Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to (...) be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs. (shrink)

Moore’s Paradox is a test case for any formal theory of belief. In Knowledge and Belief, Hintikka developed a multimodal logic for statements that express sentences containing the epistemic notions of knowledge and belief. His account purports to offer an explanation of the paradox. In this paper I argue that Hintikka’s interpretation of one of the doxastic operators is philosophically problematic and leads to an unnecessarily strong logical system. I offer a weaker alternative that captures in a more accurate (...) way our logical intuitions about the notion of belief without sacrificing the possibility of providing an explanation for problematic cases such as Moore’s Paradox. (shrink)

BackgroundPhysical activity is known to improve mental health, and is regarded as safe and desirable for uncomplicated pregnancy. In this novel study, we aim to evaluate whether there are associations between maternal physical activity during pregnancy and neonatal brain cortical development.MethodsForty-four mother/newborn dyads were included in this longitudinal study. Healthy pregnant women were recruited and their physical activity throughout pregnancy were documented using accelerometers worn for 3–7 days for each of the 6 time points at 4–10, ∼12, ∼18, ∼24, ∼30, (...) and ∼36 weeks of pregnancy. Average daily total steps and daily total activity count as well as daily minutes spent in sedentary/light/moderate/vigorous activity modes were extracted from the accelerometers for each time point. At ∼2 weeks of postnatal age, their newborns underwent an MRI examination of the brain without sedation, and 3D T1-weighted brain structural images were post-processed by the iBEAT2.0 software utilizing advanced deep learning approaches. Cortical surface maps were reconstructed from the segmented brain images and parcellated to 34 regions in each brain hemisphere, and mean cortical thickness for each region was computed for partial correlation analyses with physical activity measures, with appropriate multiple comparison corrections and potential confounders controlled.ResultsAt 4–10 weeks of pregnancy, mother’s daily total activity count positively correlated (FDR corrected P ≤ 0.05) with newborn’s cortical thickness in the left caudal middle frontal gyrus (rho = 0.48, P = 0.04), right medial orbital frontal gyrus (rho = 0.48, P = 0.04), and right transverse temporal gyrus (rho = 0.48, P = 0.04); mother’s daily time in moderate activity mode positively correlated with newborn’s cortical thickness in the right transverse temporal gyrus (rho = 0.53, P = 0.03). At ∼24 weeks of pregnancy, mother’s daily total activity count positively correlated (FDR corrected P ≤ 0.05) with newborn’s cortical thickness in the left (rho = 0.56, P = 0.02) and right isthmus cingulate gyrus (rho = 0.50, P = 0.05).ConclusionWe identified significant relationships between physical activity in healthy pregnant women during the 1st and 2nd trimester and brain cortical development in newborns. Higher maternal physical activity level is associated with greater neonatal brain cortical thickness, presumably indicating better cortical development. (shrink)

Neste trabalho, pretende-se analisar o que se quer dizer com “falácia naturalista” e saber se há bons argumentos para sustentarmos a existência de uma falácia desse tipo. Começaremos estudando o que Hume falou sobre o assunto; se realmente ele enunciou algo como uma “Lei” contra derivar um “dever-ser” de um “ser”. Depois da obra de Hume, passaremos à de Moore. Na obra de Moore, veremos se ele quer dizer com o termo o mesmo que dizemos atualmente. Analisadas as (...) obras dos dois autores, passaremos, por último, a estudar o que “falácia naturalista” e “derivar um dever-ser de um ser” quer dizer hoje. Concluiremos que não há bons argumentos para aceitarmos que o que esses termos denotam é de fato uma falácia. Abstract:In this work, our aim is to investigate the meaning of the term “naturalistic fallacy”, and if there are good arguments to sustain the existence of a fallacy of this kind. We will begin studying what Hume said about the matter; if he really enunciated something like a “Law” against deriving a “is” from a “ought”. In the next section, we will proceed to the the arguments brought by Moore, to see whether the meaning of term is the same for him and us. Having analyzed the works of the two authors, we will proceed, in the final section, to study what the terms “naturalistic fallacy” and “deriving an ought from an is” means today. Finally, we will conclude that there aren’t good arguments for us to accept that what these terms denote is in fact a fallacy. (shrink)

It has been argued that moral assertions involve the possession, on the part of the speaker, of appropriate non-cognitive attitudes. Thus, uttering ‘murder is wrong’ invites an inference that the speaker disapproves of murder. In this paper, we present the result of 4 empirical studies concerning this phenomenon. We assess the acceptability of constructions in which that inference is explicitly canceled, such as ‘murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it’; and we compare them to similar constructions involving ‘think’ (...) instead of ‘disapprove’—that is, Moore paradoxes (‘murder is wrong but I don’t think that it is wrong’). Our results indicate that the former type of constructions are largely infelicitous, although not as infelicitous as their Moorean counterparts. (shrink)

For many years G. E. Moore asked himself what was wrong with sentences like ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did’, or ‘I believe that he has gone out, but he has not’. He discussed the problem in 1912 in his Ethics , and was still discussing it in 1944 in a paper to the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge—an event we know about from a letter of Wittgenstein that I shall quote (...) in a moment. Throughout these years of pondering, Moore retained a remarkably stable vocabulary for setting out his solution. Briefly, he held this: saying ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don't believe that I did’ is absurd, but not self-contradictory. Not self-contradictory, because ‘it may quite well be true’; yet absurd, because the speaker expressly repudiates, in the second part of the sentence, a belief which he implies by uttering the first part. The panoply of distinctions which subtends this doctrine—sentence v. utterance of sentence, saying v. implying, contradiction v. absurdity—was subjected to keen scrutiny a generation or so ago, and much of it has now passed into philosophical lore as a discussion of ‘Moore's Paradox’. (shrink)

Alex Byrne offers an ambitiously comprehensive account of self-knowledge which invokes the transparency of the mind to the world. He gives a well-known quotation from G.E. Moore which introduces th...

In what follows, I present only part of a program that consists in developing a version of actualism as an adequate framework for the metaphysics of intentionality. I will try to accommodate in that framework suggestions found in Kripke’s works and some positions developed by Amie Thomasson. What should we change if we accept “fictional entities” in the domain of the actual world? Actualism is the thesis that everything that exists belongs to the domain of the actual world and that (...) there are no possibilia. I shall defend that there are abstract artefacts, like fictional characters, and institutions. My argument could be seen as a version of Moore’s paradox: it is paradoxical to say: “I made it, but I do not believe it exists”. Moreover, there are true sentences about them. I will examine what it means to include abstract artefacts in the domain of the actual world. I favour a use of “exist” that includes beings with no concrete occupation of tri-dimensional space; to exist, it is enough to have been introduced at some moment in history.artefacts, like fictional characters, exist in that sense. I argue that it is important to distinguish two perspectives in order to clarify the kind of knowledge we have of fictional characters. However, their existence presupposes a relation of dependence to a material basis and the mental activities of many people. (shrink)

It has been argued that moral assertions involve the possession, on the part of the speaker, of appropriate non-cognitive attitudes. Thus, uttering ‘murder is wrong’ invites an inference that the speaker disapproves of murder. In this paper, we present the result of 4 empirical studies concerning this phenomenon. We assess the acceptability of constructions in which that inference is explicitly canceled, such as ‘murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it’; and we compare them to similar constructions involving ‘think’ (...) instead of ‘disapprove’—that is, Moore paradoxes (‘murder is wrong but I don’t think that it is wrong’). Our results indicate that the former type of constructions are largely infelicitous, although not as infelicitous as their Moorean counterparts. (shrink)

I recently argued that reductive physicalist versions of libertarian free will face a physical indeterminism luck objection. John Lemos claims that one potential advocate of reductive physicalist libertarianism, Robert Kane, avoids this physical indeterminism luck objection. I here show how the problem remains.

The works of the early Greek philosophers are not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and the whole of ancient philosophy, but also a perennially fresh resource that has stimulated Western thought until the present day. This nine-volume edition presents all the major fragments from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC.

Experiences of absence are common in everyday life, but have received little philosophical attention until recently, when two positions regarding the nature of such experiences surfaced in the literature. According to the Perceptual View, experiences of absence are perceptual in nature. This is denied by the Surprise-Based View, according to which experiences of absence belong together with cases of surprise. In this paper, I show that there is a kind of experience of absence—which I call frustrating absences—that has been overlooked (...) by the Perceptual View and by the Surprise Based-View and that cannot be adequately explained by them. I offer an alternative account to deal with frustrating absences, one according to which experiencing frustrating absences is a matter of subjects having desires for something to be present frustrated by the world. Finally, I argue that there may well be different kinds of experiences of absence. (shrink)

Around a hundred years ago there was a tiny Jewish community in Hämeenlinna, a small provincial capital in Finland. The dissolution of the Hämeenlinna Jewish community has become shrouded in mystery. Some amateur historians have even suggested that the last members of the Jewish community were shot by Russian soldiers in 1914. What happened to the last Jews of Hämeenlinna, and what were the reasons behind the historical process that led to the dissolution of the community? This article examines the (...) turns of fate that prompted the leading Jewish families, the Rosenbergs and the Krapiffskys, to leave the town. The involvement of the local governor, the hardline antisemite Rafael Spåre, turned out to be instrumental in the case of the Krapiffsky family, who were the last remaining members of the community. (shrink)

Le concept logico-métaphysique d¿éminence trouve une abondante illustration dans l¿oeuvre de Descartes. On se doit de l¿interpréter au travers des usages qui en furent connus de l¿auteur des Méditations, que ce soit selon les perspectives créationnistes de Suarez de Salamanca ou de Grégoire de Valencia, que ce soit selon celle, dans l¿acte interne divin, qu¿expose Gibieuf. Les conséquences pour l¿étude du concept de ¿cause de soi¿ en sont considérables aussi bien en métaphysique qu¿en physique.

L'espace économique s'est profondément modifié au cours des vingt dernières années en raison, bien sûr, de la mondialisation, niais aussi de la déréglementation de nombreuses économies parmi les plus influentes du monde. D'une économie empirique de travail, nous sommes ainsi passés à une économie virtuelle de spéculation avec, à la clé, un recul de l'éthique au profit de logiques financières. C'est pour contrer les effets néfastes de cette financiarisation de l'économie que le mouvement de la finance socialement responsable s'est développé, (...) ses tenants utilisant les leviers économiques, en l'occurrence de nombreux fonds de placement, pour faire pression sur les décideurs et les orienter vers des avenues plus responsables. Ce livre présente le regard d'un philosophe et d'une sociologue sur ce mouvement. Les auteurs définissent les origines de la finance socialement responsable, pour ensuite exposer ses pratiques et ses stratégies, dresser un portrait de ses principaux acteurs et proposer des pistes de réflexion sur la dimension éthique de la finance ainsi que des outils pertinents aux pratiques des financiers. Il s'agit d'une introduction indispensable à tous ceux qui souhaitent s'initier au mouvement de la finance socialement responsable et qui recherchent des avenues éthiques en matière de développement économique. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the effect of sound on visual motion perception. One model involves the illusion created when two identical objects moving towards each other on a two-dimensional visual display can be seen to either bounce off or stream through each other. Previous studies show that the large bias normally seen toward the streaming percept can be modulated by the presentation of an auditory event at the moment of coincidence. However, no reports to date provide sufficient evidence to (...) indicate whether the sound bounce-inducing effect is due to a perceptual binding process or merely to an explicit inference resulting from the transient auditory stimulus resembling a physical collision of two objects. In the present study, we used a novel experimental design in which a subliminal sound was presented either 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence of two disks moving towards each other. The results showed that there was an increased perception of bouncing when the subliminal sound was presented at or 150 ms after the moment of coincidence compared to when no sound was presented. These findings provide the first empirical demonstration that activation of the human auditory system without reaching consciousness affects the perception of an ambiguous visual motion display. (shrink)

If we return to the experiences of our youth, we perceive what had the power to awaken our curiosity and ambitions*. The non-conformism of the Surrealists was fostered by Romantic sources and every conceivable symbolism; even if in a roundabout manner, it was through them that the names of Klee and Kandinsky were first heard. The world of the marvellous, the only one decreed worthy of attention, opened out onto painting. The moderns of the group: Dali, Tanguy, Masson, received first (...) prize for poetic adventure, but they harked back to certain selected precursors—rightly or wrongly—for the same gifts that they had themselves: Uccello, Bosch, Dürer, Blake, and Gustave Moreau. And indeed, by retaining only the unexpected, the fantastic, and (often indulgently) the scandalous, a taste was maintained for emotional shock and association, as exemplified by the sustained style of André Breton, and the more supple prose of Aragon. (shrink)

Overview of feminist bioethics for the journal of the Ewha Women's College, Seoul, South Korea.

O presente artigo pretende apresentar um recorte da filosofia da arte na Alemanha, nos séculos XVIII e XIX, tendo como foco o contexto em que se insere O nascimento da tragédia, de Nietzsche. Para isso, serão discutidos mais especificamente os conceitos de intuição estética e princípio de individuação, a partir de Schelling e Schopenhauer, respectivamente.

O presente artigo científico é parte de pesquisa destinada a investigar as implicações e interpretações advindas da transformação do posicionamento do princípio de universalização (U) operada na teoria do discurso do filósofo alemão Jürgen Habermas, sobretudo a partir de algumas de suas obras das décadas de 80 e 90. A pretensão cognitivista da ética do discurso fundamenta a moral diante da possibilidade de reconstrução racional discursiva das justificativas das normas. O teste de universalização faz parte da fundamentação, mas em que (...) sentido? A fim de afastar o ceticismo quanto a pretensão de justificação prática, Habermas repensa a relação kantiana entre moral e direito. Mais precisamente, diante de sociedades complexas marcadas pelo Estado Democrático de Direito e pelo uso de discursos práticos diversos da moral para a justificação das práticas sociais, a legitimidade das normas passa por explicitar a relação discursiva entre direito, moral e política. É no âmbito deste desafio que o filósofo alemão vem modificando a formulação e o posicionamento de seu princípio de universalização (U) ao longo do tempo, bem como sua relação com o princípio do discurso (D) e, posteriormente, com o princípio da democracia (De). Após percorrermos este caminho, lançamos a hipótese, segundo a qual, a ênfase que Habermas confere ao direito em Facticidade e Validade junto do reposicionamento do ponto de vista moral, permite pensar de maneira dialógica a interação social como práxis comunicativa sem sujeitos. (shrink)

« L’ordre de la chambre reproduit l’ordre du monde dont elle est la particule élémentaire », écrit Michelle Perrot en conclusion du bel essai qu’elle vient de consacrer à l’histoire de la chambre comme lieu de vie. Mais son livre dément ou du moins déborde cette proposition trop générale par la complexité sinueuse et aléatoire des transformations dont il reconstitue le cheminement. Dans l’histoire de l’habitat, la chambre individuelle ou conjugale constitue moins une particule élémentaire qu...