This paper describes a “double move“ made by Maimonides, Kant, and Hermann Cohen when they simultaneously dismiss and resolve the cosmological problem of the origin of the universe in time in order to represent creation as a moral issue. Maimonides claims to lack a compelling metaphysical argument regarding creation. However, a reading of Maimonides inspired by the views of Hermann Cohen finds him to be a Platonist who accepts creation from absolute privation so as to establish a moral world in (...) which revelation establishes a correlation between humans and God. For Kant, metaphysics also cannot address the origin of the universe, but he positively describes the regress towards the origin as indeterminately large to derive the unconditioned ideal of reason that supports the regulative use of reason. Cohen, therefore, follows the precedents set by Maimonides and Kant when he claims that the Jewish concept of creation is an ethical and logical problem rather than a cosmological one, even though his account of creation presupposes his era's dominant scientific model of the eternity of the universe. (shrink)

For more than a quarter of a century, Hubert L. Dreyfus has been the leading voice in American philosophy for the continuing relevance of phenomenology, particularly as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus has influenced a generation of students and a wide range of colleagues, and these volumes are an excellent representation of the extent and depth of that influence.In keeping with Dreyfus's openness to others' ideas, many of the essays in this volume take the form (...) of arguments with various of his positions. The essays focus on the dialogue with the continental philosophical tradition, in particular the work of Heidegger, that has played a foundational role in Dreyfus's thinking. The sections are Philosophy and Authenticity; Modernity, Self, and the World; and Heideggerian Encounters. The book concludes with Dreyfus's responses to the essays.Contributors : William D. Blattner, Taylor Carman, David R. Cerbone, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Charles Guignon, Michel Haar, Beatrice Han, Alastair Hannay, John Haugeland, Randall Havas, Jeff Malpas, Mark Okrent, Richard Rorty, Julian Young, Michael E. Zimmerman. (shrink)

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

Dasein and being-in-the-world -- The world -- The structure of being-in-the-world, pt. 1: Disposedness and moods -- The structure of being-in-the-world, pt. 2: Understanding and interpretation -- Everydayness and the 'one' -- Death and authenticity -- Truth and art -- Language -- Technology -- Our mortal dwelling with things.

National decline is typically blamed on special interests from the demand side of politics corrupting a country's institutions. The usual demand-side suspects include crony capitalists, consumer activists, economic elites, and labor unions. Less attention is given to government insiders on the supply side of politics - rulers, elected officials, bureaucrats, and public employees. In autocracies and democracies, government insiders have the motive, means, and opportunity to co-opt political power for their benefit and at the expense of national well-being. Many storied (...) empires have succumbed to such inside jobs. Today, they imperil countries as different as China and the United States. Democracy - government by the people - does not ensure government for the people. Understanding how government insiders use their power to subvert the public interest - and how these negative consequences can be mitigated - is the topic of this book by Mark A. Zupan. (shrink)

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this 'end of metaphysics' should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, (...) anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall. (shrink)

Wie geartet ist das Verhältnis zwischen den zentralen Begriffen „Bewußtsein“ und „Reflexion“ in Lockes Essay? Sind diese Begriffe für Locke identisch oder voneinander verschieden? Falls sie verschieden sind, wie ist der Unterschied genau zu bestimmen? Diese Arbeit untersucht die Fragen, unter Berücksichtigung der unterschiedlichen Deutungen in der Sekundärliteratur; sie sichtet und prüft den Text des Essays sorgfältig und breitet ein breites Spektrum philosophischer Implikationen von Lockes Ausführungen über das „Bewußtsein“ und „Reflexion“ aus. Der abschließende Teil legt dar, daß Locke niemals (...) eine feste Position gegenüber dem Verhältnis zwischen den beiden Begriffen eingenommen hat, sondern daß er zwischen verschiedenen Positionen schwankte -als Resultat der starken philosophischen Kräfte, die ihn bald in die eine, bald in die andere Richtung zogen. (shrink)

Dieser Aufsatz analysiert Leibniz' Begriff der Expression. Er ist eine Vorstudie zu einer umfassenden Untersuchung der Lehre, daß jede einfache Substanz das ganze Weltall ausdrückt. Leibnizens Beispiele und Definitionen von Expression werden besprochen, und dann wird die Analyse des Begriffs in zwei Stufen entwickelt.

We demonstrate a method for optimizing desired functionality in real complex chemical systems, using a genetic algorithm. The chemical systems studied here are mixtures of amphiphiles, which spontaneously exhibit a complex variety of self-assembled molecular aggregations, and the property optimized is turbidity. We also experimentally resolve the fitness landscape in some hyper-planes through the space of possible amphiphile formulations, in order to assess the practicality of our optimization method. Our method shows clear and significant progress after testing only 1 % (...) of the possible amphiphile formulations. (shrink)

Weak emergence has been offered as an explication of the ubiquitous notion of emergence used in complexity science (Bedau 1997). After outlining the problem of emergence and comparing weak emergence with the two other main objectivist approaches to emergence, this paper explains a version of weak emergence and illustrates it with cellular automata. Then it explains the sort of downward causation and explanatory autonomy involved in weak emergence.

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

Fenomenološka tradicija dugo je smatrala da prirodna percepcija nije ni konceptualno artikulirana niti upravljana determinističkim zakonima, već je radije organizirana prema praktično artikuliranoj strukturi tjelesnog bitka-u-svijetu. Ali to ostavlja problem objašnjavanja kako percepcija može omogućiti opravdavajuću podršku mišljenju. Odgovor fenomenologa jest taj da nam značenjska struktura prirodne percepcije omogućuje da mislimo o objektima motivirajući pojedinačne misli o objektima kakvima se oni predstavljaju u percepciji. Pokazujem kako takvo gledište omogućuje izlaz iz briga koje more suvremenu filozofiju uma.The phenomenological tradition has long (...) contended that natural perception is neither conceptually articulatednor governed by deterministic laws, but rather organized according to the practically articulatedstructure of bodily being-in-the-world. But this leaves the problem of explaining how perceptioncan provide justificatory support to thought. The phenomenologists’ answer is to say thatthe meaningful structure of natural perception makes it possible for us tothink about objects by motivating particular thoughts about the objects as they present themselvesin perception. I show how this view provides a way out of worries that plague contemporary philosophyof mind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Kristen R. GhodseeMark A. AllisonKristen R. Ghodsee. Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. 352 pp., hardcover, $29.99. ISBN 9781982190217.Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and experimentation. Everyday (...) Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic lives" (17).Ghodsee situates this turn to the domestic in two contexts. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the frangibility of the international commitment to gender equality. "Women around the globe woke up and realized that decades of feminism had done little to reverse the social expectation that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters should provide care for young children, elderly parents, and sick relatives, as well as perform the emotional labors that hold families together in times of crisis," she laments (xii). Everyday Utopia's second context is the spate of recent works of "popular neo-utopianism," including Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists (2017), Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) (14). What Ghodsee finds wanting in this discourse is its myopic focus on the public sphere, and its unspoken presupposition that our private and domestic lives have no such need of utopian renovation. But it is just this presupposition [End Page 285] that the COVID-19 lockdown discredited, although many other indicators (runaway housing and childcare costs, the environmental crisis, the epidemic of loneliness) already suggested as much. Ghodsee rightly insists that "where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment" (14). As utopian thinkers from Plato forward have understood, moreover, it is short-sighted to suppose that sweeping economic and political transformations are possible without a concomitant rethinking of the "intimate worlds" that subtend these public domains (15).Accordingly, Everyday Utopia devotes its succeeding chapters to examining alternatives to the dominant institutions of the contemporary private sphere, including the single-family household, the monogamous couple paradigm of childrearing and mating, and the institution of private property. In each case, Ghodsee plumbs the past and limns the present to highlight utopian alternatives to contemporary norms. Among this book's greatest strengths is its consistently international range of examples and admirably sustained commitment to feature "experiments that have received relatively less attention" in the extant literature (xv).Take, for example, the chapter on communal alternatives to single-family homes. Ghodsee includes many of the usual (and eminently worthy) suspects: Buddhist and Christian cenobite monasteries, Fourierist phalansteries, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Corbusier-inspired "microdistricts" of the former Eastern bloc (47). But we also learn of less canonical phenomena, such as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük, "one of the first major settlements in the world," where as many as eight thousand people lived in an essentially contiguous structure, in highly egalitarian and likely non-consanguineous households (32). Or consider the Beguine nuns, a lay order founded in 1190 that survived, albeit in attenuated form, into the twentieth century. The Beguine lived communally in urban areas, enjoying liberties unthinkable not only to their cloistered counterparts, but to virtually all their female contemporaries: they brewed beer, made lace, taught school—and traversed the streets unchaperoned. The chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary cohousing. In Denmark, roughly one percent of the population was living in co... (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the nature of social rules, including the limitations of most theories of rules which see them either as intentionally followed by, or as objectively describing the behavior of social actors. I argue that a phenomenological description of what it is like actually to be governed by a rule points the way to reconceptualizing the role of social rules in structuring our world and our experience of the world.

This book is a must-read for researchers interested in taking a high-level, non-mechanistic approach to answering age-old fundamental questions in the brain ...

Martin Heidegger was one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly influenced philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze. His accounts of human existence and being and his critique of technology have inspired theorists in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and the humanities. (...) This Lexicon provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to Heidegger's notoriously obscure vocabulary. Each entry clearly and concisely defines a key term and explores in depth the meaning of each concept, explaining how it fits into Heidegger's broader philosophical project. With over 220 entries written by the world's leading Heidegger experts, this landmark volume will be indispensable for any student or scholar of Heidegger's work. (shrink)

Anthropology is a significant matter within the church. A person's doctrine of humanity will inevitably shape the way a person thinks about the church, salvation, and in part, God. This dissertation is written out of concern for the potential harm that a faulty anthropology may do to the church. This study is concerned with exposing an approach to leadership within the church that is based on a faulty anthropology. Servant leadership has been hailed as the answer to the leadership crisis (...) that has plagued businesses, political offices, and churches. It is said that the authoritarian, monarchical style of leadership in the twentieth century no longer meets the needs of the current setting. In 1970 Robert K. Greenleaf---the chief advocate of servant leadership---proposed servant leadership as the emerging style that was prepared to address the social unrest of the 1960's and 1970's. He argued that the current leadership style must change---adapt to the emerging needs of the people. Greenleaf developed his ideas on servant leadership in the context of his reading of Hermann Hesse and Albert Camus. The repercussions of Robert K. Greenleaf's anthropology are evident in his view of human transformation. ;This study exposes the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Greenleaf's work on servant leadership as a distortion of the nature of humanity to the point that it leaves the doctrines of sin and salvation bereft of Christian significance. Since many within the church have used Greenleaf in their search for a biblical leadership paradigm, a Christian theological response to Greenleaf's assessment of humanity and human transformation will conclude this study. (shrink)

The dynamical patterns in mental phenomena have a characteristic suppleness&emdash;a looseness or softness that persistently resists precise formulation&emdash;which apparently underlies the frame problem of artificial intelligence. This suppleness also undermines contemporary philosophical functionalist attempts to define mental capacities. Living systems display an analogous form of supple dynamics. However, the supple dynamics of living systems have been captured in recent artificial life models, due to the emergent architecture of those models. This suggests that analogous emergent models might be able to explain (...) supple dynamics of mental phenomena. These emergent models of the supple mind, if successful, would refashion the nature of contemporary functionalism in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to systematically organize more than 50 kinds of illusion into a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. In particular, this article demonstrates that (1) smaller sizes, (2) slower speeds, (...) (3) greater luminance contrast, (4) farther distance, (5) lower eccentricity, (6) greater proximity to the vanishing point, and (7) greater proximity to the focus of expansion all tend to have similar perceptual effects, namely, to (A) increase perceived size, (B) increase perceived speed, (C) decrease perceived luminance contrast, and (D) decrease perceived distance. The detection of these empirical regularities was motivated by a hypothesis, called “perceiving the present,” that the visual system possesses mechanisms for compensating neural delay during forward motion. This article shows how this hypothesis predicts the empirical regularity. (shrink)

In contrast to recent postmodern and deconstructionist readings, Mark A. Tietjen believes that the purpose behind Kierkegaard's writings is the moral and religious improvement of the reader. Tietjen defends Kierkegaard against claims that certain features of his works, such as pseudonymity, indirect communication, irony, and satire are self-deceived or deceitful. Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue reveals how they are directly related to the virtues or moral issues being discussed. In fact, Tietjen argues, the manner of presentation is a critical element (...) of the philosophical message being conveyed. Reading broadly in Kierkegaard’s writings, he develops a hermeneutics of trust that fully illustrates Kierkegaard’s aim to evoke faith in his reader. (shrink)

Abstract:Moral imagination is a reasoning process thought to counter the organizational factors that corrupt ethical judgment. We describe the psychology of moral imagination as composed of the four decision processes identified by Rest (1986), i.e., moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral intention, and moral behavior. We examine each process in depth, distilling extant psychological research and indicating organizational implications. The conclusion offers suggestions for future research.The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others—terribly objective sometimes—but the real (...) task is in fact to be objective toward one’s self and subjective toward all others. (shrink)