reception of Spinoza’s Theological–Political Treatise (TTP) in Iran, this paper studies issues with the interactions among political, theological and philosophical ideas in the recep...
The goal of this article is to bring into wider attention the often neglected important work by Bertrand Russell on the philosophy of nature and the foundations of physics, published in the year 1927. It is suggested that the idea of what could be na...
The nineteenth century was a time of great economic, social, and political change. The population of a modernizing Europe began demanding more freedom, which in turn propelled the ongoing discussion on the philosophy of nature. This spurred on Centra...
The contention in this paper is that the theological-political disputes Spinoza was concerned with 350 years ago are similar to the conspiratorial disputes we experience today. The world in Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus, a political interv...
Future-biased individuals systematically prefer positively valenced events to be in the future (positive future-bias) and negatively valenced events to be in the past (negative future-bias). The most extreme form of future-bias is absolute future-bia...
In the field of responsibility and climate change, much attention has been paid to actions and what we need to do in order to take responsibility. This paper shifts the perspective from what we should do to how we should be in order to be responsible...
Peer-review has become increasingly important to the way scholarly journals assess whether a manuscript is suitable for publication [...]
This paper demonstrates the method and meaning behind the argument that contemporary philosophers have found the key to “de-creation” in potentiality by implementing it in artwork. While creation in the usual sense seems to imply an active attitude,...
What is a philosophical religion? Carlos Fraenkel proposes that we use this term to describe “the interpretation of the historical forms of a religion in philosophical terms”. Such a philosophical interpretation allows religious traditions to be util...
This paper resolves some puzzles regarding Spinoza’s appropriations and rejections of various aspects of Bacon’s methodology, and uses these solutions to resolve some long-standing puzzles concerning Spinoza’s modus operandi in the TTP. We argue firs...
The question concerning the meaning of life is important, but it immediately confronts the present authors with insurmountable obstacles from a philosophical standpoint, as it would require us to define not only what we hold to be life, but what we h...
This article is about a specific, but so far neglected peril of AI, which is that AI systems may become existential as well as causing suffering risks for nonhuman animals. The AI value alignment problem has now been acknowledged as critical for AI s...
Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advanta...
A foundation stone of Hans Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is the notion of the sensus communis. The philosophical significance of a “sensus communis” (common sense) begins with Aristotle, who offered scattered reflections. The topic was t...
In one of the last paragraphs of his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), Spinoza extolls the harmony between people of a diversity of faiths, maintained by the magistracy of Amsterdam. However, he also seems apprehensive about the possibility of t...
This article investigates a principle inscribed at the top of most codes of ethics for curators: they should always “serve the public good.” No self-respecting curator would ever admit to serve “the private good,” that is, the good of the few, whethe...
Among the biggest challenges facing the contemporary human condition, and therefore also education, is responding to the climate crisis. One of the sources of the crisis is assumed to be absent-mindedness, presented by Leslie Dewart as a distortion o...
The article is based on the dual concepts of theoretical incompleteness in systems science and theoretical incomprehensibility in philosophy previously introduced in the literature. Issues of incompleteness relate to the logical openness of complexit...
