From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher (...) had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe. (shrink)

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

Edmond Hiriartborde & Paul Fraisse, « Les Aptitudes rythmiques », Monographie française de psychologie, n° 14, 1968. - Psychologie.

Arguments about ethics often centre on traditional questions of, for instance, euthanasia and abortion. Whilst these questions are still in the foreground, recent years have seen an explosion of new moral problems. Moral and political clashes are now as likely to be about sexuality and gender and the status of refugees, immigrants and borders, or the ethics of social media, safe spaces, disability and robo-ethics. How should we approach these debates? What are the issues at stake? What are the most (...) persuasive arguments? Edited by best-selling philosophy author David Edmonds, Ethics and the Contemporary World assembles a star-studded line-up of philosophers to explore twenty-five of the most important ethical problems confronting us today. They engage with moral problems in race and gender, the environment, war and international relations, global poverty, ethics and social media, democracy, rights and moral status, and science and technology. Whether you want to learn more about the ethics of poverty, food, extremism, or artificial intelligence and enhancement, this book will help you understand the issues, sharpen your perspective and, hopefully, make up your own mind. P> Whether you want to learn more about the ethics of poverty, food, extremism, or artificial intelligence and enhancement, this book will help you understand the issues, sharpen your perspective and, hopefully, make up your own mind. (shrink)

This is a survey of the development of the philosophy of perception over the past twelve years. There are four sections. Part I deals largely with arguments for the propositionalizing of perception and for those types of externally founded realism that eschew inner representation. Part ii is devoted to three books that put the case for sense-Data (pennycuick, Jackson, Ginet) and some of the arguments against (pitcher). Part iii outlines james j gibson's psychological theory. Part iv takes up the arguments (...) for a theory of 'dual coding', Combining a non-Epistemic inner presentation as a first stage with epistemic selection as an independent module. The mental-Image argument (kosslyn, Pylyshyn) and wittgenstein's remarks on psychology, Recently published, Are brought in as relevant to this issue. (edited). (shrink)

Epistemologists frequently claim that the question “What should I believe?” demarcates the field of epistemology. This question is then compared to the question asked in ethics: “What should I do?” The question and the ensuing comparison, it is thought, specify both the content and the normativity at stake in epistemology. I argue that both of the assumptions embedded in this demarcation are problematic. By thinking of epistemology’s focal question in this light, first, we risk importing our assumptions about the epistemic (...) domain into our understanding of the nature and normativity of the belief state, and second, we come to have a false picture of the normativity that supposedly underlies the domain. In Chapter 1, “The Doxastic Account of the Epistemic”, I explore a range of views that assume there to be an essential connection between belief and truth. I look at views that treat all beliefs as attempts to believe the truth, views that consider belief’s biological function to be accurate representation, and views that hold that the very concept of belief is a normative concept. I go on to explore instrumentalist conceptions of belief’s truth connection and conduct an inquiry into the value of true belief. I conclude that neither the value of true belief nor an essential connection between belief and truth can explain epistemic normativity. In Chapter 2, “Evidential Exclusivity, Correctness, and the Nature of Belief” I note that epistemologists have recently argued that the best explanation for the apparent truth of a pair of claims - “Transparency” and “Exclusivity” – is that belief is subject to a standard of correctness such that a belief that p is correct if and only if p is true. I argue that the proposed explanation unduly privileges one part of belief’s full functional profile – its role in deliberation – and that a more complete consideration of belief’s role in cognition suggests an alternative explanation for Exclusivity and Transparency but denies belief’s standard of correctness. In Chapter 3, “Tradeoffs and Epistemic Value”, I look at a debate about whether epistemic norms are teleological. Though it’s standard to assume in keeping with teleology that certain goals or values explain the content of our norms, a collection of recent papers have aimed to show that this assumption can’t be correct because teleological norms countenance tradeoffs but epistemic norms don’t countenance tradeoffs. I note that the kind of non-teleological view that countenances no tradeoffs whatsoever is actually quite extreme and virtually unheard of in ethics. I go on to make the case that norms that license no tradeoffs can’t reasonably be taken to be grounded in value at all, and thus can’t be understood to give rise to necessary normativity. I conclude by suggesting that we broaden our conception of the epistemic domain to recognize teleological norms that provide recommendations for methods of inquiry or pursuit of significant truth or knowledge. (shrink)

Plato and the Power of Images addresses ways Plato has used images and the ways to understand their status as images, particularly how an image resembles what it represents and how to avoid mistaking that image for what it represents.

Some practical criteria for free-will are suggested where free-will is a matter of degree. It is argued that these are more appropriate than some extremely idealised conceptions. Thus although the paper takes lessons from philosophy it avoids idealistic approaches as irrelevant. A mechanism for allowing an agent to meet these criteria is suggested: that of facilitating the gradual emergence of free-will in the brain via an internal evolutionary process. This meets the requirement that not only must the choice of action (...) be free but also choice in the method of choice, and choice in the method of choice of the method of choice etc. This is directly analogous to the emergence of life from non-life. Such an emergence of indeterminism with respect to the conditions of the agent fits well with the `Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis' which posits that our intelligence evolved (at least partially) to enable us to deal with social complexity and modelling `arms races'. There is a clear evolutionary advantage in being internally coherent in seeking to fulfil ones goals and unpredictable by ones peers. To fully achieve this vision several other aspects of cognition are necessary: open-ended strategy development; the meta-evolution of the evolutionary process; the facility to anticipate the results of strategies; and the situating of this process in a society of competitive peers. Finally the requirement that reports of the deliberations that lead to actions need to be socially acceptable leads to the suggestion that the language that the strategies are developed within be subject to a normative process in parallel with the development of free-will. An appendix outlines a philosophical position in support of my position. (shrink)

A sensory receptor, in any organism anywhere, is sensitive through time to some distribution - energy, motion, molecular shape - indeed, anything that can produce an effect. The sensitivity is rarely direct: for example, it may track changes in relative variation rather than the absolute change of state (as when the skin responds to colder and hotter instead of to cold and hot as such); it may track differing variations under different conditions (the eyes' dark-adaptation; adaptation to sound frequencies can (...) lower the difference threshold; the kinesthetic sense will shut down if a limb is held in a stationary position too long - the limb 'going to sleep'); it may be subject to distortion of the input from overloading (dazzle producing strong-after-images); it may not be confined to one channel of sensitivity (the retina is sensitive to pressure; the hands can feel some strong sound-vibrations, the tympanum of the ear records touch). Strictly speaking there is no limit as to what intensities and what ranges receptors could be sensitive. Sharks are sensitive to electrostatic fields, homing pigeons to magnetic fields; snakes to infra-red rays; bacteria to acid concentrations; perhaps there has even been a mutant organism sensitive to the passage of cosmic rays, even though that would hardly have bestowed any conceivable survival value. What is irrefutable is that individual receptors differ markedly from organism to organism, between different members of the species (one dog being better at tracing smells than another; one person being able to sense light-waves of 375 nanometres, another not; children able to hear 20,000 Hz, older persons not), and between receptors of the same kind within one organism (one eye being sensitive to 765 nm and the other not; one ear deaf to 15,000 Hz and over, the other not). There are also just-noticeable-differences (JND's), in that one person can see two shades of a colour where another sees only one; similarly with sounds. (shrink)

This essay contains an attempt to trace the evolution of the concept of wisdom as found in the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas in terms of how the philosophical concept of wisdom as an intellectual virtue is understood and used to express the theological concept of wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit. The main aim is to understand how Aquinas derived the concept of wisdom from Aristotle's metaphysics and developed it in his mysticism. This research is based on (...) a close study of Book Six of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, the corresponding sections of Aquinas' Sententia libri Ethicorum and question forty-five of the second part of the second part of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. The insights gained from the study are then used to decipher the theoretical meaning of Augustine's famous saying: "love and do what thou wilt" and to expound on the practical value of wisdom for religious leaders. (shrink)

In this paper I address the phenomenon of syncretism with respect to Chinese religions. An analysis of the syncretism that takes place between the three major Chinese religious traditions is first done in its personal and social dimensions. The social structure of Chinese religion is then used as a framework to understand how Buddhism and Daoism were made compatible with Confucianism. All this will serve as a background for the case study of Macau, where Chinese religious syncretism is very much (...) alive. Three popular religious festivals are celebrated annually and simultaneously on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, namely, zuilongjie (醉龍節) Feast of the Drunken Dragon, tangongdan (譚公誕) Tam Kung Festival and fodanjie (佛誕節) Feast of the Buddha. (shrink)

This book reflects upon the manner in which medical research is performed and interpreted.

This book is an archetypal product of the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) school of multi-agent systems. It presents what is now the mainstream view as to the best way forward in the dream of engineering reliable software systems out of autonomous agents. The way of using formal logics to specify, implement and verify distributed systems of interacting units using a guiding analogy of beliefs, desires and intentions. The implicit message behind the book is this: Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) can be a respectable (...) engineering science. It says: we use sound formal systems; can cite established philosophical foundations; and will be able to build reliable and flexible software systems. (shrink)

Pour Thucydide, les trois traités conclus entre Sparte et la Perse en 412-411 sont de plus en plus favorables aux Grecs. En fait, le Roi renonce sans doute à affirmer ses droits sur le territoire et les cités possédés par ses ancêtres. Mais, sur la question des tributs, les traités lui sont de plus en plus favorables : le premier veut empêcher les Athéniens d'en lever, le second interdit aux Spartiates de le faire et le troisième laisse toute latitude au (...) Roi d'agir comme il l'entend, donc d'en lever. D'autre part, la suppression des πόλεις dans l'expression χώρα και πόλεις rend le troisième traité ambigu et prépare tous les conflits d'après-guerre. (shrink)

Confucian education is best captured by the programme described in the Great Learning. Education is presented first as the process of self-cultivation for the sake of developing virtuous character. Self-cultivation then allows for virtue to be cultivated in the familial, social and international dimensions. My central thesis is that Confucianism can serve as a universal framework of educating people for the common good in its promotion of personal cultivation for the sake of human progress. On this account the common good (...) specifically refers to the social order accomplished by the virtuous behaviour found in the members of society. In this paper I argue that the Confucian notion of “lesser learning” sheds light on the concept of general education and the notion of “greater learning” improves our understanding of liberal education. Under this analysis the necessity of general education is assured although its importance should not be overly exaggerated. Furthermore, the objectives of liberal education deserve greater emphasis due to their historical importance and enduring relevance to promoting the common good of universal humanity. (shrink)

Philosophy Bites brings together the twenty-five best interviews from this hugely successful website.

In this paper I shall try to analyse appropriate logic and actual methods as a preliminary to developing expert systems that will simulate clinical diagnosis. It is doubtful that all diagnoses address the same kind of problem and hence no one logic will suffice. Sometimes the signs and symptoms manifest an underlying disorder that cannot be observed directly (the substantialist model); sometimes there seems to be no underlying disorder and the diagnosis is a rearrangement of the data (the nominalist model). (...) In deciding their merits in the particular case, we must identify the sources of variation; what is meant by saying that the data are independent; and what can be meant by wrong diagnosis and misclassification. Problems arise in human diagnosis because the data may be false, even lies; because the known list of diseases is not exhaustive; and because the probability of multiple unrelated diseases increases with age. Special difficulties arise from homeostasis (which is fundamental in defining and understanding disease) because the primary disturbances may be hard to distinguish from the homeostatic responses to them. (shrink)

The title of this paper is 'The Story of the Story'. If its argument is valid, I cannot be speaking to you now, trying to change your view of something without telling a story myself, even about the Story. Over the last two decades there has been an increasing number of people in a variety of disciplines telling us that the story, narrative, is an inescapable feature of human communication. Listen to a few representative voices. from psychology - Theodore Sarbin: (...) 'Human beings think, perceive, imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures' (Sarbin, 1986,8); from philosophy' - Alasdair MacIntyre: 'In what does the unity of a human life consist? The answer is that its unity is the unity of a.. (shrink)

The paper investigates what is meant by "good science" and "bad science" and how these differ as between the natural (physical and biological) sciences on the one hand and social sciences on the other. We conclude on the basis of historical evidence that the natural science are much more heavily constrained by evidence and observation than by theory while the social sciences are constrained by prior theory and hardly at all by direct evidence. Current examples of the latter proposition are (...) taken from recent issues of leading social science journals. We argue that agent based social simulations can be used as a tool to constrain the development of a new social science by direct (what economists dismiss as anecdotal) evidence and that to do so would make social science relevant to the understanding and influencing of social processes. We argue that such a development is both possible and desirable. We do not argue that it is likely. (shrink)

1.1 - Background - page 17 1.2 - The Style of Approach - page 18 1.3 - Motivation - page 19 1.4 - Style of Presentation - page 20 1.5 - Outline of the Thesis - page 21..

From an Indirect Realist point of view, the Knowledge Argument in the philosophy of perception has been misdirected by its very title. If it can be argued that sense-fields are at their basis no more than evidence, indeed, a part of existence as brute as what is usually termed the 'external', then, if 'knowing' is not essential to sensing, that argument has to be radically reconstructed. Resistance to there being an non-epistemic or 'raw feel' basis for sensing is very fashionable (...) at the moment (e.g. in Davidson, McDowell, Harman), but the present article aims at breaking through it. Scientific facts are adduced to show that sensing can exist without perceiving. It is argued that the part played by motivation in the gathering of knowledge in a feedback system, enhanced by intersubjective linguistic correction in the human case, allows for a ready evolutionary adaptation. One can advance from this to a fresh view of knowledge and rationality which see them at base as part of a folk-psychological method of allowing for continuing disambiguation of what are identified within that method as 'entities' and 'properties'. (shrink)