This book offers the first study of theological thought experiments. It advances the discussion about the religious significance of the imagination and presents a tightly argued response to debates ...over pluralism in the history and philosophy of science.
The Anthropocene deserves spatial as well as temporal analysis. “Patchy Anthropocene” is a conceptual tool for noticing landscape structure, with special attention to what we call “modular ...simplifications” and “feral proliferations.” This introduction suggests guidelines for thinking structurally about more-than-human social relations; “structure” here emerges from phenomenological attunements to specific multispecies histories, rather than being system characteristics. Indeed, we discuss “systems” as thought experiments, that is, imagined holisms that help make sense of structure. Ecological modeling, political economy, and alternative cosmologies are systems experiments that should rub up against each other in learning about the Anthropocene. We address the misleading claim that studies of nonhumans ignore social justice concerns as well as suggesting ways that ethnographers might address “hope” without rose-colored glasses. This introduction offers frames for appreciating the distinguished contributions to this supplement, and it traces key changes in anthropological thinking from the time of this supplement’s predecessor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation–sponsored 1956 volume, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Rather than interrogating philosophies of the Anthropocene, the supplement shows how anthropologists and allies, including historians, ecologists, and biologists, might best offer a critical description.
The imagination of young children has notable constraints. The outcomes and possibilities that they imagine rarely deviate from the everyday regularities they have observed and remembered. Their ...reality‐based imagination is evident in a variety of contexts: early pretend play, envisioning the future, judgments about what is possible, the instructive role of thought experiments, tool making, and figurative drawing. Overall, the evidence shows that children’s imagination helps them to anticipate reality and its close alternatives. This perspective invites future research on the scope of children's thinking about counterfactual possibilities, their ability to make discoveries about reality on the basis of thought experiments, and the ways in which cultural input can expand the scope of the possibilities that they entertain.
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This article provides a philosophical overview of different approaches to age and ageing. It is often assumed that our age is determined by the amount of time we have been alive. Here, I challenge ...this belief. I argue that there are at least three plausible, yet unsatisfactory, accounts to age and ageing: the chronological account, the biological account, and the experiential account. I show that all of them fall short of fully determining what it means to age. Addressing these problems, I suggest the Two‐tier principle of age: whenever the three accounts of age contradict, combine the two accounts that differ the least, and reject the third. However, while this principle does solve some difficulties, it is itself vulnerable to problems; therefore I propose we should jettison it. I conclude that there are no accounts to ageing that are satisfactory; they all come with a bullet to bite.
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Teletransporter and origami Kardash, A. M.
Omsk Scientific Bulletin. Series Society. History. Modernity,
02/2024, Volume:
9, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The author criticizes the thought experiment about survival in a teletransporter. The weakness of the experiment lies in the implicit dualism and the uncritical premise of multiple implementations in ...the conditions. The assumption about the qualitative identity of bodies after teleportation through the category of mereorganic continuity is criticized.
Research on moral dilemma judgments has been fundamentally shaped by the distinction between utilitarianism and deontology. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the moral status of ...behavioral options depends on their consequences; the principle of deontology states that the moral status of behavioral options depends on their consistency with moral norms. To identify the processes underlying utilitarian and deontological judgments, researchers have investigated responses to moral dilemmas that pit one principle against the other (e.g., trolley problem). However, the conceptual meaning of responses in this paradigm is ambiguous, because the central aspects of utilitarianism and deontology-consequences and norms-are not manipulated. We illustrate how this shortcoming undermines theoretical interpretations of empirical findings and describe an alternative approach that resolves the ambiguities of the traditional paradigm. Expanding on this approach, we present a multinomial model that allows researchers to quantify sensitivity to consequences (C), sensitivity to moral norms (N), and general preference for inaction versus action irrespective of consequences and norms (I) in responses to moral dilemmas. We present 8 studies that used this model to investigate the effects of gender, cognitive load, question framing, and psychopathy on moral dilemma judgments. The findings obtained with the proposed CNI model offer more nuanced insights into the determinants of moral dilemma judgments, calling for a reassessment of dominant theoretical assumptions.
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Powszechność stosowania eksperymentów myślowych w filozofii sprawia, że same eksperymenty myślowe stają się coraz częstszym przedmiotem filozoficznych analiz. Różni autorzy, wychodząc od rozmaitych ...epistemologicznych i metafizycznych założeń, proponowali rozmaite poglądy na naturę eksperymentów myślowych. Moim celem jest krytyczna analiza tych stanowisk. W pierwszej części artykułu podaję ogólną charakterystykę eksperymentów myślowych, zakładając podobieństwo eksperymentów myślowych i eksperymentów rzeczywistych. W drugiej części omawiam obecne w literaturze propozycje typologizacji eksperymentów myślowych. W trzeciej części przedstawiam sześć stanowisk dotyczących natury eksperymentu myślowego.
The widespread use of thought experiments in philosophy has made thought experiments themselves an increasingly common subject of philosophical analysis. Different authors, starting from various epistemological and metaphysical assumptions, have proposed a variety of views on the nature of thought experiments. The purpose of this paper is a critical analysis of these positions. In the first, I give a general characterization of thought experiments assuming the similarity of thought experiments and real experiments. In the second part, I discuss the typologizations of thought experiments present in the literature. In the third part, I present six concepts of thought experiment.
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10.
Fiction as Thought Experiment Elgin, Catherine Z.
Perspectives on science,
06/2014, Volume:
22, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Although fictions and thought experiments are not physical realizations of the phenomena they pertain to, like real experiments, they exemplify properties or patterns that they share with those ...phenomena. They thereby afford epistemic access to properties and patterns that are realized in fact.
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