Synchrony in Psychotherapy: A Review and an Integrative Framework for the Therapeutic Alliance.Sander L. Koole &Wolfgang Tschacher -2016 -Frontiers in Psychology 7:191242.detailsDuring psychotherapy, patient and therapist tend to spontaneously synchronize their vocal pitch, bodily movements, and even their physiological processes. In the present article, we consider how this pervasive phenomenon may shed new light on the therapeutic relationship– or alliance– and its role within psychotherapy. We first review clinical research on the alliance and the multidisciplinary area of interpersonal synchrony. We then integrate both literatures in the Interpersonal Synchrony (In-Sync) model of psychotherapy. According to the model, the alliance is grounded in (...) the coupling of patient and therapist’s brains. Because brains do not interact directly, movement synchrony may help to establish inter-brain coupling. Inter-brain coupling may provide patient and therapist with access to another’s internal states, which facilitates common understanding and emotional sharing. Over time, these interpersonal exchanges may improve patients’ emotion-regulatory capacities and related therapeutic outcomes. We discuss the empirical assessment of interpersonal synchrony and review preliminary research on synchrony in psychotherapy. Finally, we summarize our main conclusions and consider the broader implications of viewing psychotherapy as the product of two interacting brains. (shrink)
Formação E Perspectividade. Controvertibilidade E Proibição De Doutrinação Como Componentes Básicos Da Formação E Da Ciência.WolfgangSander.Bento Itamar Borges -2011 -Educação E Filosofia 25 (50):757-784.detailsNa discussão acadêmica alemã sobre a formação política, os princípios da controvertibilidade e da proibição da doutrinação valem, desde o Consenso de Beutelsbach, no final da década de 1970, como critérios de qualidade fundamentais e consensuais para a práxis pedagógica. Esta contribuição investiga se e em que sentido esses princípios poderiam, indo além da formação política, reivindicar validade para todo o âmbito da educação, e, de modo especial, para as escolas. Isso será feito em três passos: primeiramente, a partir do (...) Consenso de Beutelsbach, a multiperspectividade será fundamentada como princípio para todas as áreas; em seguida, ela será exposta a partir de uma visão construtivista do contexto formado por saber e perspectividade; por fim, será feita a defesa de uma renaissance do conceito de formação enquanto minuta de referência para a escola com base nessa compreensão construtivista do saber. (shrink)
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Controvertibilidade Sem Controvérsia? Marcelo Dascal.Bento Itamar Borges -2011 -Educação E Filosofia 25 (50):785-792.detailsWolfgangSander propõe uma inovação significativa no pensamento pedagógico atual. Em termos conceituais, sua sugestão é renovar o conceito de “Bildung”, do século XIX, por meio da inserção da controvertibilidade e da perspectividade como componentes essenciais do processo de ensino e aprendizagem, bem como do ideal de uma pessoa “instruída”.2 Essa mudança conceitual, defende ele, requer uma alteração paralela nas noções de conhecimento e ciência, as quais ele propõe encarar do ponto de vista “construtivista”. Na prática, a implementação (...) dessa ideia demandaria com certeza uma extensa reforma do sistema educacional, inclusive uma abordagem radicalmente nova do magistério, dos currículos, da participação dos estudantes, do uso e do desenvolvimento de novas tecnologias na escola e até do cenário físico do ambiente da escolarização. O enfoque deSander está principalmente centrado na fundamentação de sua proposta. Eu vou, naturalmente, acompanhá-lo nesse aspecto, considerando, sobretudo, embora não de modo exclusivo, o conceito de controvertibilidade”. Minhas considerações, todavia, implicam que seria um grave erro ignorar a dimensão prática desse conceito até mesmo para as análises teóricas que dele sejam feitas. (shrink)
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Logical Positivism: The History of a “Caricature”.Sander Verhaegh -2024 -Isis 115 (1):46-64.detailsLogical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to appreciate (...) the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. It argues that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. The essay shows that the view has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration. (shrink)
An Architectonic for Science: The Structuralist Program.Wolfgang Balzer,C. U. Moulines &J. D. Sneed -2014 - Springer.detailsThis book has grown out of eight years of close collaboration among its authors. From the very beginning we decided that its content should come out as the result of a truly common effort. That is, we did not "distribute" parts of the text planned to each one of us. On the contrary, we made a point that each single paragraph be the product of a common reflection. Genuine team-work is not as usual in philosophy as it is in other (...) academic disciplines. We think, however, that this is more due to the idiosyncrasy of philosophers than to the nature of their subject. Close collaboration with positive results is as rewarding as anything can be, but it may also prove to be quite difficult to implement. In our case, part of the difficulties came from purely geographic separation. This caused unsuspected delays in coordinating the work. But more than this, as time passed, the accumulation of particular results and ideas outran our ability to fit them into an organic unity. Different styles of exposition, different ways of formalization, different levels of complexity were simultaneously present in a voluminous manuscript that had become completely unmanageable. In particular, a portion of the text had been conceived in the language of category theory and employed ideas of a rather abstract nature, while another part was expounded in the more conventional set-theoretic style, stressing intui tivity and concreteness. (shrink)
Working from Within: The Nature and Development of Quine's Naturalism.Sander Verhaegh -2018 - New York: Oxford University Press.detailsDuring the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)
Columbia Naturalism and the Analytic Turn: Eclipse or Synthesis?Sander Verhaegh -2025 - InAmerican Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration: Pragmatism, Logical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter.detailsHistorical reconstructions of the effects of the intellectual migration are typically informed by one of two conflicting narratives. Some scholars argue that refugee philosophers, in particular the logical positivists, contributed to the demise of distinctly American schools of thought. Others reject this ‘eclipse view’ and argue that postwar analytic philosophy can best be characterized as a synthesis of American and positivist views. This paper studies the fate of one of the most influential schools of U.S. philosophy—Columbia naturalism—and argues that both (...) narratives are part of a larger story. First, I reconstruct the rise of the Columbia school, focusing on its naturalist analyses of science, morality, and religion as well as its contributions to the history of ideas. Next, I trace some of the naturalists’ contacts with German philosophers and show that they encountered a strong bifurcation between historical and scientific philosophy in their discussions. I argue that a similar distinction gradually infected debates between naturalists, eventually resulting in a split within the Columbia school itself. The historically-oriented naturalists, I argue, were overshadowed by the analytic movement, whereas the science-minded naturalists were able to incorporate the views of the émigrés, thereby developing the tradition in new directions. (shrink)
The Behaviorisms of Skinner and Quine: Genesis, Development, and Mutual Influence.Sander Verhaegh -2019 -Journal of the History of Philosophy 57 (4):707-730.detailsin april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...) obtaining the endowed chair at Harvard's department of philosophy, the former taking up the position at Harvard's psychology department.2Besides these biographical parallels, there also... (shrink)
The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics.MaureenSander-Staudt -2001 -Hypatia 21 (4):21-39.detailsThe proposal that care ethic be subsumed under the framework of virtue ethic is both promising and problematic for feminists. Although some attempts to construe care as a virtue are more commendable than others, they cannot duplicate a freestanding feminist CE.Sander-Staudt recommends a model of theoretical collaboration between VE and CE that retains their comprehensiveness, allows CE to enhance VE as well as be enhanced by it, and leaves CE open to other collaborations.
Justified True Belief: The Remarkable History of Mainstream Epistemology.Sander Verhaegh -forthcoming -Journal of the History of Philosophy.detailsThis paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman (...) Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period. (shrink)
(1 other version)Coming to America: Carnap, Reichenbach and the Great Intellectual Migration. Part II: Hans Reichenbach.Sander Verhaegh -2020 -Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (11).detailsIn the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second World War, a small number of European philosophers of science emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the (...) impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of science as a subtler alternative. (shrink)
Nagel’s Philosophical Development.Sander Verhaegh -2021 - In Matthias Neuber & Adam Tamas Tuboly,Ernest Nagel: Philosophy of Science and the Fight for Clarity. Springer. pp. 43-65.detailsErnest Nagel played a key role in bridging the gap between American philosophy and logical empiricism. He introduced European philosophy of science to the American philosophical community but also remained faithful to the naturalism of his teachers. This paper aims to shed new light on Nagel’s intermediating endeavors by reconstructing his philosophical development in the late 1920s and 1930s. This is a decisive period in Nagel’s career because it is the phase in which he first formulated the principles of his (...) naturalism and spent a year in Europe to visit the key centers of logical empiricism. Building on a range of published and unpublished papers, notes, and correspondence—including hundreds of pages of letters to his close friend Sidney Hook—I reconstruct Nagel’s philosophical development, focusing especially on the philosophical influence of John Dewey, Morris R. Cohen, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Reichenbach. (shrink)
The Analytic Turn in American Philosophy: An Institutional Perspective. Part I: Scientific vs. Humanistic Philosophy.Sander Verhaegh -forthcoming -Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science.detailsThis two-part paper reconstructs the analytic turn in American philosophy through a comparative longitudinal study of three major philosophy departments: Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. I trace their hiring policies, tenure decisions, curriculum designs, and the external pressures that forced them to continuously adapt their strategies; and I use those analyses to distill some of the factors that contributed to the rapid growth of analytic philosophy between 1940 and 1970. In this first part, I show that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and (...) Columbia actively tried to promote a ‘humanistic’ conception of philosophy until the early 1950s. I argue that logical positivism and related ‘scientific’ approaches were seen as a fundamental threat to the discipline and that this opposition influenced decision making at all three institutions. While many students and recent graduates saw philosophy as a scientific discipline, senior members of the community deplored the decline of the humanities and appointed mostly humanistic philosophers. I show that this generational conflict was reinforced by demographic, political, and economic developments and argue that these discriminatory practices helped forge a coalition between logical empiricists, scientific pragmatists, and ordinary language philosophers, who all began to identify as ‘analytic’ philosophers after the war. (shrink)
Boarding Neurath's Boat: The Early Development of Quine's Naturalism.Sander Verhaegh -2017 -Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (2):317-342.detailsW. V. Quine is arguably the intellectual father of contemporary naturalism, the idea that there is no distinctively philosophical perspective on reality. Yet, even though Quine has always been a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the early 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct the genesis of Quine’s ideas on the relation between science and philosophy. Scrutinizing his unpublished papers and notebooks, I examine Quine’s development in the first decades of his career. After identifying three (...) commitments supporting his naturalism—viz. empiricism, holism, and realism—I piece together the evolution of Quine’s position by examining the origins of these commitments one by one, showing how his early views gradually evolved into the mature naturalistic position that would have such an enormous impact on post-war analytic philosophy. (shrink)
The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters, 1929–1932.Sander Verhaegh -2020 -Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (10):106-142.detailsThis paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the *Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung*, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the (...) Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of the American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism. (shrink)
The Analytic Turn in American Philosophy: An Institutional Perspective. Part II: Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy.Sander Verhaegh -forthcoming -Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science.detailsThis paper continues a reconstruction of the analytic turn in American philosophy between 1940 and 1970. The first part of this paper argued that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia sought to stimulate ‘humanistic’ approaches to philosophy in their hiring policies and tenure decisions, thereby marginalizing the ‘scientific’ philosophies that were in vogue among their students. This second part unearths some of the mechanisms that contributed to the analytic turn once the movement’s fiercest opponents retired. I argue that a new (...) generation of deans and chairmen initially tried to craft ‘balanced’ departments but that various external variables— competition between elite universities, a shortage of graduates with training in modern logic, and the explosive growth of American higher education—eventually led to major policy shifts. Within a decade, I show, the distorted job market helped tip the balance into the other direction, strongly advantaging departments that had invested in analytic philosophy. By the late 1960s, the movement became so successful that the traditional division between humanistic and scientific approaches began to be replaced by a distinction between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy, referring to the schools of philosophy that were popular across the Atlantic. American philosophy, by then, just was analytic philosophy. (shrink)
Amazing light --visions for discovery.Wolfgang Baer -2006 -Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (1-2):177-183.detailsAn International Symposium In Honor of the 90th Birthday Year of Charles Townes October 6-8, 2005, UC Berkeley.
Blurring Boundaries: Carnap, Quine, and the Internal–External Distinction.Sander Verhaegh -2017 -Erkenntnis 82 (4):873-890.detailsQuine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal–external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics (...) are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects. (shrink)
Sign and Object : Quine’s forgotten book project.Sander Verhaegh -2019 -Synthese 196 (12):5039-5060.detailsW. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object, is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Where “Two Dogmas (...) of Empiricism” is usually considered to be a turning point in Quine’s development, this paper redefines the place of ‘Two Dogmas’ in his oeuvre. Not only does Quine’s book project reveal that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s ; Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective; steps that will be traced in the second half of this paper. (shrink)
The mineness of experience.Wolfgang Fasching -2009 -Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2):131-148.detailsIn this paper I discuss the nature of the “I” (or “self”) and whether it is presupposed by the very existence of conscious experiences (as that which “has” them) or whether it is, instead, in some way constituted by them. I argue for the former view and try to show that the very nature of experience implies a non-constituted synchronic and diachronic transcendence of the experiencing “I” with regard to its experiences, an “I” which defies any objective characterization. Finally I (...) suggest that the self, though irreducible to inter-experiential relations, is not a “separately existing entity”, but should be conceived of as a dimension , namely the dimension of first-personal manifestation of the experiences. (shrink)
Distanciation in Ricoeur's theory of interpretation: narrations in a study of life experiences of living with chronic illness and home mechanical ventilation.PiaSander Dreyer &Birthe D. Pedersen -2009 -Nursing Inquiry 16 (1):64-73.detailsWithin the caring science paradigm, variations of a method of interpretation inspired by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory of interpretation are used. This method consists of several levels of interpretation: a naïve reading, a structural analysis, and a critical analysis and discussion. Within this paradigm, the aim of this article is to present and discuss a means of creating distance in the interpretation and the text structure by using narration in a poetic language linked to the meaning of the (...) text. Ricoeur's ‘Hermeneutical function of distanciation’ will be introduced, and this concept of distanciation will be illustrated with reference to narrations from a study of patient's life experiences living with chronic illness and home mechanical ventilation in Denmark. Distanciation in the interpretation objectifies the text, and narration in a poetic language creates a particular kind of mediation in the interpretation. That narration represents an interpreted understanding of the whole, which facilitates an appropriate and evocative presentation of the interpreted data. This way of objectifying the text through narration can contribute yet another perspective to Ricoeur's rich and varied theory of interpretation. (shrink)
Verloren im Schützengraben. Zur Raumsemantik der dargestellten Kriegsräume in Erich Maria Remarques „Im Westen nichts Neues”.Wolfgang Brylla -2014 -Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Germanica 10.detailsDuring the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War Erich Maria Remarque’s bestseller “All Quiet on the Western Front” is surpassing successive records of popularity. Commonly considered as an antiwar and pacifist novel, the history of Paul Bäumer, a young soldier on the western front, is rather a novel about a war generation lost in the trenches. Remarque describes this written off generation on the stage of various war-spaces. The first-person narrator who very often switches to the collective (...) ‘we’, is the voice of virtually the whole community of combatants engaged on the side of the German recruits, describes 1) barracks in which it has been attempted to destroy their youth and build their new identity, 2) the latrine at the front that paradoxically secures relative peace for them, 3) earthworks as a prelude to hostilities, 4) trenches/dugouts that are only a waiting-room for death, 5) the home front which is presented in the context of “La Grande Guerre” as an alien and impersonal space, and 6) the military hospital that from the narrator’s Bäumer’s perspective is the war in a minature format. The homodiegetic and autodiegetic method of narration in “All Quiet on the Western Front” is on the one hand based on the visualization of the war-spaces, on the other – on showing, through the making of the narrative semantics of these spaces, the lost generation. Bäumer’s and his companions’s moral-ethical-human fall is related to, and dependent on, the spaces in which they exist and which affect their psychic and physical condition. With the death of the main narrator also dies the space of the narration, however the frame of the narrative spaces remains and documents the cruelty and savagery of the hell of 1914–1918. (shrink)
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Sound Trust and the Ethics of Telecare.Sander A. Voerman &Philip J. Nickel -2017 -Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 42 (1):33-49.detailsThe adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)
Quine's Argument from Despair.Sander Verhaegh -2014 -British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (1):150-173.detailsQuine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...) is a mistake, there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine's argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine's work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence. (shrink)
Quine on the Nature of Naturalism.Sander Verhaegh -2017 -Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (1):96-115.detailsQuine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open-minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science”. Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine's naturalism contains a “deep-seated and significant (...) ambivalence”. In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible—a reading that does justice to Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine's position and argue that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine's naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine's naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science-immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting our language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive. (shrink)
The Colony as Laboratory: German Sleeping Sickness Campaigns in German East Africa and in Togo, 1900-1914.Wolfgang Eckart -2002 -History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 24 (1):69 - 89.detailsThis paper is on dangerous human experimentations with drugs against trypanosimiasis carried out in the former German colonies of German East Africa and Togo. Victory over trypanosomiasis could not be achieved in Berlin because animals were thought to be unsuitable for therapeutic laboratory research in the field of trypanosomiasis. The colonies themselves were necessarily chosen as laboratories and the patients with sleeping sickness became the objects of therapeutical and pharmacological research. The paper first outlines Robert Koch's trypanosomiasis research in the (...) large sleeping sickness laboratory of German East Africa and then focuses on the escalating human experiments on trypanosomiasis in the German Musterkolonie Togo, which must be interpreted as a reaction to the starting signal given by Robert Koch in East Africa. (shrink)
Health and Reference Classes.Sander Werkhoven -2020 -Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 45 (2):145-158.detailsIn this article, I address two objections developed by Kingma against Boorse’s bio-statistical theory of health, the objections that choice of reference classes renders the theory both circular and problematically value-laden. These objections not only apply to the bio-statistical theory of health but also to other naturalistic theories, like the dispositional theory of health. I present three rejoinders. First, I argue that the circularity objection arises from excessive methodological demands. Second, I argue that naturalists can resist the normativist claim that (...) health and pathology are differentiated on the basis of personal or cultural values. Finally, I show that it is possible to justify choices between rival theories of health without the interference of evaluative commitments. With these rejoinders, I conclude that the bio-statistical theory, as well as other naturalistic theories of health utilizing reference classes, is not undermined by Kingma’s arguments. (shrink)
Quine's ‘needlessly strong’ holism.Sander Verhaegh -2017 -Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 61:11-20.detailsQuine is routinely perceived as having changed his mind about the scope of the Duhem-Quine thesis, shifting from what has been called an 'extreme holism' to a more moderate view. Where the Quine of 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' argues that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, 42), the later Quine seems to back away from this “needlessly strong statement of holism” (1991, 393). In this paper, I show that the received view is incorrect. I distinguish (...) three ways in which Quine's early holism can be said to be wide-scoped and show that he has never changed his mind about any one of these aspects of his early view. Instead, I argue that Quine's apparent change of mind can be explained away as a mere shift of emphasis. (shrink)