That’s Bill Calvin, whose brain is worthy of study in its own right. Technically, he’s a theoretical neurophysiologist and affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. But he’s also known as a scientist with a wide-ranging intellect and a prolific (and accessible) writer who constantly offers remarkable insights about the world around him. As I sat down to interview Calvin in his book-lined Seattle home last Fall, I recalled the comments of someone who (...) had come to GBN to hear Calvin speak. He said that he didn’t know—or care—what Calvin was going to talk about because everything that Bill Calvin said was not only interesting, but worth learning about. After more than three hours of conversation with Calvin, I couldn’t agree more. (shrink)

Abstract:Calvin Warren talks about Heidegger's influence on Afropessimism, and about the philosophical significance of the Harlem Renaissance.

Psychology's fascination with memory and its imperfections dates back further than we can remember. The first careful experimental studies of memory were published in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and tens of thousands of memory studies have been conducted since. What has been learned, and what might the future of memory be?

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of (...) blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

Neurobiologist William Calvin explores the human brain, positing that the neurons in the brain operate in an accelerated version of biological evolution, evolving ideas through random variations and selections, and supports his hypothesis with numerous ca.

Sketching a new portrait of the human self in this thought-provoking book, leading American philosopher Calvin O. Schrag challenges bleak deconstructionist and postmodernist views of the self as something ceaselessly changing, without origin or purpose. Discussing the self in new vocabulary, he depicts an action-oriented self defined by the ways in which it communicates. The self, says Schrag, is open to understanding through its discourse, its actions, its being with other selves, and its experience of transcendence. In his discussion, (...) Schrag responds critically to both modernists and postmodernists, avoiding what he calls the modernists' overdetermination of unity and identity and the postmodernists' self-enervating pluralism. He agrees with postmodernist attacks on both the classical theory of the self as a metaphysical substance and the modern epistemological construal of the self as transparent mind, yet he maintains that jettisoning the self as understood in these terms does not mean jettisoning it altogether. The self as subject is not dead, nor are the constitutive features of self-formation and self-understanding. In addressing the role of culture in the dynamics of self-formation, the author offers a critique of Max Weber's and Jürgen Habermas's view of modernity as a radical differentiation of three cultural spheres: science, morality, and art; he adds religion as a legitimate fourth cultural sphere. The overview of Schrag's philosophy that _The Self after Postmodernity_ provides will appeal to readers with an interest in literary criticism and religion as well as philosophy. (shrink)

The spatial misrepresentation objection (SMO) against the wave theory of sound argues that if sounds are compression waves, then our auditory experiences are massively illusory for not representing sounds as propagating in the medium. Thus, it claims that the wave theory should be rejected because it is unreasonable to accept such an error theory of hearing. This paper presents a metaphysics of compression waves to show that the wave theory correctly implies that we cannot hear sounds as propagating. Moreover, I (...) argue that the SMO is based on a mischaracterisation of the phenomenology of auditory experiences. A new conception of auditory perception is then proposed to explain how a sound source and its compression wave are both represented in the same auditory experience. Finally, I compare my view with some alternative theories of sound. Overall, it is found that the SMO is more of an objection against the traditional conception of hearing than a challenge to the wave theory of sound. (shrink)

Contemporary or traditional? Blended or seeker? Pop or "classical"? Chorus or hymn? Combo or organ? Questions concerning music in worship abound these days. Is there a practical way to deal with these issues? In Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint, Calvin Johansson looks to God's Word for principles foundational to music ministry. Weaving together great scriptural truths, he establishes the need for a "directional balance" between pastoral contextualization and prophetic purity. In a time of facile musical accommodation of the (...) gospel to culture, Dr. Johansson suggests that a heightened concern for musical style and quality is in order-not for the sake of music, but for the sake of the gospel. (shrink)

This is a book about the human sciences. However, it is not a treatise on scientific methodology nor is it a proposal for a unification of the human sciences through an integration of their findings within a general conceptual scheme.

Many accept the following three theses in animal ethics. First, although animal welfare should not be—or at least, need not be—our top moral priority, it is not a trivial one either. Second, if an animal is sentient, then it is a moral patient. Third, the extinction of an animal species is a tragic outcome that we have moral reason to prevent. I argue that a traditional (i.e., pre-modern) Buddhist perspective pushes against the first thesis and that a naturalized Buddhist perspective (...) is inconsistent with the latter two. (shrink)

I argue against pessimistic readings of the Buddhist tradition on which unawakened beings invariably have lives not worth living due to a preponderance of suffering (duḥkha) over well-being.

Many societies have norms of equity – that those who make symmetric social contributions deserve symmetric rewards. Despite this, there are widespread patterns of social inequity, especially along gender and racial lines. It is often the case that members of certain social groups receive greater rewards per contribution than others. In this article, we draw on evolutionary game theory to show that the emergence of this sort of convention is far from surprising. In simple cultural evolutionary models, inequity is much (...) more likely to emerge than equity, despite the presence of stable, equitable outcomes that groups might instead learn. As we outline, social groups provide a way to break symmetry between actors in determining both contribution and reward in joint projects. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 353 - 371 While agreeing with Professor D’Ors’ thesis that the notion of logical consequence cannot be exhaustively characterized, I depart from Professor d’Ors’ conclusion that the very notion of good consequence is primitive and can only be identified with the set of acceptable rules of inference, and from his conviction that modal notions such as necessity and impossibility are equivocal and gain such clarity as they have by their interaction with rules of (...) inference. Inspired by this picture, Professor d’Ors undertook an examination of a number of medieval attempts to analyze the notion of consequence and tried to show how certain developments in the medieval history of logic made sense in the light of debate over such analyses. This paper examines a small fragment of Professor d’Ors programme and its relation to some aspects of Jean Buridan’s account of the consequence relation. (shrink)

This article considers the relationship between utilitarianism and the ethics of Early Buddhism and classical Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism. Section 2 discusses normative ethics. I argue (i) that Early Buddhist ethics is not utilitarian and (ii) that despite the many similarities between utilitarianism and Mahāyāna ethics, it is at best unclear whether Mahāyāna ethics is consequentialist in structure. Section 2 closes by reconstructing the Buddhist understanding of well-being and contrasting it to hedonism. -/- Section 3 focuses on applied ethics. I suggest (...) that two major choice-points for the Buddhist are, first, whether to accept the doctrine of rebirth and, second, whether to adopt a pessimistic or tentatively optimistic reading of Buddhist axiology. I assess the implications of the possible resulting views for various topics in applied ethics, including cause prioritization, global health and poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, space colonization, and human biomedical enhancement, comparing Buddhist answers to contemporary utilitarian positions on these issues. Along the way, I also argue against the pessimistic reading of Buddhist axiology and in favor of a moral-patient-affecting, rather than totalist, understanding of Buddhist population ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Night ShiftCalvin R. GrossI don't like working at night anymore. Too much goes wrong when you're alone.I'm sitting at my desk in the middle of the cardiac intensive care unit, and it's far later than I'd like to be awake—two or three in the morning. Things are calm, almost pleasant. I can hear the occasional alarm going off—an imperfectly positioned blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter with a poor (...) waveform, a ventilator with secretions in it. The night's initial frenzied work is done; my new admissions are tucked away, and my overnight to-dos are completed. Now it's just time to sit and wait. I could sleep, but despite the calm, I'm too afraid to leave the unit to rest. The fellow has gone to bed hours ago, and now it's just me. Sure, I'm surrounded by experienced nurses who know their work well, but somehow, I'm the one in charge. A brand-new second-year resident, the only doctor there. I'm no intern, that's for sure, but I've never led a code before, and I've only ever placed one central line without supervision. As second years go, I'm as fresh as they come.The daytime, you see, is far different than nights. There's a large (and even bloated) team of two attendings, two fellows, two pharmacists, and more importantly, multiple other residents. When you don't know what to do for a patient, there's always someone there to bounce ideas off of. When something difficult or surprising happens, there are peers and mentors to process with. At night, it's the opposite—no peers, no mentors, only a group of experienced nurses, whose circle is closed to me, the outsider. I long to be a part of that large and bloated daytime team."Can you come into 23? I think his pupils are a different size."I'm startled out of my thoughts. 23 … All I can remember from sign-out that evening is that he's young, close to my age, and supposedly stable. I look at my notes, a catalogue of tragedies: early onset heart failure, multiple prior suicide attempts, intubated because of pulmonary edema, and a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) that's malfunctioning. I walk over to the room and look at the nurse at the other side of the bed. She's in the early phases of her career too—less than a year on the job—but she's still more experienced than me. I take a flashlight, open his eyelids, and look at the pupils. Sure enough, one of them is much larger than the other. When I shine the light into each eye, the large one doesn't change. When I turn his head from side to side, his eyes stay fixed. We look [End Page 83] at each other, she and I. We both know something terrible is happening."Should we maybe wake the fellow up?" she asks tentatively.I nod my head in agreement, glad to have been offered a suggestion. It's the right thing to do. I walk to the fellow's call room, knock on the door, and wake him up. He's set to work 24 hours and would like nothing more than to keep resting. He sleepily comes with me to the bedside, looks at the pupils as well, and says, "With the sedation on, your exam isn't going to be the most accurate. We should start by scanning his head, and then go from there. Wake me back up if you need me, but I know you've got this one."I don't think that I deserve the confidence he has in me. I walk back to my desk, open the patient's chart, and place the order for an urgent CT scan. The machinery of the hospital starts to rumble as the imaging schedulers find a spot in the queue for the scan, the patient's nurse and respiratory therapist disconnect and reconnect cables and tubes, the technicalities of the scan are ironed out, and he is... (shrink)

Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options. Proponents of MEC have offered two main lines of response. The first is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions (...) to fanaticism on offer in decision theory. The second is to propose statistical normalization as a novel solution on behalf of MEC. This paper argues that the first response is open to serious doubt and that the second response fails. As a result, MEC appears significantly less plausible when compared to competing accounts of decision-making under moral uncertainty, which are not fanatical. (shrink)

Explains how Native Americans understand the world and their place in it and discusses what other cultures can learn by studying Native American beliefs and traditions.

Non-Archimedean population axiologies – also known as lexical views – claim (i) that a sufficient number of lives at a very high positive welfare level would be better than any number of lives at a very low positive welfare level and/or (ii) that a sufficient number of lives at a very low negative welfare level would be worse than any number of lives at a very high negative welfare level. Such axiologies are popular because they can avoid the (Negative) Repugnant (...) Conclusion and satisfy the adequacy conditions given in the central impossibility result in population axiology due to Gustaf Arrhenius. I provide a novel argument against them which appeals to the way that good and bad lives can intuitively outweigh one another. (shrink)

Three philosophical questions that are often confused should instead be keep distinct: First, what is a thought? Second, what is that in virtue of which a thought is a thought? Third, what is it that determines of what a thought is a thought? These questions raise very different issues within Ockham’s philosophy. Although Ockham’s views about the first question evolve, he seems to answer the second and the third questions in the same way, maintaining throughout his career that the intentionality (...) of thoughts, which he expresses in terms of signification, is a primitive feature of them. Ockham’s view contrasts sharply with the view that can be found in Aquinas and others that a thought is a form of being present in an immaterial way. This alternative view explains intentionality by reducing it to the co-presence of a number of non-cognitive factors. This latter view offers hope of unifying epistemology and such sciences as optics but at the price of a very peculiar ontology. Ockham avoids this peculiarity, but his way of doing so raises issues about what determines the taxonomy of thoughts, and about whether the items which are thoughts are essentially so or whether by God’s power they could exist without being thoughts. Despite Ockham’s terminology of similitude, the taxonomy of thoughts is not fixed by internal features of the metaphysical items which are thoughts but by the objects of the thoughts, and this suggests a negative answer to the questions whether thoughts are essentially thoughts, an answer that Ockham seems not to draw explicitly but which is explicit in the work of some, like Pierre d’Ailly, who are much influenced by him. (shrink)

We consider how human subjects establish signaling conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. These experiments involve games where there are precisely the right number of signal types to represent the states of nature, games where there are more signal types than states, and games where there are fewer signal types than states. The aim is to determine the conditions under which subjects are able to establish signaling conventions in such games and to identify a learning dynamics that approximates (...) how they succeed when they do. Our results suggest that human agents tend to use a win-stay/lose-shift with inertia dynamics to establish conventions in such games. We briefly consider the virtues and vices of this low-rationality dynamics. (shrink)

The research ethics framework put forward by McCradden et al. to support systematic inquiry in the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healt...

Kyosei, a traditional Japanese concept, has been applied to a variety subjects, from biology to business. It has more recently become synonymous with the concepts of corporate responsibility, ethical decision making, stakeholder maximization, and responsible reciprocity. The purpose of this paper is to trace kyosei's modern business application back to ancient Confucian thought. The ideals associated with Confucianism were instrumental in the creation of Japanese business codes of ethics during the early part of the seventeenth century. A short history of (...) this period is presented to provide a contextual framework for understanding these codes. A specific code of ethics, called the shuchu kiyaku, is presented for the first time in English and shown to have direct roots in Confucian writings. Statements from modern company codes and from modern Japanese and American businessmen are presented to reflect the philosophy of business embodied in that ancient code of ethics. (shrink)

A moral dilemma exists in biomedical research relating to the use of animal or human tissue when conducting scientific research. In human ethics, researchers need to justify why the use of humans is necessary should suitable models exist. Conversely, in animal ethics, a researcher must justify why research cannot be carried out on suitable alternatives. In the case of medical procedures or therapeutics testing, the use of animal models is often justified. However, in forensic research, the justification may be less (...) evident, particularly when research involves the infliction of trauma on living animals. To determine how the forensic science community is dealing with this dilemma, a review of literature within major forensic science journals was conducted. The frequency and trends of the use of animals in forensic science research was investigated for the period 1 January 2012–31 December 2016. The review revealed 204 original articles utilizing 5050 animals in various forms as analogues for human tissue. The most common specimens utilized were various species of rats, pigs, mice, and rabbits although different specimens were favored in different study themes. The majority of studies were conducted on post-mortem specimens. It is, however, evident that more needs to be done to uphold the basic ethical principles of reduction, refinement and replacement in the use of animals for research purposes. (shrink)

Abstract:The article interrogates notions of resistance and will against the Black Radical Tradition vis-à-vis a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power and through Hortense Spiller’s seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” In reading Spillers alongside Nietzsche, the essay argues that black nihilism presents a more severe problem than Nietzsche could anticipate: that the black will is denied active desire and a cosmological body is left to express its “power”—only to highlight (black) resistance as a question.

In "The Cerebral Code," he has solidly embedded his ideas in experimental neurophysiology and neuropharmacology, deriving from his decades in the laboratory.

In Fallibilism Democracy and the Market, Calvin Hayes proposes an original solution to the major meta-theoretical issue in moral philosophy, the is-ought problem, then utilizes it to define and/or solve practical problems in both applied ethics and public policy. The solution and its applications are based on a unified theory of rationality applicable to epistemology, ethics and public policy, predicated on a revised Popperian fallibilism. It is intended as a defense of Karl Popper's political philosophy but only after a (...) substantial revision of its theoretical and meta-theoretical basis. (shrink)