To accept that cognition is embodied is to question many of the beliefs traditionally held by cognitive scientists. One key question regards the localization of cognitive faculties. Here we argue that for cognition to be embodied and sometimes embedded, means that the cognitive faculty cannot be localized in a brain area alone. We review recent research on neural reuse, the 1/f structure of human activity, tool use, group cognition, and social coordination dynamics that we believe demonstrates how the boundary between (...) the different areas of the brain, the brain and body, and the body and environment is not only blurred but indeterminate. In turn, we propose that cognition is supported by a nested structure of task-specific synergies, which are softly assembled from a variety of neural, bodily, and environmental components (including other individuals), and exhibit interaction dominant dynamics. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

The term “principle of sufficient reason” (PSR) was coined by Leibniz, and he is often regarded as its paradigmatic proponent. But as Leibniz himself often insisted, he was by no means the first philosopher to appeal to the idea that everything must have a reason. Histories of the principle attribute versions of it to various ancient authors. A few of these studies include—or at least do not exclude—medieval philosophers; one finds the PSR in Abelard, another finds it in Aquinas. And (...) while Leibniz retains pride of place in these histories, Spinoza is sometimes said to precede him “in appreciating the importance of the Principle and placing it at the center of his philosophical system.” In this paper, the author argues that the same should be said of the Islamic philosopher Avicenna. Writing 600 years before his early modern counterparts, Avicenna routinely and consistently appeals to the PSR in generating his metaphysical system. The paper aims first to establish that Avicenna deserves a position of prominence in histories of the PSR, and then to consider how he addresses certain challenges to the PSR, especially the threat posed by necessitarianism. (shrink)

The study examines the argumentative competencies of people with Asperger syndrome (AS) and compares this with those of normal – or what are called neurotypical (NT) – subjects. To investigate how people with AS recognise, evaluate and engage in argumentation, we have adapted and applied the empirical instrument developed by van Eemeren, Garssen and Meuffels to study the conventional validity of the pragma-dialectical freedom rule (van Eemeren, Gars- sen & Meuffels 2003a; 2003b; 2005a; 2005b; van Eemeren & Meuffels, 2002). Our (...) paper begins with some background information on Asperger syndrome and how it impacts upon communication and argumentation; then it addresses the research questions and methods used; thirdly, it presents some initial findings; finally, it will conclude with some im- plications for those people with AS, for those they come into contact with and for the pragma-dialectic model in general. (shrink)

As one of the most important ethicists to emerge since the Second World War, Alan Gewirth continues to influence philosophical debates concerning morality. In this ground-breaking book, Gewirth's neo-Kantianism, and the communitarian problems discussed, form a dialogue on the foundation of moral theory. Themes of agent-centered constraints, the formal structure of theories, and the relationship between freedom and duty are examined along with such new perspectives as feminism, the Stoics, and Sartre. Gewirth offers a picture of the philosopher's theory and (...) its applications, providing a richer, more complete critical assessement than any which has occurred to date. (shrink)

We commend Mergenthaler and colleagues for bringing the topic of patient recruitment and consent in intracranial electrophysiology research to the attention of the neuroethics community. Mergenthal...

It is often claimed that epistemological thought divides around the issue of the place of experience in knowledge: While empiricists argue that experience is the only legitimate source of knowledge, rationalists find other such sources. The trouble with such accounts is not that they are wrong, but that they are incomplete. On occasion, epistemological differences run deeper, raising the very notion of experience as an issue for epistemology. This paper looks at two epistemological debates which concerned not simply the place (...) of experience in knowledge but also the appropriate account of experience itself. The first episode is the rise of Marburg Neo-Kantianism in the 1870s – in particular the seminal work of Hermann Cohen in his Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (1871). Cohen's principal point was that Kant's significance as an epistemologist was in providing a new theory of experience, one that tied experience to exact science and led to a new stress on the formal conditions of exact knowledge. The second episode is Carnap's rejection of epistemology in the 1930s in favour of a program of the logic of science. My focus in each case will be the interplay between an epistemology focused on exact science as the locus of knowledge and a concomitant call for logical methods in epistemology. (shrink)

The introduction of statistical models represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) has proved fruitful in the construction of expert systems, in allowing efficient updating algorithms that take advantage of conditional independence relations (Pearl, 1988, Lauritzen et al. 1993), and in inferring causal structure from conditional independence relations (Spirtes and Glymour, 1991, Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines, 1993, Pearl and Verma, 1991, Cooper, 1992). As a framework for representing the combination of causal and statistical hypotheses, DAG models have shed light on a (...) number of issues in statistics ranging from Simpson’s Paradox to experimental design (Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines, 1993). The relations of DAGs with statistical constraints, and the equivalence and distinguishability properties of DAG models, are now well understood, and their characterization and computation involves three properties connecting graphical structure and probability distributions: (i) a local directed Markov property, (ii) a global directed Markov property, (iii) and factorizations of joint densities according to the structure of a graph (Lauritizen, et al., 1990). (shrink)

Many biologists assume, as Darwin did, that natural selection acts mainly on late embryonic or postnatal development. This view is consistent with von Baer's observations of morphological divergence at late stages. It is also suggested by the conserved morphology and common molecular genetic mechanisms of pattern formation seen in embryos. I argue here, however, that differences in adult morphology may be generated at a variety of stages. Natural selection may have a major action on developmental mechanisms during the organogenetic period, (...) because this is when many adult traits are specified. Evolutionary changes in these early developmental mechanisms probably include subtle shifts in the timing of gene expression. Changes of this kind have little or no gross effect on the anatomy of the embryo; they are only phenotypically expressed, or readily detected, when amplified at later stages. The phylotypic stage, the developmental hourglass, modularity, and von Baerian divergence are reassessed in terms of these arguments. BioEssays 21:604–613, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The concept of efficient causation originates with Aristotle, who states that the types of cause include ‘the primary source of the change or rest’. For Medieval Aristotelians, the scope of efficient causality includes creative acts. The Islamic philosopher Avicenna is an important contributor to this conceptual change. In his Metaphysics, Avicenna defines the efficient cause or agent as that which gives being to something distinct from itself. As previous studies of Avicenna's ‘metaphysical’ conception of the efficient cause attest, it takes (...) God as a model agent. This essay considers whether Avicenna's ‘metaphysical’ conception of the efficient cause applies to natural agents. It ultimately argues that Avicenna offers a unified view of the efficient cause, which includes both divine and natural agents. On this view, an efficient cause gives being to another and is simultaneous with its effect. While Avicenna's defence of this view is an important chapter in the history of the concept of the efficient cause, it is also of interest in its own right. By appeal to a version of the principle of sufficient reason, it challenges a widespread view that causes are temporally prior to their effects. (shrink)

This study brings together a number of related critical issues, including the causal laws that attempt to govern fictional worlds, the reader's implication in the causal dilemmas that confront major characters, and the philosophical and ideological ascriptions of cause that are variously embodied, interrogated, or parodied. One of the most significant features of this study is its disclosure of just how fundamental and widespread causal issues are in complex narratives - and how insistently they are thematized in twentieth-century works.

Conceptual ethics concerns the question: what concepts ought we use? The goal of this paper is to answer a related foundational question: what determines what concepts we ought to use? According to one view, it is our values — our goals, interests, purposes, etc. — that determinate what concepts we ought to use. Call this the _subjective value determinacy thesis_ (SVT). In this paper, I take a critical look at SVT. While SVT is intuitive, it cannot make sense of conceptual (...) disputes that are resolved by factors that are partly independent of our values. On my view, what concept we ought to use will be settled partly on the basis of moral or political values that we do not always possess. This is the _objective value determinacy thesis_ (OVT). Our values do not settle what concepts we ought to use; rather, they settle what options are considered relevant for the purposes of normative deliberation. One surprising consequence of OVT is that many conceptual disputes that are ostensibly non-moral — like engineering the concept of truth — have a fundamentally moral basis. (shrink)

Critical social ontology is any study of social ontology that is done in order to critique ideology or end social injustice. The goal of this paper is to outline what I call the fundamentality approach to critical social ontology. On the fundamentality approach, social ontologists are in the business of distinguishing between appearances and (fundamental) reality. Social reality is often obscured by the acceptance of ideology, where an ideology is a distorted system of beliefs that leads people to promote or (...) accept widespread social injustices. Social reality is also obscured in cases where ordinary thought and language simply is not perspicuous enough to represent the social objects, kinds, and structures that are central to understanding social injustice. In both cases, I argue that the critical social ontologist will benefit from using the tools and concepts of fundamental metaphysics. (shrink)

A key and continuing concern within the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation is how to account for effective persuasion disciplined by dialectical rationality. Currently, van Eemeren and Houtlosser offer one response to this concern in the form of strategic manoeuvring. This paper offers a prior/passing theory of communicative interaction as a supplement to the strategic manoeuvring approach. Our use of a prior/passing model investigates how a difference of opinion can be resolved while both dialectic obligations of reasonableness and rhetorical ambitions of (...) argumentative success are simultaneously accommodated. The paper explores the model with particular reference to the pragma-dialectical rules of critical discussion, strategic manoeuvring and fallacious reasoning. (shrink)

(1983). Consciousness and complexity: Evolutionary perspectives on the mind-body problem. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 61, No. 4, pp. 378-395.

This article blends cultural history and theoretical psychology in a discussion of new treatment methods for psychiatric casualties that emerged early in World War II. It draws on philosophical hermeneutics and Hacking's historical ontology to clarify how our interpretation of this history inevitably reflects current struggles making sense of PTSD while efforts to understand this history can enrich present-day reflections about war neurosis and the social good. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper takes a first step towards a critical thinking curriculum for neural auto-regressive language models. We introduce a synthetic corpus of deductively valid arguments, and generate artificial argumentative texts to train and evaluate GPT-2. Significant transfer learning effects can be observed: Training a model on three simple core schemes allows it to accurately complete conclusions of different, and more complex types of arguments, too. The language models generalize the core argument schemes in a correct way. Moreover, we obtain consistent (...) and promising results for NLU benchmarks. In particular, pre-training on the argument schemes raises zero-shot accuracy on the GLUE diagnostics by up to 15 percentage points. The findings suggest that intermediary pre-training on texts that exemplify basic reasoning abilities (such as typically covered in critical thinking textbooks) might help language models to acquire a broad range of reasoning skills. The synthetic argumentative texts presented in this paper are a promising starting point for building such a "critical thinking curriculum for language models.". (shrink)

This chapter examines how this power ontology could be compatible with Nietzsche's frequent assertion that the world is “not being but becoming.” That appears to rule out any ontology – understood as a “theory of being” – but I argue that it instead expresses a surprising new ontology, which insists on process and contextuality. I develop this theory of becoming in relation to Plato's formative discussion of being/becoming, arguing that Nietzsche retains far more than we expect or he implies. The (...) chapter then returns to other parts of his system to show their temporal content. For example, the types master–slave–overman each involves a specific temporal stance – in particular the overman's stance involves willing or embracing eternal return. (shrink)

Sridhar Venkatapuram's Health Justice argues that health is a ‘metacapability’ – specifically, as the metacapability of having the ten ‘central human capabilities’ described by Martha Nussbaum. This cannot be right, as it provides no basis for distinguishing health from education, riches, or love. An amendment correcting this problem is suggested, namely that health is the involuntary, bodily aspect of the metacapability for the central capabilities. This amendment is defended against the objection that it fails to capture some important aspects of (...) mental health. (shrink)

In this paper, I juxtapose the work of two contemporary feminist philosophers: Christine Battersby and Adriana Cavarero – both working within the Continental tradition – to show how they go well beyond feminist critique to produce different images of self-identity and conceptions of the political. Both reject traditional positions on selfhood but also stress the materiality of bodies and provide alternatives to the work of post-structuralists, such as Judith Butler. My aim is to draw out some of the politico-legal implications (...) of their differing images of selfhood. In the final section I then apply both their approaches to the concept of self to ask how their respective arguments can inform contemporary political questions regarding privacy and dissensus. (shrink)

In this installment of the Faculty Authors Series, Vance Morgan (Philosophy, Providence College) discusses his newest book, "Freelance Christianity: Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World.".