The study of highly imagistic representations of Spinoza's philosophy found in popular, extra‐academic literature is essential for building a rational view on Spinoza's philosophy. Popular literature on Spinoza is an ineliminable condition of academic literature on Spinoza. The cementing of Spinoza's popularity belongs to a larger history of Spinoza's reception. This chapter examines two late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth century works on Spinoza. Jules Prat's idiosyncratic blend of Spinozism and left‐wing French Republicanism stands out as a historically and (...) philosophically rich approach to Spinoza that has hardly been studied thus far. The chapter also examines the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud. One common feature to Singer and Malamud is the way that they root their Spinozists in a Jewish world. In this, they are forerunners of the ongoing popular preoccupation with Spinoza's own relation to Judaism. (shrink)

The first part of this book is a translation of a philosophical work by the Breton philosopher Jules Lequyer, which explores questions of divine justice and human equality. The second part is a biography of Lequyer by Donald Wayne Viney, based on Prosper Hemon's life of Lequyer, and other material.

This is an account of the psychotherapeutic treatment of a sign-maker. The treatment posed a special challenge owing to the patient's idiosyncratic blend of sexual, artistic, and spiritual interests, all of which informed his own notion of the sign/way-finding relationship. Way-finding came to connote more than its usual pedestrian meaning; it came to represent a spiritual quest and a personal exploration of the sacred. Conceptualizing this treatment, first for myself, then the patient, and now for you the reader, (...) led me through a way-finding process of my own. This entailed a reconsideration of the function and meaning of signs before finally locating the pertinent theoretical context for my... (shrink)

This is a collection of twenty-seven essays written by its author between 1962 and 1989 on topics in the history of science, the philosophy of science, and "the relevance of scientific practice to other parts of philosophy and culture". Twenty-one have been previously published, the remainder hitherto aired only as public presentations. The papers are gathered under six section-headings, including "Explanation," "Hume's Problem," "Logic and Causality," "Machines and Practices," "Scientific Knowledge--Its Scope and Limits," and "Science and Subjectivity"; yet their actual (...) range is both more diverse and less in keeping with prevailing currents in the philosophy of science than these tidily familiar rubrics suggest. "Explanation," for example, flirts with mainstream subject-matter in a much deserved encomium to Hempel's contributions in philosophy of science that reaches beyond the titular subject to the whole of Hempel's work. The section also embraces a discussion of General Systems Theory that distinguishes a doctrinaire, a prioristic approach to the study of science from a pragmatic-pluralistic version, urging the ills of the former and the virtues of the latter. It culminates in two presentations of the view that the theory of evolution rests on "circumstantial evidence" only as it involves the "logical fallacy" of "the inference of causes from effects" : the one is a historical piece on the little-known nineteenth-century naturalist, Phillip Henry Gosse, highlighting his creationistic "Omphalos" theory of the origins of biological species and the fossil record; the other is a short treatment of some conceptual issues involved in the creationist controversy. If the remaining five sections are not so heterogeneous in the scatter of subjects on which their articles touch, they are for the most part more idiosyncratic in the issues they address, the questions they raise, and the answers they suggest. Typical are "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time," an argument for the ultimacy of subjectivity on the basis of relativity theory, and "Truth and Presence," explicating the attempt of Gaston Bachelard to blend science and poetry as complementary aspects of the human imagination. Sometimes they are also eyebrow-raising. "The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager," would "show the impossibility of... logical proof [of the principle of induction]... by locating it among the paradoxes". Caw's case for paradox is simply that if inductive inference is legitimate then our past inability to justify such inference warrants the inductive conclusion that we shall never be able to justify it. But even if nothing else were suspect in this argument, its force is presumably at most probabilistic, making it hard to see how it could establish the "impossibility" of anything. Another paper, "Three Logics, or the Possibility of the Improbable," concerns "the logic of incredible events", touting the merits of so construing the natural world that events with zero probability occasionally occur and initiate spontaneous causal chains. Yet it is thoroughly unclear what interpretation of probability theory could both license identifying uncaused with impossible events and yet allow that such events may occur. Still another, "Rethinking Intentionality," includes the puzzling contention that "there can't be a science of intention because science presupposes intention". Unlike these last examples, most of the essays in the collection are provocative rather than upsetting, bearing the earmark of the independent, iconoclastic, speculative mind from which they spring, a former physicist not aligned with any of the current schools in philosophy of science, and more influenced by the classic giants of the Western philosophical tradition and by Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre than by empiricist philosophers of science or the recent analytic tradition. Thus, it is no surprise that the issues Caws addresses are nonstandard, and that his manner of addressing them embodies a looser, more broad-stroked, more humanistic, and more metaphysically self-conscious approach than is common in recent mainstream philosophy of science. This orientation doubtless accounts, too, for the somewhat subjective-idealistic stance, the view that one cannot definitively progress beyond one's own sensations and ideas, argued in "Yorick's World or the Universe in a Single Skull," and manifest in the tone, substance, and central thrust of a number of the essays in the collection. It is thus appropriate that Caws should have borrowed from this title to name the anthology itself.-Robert B. Barrett, Washington University in St. Louis. (shrink)

The ability to reason and problem‐solve in novel situations, as measured by the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), is highly predictive of both cognitive task performance and real‐world outcomes. Here we provide evidence that RAPM performance depends on the ability to reallocate attention in response to self‐generated feedback about progress. We propose that such an ability is underpinned by the basal ganglia nuclei, which are critically tied to both reward processing and cognitive control. This hypothesis was implemented in a neurocomputational (...) model of the RAPM task, which was used to derive novel predictions at the behavioral and neural levels. These predictions were then verified in one neuroimaging and two behavioral experiments. Furthermore, an effective connectivity analysis of the neuroimaging data confirmed a role for the basal ganglia in modulating attention. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in a neural circuit related to reward processing underpin human fluid reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Two nearly complete translations of Spinoza’s works were published in 19th century France. Their philosophical choices refract the intellectual conflicts of the period. Saisset’s Cousinian spiritualism confronts Prat’s materialist and republican interpretation.

In academic and political spaces, as well as in the dominant culture in the United States, sex workers are granted little authority, and their lived experiences are not privileged as a form of valuable knowledge. As feminist scholars, we seek to counter this pattern by highlighting the situated knowledges and agency of sex workers in the United States. To do so, we share the words of sex workers through I-poems. I-poems are a form of poetic inquiry and a method for (...) qualitative research analysis. As a form of found poetry, these poems are constructed using only the words of the participants. Unlike prior scholars, we use focus groups that capture conversation about people involved in street-based sex work rather than individual interviews. By centering the participants’ own words, we hope to moderate our influence as researchers on the presentation of data. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Circalunar clocks, which allow organisms to time reproduction to lunar phase, have been experimentally proven but are still not understood at the molecular level. Currently, a new generation of researchers with new tools is setting out to fill this gap. Our essay provides an overview of classic experiments on circalunar clocks. From the unpublished work of the late D. Neumann we also present a novel phase response curve for a circalunar clock. These experiments highlight avenues for molecular work and call (...) for rigor in setting up and analyzing the logistically complex experiments on circalunar clocks. Re‐evaluating classic experiments, we propose that (1) circalunar clocks in different organisms will have divergent mechanisms and physiological bases, (2) they may have properties very different from the well‐studied circadian clocks and (3) they may have close mechanistic and molecular relations to seasonal rhythms and diapause. (shrink)

The "Duhem-Quine thesis" says that isolated hypotheses are not singularly verifiable by experience, only the whole body of a theory being able to be subjected to the test of experience. I first examine the rather divergent meanings this thesis takes when it is replaced in the different contexts of Duhem's and Quine'sphilosophies. Secondly, questions are asked about the acceptability of the thesis, its logical strength and its historical soundness. Finally, the consequences of some doubts raised by this inquiry are examined (...) especially with respect to Quine's philosophy. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 7, July 2024, Page 6-12.

Studies that have explored the wish to hasten death (WTHD) in patients with advanced illness have found that the feeling of being a burden may trigger WTHD. Research suggests that both the feeling and the wish are indicators of multidimensional suffering whose meaning may depend on the patient's biographical background. Therefore, we carried out a systematic review and meta‐ethnography. Fourteen qualitative studies, reported in 16 articles, met the inclusion criteria. The analysis identified two themes: the personal and social dimensions that (...) could help to explain the feeling of being a burden in these patients. These dimensions reveal how this feeling is linked to physical, psychological/emotional, existential and social factors. The feeling of being a burden cannot be understood without considering patients’ personal interpretation of their dependency or care needs, and hence it is also necessary to understand their biographical background. Such an understanding is crucial to inform clinical policies based on the moral duty to provide all patients with humane care. (shrink)

Al-Ghazzālī a toujours utilisé les travaux de ses prédécesseurs. Le Mi‘yār al-‘ilm fī fann, sorte de manuel de logique aristotélicienne adaptée au droit et à la théologie islamiques, contient ainsi une grande variété d’écrits avicenniens, du K. jusqu’à certaines parties du Šifā’. Mais quelques écrits farabiens, en particulier al-Qiyās et al-Maqūlāt, y sont mêlés. C’est la première et, à notre connaissance, la seule fois qu’al-Ghazzālī combine ainsi des éléments empruntés à ces deux grands maîtres.

My goal, in interpreting Arendt’s analyses of the polis – both modern and ancient – is to conceptualize the role that ‘healthy’ public spaces can play in modern cities. What distinguishes my interpretation of her work is how I integrate her seminal conception of a philosophy of natality in the constellation of elemental concepts: labor, work, and action, as a way to understand the rise and fall of Detroit and to set the possible horizon for its reincarnation as a ‘sustainable’ (...) and flourishing city beautiful. For me, it is precisely this conceptualization, as a philosophy of natality, that enables us to better identify the metaphysical and political foundations of her ideas about the polis and its possible pragmatic application for recreating public spaces in other modern, cosmopolitan cities. I end up considering what it means to become “native to a place” in the sense that was adopted in the rebirth of the River Rouge Complex and just what that has to do with the emergence of the barrio of Mexicantown in Detroit as a quintessential sign of successful city living and a sign of hope for a brighter, more beautiful future. (shrink)

Complex skill learning depends on the joint contribution of multiple interacting systems: working memory (WM), declarative long-term memory (LTM) and reinforcement learning (RL). The present study aims to understand individual differences in the relative contributions of these systems during learning. We built four idiographic, ACT-R models of performance on the stimulus-response learning, Reinforcement Learning Working Memory task. The task consisted of short 3-image, and long 6-image, feedback-based learning blocks. A no-feedback test phase was administered after learning, with an interfering task (...) inserted between learning and test. Our four models included two single-mechanism RL and LTM models, and two integrated RL-LTM models: (a) RL-based meta-learning, which selects RL or LTM to learn based on recent success, and (b) a parameterized RL-LTM selection model at fixed proportions independent of learning success. Each model was the best fit for some proportion of our learners (LTM: 68.7%, RL: 4.8%, Meta-RL: 13.25%, bias-RL:13.25% of participants), suggesting fundamental differences in the way individuals deploy basic learning mechanisms, even for a simple stimulus-response task. Finally, long-term declarative memory seems to be the preferred learning strategy for this task regardless of block length (3- vs 6-image blocks), as determined by the large number of subjects whose learning characteristics were best captured by the LTM only model, and a preference for LTM over RL in both of our integrated-models, owing to the strength of our idiographic approach. (shrink)

Doubts on Avicenna: A Study and Edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī’s Commentary on the Ishārāt. By Ayman Shihadeh. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science, Texts and Studies, vol. 95. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. viii + 289. $126, €97.

Jules Coleman, one of the world's most influential philosophers of law, here expounds his recent views on a range of important issues in legal theory. Coleman offers for the first time an explicit account of the pragmatist method that has long informed his work, and takes on the views of highly respected contemporaries such as Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz.

The Postscript to The Concept of Law contains Herbert Hart's only sustained and considered response to the objections pressed against his views by his distinguished critic, Ronald Dworkin. In this extraordinary collection, many of the leading legal philosophers in the world evaluate the success of Hart's responses to Dworkin on several of these counts. Notable contributors include Joseph Raz of Oxford University and Jules L. Coleman of the Yale Law School.

It is not uncommon for patients with advanced disease to express a wish to hasten death. Qualitative studies of the WTHD have found that such a wish may have different meanings, none of which can be understood outside of the patient’s personal and sociocultural background, or which necessarily imply taking concrete steps to ending one’s life. The starting point for the present study was a previous systematic review of qualitative studies of the WTHD in advanced patients. Here we analyse in (...) greater detail the statements made by patients included in that review in order to examine their moral understandings and representations of illness, the dying process and death. We identify and discuss four classes of assumptions: assumptions related to patients’ moral understandings in terms of dignity, autonomy and authenticity; assumptions related to social interactions; assumptions related to the value of life; and assumptions related to medicalisation as an overarching context within which the WTHD is expressed. Our analysis shows how a philosophical perspective can add to an understanding of the WTHD by taking into account cultural and anthropological aspects of the phenomenon. We conclude that the knowledge gained through exploring patients’ experience and moral understandings in the end-of-life context may serve as the basis for care plans and interventions that can help them experience their final days as a meaningful period of life, restoring some sense of personal dignity in those patients who feel this has been lost. (shrink)

One of the most important facts that the Second Vatican Council has revealed is that the point of the Church is not itself, but to go beyond itself, to be a community that preaches, serves, celebrates, and witnesses to the reign of God with due respect to the text and context. During the past century, the Church of the Middle East experienced the absence of an authentic missionary enthusiasm and the lack of a clear and pertinent theology with which it (...) could face the challenge presented to Christianity by Islam. This challenge resides in its special role and mission before the Muslims, which this paper will further discuss and, in doing so, answer the question, How can the Church of the Middle East try to approach the Muslims in a time of violent Islamic fundamentalism and persecutions, in a region where most of the Christians are opting to remain distant or to emigrate? (shrink)

Going from cognitive theory to neural data to ACT‐R models, the authors relate brain activity in a lexical ambiguity priming task to brain processes that resolve ambiguity in word meanings. These detailed data were tested and found compatible to the results of an ACT‐R computational model of reinforcement learning (RL). The model confirms and extends the behavioral findings to provide a RL account of individual differences in lexical ambiguity resolution.

In recent years, the concept of “integrity” has been frequently discussed by scholars, and deployed by courts, in the domain of criminal procedure. In this paper, we are particularly concerned with how the concept has been employed in relation to the problem of the admissibility of evidence obtained improperly. In conceptualising and addressing this problem, the advocates of integrity rely on it as a standard of conduct for the criminal justice authorities and as a necessary condition for the state authority (...) to condemn and punish. We raise a series of challenges that need answering before integrity can perform these roles. Our aim is not to show that integrity is useless in normative theorising about the admissibility of evidence, and about the criminal process in general. Rather, it is to give guidance for the elaboration of a theory of integrity that is cogent, coherent, and has useful implications for the process of proof. (shrink)

The study of the contrast between fundamental aspects of spatial and temporal awareness offers a good opportunity to bring to light the relation between philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. In this paper we critically examine important work by Rick Grush on spatial and temporal experience, and we show that while there is a valid claim for the relevant neuroscientific model to be one that supports Gareth Evans's stance on "behavioral space", there is not at present any scientific model that (...) offers comparable support for philosophical theories of temporal experience, despite some claims by Grush that might suggest the contrary. Moreover, we argue that careful attention to the spatial case allows us to locate the point at which even relatively successful cases of neuroscientific modeling and explanation are left wanting when their aim is to show that phenomenal features of experience are a function of the representational structures produced by our neural information-processing machinery: an aim widely shared by the predominant programmatic stance in current neuroscience research. (shrink)

Max Weber's concept of the iron cage has become a byword in the scholarly world since the publication in 1930 of Talcott Parsons' translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . What is less well-known is that Jules Verne had earlier used the iron cage metaphor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) to reveal the paradoxes of modernity. Roland Barthes criticized Verne's vision of modernity as bourgeois and positivistic, pointing out his narrow-minded enthusiasm for (...) futuristic technology. In this essay, I argue that Verne's originality lies precisely in his equivocal attitude towards modernity with its high technology. Verne, I suggest, does not reject technological modernity, but by dissecting it he reveals its propelling forces, high demands and price. He shows that the Enlightenment's Rule of Reason is, in the end, governed by the ancient passions of fear, bitterness and the thirst for revenge. It is this combination that makes the human condition tragic. Verne's Homeric imagination creates an epic hero—Captain Nemo—who personifies the remarkable alliance of modern science and ancient heroism. (shrink)

The possibility of combining powerful genetic methods with biochemical analysis has made baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae the organism of choice to study the complex process of translation initiation in eukaryotes. Several new initiation factor genes and interactions between components of the translational machinery that were not predicted by current models have been revealed by genetic analysis of extragenic suppressors of translational initiation mutants. In addition, a yeast cell‐free translation system has been developed that allows in vivo phenotypes to be correlated (...) with in vitro biochemical activities. We summarize here the current view of yeast translational initiation obtained by these approaches. (shrink)

It has been argued that philosophical theories in the philosophy of mind necessarily require empirical theories in cognitive science or cognitive neuroscience to be validated. This is indeed an unexpected relation between philosophy and science, since it is widely assumed nowadays – quite apart from Quinean qualms – that philosophical claims are largely a priori just in that their justification proceeds along paths which are independent of empirical investigations. I will defend that the case of attention provides further confirmation of (...) a position which is similar to Davies’s, but it shows at the same time that we should subscribe to a weaker version that has to do with the possibility of an eliminativist attitude towards the philosophical theory and the entities postulated in it. However, I will try to show that the case studies concerning attention show that this possibility, though it should not be excluded, is rather remote due to the fact that philosophical theories of mental phenomena are typically related to one in a set of different possible empirical theories. I will also try to show that this relation arises in at least one rather interestingly different way, in addition to the one involved in the case studies discussed by Davies. (shrink)

Une lettre inédite de Karl Marx à Jules Guesde sur la France, l’«Orient» et l’« Occident » (1879). Actuel Marx, v. 73, n. 1, pp. 109-14. Disponível em:. Traduzido do francês por Gabriella M. S. Souza (graduada e mestranda em direito pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). E-mail: [email protected]. Revisão técnica de Ester Vaisman.

Do participants in shared activity have mutual obligations to do their bit? This article shows this question has no one-size-fits-all answer and offers a pluralist account of the normativity of shared agency. The first part argues obligations to do one's bit have three degrees of involvement in shared activity. Such obligations might, obviously, bolster co-participants’ resolve to act as planned (degree 1). Less obviously, there also are higher and lower degrees of involvement. Obligations to do one's bit might provide our (...) agency-pooling mechanism. When they do, we act together by virtue of satisfying them (degree 2). Conversely, some shared activities involve no obligation (degree 0). In the second part, I argue shared agency theory is best served by a non-moralistic conception of obligation, one on which co-participants’ obligations need be neither strict-performance obligations, nor directed ones. Overall, my arguments suggest that we can choose how to coordinate normatively our shared activities. (shrink)

In the present paper it is shown that al-Ämidî has tried to integrate somehow pilosophy into theology in way that reveals closer to al-Ghazâlî's than to F.D. al-Râzî's way of combining both currents of thought. Based on an analysis of several ideas taken from different works it is shown that al-Ämidî not only accepts the logic of the philosophers, but also their views that may be considered as scientifically established beyond any reasonable doubt.

There can be no question but that Lachelier exercised great influence over French philosophy. Gabriel Séailles notes it as do others. Boutroux remarked "il fut un excitateur singulièrement puissant des intelligences," and Benrubi places him with Ravaisson in initiating the tradition of spiritualistic positivism in France. Bergson also recognized and acknowledged his debt to Lachelier, although the tradition which Lachelier helped to father was opposed to Bergsonianism in many important respects. The two traditions can, I suggest, be recognized as dialectical (...) opposites of one another. (shrink)

Il y a un mot de passe pour entrer dans ce livre. Un mot de passe facile à retenir. C'est le mot AMOUR. L'auteur ne le révèle qu'à la toute fin, mais dès les premières pages, on le devine. On a tôt fait de découvrir un homme en amour avec «son» Plateau, où il habite depuis plus de trente ans. Cet amour bien réel en cache un autre plus profond, l'amour de la langue française. Quelques essais bien sentis en témoignent (...) éloquemment. C'est ainsi qu'à travers récits et essais, dans une langue belle et empreinte d'humour, Jules Tessier nous invite à partager des souvenirs où il sera question de pièces de théâtre, de personnages méconnus mais hauts en couleur, de conseils pour augmenter sa longévité, d'invitations au voyage et même de péchés et de vertus! «Un dénominateur commun relie tous ces chapitres, que ce soit le point de vue d'un observateur ou d'un actant: un vif intérêt, peut-être même une passion pour les thèmes abordés.» Au cours de sa carrière universitaire, Jules Tessier s'est intéressé notamment aux manifestations de la vie française sur le continent, tant sur le plan de la langue que sur celui de la littérature. Il est à l'origine du périodique Francophonies d'Amérique qu'il a dirigé pendant dix ans, à partir de sa fondation en 1991, et vingt-cinq ans plus tard, cette revue est toujours aussi nécessaire et dynamique. Mot de passe est le quatrième d'une série de titres consacrés à des essais et inaugurée par Sur la terre comme un ciel (Fides, 2010). (shrink)

Ibn Sina, long known in the West as Avicenna, was at the center of the school of Islamic philosophy that inherited and adapted Greek thinking from pre-Socratic to late Hellenic times, says Jansson. The 17 essays he has collected here discuss such aspects as his heritage in the Islamic world and the Latin West, the problem of human freedom, al-Gazzali and his use of Avicennian texts, and some elements of Avicennian influence on Henry of Ghent's psychology. One is published here (...) for the first time; the others are reproduced--with original page numbers--from publication since 1987, but mostly the late 1990s. (shrink)

Our focus here is on whether, when influenced by implicit biases, those behavioural dispositions should be understood as being a part of that person’s character: whether they are part of the agent that can be morally evaluated.[4] We frame this issue in terms of control. If a state, process, or behaviour is not something that the agent can, in the relevant sense, control, then it is not something that counts as part of her character. A number of theorists have argued (...) that individuals do not have control, in the relevant sense, over the operation of implicit bias. We will argue that this claim is mistaken. We articulate and develop a notion of control that individuals have with respect to implicit bias, and argue that this kind of control can ground character-based evaluation of such behavioural dispositions. (shrink)

As every teacher of literature knows, obscure writing is not necessarily the most problematic kind to deal with. A sonnet by Donne or an equal number of lines by Dylan Thomas will handily fill the teaching hour. But what about that other kind of writing, the kind that imposes silence, not by its obvious difficulty but by its infuriating obviousness, the perfection of its form, the simplicity of its language, the transparency of its meaning? There is no trouble filling the (...) hour with Yeats’s Byzantium poems, but what about this one?The fascination of what’s difficultHas dried the sap out of my veins, and rentSpontaneous joy and natural contentOut of my heart. There’s something ails our coltThat must, as if it had not.. (shrink)