This book is timely considering that the beginning of the 21st century is marked by the tragedy of 9/11 which witnessed the most heinous act of terrorism committed in the land of democracy. This tragedy has changed the discourse on religion and terrorism and continues to be discussed by scholars. Experts are interested to explore the role of religion especially Christianity and Islam in the age where religious fundamentalism has been closely linked to violent acts. The book contains nine chapters (...) that are based on papers presented at the conference on ‘Faith in an Age of Terror’ organised by the Biblical Graduate School of Theology, Singapore. The editors of this book, Quek Tze-Ming and Philip E. Sattherwaite, are lecturers at the BGST. The most interesting fact about the book is that it includes the perspective of inter-faith relations especially Muslim-Christian relations and the discussion on how to move forward in a multi-cultural and diverse society such as Singapore. The other contributors to the book are from various academic disciplines such as Sociology, Political Science, and Theology. They are Kumar Ramakrishna, Robert M.Solomon, Timothy T.N Lim, Lewis E. Winkler, Kiem-Kiok Kwa, Sng Bee Bee, Benjamin Pwee, and Mohammad Alami Musa. Through the inter-disciplinary perspective of these contributors the book discusses terror acts that are inspired by religious values, and methods that religious community can adopt in trying to understand and curb them. (shrink)

Geach's problem, the problem of accounting for the fact that judgements expressed using moral terms function logically like other judgements, stands in the way of most noncognitive analyses of moral judgements. The non-cognitivist must offer a plausible interpretation of such terms when they appear in conditionals that also explains their logical interaction with straightforward moral assertions. Blackburn and Gibbard have offered a series of accounts each of which interprets such conditionals as expressing higher order commitments. Each then invokes norms for (...) the coherent acceptance of attitudes to explain why we hold certain combinations inconsistent. Against these accounts the paper presses two related objections: (1) The norms needed to do the explanatory work cannot be strong enough to do that work without also ruling clearly consistent attitudes inconsistent. And (2), the norms of rational attitude acceptance do not neatly track the distinction between consistent and inconsistent attitudes. (shrink)

This paper examines how professionals (N = 32) working on artificial intelligence (AI) view structural AI ethics challenges like injustices and inequalities beyond individual agents' direct intention and control. This paper answers the research question: What are professionals’ perceptions of the structural challenges of AI (in the agri-food sector)? This empirical paper shows that it is essential to broaden the scope of ethics of AI beyond micro- and meso-levels. While ethics guidelines and AI ethics often focus on the responsibility of (...) designers and the competencies and skills of designers to take this responsibility, our results show that many structural challenges are beyond their reach. This result means that while ethics guidelines and AI ethics frameworks are helpful, there is a risk that they overlook more complicated, nuanced, and intersected structural challenges. In addition, it highlights the need to include diverse stakeholders, such as quadruple helix (QH) participants, in discussions around AI ethics rather than solely focusing on the obligations of AI developers and companies. Overall, this paper demonstrates that addressing structural challenges in AI is challenging and requires an approach that considers four requirements: (1) multi-level, (2) multi-faceted, (3) interdisciplinary, and (4) polycentric governance. (shrink)

Lately, philosophers of mathematics have been exploring the notion of mathematical explanation within mathematics. This project is supposed to be analogous to the search for the correct analysis of scientific explanation. I argue here that given the way philosophers have been using “ explanation,” the term is not applicable to mathematics as it is in science.

The turn to descriptive studies of ethics is inspired by the sense that our ethical theorizing needs to engage ethnography, history, and literature in order to address the full complexity of ethical life. This article examines four books that describe the cultivation of virtue in diverse cultural contexts, two concerning early China and two concerning Islam in recent years. All four emphasize the significance of embodiment, and they attend to the complex ways in which choice and agency interact with the (...) authority of tradition. In considering these books, this article examines the relations between our academic claims concerning the self and ethics, conceptual or theoretical claims made in the elite writings of traditions, and the lived experiences of the people we study. The conclusion turns to our methodological foundations for studying these topics both comparatively and constructively. (shrink)

Offers managers new tools to deal with the tough problems businesses face today. Reveals how analyzing the ethical dimensions of problems actually offers competitive advantages. Offers illustrative case examples from internally recognized companies showing that high ethics and high profits go hand in hand--and identifies the factors responsible for these companies' success.

In this chapter, I outline dynamic models of motivation and emotion. These turn out not to be autonomous subsystems, but, instead, are deeply integrated in the basic interactive dynamic character of living systems. Motivation is a crucial aspect of particular kinds of interactive systems -- systems for which representation is a sister aspect. Emotion is a special kind of partially reflective interaction process, and yields its own emergent motivational aspects. In addition, the overall model accounts for some of the crucial (...) properties of consciousness. (shrink)

A final version of this paper is in press as: Bickhard, M. H.. The Dynamic Emergence of Representation. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, P. Slezak Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation. Praeger.

Among the powers of living beings are intentional psychic powers, psychic powers that are of something. Thus, there is something seen, just as there is something feared or known. A puzzle arises when we consider whether these psychic powers might also be reflexive. Can these psychic powers be applied to themselves, or at least their exercise, such that the powers themselves, or their exercise, are their intentional objects? So, for example, in seeing what one does, and so being aware from (...) within that one thus sees, does one thereby see the seeing of it? An initial difficulty is that, in a range of familiar cases, the intentional object is distinct from the power and its exercise. The scene is distinct from the sight or seeing of it. Should this be a general feature of intentionality, then intentional powers are irreflexive. There is a potential tension, then, between the intentional character of psychic powers and their alleged reflexivity. This tension forms the basis of a puzzle or aporia that is at the heart of the Charmides. Part of what is at stake here is the coherence of perceptual self-consciousness, at least on an understanding of it. (shrink)

The last two decades have stood witness to a quiet revolution in epistemology. We used to think of ethics and epistemology as quite distinct areas of inquiry – ethics concerned with action, and epistemology concerned with belief. While ethics is the domain of values, epistemology is the domain of facts – the facts that we must get right, and get right first, in order to know how to pursue our values in ethics. The only competing values in epistemology, we were (...) taught, were those of acquiring truth and avoiding error. But proponents of the revolution have pushed us to find values in the stronghold of truth. They have argued that rationality, justification, and even knowledge can depend on what is practically or even morally at stake, so that we can't do epistemology without thinking about values. And some have gone further, arguing that ethics is not just about action, after all, but also includes distinctively moral, and not just epistemological, questions about what to believe. The revolution in our understanding of the relationship between ethics and epistemology is well underway. -/- Yet as in all revolutionary movements, there comes a moment when the revolutionaries must decide amongst themselves whether what they seek is reform or annihilation of the received world order. The reformists seek calculated interventions in the order of things. But the radicals want to go farther. They believe that more of the old must be thrown out, before the new can be ushered in. This is a chaotic period, when the revolution can yet be lost, if and as the alternative begins to look like total anarchy. And many possible visions of the future remain in play. This paper is a contribution toward working through these issues amongst the revolutionaries in epistemology. Let there be no surprises in this paper: I am of a reformist mindset, and the aim of this paper is to hold the line on cautious, calculated intervention, even in the pursuit of bold results. (shrink)

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 ...

Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices as (...) the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Todes 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (Brandom 1994, xiii) Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively.. (shrink)

neglected aspect: knowledge of error, or ‘‘negative’’ knowledge. The development of knowledge of what counts as error occurs via a kind of internal variation and selection, or quasi-evolutionary, process. Processes of reflection generate a hierarchy of principles of error.

This book is a philosophical study of the relations between hearing and thinking about music. The central problem it addresses is as follows: how is it possible to talk about what a listener perceives in terms that the listener does not recognize? By applying the concepts and techniques of analytic philosophy the author explores the ways in which musical hearing may be described as nonconceptual, and how such mental representation contrasts with conceptual thought. The author is both philosopher and musicologist (...) and uniquely combines the perspectives of both disciplines. Exploring the philosophical questions of mental representation in the relatively neglected, nonverbal domain of music, this study is a major contribution to the philosophical understanding of music perception and cognitive theory. (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.

This paper is a contribution to a symposium on Herman Cappelen’s 2023 book The Concept of Democracy: An Essay on Conceptual Amelioration and Abandonment. In that book, Cappelen develops a theory of abandonment—a theory of why and how to completely stop using particular linguistic expressions—and then uses that theory to argue for the general abandonment of the words “democracy” and “democratic”. In this paper, I critically discuss Cappelen’s arguments for the abandonment of “democracy” and “democratic” in political theory specifically.

Philosophical interest in ecology is relatively new. Standard texts in the philosophy of biology pay little or no attention to ecology (though Sterelny and Griffiths 1999 is an exception). This is in part because the science of ecology itself is relatively new, but whatever the reasons for the neglect in the past, the situation must change. A good philosophical understanding of ecology is important for a number of reasons. First, ecology is an important and fascinating branch of biology with distinctive (...) philosophical issues that arise from its study. Second, ecology is only one small step away from urgent political, ethical, and management decisions about how best to live in an apparently increasingly-fragile environment. Third, philosophy of ecology, properly conceived, can contribute directly to both our understanding of ecology and help with its advancement. Philosophy of ecology can thus be seen as part of the emerging discipline of “biohumanities”, where biology and humanities disciplines together advance our understanding and knowledge of biology (Stotz and Griffiths forthcoming). In this paper, we focus primarily on this third role of the philosophy of ecology and consider a number of places where philosophy can play an important role in ecology. In the process, we.. (shrink)

Recently, several states in the US have made it more difficult to receive nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the hope of better orienting parents towards vaccination. However, little is known about how public-facing school staff implement and enforce mandate policies, including why or how often they steer parents towards nonmedical exemptions. This study focused on Michigan, which has recently added an additional burden for families seeking nonmedical exemptions. We used an anonymous online survey to assess Michigan public-school employees (...) (n = 157) about their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors regarding Michigan's school enrollment vaccine mandate policy. Our main conclusions are that frontline school staff are generally knowledgeable about vaccines and immunization policy, but are at best ambivalent about their role in immunization governance, believing that other agents should be responsible for ensuring that children are vaccinated. Furthermore, some respondents indicated low vaccine confidence, which was associated with increased ambivalence about, or opposition to, their role in immunization governance. As more jurisdictions within and beyond the US consider introducing or tightening childhood vaccine mandates, it is increasingly important to understand how these policies can be improved by attending to the attitudes and roles of relevant frontline actors. (shrink)

Originally published in 1999, this classic textbook includes twenty-six cases with commentary and bibliographic resources designed especially for medical students and the training of ethics consultants. The majority of the cases reflect the day-to-day moral struggles within the walls of hospitals typically described as community hospitals; as a result, the cases do not focus on esoteric, high-tech dilemmas--viz., genetic engineering or experimental protocols--but rather on fundamental problems that are pervasive in basic healthcare delivery in the United States: where to send (...) a frail, elderly patient who refuses to go to a nursing home; what role the family should play in making a treatment decision; what a hospital should do when it is getting stuck with too many unpaid bills. This thoroughly revised and updated second edition includes thirteen new cases, five of which are designated as "skill builder" cases aimed specifically for those participants in the Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics' web-based instructional program. This edition has also been restructured for teachability, and will feature reformatted and revised commentaries. (shrink)

Psychiatrische en godsdiensthistorische beschouwingen over mystiek.

Axel Honneth est mondialement connu pour sa théorie de la reconnaissance. Mais il se trouve que dans son dernier livre (Der Geist der Freiheit ; L'esprit de la liberté), Honneth opère ce qui paraît être un tournant dans sa pensée, en mettant l'accent non plus tant sur la reconnaissance que sur la liberté, et en particulier sur la manière dont les institutions peuvent réellement augmenter la liberté des individus. Faut-il donc désormais parler d'un Honneth I (celui de la reconnaissance), et (...) d'un Honneth II (celui de la liberté)? (shrink)

Continuous massive infrastructural development is necessary if anation is to remain on the pathway to development and be considered a developed nation. Infrastructural development involves the buitding of roacls, dams, bridges, power plants, healthfacilities, schools, etc. These infrastructures help in adequate provision of goods and services to the people. provision and maintenance of social infrastructures often coulcl have impact and effects on the natural environment. Some of these effects ctt times are negative and could damage the ecosystem. some infrastructural clevelopment (...) projects are carried out without environmental impact assessment. This paper argues that infrastractural development projects should be carried out within theframework of the values of ecological ethics. It uses a critical analytic method and finds out that the values of ecological ethics are necessary for sustainable infrastructural development in Nigeria. (shrink)

Written by the great medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed attempts to explain the perplexities of biblical language--and apparent inconsistencies in the text--in the light of philosophy and scientific reason. Composed as a letter to a student, The Guide aims to harmonize Aristotelian principles with the Hebrew Bible and argues that God must be understood as both unified and incorporeal. Engaging both contemporary and ancient scholars, Maimonides fluidly moves from cosmology to the problem of evil to the (...) end goal of human happiness. His intellectual breadth and openness makes The Guide a lasting model of creative synthesis in biblical studies and philosophical theology. (shrink)

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God’s infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God’s foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains (...) what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God’s foreknowledge. (shrink)

We have used fMRI to measure responses to chromatic and achromatic contrast in retinotopically defined regions of macaque and human visual cortex. We make four observations. Firstly, the relative amplitudes of responses to color and luminance stimuli in macaque area V1 are similar to those previously observed in human fMRI experiments. Secondly, the dorsal and ventral subdivisions of macaque area V4 respond in a similar way to opponent (L j M)-cone chromatic contrast suggesting that they are part of a single (...) functional area. Thirdly, we find that macaque area V4, like area V1, responds preferentially to chromatic contrast compared to luminance contrast and the degree of preference is strongly influenced by the temporal frequency of the stimulus. Finally, we observe that while macaque V4d is a region on the dorsal surface of the macaque visual cortex that responds robustly to chromatic stimuli, human chromatic responses to identical stimuli are largely confined to the ventral surface suggesting a fundamental difference in the topographical organization of higher visual areas between humans and macaques. (shrink)

This book examines the reception of the works of the baron d'Holbach throughout francophone Europe. It insists that d'Holbach's historical importance has been understated, argues the case for the existence of a significant 'Christian Enlightenment', and much more.

Merging the information from different senses is essential for successful interaction with real-life situations. Indeed, sensory integration can reduce perceptual ambiguity, speed reactions, or change the qualitative sensory experience. It is widely held that integration occurs at later processing stages and mostly in higher association cortices; however, recent studies suggest that sensory convergence can occur in primary sensory cortex. A good model for early convergence proved to be the auditory cortex, which can be modulated by visual and tactile stimulation; however, (...) given the large number and small size of auditory fields, neither human imaging nor microelectrode recordings have systematically identified which fields are susceptible to multisensory influences. To reconcile findings from human imaging with anatomical knowledge from nonhuman primates, we exploited high-resolution imaging (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of the macaque monkey to study the modulation of auditory processing by visual stimulation. Using a functional parcellation of auditory cortex, we localized modulations to individual fields. Our results demonstrate that both primary (core) and nonprimary (belt) auditory fields can be activated by the mere presentation of visual scenes. Audiovisual convergence was restricted to caudal fields [prominently the core field (primary auditory cortex) and belt fields (caudomedial field, caudolateral field, and mediomedial field)] and continued in the auditory parabelt and the superior temporal sulcus. The same fields exhibited enhancement of auditory activation by visual stimulation and showed stronger enhancement for less effective stimuli, two characteristics of sensory integration. Together, these findings reveal multisensory modulation of auditory processing prominently in caudal fields but also at the lowest stages of auditory cortical processing. (shrink)