Ik kan de zeepokken niet vinden. Het is een warme zaterdagnamiddag in september, ik ben net aangekomen op het eiland en loop langs het water in de haven. Ik ben hier bijna twintig jaar niet geweest." In 'Vuurduin' gaat Eva Meijer een week naar Vlieland, op zoek naar wat verdwijnt. Het ecosysteem van de wadden staat onder druk, maar er liggen ook delen van haar eigen geschiedenis op het eiland, stukken tijd die nooit meer terugkomen. Alles verdwijnt natuurlijk: familie, geliefden, (...) huisdieren, gebeurtenissen. En de natuurlijke wereld laat ons zien dat dat erbij hoort - het is de stof waar we uit geweven zijn. Tegelijkertijd verdwijnt de levende wereld waarin dit alles ingebed is zelf in razende vaart: diersoorten sterven uit, ecosystemen gaan eraan, de permafrost smelt, onze winters worden herfst. Met behulp van schrijvers, filosofen, kunstenaars en hond Doris gaat Meijer op zoek naar de juiste woorden voor dit verlies, en voor wat we ertegenover kunnen zetten"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

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Robots are increasingly envisaged as our future cohabitants. However, while considerable progress has been made in recent years in terms of their technological realization, the ability of robots to inter-act with humans in an intuitive and social way is still quite limited. An important challenge for social robotics is to determine how to design robots that can perceive the user’s needs, feelings, and intentions, and adapt to users over a broad range of cognitive abilities. It is conceivable that if robots (...) were able to adequately demonstrate this, humans would eventually accept them as social companions. We argue that the best way to achieve this is using a systematic experimental approach based on behavioral and physiological neuroscience methods such as motion/eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), or functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) embedded in interactive human-robot paradigms. This approach requires understanding how humans interact with each other, how they perform tasks together and how they develop feelings of social connection over time, and using these insights to formulate design principles that make social robots attuned to the workings of the human brain. In this review, we put forward the argument that the likelihood of artificial agents being perceived as social companions can be increased by designing them in a way that they are perceived as intentional agents that activate areas in the human brain involved in social-cognitive processing. We first review literature related to social-cognitive mechanisms involved in human-human interactions, and high-light the importance of perceiving others as intentional agents to activate these brain areas. We then discuss how attribution of intentionality can positively affect human-robot interaction by (a) fostering feelings of social connection, empathy and prosociality, and by (b) enhancing performance on joint human-robot tasks. Lastly, we describe circumstances under which attribution of intentionality to robot agents might be disadvantageous, and discuss challenges associated with designing social robots that are inspired by neuroscientific principles. (shrink)

In this paper it will be shown that the Beth definability property corresponds to surjectiveness of epimorphisms in abstract algebraic logic. This generalizes a result by I. Németi (cf. [11, Theorem 5.6.10]). Moreover, an equally general characterization of the weak Beth property will be given. This gives a solution to Problem 14 in [20]. Finally, the characterization of the projective Beth property for varieties of modal algebras by L. Maksimova (see [15]) will be shown to hold for the larger class (...) of semantically algebraizable logics. (shrink)

Schupbach and Sprenger introduce a novel probabilistic approach to measuring the explanatory power that a given explanans exerts over a corresponding explanandum. Though we are sympathetic to their general approach, we argue that it does not adequately capture the way in which the causal explanatory power that c exerts on e varies with background knowledge. We then amend their approach so that it does capture this variance. Though our account of explanatory power is less ambitious than Schupbach and Sprenger’s in (...) the sense that it is limited to causal explanatory power, it is also more ambitious because we do not limit its domain to cases where c genuinely explains e. Instead, we claim that c causally explains e if and only if our account says that c explains e with some positive amount of causal explanatory power. (shrink)

Among the various human forms alluded to in the Hebrew prayer, mental retardation appears to be one of the most difficult to celebrate. It is the disability that other disabled persons do not want attributed to them. It is the disability for which prospective parents are most likely to use selective abortion (Wertz 2000). And it is the disability that prompted one of the most illustrious United States Supreme Court Justices to endorse forced sterilization, because "three generations of imbeciles are (...) enough." The mentally retarded have at times been objects of pity, compassion, or abuse by their caretakers and society at large. But they have rarely been seen as subjects, as citizens, as persons with equal entitlement to fulfillment. (shrink)

The technique of imaging was first introduced by Lewis, in order to provide a novel account of the probability of conditional propositions. In the intervening years, imaging has been the object of significant interest in both AI and philosophy, and has come to be seen as a philosophically important approach to probabilistic updating and belief revision. In this paper, we consider the possibility of generalising imaging to deal with uncertain evidence and partial belief revision. In particular, we introduce a new (...) logical criterion that any update rule should satisfy, and use it to evaluate a range of different approaches to generalising imaging to situations involving uncertain evidence. We show that none of the currently prevalent approaches to imaging allow for such a generalisation, although a lesser known version of imaging, introduced by Joyce, can be generalised in a way that mitigates these problems. (shrink)

Nach Erläuterung der wesentlichen Begriffe wie „Emotion“ und „Gefühl“ stellt Eva-Maria Engelen die wichtigsten theoretischen Ansätze vor. Dabei spielen sowohl Theorien aus der Philosophie, der Psychologie als auch aus den Neurowissenschaften eine wichtige Rolle. Geklärt wird in weiteren Kapiteln das Verhältnis von Gefühlen und Emotionen zum Verstand, zum Bewusstsein und zu Werten.

Time and the body -- Time and the mind -- Time and culture -- Time in our time.

The problem of the character in literature is today one of the most pressing in Marxist-Leninist esthetics. Discussions over the category "character" never cease.

Recent policy debates in the US over access to mental health care have raised several philosophically complex ethical and conceptual issues. The defeat of mental health parity legislation in the US Congress has brought new urgency and relevance to theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of mental illness and its relation to other forms of sickness and disability. Manifold, nebulous, and often competing conceptions of mental illness make the creation of coherent public policy exceedingly difficult. Referencing a variety of (...) approaches to ethical reflection on health care, and drawing from the empirical literature on therapeutic efficacy and economic efficiency, we argue that differential rationing, ‘disparity,’ is unjustifiable. (shrink)

There is a long-standing debate regarding the nature of the relationship between emotions and consciousness. Majority of existing computational models of emotions largely avoid the issue, and generally do not explicitly address distinctions between the conscious and the unconscious components of emotions. This paper highlights the importance of developing an adequately differentiated vocabulary describing the mental states of interest, and their features and components, for the development of computational models of the relationships between emotions and consciousness. We discuss current psychological (...) theories of emotion, highlighting specific points in the affective processes where links exist with consciousness, and possible roles played by each. We discuss examples of models that are beginning to address components of the interface between emotions and consciousness: models of social emotions, requiring explicit representations of the self; models of affective biases on attention; models of emotion and metacognition; and models of emotion regulation. We conclude with a discussion of some of the challenges associated with modeling mental states whose core distinguishing characteristic is an awareness of affective feelings, and highlight the importance of integrating the diverse approaches to emotion research and modeling currently existing within psychology and neuroscience. (shrink)

Women's activities and relations to men are persistent metaphors for man's projects. I query the prominence of these and the lack of equivalent metaphors where men are the metaphoric vehicle for women and women's activities. Women's role as metaphor results from her otherness and her relational and mediational importance in men's lives. Otherness, mediation, and relation characterize the role of metaphor in language and thought. This congruence between metaphor and women makes the metaphor of woman especially potent in man's conceptual (...) economy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Learning Music:Embodied Experience in the Life-WorldEva Alerby and Cecilia FermIn the present age, which is often signified as post-modern or knowledge-intensive, the calls for learning echo loud. Discussions of learning, as well as teaching, permeate almost all levels and arenas of our society, and have a sure place in every-day conversation as well as scientific debate. The concept of learning can be understood and explained in many different ways. (...) Our intention in this article is to make visible and discuss how learning music can be understood and explained from a life-world approach.By life-world approach we mean that learning is constituted by the experiences that we are having in the world. From that perspective it can be seen as a process which leads to some kind of change, whose utmost purpose is—consciously or unconsciously—to create meaning and make managing the world possible. In addition, we stress that learning does not arise nor is formed in a vacuum, but instead is found in complex contexts. In turn this creates the necessity of making learning situated and contextualized.1How one understands how music is learned is consequently influenced not only by what fundamental assumptions one holds about learning but also by prevailing views of music. Furthermore, how musical ability is regarded and whether musicality is accepted as an emotional or cognitive phenomenon is also [End Page 177] important. Other assumptions that need to be considered are whether or not it is possible to divide musicality into smaller parts and if that is the case, what is the relationship between these parts. One further question that has to be illuminated is the question about biological and social influences on musicality.2 According to Sture Brändström,3 musicality is sometimes divided into two categories—absolute contra relativistic musicality. The first category implies that musicality is regarded as a native ability, already existing within the human being, an ability that some people have and others lack. The second category reflects an approach that assumes that musicality is something everybody can acquire, it can be learned and appropriated. We will return later to this issue.These questions reveal a dualistic approach, specifically: whether musicality is an emotional or a cognitive phenomenon, or absolute or relative, which in turn leads to the question of whether or not learning music is constituted within or outside the human being. To expose problems related to this dualistic approach in music education, we will examine musical learning using life-world phenomenology as a theoretical framework, a brief description of which follows.Phenomenology: A Way of ThinkingAt the turn into the twentieth century, the German philosopher, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), named his philosophical approach phenomenology, and with that the development of modern phenomenology began. Phenomenology is both a method and a way of thought.4 He distinguished the fundamental principle of phenomenology as—'back to the things themselves.' According to Husserl it is through experiences that we gain access to things themselves. The concept of experience was essential to his formulation, and it became a key signature for the whole of phenomenology. His starting-point was how the world is experienced in a subjective way, and the aim was to find a way to describe the meaning of these subjective experiences. In other words, phenomenology has been summarized as a description of how the world is experienced by the person in the world.Various thinkers have interpreted phenomenology in different ways. Jan Bengtsson5 emphasized that phenomenological method should be named in the plural as methods. The phenomenology of the life-world, which was developed as an alternative to the so-called epoché, the special method of transcendental phenomenology, is a philosophy of the life-world without transcendental reduction. It is the life-world that constitutes the basis of our lives. It is the everyday world of our experiences, which we take for granted and where we live our lives. In other words it is the life-world that constitutes people's being-in-the-world.6 Through our existence we experience the concrete world in all its complexity, which is both historically and contextually dependent. Consequently... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I propose that examining Locke’s response to skepticism requires us to consider at least three distinct senses in which skepticism appears on the horizon of the Essay. Skepticism is addressed, directly or indirectly, (i) as a general outcome of philosophical inquiry, (ii) as a methodical decision to doubt, and also (iii) as the result of a particular problem that challenges the claim to knowledge. I think that by examining how Locke reacts to such issues, we get (...) a more accurate and nuanced picture of Locke’s relationship to skeptical philosophy. (shrink)

To what extent can philosophy speak to and write about what is most fundamental to itself? This essay sorts through aspects of the problem of Plato's alleged "unwritten doctrine." The essay begins by moving back to Plato's teacher and the non-doctrinal investigations of Socrates, which are grounded in the positing of hypotheses and dialogic questioning. Following this move, the essay turns forward to Plotinus's later, more systematic presentations where the use of terms like “the one” and “the good” are not (...) only beyond being but “are” non-objects, unable to be intuited by the intellect. These terms serve as pointers to “what” can only be realized through the soul's blissful union with its non-objective source and ground. (shrink)

The impact of hysterectomy without oophorectomy and with no malignant purpose on body composition and postmenopausal weight gain was tested in 184 Viennese females aged between 47 and 57 years. Hysterectomized women were significantly heavier than those who experienced a spontaneous menopause. The amount of fat tissue, especially in the abdominal region, was significantly higher in hysterectomized women. Furthermore, they were reported to have experienced a significantly higher weight gain since menopause. No significant differences in bone mass were found. Psychological (...) stress factors and hormonal changes following hysterectomy are discussed as possible causes of these differences. (shrink)

Temporal dynamics have been increasingly recognized as an important component of facial expressions. With the need for appropriate stimuli in research and application, a range of databases of dynamic facial stimuli has been developed. The present article reviews the existing corpora and describes the key dimensions and properties of the available sets. This includes a discussion of conceptual features in terms of thematic issues in dataset construction as well as practical features which are of applied interest to stimulus usage. To (...) identify the most influential sets, we further examine their citation rates and usage frequencies in existing studies. General limitations and implications for emotion research are noted and future directions for stimulus generation are outlined. (shrink)

This paper presents results of a qualitative study focussed on reconstructingcurrent reception processes of Tibetan Buddhist teachings and practicesas well as its representatives by the Swiss public since the mid 1990’s. Byexamining public discourses on Tibetan Buddhism in Switzerland, the paperaddresses issues concerning the social construction, representation and (re-)production of cultural and religious difference. It is argued that public receptionand representation of Tibetan Buddhism in the media clearly – even if implicitly– reflects disputes about conceptions of one’s own religious, cultural (...) and nationalidentity as well as about collectively shared values. It is shown that publicdiscourse on Tibetan Buddhism in Switzerland is characterized by opposingtendencies: on the one hand, it is clearly dominated by well-known positiveimages and stereotypes, which might be regarded as elements of an establishedrepertoire of knowledge about Tibet, Tibetans and the “World Religion of Buddhism”and which are reproduced as a matter of course within public discussionson the topic. On the other hand, nevertheless, these dominant topoi arecurrently being questioned by various social actors and on various levels. Theseefforts at deconstructing popular images and perceptions of Tibetan cultural andreligious traditions, however, have relatively small impact on wider social processesof constructing religious and cultural alterity – not nearly as much, forexample, as the construction of an Islamic “Other” culminating in the minaretreferendum of 2009. (shrink)

As strategies of suspicion, skeptical philosophies are themselves suspicious. Despite of their routinely anti-systematic rhetoric, skeptics raise the suspicion of secretly playing into the hands of the ruling regime . In his book Skepticism and Epistemology: The Development and Application of the Skeptical Method in Philosophy, Tim Köhne argues at length that a stabilizing, affirmative trait in fact characterizes all argumentative strategies of radical skepticism, for in the final instance it is not doubt that motivates skepticism but instead the desire (...) for coherence or for a system that would rise beyond all doubt. (shrink)