This latest volume of BACAP Proceedings contains some innovative research by international scholars on Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. It covers such themes as Plato on the philosopher ruler, and Aristotle on essence and necessity in science. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

We argue that prediction success maximization is a basic objective of cognition and cortex, that it is compatible with but distinct from prediction error minimization, that neither objective requires subtractive coding, that there is clear neurobiological evidence for the amplification of predicted signals, and that we are unconvinced by evidence proposed in support of subtractive coding. We outline recent discoveries showing that pyramidal cells on which our cognitive capabilities depend usually transmit information about input to their basal dendrites and amplify (...) that transmission when input to their distal apical dendrites provides a context that agrees with the feedforward basal input in that both are depolarizing, i.e., both are excitatory rather than inhibitory. Though these intracellular discoveries require a level of technical expertise that is beyond the current abilities of most neuroscience labs, they are not controversial and acclaimed as groundbreaking. We note that this cellular cooperative context-sensitivity greatly enhances the cognitive capabilities of the mammalian neocortex, and that much remains to be discovered concerning its evolution, development, and pathology. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

It is definitely a welcome contribution to Nietzsche scholarship that a volume on Beyond Good and Evil has been published in the German series Klassiker Auslegen, established by Ottfried Höffe. The series aims at providing cooperative commentaries by leading scholars in the field on the most important works in the history of philosophy. As with the other “classics” that have been covered, the order of contributions follows the order of the original publication; in the case of Beyond Good and Evil, (...) there is one contribution for each of the nine chapters, plus one contribution each analyzing the “preface” and “aftersong” and a general introduction by the editor. All the contributions aim at... (shrink)

To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of (...) cooperation, transmitted culture, and epigenetics. We do this to avoid confusion and wasted effort—dangers that are particularly acute in interdisciplinary research. Throughout this article, we suggest ways in which misunderstanding may be avoided in the future. (shrink)

Discussions of socioeconomic liability and compensation must necessarily start from an understanding of the socioeconomic, legal, and scientific basis for identifying, assessing, managing, and apportioning blame for hazards related to innovations. Public discussions about the nature of the liability challenge related to genetically modified (GM) crops and other modified organisms have focused less on direct, traditional health, public safety, technical, or environmental failures (e.g., innovations that generate hazards directly for users or indirectly to bystanders) and more on socioeconomic concerns, such (...) as comingled product that offends product quality standards. This article examines the theoretical and legal underpinnings of the current risk analysis framework used in most Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries and uses it to assess two areas of significant controversy—the release of herbicide-tolerant canola and flax varieties in Western Canada. The article offers lessons for the management of liabilities arising from the introduction of GM crops. (shrink)

Using Twin Peaks' Agent Dale Cooper as an example, we explore the paradox of fiction. Employing resources from Aimee Thomasson's account of fictional characters in conjunction with some research on parasocial interaction, we make offer a potential solution for the paradox.

The relationship between humans and animals is complex and influenced by multiple variables. Humans display a remarkably flexible and rich array of social competencies, demonstrating the ability to interpret, predict, and react appropriately to the behavior of others, as well as to engage others in a variety of complex social interactions. Developing computational systems that have similar social abilities is a critical step in designing robots, animated characters, and other computer agents that appear intelligent and capable in their interactions with (...) humans and each other. Further, it will improve their ability to cooperate with people as capable partners, learn from natural instruction, and provide intuitive and engaging interactions for human partners. Thus, human−animal team analogs can be one means through which to foster veridical mental models of robots that provide a more accurate representation of their near-future capabilities. Some digital twins of human−animal teams currently exist but are often incomplete. Therefore, this article focuses on issues within and surrounding the current models of human−animal teams, previous research surrounding this connection, and the challenges when using such an analogy for human−autonomy teams. (shrink)

This chapter examines biological practice in relation to agricultural management at the Dutch botanical garden at Buitenzorg, Java. Melchior Treub, Buitenzorg’s director from 1880 to 1909, fundamentally transformed the garden by expanding and developing its facilities, partly in response to the need to control diseases of both plants and humans. The Garden attracted foreign scientists from around the world and became a model for biological stations elsewhere. Garden scientists also led in the disciplinary transformation of morphological science around 1900. In (...) response to problems of tropical biology and agriculture, evolutionary morphology developed into a new kind of science that embraced an ecological approach involving both field and laboratory research. This new conception of morphology departed dramatically from the understanding of morphology as the speculative construction of evolutionary trees, the predominant view in the European university. The Garden provides an exceptionally good location to assess the transformations occurring in biological science around 1900. Instead of the idea that there was a “revolt” from morphology at this time, we can see that there was instead a transformation and reinvention of the morphological orientation, one that depended on a cooperative relationship between more academic and corporate approaches to science, parallel to the study of cooperation processes in the environment itself. (shrink)

This essay explores an overlooked dimension of Slavoj Žižek's thought: his perspective on, and engagement with, a concrete philosophy of Trans-History. Specifically, it examines the philosophy of Trans-History presented in Surplus Enjoyment. While I do not claim that Žižek constructs a new philosophy of Trans-History in this book, I demonstrate that he directly and consistently engages with this philosophical domain and adopts several premises from Hegelian, Marxist, and Christian philosophies of Trans-History. Building on this analysis, I elucidate Žižek's stance on (...) historicism, his advocacy for the use of theological concepts to understand and safeguard contemporary history, and his interpretation of Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) as a figure that should not be considered a sociopolitical paradigm for achieving the telos of contemporary history—namely, the unification and cooperation of global societies to avert a looming ecological catastrophe. Additionally, I challenge Žižek's praise of Joker for its portrayal of a profound and ambiguous character symbolizing "self-destructive political nihilism." I argue that this depiction of the Joker lacks originality and merit within the context of the film, as it borrows heavily from the Joker's extensive history in comics, a legacy dating back to 1940 and shaped by numerous writers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:564 BOOK REVIEWS illuminating re-examination of the category of inwardness in Kierkegaard 's writings. The majority of the essays in the hook are similarly suggestive and will prove rewarding and interesting reading-they echo the aim and gift, share by Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard, of "making their readers thinkers" (xvi). University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia M. JAMIE FERREIRA Let the Future Come. By WILFRED DESAN. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1987. (...) Pp. 152. $9.95 (paper). Toward a lust Social Order. By DEREK L. PHILLIPS. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. 434. $12.50. After several decades of doldrum thinking, social ethics, i.e., personal and political ethics done on the same canvas, is undergoing a welcome renewal. Perhaps spurred by the growing awareness of the massive problems of our tiny planet, thinkers from diverse areas are beginning to offer what the social sciences call "grand theory." Both Desan and Phillips make valuable contributions to this project and represent the best levels of refleotion from the teleological and deontological perspectives respectively. Desan's essay is the final volume of three, hut may be read independently of the earlier studies, discussed by this reviewer in 1973 in The Thomist (Vol. 37, pp. 249-255). If Desan has a core concept for his thinking it is planetary peace and the human individual as gardener and guardian of this admittedly future state of affairs. Phillips, critically inheriting the Anglo-American rights tradition, focuses on the person, not the planet, on the distinctiveness of the part, not on Desan's projeotion of a whole humanum composed of parts (each a member of the human community yet only a member). The metaphysical background here, then, is the whole-of-parts versus parts·of-awhole dialectic. Read together the two works would truly stimulate a graduate ethics seminar, for we see the renewal of ethical,thinking against some classical ontological themes. For Desan, the person is homo custos, self-aware becoming otheraware ; for Phillips, the person is the source and enactor of rights. He offers heavy criticism of the virtue/community school's orientation towards the common good of society, with subsidiary private rights located within that context. This is the weakest part of his massive survey of recent ethics. Phillips simply cannot see the reality of human community, which is exactly what Desan is determined to project as BOOK REVIEWS 565 our only possible future. Desan's combination of Thomism and Hegel stands to the far side of Phillips's Lockean stress on private rights as the base criterion for any future just public order. We will look first at Desan's final effort to summarize a notion of " planetary " existence that will be valid both individually and communally and then turn to Phillips's detailed, Rawls-like approach. Desan's argument against the primacy of the individual over the world community was carefully nuanced in his two earlier volumes; he has no intention of denigrating the person in order to celebrate the planet, and he is no partisan of the " deep ecology " effort to elevate nature above the sub-category human nature. His planet is social and political, a cosmic existent dependent upon specifically human activitynot individual activity at either the personal or national levels but activity at the level of the total earth population. He is not so much detailing yet another agenda for a New World Order as he is striving to raise modern individualized consciousness to a height where the reality of interdependency is rationally undeniable. Desan's appreciative critique of Husserl's individualized consciousness in his first volume, A Noetic Prelude to a United World, displayed the plight of personalized consciousness as against planetary awareness. In this final panel of his triptych, he synthesizes that critique: "Where the individual Observer is the magister, there are as many worlds as there are magistri." This privatized existence is not to be denied but rather seen for what it is: a limit instead of a secure startpoint for either ethical or epistemological theory. His second volume stressed that our very awareness of this limitation gives rise, perhaps in a Hegelian dialectic, to potential for participation in global existence. To resist this cooperative... (shrink)

Heintz & Scott-Phillips propose that the partner choice ecology of our ancestors required Gricean cognitive pragmatics for reputation management, which caused a tendency toward showing and expecting prosociality that subsequently scaffolded language evolution. Here, we suggest a cognitively leaner explanation that is more consistent with comparative data and posits that prosociality and eventually language evolved along with cooperative breeding.

In this paper, I critique two conceptions of mechanisms, namely those put forth by Stuart Glennan (Erkenntnis 44:49–71, 1996; Philosophy of Science 69:S342–S353, 2002) and Machamer et al. (Philosophy of Science 67:1–25, 2000). Glennan’s conception, I argue, cannot account for mechanisms involving negative causation because of its interactionist posture. MDC’s view encounters the same problem due to its reificatory conception of activities—this conception, I argue, entails an onerous commitment to ontological dualism. In the place of Glennan and MDC, I propose (...) a “modified conception” of mechanisms, which (a) obviates the problem of negative causation by reinterpreting MDC’s activities according to a “descriptivist” account, and (b) avoids MDC’s problem by postulating a monistic ontology of entities. Thus, by solving these problems, my modified conception offers a cogent, more adequate alternative to Glennan’s and MDC’s conceptions of mechanisms. (shrink)

This paper seeks to show Kant’s importance for the formal distinction between descriptive natural history and a developmental history of nature that entered natural history discussions in the late eighteenth century. It is argued that he developed this distinction initially upon Buffon’s distinctions of ‘abstract’ and ‘physical’ truths, and applied these initially in his distinction of ‘varieties’ from ‘races’ in anthropology. In the 1770s, Kant appears to have given theoretical preference to the ‘history’ of nature [Naturgeschichte] over ‘description’ of nature (...) [Naturbeschreibung]. Following Kant’s confrontations with Johann Herder and Georg Forster in the late 1780s, Kant weakened the epistemic status of the ‘history of nature’ and gave theoretical preference to ‘description of nature’. As a result, Kant’s successors, such as Goethe, could draw from Kant either a justification for a developmental history of nature, or, as this paper argues, a warrant from the critical philosophy for denying the validity of the developmental history of nature as anything more than a ‘regulative’ idea of reason. (shrink)

The mass movement of people across the globe constitutes a major feature of world politics today. -/- Whatever the cause of the movement - often war, famine, economic hardship, political repression or climate change - the governments of western capitalist states see this 'torrent of people in flight' as a serious threat to their stability and the scale of this migration indicates a need for a radical re-thinking of both political theory and practice, for the sake of political, social and (...) economic justice. -/- This book argues that there is at present a serious gap between the legal and social practices of immigration and naturalisation in liberal democratic states and any theoretical justification for such practices that can be made within the tradition of liberal political philosophy. How can liberal states develop institutions of democratic citizenship and at the same time justifiably exclude 'outsiders' from participating in those institutions? The book examines various responses to this contradiction within the liberal tradition, and finds none of them satisfactory - there are no consistently liberal justifications for immigration control and this has serious implications both for liberal practice and theory. (shrink)

Business ethics is a topic receiving much attention in the literature. However, the term 'business ethics' is not adequately defined. Typical definitions refer to the rightness or wrongness of behavior, but not everyone agrees on what is morally right or wrong, good or bad, ethical or unethical. To complicate the problem, nearly all available definitions exist at highly abstract levels. This article focuses on contemporary definitions of business ethics by business writers and professionals and on possible areas of agreement among (...) the available definitions. Then a definition is synthesized that is broad enough to cover the field of management in a sense as full as most managers might conceive of it. (shrink)

Composition as identity, as I understand it, is a theory of the composite structure of reality. The theory’s underlying logic is irreducibly plural; its fundamental primitive is a generalized identity relation that takes either plural or singular arguments. Strong versions of the theory that incorporate a generalized version of the indiscernibility of identicals are incompatible with the framework of plural logic, and should be rejected. Weak versions of the theory that are based on the idea that composition is merely analogous (...) to identity are too weak to be interesting, lacking in metaphysical consequence. I defend a moderate version according to which composition is a kind of identity, and argue that the difference is metaphysically substantial, not merely terminological. I then consider whether the notion of generalized identity, though fundamental, can be elucidated in modal terms by reverse engineering Hume’s Dictum. Unfortunately, for realists about possible worlds, such as myself,... (shrink)

People may have open minds on whether a life-extending drug or technology is going to be developed before their sixties and may strongly desire that development. Do they therefore hope that it occurs? Do they hope for it in the substantive sense of “pinning their hopes” on the development? No, they do not. Hoping for a prospect in that sense certainly presupposes having an open mind on whether it will occur and having a desire for its occurrence. But, more crucially, (...) it means investing the prospect with a characteristic, galvanizing, and orientating role: it involves setting aside doubts about the possible nonoccurrence of the prospect and acting accordingly. This article offers a characterization of hope in that substantive sense and argues both that it can be rational and that it is ubiquitous. (shrink)

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic (...) Montague gramma rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book. (shrink)

Phillip Cary argues that Augustine invented or created the concept of self as an inner space--as space into which one can enter and in which one can find God. This concept of inwardness, says Cary, has worked its way deeply into the intellectual heritage of the West and many Western individuals have experienced themselves as inner selves. After surveying the idea of inwardness in Augustine's predecessors, Cary offers a re-examination of Augustine's own writings, making the controversial point that in (...) his early writings Augustine appears to hold that the human soul is quite literally divine. Cary goes on to contend that the crucial Book 7 of the Confessions is not a historical report of Augustine's "conversion" experience, but rather an explanation of his intellectual development over time. (shrink)

_ The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Educational Thinkers_ comprises 128 essays by leading scholars analysing the most important, influential, innovative and interesting thinkers on education of all time. Each of the chronologically arranged entries explores why a particular thinker is significant for those who study education and explores the social, historical and political contexts in which the thinker worked. Ranging from Confucius and Montessori to Dewey and Edward de Bono, the entries form concise, accessible summaries of the greatest or most influential (...) educational thinkers of past and present times. Each essay includes the following features; concise biographical information on the individual, an outline of the individual’s key achievements and activities, an assessment of their impact and influence, a list of their major writings, suggested further reading. Carefully brought together to present a balance of gender and geographical contexts as well as areas of thought and work in the broad field of education, this substantial volume provides a unique history and overview of figures who have shaped education and educational thinking throughout the world. Combining and building upon two internationally renowned volumes, this collection is deliberately broad in scope, crossing centuries, boundaries and disciplines. The Encyclopaedia therefore provides a perfect introduction to the huge range and diversity of educational thought. Offering an accessible means of understanding the emergence and development of what is currently seen in the classroom, this Encyclopaedia is an invaluable reference guide for all students of education, including undergraduates and post-graduates in education or teacher training and students of related disciplines. (shrink)

By means of a comprehensive and penetrating examination of the main elements of Epicurean ethics, Phillip Mitsis forces us to reevaluate this widely misunderstood figure in the history of philosophy.

David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns. For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity. David E. Cooper (...) sets Nietzsche's critique against the background of nineteenth-century German culture, yet is concerned at the same time to emphasize its bearing upon recent educational thought and policy. (shrink)

In this chapter, I evaluate various conceptions of distance. Of the two most prominent, one takes distance relations to be intrinsic, the other extrinsic. I recommend pluralism: different conceptions can peacefully coexist as long as each holds sway over a distinct region of logical space. But when one asks which conception holds sway at the actual world, one conception stands out. It is the conception of distance embodied in differential geometry, what I call the Gaussian conception. On this conception, all (...) fundamental facts about distance are “local” facts.” But there is a problem: the Gaussian conception, notwithstanding its mathematical and physical credentials, appears metaphysically suspicious on Humean grounds. In the final section, I suggest that the Gaussian conception can be given a sound metaphysical footing in terms of non-standard analysis. (shrink)

Metaphor has a double life. It can be described as a directional process in which a stable, familiar base domain provides inferential structure to a less clearly specified target. But metaphor is also described as a process of finding commonalities, an inherently symmetric process. In this second view, both concepts may be altered by the metaphorical comparison. Whereas most theories of metaphor capture one of these aspects, we offer a model based on structure-mapping that captures both sides of metaphor processing. (...) This predicts (a) an initial processing stage of symmetric alignment; and (b) a later directional phase in which inferences are projected to the target. To test these claims, we collected comprehensibility judgments for forward (e.g., “A rumor is a virus”) and reversed (“A virus is a rumor”) metaphors at early and late stages of processing, using a deadline procedure. We found an advantage for the forward direction late in processing, but no directional preference early in processing. Implications for metaphor theory are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that holes are not objects, but should instead be construed as properties or relations. The argument proceeds by first establishing a claim about angles: that angles are not objects, but properties or relations. It is then argued that holes and angles belong to the same category, on the grounds that they share distinctive existence and identity conditions. This provides an argument in favour of categorizing holes as one categorizes angles. I then argue that a commitment (...) to the existence of properties to be identified with holes provides sufficient resources to account for true claims about holes. (shrink)

Was Plato a Pythagorean? Plato's students and earliest critics thought so, but scholars since the nineteenth century have been more skeptical. With this probing study, Phillip Sidney Horky argues that a specific type of Pythagorean philosophy, called "mathematical" Pythagoreanism, exercised a decisive influence on fundamental aspects of Plato's philosophy. The progenitor of mathematical Pythagoreanism was the infamous Pythagorean heretic and political revolutionary Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of Pythagoras who is credited with experiments in harmonics that led to innovations (...) in mathematics. The innovations of Hippasus and other mathematical Pythagoreans, including Empedocles of Agrigentum, Epicharmus of Syracuse, Philolaus of Croton, and Archytas of Tarentum, presented philosophers like Plato with novel ways to reconcile empirical knowledge with abstract mathematical theories. Plato and Pythagoreanism demonstrates how mathematical Pythagoreanism established many of the fundamental philosophical questions Plato dealt with in his central dialogues, including Cratylus, Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus, and Philebus. In the process, it also illuminates the historical significance of the mathematical Pythagoreans, a group whose influence on the development of philosophical and scientific methods has been obscured since late antiquity. The picture that results is one in which Plato inherits mathematical Pythagorean method only to transform it into a powerful philosophical argument about the essential relationships between the cosmos and the human being. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the merits and motivations for eliminativist error theories of absence causation, such as those offered by Beebee, Varzi, and Mumford. According to such views, there is no causation by absence. Here I argue that, despite of- fering an alternative picture of the practice of citing absences as causes, these views are inadequately motivated. I consider and reject a range of arguments for error-theoretic approaches, including appeals to ontological economy, physicalism and the causal clo- sure of (...) the physical, as well as Mumford’s recent appeal to soft Parmenideanism. I also argue that the arguments in the literature which aim to show that causation by absence is conceptually problematic are less forceful than they might initially appear. The result is that there is no compelling reason yet why we should reject absence causation. (shrink)

This engaging volume explores and defends the claim that misanthropy is a justified attitude towards humankind in the light of how human beings both compare with and treat animals. Reflection on differences between humans and animals helps to confirm the misanthropic verdict, while reflection on the moral and other failings manifest in our treatment of animals illuminates what is wrong with this treatment. Human failings, it is argued, are too entrenched to permit optimism about the future of animals, but ways (...) are proposed in which individual people may accommodate to the truth of misanthropy through cultivating mindful, humble and compassionate relationships to animals. Drawing on both Eastern and Western philosophical traditions David E. Cooper offers an original and challenging approach to the complex field of animal ethics. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the theory that holes are immaterial objects faces an objection that has traditionally been thought to be the principal difficulty with its main rival, which construes holes as material parts of material objects. Consequently, one of the principal advantages of identifying holes with immaterial objects is illusory: its apparent ease of accounting for truths about number of holes. I argue that in spite of this we should not think of holes as material parts of (...) material objects. This is because the theory that holes are properties does not face the same difficulties as either of these theories that construe holes as objects of some sort. (shrink)

Phillip Ferreira - Perfectionism and the Common Good: Themes in the Philosophy of T.H. Green - Journal of the History of Philosophy 43:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.3 369-370 David O. Brink. Perfectionism and the Common Good: Themes in the Philosophy of T. H. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 139. Cloth, $27.50. The British idealists have not fared well during the past century. Still, there has been in recent years a renewed interest in the (...) movement's principal figures: F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green. And, while Bradley's polemical style has found a wider audience, Green's work—especially his Principles of Political Obligation—appears to have had the steadier following. Lesser known than Green's political writing, though, is his longer and more difficult Prolegomena to Ethics. And David O. .. (shrink)