Cognitive scientists distinguish between automatic and controlled mental processes. Automatic processes are either innately involuntary or become automatized through extensive practice. For example, reading words is a purportedly automatic process for proficient readers and the Stroop effect is consequently considered the “gold standard” of automated performance. Although the question of whether it is possible to regain control over an automatic process is mostly unasked, we provide compelling data showing that posthypnotic suggestion reduced and even removed Stroop interference in highly hypnotizable (...) individuals. Drawing on a large sample of highly hypnotizable participants, we examined the effects of suggestion on Stroop performance both with and without a posthypnotic suggestion to perceive the input stream as meaningless symbols. We show that suggestion administered to highly hypnotizable persons significantly reduced Stroop interference and derailed a seemingly automatic process. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to offer an interpretation of Kant’s notion of proportionality between morality and happiness, which is fundamental to his conception of the highest good. Kant claims that the complete good of humans as both natural and rational beings is a proportionate relation between virtue and happiness. He takes this to mean that nature is purposively designed so it accords with morality, which is only possible in a divine world where God secures this responsiveness. The paper (...) shows various difficulties with this claim and argues that they can be resolved by a nuanced interpretation of what Kant might mean by “happiness”. This finally leads to a conception of proportionality modeled on Kant’s aesthetics. (shrink)

Ptolemy presents only one argument for the eccentricity in his models of the superior planets, while each one of them has two eccentricities: one for center of the uniform motion, the other for the center of the constant distance. To take into account the first eccentricity, he introduces the equant point, but he provides no argument for the eccentricity of the center of the deferent. Why is the second eccentricity different from the first one? The 13 th century astronomer Quṭb (...) al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, a member of the famous school of Marāgha, who was interested in this problem, suggests the “retrograde arcs” as the empirical origin of the second eccentricity and develops an argument to justify this conjecture. Although his argument is not without difficulty, his suggestion is in line with the suggestions made by some historians of astronomy in recent decades. Résumé Ptolémée ne donne qu'un seul argument pour expliquer dans son système l'excentricité des planètes supérieures, alors que chacune d'elles a deux excentricités: l'une par rapport au centre du mouvement uniforme, l'autre par rapport au centre de la distance constante. Pour rendre compte de la première excentricité, il introduit le point équant, mais il ne donne en revanche aucun argument pour l'excentricité par rapport au centre du cercle déférent. Or, pourquoi la seconde excentricité est-elle différente de la première? Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī, astronome du xiii e siècle membre de l'école de Marāgha, qui s'est intéressé à cette question, a fait l'hypothèse que les “arcs de rétrogradation” constituent l'origine empirique de cette seconde excentricité. Bien que l'argument sur lequel il appuie cette hypothèse ne soit pas exempt de difficultés, sa suggestion rejoint celles faites par des historiens de l'astronomie durant les dernières décennies. (shrink)

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood to see whether it is fully developed in infancy or improves with age, like many other cognitive abilities. A recent study showed modality‐based differences in the effect of age (...) during childhood: While visual SL improved with age, auditory SL did not. This finding was taken as evidence for modality‐based differences in SL. However, since that study used auditory linguistic stimuli (syllables), the differential effect of age may have been driven by stimulus type (linguistic vs. non‐linguistic) rather than modality. Here, we ask whether age will affect performance similarly in the two modalities when non‐linguistic auditory stimuli are used (familiar sounds instead of syllables). We conduct a large‐scale study of children's performance on visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL during childhood (ages 5–12 years). The results show a similar effect of age in both modalities: Unlike previous findings, both visual and non‐linguistic auditory SL improved with age. These findings highlight the stimuli‐sensitive nature of SL and suggest that modality‐based differences may be stimuli‐dependent, and that age‐invariance may be limited to linguistic stimuli. (shrink)

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, shows great promise and potential and is gradually being used in mental health care, but it also raises ethical concerns. These relate t...

Contributors to the recent disagreement debate have sought to provide a uniform response to cases in which epistemic peers disagree about the epistemic import of a shared body of evidence, no matter what kind of evidence they are disagreeing about. The varied cases addressed in the literature have included examples of disagreement about restaurant bills, court verdicts, weather forecasting, chess, morality, religious beliefs, and even disagreements about philosophical disagreements. The equal treatment of these varied cases has motivated the search for (...) a uniform response to peer disagreement wherever it is encountered. In this article I challenge this prevalent approach in the literature. I grant the notion of epistemic peer and accept that being a peer may amount to the same thing in different domains; nonetheless I contend that different domains appear to call for different responses to disagreement. I argue that the appropriate response to finding out about a disagreement with a peer is different in different domains. (shrink)

The existing research on Peshitta has mostly overlooked the translation techniques used in Peshitta Psalms. Prior studies have primarily focused on comparing Peshitta Psalms with the Masoretic Text (MT), the Septuagint and Targum, leaving a gap in the analysis of Peshitta Psalms within the context of Classical Syriac Poetry. This study will delve into how adeptly the Syriac translator employed poetic elements to construct strophic structures and poetic style within the Peshitta Psalm. This article presents an analysis of strophic structure, (...) word repetition, sound figures and versification in the Syriac translation of Psalm 29, comparing them with their Hebrew counterparts. In this study, the utilisation of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) is employed for the MT, while the ‘Leiden edition’ is employed for the Peshitta. The findings from this analysis reveal that the Syriac rendition of Psalm 29 within the Peshitta incorporates numerous poetic elements. This suggests the translator’s familiarity with the strophic arrangement, word repetition, alliteration and various other poetic characteristics utilised by Hebrew scribes. The Peshitta translation of Psalm 29 closely resembles the MT Hebrew text, resulting in a balance of fidelity and aesthetic elegance. The Syriac rendition incorporates poetic elements like strophic arrangement, word repetition and alliteration but employs these features in a distinct manner. The Syriac text has a lower frequency of alliteration and word repetition but still possesses appealing poetic characteristics. The Syriac approach to verse composition closely resembles the Hebrew method, with some exceptions. Contribution: This study explores the Syriac translator’s use of poetic elements in Peshitta Psalms, revealing their familiarity with Hebrew techniques and the unique incorporation of elements. It provides insights into the evolution of Classical Syriac Poetry and contributes to our understanding of Biblical and Syriac poetry. (shrink)

Recent data indicate that under a specific posthypnotic suggestion to circumvent reading, highly suggestible subjects successfully eliminated the Stroop interference effect. The present study examined whether an optical explanation could account for this finding. Using cyclopentolate hydrochloride eye drops to pharmacologically prevent visual accommodation in all subjects, behavioral Stroop data were collected from six highly hypnotizables and six less suggestibles using an optical setup that guaranteed either sharply focused or blurred vision. The highly suggestibles performed the Stroop task when naturally (...) vigilant, under posthypnotic suggestion not to read, and while visually blurred; the less suggestibles ran naturally vigilant, while looking away, and while visually blurred. Although visual accommodation was precluded for all subjects, posthypnotic suggestion effectively eliminated Stroop interference and was comparable to looking away in controls. These data strengthen the view that Stroop interference is neither robust nor inevitable and support the hypothesis that posthypnotic suggestion may exert a top-down influence on neural processing. (shrink)

Using the Stroop paradigm, we have previously shown that a specific suggestion can remove or reduce involuntary conflict and alter information processing in highly suggestible individuals . In the present study, we carefully matched less suggestible individuals to HSIs on a number of factors. We hypothesized that suggestion would influence HSIs more than LSIs and reduce the Stroop effect in the former group. As well, we conducted secondary post hoc analyses to examine negative priming – the apparent disruption of the (...) response to a previously-ignored item. Our present findings indicate that suggestion reduces Stroop effects in HSIs. Secondary analyses show that LSIs had an NP effect at baseline and that suggestion influenced the NP condition. Thus, at least in this experimental context, suggestion seems to dampen a deeply-engrained and largely automatic process – reading – by wielding a larger influence on HSIs relative to comparable LSIs. (shrink)

How should one write, what words should one select, what forms and structures and organization, if one is pursuing understanding? Sometimes this is taken to be trivial question. I shall claim that it is not.[T]here is nothing that so alters the material qualities of the voice as the presence of thought behind what is being said: the resonance of the diphthongs, the energy of the labials are profoundly affected—as is the diction.philosophy and literature are akin in rich and meaningful ways. (...) Like philosophy, novels make arguments and explicitly engage the range of philosophical questions; and like literature, essential elements of philosophy include... (shrink)

Based on the fact that Arabic words have roots from which they are derivated and their common meanings and there is a meaning relationship between words derivated from the same root Ibn Fāris tried to prove this theory in his dictionary. According to Ibn Fāris maqāyīs means the words that was derivated from a same root and have a common meaning. The purpose of writing this dictionary by Ibn Fāris is to determine the common meaning of words that was derivated (...) from a same root. This common meaning is called asl (origin) or miqyās (gauge). He tried to mention the most obvious expression of common meaning. Thus, the words with similar meanings can be gathered around the same expression. There are totally 4659 articles in al-Maqāyīs. Of these articles approximately 2175 articles have one common meaning, 355 articles have two common meanings, 68 articles have three common meanings and 15 articles have four common meanings. There are just 4 aricles they have five common meanings andonly one article has six common meanings. He characterized 222 articles with useyl. While explaning the articles he gaved a great importance to the testimony. He recorded in his dictionary approximately 5.000 poems and 858 rajazs. And there are 612 verses, 579 hadithes and nearly 390 proverbs in this work. While explaning these articles Ibn Fāris used some concepts. He generally recorded these concepts in the first line when he starts to explain an article. That’s why it’s not easy to understand the articles without understanding the recorded concepts in this work. This article was prepared to explain the concepts in al-Maqāyīs. In this way, it is aimed to understand this work better. In this article are explained 14 concepts and are given some articles in which these concepts are mentioned as examples. Ibn Fāris used the word of kalima wāhida (one word) in the meaning of meaning/content. The concept of binā is used in some articles in the meaning of root, in some articles in the meaning of meaning/content and somtimes is used in the meaning of common meaning. But the concept of harf (letter) is used for the roots which is given a little explanation. It is possible to say that this concept means word (kalima) and these articles are not suitable for common meaning. Also in some articles the author mentioned about the meaning inconsistency and the meaning distance between common meanings. He used terms like meaning dissimilarity (ademu inqiyās) and individual meaningful words for the roots which he could not find the common meanings. The author sometimes used the terms of difference (tafāwut), meaning similarity (taqārub) and interference (tadākhul) between origins and words. Although he accepts the existence of common words and auto-antonym (ezdād) in Arabic language, he states that there is a detail difference between the words which are considered to be synonym. The concept of muhmal means the neglected articles or the articles whose letters are incomatible. (shrink)

The acquaintance principle (AP) and the view it expresses have recently been tied to a debate surrounding the possibility of aesthetic testimony, which, plainly put, deals with the question whether aesthetic knowledge can be acquired through testimony—typically aesthetic and non-aesthetic descriptions communicated from person to person. In this context a number of suggestions have been put forward opting for a restricted acceptance of AP. This paper is an attempt to restrict AP even more.

In recent years, firms have greatly increased the amount of resources allocated to activities classified as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). While an increase in CSR expenditure may be consistent with firm value maximization if it is a response to changes in stakeholders' preferences, we argue that a firm's insiders (managers and large blockholders) may seek to overinvest in CSR for their private benefit to the extent that doing so improves their reputations as good global citizens and has a "warm-glow" effect. (...) We test this hypothesis by investigating the relation between firms' CSR ratings and their ownership and capital structures. Employing a unique data set that categorizes the largest 3000 U. S. corporations as either socially responsible (SR) or socially irresponsible (SI), we find that on average, insiders' ownership and leverage are negatively related to the firm's social rating, while institutional ownership is uncorrelated with it. Assuming that higher CSR ratings is associated with higher CSR expenditure level, these results support our hypothesis that insiders induce firms to over-invest in CSR when they bear little of the cost of doing so. (shrink)

Background: Ethical conflict is a barrier to decision-making process and is a problem derived from ethical responsibilities that nurses assume with care. Intensive care unit nurses are potentially exposed to this phenomenon. A deep study of the phenomenon can help prevent and treat it. Objectives: This study was aimed at determining the frequency, degree, level of exposure, and type of ethical conflict among nurses working in the intensive care units. Research design: This was a descriptive cross-sectional research. Participants and research (...) context: In total, 382 nurses working in the intensive care units in Iranian hospitals were selected using the random sampling method. Data were collected using the Ethical Conflict in Nursing Questionnaire-Critical Care Version (Persian version). Ethical considerations: This study was approved by the Medical Research Ethics Committee. Ethical considerations such as completing the informed consent form, ensuring confidentiality of information, and voluntary participation were observed. Findings: The results showed that the average level of exposure to ethical conflict was 164.39 ± 79.06. The most frequent conflict was related to “using resources despite believing in its futility,” with the frequency of at least once a week or a month (68.6%, n = 262). The most conflictive situation was violation of privacy (76.9%, n = 294). However, the level of exposure to ethical conflict according to the theoretical model followed was the situation of “working with incompetent staff.” The most frequently observed type of conflict was moral dilemma. Conclusion: The moderate level of exposure to ethical conflict was consistent with the results of previous studies. However, the frequency, degree, and type of ethical conflict were different compared to the results of other studies. Recognizing ethical conflict among intensive care unit nurses can be useful as it allows to consolidate those measures that favor low levels of ethical conflict, design appropriate strategies to prevent ethical conflicts, and improve the nursing work environment. (shrink)

This book investigates the role of humor in the good life, specifically as discussed by three prominent French intellectuals who were influenced by Nietzsche's thought: Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Clément Rosset. Lydia Amir begins by discussing Nietzsche's reception in France, and she explains why and how he came to be considered a "philosopher of laughter" in the French academe. Each of the subsequent three chapters focuses on the significance of humor and laughter in the good life as advocated (...) by Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset. These chapters also explore the complex relationship between the comic and the tragic, and of humor and laughter to irony, satire, and ridicule. The Legacy of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Laughter makes an invaluable contribution to recent interpretive work done on Bataille and Deleuze, and offers further introduction to the relatively understudied Rosset. It illuminates the philosophies of these three thinkers, their connection to Nietzsche, and, overall, the significant role that humor plays in philosophy. (shrink)

This paper shows how we can plausibly extend the guise of the good thesis in a way that avoids intellectualist challenge, allows animals to be included, and is consistent with the possibility of performing action under the cognition of their badness. The paper also presents some independent arguments for the plausibility of this interpretation of the thesis. To this aim, a teleological conception of practical attitudes as well as a cognitivist account of arational desires is offered.

While research on political violence often focuses on its outcome, there is little attention to the process of political violence. Filling the knowledge gap, the present research applies the theory of instrumentalism to understand political violence as a means to achieve certain political ends. The research is a qualitative case study on Lyari, which was a comparatively peaceful neighborhood in Karachi but transformed into a violent no-go area during 2000s. The paper describes the process of instrumentalization of political violence in (...) Lyari with the objective of outlining the relationship of three key actors – political parties, state authorities, and criminal gangs – using violence for their respective interests. The paper explains how the convergence of their interests influenced the intensity of political violence and converted it into an ethnic conflict. Hence, it expands the literature on political violence by outlining the complexities of the real world where multiple political actors simultaneously use violence to achieve varied objectives that sometimes compliment and sometimes clashes with each other, resulting in further extension of violence. (shrink)

Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn was a religious Zionist thinker and one of the founders of the “Mizrachi” movement. The present article aims to trace his approach towards work: did he see work as a need, an obligation imposed upon the human being to sustain his household, or did he, perhaps, associate work with a religious value as an integral part of the theology which he steered by? The conclusion is that R. Hirschensohn's approach towards work is both a must for a (...) livelihood and part of Jewish and national identity, to the point where Redemption itself depends upon it. Work is also part of religious Zionist theology, one of whose proponents and founders Chaim Hirschensohn was. (shrink)

Cells live in dynamic environments that necessitate perpetual adaptation. Since cells have limited resources to monitor external inputs, they are required to maximize the information content of perceived signals. This challenge is not unique to microscopic life: Animals use senses to perceive inputs and adequately respond. Research showed that sensory‐perception is actively shaped by learning and expectation allowing internal cognitive models to “fill in the blanks” in face of limited information. We propose that cells employ analogous strategies and use internal (...) models shaped through the long process of evolutionary adaptation. Given this perspective, we postulate that cells are prone to “misperceptions,” analogous to visual illusions, leading them to incorrectly decode patterns of inputs that lie outside of their evolutionary experience. Mapping cellular misperception can serve as a fundamental approach for dissecting regulatory networks and could be harnessed to modulate cell behavior, a potentially new avenue for therapy. (shrink)

Seeking Mandela is a disappointing book. This is not because it does injustice to the subject matter of its research. The opposite is true: the book deals with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and with the historical transition of power in South Africa in a rigorous and attentive manner. The problem lies in the name that the authors, Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, chose to give the book. Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians is a promising, hopeful title for a project. (...) The promise is, in fact, spelled out in the preface: “Our metaphor ‘Seeking Mandela’ speculates on what would have…. (shrink)

Like the navigation tools that freed ancient sailors from the need to stay close to the shoreline—eventually affording the discovery of new worlds—Big Data might open us up to new sociological possibilities by freeing us from the shackles of hypothesis testing. But for that to happen we need forensic social science: the careful compilation of evidence from unstructured digital traces as a means to generate new theories.

Plagiarism has been on the rise amongst university students in recent decades. This study puts university teachers in the spotlight and investigates their role in raising students’ awareness about plagiarism. To that end, plagiarism policies in 207 Iranian university TEFL teachers’ syllabuses were analyzed. The researchers analyzed the syllabuses to find out if they contain a plagiarism policy, and if so, how the term is defined; whether they approach the issue of plagiarism directly; if they offer students any guidelines on (...) how to avoid plagiarism; and if the consequences of committing plagiarism are specified. The results indicated that the majority of the syllabuses (83.6%) lacked a plagiarism policy and those that did include a policy were often vague in their definition of the phenomenon. However, when there was a plagiarism policy in the syllabuses, the teachers tried to address the issue directly half of the time and offered students brief guidelines on how to avoid plagiaristic behavior, which was a small step in the right direction. It is recommended that other higher education institutions make it obligatory for their academic staff to include a plagiarism policy in their syllabuses if they wish to cultivate academic integrity in students. (shrink)

A culturally cultivated ignorance with regard to the care and presentation of tightly-curled hair pervades American society. This ignorance masquerades as a discourse of manageability, which supports institutional prohibitions of historically Black American hairstyles. In other words, rather than acknowledging our knowledge deficits, we attribute the medical and aesthetic consequences of our ignorance to the hair itself. The insidious implication is that the display of tightly curled hair is not a matter of taste but indicative of a lack of self-care. (...) I conclude that this trend is racially prejudicial and that laws and education are possible mechanisms of redress. (shrink)

In his 1985 lecture, Geschlecht III, Derrida sought to ‘situate Geschlecht within Heidegger’s path of thought’. Having identified a political disclosure of sorts in Heidegger’s discussion of the significance of Trakl’s poetic invocation of the polysemic, German word ‘Geschlecht’, Derrida intimates that Heidegger betrays ideas and presumptions concerning the ‘problematic of philosophical nationalism’. Given the contentious political context of Heideggerian thought, some scholars might hope that Derrida’s intervention here would bear upon the divisive scholarly concern referred to as the ‘Heidegger (...) Question’. While Geschlecht III does not provide a resolution, a close reading betrays productive political implications to his manner of engagement. In this brief study, I will survey the political stakes of various methodological approaches to reading Heidegger, with Derrida’s manner of reading Heidegger’s ‘Language in the Poem’ at the centre. Ultimately, I argue that Derrida and Heidegger both appeal to a particular sense of the political that must be respected, though not necessarily accepted. (shrink)

Tel-Aviv University and York University, Toronto Plato suggested ways to regulate and integrate slaves within the legal system of his Utopian Cretan polis Magnesia as described in his work, Laws . This text alone invalidates most criticism of Popper's presentation of Plato's political views. His 50-year-old reading of Plato fits the text better than any other. To preserve the noble tradition of classical scholarship, classical scholars should acknowledge explicitly that he was correct, and that by now they have surreptitiously incorporated (...) the substance of his views. Key Words: Plato • slavery • apologetics • classical scholarship • Laws • Popper. (shrink)

This Article analyzes the composition of the board of directors as a vehicle for state intervention in corporate governance. Such intervention is ubiquitous and often motivated by goals that stray from shareholder wealth maximization, or corporate governance more generally, to promote other national interests such as diversity. Regulating board composition thus is merely the continuation of politics by other means. After briefly discussing direct state ownership in business firms as a way to advance policy goals, the Article explicates the tensions (...) between boards’ dual responsibilities of monitoring and strategy-setting. These oftentimes conflicting missions curb the law’s ability to guide board members’ conduct through the conventional legal duties of loyalty and care or other injunctions. Although the two roles also may entail conflicting implications for board composition, regulation of board composition nonetheless may prove a superior means for promoting policy goals, especially with regard to the objective of the corporation. Composition regulation harnesses board members’ personal attributes — specifically, their values — to facilitate the attainment of these goals. Instead of telling board members what to do, the state may fare better by regulating who they are. (shrink)

Rabbi Shaul Yisraeli was one of religious Zionism’s greatest rabbis and adjudicators. He served for many years as the rabbi of Moshav Kfar Haroeh, sat as a judge in the supreme Rabbinical Court and was head of the Merkaz Harav yeshiva. The purpose of this study is to shed light on Yisraeli’s attitude towards work. Did he see work as a basic human obligation spelled out by the physical need for survival? Did he associate an ideological value with work, as (...) part of a worldview integrating religious values with extra-religious ones, similar to socialism? Or did he see work as a religious value, one that stemmed from his theology? (shrink)

This paper evaluates the potentials of Mullā Şadrā’s philosophy to explain the possibility of the Islamization of philosophy. This contributes to a more general, yet controversial, project in post-revolutionary Iran, namely the Islamization of knowledge, especially in the humanities. If there would be a mechanism through which Islamization of philosophy – as a historical example and as a field of knowledge that provides theoretical grounds of other humanities – can be plausibly explained, then one might think of Islamizing the humanities, (...) as well. One famous explanation in Iran is based on the distinction between contexts of discovery and justification. It explains how a philosopher is permitted to use the Islamic content in the context of discovery – not justification – and how this helps to Islamize philosophy. In this article, we claim a new explanation which is based on Mullā Şadrā’s transcendent philosophy. Such a philosophical explanation not only acknowledges using the Qur’an and authentic narrations in the context of discovery but also necessitates involving revelation as a philosophical criterion in the context of justification and a highly valid epistemic source in producing the new philosophical content. This provides a strong account of the Islamization of philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to elaborate two distinctive but interconnected modes of temporalization through common points in the work of Jaques Derrida and Jaques Lacan, namely the Subalternated and the Dislocated time. The explication of the different form of time structure reveals time as relational phenomena, which is constituted by the non-relation between the subject and the Other. The process of subjectivization as the formalization of the Real, or as the work of mourning, excludes traumatic present and opens (...) the space for free flow of the Subalternated time, which is marked by linearity, identitarian thought, subordination, causality ect. The present is, therefore, marked by ontologization of the posthumous remains, canonized, excluded and deprived of any subversive potential. But despite this eternal requiem, something remains between the future and the past, non-present in its spectral subsistence which disrupts smooth stream of the Subalternated narrativity, announcing arrival, return and temporarily inexhaustible artificiality of novelty in the form of the Dislocated time. (shrink)

The Kripkean conception of natural kinds (kinds are defined by essences that are intrinsic to their members and that lie at the microphysical level) indirectly finds support in a certain conception of a law of nature, according to which generalizations must have unlimited scope and be exceptionless to count as laws of nature. On my view, the kinds that constitute the subject matter of special sciences such as biology may very well turn out to be natural despite the fact that (...) their essences fail to be microphysical or micro-based. On the causal conception of natural kinds I privilege, the naturalness of a kind is a function of the fact that it figures prominently in at least one causal law. However, there is a strong tendency prevailing among contemporary philosophers to assume that, in order to count as proper laws generalizations must be expectionless. Since most generalizations tracked down by the special sciences turn out not to fulfill these criteria, what this conception of a law implies is that most of the generalizations the special sciences trade in are not proper laws. It follows that, on this view, most if not all of the kinds the special sciences dealing with turn out not to constitute natural kinds, understood as kinds to which bona fide laws apply. In order to establish that the non-microstructurally defined kinds that fall within the domain of enquiry of the special sciences are eligible for the status of natural kind, I must therefore establish that generalizations needn’t have unlimited scope and be exceptionless to count as laws of nature. This is precisely what I seek to do in this paper. I begin by arguing that the question “what is a law of nature?” is most naturally interpreted as the question “what features must generalizations exhibit in order to ground scientific explanations?” and by offering reasons to believe that generalizations needn’t be exceptionless and have unlimited scope to play the crucial role laws have been thought to play in scientific explanation. Drawing on Sandra Mitchell [Mitchell, S. (2000). Philosophy of Science, 67, 242–265] and James Woodward’s [Woodward, J. (1997). Philosophy of science, 64 (proceedings), 524–541; Woodward, J. (2000). British Journal for the philosophy of science, 51(2), 197–254; Woodward, J. (2001). Philosophy of science, 68, 1–20] work, I subsequently develop an alternative account of the criteria generalizations must satisfy in order to count as laws of nature, which at least some of the generalizations of the special sciences turn out to fulfill. I thus give credence to the idea that at least some of the kinds that fall within the domain of the special sciences figure in laws of nature, and I thereby restore the possibility that some special science kinds deserve to be deemed natural. (shrink)

This article aims to understand the concept of work in the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook. As the person who had the maximum impact on the religious Zionist sector, with its guiding principle of Torah va’avodah, meaning Torah and work, it is necessary to clarify his attitude towards work. Did he perceive work as a necessity, a part of one’s duty to support the members of the household, or perhaps also as an ideological value, part of a worldview (...) that combines religious values with extra-religious values, or then again maybe he perceived work as a religious value? This article shows that R. Kook’s positive attitude towards work differs from traditional perspectives on work because of a pantheistic influence. Pantheism made him redefine the boundaries of Torah and include work and materiality. (shrink)

Computational properties, it is standardly assumed, are to be sharply distinguished from semantic properties. Specifically, while it is standardly assumed that the semantic properties of a cognitive system are externally or non-individualistically individuated, computational properties are supposed to be individualistic and internal. Yet some philosophers (e.g., Tyler Burge) argue that content impacts computation, and further, that environmental factors impact computation. Oron Shagrir has recently argued for these theses in a novel way, and gave them novel interpretations. In this paper I (...) present a conception of computation in cognitive science that takes Shagrir's conception as its starting point, but further develops it in various directions and strengthens it. I argue that the explanatory role of computational properties emerges from the idea that syntactical properties and the relevant external factors presented by cognitive systems compose wide computational properties. I also elaborate upon the notion of content that is in play, and argue that it is contents of the kind that are ascribed by transparent interpretations of content ascriptions that impact computation. This fact enables the thesis that external factors impact computation to rebuff the challenge which concerns the claim that psychology must be individualistic. (shrink)

Publication date: 31 January 2018 Source: Author: Amir Abbas Moslemi Ezra Pound’s Shi-Shu: Rats is read Foucauldianly to instantiate an interaction between Confucianism and Western schools of thought in response to the problem of evil. There is a review of Leibniz’s theodicy to clear up confusion, and also to pave the way for a succession of readings of a number of philosophers like Hume and James — foregrounding epistemic inclination of poets like Pope, Wordsworth and Burns. ‘Accidentality’ and ‘essentiality’ (...) are key philosophic terms, without which this problem cannot hold its logical structure, especially in terms of an answer. Epistemo-political ‘docility’ and literal ‘decency’ are employed together for the first time to be reintroducing ancient relationship between cruel politicians and carceral system. Utopia is taken as a mere dream so that ‘the problem’ would tend to keep its identity. What is new in this paper is a ‘gaze’-wise trace of mice in literature supporting the problem of evil in philosophy, based on an actual political background, within a broad sociological realm. (shrink)

_An exploration of philosophical and religious ideas about humor in modern philosophy and their secular implications._.