The TNM classification (Tumor-Node-Metastasis) is the most important coding scheme used to stage tumors based on size and location. Its coding rules may change across different TNM versions, such t...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties ed. by Paul T. Wilford and Samuel A. StonerBenedikt BrunnerPaul T. Wilford and Samuel A. Stoner, editors. Kant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Hardback, $65.00.Our present does not invite, let alone suggest, particularly optimistic expectations for the future. This volume, edited by (...) Paul Wilford and Samuel Stoner, not only analyzes the historical foundations of Kant's idea of progress but also explores contemporary reflections on such questions as the following: Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? And if not, why has this ability been lost? What about liberal democracy, which is contested from many sides?In addition to a lucid introduction, which clarifies the concepts of modernity and postmodernity, the volume assembles thirteen chapters. While the first seven chapters deal with the idea of progress in Kant, the remaining six contributions shed light on the history of that idea after Kant. Within the framework of this review, only selected articles can be discussed. In chapter 1, Oliver Sensen examines the idea of moral progress in the individual. In chapter 2, Kate Moran asks the fundamental question: should we believe in moral progress? According to Kant, the human being possesses "a duty to avoid despondency" (46). Following Kant, she encourages us not to go down the road of misanthropy as a consequence of one's own or others' moral failure, but "to be generous in our assessments of others" (46). In chapter 3, Jens Timmermann takes up this aspect again and illustrates clearly how complex Kant's concept of moral progress is. Moreover, he highlights that moral progress has a double meaning for Kant: "first in a fundamental change of priorities—privileging morality over self-interest—and then in an ever-closer approximation to a perfectionist ideal of virtue" (61). Like some of the other contributors to this volume, however, Timmermann remains rather vague regarding possible avenues for further research. Two other contributions deal specifically with Kant's relationship to religion. In chapter 5, Naomi Fisher asks how God, teleology, and progress are connected in the third Critique. She argues that in the 1790s, Kant made concrete new efforts to integrate different strands of his philosophy "and to develop a more unified view of the human being as free and natural" (93). Chapter 6 is a joint contribution by the two editors of this volume entitled "Realizing the Ethical Community." Their focus is on Kant's religious writings and their role in the context of a "Reformation of Culture." They notice—an observation as important as it is exciting—that Kant tempered his ambitious goal regarding the moral betterment of human beings with his ideas about radical evil. At the same time, Kant insisted that people must become aware of their duty to improve themselves.In the second section, Kant is brought into conversation with his contemporaries and some of his successors. In chapter 8, Karl Ameriks provides an overview of the relationship between history, progress, and autonomy in Kant, Herder, and beyond. In chapter 9, Richard L. Velkley analyzes the significance of language, embodiment, and the supersensual in Fichte. In chapter 10, Mark Alznauer examines the concept of philosophical history in Hegel.The volume concludes with three different but equally stimulating contributions. In chapter 11, Ryan S. Kemp argues that Kierkegaard "relocated" the concept of the Highest Good: "Unlike Kant, who regards happiness as realizable (if at all) only in an afterlife, Kierkegaard seems to think that the person who truly embraces the self-denial of Christian love, can, even now, receive the world in joy" (200). In this approach, Kierkegaard was clearly different from his predecessors in the German idealistic tradition. In chapter 12, entitled "Kant and Benjamin on Hope, History, and the Task of Interpretation," C. Allen [End Page 159] Speight shows that Walter Benjamin stands in Kant's tradition while also diverging from him in some important respects. From Kant's universalizing assumptions, especially in relation to progress, Benjamin moved "toward a distinctive, messianically influenced sense of time where interruption and immanent... (shrink)

In this paper, I want to make two main points. The first point is methodological: Instead of attempting to give a classical analysis or reductive definition of the term “expertise”, we should attempt an explication and look for what may be called symptoms of expertise. What this comes to will be explained in due course. My second point is substantial: I want to recommend understanding as an important symptom of expertise. In order to give this suggestion content, I begin to (...) develop an account of understanding. Finally, I will draw attention to some consequences of this approach. (shrink)

Critically engaging the work of Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida together with her own observations on contemporary politics, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of a just and sustainable world, Kelly Oliver lays the groundwork for a politics and ethics that embraces otherness without exploiting difference. Rooted firmly in human beings' relationship to the planet and to each other, Oliver shows peace is possible only if we maintain our ties to earth and world. Oliver (...) begins with Immanuel Kant and his vision of politics grounded on earth as a finite surface shared by humans. She then incorporates Hannah Arendt's belief in plural worlds constituted through human relationships; Martin Heidegger's warning that alienation from the Earth endangers not only politics but also the very essence of being human; and Jacques Derrida's meditations on the singular worlds individuals, human and otherwise, create and how they inform the reality we inhabit. Each of these theorists, Oliver argues, resists the easy idealism of world citizenship and globalism, yet they all think about the earth against the globe to advance a grounded ethics. They contribute to a philosophy that avoids globalization's totalizing and homogenizing impulses and instead help build a framework for living within and among the world's rich biodiversity. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper a relational account of incongruent counterparts is defended against an argument due to Kant. I then consider a more recent attack on such an account, due to John Earman, which alleges that the relationalist cannot account for the lawlike left--right asymmetry manifested in parity-violating phenomena. I review Hoefer's, Huggett's and Saunders' responses to Earman's argument and argue that, while a relationalist account of parity-violating laws is possible, it comes at the cost of non-locality.

In a companion paper (Pooley & Brown 2001) it is argued that Julian Barbour's Machian approach to dynamics provides a genuinely relational interpretation of Newtonian dynamics and that it is more explanatory than the conventional, substantival interpretation. In this paper the extension of the approach to relativistic physics is considered. General relativity, it turns out, can be reinterpreted as a perfectly Machian theory. However, there are difficulties with viewing the Machian interpretation as more fundamental than the conventional, spacetime interpretation. Moreover, (...) this state of affairs provides little solace for the relationist for, even when interpreted along Machian lines, general relativity is a substantival theory although the basic entity is space, not spacetime. (shrink)

Mein Beitrag behandelt zentrale Probleme der Methodologie der Textinterpretation im Lichte der neueren Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie. Nach Vorbemerkungen zum Begriff der Interpretation wende ich mich den Methoden der Bildung und kritischen Prüfung von Interpretationshypothesen zu. Wie ist das Verhältnis von Daten und Hypothesen im Falle der Textinterpretation? Wie können Interpretationshypothesen epistemisch gerechtfertigt bzw. gestützt werden? Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen untersuche ich die Anwendung der Hypothetisch-Deduktiven Methode und der Methode des Schlusses auf die beste Erklärung auf die Textinterpretation. Der Vergleich zeigt, (...) dass die Methode des Schlusses auf die beste Erklärung vorzuziehen ist. (shrink)

Binding specificity is a centrally important concept in molecular biology, yet it has received little philosophical attention. Here I aim to remedy this by analyzing binding specificity as a causal property. I focus on the concept’s role in drug design, where it is highly prized and hence directly studied. From a causal perspective, understanding why binding specificity is a valuable property of drugs contributes to an understanding of causal selection—of how and why scientists distinguish between causes, not just causes from (...) noncauses. In particular, the specificity of drugs is precisely what underwrites their value as experimental interventions on biological processes. (shrink)

Recent advances in evolutionary biology and ethology suggest that humans are not the only species capable of empathy and possibly morality. These findings are of no little consequence for theology, given that a nonhuman animal as a free moral agent would beg the question if human beings are indeed uniquely created in God's image. I argue that apes and some other mammals have moral agency and that a traditional interpretation of the imago Dei is incorrectly equating specialness with exclusivity. By (...) framing the problem in terms of metaphor, following the work of Paul Ricoeur and Sallie McFague, I propose that the concept of the imago Dei could be extended to accommodate moral species other than our own. (shrink)

As a linguist, Julia Kristeva has pioneered a revolutionary theory of the sign in its relation to social and political emancipation; as a practicing psychoanalyst, she has produced work on the nature of the human subject and sexuality, and on the "new maladies" of today's neurotic. _The Portable Kristeva_ is the only fully comprehensive compilation of Kristeva's key writings. The second edition includes added material from Kristeva's most important works of the past five years, including _The Sense and Non-Sense of (...) Revolt_, _Intimate Revolt_, and _Hannah Arendt_. Editor Kelly Oliver has also added new material to the introduction, summarizing Kristeva's latest intellectual endeavors and updating the bibliography. (shrink)

Der Artikel spürt den subtilen Veränderungen nach, die bei Patienten, die mit tiefer Hirnstimulation behandelt werden, möglicherweise beobachtet werden können. Dabei sollen im Rückgriff auf Konzeptionen zur narrativen Identität mittels einer möglichst genauen Beschreibung und Analyse der Selbstwahrnehmung der Patienten sowie der Wahrnehmung ihres Umfelds die Änderungen im praktischen Selbstverhältnis untersucht werden, u. a. am Beispiel technomorpher Metaphern, die von den Patienten in ihren Selbstbeschreibungen verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, die Neuartigkeit und das Spezifische der Neurotechnologien – über die bisherigen (...) Untersuchungen hinaus – hinsichtlich des Umgangs mit sich selbst herauszuarbeiten und greifbar zu machen. Abschließend werden auf Basis der Analyse der Patienten-Narrationen die entsprechenden normativen Implikationen für eine ethische Bewertung des Einsatzes von Neurotechnologien benannt. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue against both neuropsychological and cognitive accounts of our grasp of numbers. I show that despite the points of divergence between these two accounts, they face analogous problems. Both presuppose too much about what they purport to explain to be informative, and also characterize our grasp of numbers in a way that is absurd in the light of what we already know from the point of view of mathematical practice. Then I offer a positive methodological proposal about the (...) role that cognitive science should play in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

In [14], we studied the computational behaviour of various first-order and modal languages interpreted in metric or weaker distance spaces. [13] gave an axiomatisation of an expressive and decidable metric logic. The main result of this paper is in showing that the technique of representing metric spaces by means of Kripke frames can be extended to cover the modal (hybrid) language that is expressively complete over metric spaces for the (undecidable) two-variable fragment of first-order logic with binary pred-icates interpreting the (...) metric. The frame conditions needed correspond rather directly with a Boolean modal logic that is, again, of the same expressivity as the two-variable fragment. We use this representation to derive an axiomatisation of the modal hybrid variant of the two-variable fragment, discuss the compactness property in distance logics, and derive some results on (the failure of) interpolation in distance logics of various expressive power. (shrink)

Generative AI has gained a lot of attention in society, business, and science. This trend has increased since 2018, and the big breakthrough came in 2022. In particular, AI-based text and image generators are now widely used. This raises a variety of ethical issues. The present paper first gives an introduction to generative AI and then to applied ethics in this context. Three specific image generators are presented: DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. The author goes into technical details and (...) basic principles, and compares their similarities and differences. This is followed by an ethical discussion. The paper addresses not only risks, but opportunities for generative AI. A summary with an outlook rounds off the article. (shrink)

Cet article propose une interprétation de la relation entre l’aletheia et la doxa dans le poème de Parménide sur la base d’une analyse du voyage relaté dans le proème. À partir d’un examen précis du texte parménidien, il établit que l’hypothèse selon laquelle la citadelle de la nuit est la destination finale du voyage rend bien mieux compte de celui‑ci que l’hypothèse longtemps admise selon laquelle il s’agirait de la lumière. Cette lecture du proème permet non seulement d’établir un certain (...) nombre de parallèles avec d’autres œuvres poétiques qui décrivent le trajet du Soleil, mais surtout de mettre au jour une analogie entre le récit de voyage et la partition en deux du poème parménidien : notre monde, où alternent le jour et la nuit, représente le monde de la doxa, où être et non-être sont mêlés et qui est gouverné par deux principes correspondants, le feu et la nuit, tandis que l’unicité de la déesse de la Nuit dans l’au‑delà renvoie à celle de l’être. De plus, en distinguant deux étapes dans le voyage du narrateur, celle où il atteint de lui‑même le chemin de la nuit et du jour et celle où les filles d’Hélios le guident sur ce chemin, on peut expliquer l’existence même d’un discours sur les opinions des mortels : de même que le narrateur a besoin d’abord d’aller de notre monde quotidien jusqu’au chemin de la nuit et du jour pour avoir ensuite accès à la connaissance divine, de même il faut expliquer le monde de l’opinion en le faisant remonter à deux principes fondamentaux pour montrer aux mortels le chemin vers l’aletheia. L’article conclut en expliquant, à partir des fragments B14 et B15, pourquoi Parménide a recours à la déesse de la Nuit pour faire cette révélation : ce choix repose sur une critique de la lumière du soleil comme condition de la vision trompeuse. (shrink)

Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis is a sympathetic critique of Freud's work, tracing its political content and context from his early writings on hysteria to his late essays on civilization and religion. Brunner's central claim is that politics is a pervasive and essential component of all of Freud's discourse, since Freud viewed both the psyche and society primarily as constellations of power and domination. Brunner shows that when read politically, Freud's discourse can be seen to unite mechanics (...) and meaning into a plausible, fruitful and internally consistent theory of the mind, therapy, family and society. Part one deals with the medical and political background of Freud's work. It explains how Freud postulated mental principles that were the same for all races and nations. The second part is concerned with the logic and language of Freud's theory of the mind. Brunner also details how Freud introduced dynamics of dominance and subjugation into the very core of the psyche. Part three addresses dynamics of power in the clinical setting, which Freud forged out of a curious blend of authoritarian and liberal elements. Brunner focuses on how this setting creates an arena for verbal politics. He also examines various social factors that influenced the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis, such as class, gender and education. Part four explores Freud's analysis of the family and large-scale social institutions. Though Brunner is critical of the authoritarian bias in Freud's social theory, he suggests that it provides a useful vocabulary to unmask hidden psychological aspects of domination and subjection. (shrink)

North Korea is under strict UN economic sanctions because it violated UN policy in its development of nuclear weapons and long range missiles as well as for its militant rhetoric. South Korea and Japan, as close allies of the USA, are unsure of the future. Is there a way to bring some peace and stability to the Korean peninsula? Some argue that this is a hopeless task as long as the current leadership of North Korea is in power. This article (...) takes a more positive stance and outlines a possible way forward. The study, following the position of the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, assumes that the conflict is at root one over ideology and power. The leadership of North Korea understands itself as “a revolutionary and socialist state” and is determined to continue to control the country through a rigorous and sometimes brutal government oversight of the culture. Although poverty and hunger are widespread, the people have little opportunity to be heard. What if the leaders of North Korea were persuaded that they could gain legitimacy through developing a dynamic economy that brought flourishing to their people and respect by fellow-nations in the global village? The article proposes to start this new adventure by developing enterprise zones in the North that would bring jobs and food to hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. To begin this project, there would need to be dramatic steps toward denuclearization on the part of the North in order to relax the UN economic sanctions. Is it possible? The article outlines a way forward. (shrink)

Dummctt argues that classical quantification is illegitimate when the domain is given as the objects which fall under an indefinitely extensible concept, since in such cases the objects are not the required definite totality. The chief problem in understanding this complex argument is the crucial but unexplained phrase 'definite totality' and the associated claim that it follows from the intuitive notion of set that the objects over which a classical quantifier ranges form a set. 'Definite totality' is best understood as (...) disguised plural talk like Cantor's 'consistent multiplicity', although this does not help in understanding how a totality could be anything other than definite. Moreover, contrary to his claims, Dummett's own notion of set is not intuitive and he does not demystify the set-theoretic paradoxes. In conclusion, it is argued that Dummett's context principle is responsible for the incoherent projection of the haziness of a conception of some objects onto reality. (shrink)

Occam’s razor directs us to adopt the simplest hypothesis consistent with the evidence. Learning theory provides a precise definition of the inductive simplicity of a hypothesis for a given learning problem. This definition specifies a learning method that implements an inductive version of Occam’s razor. As a case study, we apply Occam’s inductive razor to causal learning. We consider two causal learning problems: learning a causal graph structure that presents global causal connections among a set of domain variables, and learning (...) context-sensitive causal relationships that hold not globally, but only relative to a context. For causal graph learning, Occam’s inductive razor directs us to adopt the model that explains the observed correlations with a minimum number of direct causal connections. For expanding a causal graph structure to include context-sensitive relationships, Occam’s inductive razor directs us to adopt the expansion that explains the observed correlations with a minimum number of free parameters. This is equivalent to explaining the correlations with a minimum number of probabilistic logical rules. The paper provides a gentle introduction to the learning-theoretic definition of inductive simplicity and the application of Occam’s razor for causal learning. (shrink)

Every materially adequate explication of the concepts ``picture''and ``the pictorial'' has to appeal to syntactical properties.From the available definitions, a conception of syntax is extractedthat is applicable to symbol systems of any sort. Against thisbackground, it is shown that a non-semantical characterization ofthe pictorial is mandatory. Finally, specific syntactical featuresare explicated that recommend themselves as necessary conditions forthe application of the concept of a picture.

A provocative and wide-ranging analysis of the cultural mood of anxiety and pessimism in the early 21st century.

A dual-code model of number processing needs to take into account the difference between a number symbol and its meaning. The transition of automatic non-abstract number representations into intentional abstract representations could be conceptualized as a translation of perceptual asemantic representations of numerals into semantic representations of the associated magnitude information. The controversy about the nature of number representations should be thus related to theories on embodied grounding of symbols.