Addressing vaccination hesitancy is a major challenge in the fight against infectious disease. Vaccine hesitancy has given rise to recent outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases (e.g., measles) in developed countries. In developed regions, particularly Europe and North America non-structural barriers to vaccination such as risk perceptions and philosophical beliefs seem to play a crucial role in vaccination uptake (Larson et al. 2014), and also contribute to current vaccine hesitancy with regard to COVID-19. To combat these developments, understanding psychological factors in (...) vaccination hesitancy is increasingly important. A better understanding of these psychological factors in turn points to communication strategies that can reduce vaccine hesitancy. These strategies depend upon individuals’ possession of capacities that are required for morally responsible agency (“responsibility-level capacities”), and in particular the capacities to recognize and respond to reasons. Strategic communication concerning vaccines can improve the exercise of individuals’ responsibility-level capacities as they pertain to risk perception and outcome expectancies. We begin by introducing cutting-edge work from the philosophical literature on agency and responsibility, with a special focus on the responsibility-level capacities at work in the practical context of deciding whether to vaccinate. We then summarize lessons drawn from a variety of studies in psychology and behavioural economics on how individuals reason, decide, and behave in these practical contexts. These lessons help illuminate the extent to which individuals exercise responsibility-level capacities in such contexts while also pointing to strategies that can improve the exercise of those capacities. (shrink)

Identifying, classifying, and analyzing arguments in legal discourse has been a prominent area of research since the inception of the argument mining field. However, there has been a major discrepancy between the way natural language processing (NLP) researchers model and annotate arguments in court decisions and the way legal experts understand and analyze legal argumentation. While computational approaches typically simplify arguments into generic premises and claims, arguments in legal research usually exhibit a rich typology that is important for gaining insights (...) into the particular case and applications of law in general. We address this problem and make several substantial contributions to move the field forward. First, we design a new annotation scheme for legal arguments in proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that is deeply rooted in the theory and practice of legal argumentation research. Second, we compile and annotate a large corpus of 373 court decisions (2.3M tokens and 15k annotated argument spans). Finally, we train an argument mining model that outperforms state-of-the-art models in the legal NLP domain and provide a thorough expert-based evaluation. All datasets and source codes are available under open lincenses athttps://github.com/trusthlt/mining-legal-arguments. (shrink)

Therapeutic strategies capable of inducing and enhancing prosthesis embodiment are a key point for better adaptation to and acceptance of prosthetic limbs. In this study, we developed a training protocol using an EMG-based human-machine interface that was applied in the preprosthetic rehabilitation phase of people with amputation. This is a case series with the objective of evaluating the induction and enhancement of the embodiment of a virtual prosthesis. Six men and a woman with unilateral transfemoral traumatic amputation without previous use (...) of prostheses participated in the study. Participants performed a training protocol with the EMG-based HMI, composed of six sessions held twice a week, each lasting 30 mins. This system consisted of myoelectric control of the movements of a virtual prosthesis immersed in a 3D virtual environment. Additionally, vibrotactile stimuli were provided on the participant’s back corresponding to the movements performed. Embodiment was investigated from the following set of measurements: skin conductance response, crossmodal congruency effect, ability to control the virtual prosthesis, and reports before and after the training. The increase in the skin conductance response in conditions where the virtual prosthesis was threatened, recalibration of the peripersonal space perception identified by the crossmodal congruency effect, ability to control the virtual prosthesis, and participant reports consistently showed the induction and enhancement of virtual prosthesis embodiment. Therefore, this protocol using EMG-based HMI was shown to be a viable option to achieve and enhance the embodiment of a virtual prosthetic limb. (shrink)

Bruineberg et al. provide compelling clarity on the roles Markov blankets could (and perhaps should) play in the study of life and mind. However, here we draw attention to a further role blankets might play: as a hypothesis about cognition itself. People and other animals may use blanket-like representations to model the boundary between themselves and their worlds.

Przekaz legendarnego Orfeusza już przez autorów starożytnych identyfikowany był z niejasną i trudną symboliką. Język ten, pomimo swojej niejasności, był najlepszą drogą do komunikacji pomiędzy bogami a ludźmi. Niniejszy artykuł jest kolejną próbą, na podstawie starożytnych przekazów, współczesnej literatury krytycznej i refleksji autora, opisania orfizmu: starożytnego fenomenu łączącego ze sobą przekaz religijny, filozoficzny, antropologię i teologię. Zjawisko to wciąż nie jest dostatecznie rozumiane, mimo, że odgrywa kluczową rolę w kształtowaniu się mentalności i duchowości współczesnego człowieka. Orfizm jako starożytna via-religia do (...) zbawienia i samopoznania wymaga nieustających studiów bazujących wyłącznie na oryginalnych greckich tekstach, stanowiących niezgłębioną kopalnię wiedzy na temat religijności starożytnych Greków. (shrink)

Hertwig and Ortmann (H&O) rightly criticize the usage of deception. However, stationary replication may often have no ecological validity. Many economic experiments are not interactive; when they are, there is not much specifically validating H&O's psychological views on script enactment. Incentives in specific market structures may scaffold even zero rational decision-making, but this says very little about individual psychology.

Ernst Brücke’s 1861 essay Die Elementarorganismen has often been cited as a watershed in the history of physiology as well as in the history of cell theory. In its time it was widely read as a reform of animal cell theory, shifting the concept of the cell away from Schleiden and Schwann’s original cell schema of a membranous vesicle with a nucleus, and towards the protoplasm theory that had developed in botany, centered on the cell’s living contents. It was also (...) notorious for its arguments against the necessity of both the nucleus and the cell membrane. An English translation of “The Elementary Organisms” is presented for the first time in this journal issue, with annotations and illustrations, doi:10.1007/s10739-024-09773-9. Brücke’s essay was not only an intervention into cell theory: historians can read it as a continuation of debates on the nature of the organism and theories of organization, and as an epistemological meditation on the microscope. In addition, although Brücke was known as a founder of the Berlin school of organic physics, “The Elementary Organisms” shows how he combined an avant-garde physicalist physiology with a much older tradition of comparative anatomy and physiology. The following introductory essay will provide a scientific biography of Ernst Brücke up to 1863, with background on debates on biological organization, cell theory, and muscle histology. (shrink)

Identity, Morality, and Threat offers a critical examination of the social psychological processes that generate outgroup devaluation and ingroup glorification as the source of conflict. Daniel Rothbart and Karyna Korostelina bring together essays analyzing the causal relationship between escalating violence and opposing images of the Self and Other.

If rhetoric is the art of speaking, who is listening? In Being-Moved, Daniel M. Gross provides an answer, showing when and where the art of speaking parted ways with the art of listening-and what happens when they intersect once again. Much in the history of rhetoric must be rethought along the way. And much of this rethinking pivots around Martin Heidegger's early lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric, where his famous topic, Being, gives way to being-moved. The results, Gross goes on (...) to show, are profound. Listening to the gods, listening to the world around us, and even listening to one another in the classroom-all of these experiences become different when rhetoric is reoriented from the voice to the ear. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 308-321 [Access article in PDF] Early Modern Emotion and the Economy of Scarcity 1 - [PDF] Daniel M. Gross Where do we get the idea that emotion is kind of excess, something housed in our nature aching for expression? In part, I argue, from The Passions of the Soul (1649), wherein Descartes proposed the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that informs both romantic expressivism (...) and latter-day psychology. Indeed, one goal of this article is simply to recall that we do not just naturally express emotions generated in our amygdala or wherever, but rather that we are first constituted as expressive agents by what the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment called "social passions." Contrary, however, to these largely optimistic philosophers, such as Hutcheson and Smith, who anchored social passions in a moral sense equally shared by all, I argue that the constitutive power of emotion derives from their unequal distribution. In what follows I work primarily with Aristotle's Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a "political economy" wherein passions are (1) constituted as differences in power and (2) conditioned not by their excess but by their scarcity. Though we may reject the political conclusions reached by Aristotle and Hobbes, their analysis of emotion allows us to address important political questions neutralized in the Cartesian paradigm. 1. Descartes If you are tickled to learn that Aztec culture located passions in the liver, here is something at least as quaint from Descartes: "The ultimate and most proximate cause of the passions of the soul is none other than the agitation with which the spirits move the little gland which is in the middle of the [End Page 308] brain," that is, the pineal gland. Or so Descartes proposes in his 1649 treatise on the passions composed for Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Now compare this to Aristotle's Rhetoric, where for instance anger is defined as "desire, accompanied by distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one" (1378a 31-33). For Aristotle anger may indeed be accompanied by physical distress, as in the boiling of blood expressed in crimson cheeks, but its proximate cause is anything but that little gland in the middle of the head. Anger is a deeply social passion provoked by perceived slightsunjustified, and it presupposes a public stage where social status is always subject to performative infelicities.Indeed, we can learn a good deal about the rhetoric of human nature in early-modern Europe simply by asking what passions were. When we do, we find not only that their descriptions disagree, but also that the things described as passions seem incommensurable. Are passions tangible "things" residing in the soul, or are they dispositions of the heart or beliefs of the mind? Is passion a matter of personal expression, or is it something essentially social that a person performs? Do they come from our interior, or from the things we perceive? Can they be measured and manipulated--their causes controlled--or do passions elude control by their very nature? Are they divine, diabolical, or human, and can we distinguish them according to the status of their origin? Are they the enabling condition of virtue or its enemy? Are they necessary or disposable? What is their number and what do they do? Exasperated by endless wrangling over such questions, Descartes complains: There is nothing in which the defective nature of the sciences which we have received from the ancients appears more clearly than in what they have written on the passions; for although this is a matter which has at all times been the object of much investigation, and though it would not appear to be one of the most difficult, inasmuch as since everyone has experience of the passions within himself, there is no necessity to borrow one's observations from elsewhere in order to discover their nature. (331) 2With this preliminary remark Descartes renders human nature in its quintessential modern form: it is something housed in a body subject to the self-evidence... (shrink)

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Pages de début Introduction Chapitre I. L'Origine des Espèces Chapitre II. Les sciences de la nature avant Darwin Chapitre III. La naissance d'une théorie : découverte et implications Chapitre IV. Progrès et évolution avant l'origine des espèces (...) Chapitre V. La théologie victorienne Chapitre VI. Les polémiques Chapitre VII. Triomphe et déclin du positivisme évolutionniste 1860-1900 Chapitre VIII. La religion victorienne etl'évolutionnisme Chapitre IX Bibliographie Index auteurs Pages de fin. (shrink)

Let me first thank the critics for their insightful contributions to the debate. I hesitate to call the three professors “critics” since the areas of agreement may outweigh the areas of disagreement. But I should focus on areas of disagreement to further the debate, and that’s what I’ll try to do here. I’ll begin with a few remarks about methodology, then attempt to clarify my own view regarding democracy with “Confucian characteristics,” and my response will conclude with some reflections on (...) alternative proposals. On Methodology Professor Dallmayr worries that my book is primarily addressed to an East Asian audience and to those who can affect the lives of East Asians. But I wonder why this intent should be viewed as “reinforcing Asian parochialism”? (shrink)

Would you want to be operated on by a surgeon trained at a medical school that did not evaluate its students? Would you want to fly in a plane designed by people convinced that the laws of physics are socially constructed? Would you want to be tried by a legal system indifferent to the distinction between fact and fiction? These questions may seem absurd, but there are theories being seriously advanced by radical multiculturalists that force us to ask such questions. (...) These scholars assert that such concepts as truth and merit are inextricably racist and sexist, that reason and objectivity are merely sophisticated masks for ideological bias, and that reality itself is nothing more than socially constructed mechanism for preserving the power of the ruling elite. In Beyond All Reason, liberal legal scholars Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry mount the first systematic critique of radical multiculturalism as a form of legal scholarship. Beginning with an incisive overview of the origins and basic tenets of radical multiculturalism, the authors critically examine the work of Derrick Bell, Catherine MacKinnon, Patricia Williams, and Richard Delgado, and explore the alarming implications of their theories. Farber and Sherry push these theories to their logical conclusions and show that radical multiculturalism is destructive of the very goals it wishes to affirm. If, for example, the concept of advancement based on merit is fraudulent, as the multiculturalists claim, the disproportionate success of Jews and Asians in our culture becomes difficult to explain without opening the door to age-old anti-Semitic and racist stereotypes. If historical and scientific truths are entirely relative social constructs, then Holocaust denial becomes merely a matter of perspective, and Creationism has as much "validity" as evolution. The authors go on to show that rather than promoting more dialogue, the radical multiculturalist preferences for legal storytelling and identity politics over reasoned argument produces an insular set of positions that resist open debate. Indeed, radical multiculturalists cannot critically examine each others' ideas without incurring vehement accusations of racism and sexism, much less engage in fruitful discussion with a mainstream that does not share their assumptions. Here again, Farber and Sherry show that the end result of such thinking is not freedom but a kind of totalitarianism where dissent cannot be tolerated and only the naked will to power remains to settle differences. Sharply written and brilliantly argued, this book is itself a model of the kind of clarity, civility, and dispassionate critical thinking which the authors seek to preserve from the attacks of the radical multiculturalists. With far-reaching implications for such issues as government control of hate speech and pornography, affirmative action, legal reform, and the fate of all minorities, Beyond All Reason is a provocative contribution to one of the most important controversies of our time. (shrink)

This article examines Thomas Hobbes’s notorious claim that “fear and liberty are consistent” and therefore that agreements coerced by threat of violence are binding. This view is to a surprising extent inherited from Aristotle, but its political implications became especially striking in the wake of the English Civil War, and Hobbes recast his theory in far-reaching ways between his early works and Leviathan to accommodate it. I argue that Hobbes’s account of coercion is both philosophically safe from the most common (...) objections to it and politically superior to the seemingly commonsensical alternatives that we have inherited from Hobbes’s critics. (shrink)

This book studies geoethics in Latin America and offers comprehensive research on geoethics and geoeducation. Its respective chapters explore geoethics in relation to UNESCO geoparks, mining activities in Latin America, natural hazards and risk management. Geoethics is a key discipline in the field of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and not only includes scientific, technological, methodological and social-cultural aspects, but also addresses the need to consider appropriate protocols, scientific integrity issues and a code of good practice when studying the abiotic world. (...) The position of Latin America’s recently created geoethics associations is based on protection of the environment, together with a reassurance that the balance of nature and the rights of human beings to enjoy it will be preserved. (shrink)

The essay analyses the development of Joseph de Maistre’s ideas on war and peace. Commonly seen as advocating militarism and bloodshed, Maistre’s insights and propositions on the nature of war are in fact highly modern and original. As a witness to the European upheaval of 1792-1815, Maistre emphasizes the indeterminacy and unpredictability of modern war, and its irreducibility to a science or a doctrine. In order to regulate and restrain warfare, Maistre argues, it is necessary to cultivate public opinion, an (...) elusive and difficult process which can only be sustained by informal cultural institutions. The essay also examines the legacy of Maistre’s ideas on war and peace in political thought. (shrink)

Draft of a paper for the Sinn und Bedeutung 14 conference. Explains how to capture the link between conditionals the probability of indicative conditionals and conditional probability using a classical semantics for conditionals. (Note: some introductory material is shared with a twin paper, "Capturing the Relationship Between Conditionals and Conditional Probability with a Trivalent Semantics".).

Although Popper rarely examined the “life of the laboratory” , some of his epistemic doctrines reveal important themes about knowledge‐acquisition in the laboratory sciences. In particular, when modern instruments are needed for exploring the subatomic realm, empirical evidence is dispositional in a Popperian sense. Evidence is defined conditionally with respect to a complex system of technological apparatus and theoretical judgments.After summarizing certain elements of Popper's epistemology , the character of observation in the laboratory sciences is explored . A conception of (...) property as capacities is then developed . This conception of property is applicable to empirical studies using modem scientific instruments, as information‐processing systems. (shrink)

This paper is about pragmatic explanations of certain linguistic phenomenon based on Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. According to Grice’s theory, audiences draw inferences about what the speaker is trying to convey based on the idea that the speaker is following certain maxims governing conversation. Such explanations of the inferences audiences make about the speaker play a central role in many parts of philosophy of language and linguistics.

Moral injury names how the lived experience of armed conflict can damage an individual's ethical foundations, often with serious consequences. While the term has gained increasing acceptance for the clinical treatment of veterans and as a means of better understanding the impact of war, it is generally applied to individualized trauma. As part of the roundtable, “Moral Injury, Trauma, and War,” this essay argues that moral injury is also a useful means of addressing political violence at a societal level. It (...) explores the term's value within international human rights discourse and practice, particularly in efforts to document and analyze the systematic commission of atrocities to achieve accountability and reconciliation. The essay presents field research among Iraqi human rights investigators as a means of reflecting on the value of rediscovering agency in the aftermath of societal trauma. In this way, moral injury provides guidance on the essential ethical qualities of the lived experience of violent repression, an issue central to a more complete understanding of international affairs. (shrink)

Resumo : O objetivo deste artigo será o de tentar verificar qual a relação de Willard Van Orman Quine com a teoria deflacionária da verdade. Para tanto, começaremos com o exame dos portadores de verdade, com a intenção de saber a opinião de Quine sobre qual, dentre outros, seria o verdadeiro portador ou veículo da verdade, ou seja, saber, segundo Quine, de que dizemos ser verdadeiro ou falso. Reduziremos nosso exame às sentenças e proposições, e uma vez identificado o portador (...) de verdade escolhido por nosso filósofo aqui em questão, a saber, a sentença , faremos uma breve apresentação das terias “deflacionárias” e “da correspondência” no que diz respeito à verdade. Por fim, com base em tal apresentação, trataremos de identificar a posição quiniana no que se refere à verdade e, consequentemente, sua relação com o deflacionismo. (shrink)

How is Nature Possible?: Kant's Project in the First Critique presents a clear and systematic appraisal of what is perhaps the most difficult treatise in the philosophical canon. Daniel N. Robinson situates Kant's undertaking in the First Critique within the context of the history of philosophy and as a response to the challenges of scepticism. Kant's central task in the First Critique is to tie his metaphysical analysis to the very possibility of nature itself. Where others assumed the validity (...) or the weakness of perception and reason, Kant presents a critical appraisal of both, thereby establishing the very limits of sense and reason as instruments of discovery. Ideal for students at all levels, this fascinating introduction clarifies the aims and significance of Kant's project, locates its place within the history of philosophy and identifies the strengths and weaknesses reasonably attributed to this most significant contribution to the history of philosophical reflection. (shrink)

The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 1, Ancient Science. Edited by Alexander Jones and Liba Taub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xix + 642. $160.

Im Großstadtdiskurs um 1900 spielte die Frage, ob das sensorische Regime der urbanen Moderne lediglich alte Lebensrhythmen auflösten oder auch neue hervorbrachte, eine zentrale Rolle. Der Essay verfolgt zwei unterschiedliche Antworten auf diese Frage einerseits in der Kultursoziologie Georg Simmels und andererseits in der Geräuschkunst des italienischen Futurismus und stellt sie einander gegenüber.

The present paper analyzes how the semantic and pragmatic functions of closed class categories, or grammatical morphemes (i.e., inflections and function words), organize discourse processing. Grammatical morphemes tend to express a small set of conceptual distinctions that organize a wide range of objects and relations, usually expressed by content or open class words (i.e., nouns and verbs), into situations anchored to a discourse context. Therefore, grammatical morphemes and content words cooperate in guiding the construction of a situation model during discourse (...) comprehension by specifying complementary aspects of described situations. The paper reviews and extends analytical and empirical evidence for this grammatical‐conceptual correspondence, and suggests that the correspondence developed in response to the cognitive demands of discourse processing. Thus the distinction between open and closed linguistic categories is interpreted in terms of a fundamental correspondence between conceptual and linguistic structure that helps organize discourse processing. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

Present from the start in Western thought, interrogations concerning the nature and potentialities of the human intellect in its relation to the world are still very rich today. Vladimir Jankélévitch, inspired by Bergson, offers a critical diagnosis of the intellect, even while expanding on the notion of intuition. We compare that analysis to Aristotle’s, especially in the De Anima, as reread by contemporary thinkers, hoping to draw from it whatever might shed light on our present-day debates.