In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

The paper considers the recently published British Medical Association Guidance on ethical issues arising in relation to rationing of treatment during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It considers whether it...

Heidegger's Moral Ontology offers the first comprehensive account of the ethical issues that underwrite Heidegger's efforts to develop a novel account of human existence. Drawing from a wide array of source materials from the period leading up to the publication of Being and Time, and in conversation with ancient, modern, and contemporary contributions to moral philosophy, James D. Reid brings Heidegger's early philosophy into fruitful dialogue with the history of ethics, and sheds fresh light on such familiar topics as (...) Heidegger's critique of Husserl, his engagement with Aristotle, his account of mortality, the role played by Kant in the genesis of Being and Time, and Heidegger's early reflections on philosophical language and concepts. This lively book will appeal to all who are interested in Heidegger's early phenomenology and in his thought more generally, as well as to those interested in the nature, scope, and foundations of ethical life. (shrink)

Darwin and the Art of Science will consist of excerpts from six of Darwin's books, chosen and introduced by James Costa. The excerpts will be arranged by plant (rather than according to which book they're from) in order to make the most of extraordinary images provided by the Oak Springs Garden Foundation library. As a group, they will provide unparalleled access to Darwin's fascinating observations and musings about the world of plants and how their distinctive features have evolved.

Durkheim and National Identity in Ireland uses the classical sociology of Durkheim, in association with established theories of nation formation, to explore the development of opposed national identities in Ireland and Northern Ireland. James Dingley looks at Catholicism, the core of Irish nationalist identity, and draws upon its established sociological association of pre-industrial, rural peasant society and culture. By contrast, Dingley reviews Protestantism as the core of Ulster identity, with the equal association of industrial, scientific society, as the key (...) elements in explaining why Ulster Unionists evolved an opposed and incompatible culture and identity to Irish nationalism. These underlying religious philosophies of Catholicism and Protestantism illustrate how religion acted as a symbolic representation of socio-economic separate development, and examine a Durkheimian analysis as an alternative approach to conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. (shrink)

Unlike science fiction, which assumes a baseline of ordinary experience and sense of the nature of reality that are marked white, Black speculative literature's baseline is a parallel tradition responding to Black origins in slavery, racism, and colonialism; it imagines a future that critiques and is not bound up with science fiction's white origins in the onset of modernity. Its cosmologies and anthropologies are completely different. The Dark Delight of Being Strange is a work of but not about Black speculative (...) fiction. It explores the inherent meaning of speculative production for thinking, writing, living, and enacting concepts of Black freedom and why it is so critical for understanding Black sociality and politics. It combines memoir, storytelling, and philosophical prose with the Black imaginary to capture the idea that Black life is surreal, extraordinary--but not (or not only) in the sense of speculative fiction. It leaves us squarely in our world and time to reveal these aspects within the mundane or everyday. James Haile challenges us to rethink contemporary and historical Black life and approaches to freedom outside of Euromodernity in order to demonstrate the avant-garde aesthetic expressions critical to Black political thinking. It offers a rereading of enslavement through an innovative account of Henry Box Brown's famed escape, posits a parallel Black lifeworld as the destination of H. G. Wells' Journey to the Center of the Earth, thematizes time in Henry Dumas as an embodied phenomenological reality, imagines the survival skills of the octopus as an emblem for how to negotiate Black existence, theorizes memory as subject to metaphysical and ontological lack as a result of social alienation, questions whether there can be an outside--a place where Black people can be free--given the condition of death we call democracy as related in James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, and concludes by depicting Frederick Douglass as exemplar of the aesthetic, political, and philosophical Blackness that can be free. Each narrative is accompanied by a critical introduction and endnotes that provide philosophical context; together they argue that Blackness is a fundamental entanglement and not a limit--of the human or of freedom--rather somewhere beyond. Dark Delight invites us to reimagine time, space, place, history, and memory and how to understand the past. (shrink)

Values are missing from American politics. But should religion and government mix? A. James Reichley makes the provocative case that without a strong moral basis, American democracy is in trouble. The author's deep background in political theory and American Constitutional history allows him to propose practical steps for a constitutionally valid relationship between religion and public life. He surveys the seven major value systems currently competing for America's heart and soul and convincingly demonstrates that only one—what Reichley calls 'transcendent (...) idealism'—is the way to secure America's future. He then goes an extra step by pointing out examples of successful, morally-based public policies addressing critical social problems ranging from drug abuse to single parenthood to school choice. What's God got to do with good government? In The Values Connection, the answer is everything. (shrink)

In this book, James Boyd White shows how texts by some of our most important thinkers and writers—including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela, and Lincoln—answer these questions, not in the abstract, but in the way they wrestle ...

A PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY FOR WAR TIME BY THE AUTHOR OF STREAMLINE YOUR MIND A Personal Philosophy for War Time JAMES L. MURSELL Professor of Education Teachers ...

Mathematics and ethics are surprisingly similar. To some extent this is obvious, since neither looks to laboratory experiments nor sensory experience of any kind as a source of evidence. Both are based on reason and something commonly call “intuition.” This is not all. Interestingly, mathematics and ethics both possess similar distinctions between pure and applied. I explore some of the similarities and draw methodological lessons from them. We can use these lessons to explore how and why Freiling’s refutation of the (...) continuum hypothesis might be justified. (shrink)

This book examines the ethics of the alternatives to war. It assesses the moral case for each of the alternative in their own right, and provides an overall assessment of the alternatives to war.

This second edition of Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife recounts the life, thought, and experiences of a remarkable man who has left an indelible mark on the social sciences, education, and theology. As one who was born in the northeastern part of Brazil in a city called Recife, Freire experienced the sting of poverty and the pangs hunger within an unjust social and economic system, yet he emerged as a courageous, prophetic voice of conscience. With a new Foreword, Preface, (...) and Afterword, notable stylistic changes in chapter structures, and updated chapters relevant to these contemporary times, this new revised, updated edition continues to bring attention to a man whose thought continues to influence around the globe. (shrink)

How did Casanova learn the theory of sex? Why did male pornographers write as intellectual women? What forms of sexuality emerged in the age of educational, scientific, and political revolution? Schooling Sex reconstructs the vividly compelling loose canon of sexually-explicit literature, in Latin, Italian, French, and English.

Historians of science and religion have given little attention to how historical‐critical scholarship influenced perceptions of the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century. However, the so‐called “cofounders” of the “conflict thesis,” the idea that science and religion are fundamentally and irrevocable at odds, were greatly affected by this literature. Indeed, in his two‐volume magnum opus, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), Andrew D. White, in his longest and final chapter of his (...) masterpiece, traced the development of the “scientific interpretation” of the Bible. In this article, I argue that developments in biblical criticism had a direct impact on how White constructed his historical understanding of the relationship between science and religion. By examining more carefully how biblical criticism played a significant role in the thought of White and other alleged cofounders of the conflict thesis, this article hopes to relocate the origins, development, and meaning of the science–religion debate at the end of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

There is a recursive set of natural numbers which is the difference set of some recursively enumerable set but which is not the difference set of any recursive set.

A collection of essays spanning Smith's career that examines the prospects for a renewed continental philosophy of religion, while making a constructive case for Smith's own vision of the "Nicene option" and incarnational theology as conversation partner.

Over the last two decades the practice of applied philosophy has undergone re­surgence. It is now common for philosophers to sit on ethics committees in hospitals, or to provide ethical advice to businesses, and many universities and colleges now offer courses in practical philosophy. Despite this, practical philosophy is subject to increasing criticism, with persons charging that (1) it is philosophically shallow, and (2) it has little to offer persons grappling with concrete ethical problems, either because (a) its techniques or (...) too removed from such problems, or (b) because ethical theory is too abstract. In this paper I develop responses to these criticisms, and offer suggestions as to how practical philosophy should be developed. (shrink)

In the summer of 1893, following the first publication of F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Edward Caird and Sir Henry Jones exchanged letters, with Caird bringing criticism to bear on Bradley’s work analogous to one of Hegel’s objections to Spinoza’s theory of the attributes of substance. Spinoza’s attributes of his one reality, or substance — i.e., extension and thought and infinitely many other attributes not directly known to us — each contain this reality, and they are each a way for (...) us to know it. Hegel objected that they each failed in this owing to the abstractness of Spinoza’s ideas of the attributes. Caird held that Bradley’s metaphysics also makes the idea of reality in this way opposed to its object. The idea fails to contain reality as concrete experience. (shrink)

""Why theories of religion?" After raising and answering this question the author begins his examination of theories of religion by first looking at the explanations given by religious believers (Revelation and Religious Experience). He then considers the view of thinkers who have sought to transform religion into philosophy (Plato, Kant and Hegel), before reviewing the theories of those who have seen religion as arising out of errors in primitive thinking (Tyler, Frazer and Levy-Bruhl) and those 'masters of suspicion', as Paul (...) Ricoeur has called them, (Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud) who offered what they believed to be exhaustive psychological and sociological theories of the origin and nature of religion. In the course of his discussion the author also engages with many contemporary thinkers whose discussions of religion have been based on these classical accounts."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)