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)

Paul M. Pietroski presents an ambitious new account of human languages as generative procedures that respect substantive constraints. He argues that meanings are neither concepts nor extensions, and sentences do not have truth conditions; meanings are composable instructions for how to access and assemble concepts of a special sort.

Proponents of the extended mind have suggested that phenomenal transparency may be important to the way we evaluate putative cases of cognitive extension. In particular, it has been suggested that in order for a bio-external resource to count as part of the machinery of the mind, it must qualify as a form of transparent equipment or transparent technology. The present paper challenges this claim. It also challenges the idea that phenomenological properties can be used to settle disputes regarding the constitutional (...) status of bio-external resources in episodes of extended cognizing. Rather than regard phenomenal transparency as a criterion for cognitive extension, we suggest that transparency is a feature of situations that support the ascription of certain cognitive/mental dispositional properties to both ourselves and others. By directing attention to the forces and factors that motivate disposition ascriptions, we arrive at a clearer picture of the role of transparency in arguments for extended cognition and the extended mind. As it turns out, transparency is neither necessary nor sufficient for cognitive extension, but this does not mean that it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of the circumstances in which episodes of extended cognizing are apt to arise. (shrink)

Examples of extended cognition typically involve the use of technologically low-grade bio-external resources (e.g., the use of pen and paper to solve long multiplication problems). The present paper describes a putative case of extended cognizing based around a technologically advanced mixed reality device, namely, the Microsoft HoloLens. The case is evaluated from the standpoint of a mechanistic perspective. In particular, it is suggested that a combination of organismic (e.g., the human individual) and extra-organismic (e.g., the HoloLens) resources form part of (...) a common mechanism that realizes a bona fide cognitive routine. In addition to demonstrating how the theoretical resources of neo-mechanical philosophy might be used to evaluate extended cognitive systems, the present paper illustrates one of the ways in which mixed reality devices, virtual objects (i.e., holograms), and online (Internet-accessible) computational routines might be incorporated into human cognitive processes. This, it is suggested, speaks to the recent interest in mixed/virtual reality technologies across a number of disciplines. It also introduces us to issues that cross-cut disparate fields of philosophical research, such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

The Spirit of the Soil challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

Immanuel Kant claims that transcendental idealism yields a form of realism at the empirical level. Polite silence might best describe the reception this assertion has garnered among even sympathetic interpreters. This book challenges that prejudice, offering a controversial presentation and rehabilitation of Kant's empirical realism that places his realist credentials at the centre of the account of representation he offers in the Critique of Pure Reason. This interpretation ranges over the major themes contained in the Analytic of Principles and relevant (...) portions of the Dialectic. Kant's analysis of the conditions necessary for determinate representation is shown to involve a realist understanding of the relation of mind and world. The realist character of Kant's account of empirical truth, and his commitment to the unity of nature, are defended against competing empiricist, pragmatist, and methodological readings. This title links Kant studies to contemporary philosophical debates, and will appeal to scholars and students of Kant, as well as epistemologists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science interested in a powerful, experience-sensitive, form of realism. (shrink)

Self-fulfilling beliefs are, in at least some cases, a kind of belief that is rational to form and hold in the absence of strong evidential support The rationality of such beliefs have significant implications for a range of debates in epistemology. Most startlingly, it undermines the idea that having sufficient evidence for the truth of p is necessary for it to be rational to believe that p. The rationality of self-fulfilling beliefs is here defended against the idea that their rationality (...) is incompatible with a compelling closure principle. (shrink)

This entry provides a substantive overview of research and debates concerning creativity in philosophy and related fields. Topics covered include definitions of creativity, whether creativity can be learned, whether it can be explained, attempts to explain creativity in cognitive science, and whether computer programs or AI systems can be creative.

Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study. We asked participants to make judgments about the same acts in a series of sacrificial dilemmas three times, (...) 6–8 days apart. In addition to investigating the stability of our participants’ ratings over time, we also explored some potential explanations for instability. To end, we will discuss these and other potential psychological sources of moral stability (or instability) and highlight possible philosophical implications of our findings. (shrink)

Supporters of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy have largely shied away from relating his logic to modern symbolic or mathematical approaches. While it has predominantly been the non-Greek discipline of algebra that has informed modern mathematical logic, philosopher Paul Redding argues that the approaches of Plato and Aristotle to logic were deeply shaped by the arithmetic and geometry of classical Greek culture. And by ignoring the fact that Hegel's logic also has this deep mathematical dimension, conventional Hegelians have missed some of (...) Hegel's greatest insights. In Conceptual Harmonies, Redding develops an account of Hegel's logic against a classical and modern historical background that is rarely considered. He stresses Hegel's attention to the Platonic background of Aristotle's original syllogistic and beyond. He then links these Platonic elements to Leibniz's modern revitalization of the logical tradition and then to new forms of algebraic geometry emerging in Hegel's lifetime. Redding thereby reestablishes aspects of Hegel's philosophy that are essential if Hegel is to be taken as a thinker relevant not only to contemporary philosophy, but also to current philosophical conceptions of logic. (shrink)

Mark Schroeder’s Reasons First is admirable in its scope and execution, deftly demonstrating the theoretical promise of extending the reasons-first approach from ethics to epistemology. In what follows we explore how (not) to account for the evidence-that relation within the reasons-first program, we explain how factive content views of evidence can be resilient in the face of Schroeder’s criticisms, and we explain how knowledge from falsehood threatens Schroeder’s view of knowledge. Along the way we sketch a reliabilist account of the (...) reasons-for relation (inspired by Alston) and show how it limits the applicability of Schroeder’s arguments. (shrink)

Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more (...) virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith, and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy. (shrink)

This paper states and gives three applications of a novel ‘Presentist Fragmentalist’ interpretation of quantum mechanics. In a cognate paper it was explicitly shown this kind of presentism is consistent with special relativity and that it has implications for how to understand time as it relates to the Big Bang. In this paper we narrowly focus on three applications. These are surely the most important conundrums for any proposed interpretation of quantum mechanics: Schrodinger’s Cat, Bell non-locality, and the Born rule. (...) It will be shown that these can be handled in a consistent and intuitive way. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. In this short and accessible book, he turns to a topic at the heart of much of his work: What is translation and why is it so important? Reminding us that The Bible, the Koran, the Torah and the works of the great philosophers are often only ever read in translation, Ricoeur reminds us that translation not only spreads knowledge but can change its very meaning. In (...) spite of these risk, he argues that in a climate of ethnic and religious conflict, the art and ethics of translation are invaluable. Drawing on interesting examples such as the translation of early Greek philosophy during the Renaissance, the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of Hannah Arendt, he reflects not only on the challenges of translating one language into another but how one community speaks to another. Throughout, Ricoeur shows how to move through life is to navigate a world that requires translation itself. Paul Ricoeur died in 2005. He was one of the great contemporary French philosophers and a leading figure in hermeneutics, psychoanalytic thought, literary theory and religion. His many books include Freud and Philosophy and Time and Narrative. (shrink)

We introduce proof nets and sequent calculus for the multiplicative fragment of non-commutative logic, which is an extension of both linear logic and cyclic linear logic. The two main technical novelties are a third switching position for the non-commutative disjunction, and the structure of order variety.

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it easier (...) for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

Although the term integration is central to the definition of brain death, there is little agreement on what it means. Through a genealogical analysis, this essay argues that there have been two primary ways of understanding integration in regard to organismal wholeness. One stems from neuroscience, focusing on the role of the brain in responding to external stimuli, which was taken up in phenomenological accounts of life. A second, arising out of cybernetics, focuses on the brain’s role in homeostasis. Recent (...) debates over brain death are largely over this cybernetic understanding of integration. However, the phenomenological understanding of organismal wholeness can be seen in arguments by the President’s Council on Bioethics in favor of brain death. This essay argues that the cybernetic understanding of life is problematic and should be discarded. A phenomenological understanding of life can provide a better basis for arguments over definitions of life and death. (shrink)

(2002). Clarifying the Ethics of Clinical Research: A Path toward Avoiding the Therapeutic Misconception. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 22-23.

Rawls says in Political Liberalism that “the focus of an overlapping consensus is [more likely to be] a class of liberal conceptions” than a single one. In conceding that members of the well-ordered society are unlikely to live up to justice as fairness, Rawls would seem to have conceded that they are also unlikely to live autonomously. This is exactly the conclusion some commentators have drawn. I contend that the likelihood of “reasonable pluralism about justice” does not have the implication (...) for Rawls’s project that it is said to have: political autonomy remains available even when such pluralism obtains. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of the later Renaissance whose writings encompassed the ongoing traditions, intentions, and achievements of his times and transmitted them into early modernity. Taking up the medieval practice of the art of memory and of formal logic, he focused on the creativity of the human mind. Bruno … Continue reading Giordano Bruno →.

Zoos and aquariums have an enormous global reach and hence an ability to craft meaningful conservation action for threatened species, implement educational strategies to encourage human engagement, development and behavior change, and conduct scientific research to enhance the husbandry, roles and impacts of the living collection. The recreational role of the zoo is also vast- people enjoy visiting the zoo and this is often a shared experience amongst family and friends. Evaluating how the zoo influences this “captive audience” and extending (...) its reach to include a compassionate approach to animals and people can further enhance the mission, value, and relevance of their work. The modern zoo’s current aims—Conservation, Education, Research and Recreation—provide useful foundations for the activities that zoos conduct at a local and national level. However, to improve sustainability of their actions and outcomes, we feel that Wellbeing should become the fifth aim of the modern zoo for the future- both from an animal perspective and from a human perspective. This paper provides discussion and review of how Wellbeing is already a substantial part of what zoos work on as well as posing the idea of altering the Recreation aim of the zoo to one of Engagement, which potentially is more measurable and therefore can allow zoo researchers and managers further options for the collection of evidence on the local and global reach of their zoo’s aims. Education, Engagement, Conservation, Research and Wellbeing provide a more complete picture of the roles of the modern zoo for the animals, human visitors and workforce, and to society more widely. (shrink)

The digital humanities have developed in concert with online systems that increase the accessibility and speed of learning. Whereas previously students were immersed in the fluidity of campus life, they have become suspended and drawn-into various streams and currents of digital pedagogy, which articulate new forms of epistemological movement, often operating at speeds outside the lived time and rhythm of human thought. When assessing learning technologies, we have to consider the degree to which they complement the rhythms immanent to human (...) thought, knowledge, investigation, and experimentation.In this paper, we examine learning from a humanities perspective, arguing that reading, writing, and thinking are ways of learning underscored by various genres of movement that segue with or diverge from the movements inherent to digital technologies, especially those deployed in learning systems. Using the work of thinkers such as John Dewey and Michel Serres, we examine the importance of movement in dialogue, where to truly learn involves embedding oneself in the flow of thought, accepting the flexibility of concepts, and aligning oneself with a community of thinkers. (shrink)

Causal decision theory attends to probabilities used to obtain an option's expected utility but for completeness should also attend to utilities of possible outcomes. A suitable formula for an option's expected utility uses a certain type of conditional utility.

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)

Amongst traditionally-available frameworks within which end-of-life decisions in Intensive Care Units (ICU) are situated, we favour Ordinary versus Extra-ordinary care distinctions as the most helpful. Predicated on this framework, we revisit the concepts of personhood and autonomy. We argue that a full account of personhood locates its foundation in relationships with others, rather than merely in “rationality”. A full account of autonomy also recognises relationships with others, as well as the actual reality of the patient’s situation-in-the-world. The fact that, when (...) critically ill, the patient may no longer be able to take an active role in decision-making does not bring about the end of their personhood, or of their autonomy. Because the patient’s autonomy is intimately linked to their relationships with others, once critical illness supervenes, respect for their autonomy devolves to those others with whom the patient is in relationship. In practical application, this means that there must be a dialogue, as the end-of-life of the critically-ill patient in ICU comes into view. Such dialogue should be grounded on this understanding in order to conform best to moral philosophical principles. Ideally the dialogue will involve all those with whom the patient is in relationship and, practical difficulties within an ICU notwithstanding, will aim to be inclusive, non-coercive and reflective as it seeks to maximise the good of the patient in their unique context. (shrink)

Genomic research—including whole genome sequencing and whole exome sequencing—has a growing presence in contemporary biomedical investigation. The capacity of sequencing techniques to generate results that go beyond the primary aims of the research—historically referred to as “incidental findings”—has generated considerable discussion as to how this information should be handled—that is, whether incidental results should be returned, and if so, which ones.Federal regulations governing most human subjects research in the United States require the disclosure of “the procedures to be followed” in (...) the research as part of the informed consent process. It seems reasonable to assume—and indeed, many commentators have concluded—that genomic investigators will be expected to inform participants about, among other procedures, the prospect that incidental findings will become available and the mechanisms for dealing with them. Investigators, most of whom will not have dealt with these issues before, will face considerable challenges in framing meaningful disclosures for research participants.To help in this task, we undertook to identify the elements that should be included in the informed consent process related to incidental findings. We did this by surveying a large number of genomic researchers (n = 241) and by conducting in‐depth interviews with a smaller number of researchers (n = 28) and genomic research participants (n = 20). Based on these findings, it seems clear to us that routine approaches to informed consent are not likely to be effective in genomic research in which the prospect of incidental findings exists. Ensuring that participants’ decisions are informed and meaningful will require innovative approaches to dealing with the consent issue. We have identified four prototypical models of a consent process for return of incidental findings. (shrink)

A passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism from the international bestselling author of Postcapitalism How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted by algorithms and A.I. anyway? In Clear Bright Future, Paul Mason calls for a radical, impassioned defence of the human being, our universal rights and (...) freedoms and our power to change the world around us. Ranging from economics to Big Data, from neuroscience to the culture wars, he draws from his on-the-ground reporting from mass protests in Istanbul to riots in Washington, as well as his own childhood in an English mining community, to show how the notion of humanity has become eroded as never before. In this book Paul Mason argues that we are still capable - through language, innovation and co-operation - of shaping our future. He offers a vision of humans as more than puppets, customers or cogs in a machine. This work of radical optimism asks: Do you want to be controlled? Or do you want something better? (shrink)

One of the core debates concerning equity in the response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change is how the responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions should be allocated, or, correspondingly, how the right to emit greenhouse gases should be allocated. Two alternative approaches that have been widely promoted are, first, to assign obligations to the industrialized countries on the basis of both their ability to pay (wealth) and their responsibility for the majority of prior emissions, or, second, to assign (...) emissions rights on a (possibly modified) equal per capita basis. Both these proposals ignore intra-national distributional equity. Instead, we develop a policy framework we call ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) which allocates obligations to pay for climate policies (both mitigation and adaptation) on the basis of an individually quantified metric of capacity (ability to pay) and responsibility (prior emissions). Crucially, the GDRs framework looks at the distribution of income within countries and treats people of equal wealth similarly, whatever country they live in. Thus even poor countries have obligations proportional to the size and wealth of their middle and upper classes, defined relative to a ‘development threshold’. While this method nominally identifies the ‘right to development’ as applying to people, not countries, as a proposal for a treaty among sovereign nations, there is no obvious way to give legal meaning to that right. In this paper, then, we raise some of the philosophical and political questions that arise in trying to quantify capacity and responsibility and to use the ‘right to development’ as a principle for allocating costs.Footnote**The ‘Greenhouse Development Rights’ (GDRs) framework is a collective project. The core team includes the author, Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict; this is the ‘we’ that appears where the text refers to the project, as in ‘we intended this’, and so on. This paper, however, is primarily the author's own product and, beyond the description of GDRs, my collaborators have not read or approved it; thus much of the writing and philosophical speculation uses the first person singular. And, while credit for useful work goes to all team members, the blame for philosophical sloppiness remains with the author. (shrink)

A lean hylomorphism stands as a metaphysical holy grail. An embarrassing feature of traditional hylomorphic ontologies is prime matter. Prime matter is both so basic that it cannot be examined (in principle) and its engagement with the other hylomorphic elements is far from clear. One particular problem posed by prime matter is how it is to be understood both as a principle of individuation for material substances and as pure potency. I present Thomas Aquinas’s way of squeezing some intelligibility out (...) of prime matter by modeling it on the idea of logical genus. Such a modeling provides insight into understanding prime matter as substratum, as maximally indeterminate, and as ontologically vague. One of the unusual but exciting things that fall out from this analysis of prime matter is the Entirety Thesis: “For any substance x, if x has prime matter then the prime matter of x is the same* as x,” where ‘same*’ is understood as “indeterminately identical.”. (shrink)

There is no doubt that spatial relations aid us in pairing up causes and effects. But when we consider the possibility of qualitatively indiscernible things, it might seem that spatial relations are more than a mere aid – they might seem positively required. The belief that spatial relations are required for causal relations is behind an important objection to Cartesian Dualism, the pairing problem. I argue that the Cartesian can answer this objection by appeal to the possibility of primitive causal (...) relations, a possibility I defend. This topic is of importance beyond the philosophy of mind; the possibility that causal relations might sometimes hold brutely is of general metaphysical importance. I close with a discussion of what Cartesians should say about embodiment, and how that bears on issues of mental causation. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary work, Paul W. Kahn argues that political order is founded not on contract but on sacrifice. Because liberalism is blind to sacrifice, it is unable to explain how the modern state has brought us to both the rule of law and the edge of nuclear annihilation. We can understand this modern condition only by recognizing that any political community, even a liberal one, is bound together by faith, love, and identity.Putting Liberalism in Its Place draws (...) on philosophy, cultural theory, American constitutional law, religious and literary studies, and political psychology to advance political theory. It makes original contributions in all these fields. Not since Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self has there been such an ambitious and sweeping examination of the deep structure of the modern conception of the self.Kahn shows that only when we move beyond liberalism's categories of reason and interest to a Judeo-Christian concept of love can we comprehend the modern self. Love is the foundation of a world of objective meaning, one form of which is the political community. Arguing from these insights, Kahn offers a new reading of the liberalism/communitarian debate, a genealogy of American liberalism, an exploration of the romantic and the pornographic, a new theory of the will, and a refoundation of political theory on the possibility of sacrifice.Approaching politics from the perspective of sacrifice allows us to understand the character of twentieth-century politics, which combined progress in the rule of law with massive slaughter for the state. Equally important, this work speaks to the most important political conflicts in the world today. It explains why American response to September 11 has taken the form of war, and why, for the most part, Europeans have been reluctant to follow the Americans in their pursuit of a violent, sacrificial politics. Kahn shows us that the United States has maintained a vibrant politics of modernity, while Europe is moving into a postmodern form of the political that has turned away from the idea of sacrifice. Together with its companion volume, Out of Eden, Putting Liberalism in Its Place finally answers Clifford Geertz's call for a political theology of modernity. (shrink)

The Modern School Movement traces the efforts made by the Anarchist movement to abolish all forms of authority and usher in a new society through a different form of education. Between 1910 and 1960 anarchists established more than twenty schools in the United States where children might study in an atmosphere of freedom and self-reliance in sharp contrast to the discipline of the traditional classroom. The prominent participants of this movement, including Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Alexander Berkman and Man Ray (...) are discussed. (shrink)

In Out of Eden, Paul W. Kahn offers a philosophical meditation on the problem of evil. He uses the Genesis story of the Fall as the starting point for a profound articulation of the human condition.

: Responding to the paper by Miller and Joffe, we review the development of the concept of therapeutic misconception (TM). Our concerns about TM's impact on informed consent do not derive from the belief that research subjects have poorer outcomes than persons receiving ordinary clinical care. Rather, we believe that subjects with TM cannot give an adequate informed consent to research participation, which harms their dignitary interests and their abilities to make meaningful decisions. Ironically, Miller and Joffe's approach ends up (...) largely embracing the very position that they inaccurately attribute to us: the belief that, with some exceptions, it is only the prospect of poorer outcomes that should motivate efforts to dispel TM. In the absence of empirical studies on the steps required to dispel TM and the impact of such procedures on subject recruitment, it is premature to surrender to the belief that TM must be widely tolerated in clinical research. (shrink)

The aim of this review is to show the fruitfulness of using images of facial expressions as experimental stimuli in order to study how neural systems support biologically relevant learning as it relates to social interactions. Here we consider facial expressions as naturally conditioned stimuli which, when presented in experimental paradigms, evoke activation in amygdala–prefrontal neural circuits that serve to decipher the predictive meaning of the expressions. Facial expressions offer a relatively innocuous strategy with which to investigate these normal variations (...) in affective information processing, as well as the promise of elucidating what role the aberrance of such processing might play in emotional disorders. (shrink)

Horror stories attached to some recent retailing events concerning Hoover, Ratners and others raise questions about a company’s ethical concern, whether it be part of its marketing strategy or ‘thrust upon it’. If ethics is to have a place in retail strategy that place is better focused around performance at an operational level rather than at the level of promotion or publicity. The author is Professor of Retailing at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham NG1 4BU, U.K. e‐mail: smm3whysapt@ntu.ac.uk.

Professor Clark's splendid essay represents a step forward from which there should be no retreat. Ourde factomoral cognition involves a complex and evolving interplay between, on the one hand, thenondiscursive cognitive mechanisms of the biological brain, and, on the other, the often highly discursive extra-personal “scaffolding” that structures the social world in which our brains are normally situated, a world that has been, to a large extent, created by our own moral and political activity. That interplay extends the reach and (...) elevates the quality of the original nondiscursive cognition, and thus any adequate account of moral cognition must address both of these contributing dimensions. An account that focuses only on brain mechanisms will be missing something vital. (shrink)

What does it take to solve the exclusion problem? An ingenious strategy is Stephen Yablo’s idea that causes must be commensurate with their effects. Commensuration is a relation between events. Roughly, events are commensurate with one another when one contains all that is required for the occurrence of the other, and as little as possible that is not required. According to Yablo, one event is a cause of another only if they are commensurate. I raise three reasons to doubt that (...) this account solves the exclusion problem successfully. First, it leaves a mystery about what determines a particular’s causal capacities. Second, because there are two ways of construing coincidence between particulars, a dilemma arises: either the solution to the exclusion problem is threatened, or the account of coincidence loses an attractive feature concerning ontological economy. Third, even if we assume the commensuration constraint, a plausible principle about overdetermination seems to regenerate the exclusion problem. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Paul Rateau traces the genesis and development of G.W. Leibniz's treatment of the problem of evil, from his earliest writings through the Essays on Theodicy (1710). By investigating Leibniz's early thinking about what evil is and where it comes from, Rateau reveals the deeply original nature of Leibniz's later work and the challenges it raises. Rateau explores the ways in which the Theodicy's theoretical project, which integrates numerous disciplines and various argumentative strategies, informs and is influenced by two more (...) practical aims-justifying the end of denominational divisions between Catholics and Protestants, and inculcating "true piety" in believers. By paying equal attention to both Leibniz's intellectual and personal development, Rateau offers a holistic view of Leibniz's most profound and sophisticated work of philosophy. Rateau shows how the young Leibniz moves from suggesting that the author of evil is God himself to later defending an original theory of necessitarianism (in The Confession of a Philosopher), which makes God the first link in the chain of beings that constitute the world, but which ultimately denies God's responsibility for sin. By examining Leibniz's theoretical development after 1673, he demonstrates how Leibniz comes to a revised framework that forms the basis for the project of theodicy. After having examined the defensive and the doctrinal aspects of the Theodicy, Rateau shows how human freedom can be reconciled with divine freedom in Leibniz's system. Newly translated from the original French edition, Rateau's book offers a novel and important new interpretation of Leibniz and will appeal to scholars both of Leibniz and of early modern thought generally. (shrink)

The Theaetetus is one of the most widely studied of any of the Platonic dialogues because its dominant theme concerns the significant philosophical question, what is knowledge? In this book Paul Stern provides a full-length treatment of its political character in relationship to this dominant theme. He argues that this approach sheds significant light on the distinctiveness of the Socratic way of life, with respect to both its initial justification and its ultimate character. More specifically, he argues that Socrates' (...) revolutionary decision to subject political life to philosophic reflection, the decision that leads directly to his trial and execution, is based on his awareness of the elusiveness of comprehensive knowledge and the implications of that elusiveness for the validity of philosophic inquiry. This view of Socrates' rationale has important consequences for our understanding of political philosophy and of the validity of the life of reason itself. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to throw light on the reciprocal exchanges between legal philosophy and the theory of speech acts (as developed by Austin and Searle). The first part concerns the contributions to legal philosophy made by the theory of speech acts with a view to developing new perspectives. The second part deals with the contributions of legal philosophy to speech act theory.

One metaphysical problem about laws is how to find appropriate truthmakers for fully general functional laws. What makes it true, for instance, that an uninstantiated mass would interact with others as prescribed by laws concerning mass? This is the missing value problem. D. M. Armstrong attempted to solve it by appeal to determinable universals. I will offer a trope‐theoretic solution that, while in some ways more metaphysically adventurous than Armstrong's view, avoids commitment to universals and determinables (as different from their (...) determinates). The solution makes use of a special conception of tropes as capable of intrinsic change. It also makes use of a distinction between two ways of having a causal power (a distinction we should make in any case). Existing powers‐based approaches to the problem struggle to avoid the idea that powers mysteriously point beyond themselves. But if tropes are capable of intrinsic change in the way I propose, they can account for the full generality of laws with minimal pointing beyond, and can do so while retaining natures that are credibly intrinsic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Since the seventeenth century, scholars have been accusing each other of ‘dogmatism’. But what exactly did this mean? In exploring this question, this article focuses on philosophy and Biblical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany. Scholars in both of these fields habitually contrasted Dogmatismus with Kritik, to the point of emplotting the history of their field as a gradual triumph of critical thinking over dogmatic belief. The article shows that charges of dogmatism derived much of their rhetorical force from such progressive (...) narratives. Especially neo-Kantian philosophers and Biblical scholars of liberal Protestant persuasion liked to depict their opponents as clinging to long-superseded modes of thought, thereby implying that these colleagues harked back to a past from which modern Wissenschaft had emancipated itself. This ‘denial of coevalness’, as Johannes Fabian calls it, demonstrates to what extent the vice of dogmatism was imbued with normative visions of how the field or, more broadly, German intellectual life should develop. (shrink)