In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative psychology. I argue that AlphaGo displays one important aspect of creative problem solving (namely mental scenario building in the form of Monte Carlo (...) tree search), while lacking another (domain generality). This analysis has consequences for how we think about creativity in humans and AI. (shrink)

The relationship between philosophy and science has always been complementary. Today, while science moves increasingly fast and philosophy shows some problems in catching up with it, it is not always possible to ignore such relationships, especially in some disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience. However, the methodological procedures used to analyze these data are based on principles and assumptions that require a profound dialogue between philosophy and science. Following these ideas, this work aims to raise the (...) problems that a classical connectionist theory can cause and problematize them in a cognitive framework, considering both philosophy and cognitive sciences but also the disciplines that are near to them, such as AI, computer sciences, and linguistics. For this reason, we embarked on an analysis of both the computational and theoretical problems that connectionism currently has. The second aim of this work is to advocate for collaboration between neuroscience and philosophy of mind because the promotion of deeper multidisciplinarity seems necessary in order to solve connectionism’s problems. In fact, we believe that the problems that we detected can be solved by a thorough investigation at both a theoretical and an empirical level, and they do not represent an impasse but rather a starting point from which connectionism should learn and be updated while keeping its original and profoundly convincing core. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFinance may suffer from institutional deformations that subordinate its distinctive goods to the pursuit of external goods, but this should encourage attempts to reform the institutionalization of finance rather than to reject its potential for virtuous business activity. This article argues that finance should be regarded as a domain-relative practice. Alongside management, its moral status thereby varies with the purposes it serves. Hence, when practitioners working in finance facilitate projects that create common goods, it allows them to develop virtues. This (...) argument applies MacIntyre’s widely acknowledged account of the relationship between practices and the development of virtues while questioning some of his claims about finance. It also takes issue with extant accounts of particular financial functions that have failed to identify the distinctive goods of financial practice. (shrink)

Philosophers of embodied and situated cognition have provided convincing explanations of what objects do in affective processes (e.g., in emotion regulation). They have often used the concept of 'affective affordance' to account for the affective role of objects but it is not clear how this concept relates to other concepts of affordance, in particular those used in empirical works in cognitive science. We start to fill this gap by providing a new definition of affective affordances and we suggest a possible (...) way to test this novel theoretical construct through a kinematic analysis of hand movements. (shrink)

Cancer research has been at the forefront of biomedical activity in recent decades, and advances in molecular biology have provided a growing amount of information on the mechanisms involved in the etiopathogenesis of tumors. Nevertheless, despite these advances, the complexity of cancer is more evident, especially as different levels of phenomena are considered to explain the heterogeneity of the neoplastic process. A synthetic analysis of advances in cancer research illustrates these changes. In attempting to overcome the limits of epistemological reductionism, (...) there is a move from a view of a genetic basis for cancer to a more comprehensive perspective aiming to integrate a large amount of information and to understand the neoplastic phenomenon at higher levels of biological complexity through a new interpretative framework. (shrink)

The author discusses professional teaching ethics and its main principles and values. The theoretical basis of the study is ethics of social consequences and, in its context, primarily the principles and values of humanity and human dignity, including their possible application in the teaching profession and, partially, in the process of teaching foreign languages and Slovak as a foreign language to students from abroad.

In the 1970s, Peter Hacker and Bernard Williams argued that Wittgenstein was a Kantian transcendental idealist. In the 1980s, Hacker officially rescinded this interpretation and Williams in any case regarded Wittgenstein's transcendental idealism as a philosophical mistake. And ever since, there has been a lively debate about Wittgenstein's Kantianism, anti‐Kantianism, or non‐Kantianism. No one doubts that throughout his philosophical writings, Wittgenstein saw a fundamental connection between language and human life. Jonathan Lear's critical judgment on the later Wittgenstein's transcendental anthropology is (...) that it is ultimately a failure, due to an incoherence between the prima‐facie‐opposed 'transcendental' and 'anthropological' levels of reflection. According to Kant, a mental representation is transcendental when it is either part of, or derived from, our nonempirical innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities. Then Kant's transcendental idealism (TI) can be formulated as a two‐part philosophical equation: representational transcendentalism, cognitive idealism. (shrink)

By “essentially embodied Kantian selves,” I mean necessarily and completely embodied rational conscious, self-conscious, sensible (i.e., sense-perceiving, imagining, and emoting), volitional or willing, discursive (i.e., conceptualizing, judging, and inferring) animals, or persons, innately possessing dignity, and fully capable not only of free agency, but also of a priori knowledge of analytic and synthetic a priori truths alike, with egocentric centering in manifestly real orientable space and time. The basic theory of essentially embodied Kantian selves was spelled out by Kant over (...) the course of slightly less than two decades, between 1768 and 1787, but above all, it flows from an empirical realist and metaphysical reading of the “Refutation of Idealism” that Kant inserted into the Postulates of Empirical Thought section in the 1787 edition of the first Critique. In my opinion, all rational but also “human, all-too-human” creatures like us are, synthetic a priori necessarily, essentially embodied Kantian selves. Let’s call that the essentially embodied Kantian selves thesis, or for short, EEKST. If EEKST is true, then it’s synthetic a priori impossible for the selves of creatures like us to exist independently of our own living organismic animal bodies or beyond the deaths of those bodies, whether temporarily or permanently, by any means whatsoever. Indeed, the very ideas of disembodied selves, their survival after death, and of human immortality, while minimally logically consistent, are in fact conceptually empty and incoherent, even over and above the synthetic a priori impossibility of such things, since the term “myself” indexically picks out an essentially embodied Kantian self, all of whose core features require grounding in a particular living organismic animal body. According to the recent and contemporary movement of transhumanism, the selves of creatures like us can not only exist independently of our bodies, as functional systems of representational content that are inherently able to be implemented or realized in digital-mechanical technology and uploadable to servers, but also to survive accidental or natural human death in server-limbo, then be downloaded into technologically enhanced partially mechanical humanoid bodies or even into wholly artificially-created completely mechanical non-humanoid bodies, survive in these new implementations or realizations for an indefinitely long time, repeat that process, and possibly even become immortal. Transhumanism is in fact metaphysically equivalent to Swedenborgianism, which Kant so effectively criticizes and wittily derides in his 1766 book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Moreover, and more importantly, if EEKST is true, then, just like Swedenborgianism, transhumanism is not only conceptually empty and incoherent, but also synthetic a priori impossible. And what’s more, it’s also existentially and morally reprehensible. In short, then, the belief in transhuman selves is nothing but a reprehensible noumenal fantasy or Hirngespinst. (shrink)

This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under Israeli (...) rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination. (shrink)

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, Davidson, (...) Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities. (shrink)

This paper aims to discuss the coherence and consistency of the Stoic and the Nietzschean “art of dying at the right time”. Throughout this paper, we will use this expression to refer to the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s treatment both of involuntary and voluntary death, inasmuch as both seem to be strongly connected to and grounded on the notion of timeliness. Taking this notion as a guiding thread, we will emphasize the several similarities that link their approach to suicide. Indeed, as (...) will be shown, it is plausible to assume that Nietzsche’s understanding of voluntary death is particularly influenced by the Stoic tradition. At the same time, we will point out the relevant differences that make these two approaches differ. In dealing with the Stoic and the Nietzschean attitude towards suicide, the underlying question will be whether the legitimization and defense of voluntary death is compatible—and if so, to which extent—with their teachings, in particular, with their notions of happiness and affirmation of life, on the one hand, and their ideals of living in accordance with nature and amor fati, on the other. (shrink)

Many critics of commercial surrogate motherhood argue that it violates the rights of children. In this paper, I respond to several versions of this objection. The most common version claims that surrogacy involves child‐selling. I argue that while proponents of surrogacy have generally failed to provide an adequate response to this objection, it can be overcome. After showing that the two most prominent arguments for the child‐selling objection fail, I explain how the commissioning couple can acquire parental rights by paying (...) the surrogate only for her reproductive labor. My explanation appeals to the idea that parental rights are acquired by those who have claims over the reproductive labor that produces the child, not necessarily by those who actually perform the labor. This account clarifies how commercial surrogacy differs from commercial adoption. In the final section of the paper, I consider and reject three further child‐based objections to commercial surrogacy: that it establishes a market in children's attributes, that it requires courts to stray from the best interests standard in determining custodial rights, and that it requires the surrogate to neglect her parental responsibilities. Since each of these objections fails, children's rights probably do not pose an obstacle to the acceptability of commercial surrogacy arrangements. (shrink)

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. My reading of the situation is that our inability to come up with an intelligible conception of the relation between mind and body is a sign of the inadequacy of our present concepts, and that some development is needed. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain.

We draw on the concept of dignity to consider the ethics of the disposal of amputated limbs. The ethics of the management and disposal of human tissue has been subject to greater scrutiny and discussion in recent years, although the disposal of the limbs often remains absent from such discourses. In light of the recent UK controversy regarding failures in the medical waste disposal and the stockpiling of waste (including body parts), the appropriate handling of human tissue has been subject (...) to further scrutiny. Although this scandal has evoked concern regarding procurement and supply chain issues, as well as possible health and safety risks from such a ‘stockpile’, the dignity of those patients’ implicated in this controversy has been less widely discussed. Drawing at Foster’s (2014) work, we argue that a dignity framework provides a useful lens to frame consideration of the disposal of limbs after amputation. Such a framework may be difficult to reconcile with the logic of business and the ‘biovalue’ of the medical waste, but would we argue afford more patient-centred approaches towards disposal. It may also facilitate better practices to help mitigate future stockpiling incidences. (shrink)

Objectives: This study investigated Finnish physicians’ experiences of decisions concerning living wills and do not resuscitate orders and also their views on the role of patients and family members in these decisions.Design: A questionnaire was sent to 800 physicians representing the following specialties: general practice ; internal medicine ; neurology , and oncology .Results: The response rate was 56%. Most of the respondents had a positive attitude toward , and respect for living wills, and 72% reported situations in which such (...) a will would have been helpful, although experience with their use was limited. The physicians reported both benefits and problems with living wills. Thirteen per cent had completed a living will of their own. Half did not consider living wills to be reliable if they were several years old. Do not resuscitate orders were interpreted in two ways: resuscitation forbidden or only palliative care required . The respondents also documented DNR orders differently. Seventy two per cent discussed DNR decisions always or often with patients able to communicate, and even 76% discussed DNR orders with the family members of patients unable to communicate. Most respondents were able to approach a dying patient without difficulty. They also felt that education in general was needed.Conclusions: In general Finnish physicians accept living wills, but find they are accompanied by several problems. Many problems could be avoided if physicians and patients conducted progressive discussions about living wills. The differing interpretations of DNR orders are a matter of concern in that they may affect patient treatment. The promotion of patient autonomy with respect to treatment seems rather good, but the limitations of the study need to be kept in mind. (shrink)

Durante siglos lo que era un hecho que daba consistencia a la vida humana –cuidar– ha parecido ser sistemáticamente descatalogado y descargado de todo rango y categoría ética. La profusa presencia del cuidado en las fuentes griegas de la antigüedad desde la palabra epiméleia nos ha obligado a profundizar en los sentidos que la cura latina posee en la obra de Santo Tomás dada la preeminencia de esta para la teología moral posterior vinculada a la d– en el catálogo de (...) las virtudes junto con la misericordia, la beneficencia y la limosna que hacen operativa la caridad. El cuidar en su realización del amor irá más allá de socorrer las necesidades cuya forma verbal subvenio oscureció la cura y su sentido de atención, preocupación y ocupación activa por el prójimo.For centuries, what gave consistency to human life –to take care of- has seemed to be systematically discontinued and discharged of all rank and its ethical category. The abundant presence of care in the Greek sources of antiquity since the word epimeleia, has forced us to go deeper into the different meanings that the Latin word cura has in St Thomas’ work, given its prominence in a subsequent moral theology linked to charity. This requires a careful review of care as a virtue - to give it the majority of age- in the catalog of virtues together with mercy, beneficence and alms that make charity operational. Caring, in their realization of love, will go beyond needs help whose verbal form subvenio obscured its meaning of attention, concern and active occupation for the neighbor. (shrink)

Numerical identity is standardly considered to be a relation between things. This means that two things are identical if they are only one thing. It is not only Wittgenstein who finds this claim rather odd. Another possibility is to understand identity as a relation between names which denote the same thing; or as a relation between the senses of those names which are modes of presentation of the same thing. Or identity statements can be considered as expressions of the fact (...) that there is exactly one thing that has certain characteristics. These conceptions are, in fact, closely interlinked. There are some rather straightforward proposals on how to give these approaches a formal pattern in relative harmony with classical logic. What is important to emphasize and keep in mind is the specific character of identity and essential dissimilarities between identity and relations of objects in logic. (shrink)

Irène Némirovsky’s novella Les Mouches d’automne paints an effective portrait of exile, of the longing for the lost home, and the disorientation that one feels when faced with a reality that is neither recognizable nor understandable. In this article, I analyse Némirovsky’s narrative strategies in relation to spatio-temporal phenomena. My analysis is based on the work of philosophers Mikhail Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze: Bakhtin’s chronotope and Deleuze’s crystal-image illuminate how the novella’s dominant themes, exile and nostalgia for the home, are (...) irreducible to the clichés of a linear narration and to the simplistic dichotomy home/exile, past/present, and here/there. Instead, Némirovsky creates a productive tension of overlapping and coalescing space- and time-frames. The philosophical framework provided by Bakhtin and Deleuze is useful to unlock and make visible how this thematic complexity is reflected in the novella’s narrative structure. Indeed, my analysis of Les Mouches’s chronotopes and crystal images illuminates Némirovsky’s innovative experimentation in the creation of time–space crossings and a/synchronies, and also contributes to extend further our understanding of Némirovsky’s place within the contemporaneous literary panorama. (shrink)

This study investigates the complex relationship between the physical and digital spaces of the city of Douala, Cameroon by comparing its online representation with the social representations emerging orally by locals. Using the results of two existing studies reporting on the online image of the city, we investigate the social representations foreigners and locally relevant people have of Douala and uncover similarities and discrepancies of the two resulting representations. Outcomes from the analysis permit reflection on the implications of these and (...) show an unripe, intermediate stage of the “hybrid Douala,” where the virtual space seems still not to be affecting the way the physical space is experienced, as well as where the gaps in the digital divide are perpetuated. At the same time, strong local ownership of certain digital activities suggests how the online image of the city is in the process of being constructed and developed locally. As the spaces of the city start appearing online, the process of hybridization between physical and digital Douala is slowly taking place and offline and online narratives, now rather separated, will possibly communicate a different image of the city to global online narratives. (shrink)

This article examines the compatibility and relevance of Gabriel Marcel’s phenomenology of hope in interdisciplinary research on the role of hope in end-of-life care. Our analysis is divided into three thematic topics which examine the various shades of hope observed in Marcel’s phenomenology of hope and in the collection of 20 EOL studies on hope as experienced by adult palliative care patients, health care professionals and parents of terminally ill children. The three topics defining the shades of hope are: the (...) meaning of hope in its dynamic aspects, the dialectics of hope and despair, and the transcendent facets of hope. We analyse how Marcel’s understanding of hope is reflected in EOL studies, and how this perception can enrich the philosophy of PC and significantly deepen and broaden HCPs’ understanding of hope. Our findings prove that despite terminological differences between Marcelian phenomenology and the concepts of hope in the 20 EOL studies, hope emerges as a resourceful movement towards being. Implementing Marcelian hope within communication in EOL care could help in HCPs’ interpersonal approach to patients as his concept harbors a holistic perception of the existential situation of a person. Equally, introducing Marcel’s phenomenology of hope into the clinical encounter could play a beneficial role in improving the ability of patients to adapt to the difficult conditions of their disease and PC treatment. (shrink)

Political correctness as a norm of behaviour in liberal political culture is criticized as a sophisticated type of modern censorship, or stronger, as an ideological tool in the hands of part of Western political and cultural elites. Nonetheless, it appears to play important and necessary functions in a democratic system. Even if we agree that political correctness is cynical and hypocritical by nature, it does not lose its value. Its ambiguous potential can be creatively used, particularly in the areas of (...) public discourse, deliberation and public debate, but also in other important spheres of liberal political culture and, more broadly, the democratic political system. (shrink)

Grounding is typically associated to metaphysical explanation on the basis of the explanatory role’s being characteristic of grounding as well. Some even say that all what metaphysical explanation does is tracking the grounding relation. However, recently Maurin has argued that grounding does not “inherit” its properties from metaphysical explanation and, consequently, we should be “separatists”. In this paper separatism will be defended from the perspective of metaphysical explanation thus giving a turn to the separatist strategy. In particular, the structural difference (...) between grounding and metaphysical explanation will be pointed out as affecting also the explanatory function. It will be shown how dispositions and essentialist claims play different roles in the two theories. Lastly, it will be claimed that the two theories diverge on accounting for law-like and accidental generalizations. Provided these arguments are sound, there will be good reason to tell metaphysical explanation apart from grounding. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between Eugenio d’Ors and Pragmatism. Specific attention is devoted to showing the reception of Pragmatism in the philosophy of d’Ors, and to explaining a constant theme in his works: the characterisation of his thought as a post–pragmatic intellectualism.

Writer Eugenio d'Ors was born in Barcelona in 1881, but frequently alludes that his work owes a debt to pragmatism. He is one of the thinkers in Spain who consciously included connections with the American philosophical world. This chapter explores d'Ors thinking and explains a clear affinity between his thinking and the pragmatism of Charles S. Pierce.

The majority of the studies underlined how adolescent and young adult Cancer Survivors had no significant differences in their well-being and quality of life compared with a control group of healthy counterparts, although French et al. found less years of education among cancer survivors. The present study aimed at comparing AYA cancer survivors and a control group of peers who had no history of serious illness, in terms of well-being, cognitive functioning, and perceptions of life. Participants in this study were (...) 205 AYA cancer survivors, 126 males, off therapy from a mean of 10.87 years, with a mean age of 18.96, recruited during follow-up visits and healthy counterparts, matched for age and gender. They all completed self-report questionnaires: Ladder of Life, BSI-18 and Cognitive problems. Paired t test evidenced significant differences between survivors and controls in perceptions of quality of life regarding 5 years before the current time [t = −3.39; p = 0.001], with a lower level for childhood cancer survivors. Specifically, Hierarchical regression identified a shorter time since the completion of treatment and a trend of stem cell transplantation experience as factors associated with negative perception of precedent quality of life. The AYA cancer survivors reported lower cognitive difficulties than controls [t = −3.41; p = 0.001]: in memory [t = −4.52; p = 0.001], in concentration [t = −4.66; p = 0.001] and in mental organization skills [t = −2.56; p = 0.01], even if they had a lower educational attainment [X2 = 131.28; p = 0.001]. They showed similar satisfaction with their psychological well-being and their lives as healthy counterparts, except for past life perceptions associated with the cancer period. Important recommendations for future research and clinical suggestions could be given. (shrink)