In this article we introduce the concept of implied optical perspective in deep learning computer vision systems. Taking the BBC's experimental television programme “Made by Machine: When AI met the Archive” as a case study, we trace a conceptual and material link between the system used to automatically “watch” the television archive and a specific type of photographic practice. From a computational aesthetics perspective, we show how deep learning machine vision relies on photography, its technical regimes and epistemic advantages, and (...) we propose a novel way to identify the latent camera through which the BBC archive was seen by machine. (shrink)

As Peter Niebyl has documented, one of the issues in which the Wittenberg-based physician and philosopher Daniel Sennert (1572–1637) departed from Paracelsus and his followers was the concept of disease. Paracelsus and some of his followers regarded diseases as real beings—so-called “disease-entities” (entia morbis) that can enter into the body of a living being and thereafter possess a clearly defined location in the affected organism. 1 For Sennert, such a view is a dangerous confusion between disease and its causes. (...) According to him, causes of disease can be present in an organism without actually causing a disease (Sennert 1629, p. 253). Moreover, he shares the traditional Christian doctrine .. (shrink)

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the (...) main focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project. (shrink)

Introduction, by D. J. Silver.--The issues: Some current trends in ethical theory, by A. Edel. Contemporary problems in ethics from a Jewish perspective, by H. Jonas. What is the contemporary problematic of ethics in Christianity? By J. M. Gustafson. Modern images of man, by J. N. Hartt. Is there a common Judaeo-Christian ethical tradition? By I. M. Blank. Problematics of Jewish ethics, by M. A. Meyer. Revealed morality and modern thought, by N. Samuelson.--The Jewish background: Does Torah mean law? (...) By J. Neusner. Confrontation of Greek and Jewish ethics: Philo: De Decalogo, by S. Sandmel. Reprobation, prohibition, invalidity: an examination of the Halakhic development concerning intermarriage, by L. Silberman. Death and burial in the Jewish tradition, by S. B. Freehof. God and the ethical impulse, by W. G. Plaut.--Social action: Civil disobedience and the Jewish tradition, by S. G. Broude. Religious responsibility for the social order: A Jewish view, by E. L. Fackenheim. Toward a theology for social action, by R. G. Hirsch. The mission of Israel and social action, by E. Lipman. Some cautionary remarks, by J. Kravetz.--The mission of Israel: On the theology of Jewish survival, by S. S. Schwarzchild. Meaning and purpose of Jewish survival, by A. Gilbert. Beyond the apologetics of mission, by D. J. Silver. (shrink)

The recent publication of the stenographer's transcript of Whitehead's guest lecture on “social ethics” has shed new light on the relation between his metaphysics and ethics. Instead of including ethics in his philosophy, Whitehead treats it as a distinct, specialized science that does not share in the universality of metaphysics. The present article argues that an analysis of his lecture shows that a nonindividualist Whiteheadian ethics is possible without rupturing the coherence of Whitehead's system or contradicting the ontological or subjectivist (...) principle. As part of a larger transition in Whitehead's thinking during the years 1925–1927, he reformulates the notion of the environment as inheritance and is therefore able to pose the question of the endurance of values at the level of society, which is the purview of ethics. Reconstructing the metaphysical background may provide a “stimulus to the imagination” for ethical debates today, especially in the field of environmental ethics. (shrink)

Research over the past half century has produced extensive evidence that observers cannot report or retain all of the details of their visual world from one moment to the next. During the past decade, a new set of studies has illustrated just how pervasive these limits are. For example, early evidence for the failure to detect changes to simple dot patterns (Phillips, 1974) and arrays of letters (Pashler, 1988) generalizes to more naturalistic displays such as photographs and motion pictures (e.g., (...) Levin & Simons, 1997; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 1997; see Rensink, 2002 for a recent review). This failure to report changes (change blindness) can be induced in both simple and naturalistic displays, whenever the change co-occurs with a visual disruption such as an eye movement (Currie, McConkie, Carlson-Radvansky, & Irwin, 1995; Hollingworth, Schrock, & Henderson, 2001), image shift (Blackmore, Brelstaff, Nelson, & Troscianko, 1995), flashed blank screen (Rensink et al., 1997), blink (O’Regan, Deubel, Clark, & Rensink, 2000), transient (O’Regan, Rensink, & Clark, 1999; Rensink, O’Regan, & Clark, 2000), movie cut or pan (Levin & Simons, 1997; Simons, 1996), or an occlusion event (Levin, Simons, Angelone, & Chabris, 2002; Simons & Levin, 1998). Change blindness can also occur in the absence of a disruption, provided the change occurs gradually enough that it does not attract attention (Simons, Franconeri, & Reimer, 2000). -/- Failures of visual awareness have been induced in a number of ways. For example, observers often fail to report a visible but unexpected stimulus when attention is focused on some other object or event in the display (inattentional blindness). As for change blindness, inattentional blindness occurs for both simple (Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001) and naturalistic stimuli (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Similarly, repeated instances of an item often go undetected when embedded in a rapid sequence (repetition blindness), a phenomenon that occurs for both words and pictures (Kanwisher, 1987; Kanwisher & Potter, 1990). Observers can also fail to detect a stimulus in a rapid stream of stimuli provided they had to perform an attention-demanding task shortly before the stimulus appeared (Shapiro, Arnell, & Raymond, 1997). The surprisingly large variety of conditions that induce failures of conscious perception reinforces the broad conclusion that we are often unaware of what would otherwise be fully-visible stimuli. -/- Along with an increased appreciation of the limitations of visual awareness has come a renewed interest in using these limitations to explore the nature of the representations and processes underlying our visual experience. Are these limitations due to failures of perception? Of attention? Of memory? What is preserved with and without awareness? -/- The papers in this special issue of the Journal of Vision provide examples of exciting new work on induced failures of visual awareness and the mechanisms that underlie them. For example, several papers examine whether observers are drawn to parts of a display by the stimulus features or whether top-down control or semantic comprehension influence search through a display. Others investigate the nature of and limits on the information that is preserved from one view to the next and how much information needs to be retained for effective perception and action. As guest editors, we hope that this special issue will illustrate how studying the relationship between visual awareness and visual representations can lead to important new insights into the nature of seeing. (shrink)

This paper argues for two claims. (1) In his biological views, Kenelm Digby tries to reconcile aspects of an Aristotelian theory of composite substance with early modern corpuscularianism. (2) From a methodological point of view, he uses the Stoic-Epicurean epistemology of common notions in order to show the adequacy of his conciliatory approach. The first claim is substantiated by an analysis of Digby’s views on the role of mixture and homogeneity in the process of animal generation. The second claim is (...) substantiated by an analysis of Digby’s views on the role of the concept of quantity in the evaluation of scientific hypotheses. Both arguments make use of the context of Digby’s philosophy: the first argument draws on his background in the work of early modern corpuscularian Aristotelians such as Daniel Sennert; the second argument draws on his background in the epistemology of Pierre Gassendi. (shrink)

Conversation is supported by the beliefs that people have in common and the perceptual experience that they share. The visual context of a conversation has two aspects: the information that is available to each conversant, and their beliefs about what is present for each other. In our experiment, we separated these factors for the first time and examined their impact on a spontaneous conversation. We manipulated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and the belief that a (...) visual scene was shared or not. Participants watched videos of actors talking about a controversial topic, then discussed their own views while looking at either a blank screen or the actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We recorded conversants’ eye movements, quantified how they were coordinated, and analyzed their speech patterns. Gaze coordination has been shown to be causally related to the knowledge people share before a conversation, and the information they later recall. Here, we found that both the presence of the visual scene, and beliefs about its presence for another, influenced language use and gaze coordination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What inspires action in Global Health?Daniel Palazuelos"Why do all of you want to go to the middle of nowhere and take care of the sickest people even though you won't have half the tools necessary to make the slightest difference?" he asks.I'm sitting in the Intensive Care Unit workroom enjoying one of those rare, calm moments during residency when this question suddenly breaks my peace. A co-resident, my (...) friend from Latin America, makes this inquiry without even looking up, as he clicks nonchalantly through some Internet pages. I look at him and try to understand him within his context; he was born and raised in [End Page E6] what is traditionally considered a "resource-poor setting," but through talent, hard work, luck and privilege he was accepted into one of the best residency programs in one of the best U.S. hospitals. Unprepared, I give some anemic responses about social responsibility and global citizenship.He looks at his screen and clicks on a couple of links. Suddenly, he turns to me and exclaims, "I get it! You guys are going because then you can put your PWAB on your CV!" I give him a blank look.He stands and goes over to the dry erase board to write: "PWAB—Picture With an African Baby."I'm amused for a moment, and then suddenly hurt. What does this mean? Is he questioning our intentions, our moral resolve? I look over to his computer and see that he's been flipping through the "Global Health Residency" pages of all the local residency programs, or the Facebook pages of colleagues who have recently returned from work abroad. My hurt morphs into incredulity—all the pages have a picture of a beaming, healthy doctor holding a beautiful, newly happy, previously sick, African baby. And then, the code bell goes off, and the admissions start. Reflection time is over.Years later, now that I have become a junior faculty member within the same residency program, I divide my year between global health projects in rural Mexico and Guatemala, the classrooms of a U.S. medical school, and the patient rooms of a teaching hospital. The number of undergraduate and medical students who approach me because they want advice about how to work in global health is staggering; their emails fill my inbox and their faces grace my office hours. External observers have even compared the unprecedented rise of this type of interest to "a veritable tsunami," and we often take for granted that this is because the field is "inspiring" (Mallampati & Heintz, 201, p. 22). We still don't know, however, what all this inspiration becomes once it touches down on-site. For many students, the experience with talented mentors on-site opens up for them a life-long career that aims to address the greatest challenges of our day. The PWAB, however, implies that for an important number of other students, global health is becoming a social capital commodity: an edu-vacation, something to make your mother proud, win a mate, maybe even just another mandatory rotation needed to spice up the application for a career in a highly competitive subspecialty.If students are the future of this field, then the way that global health educators like myself manage this issue may ultimately determine the objectives and scope of countless potential projects hoping to help the billions of people barely surviving abject poverty. I have a career in global health that is more than a hobby because of the clear vision and strong leadership of my mentors and our university (Farmer, 2011). When I was hired as faculty, they worked with me to find the right full-time equivalent (FTE) split so that I could both make a living as an attending, and also still have time to teach, think, research, and manage a project abroad pro bono. But it's from this point that my question begins: once the students are inspired, and the investment made, what inspires good, sustained, pragmatic action in global health?A big part of the answer to this question will depend on how we define global health. Global health is growing, but... (shrink)

Past research has repeatedly documented the close relationship between visual attention and awareness. Most recently, research exploring change blindness, inattentional blindness, repetition blindness, and the attentional blink has converged on the conclusion that attention to one aspect of a scene or event may lead to a highly circumscribed awareness of only the specific information attended, while other information, even that which is spatially or temporally nearby can go completely unnoticed. In the present report, we extend these observations to the dynamic (...) allocation of attention during a well-structured meaningful event. In two experiments, subjects viewed brief videos of simple events and were told to pay close attention to them. During the events, an unexpected disruption consisting of a brief low spatial frequency motion field occurred. Despite intensive questioning and opportunities for recognition, the majority of subjects reported no awareness of 200, 400, or 600 ms disruptions. In a second experiment, blank-screen disruptions were added, and these resulted in no increase in detection. We conclude that visual attention may result in far more transitory awareness of visual information than previously appreciated. (shrink)

D. H. Lawrence famously wrote that “art-speech is the only truth.” If we are to give credibility to these words, we must know what Lawrence means by “truth.” Here is the passage in which this expression occurs:Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the (...) marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.... Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.1One thing is made clear by the passage: “truth” here is not used in the sense of absolute truth, something that can never be falsified.... (shrink)

In systems of meaning that run on a regular setting, allegory is about filling in or identifying the blanks that disclose the “other story.” In the modern setting that Walter Benjamin tracked , allegory must turn significance out of the blank itself, working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward. The work most influential on, indeed syndicated in, Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play, as I’ve argued elsewhere, was Daniel Paul Schreber’s (...) Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.1 It is the text that hovers behind my own preoccupation with the science fiction genre as the “psy-fi” hub where bona fide science fictions, documentations of psychosis .. (shrink)

Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France: The Politics of Disengagement analyzes the political and ethical implications of a particular literary style, characterized by “the aesthetics of blankness” and a narrative strategy of “exhaustion,” “weakness,” and “slowness,” that Daniel Just attributes to Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras. Just’s main argument is built upon two axes, the first of which is an analysis of the historical and political setting in France. The second, larger axis comprises a (...) theoretical exploration of language’s indeterminate nature, the relationship between literary forms and politically charged times, and the prevalent view in the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 31.1 (2007) 189-196MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Fiction and Theory of Mind: An ExchangeLisa Zunshine University of KentuckyBrian Boyd's review of my new book, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2006) engages a large variety of issues.1 I would like to address an important question about the integration of scientific methodology with literary analysis suggested by Boyd's discussion.2 As (...) I argue below, two different perspectives of this integration may mark two different—indeed, incompatible—ways of formulating the disciplinary goals and philosophy of the new field of cognitive literary theory.Why We Read Fiction makes a case for admitting the recent findings of cognitive psychologists into literary studies by showing how their research into the ability to explain behavior in terms of the underlying states of mind can furnish us with a series of surprising insights into our interaction with literary texts. Using as my case studies novels ranging from Richardson's Clarissa, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov's Lolita, and Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, I advance and explore a series of hypotheses about cognitive cravings that are satisfied—and created!—when we read fiction.Although my study draws on the already well-established as well as forthcoming work of numerous cognitive scientists (including Simon Baron-Cohen, Clark H. Barrett, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Christopher Frith, Uta Frith, Paul Bloom, Susan Carey and Elizabeth Spelke, Peter Carruthers, Andy Clark, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, Alison Gopnik, Francesca Happe, Paul [End Page 189] Harris, Lawrence Hirschfeld, Stanley Klein, Alan Leslie, Andrew Meltzoff, Robert Mitchell, Keith Oatley, Gloria Origgi, Oliver Sacks, Dan Sperber, James Stiller, and Endel Tulving), it makes a point of being accessible to non-specialist readers. Cognitive science can be incredibly complicated and so can literary criticism, but I wanted to write a book on cognitive literary theory that does not scare anybody away with unnecessary jargon, knotty sentences, and overlong quotations. (Ironically, I must have succeeded too well in making my book reader-friendly and tucking my references in the endnotes since Boyd observes that I rely on only "a few findings" of cognitive scientists in my discussion.)The book consists of three parts. The first part, "Attributing Minds," introduces the first key theoretical concept of this book: mind-reading, also known as Theory of Mind. Drawing on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind), I suggest that fiction engages, teases, and pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity. Building on the recent research of Robin Dunbar and his colleagues, I then consider one particular aspect of Woolf's prose as an example of spectacular literary experimentation with our Theory of Mind. Finally, I turn to Steven Pinker's controversial analysis of Woolf in The Blank Slate to discuss the possibilities of a more profitable dialogue between cognitive science and literary studies.Of particular importance to this part of my argument is my belief that fictional narratives endlessly experiment with rather than automatically execute our evolved cognitive adaptations. When cognitive scientists succeed in isolating a certain regularity of our information-processing—for example, a constraint on the number of mutually reflecting minds that we can process with ease—we can take that constraint and see how it plays itself out in a fictional narrative. What we discover is that where there is a cognitive constraint, there is a "guarantee" of sorts that writers will intuitively experiment in the direction of challenging that constraint, probing and poking it and getting around it. The exact forms of such probing and poking will depend on specific cultural circumstances, including the mind-reading profiles of individual writers and their readers. The cognitive "limits" thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of established forms. This realization marks the possibility of a genuine interaction between cognitive psychology and... (shrink)

This collaborative publication offers salient instructional models, methods, and modalities centered on the whole person.

Perennialists regarding the phenomenology of mysticism, like Walter Stace, feel that all Christian mystical experiences are fundamentally similar to each other and to experiences described by mystics across religious traditions, cultures and ages. In his seminal work, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism, Nelson Pike convincingly argues that this extreme position is inadequate for capturing the breadth of experiences described by the canonical Medieval Christian mystics. However, Pike may have leaned too far away from perennialism in claiming (...) that all the experiences of (Christian) mystic union are essentially theistic. Here, I argue that Pike did not successfully establish this point and that union without distinction, often described as the pinnacle of union by Christian mystics, remains a viable candidate for an instance of a trans-traditionally type-identical mystical experience. (shrink)

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic "intent" about the characters, spaces, and events of film. Discussing contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely contribution to the study of film and philosophy will provoke debate among audiences and (...) filmmakers alike. FILMOSOPHY ® is a registered U.S. trademark owned by Valentin Stoilov (www.filmosophy.com) for educational services in the field of motion picture history theory and production. Mr. Stoilov is not the source or origin of this book and has not sponsored or endorsed it or its author. (shrink)

The human world is replete with narratives - narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provide a basis for the kind of reflection and evaluation that matters vitally to moral and self development. Perhaps most radically, some hold that narratives are essential for (...) the constitution of human selves. This volume brings together nine original contributions in which the individual authors advance, develop and challenge proposals of these kinds. They critically examine the place and importance of narratives in human lives and consider the underlying capacities that permit us to produce and utilise these special artifacts. All of the papers are written in a non-technical and accessible style. (shrink)

The topic of my dissertation is satire. This seems to excite many people, and over the past four years I have heard many variations of a similar refrain: “Oh, wow. You’re studying satire? That’s very topical. You must have a lot of material to work with.” There is a way in which this is true, though I suspect in a way that diverges from the way that most of my interlocutors believed. I suspect that the material they imagined me to (...) be working with was the output of Donald Trump, first a candidate for and now holder of the office of President of the United States. That is not the material I find interesting. More interesting to me is their statement. It evinces a number of beliefs that I find interesting, chief among them that Trump makes the current period particularly apt for satire, as if a doddery and incompetent ruling class is somehow a recent phenomenon. And I suspect that underneath this belief in the aptness of satire is a belief in the power of satire. Satire is somehow how people are going to strike back at the vice-governed fools who rule us. Those beliefs are the material I want to work with. This is my interest in satire, then: not so much what it is about satire that makes it powerful, but what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful? And what is it about satire that makes people think it is powerful when there is pretty powerful evidence that it is not? Unfortunately, here is where I run into the problem that in a very important way I do not have a lot of material to work with. There is not an awful lot on satire within the analytic tradition: outside of a few references to satire, analytic discussions of satire are limited to two short articles. Accordingly, I have taken the task of my dissertation to be to create an account of satire that helps to bring forward why satire is a thing that people can imagine to be powerful, that they can imagine to be politically effective. My dissertation will effectively have two halves, one where I build my account and one where I begin to apply it. The purpose of applying my account, which will comprise the final two chapters, will not be to show its implications so much as how it can be used. My goal will not so much be to give definitive answers about the nature of satire, but rather to give a demonstration of how my account facilitates engaging questions about the role of satire in social and political context. (shrink)

David Blank presents a new translation into clear modern English of a key treatise by one of the greatest of ancient philosophers, together with the first ever commentary on this work. Sextus Empiricus' Against the Grammarians is a polemical attack on ancient Greek ideas about grammar, and provides one of the best examples of sustained Sceptical reasoning.

Jaakko Hintikka (1998) has argued that clarifying the notion of abduction is the fundamental problem of contemporary epistemology. One traditional interpretation of Peirce on abduction sees it as a recipe for generating new theoretical discoveries . A second standard view sees abduction as a mode of reasoning that justifies beliefs about the probable truth of theories. While each reading has some grounding in Peirce's writings, each leaves out features that are crucial to Peirce's distinctive understanding of abduction. I develop and (...) defend a third interpretation, according to which Peirce takes abductive reasoning to lead to judgments about the relative pursuitworthiness of theories; conclusions that can be thoroughly disconnected from assessments of truth-value. Even if Peirce's use of "abduction" slides around among each of these three importantly different though potentially compatible senses, this neglected third understanding makes sense of a large number of Peirce's remarks and directs our attention to the cognitive structure of judgments that scientists face after the initial proposal of explanatory hypotheses but prior to their experimental testing; a topic which should be of interest to contemporary philosophers of science. (shrink)

Markets are central institutions in societies such as ours, and it seems appropriate to ask whether markets treat individuals justly or unjustly and whether choices individuals make concerning their market behavior are just or unjust. After all, markets influence most important features of our lives from the environment in which we live to the ways in which we find pleasure and fulfillment. Within market life we collectively determine the shape of human existence.<1>.

The volume analyzes the natural philosophical accounts and debates concerning the vegetative powers, namely nutrition, growth, and reproduction. While principally focusing on the early modern approaches to the lower functions of the soul, readers will discover the roots of these approaches back to the Ancient times, as the volume highlights the role of three strands that help shape the study of life in the Medieval and early modern natural philosophies. From late antiquity to the early modern period, the vegetative soul (...) and its cognate concepts have played a substantial role in specifying life, living functions, and living bodies, sometimes blurring the line between living and non-living nature, and, at other moments, resulting in a strong restriction of life to a mechanical system of operations and powers. Unearthing the history of the vegetative soul as a shrub of interconnected concepts, the 24 contributions of the volume fill a crucial gap in scholarship, ultimately outlining the importance of vegetal processes of incessant proliferation, generation, and organic growth as the roots of life in natural philosophical interpretations. (shrink)

Recent laboratory experiments have shown that both infant and adult learners can acquire word‐referent mappings using cross‐situational statistics. The vast majority of the work on this topic has used unfamiliar objects presented on neutral backgrounds as the visual contexts for word learning. However, these laboratory contexts are much different than the real‐world contexts in which learning occurs. Thus, the feasibility of generalizing cross‐situational learning beyond the laboratory is in question. Adapting the Human Simulation Paradigm, we conducted a series of experiments (...) examining cross‐situational learning from children's egocentric videos captured during naturalistic play. Focusing on individually ambiguous naming moments that naturally occur during toy play, we asked how statistical learning unfolds in real time through accumulating cross‐situational statistics in naturalistic contexts. We found that even when learning situations were individually ambiguous, learners’ performance gradually improved over time. This improvement was driven in part by learners’ use of partial knowledge acquired from previous learning situations, even when they had not yet discovered correct word‐object mappings. These results suggest that word learning is a continuous process by means of real‐time information integration. (shrink)

We explore the ability to distinguish random from non-random events. Randomness is defined in terms of radioactive decay whereas non-randomness is quantified by excess repetitions (“repeat”) or alternations (“switch”) between successive bits. In the first four experiments no mention was made of randomness, probability, or related concepts in task instructions. We found superior performance in distinguishing random stimuli from repeat stimuli compared to switch stimuli. The last three experiments explicitly evoked the concept of randomness, thus allowing comparison of perceptual and (...) conceptual performance. The ability to identify random events from switch distracters was inferior to the ability to discriminate random from switch stimuli. In contrast, for repeat stimuli the concept of randomness appears to roughly coincide with perceptual discriminability. Finally, the ability to identify or produce stimuli as random did not co-vary with the ability to discriminate random from non-random stimuli. (shrink)

In this paper we compare two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality. One theory, proposed by Sripada and Stich (forthcoming), posits an interlocking set of innate mechanisms that internalize moral norms from the surrounding community and generate intrinsic motivation to comply with these norms and to punish violators. The other theory, which we call the M/C model was suggested by the widely discussed and influential work of Elliott Turiel, Larry Nucci and others on the “moral/conventional task”. This theory posits (...) two distinct mental domains, the moral and the conventional, each of which gives rise to a characteristic suite of judgments about rules in that domain and about transgressions of those rules. We give an overview of both theories and of the data each was designed to explain. We go on to consider a growing body of evidence that suggests the M/C model is mistaken. That same evidence, however, is consistent with the Sripada and Stich theory. Thus, we conclude that the M/C model does not pose a serious challenge for the Sripada and Stich theory. (shrink)

This book is a study of the role of intellect in human action as described by Thomas Aquinas. One of its primary aims is to compare the interpretation of Aristotle by Aquinas with the lines of interpretation offered in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. The book seeks to clarify the problems involved in the appropriation of Aristotle's theory by a Christian theologian, including such topics as the practical syllogism and the problems of akrasia. Westberg argues that Aquinas was much closer to Aristotle (...) than is often recognized, and he puts forward important new interpretations of the relation of intellect and will in the stages of intention, deliberation, decision, and execution. In the concluding section of the book, he shows how this new interpretation yields fruitful insights on a range of theological topics, including sin, law, love, and the moral virtues. (shrink)

It has been remarked, my Hermippus, that though the ancient philosophers conveyed most of their instruction in the form of dialogue, this method of composition has been little practised in later ages, and has seldom succeeded in the hands of those who have attempted it. Accurate and regular argument, indeed, such as is now expected of philosophical enquirers, naturally throws a man into the methodical and didactic manner; where he can immediately, without preparation, explain the point at which he aims; (...) and thence proceed, without interruption, to deduce the proofs on which it is established. To deliver a SYSTEM in conversation, scarcely appears natural; and while the dialogue-writer desires, by departing from the direct style of composition, to give a freer air to his performance, and avoid the appearance of Author and Reader, he is apt to run into a worse inconvenience, and convey the image of Pedagogue and Pupil. Or, if he carries on the dispute in the natural spirit of good company, by throwing in a variety of topics, and preserving a proper balance among the speakers, he often loses so much time in preparations and transitions, that the reader will scarcely think himself compensated, by all the graces of dialogue, for the order, brevity, and precision, which are sacrificed to them. (shrink)

The role of the facilitator within Communities of Philosophical Inquiry has often been allocated to structuring group interactions and/or affirming participants' contributions. In this paper, however, it will be argued that facilitators must take a far more active role in dialogue than has hereto been recognized. This is the case because, when left to its own devices, CPI dialogue often devolves into mere opinion tourism, becomes obscure, and/or is drowned by an excess of irrelevant content. It will be argued that (...) these effects, in turn, pose a serious threat to agent investment. That is, by muddying dialogue, these effects can sever the link between agents' motivational sets and the subject matter at hand and, consequently, may cause agents to internally disengage from the discussion underway. Given the danger that unchecked dialogue poses to agent investment, it will be argued that facilitators must be vigilant in attending to the health of the linguistic environment that both they themselves and participants occupy. That is, it will be argued that facilitators have a responsibility to care for participants by intervening in dialogue and pushing for rigour and clarity. This ecocentric model of care, interestingly, often directly contends with the more intuitive, or biocentric position, that a facilitator must directly care for participants affective or emotional welfare by celebrating their contributions for contribution's sake. Instead, it suggests that facilitators can indirectly care for participants by strategically prompting them to make their contributions logically sound, concise and clear. Moreover, this ecocentric perspective also conflicts with the often purported view that a facilitator is a temporary figure that should eventually become obsolete in a CPI. To the contrary, the ecocentric perspective suggests that a facilitator's role is indispensable to a CPI's success, insofar as it helps create and maintain the necessary conditions for agent investment, and helps ensure the continued health of the linguistic ecosystem, upon which everybody's welfare crucially depends. (shrink)

Can Rawls’s theory provide a framework for assessing obligations to future generations? Extending the veil of ignorance so that participants in the original position do not know to which generation they belong appears to fail in this endeavour. Earlier generations cannot improve their situation by “cooperating” with later generations. Such circumstances, lacking mutuality, leave no room for an agreement or contract. Nevertheless, the original position can be reconstructed so as to model relations of mutuality between generations even if these are (...) absent from the real world. This chapter assesses earlier attempts to do this and provides a rationale for viewing the just savings principle as a clause in the full formulation of the difference principle. (shrink)

In the history of ideas, innumerable attempts to explain life and to define living activities have invoked the notion of the soul. Yet this theoretical entity seems to be an unfathomable thing. Difficulties beset the mere definition of it, and controversies span from whether the soul is a material body or an immaterial form, an immortal or a mortal thing, a subject of experiential or of theoretical knowledge, to the question of whether it is the subject of a specific discipline (...) or rather of a scientia de anima that, in the Aristotelian tradition, was also regarded as a part of natural philosophy—the field of philosophy that deals with natural particulars. Not only was the soul thought, from a theological angle, to define the unity and unicity of living beings, but it was also seen as the source of several bodily activities such as nutrition and growth in living beings. And since some of the beings that grow and nourish themselves also sense and think, the relation of the origin of vegetative powers to the origin of perceptual and intellectual powers has always been an object of debate. In this sense, the soul has not just been a topic of one specific field, but has rather drawn upon many disciplines, combining the work of philosophers, religious thinkers, physicians, naturalists, chymists, and so on, thereby blurring the boundaries between different fields of knowledge. Botanical treatises of the Renaissance, for example, begin with the definition of the soul of plants and its primary role in bringing forth vegetal activities. Indeed, the presence of the soul was thought to be involved also in the life of animals, human beings, and, in some cases, it was even ascribed to minerals and stones, not to speak of the world-soul, the latent idea that the entire cosmos is animated with a soul. Furthermore, the theory of the materiality of the soul was developed since Antiquity and found new momentum in early modern times, in the reappraisal of Epicurean ideas by thinkers such as Guillaume Lamy, Pierre Gassendi, and Julian Offray de La Mettrie. Yet, with the Cartesian Henricus Regius, the understanding of vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls as material importantly surfaces as a peculiar attempt to mechanize the living functions of bodies. (shrink)

In slapstick comedy, the worst thing that could happen usually does: The person with a sore toe manages to stub it, sometimes twice. Such errors also arise in daily life, and research traces the tendency to do precisely the worst thing to ironic processes of mental control. These monitoring processes keep us watchful for errors of thought, speech, and action and enable us to avoid the worst thing in most situations, but they also increase the likelihood of such errors when (...) we attempt to exert control under mental load (stress, time pressure, or distraction). Ironic errors in attention and memory occur with identifiable brain activity and prompt recurrent unwanted thoughts; attraction to forbidden desires; expression of objectionable social prejudices; production of movement errors; and rebounds of negative experiences such as anxiety, pain, and depression. Such ironies can be overcome when effective control strategies are deployed and mental load is minimized. (shrink)