The article proposes a theoretical model to account for changes in self due to Deep Brain Stimulation. First, we argue that most existing models postulate a very narrow conception of self, and thus fail to capture the full range of potentially relevant DBS-induced changes. Second, building on previous work by Shaun Gallagher, we propose a modified ‘pattern-theory of self’, which provides a richer picture of the possible consequences of DBS treatment.

Can affordances help in understanding psychiatric illness and psychopathological experience? In recent work on the philosophy of psychiatry and phenomenology, the answer appears to be a clear ‘yes’, but some recent worries have emerged that the affordance-concept might be “insufficiently discerning” and thus ill-suited to make sense of psychiatric illness and experience. In this paper I briefly review recent attempts to use the affordance-concept to make sense of psychopathology, as well as the worries voiced by the critics. I argue that (...) much of this criticism is, in fact, best understood as a call for more research and offer some exploratory considerations on how this research might proceed. Specifically, I argue that an improved understanding of the self-referentiality that is inherent to experiencing affordances can be useful for psychiatry. (shrink)

v. 1. Philosophy and the idea of freedom.

This book has a twofold purpose: the first is to trace the development of cosmology, the study of the universe, and the second is to demonstrate the limitation of science. Dr. Peacock questions the idea that the universe is infinite, showing that science can answer the hows of the universe, but not the whys.

The history of contemporary metaphysics shows there are two schools of thought. One for whom the analysis of categories assumes primarily an epistemological character and on the other hand some believe that the field to be investigated is rather to be approached in primarily ontological terms. Strawson's conception of descriptive metaphysics is a clear example of this approach.

Social psychology is a flourishing discipline. It explores the most essential questions of the human psyche, and it does so with clever, ingenuitive research methods. This edited volume is a textbook for advanced social psychology courses. Its primary target audience is first-year graduate students in social psychlogy, although it is also appropriate for upper-level undergraduate courses in social psychology and for doctoral students in disciplines connecting to social psychology. The authors of the chapters are world-renowned leaders on their topic, and (...) they have written these chapters to be engaging and accessible to students who are just learning the discipline. After reading this book, you will be able to understand almost any journal article or conference presentation in any field of social psychology. You will be able to converse competently with most social psychologists in their primary research domain, a use skill that is relevant not only in daily life but also when interviewing for a faculty position. And, most importantly, you will be equipped with the background knowledge to forge ahead more confidently with your own research. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant promised, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’, to abstain from all public lectures about religion. All past commentators agree this phrase permitted Kant to return to the topic after the King died. But it is not part of the ‘at-issue content’. Consequently, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’ is no more an escape clause than the corresponding phrase in ‘I guarantee, as your devoted fan, that these guitar strings will not break’. Just as the guarantee stands regardless of whether the (...) guarantor ceases to be your devoted fan, the compliance conditions of Kant's promise are not affected by Kant's ceasing to be the king's loyal subject. For good or ill, Kant made a lying promise to King Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1794. (shrink)

In our recent book (Abraham and Roy 2010) we have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum as a model of consciousness. In this model, discrete space and time are derived from a discrete cellular dynamical network. As our model is essentially atomistic, we included in our book a short support chapter on atomism. In this aticle we expand on the few pages of that chapter devoted to the history of atomism, to place the current revival of atomism in (...) a larger context. (shrink)

What have modern Buddhist ethicists to say about abortion and is there anything to be learned from it? A number of writers have suggested that Buddhism (particularly Japanese Buddhism) does indeed have something important to offer here: a response to the dilemma of abortion that is a 'middle way' between the pro-choice and pro-life extremes that have polarised the western debate. I discuss what this suggestion might amount to and present a defence of its plausibility.

Over the last few decades Mark Siderits has established himself as a leading philosophical interpreter of Indian Buddhist philosophy. He has published widely in this field, but three of his books are particularly well known: his Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy, a self-styled "essay in fusion philosophy"; his introductory textbook Buddhism as Philosophy ; and–with Shōryū Katsura–his translation and commentary, Nāgārjuna's Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Taken together, these three books offer a fuller sense of Siderits' philosophical concerns with Buddhism. The concern (...) with "fusion philosophy" is focused primarily on philosophical problem-solving and energetically quarries Buddhist... (shrink)

L'idée dominante veut que le développement de la philosophie au cours du XXe siècle soit influencé par une opposition entre un courant analytique surgi avec Frege et Russell, et un courant phénoménologique initié par Husserl. L'auteur, par une investigation rigoureuse du passé, met à nu une réalité historique plus complexe, porteuse d'interrogations nouvelles sur la modernité philosophique.

This paper will present a review of the approaches being taken to select the management of organizations resulting from mergers and the methods employed in determining the individuals who will be terminated when there are redundancies. Current approaches are ethically questionable and poor substitutes for a meaningful performance evaluation system.

We consider domains with a natural property called top-circularity. We show that if such a domain satisfies either the maximal conflict property or the weak conflict property, then it is dictatorial. We obtain the result in Sato :331–342, 2010) as a corollary. Furthermore, it follows from our results that the union of a single-peaked domain and a single-dipped domain is dictatorial.

While the technical aspects of engineering are emphasized in education and industry, the ethical aspects are, in some ways, just as vital. Engineering instructors should teach undergraduates about their ethical responsibilities in the realm of engineering. Students would then be more likely to grasp their responsibilities as professionals. For many students, undergraduate study is a time of growth and change, with their ethical development just beginning to take shape. In this study, we aim to understand the progression of ethical development (...) for engineering undergraduate students and identify key factors that may contribute to their development. To help us assess ethical development, we deployed in Fall 2020 a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities; the survey entailed the Defining Issues Test-2 (DIT-2). The DIT-2 evaluates ethical development based on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development; the test recognizes three levels of morality—preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. This study evaluates the associations between students’ university and class year and their Personal Interest, Maintaining Norms, and N2 scores. We utilized the results of a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to address the following research question: _Is a student’s ethical development associated with their university and class year?_ The results of the analysis reveal that students’ ethical development appear to differ between universities and to lie along a continuum, changing from first-year students to seniors of engineering undergraduate study. (shrink)

This book surveys the major thinking about Christian ethics as found in books published or distributed in the United States from the mid-sixties to the end of the seventies. In the first half of the book, Professor Long updates the analysis he first expounded in 1967 in his widely praised study, A Survey of Christian Ethics. Part one examines the literature dealing with moral reasoning, thinking about laws and codes, and ethics done in terms of situations and relationships. Part two (...) examines published work that stress the importance of institutions, politics in operational terms, and efforts to think of Christian fidelity as expressed in special communities outside or opposed to the civic mainstream. In part three Professor Long examines works concerned with the nature and function of the moral agent, covering such topics as attention to virtue and character, the nature and role of conscience, and thinking about the implications of moral development theory. Part four describes three new frameworks for doing ethics that have been developed during the last fifteen years: vocational ethics and policy studies; liberation theology; and comparative religious ethics. (shrink)

In the course of reading David Lapoujade’s Aberrant Movements, readers will undoubtedly encounter its overtly nuanced positioning. In relation to the existent patterns of critical engagement with Deleuze’s works, Lapoujade chooses to make his book seem like an expressive tissue of an expanding poetic universe rather than a measurable extensity from some representational whole. So the potency of his book, as Rajchman makes evident in the ‘Introduction’ to Aberrant Movements, doesn’t lie in unfolding like a teleological mimicry of what stands (...) before us as some kind of palimpsestic accretion of a-categorical Deleuzean readings. Rather his work is a perversely creative exercise in repeating these readings into openings of inassimilable differences. Such an inclusively ‘exclusive positioning’ of his book brings about what we may call a transformative de-familiarization of it, rendering it as indistinct patterns of aberrant movements that continuously and creatively shift us from one kind of complex territorial intensity to another. (shrink)

Since 1970, a United States prosecutor can prove perjury without specifying which statement is perjurious. A bold prosecutor could concede ignorance of which statement is false. A bolder prosecutor could further concede that the witness himself does not know. The boldest prosecutor could concede there is no specific lie. Instead of there being a statement that is intrinsically perjurious, the perjury is relational. Just as two statements can be inconsistent without either being inconsistent, two statements can be perjurious without either (...) being perjurious. These consequences are reconciled with the generalisation that all perjury involves lying. Corollaries about culpability are drawn from the phenomenon of nonspecific perjury. The reasoning is generalised to other forms of illegal lying. (shrink)