This second volume explores Jung’s understanding of synchronicity and argues that it offers an important contribution to contemporary science. Whilst the scientific world has often ignored Jung’s theories as being too much like mysticism, Haule argues that what the human psyche knows beyond sensory perception is extremely valuable. Divided into two parts, areas of discussion include: shamanism and mastery border zones of exact science meditation, parapsychology and psychokinesis _Jung in the 21 st Century Volume Two: Synchronicity and Science_ will, (...) like the first volume, be an invaluable resource for all those in the field of analytical psychology, including students of Jung, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists with an interest in the meeting of Jung and science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 99-119 [Access article in PDF] Animism and Empiricism: Copernican Physics and the Origins of William Gilbert's Experimental Method John Henry In the second year of this journal's run, way back in 1941, appeared Edgar Zilsel's classic and still widely cited paper on The Origins of William Gilbert's Experimental Method. 1 Focusing on Gilbert's De magnete of 1600, undoubtedly a seminal (...) text in the history of the experimental method, 2 Zilsel argued that Gilbert borrowed his methodology from elite craftsmen, artisans, and other manual workers involved in mining, smelting, smithing, compass making, navigation, sailing, and other activities which involved working with iron or with magnets. 3 On its appearance the paper contributed to a growing and still continuing debate in the history of science about the relative importance of scholars and craftsmen in the origins of modern science. Although Zilsel's general thesis has been critically evaluated in terms of that wider debate, 4 his very specific claims about the [End Page 99] role of elite craftsmen in providing Gilbert with a ready-made experimental method, have never been properly considered. This paper attempts to reassess Zilsel's claims about the origin of Gilbert's experimental method and, in so doing, to arrive at a richer understanding of what Gilbert was trying to do in De magnete and to suggest an alternative source for his experimentalism.The first thing to note about Zilsel's argument is that it had two strands. 5 One of these pointed to actual experimental techniques used by Gilbert and showed that they can all be found in earlier writings on magnets. To be more specific, the techniques in question are to be found either in the thirteenth-century "Letter on the Magnet" written by Petrus Pergrinus or Pierre de Maricourt, first published in 1558, or in The Newe Attractive, a work on the magnetic compass written by a retired mariner, Robert Norman, first published in 1581 but reprinted three times before 1600. 6 The second strand did not involve experiments at all, with one notable exception, but simply implied or suggested that Gilbert's experimental techniques must have been inspired by miners and foundrymen, or navigators and instrument makers. The problem here, as others have objected, 7 is that it is by no means clear that elite craftsmen were engaged in performing experiments in anything like the sense of the word required for the argument to cut any ice. For Zilsel, however, "we cannot doubt that many of [the miners and foundrymen of the period], stimulated to improvements by economic competition, were wont to try new techniques and to observe natural processes." 8 A few sentences later we are told that it is "obvious" that "among such manual labourers there were experimentalists, though experimentalists with practical aims only and without theoretical knowledge." 9 [End Page 100]The philosopher of science at this point might legitimately want to suggest that an experiment is not an experiment unless it is testing a theory, but we do not have to enter into such arguable niceties. 10 We can see that there is something profoundly tendentious in Zilsel's claims simply by reading on. At this point Zilsel mentioned the only experiment specifically referred to in this strand of his argumentation. Quoting Gilbert, Zilsel showed that Gilbert himself must have descended into a mine in order, as Zilsel says, "to verify the hypothesis" that the polarity of a magnet derives from the polarity of the earth: We had a twenty pounds' heavy loadstone dug and hauled out after having first observed and marked its ends in its vein. Then we put the stone in a wooden tub on water, so that it could turn freely. Immediately the surface which had looked to the North in the mine turned itself to the North on the water. 11Zilsel did not make the absurd claim that Gilbert must have seen miners doing this kind of experiment, but he did all he could to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Does Meditation Solve the Situationist Crisis in Modern Ethics? A Contemplative Response to John M. DorisMatthew Spencer (bio)There is a good chance you believe in character, in the notions of good character and bad character.1 You may believe in the virtues, too. The virtues are classically said to lead us toward the good, toward the noble, the fine, the honorable (to kalón, to kalon).2 But John M. (...) Doris wants you [End Page 555] to forget about, or move on from, all this talk of virtue and character. There are two suggestions, then: (1) forgetting, (2) thinking about moving on. The two stories are different, and Doris has supported both, sometimes pushing back against his own earlier statements.3 Both stories are powerful, and if we do not assess how they overlap, we will not be in good ethical shape for the future.Why does Doris criticize virtues and character? Virtues, according to the ancient sources, encourage and facilitate our having good ethical dispositions (Anscombe 1958; Keown 1992). If this is right, we ought to have the right kind of (what psychologists today call) traits and, moreover, we can have them.4 Notice, however, that while the virtues may contain or include the having of dispositions, they also extend beyond mere dispositions.According to Aristotle, cultivating courage is to be seen primarily, even exhaustively, as a matter of developing and maintaining the disposition (trait) of courage (Nic. Eth. 1115a6 ff.). However, as others have recognized,5 isolated acts of bravery still count when it comes to calling someone courageous. If you haul a stricken victim from train tracks, you merit the appellation “courageous” even if (especially if) you usually show opposite traits like non-courageousness or cowardice.Furthermore, according to modern virtue ethicists (Russell 2013, pp. 1–28), we must not only have good dispositions but also relate the virtues to the long tradition of what moral philosophy has noticed about the interplay of virtues and character with the moral life in general. Reducing this “moral life” to dispositional virtues is, as the train example indicates, not as attractive as recent writing on virtue ethics suggests.6Because virtues include even if they are not limited to the right kind of traits, they keep us stably disposed to do the right thing whatever the situation. At least, that is the classical picture. The virtues under classical description impact a range of ethically relevant traits, although do note that what “ethical relevance” amounts to is a deep if underexamined question in philosophical ethics; the meanings of “ethical” and “moral” have evolved over time and have not operated in all cultures.Not all cultures, then, have the notions of “moral” and “ethical” that we have, more or less intelligibly, in our own day.7 Arguably, these notions were foreign to Aristotle, as several philosophers from Elizabeth Anscombe to Alasdair MacIntyre have claimed. It may, moreover, be the case that they remained foreign through the early stages of the Western philosophical tradition, much as they also appear foreign to traditions such as Buddhism (MacIntyre 2013, p. 46). The notion that there is some distinguishable realm of “moral matters” as opposed to “nonmoral” matters or to some equally distinguishable realm of “the ethical” is, then, hard to find in the Nicomachean Ethics—despite the name that posterity has given it, with some irony.8 I do not believe the notion can be found, nor that it is named, in the earliest Buddhist texts.9 [End Page 556]The virtues, in any case, are classically designed (arguably in both Aristotle’s works and Buddhism) to give us good ethical dispositions. It is not much use just having a disposition; we need to put it into practice. Defeasible dispositions, in the jargon, do not count for very much—or they do not always count when it matters. The notion, then, that we can have a disposition but not always act upon it because it gets defeated, is controversial.10 How we avoid this fate is a central theme in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Then it matters that, for some years now, Doris has criticized the virtues in ancient and modern authors, deprecating... (shrink)

With contributions from medicine, psychology and philosophy, Pathways into the Jungian World looks at the central issues of commonality and difference in phenomenology and analytical psychology. The essays investigate how existential phenomenology and analytical psychology have been involved in the same fundamental cultural and therapeutic project. They both legitimize the subtlety, complexity, and depth of experience in an age when the meaning of experience has been abandoned to the dictates of pharmaceutical technology, economics and medical psychiatry. The contributors reveal how (...) Jung's relationship to the phenomenological tradition is being developed and rigorously show that the psychological resonance of the world is immediately available for phenomenological description. Contributors: Lionel Corbett, Veronica Goodchild, John Haule, David Michael Levin, Stanton Marlan, Bertha Mook, Robert Romanyshyn, Ronald Schenk, Charles E. Scott, Eva Marie Simms, Michael P. Sipiora, Mary Watkins, Mark Welman. (shrink)

The Human Psyche is an in-depth exploration of dualist-interactionism, a concept Sir John Eccles developed with Sir Karl Popper in the context of a wide...

Aristotle’s solution to Zeno’s arrow paradox differs markedly from the so called at-at solution championed by Russell, which has become the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy. The latter supposes that motion consists in simply being at different places at different times. It can boast parsimony because it eliminates velocity from the ontology. Aristotle, by contrast, solves the paradox by denying that the flight of the arrow is composed of instants; rather, on my reading, he holds that the flight is a (...) unity which is ontologically prior to the temporal parts that may be abstracted from it. I label this position temporal holism; and an entity that is ontological prior to its temporal parts lasting. Lasting, I argue, is the key to Aristotle’s solution to the arrow paradox, but it has received insufficient attention in the relevant literature. I therefore set out here to investigate lasting and highlight its major role in Aristotle’s metaphysics more broadly, and in his solution to other problems of change. I show, too, how lasting within a contemporary context underwrites a parsimonious and intuitive solution to the arrow paradox that retains instantaneous velocity, and hence solves a problem for those who think velocity is required within the ontology to underwrite certain causal roles. (shrink)

Introduction Paul Boshears The following excerpt from Paul Amitai's In Between States: Field notes and speculations on postwar landscapes (2012) confounds its reader. Presenting an alternate history of the State of Israel as a space station orbiting Earth, the excitement of possibilities crackles across the texts and images. Like Chris Marker's La Jeteé , the accompanying static images distort the viewer's temporality: are these archaeological items, images from a past, or a future? Why isn't this our future? In Between States (...) can also be seen as complementing Larissa Sansour's provocative science fiction works, Space Exodus (2009) which "documents" the Palestinian space program, and her Nation Estate (2012), in which Palestine is relocated into a skyscraper. Amitai's vision opens onto an intergalactic diaspora, wherein the refugees of World War II are given the stars as Western Europe continues to fight over terrestial colonies. —PFB Auditorium, Hoechst AG headquarters, Industriepark-Höchst, 2011. In 1941 an investigation by the US Justice Department exposed a marriage cartel between John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) and I.G. Farben. The two corporations had formed a joint operation in 1927 called Standard IG Farben. It was revealed that the two had shared patents in order to control prices and markets in their respective regions. Standard was accused of hiding patents from the US Navy and supplying fuel to German submarines, which lead to charges of criminal conspiracy. The Pentagon intervened, requesting that President Roosevelt stop the investigation in order to protect war production and oil supply. Roosevelt agreed, and the Senate committee investigating the matter, headed by Senator Harry Truman, was halted. Standard Oil paid a fine of $5000 and promised to stop supplying fuel to the enemies. Auditorium, Hoechst AG headquarters, Industriepark-Höchst, 2011. Furious at the decision to terminate the investigation of acts he considered treason, Truman initiated a new inquiry into Standard Oil’s war-time practices after succeeding Roosevelt as president in 1945. With the chief executives of I.G Farben simultaneously on trial at Nuremburg, Truman brokered a deal with the Allies that reduced or withdrew criminal charges leveled against both corporations in exchange for Standard Oil and I.G. Farben’s sponsorship of one of Truman’s most ambitious postwar projects—the relocation of the Jewish people. Detail, Sanofi-Aventis advertisement, 2011. The third critical player in this bold experiment was the nascent North Atlantic Space Agency. Formed by Allied forces using the seized assets and engineering expertise of Hitler’s hitherto classified space program (conquer Earth, then the stars), the North Atlantic Space Agency was a pre-NATO foray into interstellar nation building, with orbital occupation as the first point of order. By 1947, NASA was nearly ready to deploy the first manned space station. Standard Oil and I.G. Farben’s advanced fuel refinement capacities and deep, war-enriched financial resources allowed NASA to speed up their launch schedule significantly. Detail, Sanofi-Aventis advertisement, 2011. Diplomatic efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine were failing to gain traction, while post-colonial England held its ground on immigration restrictions and bands of Jews and Arabs battled over territory on the ground. More immediate was the issue of temporarily housing Holocaust survivors and refugees across scorched Europe. Leaders of the continental nations demonstrated, at best, reluctance to accommodate the Jews, who in turn were, at the least, resistant to returning to the same bloody cocktail from which they had fled. Truman used the impasse to advance a plan for NASA’s space station to be put to use as a temporary Jewish outpost, an orbital displaced persons camp, to be operated by the US Army. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. Final preparations advanced rapidly. Viewing the orbital displaced persons (ODP) camp as a solution to their immigration problem both at home and abroad, England came on board as a willing partner. Spaceship Exodus was positioned for takeoff on German farmland 20 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt. On December 30, 1947, one month after the UN General Assembly voted down the separation plan for Palestine, Exodus rocketed into the atmosphere hauling the first module of barracks designed to house 1,500 refugees. Transport vehicles arrived shortly thereafter, loaded down with leftover wartime military rations and 3,000 Jews of Russian and Polish origin. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule."—Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 96. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. The ODP camp proved to be a longer-term solution than originally envisioned. Additional installations were positioned to form swollen clusters of interlocking units – sleeping quarters, schools, clinics, canteens. The UN was brought in to monitor the camp following two chaotic years of US Army control in which food shortages, pandemic diseases, and rampant black market trade had brought the camp to near total collapse. No less bureaucratic or ineffectual, the UN relief agency at least had prior experience facilitating contexts of a similar magnitude and could potentially predict outcomes. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. What had been unexpected was the degree to which the camp would evolve into its own self-regulated, hive-like ecosystem where previously accepted rules of conduct were not applicable. The ODP camp was an exceptional space, a riverboat casino, an offshore research lab of social experimentation and entrepreneurial innovation. No longer Earth-bound, touching soil knotted by prescripts of Talmudic law, the camp residents were able to rationalize loopholes and detonate barriers standing in the way of absolute production. The Jewish archipelago was renamed Israel after the ancient homeland. If the temple couldn’t be rebuilt in the motherland, a post-national rhizome would sprout up in its stead. Eyes everywhere, beyond all borders. More information on the project at the author's site. (shrink)

Genetic testing has historically been performed in the context of chronic disease and cancer diagnostics. The timelines for these tests are typically measured in days or weeks, rather than in minutes. As such, the concept that genetic information might be generated and then used to alter management in the acute setting has, thus far, not been feasible. However, recent advances in genetic technologies have the potential to allow genetic information to be generated significantly quicker. The m.1555A>G genetic variant is present (...) in one in 500 individuals and predisposes to profound hearing loss following the administration of aminoglycoside antibiotics. These antibiotics are used frequently in cases of neonatal sepsis and it is estimated that approximately 180 neonates in the UK are at risk of antibiotic induced hearing loss each year because of this genetic change. Knowledge of this variant in the acute setting would allow clinicians to prescribe alternative antibiotics. The Pharmacogenetics to Avoid Loss of Hearing study will implement a genetic point of care test (POCT) for the m.1555A>G variant within two major UK based neonatal intensive care units. This represents the first trial of a genetic POCT aimed at altering management in the acute setting. This round table discussion outlines the novel ethical issues faced in the development of this trial and the legal barriers to implementation. We ask five stakeholders to provide their opinions on this trial and their perspectives on the concept of genetic testing in the acute setting.Trial registration numberISRCTN-13704894. (shrink)

Christian miller invites further clarification about the relationship between accountability and autonomy. Whereas embracing accountability to others for one’s responsibilities in those relationships emphasizes relationality, autonomy accents the individual’s own capacities to exhibit agency in enacting one’s decisions. Accordingly, we theorize that relational capacities for empathic concern and perspective-taking are especially important in the virtue of accountability. The capacity for self-regulation may serve both one’s autonomous pursuits and accountability for carrying out one’s responsibilities...

In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is (...) a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about "invasive government," yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our "rational elites" have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul shows that they have also been responsible for most of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - "Voltaire's bastards"--Whose cult of scientific management is bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose peoples increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerrilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to "solutions," he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis. (shrink)

In this article I explore Serres’ idea of science and how it impacted his overall work. This approach to understanding Serres’ idea of science is much like working with Nietzsche. I look at the areas Serres viewed as the dangers of science including what he referred to as a tsunami of data and the primary focus on methods. I end with Serres third way of inventive science.

In a fair, infinite lottery, it is possible to conclude that drawing a number divisible by four is strictly less likely than drawing an even number; and, with apparently equal cogency, that drawing a number divisible by four is equally as likely as drawing an even number.

A formal semantic analysis of the _tough_-construction is provided building on the well-known observation that _events_ play a central role. A close look at the semantic characteristics of the class of _tough_-predicates and the syntactic and semantic properties of nonfinite clauses reveals the link between these pieces, expanding on recent advances in the semantics of clauses (Moulton in Natural selection and the syntax of clausal complementation, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2009 ). Building on Salzmann (Reconstruction and resumption (...) in indirect A′-dependencies: On the syntax of prolepsis and relativization in (Swiss) German and beyond, de Gruyter, Berlin 2017b ), a formal semantic and syntactic analysis of prolepsis is provided to explain the antecedent gap chain in the _tough_-construction. In total, this paper offers a description and explanation of (i) the class of _tough_-predicates; (ii) the properties of the nonfinite clause that appears in the _tough_-construction; (iii) why no other predicates or clauses are permitted in the construction; (iv) the many properties of the antecedent gap chain in the _tough_-construction, primarily the fact that the chain is “weakly” unbounded; and (v) the semantic contribution of prolepsis as it applies in the _tough_-construction. (shrink)

This paper draws on the work of Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger to construct a postructural theory of the firm. The ideal firm is conceived as a technology that facilitates a technology-free void/site of potential. For actors within this firm to be ethical requires their achievement of human subjecthood through aesthetic fidelity to the site-induced events. Heidegger’s concerns regarding the enframing effects of technology and his recognition of the truth-revealing qualities of art, are incorporated here into a theory of the (...) firm as an idealized, technology facilitated, aesthetic void-of-potential revealing. Authentic human being thus implies that firms-as-technology ‘get out of the way’. This theory of the firm is further revealed through Badiou’s concept of event-driven human flourishing. We embrace Badiou’s ‘ethics-of-truths’ in which fidelity to the trace of an event creates human subjecthood. We consider implications of our theory-of-the-firm for social media firms such as Alphabet and Facebook. (shrink)

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar a versão carrolliana de dois paradoxos clássicos e um original, acompanhadas da reconstrução e exame do tratamento lógico oferecido por Carroll e de como tais paradoxos foram tratados por outros autores.

I evaluate Patrick Todd's critique of the idea accepted by many, including (in contemporary philosophy) Nelson Pike and John Martin Fischer, that there can be non‐causal constraints on human actions (including basic actions). I suggest that Todd's critical reflections, although illuminating, are not persuasive. I defend non‐causal constraints in part by putting forward an interpretation of the intuitive idea of the fixity of the past following Carl Ginet: our freedom is the power to add to the given past.

This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which attitudes (...) address on the curriculum and whether or not to promote them. I then apply this to the case of religious attitudes and attitudes about religions. I argue that where having or failing to have a certain attitude makes a significant difference to students’ lives, it ought to be addressed by curricula. Where failing to have the attitude is irrational, this failure ought to be remedied; where having the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be discouraged; and where neither having nor failing to have the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be introduced and discussed without encouragement or discouragement. In so far as is practicable, educators should aim to acquaint students with arguments for and against having these attitudes and initiate them into the practice of assessing their soundness. The implications of this theory for extra-curricular influence, such as upbringing in the home, are also explored. (shrink)

From the "New York Times" bestselling author of "If I Stay" Allyson Healeys life is exactly like her suitcase--packed, planned, ordered. Then on the last day of her three-week post-graduation European tour, she meets Willem. A free-spirited, roving actor, Willem is everything shes not, and when he invites her to abandon her plans and come to Paris with him, Allyson says yes. This uncharacteristic decision leads to a day of risk and romance, liberation and intimacy: 24 hours that will transform (...) Allysons life. A book about love, heartbreak, travel, identity, and the "accidents" of fate, "Just One Day" shows us how sometimes in order to get found, you first have to get lost... and how often the people we are seeking are much closer than we know. The first in a sweepingly romantic duet of novels. Willems story--"Just One Year"--is coming soon. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe was one of the most gifted and productive philosophers of the decades following the Second World War. Her writings present challenges to readers: some of them are very difficult to comprehend while others seem philosophically-minded yet situated outside of philosophy as such. There are also the issues of whether she had a philosophical method and of the influence of Wittgenstein on the manner of her approach. A summary and estimate of Anscombe’s enduring contributions is presented before exploring the (...) style and aims of her philosophical work. Then two of her writings on religion are examined and their implications for her attitude to philosophy considered. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Pursuing Jacques Derrida's reflections on the possibility of "religion without religion," John Llewelyn makes room for a sense of the religious that does not depend on the religions or traditional notions of God or gods. Beginning with Derrida's statement that it was Kierkegaard to whom he remained most faithful, Llewelyn reads Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Deleuze, Marion, as well as Kierkegaard and Derrida, in original and compelling ways. Llewelyn puts religiousness in vital touch with the struggles (...) of the human condition, finding religious space in the margins between the secular and the religions, transcendence and immanence, faith and knowledge, affirmation and despair, lucidity and madness. This provocative and philosophically rich account shows why and where the religious matters. (shrink)

A comprehensive exploration of pragmatic themes emerging from neuroscientific research,illustrating why neurophilosophy should take this advancing pragmatist direction seriously.

The theory of evolution by natural selection did not spring fully formed and unprecedented from the brain of Charles Darwin. The idea of evolution had been around, in various guises, since the time of Ancient Greece. And nor did theorizing about evolution stop with what Daniel Dennett called "Darwin's dangerous idea." In this riveting new book, bestselling science writers John and Mary Gribbin explore the history of the idea of evolution, showing how Darwin's theory built on what went before (...) and how it was developed in the twentieth century, through an understanding of genetics and the biochemical basis of evolution, into the so-called "modern synthesis" and beyond. Darwin deserves his recognition as the primary proponent of the idea of natural selection, but as the authors show, his contribution was one link in a chain that extends back into antiquity and is still being forged today. (shrink)

We introduce the computable FS-jump, an analog of the classical Friedman–Stanley jump in the context of equivalence relations on the natural numbers. We prove that the computable FS-jump is proper with respect to computable reducibility. We then study the effect of the computable FS-jump on computably enumerable equivalence relations (ceers).

According to most contemporary philosophers, the Indiscernibility of Identicals is obviously true. We might therefore expect earlier philosophers to endorse it. But I will use a puzzle about identity over time to argue that Descartes would reject it.

In this provocative book, John Keane calls for a fresh understanding of the vexed relationship between democracy and violence. Taking issue with the common sense view that 'human nature' is violent, Keane shows why mature democracies do not wage war upon each other, and why they are unusually sensitive to violence. He argues that we need to think more discriminatingly about the origins of violence, its consequences, its uses and remedies. He probes the disputed meanings of the term violence, (...) and asks why violence is the greatest enemy of democracy, and why today's global 'triangle of violence' is tempting politicians to invoke undemocratic emergency powers. Throughout, Keane gives prominence to ethical questions, such as the circumstances in which violence can be justified, and argues that violent behaviour and means of violence can and should be 'democratised' - made publicly accountable to others, so encouraging efforts to erase surplus violence from the world. (shrink)

John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not (...) be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists.". No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment. (shrink)

Sawai et al. (2022) provide a good summary of the bioethical debate about brain organoids with an eye toward future directions. Like many contemporary texts in bioethics, they call for engagement w...

"Being and Freedom is an account of ethics in Europe from the French Revolution: a phase of philosophical ethics whose influence ran far beyond philosophy, eventually dominating politics and religion in the West. Developments came from France, Germany, and Britain. This book is currently the only study that treats them together as a Europe-wide phenomenon. The first chapter covers the philosophical conflict at the heart of the French Revolution, between the individualism of the Enlightenment and two very different forms of (...) holistic ethics: the old regime's ethic of service and the radical-democracy of the Rousseauian left. Responses analysing modern freedom and democracy came from a series of French liberal thinkers. In Germany the reaction was to two revolutions seen as inaugurating modernity--the political revolution in France and the philosophical revolution of Kant. Here the fate of religion was critical; with it the metaphysics of being and freedom. The story is traced from Kant to Hegel's idealist version of ethical holism. In Britain, Enlightenment naturalism remained the prevailing framework. It took different forms: 'common sense' and the theory of the sentiments in Scotland, utilitarianism in England. From these elements came a synthesis of European themes by John Stuart Mill--comparable in range but opposed to that of Hegel. This period's ethical ideas remain the core of late modern ethics and the contested ground on which ethical disagreements take place today. The final chapter is a retrospective and assessment"--Publisher's description. (shrink)

This volume establishes the conceptual foundation for sustained investigation into tool development in neuroscience. Neuroscience relies on diverse and sophisticated experimental tools, and its ultimate explanatory target catapults the investigation of these research tools into a philosophical spotlight.

ObjectiveTo assess distracted attention and performance on a computer task following completion of a sustained attention and acute media multitasking task among adolescents with varying self-reported usual media multitasking.MethodsNinety-six 13- to 17-year-olds played the video game Tetris following completion of a Go/No-go paradigm to measure sustained attention in the presence of distractors, an acute media multitasking, or a passive viewing condition. Adolescents completed the conditions on separate visits in randomized order. Sustained attention was measured within the Go/No-go task by measuring (...) errors of omission. Distracted attention while playing the Tetris task was measured by computing eye tracking measures of attention to irrelevant distractor images that bordered the Tetris game. Participants also self-reported their daily media multitasking.ResultsThe Go/No-go task revealed important qualitative differences in sustained attention among low and high usual media multitaskers. There was a uniform improvement in sustained attention among low usual media multitaskers, demonstrated by a consistent linear decrease in omission errors. Among high usual media multitaskers, there was initially a decrease in sustained attention followed by an increase. Completing the Go/No-go task also statistically significantly reduced distractibility and increased performance while playing Tetris compared to the passive viewing condition, but only among those with low usual media multitasking. There was a non-statistically significant trend that completing the acute media multitask increased subsequent distractibility and performance while playing Tetris among high media multitaskers.ConclusionIn this sample of adolescents, practicing a sustained attention task reduces distractibility and improves task performance among those who have low levels of usual media multitasking. (shrink)

Includes the complete text of Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory and The Child and the Curriculum.

For Alesha to give valid and sufficient consent to a COVID-19 vaccine, she must possess both capacity and competency. Let us consider each in turn.Does Alesha have capacity? Is she approaching her...

Abstract: I argue that Orientalism continues to construct Arabs as subjects that cannot suffer violence, particularly the violence of torture. Beginning with Edward Said’s observation that Orientalists constructed ‘Arabs’ in the nineteenth -century as inorganic, metallic, and mineralized beings, I trace these themes through various sites in and around Guantanamo Bay. One finds the tropes of Orientalism in the Bybee memo as well as in the diary of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Through these three distinct but related moments, one finds that (...) Orientalism continues to produce Arabs as inorganic entities beyond death and thereby immune to violence and specifically the violence of torture. Insofar as imperialism has co-opted the language of non-violence by constructing its enemies as inviolable, one must recognize the Orientalized Arab as a receptor of limitless ‘non - violent’ hostilities. (shrink)

Bentham’s famous remark was a response to the assertation of natural rights that did not depend on law or some other foundation for their normative force.1 Whatever we make of that claim, it flags a problem for making and evaluating rights-based arguments in medical ethics. He wasn’t trying to say that rights are all meaningless, nor that we can readily do without them. Rather, it’s an objection to a particular way of asserting rights where they are taken to express free (...) standing claims that don’t require further defence or justification. Whether or not the rise of human rights in medical law has enriched the ability of the courts to deal with complex issues in a nuanced way is debatable, but there’s no doubting their prominence and unavoidability.2 For medical ethics, rights analysis requires paying heed to the kind of rights in play when arguing about ethics, as well as what’s distinctive about rights analysis. For many, rights operate as strong moral assertions intended to override other, less weighty, considerations and Ronald Dworkin claimed that we should view rights as a way of expressing particularly important claims that should constrain the state in its actions.3 Rights imply duties and focussing on a right's correlative duty can …. (shrink)