Though usually Edmund Burke is identified as the first to articulate the principles of a modern conservative political tradition, arguably he was preceded by a Scotsman who is better known for espousing a brilliant concept of skepticism. As Laurence Bongie notes, "David Hume was undoubtedly the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period. Hume's impact in France] was of undeniable importance, greater even for a time than the (...) related influence of Burke, although it represents a contribution to French counter-revolutionary thought which, unlike that of Burke, has been almost totally ignored by historians to this day." The bulk of Bongie's work consists of the writings of French readers of Hume who were confronted, first, by the ideology of human perfection and, finally, by the actual terrors of the French Revolution. Offered in French in the original edition of David Hume published by Oxford University Press in 1965, these vitally important writings have been translated by the author into English for the Liberty Fund second edition. In his foreword, Donald Livingston observes that "If conservatism is taken to be an intellectual critique of the first attempt at modern total revolution, then the first such event was not the French but the Puritan revolution, and the first systematic critique of this sort of act was given by Hume." Laurence L. Bongie is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of British Columbia. Donald Livingston is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes. (shrink)

One of the principal characteristics of contemporary inquiry is the rediscovery of human consciousness. This book attempts to develop that experience and continue the insight of the legendary Hermes Trismegistos that 'thought is God the Father.' The author invites the reader to attend to his own act of thinking.

Legal contracts and litigation documents common to the American legal system were encoded in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML also represents rules about the contracts and litigation procedure. In addition to an expert system tool that allows one to make inferences with that engine, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) generates the XML representing the rules. A rulebase is developed by marking up examples of the XML to be interpreted and the XML to be generated, analogously to Query By Example. (...) This article provides a broader context of the synergy between XML and artificial intelligence by including discussions of: (1) the role of Artificial Intelligence in handling routine litigation; (2) how the use of XML enables legal expert systems to get their `input' without the user having to enter the same information again for the expert system;(3) the advantages of XML markup over other forms of markup for documents; (4) the relationship between XML and ontologies; (5) other projects using XML with rules or legal affairs. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Byzantinische Zeitschrift Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 2 Seiten: 943-994.

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief (...) systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death. (shrink)

Amodel for inventing newsignals is introduced in the context of sender–receiver games with reinforcement learning. If the invention parameter is set to zero, it reduces to basic Roth–Erev learning applied to acts rather than strategies, as in Argiento et al. (Stoch. Process. Appl. 119:373–390, 2009). If every act is uniformly reinforced in every state it reduces to the Chinese Restaurant Process—also known as the Hoppe–Pólya urn—applied to each act. The dynamics can move players from one signaling game to another during (...) the learning process. Invention helps agents avoid pooling and partial pooling equilibria. (shrink)

ai Diminished gaze fixation is one of the core features of autism and has been proposed to be associated with abnormalities in the neural circuitry of affect. We tested this hypothesis in two separate studies using eye tracking while measuring functional brain activity during facial discrimination tasks in individuals with autism and in typically developing individuals. Activation in the fusiform gyrus and amygdala was strongly and positively correlated with the time spent fixating the eyes in the autistic group in both (...) studies, suggesting that diminished gaze fixation may account for the fusiform hypoactivation to faces commonly reported in autism. In addition, variation in eye fixation within autistic individuals was strongly and positively associated with amygdala activation across both studies, suggesting a heightened emotional response associated with gaze fixation in autism. (shrink)

This letter responds to letters by Garson Leder and by Harrison Lee in the same issue, September‐October 2024, of the Hastings Center Report.

Book reviewed in this article: Long Term Care: Principles, Programs and Policies. By Rosalie A. Kane and Robert L. Kane. Long Term Health Care: providing a Spectrum of Services to the Aged. By Philip W. Brickner, Anthony J. Lechich, Roberta Lipsman, and Linda K. scharer.

Commercialisation and consumerism have had lasting and profound effects upon the nature of oral health and how dental services are provided. The stigma of a spoiled dental appearance, along with the attraction of the smile as a symbol of status and prestige, places the mouth and teeth as an object and product to be bought and sold. How the dental profession interacts with this acquired status of the mouth has direct implications for the professional status of dentistry and the relationship (...) between the profession and society. This essay examines the mouth’s developing position as a symbol of status and prestige and how the dental profession’s interaction and response to this may have important effects on the nature of dentistry’s social contract with society. As rates of dental disease reduce in higher socioeconomic groups, dentistry is experiencing a reorientation from being positioned within a therapeutic context, to be increasingly viewed as body work. This is not in of itself problematic; as a discipline dentistry places a very high value upon the provision of enhanced or improved aesthetics. This position changes when the symbolic exchange value of an aesthetic smile becomes the main motivation for treatment, encouraging a shift towards a commercialised model of practice that attenuates professional altruism. The dental profession should not welcome the association of the mouth as a status and prestige symbol lightly; this article examines how this paradigm shift might impact upon the social contract and dentistry’s professional status. (shrink)

Cosmetic dentistry is a divisive discipline. Within discourses that raise questions of the purpose of the dental profession, cosmetic dentistry is frequently criticised on the basis of it being classified as a non‐therapeutic intervention. This article re‐evaluates this assertion through examination of ethics of care of the self, healthcare definitions and the social purpose of dentistry, finding the traditional position to be wanting in its conclusions. The slide of dentistry from a healthcare vocation towards being a predominantly business‐focused interaction between (...) clinician and consumer conflicts with traditional notions of dentistry as a profession. Whilst it is undeniable that cosmetic dental treatment particularly lends itself to the commercial paradigm, this is not exclusive to this area of professional practice. The cultural basis of dental appearance and the potential of the dental profession to exert coercive pressure upon the public to undergo treatment that is based upon social norms is discussed. This essay concludes that cosmetic dentistry is undeniably part of the professional purpose of 21st Century dentistry. However, the caveat that may be placed upon this, is that this status is conditional upon the professional conduct of dental practitioners remaining resilient to commercial practices not compatible with professional obligations. (shrink)

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater (...) specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism. (shrink)

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality (...) of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time. (shrink)

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to _Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins_ hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. Denis R. (...) class='Hi'>Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, _Biology and Ideology_ examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture. (shrink)

Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defence of the hypothesis that there is a necessarily existing being capable of providing an ultimate foundation for the existence of all things.

The article discusses the issue of the nature of analytic philosophy. It is shown that in the 1920s–1940s it was a certain philosophical school, whose representatives were united by some initial principles. Analytic philosophers saw the main task of philosophy in the analysis of the language of natural sciences, in establishing logical connections between scientific propositions, in the empirical substantiation of scientific theories and in the elimination of speculative concepts and proposals from the language of science. The tool for such (...) analysis was the mathematical logic created at the beginning of the 20th century by G. Frege, A.N. Whitehead, B. Russell. Another characteristic feature of the analytic tradition was a negative attitude toward philosophical speculation. Adherents of this tradition believed that philosophy does not provide knowledge about the world, therefore, it is not a science. Analytic philosophers have made a significant contribution to the methodology of scientific knowledge, offering an accurate description of the hypothetical-deductive structure of scientific theory, methods of scientific explanation and prediction, verification, confirmation and refutation of scientific statements. In the late 1930s, most of the analytic philosophers emigrated to England and the United States. The analytic movement is gradually losing its integrity and loses the features of a philosophical school. There is a rejection of mathematical logic as the main means of analysis, the connection with the natural sciences has been lost. In the second half of the 20th century, analytic philosophy from a specific philosophical school turns into a certain style of thinking of the philosophers of various philosophical research areas and orientations. (shrink)

The target article “Thinking Through Other Minds” (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was bothsynthetic– building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; andprescriptive– showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamics can be applied to the emergence of social and (...) cultural ecologies of mind. In this reply to commentators, we address key issues, including: (1) refining the concept of culture to show how TTOM and the free-energy principle (FEP) can capture essential elements of human adaptation and functioning; (2) addressing cognition as an embodied, enactive, affective process involving cultural affordances; (3) clarifying the significance of the FEP formalism related to entropy minimization, Bayesian inference, Markov blankets, and enactivist views; (4) developing empirical tests and applications of the TTOM model; (5) incorporating cultural diversity and context at the level of intra-cultural variation, individual differences, and the transition to digital niches; and (6) considering some implications for psychiatry. The commentators’ critiques and suggestions point to useful refinements and applications of the model. In ongoing collaborations, we are exploring how to augment the theory with affective valence, take into account individual differences and historicity, and apply the model to specific domains including epistemic bias. (shrink)

The investigations of Aza A. Takho-Godi, devoted to the evolution of concepts and terms in European culture, were ahead of their time and, as it turns out today, paved the way for historical semantics, which turned out to be a kind of independent version of the “history of concepts”: a direction of humanitarian thought aimed at identifying cultural, social, and political functions concepts in their historical dynamics and in relation to a wide field of cultural interactions of a particular era. (...) The impressive results of “historical semantics” in the version of Takho-Godi are connected not only with the masterful and strictly substantiated identification of the developing conceptual core of lexemes, not only with the penetrating intuitions of the living word, but also with the vision of an absolute spiritual context in which semantic worlds are driven not by mechanical causality and not by historical chance, but by a kind of teleology. (shrink)

In this paper we pay attention to the inconsistency in the derivation of the symmetric electromagnetic energy–momentum tensor for a system of charged particles from its canonical form, when the homogeneous Maxwell’s equations are applied to the symmetrizing gauge transformation, while the non-homogeneous Maxwell’s equations are used to obtain the motional equation. Applying the appropriate non-homogeneous Maxwell’s equations to both operations, we obtained an additional symmetric term in the tensor, named as “compensating term”. Analyzing the structure of this “compensating term”, (...) we suggested a method of “gauge renormalization”, which allows transforming the divergent terms of classical electrodynamics (infinite self-force, self-energy and self-momentum) to converging integrals. The motional equation obtained for a non-radiating charged particle does not contain its self-force, and the mass parameter includes the sum of mechanical and electromagnetic masses. The motional equation for a radiating particle also contains the sum of mechanical and electromagnetic masses, and does not yield any “runaway solutions”. It has been shown that the energy flux in a free electromagnetic field is guided by the Poynting vector, whereas the energy flux in a bound EM field is described by the generalized Umov’s vector, defined in the paper. The problem of electromagnetic momentum is also examined. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 646-651, September 2021.

Some of the authors of the essays on Chinese philosophers prefer the pin yin system of romanization for Chinese names and words, while others prefer the Wade‐Giles system. Given that both systems are in wide use today, important names and words are given in both their pin yin and Wade‐Giles formulations. The author's preference is printed first, followed by the alternative romanization within brackets.

The author presents a philosophical critique of the basic ideas of logical semantics, as developed by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. He argues that these logicians understated the importance of the sense of linguistic expressions.

BackgroundWhat can the analysis of the evolution of a code of ethics tell us about the dental profession and the association that develops it? The establishment of codes of ethics are foundational events in the social history of a profession. Within these documents it is possible to find statements of values and culture that serve a variety of purposes. Codes of ethics in dentistry have not frequently presented as the subjects of analyses despite containing rich information about the priorities and (...) anxieties within the profession’s membership at the time that the code was written.Main textThis essay uses critical discourse analysis to explore the 2012 and 2018 versions of the Code of Ethics produced by the New South Wales Branch of the Australian Dental Association. This method of discourse analysis examines contradictions between the discourses within the codes and how these relate to broader social realties that surround the dental profession in New South Wales. By analysing the 2012 and 2018 codes together, it is possible to understand how the dental profession views its commitments to society as established through the social contract. Through this assessment, it will be demonstrated that both codes suffer due to their failure to consider the public as a key stakeholder in the creation and curation of the Code of Ethics and how this this relates intimately with the social contract between the profession and the public.ConclusionWithout the public being the central consideration, both codes amount to declarations of professional privilege and dominance. Although the more recent 2018 Code of Ethics demonstrates insight into the changes in public trust placed in the professions, this analysis shows that that the current code of ethics is still reluctant to recognise and engage with the public as an equal stakeholder in the planning and provision of oral health care and the development of the profession’s values and cultural trajectory. (shrink)

Despite promising early work into the role of immune cells such as eosinophils in adipose tissue (AT) homeostasis, recent findings revealed that elevating the number of eosinophils in AT alone is insufficient for improving metabolic impairments in obese mice. Eosinophils are primarily recognized for their role in allergic immunity and defence against parasitic worms. They have also been detected in AT and appear to contribute to adipose homeostasis and drive energy expenditure, but the underlying mechanisms remain elusive. It has long (...) been recognized that immune cells such as macrophages respond to external signals to regulate adipose homeostasis and energy balance, however, less is known about the relevance of eosinophil activity in AT. As the authors propose in this review, given recent debate over the relative importance of their tissue‐specific abundance, the stage is now set for exploring the functionality and activation states of AT eosinophils. (shrink)

Historical memory is considered in this article as one of the most important pillars of national identity. In addition to identifying some of the characteristic features of national, historical memory, the author shows that historical memory is influenced by two factors—the direct experience of the witnesses and participants of past events and official propaganda. As the direct witnesses of events disappear, the possibility of reconstructing and distorting historical memory increases. The ideas put forth in this article are formulated based on (...) the historical memory of World War II in the United States, Russia, Germany, and other European countries. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

This Editorial reports an exchange in form of a comment and reply on the article “History and Nature of the Jeffreys–Lindley Paradox” (Arch Hist Exact Sci 77:25, 2023) by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and Alexander Ly.