Search results for "Piste"
showing 10 items of 1658 documents
Towards a Neofunctionalist Theory of Psychology?
1984
The contemporary study of human activity comprises various levels of description. Three levels are distinguished for the purpose of the present paper: (1) single acts and interaction episodes; (2) individual activity structures; (3) life process. Regardless of the level of analysis the theoretical models correspond to each other. Activity is examined in relation to goals and conditions which include both situational and environmental inputs. It is suggested that different types of explanations are fruitful for each aspect of activity, but they do not exclude each other. The action-oriented approach represents a continuation to the functionalist tradition while emphasizing intentional activi…
On Activity and Passivity in Perception: Aristotle, Philoponus, and Pseudo-Simplicius
2014
Ancient and late ancient theories of perception are often described by a generalisation according to which Aristotle held a passive theory whereas Plato, the Platonists and the Neoplatonists supposed perception to be something active. I shall argue that, despite this general difference, there are important points of convergence in the theories of Aristotle and his Neoplatonic commentators. First, the notion of activity is important for Aristotle’s theory as well. Perception not only is an activity (energeia) for Aristotle. It is a perfect activity, the perfection of which is the activity itself and is thus not dependent on an external product. Further, the reception of forms without matter …
Do as the Romans do: On the authoritarian roots of pseudoscience
2020
Recent research highlights the implications of group dynamics in the acceptance and promotion of misconceptions, particularly in relation to the identity-protective attitudes that boost polarisation over scientific information. In this study, we successfully test a mediational model between right-wing authoritarianism and pseudoscientific beliefs. First, we carry out a comprehensive literature review on the socio-political background of pseudoscientific beliefs. Second, we conduct two studies (n=1189 and n=1097) to confirm our working hypotheses: H1 – intercorrelation between pseudoscientific beliefs, authoritarianism and three axioms (reward for application, religiosity and fate control); …
The New Gnosis and the Denial of Ontological Differences
2021
The current transhumanist or posthumanist movements continue the thesis of the old gnosis devaluing the creation like something imperfect. Its novelty is to believe in the possibility of overcoming the creation thanks to technology (biotechnology and bionics). The ideology of gender partly anticipates this way of thinking by devaluing the somatic difference between male and female. This denial of the differences then applies to those existing between the human and the non-human (on one side the primates, and on the other the computer). Posthumanism and transhumanism believe that technology will not only overcome the ontological differences, which form the human, but also the so-called extre…
Conceptual Confusion is Not Always a Bad Thing – The Curious Case of European Radical Right Studies
2018
Over the course of many years, as a teacher, scholar, and friend, Ruth Zimmerling has impressed on me the importance of precisely defining one’s concepts. After all, if there is no agreement on the intension and extension of a concept, it is impossible “to assess the truth or falsity or, more generally, the correctness or incorrectness, of propositions, hypotheses or theories” (Zimmerling 2005: 15). The statement is almost self-evident: Without precisely defined concepts, the whole endeavour of science becomes pointless, and scholarly discourses are bound to turn into dialogues of the deaf.
Correlation and Truth
2013
The concept of correlation is the building block of almost any Bayesian attempt to capture or explicate any interesting aspect of scientific reasoning in terms of probabilities. This paper discusses one particularly simple correlation measure which is highly significant for almost any such attempt within the philosophy of science or epistemology. In particular, it shows how this correlation measure is related to central attempts to capture essential aspects of scientific reasoning such as confirmation, coherence, and the explanatory power of hypotheses. This intimate connection between correlation and scientific reasoning necessitates answering the question of how correlation and truth are …
Deficiencias epistemológicas en la enseñanza habitual de los conceptos de campo y potencial eléctrico
1997
This article intends to analyse up to what extent the scarce learning produced when introducing the basic concepts on electrostatics is due to deficiencies and inadequacies in its routine teaching. So, on the one hand, we analyse what have been the principal epistemological leaps forward in the making of electricity as a science. On the other hand, we analyse Physics books and the teachers’ opinions.
Obligations and Conditionals
2015
The paper considers two kinds of medieval obligational disputations (positio, rei veritas) and the medieval genre of sophismata in relation to the kinds of inferences accepted in them. The main texts discussed are the anonymous Obligationes parisienses from the early 13th century and Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata from the early 14th century. Four different kinds of warranted transition from an antecedent to a consequent become apparent in the medieval discussions: (1) the strong logical validity of basic propositional logic, (2) analytic validity based on conceptual containment, (3) merely semantic impossibility of the antecedent being true without the consequent, and (4) intuitively true…
Guises and their Existence
1996
According to H-N. Castafieda, a guise the very thin individual which lies at the bottom of the ontological furniture of the world is indifferent to existence in a Meinongian way, in the sense that it remains the same whether it exists or not. Moreover, its existence does not alter its intentional character, as it is the very same individual which is thought of regardless of its being real or not. ~ In what follows, I will attempt to show that with regards to guises both theses are illegitimate, unless one introduces the notion of an existentiallyconditioned property as a counterfactual property which a guise has prior to its actual existence. To do so means to work out an amendment to Casta…
Nurtured by Nature
2015
This chapter is about the metaphysical and psychological assumptions underlying early Stoic epistemology. I show that, according to the Stoics, each thing is qualified by nature in such a way as to be both a kind of thing and a unique thing. I also show that the mind of a human adult is qualified by nature in such a way as to be able to form thoughts about all sorts of qualified things, as long as it has acquired notions about them. I then detail how notions are acquired, i.e. how nature operates in such a way that human beings first receive all sorts of information through the senses and then retain some of this information, so that we acquire the ability to recognize things in our environ…