Here, we describe how Casas Grandes Medio period (AD 1200 to 1450) shamanic practices of the North American Southwest used tobacco shamanism, a ritual stance called the Tennessee Diviner (TD) posture, and cultural expectations to generate trance experiences of soul flight and divination. We introduce a conceptual model that holds that specific trance experiences are the emergent result of human minds interacting with additional factors including entheogens, cultural expectations, physiological states, postures/movement, and sound/stimulation. Experimental and ethnographic evidence indicates initiating trance (...) with either tobacco intoxication or the TD posture accompanied with a rapidly beating drum or rattle corresponds with perceptions of soul flight, transformation, and divination/information acquisition. Both have similar results but pairing them together as they were during the Medio period likely helped ensure the culturally desired trance experiences. This practice of mutually reinforcing factors was likely part of tobacco‐based shamanism found in other New World cultures as well. We suggest our general model can be applied to other contexts to examine how various aspects of trance induction interact to produce the cultural patterns (and resulting cosmological and spiritual frameworks) anthropologists have documented in other cultures. (shrink)

De Marco and colleagues claim that the standard account of invasiveness as commonly encountered ‘…does not capture all uses of the term in relation to medical interventions1 ’. This is open to challenge. Their first example is ‘non-invasive prenatal testing’. Because it involves puncturing the skin to obtain blood, De Marco et al take this as an example of how an incision or insertion is not sufficient to make an intervention invasive; here is a procedure that involves an incision, but (...) it is regarded as non-invasive. However, this ignores the context, and the term should really be understood in reference to the fetus. It is hard to believe healthcare professionals regard taking blood to measure, for example, ferritin levels as invasive but taking blood to look for fragments of fetal DNA as not. If anyone uses the term thinking it is not invasive to the mother, the solution would be to call it invasive, not redefine what is invasive. De Marco and colleagues’ second example is describing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as invasive. However, this is not borne out by their referenced papers. The first cited source is about non-invasive brain stimulation2 and only contains a single sentence about ECT. This sentence may suggest that their view is that ECT …. (shrink)

The significance of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy has been generally recognized for over a century, as the familiarity of his phrase “survival of the fittest” indicates, yet accounts of the origins of his system still tend to follow too closely his own description, written many decades later. This essay argues that Spencer’s own interpretation of his intellectual development gives an inadequate impression of the debt he owed to provincial scientific culture and its institutions. Most important, it shows that his evolutionism (...) was originally stimulated by his association with the Derby philosophical community, for it was through this group—of which his father, who also appears to have espoused a deistic evolutionary theory, was a member—that he was first exposed to progressive Enlightenment social and educational philosophies and to the evolutionary worldview of Erasmus Darwin, the first president of the Derby Philosophical Society. Darwin’s scheme was the first to incorporate biological evolution, associationist psychology, evolutionary geology, and cosmological developmentalism. Spencer’s own implicit denials of the link with Darwin are shown to be implausible in the face of Darwin’s continuing influence on the Derby savants, the product of insecurity in his later years when he feared for his reputation as Lamarckism became increasingly untenable. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that Nietzsche is a Kantian, and what being Kantian means. He accepts the idea that our perception is configured by concepts which unify and inform the world around us, and which result from a biological evolution of the human species. His Kantianism is thus biological and mainly influenced by Friedrich Albert Lange’s reading of Kant. But this Nietzschean conceptualism must be inscribed in his thought of the will to power, where the perceptive fixation of the (...) world is the result of a degeneration caused by the biological, psychological and historical recovery of the will to power. Thus, I show that Nietzsche’s Kantianism is as biological as it is axiological. (shrink)

This paper is part of a symposium on Paul Moser, _Philosophy After Objectivity (Oxford University Press, 1993). The paper replies to contributions by Philip Quinn and Robert Audi.

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und (...) Literaturwissenschaften sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

This paper questions the idea that Wittgenstein’s account of meaning as use requires an intrinsically normative understanding of this notion, and suggests instead that Wittgenstein is better understood as promoting a naturalistic view of meaning that undertakes an explanation based on non–semantic and non–normative facts of word–usage. It discusses the relevant positions of Kripke, Brandom and McDowell, all of whom are found to be united by the attempt to attribute to Wittgenstein a normative understanding of language that is not convincing. (...) While language does exhibit normative properties that cannot be naturalized, the understanding speakers have of their own words is “a prima facie plausible candidate for naturalistic analysis.”. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky and Frances Egan argue that David Marr’s computational theory of vision is not intentional, claiming that the formal scientific theory does not include description of visual content. They also argue that the theory is internalist in the sense of not describing things physically external to the perceiver. They argue that these claims hold for computational theories of vision in general. Beyond theories of vision, they argue that representational content does not figure as a topic within formal computational theories (...) in cognitive science. I demonstrate that Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims about Marr’s theory are false. Marr’s computational theory contains a mathematical theory of visual content, based on empirical psychophysical evidence. It also contains mathematical descriptions of distal physical surfaces and objects, and of their optic projection to the perceiver. Much computational research on vision contains these types of intentional and externalist components within the formal, mathematical, theories. Chomsky’s and Egan’s claims demonstrate inadequate study and understanding of Marr’s work and other research in this area. Computational theories of vision, by containing empirically based mathematical theories of visual content, to this extent present naturalizations of semantics. (shrink)

In 1894 the anthropologist Otis Tufton Mason called for research in an area he dubbed ‘technogeography’, and he lauded the potential benefits of the knowledge to be acquired under this heading: The...

Les mots parlent souvent d’eux-mêmes et au-delà de nos intentions les plus naturelles. Parler de décliner son identité, c’est un peu comme prétendre qu’elle est susceptible de descriptions diversement colorées. On ne se dit effectivement pas sur le même ton à l’officier de police et au groupe de travail nouvellement intégré et où l’on est..

Après avoir subi au début des années cinquante une sorte de procès public en raison de ses idées et traversé en conséquence une crise existentielle d'une rare intensité, Albert Camus, se retrouvant face à lui-même, a estimé que le problème majeur auquel l'humanité est désormais confrontée consiste dans ce besoin impérieux qu'ont les hommes de s'accuser mutuellement et de faire ainsi de leur existence un procès permanent, transformant tour à tour les mêmes personnes en prévenus, en procureurs, en avocats, en (...) témoins et en juges. Le problème, qui n'est autre que celui du jugement que les hommes portent les uns sur les autres, tient donc au fait que ceux-ci, alors même qu'ils ne croient plus au jugement de Dieu, continuent de croire qu'être juste c'est être juge. Pour expliquer que la dissociation de la justice et du jugement devrait révéler un horizon de sens nouveau à une humanité privée de boussole, Paul Audi s'applique d'abord dans cet essai à mesurer la profondeur de la crise qui a conduit l'auteur de La Chute à coucher sur le papier, quelques mois seulement avant sa mort, ce terrible ultimatum : "Je me fais la guerre et je me détruirai ou je renaîtrai, c'est tout". (shrink)

Wittgenstein was apparently looking for someone else. It was because he had not been successful that he had knocked at the Leavises’ door, to bide his time there before he looked again. On entering the house, he immediately peered through the window into the street. Yet after a moment he turned and said abruptly: “You’ve got a gramophone, I see—I don’t suppose you’ve anything worth playing.” And “Then,” so Leavis continues the description,with a marked change of tone, he exclaimed “Ah!”: (...) from the repository just at hand he pulled out the album of Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony and put the first record on the machine. A moment after the music began to sound he lifted the tone-arm, altered the speed, and lowered... (shrink)

Le concept de nature est reconstruit en considérant le processus d'objectivation à l'oeuvre dans l'expérience systémique du scientifique, qui prend la forme d'une expérience d'immanence redoublée. Ce redoublement est ensuite analysé à l'intérieur des systèmes que le savant analyse par l'étude du passage d'un système physique auto-organisé du type transition de phase à un système biologique. [Electre 2015].

In _Rawlsian Political Analysis: Rethinking the Microfoundations of Social Science, _Paul Clements develops a new, morally grounded model of political and social analysis as a critique of and improvement on both neoclassical economics and rational choice theory. What if practical reason is based not only on interests and ideas of the good, as these theories have it, but also on principles and sentiments of right? The answer, Clements argues, requires a radical reorientation of social science from the idea of interests (...) to the idea of social justice. According to Clements, systematic weaknesses in neoclassical economics and rational choice theory are due to their limited model of choice. According to such theories in the utilitarian tradition, all our practical decisions aim to maximize the satisfaction of our interests. These neo-utilitarian approaches focus on how we promote our interests, but Clements argues, our ideas of right, cognitively represented in principles, contribute independently and no less fundamentally to our practical decisions. The most significant challenge to utilitarianism in the last half century is found in John Rawls’s _Theory of Justice _and _Political Liberalism_, in which Rawls builds on Kant's concept of practical reason. Clements extends Rawls's moral theory and his critique of utilitarianism by arguing for social analysis based on the Kantian and Rawlsian model of choice. To illustrate the explanatory power of his model, he presents three detailed case studies: a program analysis of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, a political economy analysis of the causes of poverty in the Indian state of Bihar, and a problem-based analysis of the ethics and politics of climate change. He concludes by exploring the broad implications of social analysis grounded in a concept of social justice. “Paul Clements’s _Rawlsian Political Analysis _mounts an important intervention into the philosophy of the social sciences, challenging the tired fact/value, empirical/normative binaries that continue to impoverish social analysis. His insistence that social analysis must engage both facts and norms, the empirical and the normative, the good and the right, interest and principle—and that empirical social scientists must engage constructively on questions of autonomy and social justice—is noble and ultimately essential if social science is to justify its place in the years to come.” —_Fonna Forman-Barzilai, University of California, San Diego_. (shrink)

This study tests the relationship between demographic and psychological variables, particularly positive psychology, and investor preferences. Of thedemographics variables, only gender was related to investor preferences, with women expressing a longer time horizon than men. However, the positive psychology variables of hope and novelty orientation were strongly related to risk tolerance, time horizon, and estate intentions.

This book is a detailed comparison of the major political writings of Machiavelli and Xenophon. By elucidating the remarkable scope, depth, and subtlety of the debate between these two great thinkers,Excellence Unleashed offers a fresh perspective on the philosophic and political significance of Machiavelli's proto-modern break from the classical tradition.

This book explores an experience-based learning model, the Phenomenal Patterning approach for personal transformation. Rather than traditional prescriptive learning, methods of personal discovery help us understand how the human mind actually functions. Dr. Koziey introduces two modern Zen skills, watching and catharsis, to increase self-awareness.

A clear understanding of social justice requires complex rather than simple answers. It requires comfort with ambiguity rather than absolute answers. This is counter to viewing right versus wrong, just vs. unjust, or good vs. evil as dichotomies. This book provides many examples of where and how to begin to view these as continuums rather than dichotomies.