The Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are similar in many respects, not least with regards to the basic administrative set-up: a non-federal task-related division between state, counties and municipalities. In all three countries, counties and municipalities raise a large share of their own revenue, which is then supplemented by government grants. In addition, central government redistributes large amounts of locally collected revenue between the municipalities and the counties respectively, severely hampering local budgetary autonomy. Tax matters are generally centralised, (...) although local governments to a varying degree play a role in the collection of taxes as well as in the setting of local tax rates. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden alike, the administrative set-up has not been able to prevent a massive increase in local public expenditure in the latter part of the 20th century.Les pays scandinaves, Danemark, Norvège et Suède présentent des similitudes sur beaucoup de points et notamment sur le plan de l’organisation de la base administrative : une division sans relation utilitaire fédérale entre l’Etat, les régions et les municipalités. Dans ces trois pays, les régions et les municipalités lèvent une large part de leurs propres revenus qui sont alors augmentés par les subventions du gouvernement.De plus, le gouvernement central redistribue de larges sommes de revenus collectés localement entre les municipalités et les régions respectivement, ce qui gêne sérieusement l’autonomie budgétaire locale. Les questions fiscales sont généralement centralisées, bien que les gouvernements locaux, à des degrés divers, jouent un rôle dans la collecte des impôts aussi bien que dans la fixation des taux d’impositions locales. Au Danemark et en Norvège tout comme en Suède, l’organisation administrative n’a pas été capable de prévenir une augmentation massive des dépenses publiques locales dans les dernières années du 20ème siècle. (shrink)

Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet stimulus-dependent. (...) The payoff is not only a specific proposal for marking the perception–cognition boundary, but also a deeper understanding of the natures of hallucination and demonstrative thought. (shrink)

Important study focuses on the revival and assimilation of ancient Greek mathematics in the 13th–16th centuries, via Arabic science, and the 16th-century development of symbolic algebra. This brought about the crucial change in the concept of number that made possible modern science — in which the symbolic "form" of a mathematical statement is completely inseparable from its "content" of physical meaning. Includes a translation of Vieta's Introduction to the Analytical Art. 1968 edition. Bibliography.

Susan Carey's account of Quinean bootstrapping has been heavily criticized. While it purports to explain how important new concepts are learned, many commentators complain that it is unclear just what bootstrapping is supposed to be or how it is supposed to work. Others allege that bootstrapping falls prey to the circularity challenge: it cannot explain how new concepts are learned without presupposing that learners already have those very concepts. Drawing on discussions of concept learning from the philosophical literature, this article (...) develops a detailed interpretation of bootstrapping that can answer the circularity challenge. The key to this interpretation is the recognition of computational constraints, both internal and external to the mind, which can endow empty symbols with new conceptual roles and thus new contents. (shrink)

Traces the development of thought through historical movements and periods from 1500 to 1830.

Alva Noë’s version of the enactive conception in _Action in Perception_ is an important contribution to the study of visual perception. First, I argue, however, that it is unclear (at best) whether, as the enactivists claim, work on change blindness supports the denial of the existence of detailed visual representations. Second, I elaborate on what Noë calls the ‘puzzle of perceptual presence’. Thirdly, I question the enactivist account of perceptual constancy. Finally, I draw attention to the tensions between enactivism and (...) two trends in cognitive neuroscience: the two-visual systems model of human vision and the theory of internal forward models of action. (shrink)

Essays defending the human claim to have a mind.

Embodied simulation and the epistemic motivation to search for the of other people's behaviors are not necessary for specific and functional responding to, and hence processing of, human facial expressions. Rather, facial expression processing can be achieved through lower-cognitive, heuristical perceptual processing and expression of prototypical morphological musculature movement patterns that communicate discrete trustworthiness and capacity cues to conspecifics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.2 (2003) 149-157 [Access article in PDF] Introduction:The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe Jacob Soll A leading figure at Cambridge University after World War II, Herbert Butterfield seems an unlikely forerunner of the kind of cultural history that is practiced today. Yet Butterfield was a pioneer. He saw the origins of modern historical consciousness in the scholarly practices of (...) the Renaissance. These practices, he maintained, were a significant part of the slow shift to rationalist thinking that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In his remarkable work, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (1940), Butterfield sought to show that Machiavelli's inductive use of historical examples was part of a larger empirical movement that slowly replaced religious and classical authority with the new authority of observation and deduction. Like Ernst Cassirer, he saw Machiavelli as an historical counterpart to Bacon, Descartes, Vesalius, and even Copernicus: The significance of the "experimental method" itself was not fully realized or clearly established until after the emergence in the seventeenth century of new scientific apparatus—the telescope, the microscope, and more accurate measuring-instruments for example; and even Bacon and Descartes, whose names have closely been associated with the scientific revolution, can hardly be said to have realized the implications of the new method. There is a transition then, but it is slower than many people have imagined and someone has rightly said that the middle ages do not come to an end until the seventeenth century. Machiavelli, as we shall see, has a place in the transition, for in the political and human sciences as well as the natural sciences a change did occur. Machiavelli is interesting not because he is a modern man [End Page 149] born out of due time, but because he illustrates one of the mediations by which the transition was accomplished. 1Butterfield turned to Emile Durkheim's sociological study of Renaissance education to understand the relationship between traditions of learning and the cosmological shift of the seventeenth century. 2 Durkheim had used Rabelais's portrait of Pantagruel's education to illustrate how the study of ancient language and the rise of historical erudition were not only instruments of aesthetic culture, but also constituted "a mine of positivist knowledge." Citing Erasmus, Durkheim himself maintained that linguistic philology was a preparation for higher disciplines—graviores disciplinæ. 3 The English historian agreed with the French sociologist: traditions of humanist learning were essential elements of a larger ethos of natural and practical studies that differentiated post-humanist Europe from the Middle Ages.Although his later work concentrated on questions of historiography, Butterfield never studied the full effect of historical practices on the learned culture of early modern Europe. 4 These papers seek to pick up where Butterfield left off, to understand the effect that humanist historical consciousness had on educated Europe at large. They will show that questions of historical accuracy and verification were the common link among diverse disciplines between 1400 and 1800. Rather than looking for theories of history and historical method solely in the works of historians, they will examine how non-historians discussed history in terms of their own fields of study. They will show how thinkers in the domains of architecture, art, astrology, education, law, medicine, natural philosophy, politics, and theology saw the importance of historical understanding and how they used it to shape their own particular forms of knowledge. By sketching an overview of the different applications of historical knowledge, we will begin to have a clearer view of the process by which humanism historicized the world of knowledge.Learned culture at the beginning of the seventeenth century is commonly associated with the rise of scientific authority. Church dogma and the Aristotelian logical tradition no longer sufficed to explain natural phenomena and to [End Page 150] quell the curiosity of the learned. 5 As Galileo so recklessly exclaimed, look into the telescope and witness with your own eyes that Aristotle was wrong about the moon. 6 For Galileo's colleague, the great Paduan Aristotelian... (shrink)

Could it be that the Trump presidency is symptomatic of something profoundly true and constitutive as regards not only the politics but also the business and sport models of the USA? Could it be th...

Zusammenfassung Der Aufsatz untersucht die „Horizontalität“ bzw. „Vertikalität“ des Themas „Sport“ im EG/eu-prozess der letzten dreißig Jahre. Die Unterscheidung Horizontalität/vertikalität bezieht sich hierbei auf interne Strukturen der Union und nicht auf das Verhältnis Union/mitgliedstaaten. Anhand genereller Entwicklungslinien wird gefragt, ob Sport ein horizontales Thema darstellt, das in andere Themenfelder eingreift, oder aber ein eigenständiges, vertikales Thema ist. Der Beitrag kommt zu dem Schluss, dass die Realität nach wie vor eine Mischung aus Horizontalität und Vertikalität ist, dass aber das Prinzip der (...) Vertikalität verstärkt wurde. Es wird auch klar, dass die Rechtsprechung als Motor der Entwicklung eine herausragende Rolle spielte. (shrink)

Attentional control has grown in importance within theoretical and predictive models of psychopathology over past decades. The Attentional Style Questionnaire is a novel measure of internal a...

Pierre Jacob; X*—Externalism and Mental Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 June 1992, Pages 203–220, https://doi.org/10.1.