One of the most poorly understood features of consciousness is the relation between an experience and the subject of the experience. In this paper, I develop an ontology of consciousness on which experiences are events constituted by substances having properties at times. I use this to explain the relation between a subject and her experience.

Abstract:Peirce's "Lesson in Elocution" (written ca. 1892) provides insight into his ideas on continuity and community through his knowledge of performance cultures such as theatre, elocution, rhetoric, and declamation. This unpublished manuscript constitutes the extant part of an application Peirce drafted to the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary for the position of elocution instructor. Continuing Henry C. Johnson, Jr.'s account (published in Transactions [2006] vol. 42, no. 4) of the Lesson as evidence of Peirce's religious practices, this article explores (...) the Lesson as demonstration of his performance knowledge and experience. What would Peirce have brought as philosopher and scientist to the teaching of elocution? Conversely, what did his performance knowledge bring to his work on continuity and community? Outlining significant differences between Peirce's semiotic approach and that of the Seminary's then-current instructor, Francis Thayer Russell, the article argues, employing selected performance theory concepts, that performance often operates in semiosis itself, as Peirce defined it. (shrink)

In the face of limited resources during the COVID-19 pandemic response, public health experts and ethicists have sought to apply guiding principles in determining how those resources, including vaccines, should be allocated.

A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament, being Grimm's Wilke's Clavis Novi Testamenti. Translated, Revised and Enlarged by Joseph Henry Thayer, D.D., Bussey Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpretation in the Divinity School of Harvard University. Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark. 1886. 4to. pp. 726. 36s.Biblico Theological Lexicon to New Testament Greek. by Hermann Cremer, D.D., Professor of Theology in the University of Greifswald. Third English Edition. With Supplement. Translated from the latest German Edition by William (...) Uewick, M.A. Edinburgh, T. and T. Clark. 1886. 4to. pp. 943. 38s. (shrink)

One of the most influential of the Victorian philosophers, Henry Sidgwick also made important contributions to fields such as economics, political theory and classics. A proponent of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which he analysed in his classic work The Methods of Ethics , he later turned to the practical side of politics in this work, published in 1891. His aim was to have a 'rational discussion of political questions in modern states', and he offers (...) a thorough examination of Victorian politics, beginning with a discussion of political theory before moving on to more concrete matters such as property and law. The later chapters discuss the function of government through themes such as procedural matters, international affairs, war, political parties, and public participation, giving a comprehensive account of both ideas about and the functioning of late-nineteenth-century government. (shrink)

An attempt is made to give a coherent account of the logical essence of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. The central point is that quantum theory is fundamentally pragmatic, but nonetheless complete. The principal difficulty in understanding quantum theory lies in the fact that its completeness is incompatible with external existence of the space—time continuum of classical physics.

This paper examines attention as a scientific concept, and argues that it has a patchwork structure. On this view, the concept of attention takes on different meanings, depending on the scientific context. I argue that these different meanings vary systematically along four dimensions, as a result of the epistemic goals of the scientific programme in question and the constraints imposed by the scientific context. Based on this, I argue that attention is a general reasoning strategy concept: it provides general, non-specific (...) guidance that aids scientific work. As well as shedding light on attention as a scientific concept, this theory has two wider consequences. First, it demonstrates that the patchwork approach is a fruitful way to think about psychological concepts. Second, it provides novel resources to resist eliminativism about attention. (shrink)

achieved by the actions of a single animal. The concerted activity is coordinated by a multiplicity of cues and signals diffused between groups of ...

Some of our most fundamental moral rules are violated by the practices of torture and war. If one examines the concrete forms these practices take, can the exceptions to the rules necessary to either torture or war be justified? Fighting Hurt brings together key essays by Henry Shue on the issue of torture, and relatedly, the moral challenges surrounding the initiation and conduct of war, and features a new introduction outlining the argument of the essays, putting them into context, (...) and describing how and in what ways his position has modified over time. The first six chapters marshal arguments that have been refined over 35 years for the conclusion that torture can never be justified in any actual circumstances whatsoever. The practice of torture has nothing significant in common with the ticking bomb scenario often used in its defence, and weak U.S. statutes have loop-holes for psychological torture of the kind now favoured by CIA in the 'war against terrorism'. The other sixteen chapters maintain that for as long as wars are in fact fought, it is morally urgent to limit specific destructive practices that cannot be prohibited. Two possible exceptions to the UN Charter's prohibition on all but defensive wars, humanitarian military intervention and preventive war to eliminate WMD, are evaluated; and one possible exception to the principle of discrimination, Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergency', is sharply criticized. Two other fundamental issues about the rules for the conduct of war receive extensive controversial treatment. The first is the rules to limit the bombing of dual-use infrastructure, with a focus on alternative interpretations of the principle of proportionality that limits 'collateral damage'. The second is the moral status of the laws of war as embodied in International Humanitarian Law. It is argued that the current philosophical critique of IHL by Jeff McMahan focused on individual moral liability to attack is an intellectual dead-end and that the morally best rules are international laws that are the same for all fighters.Examining real cases, including U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991, the Clinton Administration decision not to intervene in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, and CIA torture after 9/11 and its alternatives, this book is highly accessible to general readers who are interested in the ethical status of American political life, especially foreign policy. (shrink)

Orthodox quantum mechanics is built upon psychophysical collapse events that are the close analogs, within contemporary physical theory, of the the Whiteheadian actual occasions, with their mental and physical poles. This article describes the way in which these events enter into quantum theory, and mediate the emergence of actuality from potentiality.

Organizations continue to show renewed focus on managing their ethics programs by developing organizational infrastructures to support their ethics implementation efforts. An important part of this process has been the creation of an ethics officer position. Whether individuals appointed to the position are successful in the role or not may depend on a number of factors. This study presents a suggested framework for their effectiveness. The framework includes a focus on personal, organizational and situational factors to predict performance in the (...) role. The study examines the complex nature of the role. These include task complexity, low task visibility, role conflict, and role ambiguity. Personal, organizational and situational factors that can serve as buffers against the complexities associated with the role are presented. The study suggests that individuals with certain competencies and orientations may be better suitable for the ethics position, and firms need to consider key organizational and situational issues critical to the performance of an ethics officer. The research and practice implications of the study are given. (shrink)

Hindman's Theorem is a prototypical example of a combinatorial theorem with a proof that uses the topology of the ultrafilters. We show how the methods of this proof, including topological arguments about ultrafilters, can be translated into second order arithmetic.

Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), English philosopher and educator is today most famous for his Methods of Ethics first published in 1874 and considered by C. D. Broad among others to be the greatest single work on ethics in English. Besides philosophy, Sidgwick wrote on education, literature, political theory, the history of political institutions, and psychical research. He was also active in University politics, economics and administration, playing a large part in the founding of the first College for women - Newnham (...) College, Cambridge. Although Methods of Ethics is considered the most valuable of his writings - reprinted here in its first and last editions - his intellect is displayed in the full extent of his writings. Professor Marshall said in reference to his discussions of the proper functions of government in Principles of Political Economy that it was 'by far the best thing of the kind in any language'. In all his writings, Sidgwick is rigorous and cautious, reluctant to advance ideas without making sure of his ground. In common with Mill he was opposed to mystical and transcendental methods. This comprehensive collection brings together the most definitive editions of all his books and includes the standard biography written by his wife, as well as two volumes of previously uncollected essays and reviews. (shrink)

We extend theories of reverse mathematics by a non-principal ultrafilter, and show that these are conservative extensions of the usual theories ACA0, ATR0, and [Formula: see text].

The science of consciousness has made great strides in recent decades. However, the proliferation of competing theories makes it difficult to reach consensus about artificial consciousness. While for purely scientific purposes we might wish to adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude, we may soon face practical and ethical questions about whether, for example, agents artificial systems are capable of suffering. Moreover, many of the methods used for assessing consciousness in humans and even non-human animals are not straightforwardly applicable to artificial (...) systems. With these challenges in mind, I propose that we look for ecumenical heuristics for artificial consciousness to enable us to make tentative assessments of the likelihood of consciousness arising in different artificial systems. I argue that such heuristics should have three main features: they should be (i) intuitively plausible, (ii) theoretically-neutral, and (iii) scientifically tractable. I claim that the concept of general intelligence — understood as a capacity for robust, flexible, and integrated cognition and behavior — satisfies these criteria and may thus provide the basis for such a heuristic, allowing us to make initial cautious estimations of which artificial systems are most likely to be conscious. -/- . (shrink)

The philosophy of quantum mechanics has often been conceived by physicists as a collection of dogmas concerning what can be measured, observed and known. To this branch of dialectics the present paper does not attempt to contribute, chiefly because it is written from the conviction that no part of science, nor any philosophy, can safely predict what may be feasible or knowable. Rather, this brief essay endeavors to expose the epistemology of quantum physics in a way which allows it to (...) be recognized as an extension of the ordinary processes of cognition, as the continuation of a line which starts in sensory perception, leads straight through the methods of classical physics into quantum mechanics and shows no signs of terminating even there. (shrink)

Novello, Henry We all know that these are difficult times for the Catholic Church in Australia as it grapples with the scandalous and painful issue of child sexual abuse by some clergy, religious, and lay church personnel. The Commonwealth Royal Commission investigating institutional responses to child sexual abuse, announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard on 12 November 2012, has made life for the faithful even more difficult, as the Catholic Church in Australia comes under intense and continual public scrutiny. (...) The church's Towards Healing protocol for responding to incidents of child sexual abuse acknowledges that not just the victims and their families but the 'whole Church community has been affected by incidents of abuse, for all Catholic people have been dismayed by the stories they have heard'. Thankfully, a spirit of sincere cooperation with the work of the Royal Commission is discernible on the part of the Catholic Church today, as both share in the objective of providing satisfaction to the victims and improving institutional responses as best they might. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Inflicting harm Increasing injustice.

The discussion of mathematical knowledge and its relation to the construction of an appropriate diagram in Aristotle's Metaphysics Θ 9. 1051 a21—33 is an important, if compressed, account of Aristotle's most mature thoughts on mathematical knowledge. The discussion of what sort of previous knowledge one must have for understanding a theorem recalls the discussion at An. Post. A 1. 71 a 17–21, where the epistemological point is similar and the examples the same. The first example, that the interior angles of (...) a triangle equal two right angles, appears no less than thirty times in the corpus . The example of the angle inscribed in a semicircle being a right angle also occurs at An. Post. B 11. 94a 27–34, but in a very different context from its two companions. Illustrations of both theorems provided clear stock examples for Aristotle. (shrink)

This paper is the forerunner of an extensive logical analysis of the relativity idea, in which an axiomatic structure based upon the principles of topology is developed. It is meant to expose the manner in which relativity stretches from the pole of pure conception to that of factual observation, from the a priori to the a posteriori. We take pains to show, in connection with special relativity, precisely which elements are postulational and which are verifiable empirically. Our attempt can be (...) somewhat naively characterized as an effort to show how misguided it is to "derive" relativity from such experimental facts as the Michelson-Morley experiment--as so many textbooks profess to do. (shrink)

Medical research is still in its infancy. Within the memory of many of us, medical knowledge has made more progress than had been achieved in all the preceding time since the beginning of history. We have witnessed the reduction of our death rate, the extension of our life span and the achievement of a general state of health hitherto unknown.