The evolution of religious traditions may be partially explained by out-group avoidance due to pathogen stress. However, many religious rituals may increase rather than decrease performers' susceptibility to infection. Moreover, religions often spread through proselytizing, which requires out-group interaction; and in other cases, the benefits of economic exchange increase religious pluralism and social interactions with out-groups.

That we owe duties to others is a commonplace, the subject of countless philosophical treatises and monographs. Morality is interpersonal and other-directed, many claim. But what of what we owe ourselves? In Duty to Self, Paul Schofield flips the paradigm of interpersonal morality by arguing that there are moral duties we owe ourselves, and that in light of this, philosophers need to significantly rethink many of their views about practical reason, moral psychology, politics, and moral emotions. -/- Among these (...) views is the idea that divisions within a person's life enable her to relate to herself second-personally--that is, as though she were relating to a distinct other person--in the way required by morality. Further, there exist political duties owed to the self, which the state may coerce persons to perform. This amounts to a novel argument for paternalistic law, which appeals to considerations of right, justice, and freedom in order to justify coercing a person for their own sake--a liberal justification for an idea typically thought to be deeply at odds with liberalism. -/- Schofield untangles how this view would impact various issues in applied ethics and political philosophy, for example, financial prudence and risk, the pursuit of the good life, and medical ethics. Duty to Self is essential for anyone working in moral and political philosophy or political theory. (shrink)

Are current theories of moral responsibility missing a factor in the attribution of blame and praise? Four studies demonstrated that even when cause, intention, and outcome (factors generally assumed to be sufficient for the ascription of moral responsibility) are all present, blame and praise are discounted when the factors are not linked together in the usual manner (i.e., cases of ‘‘causal deviance’’). Experiment 4 further demonstrates that this effect of causal deviance is driven by intuitive gut feelings of right and (...) wrong, not logical deliberation. Ó 2003 Published by Elsevier Science (USA). (shrink)

General introduction -- The concept of science in the context of Western Civilization and the debate between science and faith -- Relationship between science and religion -- The unity of reason -- General conclusion.

The first full-length study of Robert Kilwardby's commentary on Aristotle's Prior Analytics, based on a study of the medieval manuscripts.

This collection of essays is concerned with syntactic questions, with certain general features of grammatical theory related to syntax, here and there with semantic issues and quite a bit with questions of appropriate standards in pursuing research in the previously mentioned domains. It has almost nothing to say about phonology. The immediately following remarks are to be interpreted against the background of this restricted understanding of what ‘linguistic’ is here intended to denote.

This book contains the first English translations of The Origin of the Moral Sensations and Psychological Observations the two most important works by the German philosopher Paul Re. These essays present Re's moral philosophy, which ...

Children tend to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape, rather than size, color, or materialFa tendency that has been dubbed the ‘‘shape bias.’’ Is the shape bias the result of well-learned associations between words and objects? Or does it exist because of a general belief that shape is a good indicator of object category membership? The present three studies addressed this debate by exploring whether the shape bias is specific to naming. In Study 1, 3-year-olds showed (...) the shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object. Study 2 found the same shape bias when children were asked to generalize properties relevant to category membership. Study 3 replicated the findings from Study 1 with 2-year-olds. These findings suggest that the shape bias derives from children’s beliefs about object kinds and is not the product of associative learning. (shrink)

When surprising events occur, people naturally try to generate explanations of them. Such explanations usually involve hypothesizing causes that have the events as effects. Reasoning from effects to prior causes is found in many domains, including: Social reasoning: when friends are acting strange, we conjecture about what might be bothering them. Legal reasoning: when a crime has been committed, jurors must decide whether the prosecution's case gives a convincing explanation of the evidence. Medical diagnosis: given a set of symptoms, a (...) physician tries to decide what disease or diseases produced them. Fault diagnosis in manufacturing: when a piece of equipment breaks down, a trouble shooter must try to determine the cause of the breakdown. Scientific theory evaluation: scientists seek an acceptable theory to explain experimental evidence. What is the nature of such reasoning? (shrink)

The World Wide Web has had a notable impact on a variety of epistemically-relevant activities, many of which lie at the heart of the discipline of knowledge engineering. Systems like Wikipedia, for example, have altered our views regarding the acquisition of knowledge, while citizen science systems such as Galaxy Zoo have arguably transformed our approach to knowledge discovery. Other Web-based systems have highlighted the ways in which the human social environment can be used to support the development of intelligent systems, (...) either by contributing to the provision of epistemic resources or by helping to shape the profile of machine learning. In the present paper, such systems are referred to as ‘knowledge machines’. In addition to providing an overview of the knowledge machine concept, the present paper reviews a number of issues that are associated with the scientific and philosophical study of knowledge machines. These include the potential impact of knowledge machines on the theory and practice of knowledge engineering, the role of social participation in the realization of intelligent systems, and the role of standardized, semantically-enriched data formats in supporting the ad hoc assembly of special-purpose knowledge systems and knowledge processing pipelines. (shrink)

Georges Seurat, one of the most popular and admired of post-Impressionist painters, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This book by Paul Smith views the artist in a new context and explodes some of the myths that have grown up about him. Challenging the assumption that Seurat's work was scientific or that it expressed a serious commitment to anarchism, Smith instead traces the painters involvement with the various factions of the avant-garde and shows that he (...) was perhaps the earliest exponent of Idealism in modern art. Smith studies contemporary interpretations of Impressionism and analyzes how the groups surrounding Seurat constructed meaning from his art. From this investigation he creates a portrait of Seurat as one who was willing to accept, even encourage, interpretations of his art that he may not have intended. Smith shows, for example, that the "scientific" account of Seurat's color first developed by Félix Fénéon actually represents the theory and practice of Pissaro. He examines Seurat's involvement with anarchist critics and concludes that he merely posed as a painter with left-wing sympathies in order to benefit from the publicity these writers gave him. He explains that Seurat was sympathetic to Symbolism from its very inception and that he and his early Symbolist critics developed a theory of his art that was founded on Schopenhauer and Wagner's ideas on art. And he explores the ways that Seurat focused on the musicality of art and on incorporating certain "musical" features in his work. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book presents a convincing new interpretation of the work of a major artist. (shrink)

Epistemic Analysis, as I conceive of it, is concerned with the analysis of knowledge. The precincts of my concern have, however, been determined by the ...

Die vorliegende Arbeit ist die umgearbeitete Fassung einer Disser tation, die im Sommersemester 1964 von der Philosophischen Fa kultiit der Universitat KOln angenommen wurde. In der Dissertation standen die beiden folgenden Problembereiche im Zentrum der Betrachtung: die Funktion des teleologischen Geschichtsdenkens flir die transzendentale Phanomenologie und Husserls Riickgang auf die vorwissenschaftliche Lebenswelt, so wie er sich aus der Epoche von den objektiven Wissenschaften ergibt. Diese Themen sind in die umfassenderen Zusammenhange dieser Untersuchung eingegangen. Ihre Aufgabe ist es, Husserls Spatwerk in (...) seiner Ein heitlichkeit und Geschlossenheit aus dem Blickpunkt des Riick ganges von der objektiven Wissenschaft auf die Lebenswelt in einer neuen Perspektive sichtbar werden zu lassen. Sie gibt von dieser Warte aus einen Durchblick durch Husserls Spatphilosophie. Ich mochte an dieser Stelle Herrn Professor Dr. Ludwig Land grebe flir seine Forderung meiner Bemiihungen urn die Endgestalt des Husserlschen Denkens danken. Gedankt sei auch dem Direktor des Husserl-Archivs zu Lowen, Herrn Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. H. L. Van Breda flir seine Unterstiitzung und die freundliche Erlaubnis, aus unveroffentlichten Manuskripten Husserls zitieren zu diirfen. (shrink)

Initially proposed as rivals of classical logic, alternative logics have become increasingly important in sciences such as quantum physics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. The contributions collected in this volume address and explore the question whether the usage of logic in the sciences, especially in modern physics, requires a deviation from classical mathematical logic. The articles in the first part of the book set the scene by describing the context and the dilemma when applying logic in science. In part II (...) the authors offer several logics that deviate in different ways from classical logics. The twelve papers in part III investigate in detail specific aspects such as quantum logic, quantum computation, computer-science considerations, praxic logic, and quantum probability. Most of the contributions are revised and partially extended versions of papers presented at a conference of the same title of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences held at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Salzburg in May 1999. Others have been added to complete the picture of recent research in alternative logics as they have been developed for applications in the sciences. (shrink)

I focus on one approach to understanding quotation, the identity theory; I delineate varieties thereof; and I cite some considerations for favoring a speech-act version. Along the way we shall see how the study of quotation can illuminate the general conflict between speech-act semantics and formal semantics, and we shall see fresh arguments for insisting that the mechanism of quotation is referentially indeterminate.

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich (...) Nietzsche to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)