Here, William Bialek provides the first graduate-level introduction to biophysics aimed at physics students.

Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique should not be to applaud (...) its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics. (shrink)

Love cannot be everlasting, much as we might desire it to be so. So, what is love in a life that begins and ends? How does it feel to love as a finite being, imperfectly as we may? In Western philosophy and religious thought, love has often been characterized as a source of constancy and commitment. Love in Time reveals the opposite to be true. From the ways our beloveds (and their qualities that endear them to us) change over time, (...) to the possibility of our feelings toward our beloveds-or their feelings toward us-changing, love, Bialek shows, is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty. Yet it is that very uncertainty that entices us to our beloveds. Love is not a refuge from the vagaries of worldly life, impervious to its changing conditions. Rather, it is an orientation to a future that we do not yet know. In this book, Fannie Bialek explores the temporal experience of lovers spending time with their beloveds. Love in time, like any temporal experience, is composed of moments of not knowing what will happen next. It is an experience of vulnerability in this way, the lover exposed to an unknown future and waiting to see how it plays out. Attending to these vulnerabilities, Love in Time develops a fresh ethics of love that centers uncertainty and humility. It is an ethics of love that speaks to the uncertainty of the present and beyond. (shrink)

In recent philosophy of mind, a series of challenging ideas have appeared about the relation between the body and the sense of touch. In certain respects, these ideas have a striking affinity with Husserl’s theory of the constitution of the body. Nevertheless, these two approaches lead to very different understandings of the role of the body in perception. Either the body is characterized as a perceptual “organ,” or the body is said to function as a “template.” Despite its focus on (...) the sense of touch, the latter conception, I will argue, nevertheless orients its understanding of tactual perception toward visual objects. This produces a distorted conception of touch. In this paper, I will formulate an alternative account, which is more faithful to what it is like to feel. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to review the discussion concerning various difficulties which surround the definition of depression and the methods of diagnosing and treating the disease against the background of the now dominant reductionist paradigm in psychiatry, as well as to answer the question whether a new approach to psychiatric disorders proposed by philosophers of psychiatry working within the phenomenologically inspired embodied and enactive paradigm indeed offers a solution to these difficulties. I present the issues specific to the (...) subject of depression in light of the more general problems related to biological psychiatry that have recently caused much debate. In the second part of the paper, I consider enactive, phenomenological and embodied theories of depression and the possibilities of new methods of treatment. My goal is to assess whether these theories indeed add anything important to the conceptions that are already present in psychiatry. I conclude that even if the embodied philosophy of psychiatry does not solve many of the problems faced by modern psychiatry, it can, nevertheless, provide a useful theoretical basis for future changes. (shrink)

In Liberating Oedipus?: Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory, Dr. Filip Kovacevic demonstrates how psychoanalytic theory can join political theory in designing alternative political norms and values. Kovacevic proves that political practice without an emancipatory psychology to guide it is potentially dangerous.

Cypr zachował swoje bogate dziedzictwo kulturowe, a układ urbanistyczny i architektura w Nikozji są odzwierciedleniem zróżnicowanej historii stolicy. Nierozwiązany konflikt prowadzi do rywalizacji wokół kwestii kulturowych. To właśnie między innymi materialne dziedzictwo stało się „ofiarą” sytuacji politycznej i może być użyte do podsycania sporów i wzbogacania etnocentrycznych narracji. W takim przypadku jego ochrona może stać się selektywna. A z drugiej strony istnieje możliwość, że renowacje miejsc wspólnych lub istotnych dla innej grupy etnicznej staną się symbolem wysiłków na rzecz pojednania. Celem (...) artykułu jest przedstawienie, jak Cypryjczycy chronią osmańskie i brytyjskie dziedzictwo kulturowe w Nikozji. W artykule omówione zostały dwa projekty dwugminne: Nicosia Master Plan oraz Komitet Techniczny ds. Dziedzictwa Kulturowego. (shrink)

Consider Maria, a 32-year-old Spanish-speaking expectant mother who immigrated to the United States five years ago. Despite taking English classes and working in a predominantly English-speaking en...

Because philosophical reflections on touch usually start from our ability to perceive properties of objects, they tend to overlook features of touch that are crucial to correct understanding of tactual perception. This paper brings out these features and uses them to develop a general reconception of the sense of touch. I start by taking a fresh look at our ability to feel, in order to reveal its vital role. This sheds a different light on the skin's perceptual potential. While it (...) is commonly observed that tactile experiences have two intentional objects, an external object and one's own body, I will advance a more accurate alternative: in tactile experiences, one becomes aware of what one's body undergoes. This alternative not only fits better with tactility's vital role; it is also key to explaining how active touching provides for a unique contribution to our perceptual relation to material objects. By thus connecting tactility's vital role to the way we rely on touch while manipulating objects, this essay offers a cross-sectional survey of our tactile powers that reveals the interplay between sensing and touching. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify the meaning of a naturalistic position within philosophy of biology, against the background of an alternative view, founded on the basic insights of transcendental philosophy. It is argued that the apparently minimal and neutral constraints naturalism imposes on philosophy of science turn out to involve a quite heavily constraining metaphysics, due to the naturalism’s fundamental neglect of its own perspective. Because of its intrinsic sensitivity to perspectivity and historicity, transcendental philosophy can avoid (...) this type of hidden metaphysics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I want to re-examine the epistemic status of elaborated delusions. Bortolotti (2016, 2020) claims that they can be epistemically innocent. However, I will show that this type of delusions is more unique than suggested by the existing analyses of their epistemic status. They typically cause more profound harms than other kinds of delusions, and in most cases, it would be counterproductive to classify them as epistemically beneficial or innocent. I will employ predictive (...) and phenomenological models of delusions and the enactivist notion of sensus communis to explain the harms and possible benefits of elaborated delusions and why I think the existing definition does not fully grasp them. Based on this analysis, I will propose changes to the conditions for epistemic innocence. (shrink)

In this paper I take a closer look at Sextus Empiricus’ arguments in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.25-30 and try to make sense of his account of Skepticism as a goal-directed philosophy. I argue that Sextus fails to mount a convincing case for the view that tranquility, rather than suspension of judgment, is the ultimate goal of his inquiries.

People make different choices depending on which decision is the default option. In intertemporal choices, the default option is typically imposed externally. For example, people expect more for delaying the gain than are willing to pay for accelerating the future gain over the same period. We claim that apart from the external default, people’s choices are also influenced by the internal default such as the time perspective resulting in the reference point in the present. By manipulating the congruency between the (...) internal and external defaults, we show that incongruence between defaults decreases the strength of discounting of gains, but not of losses. (shrink)

This volume provides the reader with the substantial evidence, presented here for the first time in a chronological manner, of the essential place that Dionysus occupied in Greek and Roman political thought. The eleven chapters that make up the volume are authored by an interdisciplinary team of scholars (including four top specialists in the field, Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Richard Seaford, Richard Stoneman and Jean-Marie Pailler) and cover the period from archaic Greece to the late Roman empire. The reader can therefore observe (...) how the political ideas and motifs rooted in Greek classical thought were continued, adapted, and developed in successive periods of history. The contributors reconstruct the political significance of Dionysus by examining different kinds of evidence: historiography, poetry, coins, epigraphy, art, and philosophy. They discuss the place of the god in the politics of Greek city-states, explore the long tradition of imitating Dionysus that ancient leaders, from Alexander the Great to the Roman emperors, manifested in various ways, as well as demonstrate how the political role of Dionysus was reflected in Orphism and Neoplatonist philosophy. Dionysus and Politics provides an excellent introduction to a fundamental feature of ancient political thought which until now has been largely neglected by mainstream academia. The book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars interested in ancient politics and religion. (shrink)

The dominant contemporary interpretation of Adam Smith’s thought endeavors to show his anti-state attitude. According to this interpretation, Smith, as the father of economics would also be an opponent of state interference in the activity of private entities. The purpose of this work is a comprehensive presentation of the social system described by a Scottish philosopher. This task is accomplished by drawing attention to Smith’s views on the state and the law, as well as on his participation in the creation (...) of an area of knowledge known then as political economy. In order to reconcile the seemingly inconsistent views presented in Smith’s most famous works, the main subject of this analysis are the less frequently studied _Lectures on Jurisprudence_. This book, which offers Smith’s views on the role of the state and law, is the key to the correct reading of the thesis put in _Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_. The social system emerging from these works referred to by Smith as the civil government, can in retrospect be regarded as the progenitor of liberal democracy. The state and the law play a vital role in the economic life of this system. (shrink)

In zijn jongste boek, Kritiek van de interpreterende rede, bekijkt Filip Buekens de centrale thema's in de taalfilosofie van Davidson. Vertrekkend vanuit de stelling dat spreken en verstaan een vorm van rationeel handelen is, wordt onderzocht hoe een theorie voor een taal (in de vorm van een Tarskiaanse waarheidstheorie) wordt geconstrueerd vanuit het standpunt van een 'radicale interpretator' die inzicht wil krijgen in het talig handelen van personen. In een uitgebreide vergelijking met de filosofie van Michael Dummett en W.V. (...) Quine worden de specifieke uitgangspunten van Davidson verhelderd. Daarbij gaat vooral aandacht naar de constitutieve principes die het verstaan van anderen en het begrijpelijk zijn voor anderen mogelijk maken. Davidson verbindt aan dit project belangrijke metafysische conclusies. Deze worden uitgebreid toegelicht. Zo bespreekt de auteur de anti-sceptische argumenten van Davidson, het probleem van de onbepaaldheid van de referentie-relatie en Davidson's afwijzing van het relativisme. In een laatste hoofdstuk wordt de filosofie van Davidson getoetst aan belangrijke taalfilosofische discussies die de jongste jaren gevoerd werden: essentialisme, het volgen van regels, het probleem van de lingu. (shrink)

The nature of unconscious information processing is a heavily debated issue in cognitive science, and neuroscience. Traditionally, it has been thought that unconscious cognitive processing is restricted to knowledge that is strongly prepared by conscious processes. In three experiments, we show that the task that is performed consciously can also be applied unconsciously to items outside the current task set. We found that a same–different judgment of two target stimuli was also performed on two subliminally presented prime stimuli. This was (...) true for target and prime stimuli from entirely different categories, as well as for prime and target stimuli at different levels of abstraction. These results reveal that unconscious processing can generalize more widely than previously accepted. (shrink)

Recently, Matt King and Peter Carruthers have argued that the Real Self accounts of moral responsibility or autonomy are under pressure because they rely on a questionable conception of self-knowledge of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. In fact, they defend, as a plausible assumption, the claim that transparent self-knowledge of propositional attitudes is incompatible with mounting evidence in the cognitive sciences. In this chapter, we respond to this line of argument. We describe the types of self-knowledge that might (...) plausibly be involved, as psychological prerequisites, in the processes of identification and integration that lead to the constitution of the real self of an agent. We argue that these forms of self- knowledge do not require the type of transparent knowledge of propositional attitudes that, according to King and Carruthers, is incompatible with the results of contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Contextualists and assessment relativists neglect the expressive dimension of assertoric discourse that seems to give rise to faultless disagreement. Discourse that generates the intuition makes public an attitudinal conflict, and the affective -expressive dimension of the contributing utterances accounts for it. The FD-phenomenon is an effect of a public dispute generated by a sequence of expressing opposite attitudes towards a salient object or state of affairs, where the protagonists are making an attempt to persuade the other side into joining the (...) other’s camp. (shrink)

In welchem Verhaltnis steht die Seelenlehre zur Kosmologie in Platons Phaidon?

Intertemporal choice requires one to decide between smaller sooner and larger later payoffs and is captured by discount rates. Across two preregistered experiments testing three language pairs (Polish vs. English, Spanish, and German; Experiment 1) and with incentivized participants (Experiment 2), we found no evidence that using a foreign language decreased the strength or increased the consistency of intertemporal choices. On the contrary, there was some evidence of stronger discounting when a foreign language was used. We confirmed prior findings that (...) more reflective individuals discount less strongly but observed that they were just as (un)affected by using foreign language as less reflective individuals. Thus, we provide preliminary evidence that the foreign language effect is robust to individual differences in cognitive reflection. (shrink)

The nature of unconscious information processing is a heavily debated issue in cognitive science , and neuroscience . Traditionally, it has been thought that unconscious cognitive processing is restricted to knowledge that is strongly prepared by conscious processes . In three experiments, we show that the task that is performed consciously can also be applied unconsciously to items outside the current task set. We found that a same–different judgment of two target stimuli was also performed on two subliminally presented prime (...) stimuli. This was true for target and prime stimuli from entirely different categories, as well as for prime and target stimuli at different levels of abstraction. These results reveal that unconscious processing can generalize more widely than previously accepted. (shrink)

This article penetrates the idealistic, Marxist concept of the 'new Soviet man', linking it with the notion of eugenics. Departing from a reconstruction of the history and specificity of the eugenic movement in Russia since the late 19th century until the installation of Joseph Stalin as the only ruler of the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism paradigm of Soviet natural sciences is being evoked as a theoretical frame for Soviet-specific eugenic programme. Through referring to a number of chosen – both theoretical and (...) practical – issues and cases, the concept of the 'new Soviet man' is being confronted with an original reading of eugenics, understood in neo-Lamarckian terms of direct shaping human beings through environmental conditions and intergenerational transfer of acquired traits. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal apresentar uma reconstruçáo lógico-conceitual e avaliaçáo de três argumentos de Skinner para a tese de que os termos psicológicos comuns sáo, em geral, inadmissíveis em análise do comportamento (a tese da inadmissibilidade). Começamos fazendo uma revisáo da abordagem de tais termos sustentada por Skinner, particularmente sua abordagem das categoriais de termos psicológicos disposicionais. Muito dela é aqui aceito, mas adotamos, como hipótese de trabalho, um desacordo com a premissa de Skinner de que eles sejam (...) irremediavelmente mentalistas. Nossa análise mostra que, se esta hipótese estiver correta, entáo os argumentos analisados náo resultam ser inteiramente plausíveis; e, embora a opçáo do autor seja plenamente aceitável, também o é uma (em princípio) opçáo alternativa, que explore os valores heurísticos de tais termos (sem incorporá-los ao vocabulário de base) para a descoberta de padrões comportamentais e seus contextos, em ambientes abertos de pesquisa. Um objetivo colateral deste artigo é mostrar o equívoco de duas suposições muitas vezes assumidas em filosofia da mente sobre o behaviorismo radical: a de que ele náo tem uma abordagem relevante sobre o funcionamento dos termos em questáo e a de que sua tese da inadmissibilidade se baseia em premissas verificacionistas. (shrink)

Rooted in theory of planned behavior (TPB) supplemented with self-determination theory (SDT), this study explores determinants of willingness to receive and provide resources in Europe's non-remunerated and remunerated collaborative consumption (CC). The exploration was conducted within a single research model by assessing the role of (a) TPB constructs reflecting attitude towards participation in CC, perceived social pressure to engage, and perceived level of difficulty that engagement requires and (b) SDT constructs of environmental, social, and economic motives for participation. The data (...) were collected through an online questionnaire, and the structural relationships were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Willingness to consume in non-remunerated and remunerated CC was positively directly influenced by social pressure to engage in CC and participation being perceived as pleasant, negatively by the level of difficulty that engagement requires, as well as positively indirectly influenced by environmental concern and sociability. Additionally, environmental concern had positive direct effect on willingness to consume only in the remunerated context. Willingness to provide in non-remunerated CC was positively directly influenced by perceiving participation as pleasant and indirectly by environmental concern and sociability. Resource provision in remunerated CC was not explained by any of the determinants. (shrink)