This study attempts to determine a correlation effect between people’s perception and awareness of the operationalization of artificial intelligence in their everyday lives and in the production, presentation, and publication of news media in the U.S. By looking at the effect individual characteristics may have on a person’s perception and awareness of AI operationalized for news media and looking at whether perception and/or awareness of AI operationalized in a person’s daily life affects their perception and awareness of AI operationalized for (...) news media, we seek to find correlation between these two factors. The research relies on Actor-network theory, the MAIN Model, and utilizes a convenience sample survey method using the MTurk participant platform. (shrink)

Purpose: to characterize ethics course content, structure, resources, pedagogic methods, and opinions among academic administrators and course directors at U.S. medical schools. Method: An online questionnaire addressed to academic deans and ethics course directors identified by medical school websites was emailed to 157 Association of American Medical Colleges member medical schools in two successive waves in early 2022. Descriptive statistics were utilized to summarize responses. Results: Representatives from 61 (39%) schools responded. Thirty-two (52%) respondents were course directors; 26 (43%) were (...) deans of academic affairs, medical education, or curriculum; and 3 with other roles also completed the survey (5%). All 61 schools reported some form of formal ethics education during the first year of medical school, with most (n = 54, 89%) reporting a formal mandatory introductory course during preclinical education. Schools primarily utilized lecture and small-group teaching methods. Knowledge-based examinations, attendance, and participation were most commonly used for assessment. A large majority regarded ethics as equally or more important than other foundational courses, but fewer (n = 37, 60%) provided faculty training for teaching ethics. Conclusions: Despite a response rate of 39 percent, the authors conclude that medical schools include ethics in their curricula in small-group and lecture formats with heterogeneity regarding content taught. Preclinical curricular redesigns must innovate and implement best practices for ensuring sound delivery of ethics content in future curricula. Additional large-scale research is necessary to determine said best practices. (shrink)

In this book, Chad Jorgenson challenges the view that for Plato the good life is one of pure intellection, arguing that his last writings increasingly insist on the capacity of reason to impose measure on our emotions and pleasures. Starting from an account of the ontological, epistemological, and physiological foundations of the tripartition of the soul, he traces the increasing sophistication of Plato's thinking about the nature of pleasure and pain and his developing interest in sciences bearing on physical (...) reality. These theoretical shifts represent a movement away from a conception of human happiness as a purification or flight of the soul from the sensible to the intelligible, as in the Phaedo, towards a focus on the harmony of the individual as a psychosomatic whole under the hegemonic power of reason. (shrink)

_Heidegger’s Shadow_ is an important contribution to the understanding of Heidegger’s ambivalent relation to transcendental philosophy. Its contention is that Heidegger recognizes the importance of transcendental philosophy as the necessary point of entry to his thought, but he nonetheless comes to regard it as something that he must strive to overcome even though he knows such an attempt can never succeed. Engelland thoroughly engages with major texts such as _Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics_, _Being and Time_, and _Contributions _and (...) traces the progression of Heidegger’s readings of Kant and Husserl to show that Heidegger cannot abandon his own earlier breakthrough work in transcendental philosophy. This book will be of interest to those working on phenomenology, continental philosophy, and transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

Implicit memory refers to a change in task performance due to an earlier experience that is not consciously remembered. The topic of implicit memory has been studied from two quite different perspectives for the past 20 years. On the one hand, researchers interested in memory have set out to characterize the memory system underlying implicit memory, and see how they relate to those underlying other forms of memory. The alternative framework has considered implicit memory as a by-product of perceptual, conceptual, (...) or motor systems that learn. That is, on this view the systems that support implicit memory are heavily constrained by pressures other than memory per se. Both approaches have yielded results that have been valuable in helping us to understand the nature of implicit memory, but studied somewhat in isolation and with little collaboration. This volume is unique in explicitly contrasting these approaches, bringing together world class scientists from both camps in an attempt to forge a new approach to understanding one of the most exciting and important issues in psychology and neuroscience. Written for postgraduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this is a book that will have an important influence on the direction that future research in this field takes. (shrink)

Volume I. The history of evil in antiquity : 2000 BCD-450 CE -- volume II. The history of evil in the medieval age : 450-1450 -- volume III. The history of evil in the early modern age : 1450-1700 -- volume IV. The history of evil in the 18th and 19th centuries : 1700-1900 -- volume V. The history of evil in the early twentieth century : 1900-1950 -- volume VI. The history of evil from the mid-twentieth century to today (...) : 1950-2018. (shrink)

Deliberative democracy grounds its legitimacy largely in the ability of speakers to participate on equal terms. Yet theorists and practitioners have struggled with how to establish deliberative equality in the face of stark differences of power in liberal democracies. Designers of innovative civic forums for deliberation often aim to neutralize inequities among participants through proportional inclusion of disempowered speakers and discourses. In contrast, others argue that democratic equality is best achieved when disempowered groups deliberate in their own enclaves before entering (...) the broader public sphere. Borrowing from each perspective, the authors argue that there are strong reasons to incorporate enclave deliberation among the disempowered within civic forums. They support this claim by presenting case study evidence showing that participants in such forums can gain some of the same benefits of deliberation found in more heterogeneous groups, can consider a diversity of viewpoints rather than falling into groupthink and polarization, and can persuade external stakeholders of the legitimacy of the group’s deliberations. (shrink)

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 73-75, January-March.

The normative politics of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country are inextricably related to the political-philosophical principles of Contingency,irony, and solidarity, yet the nature of this relation is not explicit, particularly regarding Rorty’s earlier public/private sphere distinctionand renunciation of metavocabularies. This paper argues that Rorty’s call for patriotism as a necessary condition for political practiceand a romantic historicism that replaces intersubjectively recognized history, leads to a privatized conception of the nation, betraying the most promising principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and threatening (...) the necessary conditions of democratic and solidaristic practices. This critique also accounts for the theoretical lacunas in Rorty’s most recent essays attempting to elucidate American Empire. (shrink)

According to epistemic utility theory, epistemic rationality is teleological: epistemic norms are instrumental norms that have the aim of acquiring accuracy. What’s definitive of these norms is that they can be expected to lead to the acquisition of accuracy when followed. While there’s much to be said in favor of this approach, it turns out that it faces a couple of worrisome extensional problems involving the future. The first problem involves credences about the future, and the second problem involves future (...) credences. Examining prominent solutions to a different extensional problem for this approach reinforces the severity of the two problems involving the future. Reflecting on these problems reveals the source: the teleological assumption that epistemic rationality aims at acquiring accuracy. (shrink)

In Republic VIII, oligarchy is represented as a transitional or hybrid regime combining features of aristocracy and timocracy with the rule of appetitive desire characteristic of democracy and tyranny. The apparently anomalous intermediary position of oligarchy, in which an object of appetitive soul provides the foundation for interpersonal and political norms, demonstrates the complexity of the interaction between ruling soul parts and underlying rational structures that give unity to each constitution and character type. This interaction cannot be adequately accounted for (...) in terms of the activity of autonomous soul parts whose interactions are wholly reduced to quantitative relations of force. (shrink)

The anticipated social capabilities of robots may allow them to serve in authority roles as part of human-machine teams. To date, it is unclear if, and to what extent, human team members will comply with requests from their robotic teammates, and how such compliance compares to requests from human teammates. This research examined how the human-likeness and physical embodiment of a robot affect compliance to a robot's request to perseverate utilizing a novel task paradigm. Across a set of two studies, (...) participants performed a visual search task while receiving ambiguous performance feedback. Compliance was evaluated when the participant requested to stop the task and the coach urged the participant to keep practicing multiple times. In the first study, the coach was either physically co-located with the participant or located remotely via a live-video. Coach type varied in human-likeness and included either a real human, a Nao robot, or a modified Roomba robot. The second study expanded on the first by including a Baxter robot as a coach and replicated the findings in a different sample population with a strict chain of command culture. Results from both studies showed that participants comply with the requests of a robot for up to 11 min. Compliance is less than to a human and embodiment and human-likeness on had weak effects on compliance. (shrink)

In this paper, I engage William Rowe’s “Friendly Atheism” to illuminate the discussion of religious disagreement. I argue that his view gives way to an epistemic principle about how two “intellectual peers” might remain steadfast in what they believe their total available evidence supports and thereby reasonably disagree about their religious beliefs. I consider a key objection from Uniqueness thesis proponents and show how there are additional epistemic considerations to help fix the proposed problem.

There is no shortage of scientists who are skeptical of the power of philosophy. Philosophers themselves have had similar reservations about philosophy, at least as it is typically studied and taught in universities. It can be easy enough to feel the force of these complaints, as it is not uncommon for academic philosophers to lose the forest for the trees. It doesn’t have to be this way. Philosophers can be better at explaining how their abstract theorizing bears on concrete problems, (...) and they can spend more time directly addressing these concrete problems. There are plenty of philosophers who acknowledge this, and many of them engage in research programs that do what we call engaged philosophy. The work of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) is part of this landscape. This chapter describes TDI’s engaged philosophy as practiced in its dialogue-based workshops with cross-disciplinary teams. (shrink)

This paper will begin with an explication of the central tenets of Nussbaum’s capabilities theory. The next section examines Nussbaum’s two-fold justification of capabilities; namely, the substantive good approach (or intuitionism), which serves as the primary justification, and a version of Kantian proceduralism, which provides ancillary support. The following section focuses on Jaggar’s critique of Nussbaum. Here, I will discuss three criteria of adequacy for a global ethic and their importance, why we should accept them and how both of Nussbaum’s (...) justification strategies fail to satisfy them. In the fifth section, I propose a version of discourse ethics as an alternative justification for capabilities that can satisfy the adequacy discerned from Jaggar’s critique. This account of discourse ethics reveals that intersubjective dialogue under certain conditions is more likely to provide adequate justification of capabilities, and those engaged in dialogue are also likely to develop practical reason and affiliation. So this method of justification does not merely ground the capabilities, but helps people realize them. Finally, the sixth section presents an example from the Self-Employed Women’s Association as a real-life case illustrating how this version of discourse ethics can be manifested. (shrink)

Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatism's history with recent changes in (...) the country's racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatism's role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America. (shrink)

Our symposium on Naomi Zack's newest book, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), had its origin in an Author Meets Critics panel of the Radical Philosophy Association at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division conference in 2012, organized by José Jorge Mendoza. The respondents--Kristie Dotson, Lewis Gordon, José Jorge Mendoza, and Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.--have revised and expanded their original papers and Naomi Zack has in turn provided a detailed response (...) to their contributions. The result is an insightful, critical, and multiperspectival engagement with Zack's work. Throughout the respondents' papers you will find references to the twelve requirements that Zack argues are necessary for an ethics of race. These can be found in an appendix to Naomi Zack's response. (shrink)

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements (...) are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:72 Reviews RUSSELL VERSUS THE HAPPINESS INDUSTRY Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa [email protected] Tim Phillips. Bertrand Russell’sThe Conquest of Happiness; a Modern-Day Interpretation of a Self-Help Classic. Oxford: Infinite Ideas, 2010. Pp. 118. 978-1906821 -27-2 (pb). us$11.95. German translation as Bertrand Russells Eroberung des Glücks in a “Business Classics” series (gabal Verlag, 2012). he popular writing Bertrand Russell undertook to make money has long (...) roused the indignation of those interested in his more technical specialized work, and his 1930 The Conquest of Happiness ranks among the more extreme examples of this pot-boiling genre. Ludwig Wittgenstein denounced Russell’s Conquest of Happiness as a “vomitive.” And the best ways of understanding Russell’s own assessments of his book are unclear, owing to the various sentiments his biographers report. According to Ronald Clark, he said: “… The Conquest of Happiness … I am not very proud of”;1 whereas Caroline Moorehead reports “he was later to say that, of all his books, he felt this had done the most good”.2 In his autobiography, Russell allows us how he wrote The Conquest of Happiness at a stage in his life “when I needed much self-command and much that I had learned by painful experience if I was to maintain any endurable level of happiness.”The emotional challenges to which he was subjected at the time he wrote the book “introduced an intolerable tension into every moment of daily life.” Beacon Hill School, which Russell had started with his second wife, Dora, in 1927, was in such dire straits financially by 1930 that Russell was compelled to resort to much popular writing and lecturing in order to remain solvent. In 1930, Dora gave birth to a daughter fathered by the American journalist Grif- fin Barry.This marked the beginning of the end to Russell’s marriage to Dora. Add to the foregoing Russell’s strained relations with Wittgenstein, when the ______ 1 The Life of Bertrand Russell, p. 448. 2 Bertrand Russell, p. 383. q= Reviews 73 former was asked to be one of the examiners for Wittgenstein’s phd at Cambridge. Although the phd was awarded and Wittgenstein secured a grant to conduct research at Trinity College, Cambridge for five years, Russell and Wittgenstein’s interaction at the time resulted in an end to their friendship. In general, however much control Russell may have had over matters at earlier points in his life, 1930 was a time he was largely at the mercy of unstable circumstances.The repose and leisure on which he had depended for his philosophic activity were not then available to him. Personal problems came to the fore and he was more prone to depression than usual. About The Conquest of Happiness, written primarily with the American market in mind, he remarked to the publisher Stanley Unwin: “I think they [Americans] mostly share Al Capone’s ideas of happiness, which are in a somewhat different vein from mine.”The book became a bestseller in America. Tim Phillips writes on business, technology, social change and innovation, and he has published more than a dozen expositions of other famous authors’ works. His book Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness is a faithful tour through this Russell classic. Phillips provides a readable account of the original ’s lucid points. The treatment is certainly not pretentious or obfuscatory, as it abounds with examples of Russell’s points from contemporary pop culture. It features corroborating quotations from other authors and is salted with some results of modern surveys. Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness has good reminders of the differences between the nature of Russell’s times and lifestyle and that of our own, the most notable being the absence during Russell’s day of a happiness industry. Nowadays, we are bombarded with “self-help” books “encouraging us to obsess about ourselves or manipulate others” (p. 9). Moreover, when Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness, “the idea of an antidepressant pill was as likely as someone walking on the moon and the idea that people could ‘suffer from stress’ was thirty years into the future. For all... (shrink)

Current norms among professional military officers that govern obedience and dissent strongly discourage officers from offering public criticism of policy enacted by civilian authorities, even if that policy is immoral, illegal, or unconstitutional. We identify a set of circumstances that create a moral imperative for an officer to take action and we leverage prevailing ethical guidelines to argue that in certain cases, even individual officers not directly involved in the execution of the policy have moral standing to offer public criticism (...) of it. We consider the consequences of relaxing norms prohibiting public dissent and explore the trade-off between tolerating immoral policy and the likelihood of mistakenly criticizing appropriate policy. Finally, we offer evidence that current military-civilian relations in the United States are such that placing higher value on dissent would benefit professional military officers and may improve policy. (shrink)

"Russell's Pennsylvania" focuses on Bertrand Russell's days residing in Pennsylvania during the Second World War. It draws from contemporary local newspaper accounts, published memoirs of authors who visited Russell and his family then, as well as reminiscences from people with first-hand accounts who were able to be contacted recently.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 81 CAUSATION: A PREMATURELY DEPOSED MONARCH? Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratof{[email protected] Huw Price and Richard Corry, eds. Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisited. Oxford: Clarendon P.; New York: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. x, 403. isbn: 978-0-19-927819-0. £58 (hb); £19.99 (pb.). us$35 (pb). In 1911 the Aristotelian Society elected Bertrand (...) Russell its president, and in November of 1912 Russell’s presidential address to the Society was “On the Notion of Cause”, which, in addition to being published in the Society’s Proceedings, was later included in Russell’s book Mysticism and Logic. Russell’s address to the Aristotelian Society occurred during an interesting, brief era in the history of physics. This was a stage after the science of gravitational astronomy had beneWted from the use of diTerential equations but before the British physics community was aware of the German physicists’ advances. Less than three years after Russell delivered “On the Notion of Cause”, Einstein revolutionized the Weld of gravitational astronomy; and the quantum physicists were to eventually unearth phenomena that proved to be especially recalcitrant to comprehensive mathematical analysis. At the time of “On the Notion of Cause”, though, physics was understood as providing a thorough account of all the phenomena within its domain. In this address, Russell speaks of how Certain diTerential equations can be found, which hold at every instant for every particle of the system, and which, given the conWguration and velocities at one instant, or the conWgurations at two instants, render the conWguration at any other earlier or later instant theoretically calculable. … This statement holds throughout physics, and not only in the special case of gravitation. But there is nothing that could be properly called “cause” and nothing that could be properly called “eVect” in such a system.… [T]here is merely a formula. (ML, p. 194, Papers 6: 202; my emphasis) Russell further remarked: All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word ‘cause’ never occurs…. To me it seems that … the reason September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 82 Reviews why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things. The law of causality, … like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (ML, p. 180; Papers 6: 193). What Russell has in mind here when saying “in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word ‘cause’ never occurs” is that it is rash to infer from the observation of particular uniformities that there necessarily is a legitimate apriori category of causality (ML, p. 205; Papers 6: 209). Rather, “the law of causality, as usually stated by philosophers, is false, and is not employed in science” (ML, p. 207; Papersz 6: 210). Huw Price and Richard Corry’s Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality: Russell’s Republic Revisitedz features thirteen chapters from diTerent contributors (except for Huw Price who authors one and co-authors another) who address diTerent aspects of this matter. Price and Corry explain: One key theme of the volume turns on the possibility that in presenting philosophy with a stark choice between Wnding causation in physics and rejecting it altogether, Russell missed an important range of intermediate views. In particular, he missed what, by a natural extension of his own constitutional analogy, we may call the republican option. In the political case, rejecting the view that political authority is vested in our rulers by God leaves us with two choices: we may reject the notion of political authority altogether ; or we may regard it, with republicans, as invested in our rulers by us. Arguably, the republican option exists in metaphysics, too. Causal republicanism is thus the view that although the notion of causation is useful, perhaps indispensable, in our dealings with... (shrink)

In The Felt Meanings of the World, Quentin Smith lays the groundwork for a metaphysical worldview that is meant to stand as an alternative to nihilism. Smith finds fault with nihilism inasmuch as it fails to account for the possibility that faculties other than reason, namely feelings or intuition, may be the source of important metaphysical insight. From this observation, Smith builds his “metaphysics of feeling,” which is not concemed with rational explanations of the world’s existence, but rather with the (...) relationship between the world and our own feelings. This information, Smith says, can satisfy our metaphysical longings inasmuch as we can become more aware of “what” the world is, even if we can never know “why” it exists. Smith’s metaphysic is a viable one, but it is not without its problems. Most notable of these is Smith’s conclusion that “joy” is the proper affective response to the pure existence of the world, or Being simpliciter. It is my intent to show not only that joy cannot be an affective response to Being simpliciter; but also that the metaphysics of feeling renders incoherent any notion of affective response to Being simpliciter. (shrink)

This ambitious book presents a new interpretation of Chinese thought guided both by a philosopher's sense of mystery and by a sound philosophical theory of meaning. That dual goal, Hansen argues, requires a unified translation theory. It must provide a single coherent account of the issues that motivated both the recently untangled Chinese linguistic analysis and the familiar moral-political disputes. Hansen's unified approach uncovers a philosophical sophistication in Daoism that traditional accounts have overlooked. The Daoist theory treats the imperious intuitionism (...) that alienates critical thinkers as a feature of Confucianism alone. Freed from the view that Confucianism is the core of Chinese thought and from myopic Confucian interpretations, Chinese thinkers emerge as unmistakably philosophical. (shrink)

Zhuangzi and Hui Shi's discussion about whether Zhuangzi knows 'fish's happiness' is a Daoist staple. The interpretations, however, portray it as humorous miscommunication between a mystic and a logician. I argue for a fine inferential analysis that explains the argument in a way that informs Zhuangzi philosophical lament at Hui Shi's passing. It also reverses the dominant image of the two thinkers. Zhuangzi emerges as the superior dialectician, the clearer, more analytic epistemologist. Hui Shi's arguments betray his tendency (manifest elsewhere) (...) to misstate the conclusions of their shared relativism leading him but not Zhuangzi to intuitive mysticism. (shrink)

We present three experiments that explore the robustness of the _authentic-apparent effect_—the finding that participants are less likely to attribute knowledge to the protagonist in apparent- than in authentic-evidence Gettier cases. The results go some way towards suggesting that the effect is robust to assessments of the justificatory status of the protagonist’s belief. However, not all of the results are consistent with an effect invariant across two demographic contexts: American and Indian nationalities.

This article will offer an alternative understanding of managerial decision-making drawing from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason rather than simply Being and Nothingness. I will begin with a brief explanation of Sartre’s account of freedom in Being and Nothingness. I will then show in the second section how Andrew West uses Sartre’s conception of radical freedom from Being and Nothingness for a managerial decision-making model. In the third section, I will explore a more robust account of freedom from Sartre’s Critique (...) of Dialectical Reason. I will attempt to show that freedom is not simply a matter of choosing (or not choosing) to perform an action, but entails external constraints—including other people. Finally, I will provide the implications of this account of freedom for managerial decision-making. I will show that it’s unreasonable to place full responsibility and/or blame on managers given their constraints. This does not absolve them from responsibility, but better accounts for the way in which we ought to hold them responsible. (shrink)

Recapitulating two recent trends in Heidegger-scholarship, this paper argues that the transcendental theme in Heidegger’s thought clarifies and relates the two basic questions of his philosophical itinerary. The preparatory question, which belongs to Being and Time , I.1–2, draws from the transcendental tradition to target the condition for the possibility of our openness to things: How must we be to access entities? The preliminary answer is that we are essentially opened up ecstatically and horizonally by timeliness. The fundamental question, which (...) belongs to the unpublished Being and Time , I.3, and the rest of Heidegger’s path of thinking, is accessed by means of the first. In a turn of perspective, it targets that in terms of which we relate to the givenness of being. Heidegger first attempts to handle this question using the transcendental language of temporal horizon before happening upon the terminologically more fitting “event of appropriation” and thereafter criticizing transcendental terms. By reconstructing the preparatory question and its reversal, we can see that Heidegger’s later criticism of transcendence in fact relies on its initial success. The turn from timeliness to appropriation (initially by means of transcendental temporality) happens within the domain initially disclosed by the preparatory question. (shrink)

Pinillos’ Why We Doubt presents a powerful critique of such global skeptical assertions as “I don’t know I am not a brain-in-a-vat (biv)” by introducing a cognitive mechanism that is sensitive to error possibilities and a Bayesian rule of rationality that this mechanism is designed to approximate. This multifaceted argument offers a novel counter to global skepticism, contending that our basis for believing such premises is underminable. In this work, we engage with Pinillos’ adoption of Bayesianism, questioning whether the Bayesian (...) principle that he invokes truly does fail to generate the verdict that we don’t we aren’t biv s, contrary to what Pinillos asserts. Furthermore, we argue that Pinillos’ empirical argument is not empirical enough; we need a lot more empirical work if we are going to counter global skepticism and win over neutral bystanders. (shrink)

Phenomenologists turn to Augustine to remedy the neglect of life, love, and language in the Cartesian cogito: (1) concerning life, Edmund Husserl appropriates Augustine’s analysis of distentio animi, Edith Stein of vivo, and Hannah Arendt of initium; (2) concerning love, Max Scheler appropriates Augustine’s analysis of ordo amoris, Martin Heidegger of curare, and Dietrich von Hildebrand of affectiones; (3) concerning language, Ludwig Wittgenstein appropriates Augustine’s analysis of ostendere, Hans-Georg Gadamer of verbum cordis, and Jean-Luc Marion of confessio. Phenomenology’s non-Cartesian Augustinianism (...) can tell us something about phenomenology, namely that it is engaged in the project of recontextualizing the cogito, and something about Augustine, namely how radically different his project is than Descartes’s. Phenomenology presents an Augustine that is well positioned for the debates of our times concerning mind and world, desire and the human person, and language and embodiment. (shrink)

You can stand strong in the midst of shaking. Does it feel like all hell is breaking loose in the church right now? This time of shaking is actually an act of God -- a refiner's fire through which He will bring radical, glorious reformation to the church through exposure, confrontation, and cleansing. Through this upheaval, God is seeking to mold and mature His people into the supernatural community that were destined to be! In a dramatic encounter with the fear (...) of the Lord, author and pastor, Chad Norris received an assignment from God to bring fatherly training, correction, and rebuke to the Church, shaping fellow believers into powerful Kingdom representatives. In God is Shaking His Temple, Chad offers a prophetic invitation to partner with this move of God to manifest His Kingdom on earth. In this book, you will discover... Ancient truths that come with promises of blessing Discernment to distinguish between God's work and the devil's Strength to stand firm in the midst of crisis and chaos Wisdom to walk as a mature child of God, fit to move in signs, wonders and miracles Freedom from religious bondage and false views of God This season of upheaval is an invitation from the Father to incline your ear, hear the Lord's voice, and join His Kingdom army that will bring Heaven's light to this dark world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE SPECIES AND UNITY OF THE MORAL ACT CHAD RIPPERGER Rome, Italy IN AN ARTICLE written by Gerard Casey in the New Scholasticism,1 the problem of a lack of unity among the constituents of the moral act in St. Thomas's action theory is posed. The question he asks is a valid one: where does the moral act receive its unity? I believe St. Thomas answers that question, but (...) before we take a look at his answer, it is necessary first to discuss what the constituents of the moral act are. This in itself is not without its complications, for what the constituents of the moral act are for Aquinas is likewise open to debate. In order to answer Casey's question, the article will take the following form: first, we will consider what the constituents of the moral act are; then, we shall try to answer Casey's question: "Where does the moral act receive its unity? " I. The Constituen:ts of the Moral Act One of the difficulties with Aquinas's treatment of the species of the moral act is that of understanding precisely what he means by the object of the moral act. Later on we shall see that Aquinas uses the term "object" in a variety of ways referring to a number of different things. However, one of the ways he uses the term "object" is in reference to the end. Therefore, it will be necessary to point out how Aquinas uses this term in reference to the will so that, in considering the object of the moral act, a proper distinction can be made between the end and the object of the moral act in the strict sense. 1 See Gerard Casey, "A Problem of Unity in St. Thomas's Account of Human Action," New Scholasticism, 61, no. 2 (1987) : 146-161. 69 70 CHAD RIPPERGER Aquinas refers many times to the end as the object of the will. However, the main idea he has in mind is in reference to his theory of powers and their objects. For Aquinas, every human power has its proper object,2 and since the will is a power or faculty of man, it has its proper object. Often, Aquinas simply refers to the end as the object of the will: "the good and the end is the proper object of the will." 3 Other times, however, Aquinas refers to the end as that which is under the ratio boni. Those which know the end are always ordered toward the good as to an end: for the will, which is the appetite of the end already known, does not tend toward something except under the aspect of the good (ratio boni), which is its object.4 What Aquinas is saying here is that the intellect apprehends some being and presents it to the will under a certain aspect or concept of the good. Now since the proper object of the will, which is an appetitive power, is the good, then the particular thing must be " seen " in a certain way so that the will will tend toward it. Aquinas is pointing out that, materially, the object for the intellect and the object of the will do not differ. For instance, a piece of candy may be the object of the intellect but it may also be the object of the will once it has been apprehended by the intellect and presented to the will as desirable or under the aspect of the good. However, the ratio boni is more than just a way in which the intellect presents the will with its object. The good by nature has a universal or formal character about it. Because the intellect and will are immaterial powers for Aquinas, the objects of the these respective powers must be universals, forms or essences. The will is presented with a form of the particular thing apprehended and this form is none other than the end. 2 See S.T. I, 77, 3. 3 S.C.G. III, 1. See also Sent., II, 40, 1, 1; Sent. IV, 16, 3, 2; S.T. I, 1, 4, ad 3; S.T. I-II, 11, 1, and... (shrink)