Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

The notion of a weak Messianic power serves as the focal point for this study of theological, materialist, poetic, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic approaches to time and the historical unconscious in the work of Benjamin, Celan and Derrida.

Skepticism, Relativism, and Religious Knowledge shows where responses to skepticism and relativism by Karl Barth and Reformed epistemology have led to impasses, and reconstructs their insights in a more robust response that does not depend on making excessive claims about our epistemic capacities. This response is based on a more nuanced conception of the relationship between trust, doubt, faith, and reason, and a Kierkegaardian perspective on religious knowledge that stresses the role of the will and the intellectual and theological virtues.

How to avoid disease, how to breed successfully, and how to live to a reasonable age are questions that have perplexed humankind throughout history. This book explores our progress in understanding these challenges, and the risks and rewards of devising solutions. A broad range of topics are covered, including reproduction, the development of human progeny from conception to adulthood, staying healthy, ageing, cancer, infection and the burden of our genetic legacy.

The present collection of translations arises from our work within Writing Urban Places, a network of researchers interested in the different ways citizens appropriate meaningful built environments through stories, and in doing so are also better able to integrate with others. A key locus in this respect is what our network has termed the ‘mid-sized’ [or ‘intermediate’] European city. Often afforded only cursory attention in the discussion of both culture and society, overlooked in favour of more usual suspects, such urban (...) places allow for a more de-centred, and on occasions regionally focused, view of urban practices, even as they play host to a significant element of contemporary European life and experience. The quest for meaningfulness and appropriation of the urban environment through co-creative, adaptive, and transformative processes (many of which have a textual quality) became central to the theoretical framework of this initiative. Between the individual places in which such processes could be observed and documented, we hypothesized, arises the problem of intermediation – the move from place to place, and its techniques. Translation, more than a textual practice among others, emerged as a structuring consideration of the project at a European scale. Other Destinations is the outcome of this collective process presented here, offering entry into this work to an English-language readership for the first time. We hope that, even as they bring their cities of origin somewhat closer to a new readership, those readers will be uprooted and moved some distance in the direction of these ‘other destinations.’ -/- The edited volume Other Destinations. Translating the Mid-sized European City thus features English translations of 15 21st century (mainly) literary texts published in different media (books, podcasts, journals, online/social media) originally written in languages other than English and that have not previously been translated into English. The selected texts cover the topic of mid-sized European cities, where mid-sized does not solely refer to the size in terms of geographical scope or the number of inhabitants, but also to their socio-historical context of urban identity where these cities are neither metropolises nor small towns, but “other”, lesser-known European cities. The texts selected to be translated in this edited volume cover cities like Volos, Canakkale, Varna, Plovdiv, Durres, Tirana, Porto, Den Haag, Osijek, Salzburg, Naples, Zrenjanin, Loule and others…. The publication intends to enhance the dissemination and accessibility to an international readership of texts about overlooked urban contexts, “other”, lesser-known European cities, their stories and signifying practices in order to develop a better awareness of these cities, their self-constructions, and their responses to the challenges of the present. (shrink)

A common objection to sense-datum theories of perception is that they cannot give an adequate account of the fact that introspection indicates that our sensory experiences are directed on, or are about, the mind-independent entities in the world around us, that our sense experience is transparent to the world. In this paper I point out that the main force of this claim is to point out an explanatory challenge to sense-datum theories.

The disjunctive theory of perception claims that we should understand statements about how things appear to a perceiver to be equivalent to statements of a disjunction that either one is perceiving such and such or one is suffering an illusion (or hallucination); and that such statements are not to be viewed as introducing a report of a distinctive mental event or state common to these various disjoint situations. When Michael Hinton first introduced the idea, he suggested that the burden (...) of proof or disproof lay with his opponent, that what was needed was to show that our talk of how things look or appear to one.. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

A working hypothesis of computationalism is that Mind arises, not from the intrinsic nature of the causal properties of particular forms of matter, but from the organization of matter. If this hypothesis is correct, then a wide range of physical systems (e.g. optical, chemical, various hybrids, etc.) should support Mind, especially computers, since they have the capability to create/manipulate organizations of bits of arbitrarily complexity and dynamics. In any particular computer, these bit patterns are quite physical, but their particular physicality (...) is considered irrelevant (since they could be replaced by other physical substrata). (shrink)

In this chapter, we explore the role of habit in giving shape to conscious experience and importantly to our pre-reflective awareness of ourselves which includes the sense of mineness that accompanies our conscious experience. For the most part, discussions in philosophy of mind and phenomenology concerning pre-reflective self-awareness are focused on determining the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and selfhood. For this reason perhaps, the existence of pre-reflective self-awareness is usually appealed to as evidence for a form of selfhood that appears (...) within conscious experience as a component of its synchronic unity. In this chapter, however, we will concern ourselves with the pre-reflective sense of ourselves that appears in conscious experience as it pertains to the diachronic unity of the self—that is the sense of a unitary self as existing over the course of multiple episodic experiences. Our aim is to provide a phenomenological account of the relationship between the minimal, pre-reflective sense of self and what is often termed the ‘narrative self.’ We will argue that habits play a role in preserving the significance of our past in our present experience and in unifying our experience as a self for whom the world is present across disparate episodes of experience. (shrink)

When John Langshaw Austin died in ???? he had published only seven papers, together with a translation into English of Frege.

The central issue addressed in this CUP monograph is whether and how Christian ethics might be able to make a significant contribution to health care ethics today in the public forum of a Western, pluralistic society. It is the twenty-sixth monograph in the larger project (edited by Robin Gill) New Studies in Christian Ethics that has received considerable international attention. It offers a fresh basis for health care ethics derived from a detailed exegesis of the Synoptic virtues of compassion, care, (...) faith and humility in order to deepen the widely used secular principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice in health care ethics. In an early review David Atkinson concluded that Gills excellent, clear, and well-written book is a significant contribution. (shrink)

_Makes Schelling’s dialogue Bruno readily accessible to the English-language reader, with valuable commentary on the work itself, which details Schelling’s account of his differences from Fichte._.

Winner of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for history, Kammen addresses three themes concerning the state of historical inquiry in America. Beginning with how history as a professional discipline has changed over the past century, the book treats the relationship of the historian's craft to American nationalism, the value of historical knowledge, and the shifting attitudes of historians toward society. Kammen appraises the significance of historiography as a measure of cultural change and shows how the past has been manipulated for social (...) and ideological reasons, and how memories of the national and regional past have conflicted with the realities of historical experience. He also explains how traditional modes of interpreting the past have lost their cohesive force and why historians should pursue new approaches to the cultural history. ISBN 0-8014-1924-7: $24.95. (shrink)

Book description: The capacity to represent and think about time is one of the most fundamental and least understood aspects of human cognition and consciousness. This book throws new light on central issues in the study of the mind by uniting, for the first time, psychological and philosophical approaches dealing with the connection between temporal representation and memory. Fifteen specially written essays by leading psychologists and philosophers investigate the way in which time is represented in memory, and the role memory (...) plays in our ability to reason about time. They offer insights into current theories of memory processes and of the mechanisms and cognitive abilities underlying temporal judgements, and draw out fundamental issues concerning the phenomenology and epistemology of memory and our understanding of time. The chapters are arranged into four sections, each focused on one area of current research: Keeping Track of Time, and Temporal Representation; Memory, Awareness and the Past; Memory and Experience; Knowledge and the Past: The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Time. A general introduction gives an overview of the topics discussed and makes explicit central themes which unify the different philosophical and psychological approaches. (shrink)

In order to form a contract at least one of the parties to the bargain must give an undertaking or commitment of the appropriate kind to the other; that is, she must perform a commissive speech act of the right kind. It is widely assumed that the speech act in question is a promise. Indeed it is standard textbook fare that a contract is a promise (or an exchange of promises) that the law will enforce. This assumption underlies the venerable (...) tradition in contract theory of arguing that the morality of promise-keeping bears or ought to bear importantly on the content of the law of contract. In this paper I argue that this assumption is false. By way of a critical examination of Seana Shiffrin's impressive recent contribution to this theoretical tradition, I argue that the commissive speech act by means of which a contract is formed is not the same speech act as that by means of which we voluntarily undertake moral obligations to others. (shrink)

This volume draws together leading theologians and Christian ethicists from across the globe to critically engage with and reflect upon Gerald McKenny, widely acknowledged as one of the most original and important Christian ethicists working today. The essays highlight the significance of McKenny's interventions with a range of important debates in contemporary theological ethics, ranging from analyses of the Protestant conception of grace to bioethics and medicine. The Ethics of Grace is the first volume to facilitate critical engagements with a (...) number of key themes in McKenny's work, not in the least his interpretation of Karl Barth. Among the contributions, Jennifer Herdt discusses McKenny's Barthian interest in the relationship between nature and grace; Angela Carpenter uses his Barthian understanding of grace and human action as a framework to discuss Jonathan Edwards; Stanley Hauerwas pushes McKenny's theology beyond Barth. Economic, political, and technological themes are also discussed in depth, for instance in Robert Song's chapter on the phenomenology of biotechnological enhancement. Reaching far beyond the work of Gerald McKenny, this multifaceted volume is a high-level resource for students and scholars of theological and philosophical ethics. (shrink)

Goswami proposes to replace the current scientific paradigm of physical realism with that of a quantum-based monistic idealism and, in the process, accomplish the following goals: establish a basis for explaining consciousness, reintegrate spirituality, mysticism, morality, a sense that the universe is meaningful, etc., with scientific discoveries and the scientific enterprise, and support the assumption that humans possess free will - i.e., that they are not controlled by the apparently inexorable causality of the physical laws that govern the functioning of (...) their brains. Here, we critically examine this approach, from an artificial intelligence and neural network perspective, and point out what appear to be some inherent weaknesses in Goswami's arguments. (shrink)

This volume reconsiders pragmatist conceptions of democratic education, especially John Dewey's. It addresses what democratic education can mean in the face of the current threats that are undermining democracy. Since the middle of the twentieth century, liberal philosophers have been skeptical of fostering values through public education. Since liberal democracy must embrace different worldviews, education, especially public education, must refrain from teaching values as far as possible. Given the recent undermining of democratic nation states and their liberal foundations, this educational (...) abstinence can be interpreted as one of the drivers of the current crisis of democracy. This volume sketches how a renewed democratic education, in the model of John Dewey and other forms of pragmatist educational philosophy, might look today. The volume identifies the conceptual, political, and technological challenges to education and democracy, and explores how a new democratic education could translate into the classroom. John Dewey and Contemporary Challenges to Democratic Education will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in pragmatism and American philosophy, philosophy of education, and political philosophy. (shrink)

This article defends the Fixed Point Thesis: that it is always a rational mistake to have false beliefs about the requirements of rationality. The Fixed Point Thesis is inspired by logical omniscience requirements in formal epistemology. It argues to the Fixed Point Thesis from the Akratic Principle: that rationality forbids having an attitude while believing that attitude is rationally forbidden. It then draws out surprising consequences of the Fixed Point Thesis, for instance that certain kinds of a priori justification are (...) indefeasible and that misleading all-things-considered evidence about rational requirements is impossible. Finally, the Fixed Point Thesis is applied to defend the Right Reasons position on peer disagreement, according to which an agent who has drawn the correct conclusion from her evidence should retain belief in that conclusion even in the face of disagreeing peers. (shrink)

'Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology' provides an accessible introduction to the key concepts and principles of the Bayesian formalism. This volume introduces degrees of belief as a concept in epistemology and the rules for updating degrees of belief derived from Bayesian principles.--.