In this paper, we aim to clarify and evaluate the contention that immortality would be necessarily boring . It will emerge that, just as there are various importantly different kinds of immortality, there are various distinct kinds of boredom. To evaluate the Necessary Boredom Thesis, we need to specify the kind of immortality and the kind of boredom. We argue against the thesis, on various specifications of “immortality” and “boredom.”.

Karl Rahner (1904–1984) has exercised a profound influence on Catholic theology. This paper reconstructs both why and how Rahner’s ideas were received in the United States since the 1950s. American theologians did much more than simply repeat what the German Jesuit had outlined. Rather, they made use of his thought in order to do theology constructively. Thus, even today Rahner’s influence in the US is quite noticeable.

Near-death experiences offer a glimpse not only into the nature of death but also into the meaning of life. They are not only useful tools to aid in the human quest to understand death but are also deeply meaningful, transformative experiences for the people who have them. In a unique contribution to the growing and popular literature on the subject, philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin examine prominent near-death experiences, such as those of Pam Reynolds, Eben Alexander (...) and Colton Burpo. They combine their investigations with critiques of the narratives' analysis by those who take them to show that our minds are immaterial and heaven is for real. In contrast, the authors provide a blueprint for a science-based explanation. Focusing on the question of whether near-death experiences provide evidence that consciousness is separable from our brains and bodies, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin give a naturalistic account of the profound meaning and transformative effects that these experiences engender in many. This book takes the reality of near-death experiences seriously. But it also shows that understanding them through the tools of science is completely compatible with acknowledging their profound meaning. (shrink)

People unfamiliar with Chinese characters show poorer visual working memory (VWM) performance for Chinese characters than do literates in Chinese. In a series of experiments, we investigated the reasons for this expertise advantage. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the advantage of Chinese literates does not transfer to novel material. Experts had similar resolution as novices for material outside of their field of expertise, and the memory of novices and experts did not differ when detecting a big change, e.g., when (...) a character’s color was changed. Memorizing appears to function as a rather abstract representation of word forms because memory for characters’ fonts was poor independently of expertise (Experiment 3), though still visual. Distractors that were highly similar conceptually did not increase memory errors, but visually similar distractors impaired memory (Experiment 4). We hypothesized that literates in Chinese represent characters in VWM as tokens of visual word forms made available by long-term memory. In Experiment 5, we provided novices with visual word form knowledge. Participants subsequently performed a change detection task with trained and novel characters in a functional magnetic resonance experiment. We analyzed set size- and training-dependent effects in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the visual word form area. VWM for trained characters was better than for novel characters. Neural activity increased with set size and at a slower rate for trained than for novel characters. All conditions approached the same maximum, but novel characters reached the maximum at a smaller set size than trained characters. The time course of the bold response depended on set size and knowledge status. Starting from the same initial maximum, neural activity at small set sizes returned to baseline more quickly for trained characters than for novel characters. Additionally, high performers showed generally more neural activity in the IPS than low performers. We conclude that experts’ better performance in working memory (WM) is caused by the availability of visual long-term representations (word form types) that allow a sparse representation of the perceived stimuli and make even small changes big because they cause a type change that is easily detected. (shrink)

The article takes critiques of the entanglement of law with violence as a point of departure for exploring the possibility of a ‘tertium of law’. It thereby seeks to overcome the dichotomous basic assumptions that see law as always oscillating between an apology for violence on the one hand, and a utopia of reason on the other. The text analyses the possibility of this ‘tertium’, a ‘legal force’ beyond legal violence and legal reason, in four steps, drawing on the work (...) of Jacques Derrida and authors of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, in particular on Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It argues that in a first step law needs to be dissociated from the State. The violence of law, however, does not stem solely from law’s ties with State power. Law itself is violent even where it is not State law. The second step of legal critique thus needs to consist in the commemoration of legal violence, followed by a third that demands the transformation of violence to force. These three instances of critique are the precondition for a last and essential step according to which a critique of law must facilitate the transcendence of legal violence by taking law and its promise of justice at its word in order to turn this promise against law itself. (shrink)

This paper evaluates recent proposals for compatibilism about doxastic freedom, and attempts to refine them by applying Fischer and Ravizza’s moderate reasons-responsiveness compatibilism to doxastic freedom. I argue, however, that even this refined version of doxastic compatibilism is subject to challenging counter-examples and is more difficult to support than traditional compatibilism about freedom of action. In particular, it is much more difficult to identify convincing examples of the sort Frankfurt proposed to challenge the idea that responsibility requires alternative possibilities.

Title: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades ProjectPublisher: The MIT PressISBN: 0262521644Author: Susan Buck-MorssTitle: Walter Benjamin's PassagePublisher: SuhrkampISBN: 3518580892Author: Pierre Missac, Ulrike Bischoff Title: Erstarrte Unruhe: Walter Benjamins Begriff der GeschichtePublisher: Fischer Taschenbuch VerlagISBN: 3596109620Author: Ralf Konersmann.

Among the phenomena of near-death experiences (NDEs) are what are known as aftereffects whereby, over time, experiencers undergo substantial, long-term life changes, becoming less fearful of death, more moral and spiritual, and more convinced that life has meaning and that an afterlife exists. Some supernaturalists attribute these changes to the experience being real. John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, on the other hand, have asserted a naturalist thesis involving a metaphorical interpretation of NDE narratives that preserves their significance (...) but eliminates the supernaturalist causal explanation. I argue that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s psychological thesis fails as an explanation of NDEs. (shrink)

In his critical review of Recht und Gewalt Andreas Fischer-Lescano has suggested that the critical insight into the paradoxical entwinement of law and violence should lead towards the utopian idea of a “transcendence” of law. The response to Fischer-Lescano rejects this idea as a false leveling of the - decisive normative - difference between law and society. This difference is the condition of possibility of law’s critical and hence transformative relation to society. The response thus defends the idea, (...) brought forward in Recht und Gewalt by way of an interpretation of Benjamin’s formula of the Entsetzung of law, that the break with law’s fateful violence cannot consist in the “transcendence” but rather the “depotenciation” of law. (shrink)

Clinical research ethics consultation has emerged in the last 15 years as a service to those involved in the conduct of clinical research who face challenging issues for which more than one course of action may be justified. To respond to a growing field and need for opportunities to share knowledge and experience, the Clinical Research Ethics Consultation Collaborative, established in 2014, holds monthly webinars for its 90 members to present their most challenging cases to each other and engage in (...) substantive discussion. Every year, the group selects the four most interesting cases with accompanying commentaries for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics. This timely book brings together these cases and commentaries under a range of common themes for the first time, creating a permanent collection in book format that encourages and supports readers to gain a better understanding of the ethical challenges that they may face, and providing them with a convenient and reflective resource to reference in their own deliberations. Key Features- Comprehensive collection of cases and commentaries, chosen to reflect the range of issues faced by clinical researchers and oversight committees and illustrate the diversity of analysis that can arise. Supplemented by short introductions to each section. Focus on ethical rather than regulatory issues. Essential Reading for graduate students in bioethics and post-doctoral bioethics fellows, and useful for all participants in training grants that are funded by either NIH or NSF Presenting challenging cases to stimulate reflection, the book provides invaluable guidance to clinicians in training and in practice and to investigators, bioethics consultants, regulators, and oversight bodies. (shrink)

No detailed description available for "Berkeley's American Sojourn".

Mirror neurons are a particular class of visumotorical neurons, originally discovered in area F5 of the monkey premotorical cortex. They discharge both (1) when the animal performs a specific action and (2) when it observes a similar action. Actually, it is often assumed that this unique functioning could explain different abilities ranging from imitation behaviour to faculty of speech. In this article, we discuss the question what is meant by the expression: The neuron x mirrors the action y by perception (...) z . The problem resulted from the fact, that neurons cannot mirror anything—except in the light of a metaphorical description. How can this metaphorical description be dissolved for a distinct and explicit scientific terminology? The basic steps of our argumentation are as follows. (1) The expression to mirror can be defined in mutual relation between different types of actions in respect of at least two participants: the proponent A, who conducts a special action x (e.g. grapping a peanut (A(x)) and the opponent B who observes these actions y (B(y)) and vice versa. (2) In order to detect different tokens as a type of action and to guarantee the changes of the participants there must be constituted a speech act in a dialogue, in which types of actions are defined by the invariance of special equivalence. (3) The change of the participants represents and defines the metaphorical expression to mirror in the light of a non-metaphorical and reproducible schema. (4) Then, the invariance of the type of action can be identified in different speech acts. Three of them (called narratives) were defined paradigmatically: (4.1) the ethological-narrative; (4.2) the neurophysiological-narrative; (4.3) the language-narrative. (5) These narratives are the modelling and explicit formulations of the primarily metaphorical expression: The neuron x mirrors the action y by perception z. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractCancer is a complex disease, with sophisticated cellular mechanisms as the targets of evolutionary processes driven by random genetic and epigenetic mutations. Oncogenesis is evolutionarily linked to stem cell numbers/mutations and organ/body size; therefore, inter-disciplinary frameworks across different scales (cellular, tissue, organs and species) are necessary to decipher cancer progression.

The book contends that contrary to accepted interpretation, moral intuition, rather than any other form of reasoning, least of all formal logic, is the moral method found in the ethics of Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Dewey - the first four chapters of the book. These four thinkers represent a dialectical selection of ethical relativism and absolutism as well as a chronological succession from ancient to contemporary thought. The fifth and concluding chapter is a major presentation of the author's thesis on (...) moral intuition as the exact antidote against the dilemma ethics approach, which is widely used today with rapidly diminishing effect and interest. This chapter is a detailed illustration of how moral intuition works out concretely in the lived world. It stresses the unity of moral experience even as this is clouded over by our relatively fewer, but overdramatized, confrontations on some moral issues. (shrink)

Nietzsche distinguished between two forces in art: Apollonian, which represents order and reason, and Dionysian, which represents chaos and energy. Economists, Ward argues, have operated for too long under the assumption that their work reflects the scientific, Apollonian principals that inform physics when they simply do not apply to economics: 'constants' in economics stand in for variables, and the core scientific principles of prediction and replication are all but ignored by economists. Ward encourages economists to reintegrate the standard rigor of (...) the scientific method into their work while embracing the fact of the shape-shifting changeability of human beings. Economists can still aspire to scientific standards, as is demonstrated by the success of biology, in which there is considerable Dionysian variability. Economists must avoid the temptation to wish away dynamic complexity and diversity and must recognize, among other things, that the desire to take risks is fundamentally human. The second half of the book takes some first steps toward creating this new Dionysian Economics. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell, einer der originellsten und provokantesten Denker der amerikanischen Gegenwartsphilosophie, findet in den letzten Jahren immer größere internationale Aufmerksamkeit. Gemessen am Mainstream der analytischen Philosophie ist er ein recht atypischer Autor; er setzt sich nicht nur mit Wittgenstein, Austin und Kant, sondern auch mit Nietzsche, Heidegger und Derrida auseinander und diskutiert das Phantastische der Philosophie. Er interpretiert Dichter wie Shakespeare und Beckett, schreibt aber auch brillante Studien über Fotografie und Film. Die Überfülle der Themen und das Nebeneinanderbestehen werden dem (...) orthodoxen analytischen Philosopen ungewöhnlich, ja suspekt vorkommen..." (Davide Sparti) Der vorliegende Band bietet einen repräsentativen Querschnittdurch Stanley Cavells philosophische und kunsttheoretische Essays. (shrink)

We establish Hjorth's theorem that there is a family of continuum-many pairwise strongly incomparable free actions of free groups, and therefore a family of continuum-many pairwise incomparable treeable equivalence relations.

In this paper I argue that if a completed neuroscience of consciousness is to be attained, we must give the synchronic and diachronic application conditions for brain states and phenomenal states. I argue that, due to the temporal nature of our experiences, such states must be viewed as being temporally extended events, and illustrate how to give such application conditions using examples of other temporally extended events. However, I also raise some difficulties for the project of giving application conditions for (...) brain states and phenomenal states and suggest these as challenges for further philosophical work. (shrink)

Davis demonstrates how Simone Weil's Marxism challenges current neoliberal understandings of the self and of human rights. Explaining her related critiques of colonialism and of political parties, it presents Weil as a twentieth-century political philosopher who anticipated and critically responded to the most contemporary political theory.

This is a study of the encounter with the problem of heresy in Europe between the World Wars, in Germany and among Jews above all. It is first and foremost an intellectual history, though not exclusively so, and has four related aims. It argues, first, that the advent of a heretical ideal among Jews in the interwar period marked the definitive end of a chapter in German-Jewish history that began with Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn's gambit and the liberal Judaism that arose (...) in its wake proved unworkable by this time, and the arrival of avowedly heretical forms of Jewish return signaled the end of his epoch. But we also find in this period the beginnings of a search for post-liberal modes of Jewish identity in which its predecessor endured in interesting and unexpected ways. Second, the dissertation reconstructs and analyzes the two leading languages of heresy in the interwar period, the gnostic and the pantheist. The first pined for salvation from a sinful world by the grace of a wholly transcendent, extramundane and therefore absent God, or a deus absconditus , and was associated in the interwar period with the Protestant representatives of dialectical theology. The pantheist language of heresy, by contrast, contested the gnostic spirit by divinizing the world, and was associated with the interconfessional revival of Spinoza. On the strength of this contextual reconstruction, the study aims, third, to reinterpret the philosophical careers of three important twentieth-century thinkers, all of them German-Jewish emigres: Hans Jonas, whose philosophical biology made him an unproclaimed "guru" to the German Green movment; Leo Strauss, the philosopher and unwitting father of a neo-conservative revolt in American politics; and Gershom Scholem, the eminent scholar of religion and Jewish culture. The study shows how their diverse projects all had origins in their encounter with the problem of heresy in interwar Europe. Their projects had also a common end: all resurrected the ancient Greek distinction between physis and nomos , and all contested normative Judaism by coming down squarely on the side of the former as the ground for Jewish identity in particular and human being more generally. Fourth and last, the dissertation makes an argument for the abiding salience of a theological dimension to European intellectual life between the wars and beyond. If nothing else, the stories presented here should alert us to the ways in which talk about God could be adapted for talk about nature, or politics, or art, to the ways in which discourses of the divine not only endure in this worldly world of ours, but flourish. (shrink)

This review considers what role scholarship on the early modern law of nations (ius gentium) plays in the history of international political thought, which over the last decade has expanded far beyond its basis in Atlantic empires and European intellectual history. Recent works offer two main reasons why the law of nations and early modern jurists can still critique and destabilize assumptions about the international arena. First, these thinkers occupied a far more diverse discourse than later practitioners of ‘international law’ (...) would have allowed, recognizing no easy distinction between international and constitutional theory. The division between the inside and outside of states, ontologically necessary for the idea of international theory, was not assumed by many ius gentium authors. Second, much of the early modern law of nations took place in the context of Central European politics, particularly the late Holy Roman Empire, where the ius gentium was a means to navigate law within and amongst semi-autonomous imperial polities. This setting has continued to produce especially energetic theorists of global order from early modern Europe well into the twentieth century. Studying these thinkers still helps illuminate how the domestic and international division first emerged. (shrink)

Inquiry will be made here into a specific challenge facing writers offabulae palliatae, namely the interior scene, which they had not always the same means to display as did the poets of the νέα they adapted. One of them, Terence, will be seen to have reacted by eliminating the interior scenes that he found in his models.

Zusammenfassung Anhand von Beispielen aus schiitischen und alevitischen Kontexten in Deutschland und der Türkei beschreibt der Artikel, wie beide Traditionen über gemeinsame Praxis und einen geteilten Symbolbestand religionshistorische Grenzen ihrer jeweiligen Traditionen ausblenden. Solcherlei Grenzen erscheinen dabei für wissenschaftssystematische Zusammenhänge wichtiger als für die untersuchten Akteure selbst. Denn die hier untersuchten Gruppen und Individuen artikulieren einen Selbstentwurf von Islam, in dem der Aspekt der Verbundenheit zur Familie des Propheten, den ehlibeyt, eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Unter Bezugnahme auf Fredrick Barths Einsichten (...) zu Ethnizität und Stuart Halls Theorie der Artikulation werden die Beispiele in Bezug auf Praxen der Abgrenzung und der Identifikation beschrieben und analysiert. Dabei wird zum einen danach gefragt, in welchem Verhältnis Abgrenzung und Identifikation zueinander stehen, und zum anderen, unter welchen Bedingungen die Akteure eine Form von Islam artikulieren können, der hier als „Ehlibeyt-Islam“ bezeichnet werden soll und der jenseits konfessionalisierter Sprache zu verorten ist. (shrink)