In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom‐up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top‐down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors' intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified larger units than (...) when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal‐directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom‐up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top‐down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a business paradigm that allows and enables the integration of environmental ethics into business decisions while creating a competitive advantage through the use of an ethical framework based on classical American pragmatism. Environmental ethics could be useful as an alternative paradigm for business ethics by offering new perspectives and methodologies to grant consideration of the natural environment. An approach based on classical American pragmatism provides a superior framework for businesses by focusing on experimentation and innovation, (...) driving a long-term focus, and providing actionable clarity. Under a pragmatic approach to ethics, the choice for sustainability becomes self-evident for business performance and moral reasons. (shrink)

I develop a “two-systems” interpretation of Husserl’s theory of belief. On this interpretation, Husserl accounts for our sense of the world in terms of (1) a system of embodied horizon meanings and passive synthesis, which is involved in any experience of an object, and (2) a system of active synthesis and sedimentation, which comes on line when we attend to an object’s properties. I use this account to defend Husserl against several forms of Heideggerean critique. One line of critique, recently (...) elaborated by Taylor Carman, says that Husserl wrongly loads everyday perception with explicit beliefs about things. A second, earlier line of critique, due to Hubert Dreyfus, charges Husserl with thinking of belief on a problematic Artificial Intelligence (AI) model which involves explicit rules applied to discrete symbol structures. I argue that these criticisms are based on a conflation of Husserl’s two systems of belief. The conception of Husserlian phenomenology which emerges is compatible with Heideggerean phenomenology and associated approaches to cognitive science (in particular, dynamical systems theory). (shrink)

In order the combat the growing apathy, cynicism, and indifference observed among students, the author developed a course designed to make the study of philosophy relevant, applicable, and personal for students. This paper is a detailed exposition of the structure and content of this course. Build around the theme “Exploring Moral Character,” this course focuses on the role of moral character in ethical decision making and the nature of students’ own moral character. The course is divided into four units. Designed (...) as a voyage of personal discovery for students, each unit concludes with a non-traditional writing assignment (the moral reasoning unit, for example, concludes with students writing letters to the Admiralty as witnesses to the conviction and sentencing of Billy Budd). The author discusses why the course structure and paper assignments facilitate students’ ability to make explicit and to reflect on their own moral values. Appended to the article is a list of the course’s non-traditional paper assignments. (shrink)

Kant insists in the Rechtslehre that the right of possession is intelligible and abstracts from all sensible conditions but often maintains in his earlier drafts that empirical possession serves as the schema of intelligible possession. This paper addresses the questions, Why does Kant think in the early drafts that the right of possession requires a schematism? What work is this schematism meant to do? How does it operate in detail? What similarities between the schematism of possession and the first Critique (...) schematism justify calling them by the same name? The investigation reveals that, without the schematism of possession, no objects of choice would be available to be possessed. At the same time, the schematism must not be confused with the concept of intelligible possession. In the Rechtslehre itself, Kant retreats from a schematism of possession to a construction of right on analogy with the reciprocal relation of physical forces, and I speculate about the reasons for this change. (shrink)

I show how existing concepts of supervenience relate to two more fundamental ontological relations: determination and dependence. Determination says that the supervenient properties of a thing are a function of its base properties, while dependence says that having a supervenient property implies having a base property. I show that most varieties of supervenience are either determination relations or determination relations conjoined with dependence relations. In the process of unpacking these connections I identify limitations of existing concepts of supervenience and provide (...) ways of overcoming them. What results is a more precise, flexible, and powerful set of tools for relating sets of properties than current concepts of supervenience provide. I apply these tools to a recalcitrant problem in the physicalism literature – the problem of extras. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data, we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with (...) the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task. (shrink)

The dissertation focuses on the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In claiming "ethics is first philosophy," Levinas helps overcome the perceived indifference to ethical concerns among post-modern thinkers. However, it is often overlooked that this claim is as much about philosophy as it is about the importance of ethics. The dissertation explains why Levinas' philosophy turns to ethics and what philosophy is capable of once it has adopted this ethical figure. ;The first section is devoted to Levinas' Totality and Infinity. There, (...) Levinas argues that ethics reorients philosophy by accomplishing the metaphysical desire for beings as such, what Levinas calls the absolutely other. A reading of Jacques Derrida's essay "Violence and Metaphysics" shows that Totality and Infinity is profoundly determined by a theological conceptuality and correlatively by forgetting the ontological difference. This suggests that the primacy of ethics depends on an anterior instance, thus rendering Levinas' first philosophy secondary. ;The second section of the dissertation positions Levinas' ethical philosophy within the tradition of phenomenological philosophy and its quest for a subject who is first or ultimate. Whereas Husserl practiced the reduction to the point where it reached consciousness, Levinas practices it to a point beyond that: responsibility. Ethics intervenes as a supplement to Husserl's phenomenology: ethics is added to phenomenology in order to explain its possibility at the same time as it replaces phenomenology with ethical descriptions. This section concludes by contesting the privilege that Levinas accords to ethics in the phenomenology of the subject. It does so by showing that Heidegger's Dasein analytic offers phenomenological philosophy a similar subject. ;The third section argues that in responsibility, phenomena appear which do not appear when the subject is consciousness. These include religious phenomena. The phenomenology of responsibility can thus be the basis for a philosophy of religion. Like the modern philosophy of religion figured in Hegel and Nietzsche, it articulates the rationality or significance of religious phenomena without recourse to the dogmatic authority of faith or historical tradition. However, a philosophy of religion issued from Levinas surpasses the origin of this tradition in the death of God and end of metaphysics. (shrink)

(2006). Screed or Scholarship: The Days of Whine and Roses: The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L by Douglas Litowitz. Legal Ethics: Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 233-243.

This paper conducts an evaluative study on the rehabilitation of limb motor function by using a microsensor information flow gain algorithm and investigates the surface electromyography signals of the upper limb during rehabilitation training. The surface EMG signals contain a large amount of limb movement information. By analysing and processing the surface EMG signals, we can grasp the human muscle movement state and identify the human upper limb movement intention. The EMG signals were processed by the trap and filter combination (...) denoising method and wavelet denoising method, respectively, the signal-to-noise ratio was used to evaluate the noise reduction effect, and finally, the wavelet denoising method with a better noise reduction effect was selected to process all the EMG signals. After the noise is removed, the signal is extracted in the time domain and frequency domain, and the root mean square, absolute mean, median frequency in the time domain, and average power frequency in the frequency domain are selected and input to the classifier for pattern recognition. The support vector machine is used to classify the myoelectric signals and optimize the parameters in the support vector machine using the grid search method and particle swarm optimization algorithm and classify the test samples using the trained support vector machine. Compared with the classification results of the grid search optimized support vector machine, the optimized vector machine has a 7% higher recognition rate, reaching 85%. The action recognition classification method of myoelectric signals is combined with an upper limb rehabilitation training platform to verify the feasibility of using myoelectric signals for rehabilitation training. After the classifier recognizes the upper limb movements, the upper computer sends movement commands to the controller to make the rehabilitation platform move according to the recognition results, and finally, the movement execution accuracy of the rehabilitation platform reaches 80% on average. (shrink)

In 1988, the control of the American Psychological Association shifted to those advocating the interests of professional practice and a substantial segment of the scientific community in psychology seceded to form the American Psychological Society, devoted to scientific psychology and scientific-based practice. In this climate, it has become increasingly difficult for scientists and practitioners to maintain analytical discussions of the philosophical and methodological issues that divide these two groups. For over 25 years, the authors have been fortunate to have the (...) professional and intellectual luxury of just such a discussion, and present here a dialogue that attempts to capture their initial stark differences in perspective and the process by which differences have been clarified, and areas of agreement established. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this case study, I address the procedural ethics of conversation analysis (CA) and the collection of naturally occurring mundane interactions. I draw from the challenges that emerged from the institutional ethics review of the HIV, health and interaction study (the H2I Study), a CA project that sought to identify the practices through which normative assumptions of HIV and other health conditions are produced in conversations. Consistent with CA’s preference for naturally occurring interactions, the H2I Study collected and analysed everyday (...) telephone calls involving people living with HIV. This article offers practical strategies CA researchers might use to navigate two ethical concerns raised about the collection of naturally occurring mundane interactions. The first questions the merits of collecting naturally occurring mundane interactions. For those unfamiliar with CA, the specific advantages of analysing naturally occurring mundane interactions may not be self-evident. This places an evidentiary burden on CA researchers to warrant the collection of this type of data. To address this concern, I suggest demonstrating in ethics applications the analytic value of CA using publicly available interactions. The second concern questions the use of verbal consent necessary for the collection of naturally occurring mundane interactions. Like most CA research, the H2I Study required flexible informed consent protocols appropriate for spontaneous and unpredictable interactions. Drawing from within and outside the CA literature, I offer three rationales for the use of verbal consent. This article is written as a practical resource for conversation analysts seeking approval from their research ethics board (REB) and for REBs who might be unfamiliar with CA research. This article contributes to a small but growing body of literature that documents not only the kinds of challenges CA researchers encounter from institutional ethics review, but the specific procedural ethics they may employ to secure ethics approval. (shrink)

The sixth and most recently published of the seven Heidegger manuscripts from his literary remains, The Event , is itself something of an event. If the Beiträge zur Philosophie was to set the stage for what has been received as an even more experimental Heidegger, then The Event in many ways might look back on that experimentation as yesterday’s news. The Event seems to begin where the Beiträge ended, as if there was no longer the need to justify its sentences (...) by means of an appeal to the historical tradition; in fact, such an appeal goes further towards confirming that tradition and its corresponding metaphysics than it does towards problematizing it. This is not to say that The Event progresses as if the historical tradition were no longer unfolding, but that it is much less concerned with trying to make sense of its own unfolding from out of some vaguely universal understanding of that tradition. In fact, while the Beiträge unceasingly attempted to make .. (shrink)

My dissertation is concerned with Epicurus' attempt to reconcile libertarianism and atomism. I begin by offering my solution to 'the problem of the swerve,' arguing that Lucretius is claiming that swerves cause volitions 'from the bottom up' and that the attempts of scholars to construct a better position for Epicurus to have held were doomed to fail, since this is the only position open to the libertarian atomist. ;I also examine the swerve's role in cosmogony, arguing that 'the cosmogonic argument' (...) for the swerve is an afterthought, 'the libertarian argument' being Epicurus' chief argument for the swerve. ;I discuss the physics of the swerve as a minimal, oblique deviation of an atom from its course. And I explore its implications: atoms move at a speed greater than one minimal unit of distance per minimal unit of time, and there are no minimal units of space. ;Returning to the question of the swerve's role in action, I argue that a typical action involves a series of volitions each caused by a plurality of swerves by atoms of the mind's 'fourth nature.' And I argue that one's power to move at will is directly sensed, though also known through one's innate $\pi\rho\acute{o}\lambda\eta\psi\iota\varsigma$ of one's freedom. ;In the second half of my dissertation, I turn to the question of responsibility. I examine Epicurus' remarks about 'what is due to us' . I examine Epicurus' argument that Democriteans are self-refuting in espousing determinism and 'eliminative materialism.' I explain that Epicurus rejects only Democritus' ontology, not his epistemology . I examine Epicurus' discussion in On Nature of our 'notion of responsibility' , our responsibility as $\alpha\pi o\gamma\varepsilon\gamma\varepsilon\nu\nu\eta\mu\acute \varepsilon\nu\alpha$ , and our responsibility for our thoughts of the $\tau\acute\varepsilon\lambda o\varsigma$ and 'the criterion' . I explain what Epicurus means by the $\tau\acute\varepsilon\lambda o\varsigma$: pleasure, "katastematic" and "kinetic" . And finally, I argue that Epicurus fails to meet the challenge of 'psychological determinism'. (shrink)